“You know you’re flying over the target when you’re getting flak,” the WWII saying goes.  It means, “If you’re not a threat, they can safely ignore you, but when you’re directly over the target, they start shooting.”

United Sovereign Americans (USA), a 100% volunteer, nonpartisan organization, has been working for the last two years to expose errors and demand honest and accurate elections.  They now share their technical and legal expertise with teams in 24 states. Their peer-reviewed audits of state voter rolls have found millions of errors that violate multiple federal election laws. Recently they joined an election lawsuit in federal court in Maryland, alleging that diluting real votes with fake and illegal votes violates our civil rights to honest elections. More lawsuits are on the way.

Looks like their efforts have struck a nerve.

It’s obvious that anyone elected in this new climate of “anything goes” voting rules probably wouldn’t want those rules to change.  Instead, laws have consistently been weakened to the point where absentee ballots are mailed like sportswear circulars.  In some states, signature verification on mail-in ballots has been reduced to a bored election worker clicking a mouse in one or two seconds, when a proper review takes up to thirty seconds.

This means that anyone who picks up an unclaimed ballot from an apartment complex’s postage room floor can fill it out with no fear of getting caught.  In a blockbuster poll that should have made front-page national news, Rasmussen Reports revealed that “21% of Likely U.S. voters who voted by absentee or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election say they filled out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child,” and “17% of mail-in voters say that in the 2020 election, they cast a ballot in a state where they were no longer a permanent resident.”

This is more than enough to have changed the results in 2020, and to confirm Americans’ suspicions that our elections are out of control.  Inaccurate voter rolls allow for millions of extra votes to be cast by unscrupulous actors, as well as ordinary citizens with an extra ballot in their mailbox.

But challenges to the 2020 and 2022 election results have mostly failed, possibly because prosecutors and judges also run for election, and/or don’t want to make waves.

Until now, USA efforts have been largely ignored, but the Maryland lawsuit means that any additional conflicting rulings will automatically be sent up to the Supreme Court prior to the November election — and this has the Uniparty coalition worried enough to start cranking up their propaganda machine.

A recent article by the L.A. Times is a textbook case of shamelessly of using trigger wording to slant a narrative to oppose USA’s efforts.

(Trigger words in italics...)

The headline says it all: “Inside the far-right plan to use civil rights law to disrupt the 2024 election.”

The USA is not “far-right,” but strictly nonpartisan.  Voters from both sides should want fair and honest elections — in primaries, too.  Ensuring accurate vote counts would restore confidence, not disrupt it.

Marly Hornik, the unpaid CEO of USA, is labeled a “self-proclaimed ‘election integrity activist’,” and chairman Harry Haury is called “a man who helped push former President Trump’s baseless challenges to Joe Biden’s election in 2020.”  The Rasmussen poll proves that the challenges were not baseless.

The authors call the group’s plan to file civil rights lawsuits in multiple states and demand changes a “legal long shot” and say their experts “worry that if even one sympathetic judge rules in their favor, it could sow doubts about the integrity of a presidential rematch between President Biden and Donald Trump.”

Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general who specializes in voting rights, says, “The group’s legal arguments rely on faulty interpretations of federal election law and are likely to fail in court.”

More trigger words...”United Sovereign Americans is part of a cottage industry of far-right election deniers that has sown disinformation since Trump lost his reelection bid.”

They discuss Hornik’s first group, New York Citizens Audit, whose “members spread conspiracy theories about the results of the 2020 and 2022 elections at events across the state.”

They bring up a cease-and-desist letter from New York attorney general Letitia James telling Hornik to stop “voter deception and intimidation efforts,” describing complaints that volunteers with her group had “confronted voters across the state at their homes, falsely claimed to be Board of Elections officials and falsely accused voters of committing felony voter fraud.”

Hornik explained that at the time of the letter, no one from their group was knocking on any doors.

They describe how she met future USA chairman Harry Haury “at a 2022 conference hosted by the group that funded the debunked pro-Trump propaganda film 2000 Mules, which is based on lies about the 2020 election.”

“Haury had been part of a little-known team of self-proclaimed cybersecurity experts who helped search for evidence of fraud in the 2020 election for some of Trump’s closest allies in the weeks after Trump lost.  Haury’s background as a software engineer has largely been focused on energy technology.”

Haury has been involved with election matters for decades, including consulting on the design and creation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002.  He has worked extensively with the U.S. military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the banking and intelligence communities.  He is a recognized subject-matter expert on cybersecurity forensics, attack, and defense.  He was directly involved with elections systems analysis after 2020 and was the first to advocate focusing on the massive election misconduct.  He submitted expert testimony in several election challenges in 2020, including testimony before the Supreme Court.

Haury is much more than a software engineer.

The authors continue, “David Becker, who leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a group focused on restoring trust in the nation’s election system, described the work of Paine [from EIPCa] and Hornik as ‘an effort to dismantle election integrity under the auspices of election integrity’ amid an ‘ecosystem of grift[.]’ ... Hornik and Haury have asked for donations at public events and on far-right media, saying they need millions of dollars for their lawsuits.”

If these two are grifters, they’re the worst grifters on the planet.  Neither takes a penny of compensation for their 100-hour workweeks.  All funds go to retain lawyers for their federal lawsuits and minimal operating expenses.

Surprisingly, the authors quote Hornik accurately about USA’s plans.

“We believe that this very simple approach can advance rapidly,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you weren’t allowed to vote or if your vote was drowned and suffocated by invalid ballots, either way, you didn’t really get to vote.”

The writers continue: “But the entire plan is based on a count of alleged errors in the voter rolls conducted by volunteers who lack expertise in the election system and election law. Hornik’s allies at Election Integrity Project California claim to have counted 257,894 people who voted in the state’s 2022 election despite potentially being ineligible to cast ballots. But they did not explain their criteria for identifying alleged discrepancies in the voter rolls, raising serious questions about their count.”

Election Integrity Project California is not USA.  All USA analyses are based on official state data and are meticulously peer-reviewed by a team of statistics and database experts.

Congratulations to USA for flying directly over the target.

Image: cagdesign via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

This post has been updated to clarify that Rasmussen Reports, a company that Scott Rasmussen founded but with which he is no longer affiliated, conducted the poll. Scott Rasmussen conducts his work through RMG Research.