Election lntegrity – A Postmortem

Joe Herring

Confidence in the sanctity of Nebraska elections is paramount. Both sides agree on many points, foremost among these being the necessity for accuracy and accountability throughout the process.

The devil, as always, is in the details.

Nebraska Sunrise News’ recent investigative series on election integrity examined each of the issues raised, and addressed specific allegations leveled by the Nebraska Voter Accuracy Project, a grassroots organization dedicated to determining the validity of both Nebraska’s system and the outcomes of the last election cycle.

Secretary of State Robert Evnen has been a frequent target of NVAP criticism, much of which has proven unfair, formed from misreading or misunderstandings of the admittedly complex workings of the Nebraska election system.  

Secretary Evnen recognizes the need for numerous reforms to our system and has been working toward changing the law in nearly every way the NVAP group has suggested.

There appear to be more areas of agreement than dispute, although personalities and rancor have done an excellent job of redirecting the focus toward conflict over accord.

Nebraska Voter Accuracy Project and the Secretary of State both agree:

• Voter ID is necessary and should be implemented without undue delay

• Private money (from any source) has no place in financing the conduct of an election

• The practice of “ballot harvesting" is an invitation to fraud and manipulation and should be prohibited immediately

• Mail-in voting requires specific safeguards to offset its inherent vulnerability

• Voter registration records require frequent and thorough examination to preclude exploitation of outdated registrations, or the inclusion of false registrations

Haphazard use of ballot drop boxes, lacking sufficient security and monitoring is an invitation to fraud, in addition to placements benefiting one party over another. Five of those six issues are already included in legislative reforms proposed by the Secretary of State, but are facing significant headwinds from urban Democrat politicians.

The sixth issue - cleansing voter rolls - is not specifically addressed in Evnen’s slate of legislation. Already boasting a dense thicket of law and regulation at all levels of government, maintaining voter registration records is a perennial area of intense debate between parties.  

But even this “third rail" issue finds both the SoS and the NVAP standing ideologically shoulder to shoulder against left leaning elements who would strip all safeguards governing the maintenance of accurate voter registration.

Given this wide expanse of agreement, it appears NVAP and the SoS would be allies, not adversaries, yet there are fences across that landscape preventing the free transit of ideas, contributing instead to a gruff territorialism that weakens both sides.

Increasing complexity in the administration of government in general, and election processes in particular, lends itself to wholesale misapprehension of circumstances.

Numerous shibboleths are adopted to address areas lacking clarity, with the human frailty of oversimplification too often guiding the endeavor. NVAP has been quite active in disseminating their report, both to members of the public and elected officials. As discussed in earlier installments of NSN’s election integrity coverage, a lack of context (or a mistaken context) can lead to grossly erroneous conclusions.

ln an effort to counter mistakes made in NVAP reporting, Secretary Evnen distributed a rebuttal PowerPoint presentation among the members of the Unicameral on Saturday afternoon, hoping to bring clarity to an otherwise muddled circumstance.

The assertions Evnen addresses are wide-ranging. NVAP has alleged the state reported “a reduction in vote count" for President Trump, something that could not occur innocently in a cumulative count. 

Evnen explains the state never reported any reductions whatsoever.  

“An error was made by Edison Research, a third-party vendor to

the New York Times, which misreported public data from the Secretary of State’s

website.”

To graphically support his explanation, Evnen overlaid the actual Secretary of State’s reporting onto the graph of Edison reporting used by NVAP, clearly illustrating Edison's error. NVAP claims to have never seen the data presented by Evnen in this slide, questioning its origin.

The SoS also asks why his office has “received no affidavits from any organization," if NVAP has indeed amassed “hundreds of them" proving voter fraud.  

NVAP tells it differently.

“We have dozens of affidavits that report ballots being sent to dead people or people that moved along with statements of people that were told that they'd already voted when they went to vote. The Secretary of State after repeated attempts refuses to meet with us to see our data or our affidavits."

 What remains unclear is why these affidavits have not been presented to the AG office as evidence of criminal activity, or simply copied and delivered to the SoS office with a meeting to discuss findings coming later.

Similarly, responding to a question posed by NSN to Larry Ortega of NVAP as to why his team had not submitted their security breach research to Election Systems & Software via a well-publicized portal on the ES&S website that seeks just that sort of independently acquired information, their response lacked coherence.

They did not submit their work to ES&S because they were unable to gain access to ES&S machines to verify their assumptions.

The obvious concern would be if their findings could not be verified absent direct access to the ES&S manufactured equipment, which NVAP has not been granted, how then can the group conclude so concretely that voter fraud occurred in Nebraska?

Moreover, that such fraud was so egregious as to require our last election be set aside entirely.

NVAP further claims the state is in violation of election law by not retaining “ballot images.” ln their presentation, they speculate those images are held by ES&S, in violation of the law as they understand it.

Sec. Evnen explains Nebraska does not retain ballot images because we don’t generate them in our process. Some states generate and keep ballot images because they count the votes as seen on the images, not directly from the paper ballots as Nebraska does.  

Nebraska keeps what Nebraska counts, the ballot itself. These are retained for a period of 22 months following an election. 

Here is where the NVAP rebuttal takes on something of a more aggressive, even demeaning tone.

“The machines do not count the vote choices on your ballot, they count the choices on your ballot image. This is a 20”’ century dinosaur [Evnen] that thinks: “you can't buy things with my credit card — IT'S IN MY WALLET!”  

This represents a completely ignorant cyber neophyte. He’s never heard of people at stores and restaurants scanning the strip and collecting the card data for later use. 

In this case, the SOS doesn’t care who holds the ballot image, because don’t worry, we’ve got the ballot!!"

In the presentation given to State Senators, Secretary Evnen addresses a claim made in the NVAP presentation, that voter registration rolls were significantly inflated prior to the 2020 election, with 26,000+ registrations then removed months later.

NVAP counters that characterization, saying  

“What we actually said was that this is an abnormally high number of registrations, much higher than the number of new available voters, due to moving or turning 18 minus the death of voters. We then said it was unusual to have that many people removed from those same registration rolls in February and March, 4 to 5 months after the election."

Evnen characterized these numbers as “simply the nature of elections," and “not indicative of fraud." He continues “We continually monitor voter registration numbers, and they ramp up every single election near deadlines, especially presidential elections.”

Evnen concludes his explanation with “26,039 registrations were removed after the 2020 general election per federal law because they did not vote, and had failed to respond to inquiries as to their addresses and subsequently did not update their voter registration, sign a petition, or vote in two federal general elections.”

NVAP‘s rebuttal asked

“In these days of computerized databases and when any sportscaster can pull up

thousands of statistics in seconds, why would it take them 4 to 5 months to do this?

They know that these people, if they don‘t vote in the 2020 election, will be removed after the election. 1 day after the election, this can‘t be more than a few keyboard strokes to remove them. Why wait 4 to 5 months?”

Apparently, the Secretary of State isn‘t the only one laboring under a misconception of what is doable and what is not.

NVAP’s assumption of the amount of work involved in removing these inactive voters reveals a simplistic understanding of workflow in an office with as many varied duties as a modern Secretary of State. Aside from overseeing the conduct of elections, the Secretary of State's office is deeply involved in trade missions, census redistricting for the ever-increasing political subdivisions in our state, among many other responsibilities having nothing to do with the removal of 26,039 inactive voters “with a few keystrokes."

Furthermore, the removal of these records involves a statutory need for documentation, concurrent research of other databases to ensure the inactivity of the voter is indeed due to having died or left the jurisdiction, and above all, to make certain a voter is not denied their franchise due to a desire to dispense with inactive voters on day one, post-election.

Secretary Evnen's presentation covers a great many more claims made by NVAP, patiently addressing each one directly. The dismissive and angry tone increasingly employed by NVAP, along with their insistence of unerring reliability, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, is hurting efforts to bolster weaknesses in Nebraska’s elections. 

Should NVAP succeed in convincing a large number of Nebraskans of the futility of their vote, their efforts will have proven counterproductive indeed. Rather than ensuring free, fair, and secure elections, they will have instead encouraged their own political base to abandon the field before the battle begins. How secure will those future elections be under one party rule?