Colorado: Helping or Hurting?
Election Integrity, the Big Bad Wolf
by Debora Black
Recently I was part of a debate among ordinary citizens—the delegates at the Routt County caucus—regarding election integrity. Those advocating for improved election integrity won this debate by a 2/3 majority, but I remain troubled that this was not an unanimous win. It makes no sense to vote against securing one's own vote. It makes no sense to couch election integrity as the big bad wolf of a democracy.
The United States of America is the only country in the world whose founding documents place the power of government in the hands of the people. That is a fact that many Americans do not even know. And yet it is the key element that forms American greatness.
One of our great powers—the People’s electoral power—is so vital that America can’t even be a free nation without it. Think about it. A self-governing, independent, and free nation together with the self-governing states of that nation must have free, fair, safe, and secure elections in order to establish and maintain the right and power of the People to elect their leadership without interference, obstruction, intimidation, or force. Without those protections, some strategic alliance, some known or hidden faction of elites, not the American voter, would be putting their chosen people in power. The American voter would lose all voice and autonomy and become subjugated by that leadership—which is the way it is in many other countries.
Despite such actualities, over the last decade our modern elections have proven to be full of irregularities that breach all of our electoral rights and powers. I encourage you to read some of the myriad of articles (such as Jeffrey A. Tucker’s, Free Speech on Trial published in the March 13-19, 2024 edition of the Epoch Times or Rob Natelson’s, Why It May Be Impossible to Disqualify Trump From the Presidency published in the January 3-9, 2024 Epoch Times) and books (such as Mollie Hemingway’s, Rigged) that provide detailed reports which, in-part, informed the examples of irregularities I list below:
1. Instead of providing factual reports, legacy media outlets appear to lead disinformation campaigns that target one candidate and advance another—such as in the case where seemingly half of our country’s voters had seen news footage on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and had heard allegations regarding the Biden family foreign business dealings before the 2020 election, while the other half, whose news routinely came from legacy media, did not know anything about those news stories until well after the election.
2. Congressional investigation determined the 2016 Trump-Russia collusion was a fabrication involving candidate Clinton and members of the Justice Department. This constitutes one of the most immoral examples of election interference and candidate intimidation in American history.
3. Big-tech censorship silences plural conversation to promote one particular political agenda or social ideology over another, as was recently shown to us by Elon Musk when he bought Twitter and exposed the confirming details. Those details and other evidence led the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to issue an injunction to immediately cease the government’s ability to encourage or compulsorily require private companies to censor users in a manner that benefits a government agenda. The final outcome of the injunction request is pending a review by the Supreme Court and would only provide a temporary measure to stop the abuse until the Supreme Court hears the entire case.
4. Unprecedented levels of financial influences, including from dark money, are poured into campaigns giving these moneyed entities and special interests groups more power than the individual voters to influence the election.
5. Involving the 2020 election, rapid and unlawful changes to some states’ voting processes removed mechanisms normally in place and fomented widely believed accusations of untrustworthy election results. Those who protested—peacefully or otherwise—were jailed without due process while others are still being investigated as if it is a crime to protest election results. Just to be clear, it is the right of every American citizen to protest election results, and doing so is an important part of maintaining the integrity of our elections. Incarcerating protestors without due process is one of the highest forms of election intimidation and coercion imaginable and should not be tolerated or supported by any voter.
6. Ballot security has come into much bigger question due to expanded early voting practices where chain of custody issues exist regarding drop-box voting and mail-in voting which inherently allow for corruptions in ballot gathering and delivery and the possibility of corruptions to the ballots themselves.
7. Voting machines are distrusted by large portions of voters who conclude that the software cannot be completely secured because of the argument that any software created by an expert can be hacked by an expert.
8. Colorado lawmakers and judges, themselves, attempted to remove candidate Trump from the Colorado ballot. Notably, the case had to be pursued all the way through the United States Supreme Court in order to be resolved. It wasn’t until May 5, 2024—deep into the primary election—that the Supreme Court overturned the Colorado Court and Colorado Republicans, and Republicans across the country, could be assured their candidate would appear on the Colorado ballot. From inception, this attack lacked viable legal foundation but nonetheless was brought against a candidate, demonstrating gross election interference and abuse of power.
All of those practices explained above are substandard ways of conducting elections that are supposed to be free, fair, safe, and secure. Period.
Let us remember that election integrity isn’t about the way we feel about Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, or the many other candidates who have told us their elections were stolen. Election integrity is about protecting the American vote, state-by-state, for EVERY American citizen, regardless of his or her political affiliation.
So I ask the simple question, what kind of election system do we Colorado voters want—one of integrity, or one of irregularity?
INTEGRITY 1. Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code. See Synonyms at honesty. 2. The state of being unimpaired; soundness. 3. The quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness.
IRREGULAR 1. Contrary to rule, accepted order, or general practice. 2. Not conforming to legality, moral law, or social convention.
(Excerpts from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition. Copyright 1992 By Houghton Mifflin Company.)
