Go Look
Election fraud is real. It happens. And the worst case of it in this country in the last ten years happened about two hours from my house.
So I am not here to tell you that nobody cheats. I am here about something narrower than that: what counts as evidence that somebody did.
When I was a new nurse I walked into a room before I had gotten report. I talked with the patient. I talked with her family. Then I noticed she was on a portable defibrillator, pads front and back, sitting in standby. Then I looked at the monitor. Systolic one seventy-eight. Diastolic down in the thirties. Heart rate twenty-seven.
Skip called me out into the hall, and the first thing he asked me was what the patient was doing. I told him she was talking with her family. He said, there you go. When is the last time
you did CPR on a monitor?
And he was right.
I had read the monitor instead of the patient. The monitor was telling the truth about what it was measuring. It was measuring the machine.
That is not a stupid mistake. It is what happens when the readout is right there in front of you and the patient takes work.
Now let me tell you about the case that matters, because it happened here.
In 2018, in a congressional district that ran from Charlotte out toward the coast, a political operative in Bladen County sent hired workers door to door collecting absentee ballot requests and absentee ballots. In this state only the voter or a close relative can return that ballot. Workers later testified that they picked up ballots that were not sealed, signed as witnesses when they had witnessed nothing, and filled in races the voter had left blank, using pens of a similar color so the ballots would not look wrong.
And that is why three races got thrown out, not one. A congressional seat, a county commission seat, and a soil and water conservation supervisor. A crew sitting at somebody’s kitchen table with his ballot in front of them works the whole ballot.
That congressional race was decided by nine hundred and five votes.
And it got caught. Investigators ran down a hundred and forty-two voters and better than thirty witnesses, and subpoenaed the phone records and the financial records. The state board took four days of testimony and called it a coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme, across two counties. The candidate who was ahead sat in that room, listened for three days, and asked for a new election himself. A bipartisan board then voted five to nothing to run it again.
Now hear what actually broke it open. Not a database. People talked. The operative's own former stepdaughter testified against him. So did the son of the candidate who stood to win.
And nobody ever proved it changed the outcome. It did not have to. It only had to be bad enough to throw the race out.
That is what real fraud looks like. It is not a dead man at the polls. It is a live operator with a crew, and a crew is a lot of people who all have to keep quiet.
Now let me show you the other thing. The readout.
After the 2020 election, a conservative public interest law firm in Milwaukee called the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty published a review of that state's election. They had every reason to look hard, and they had earned the right to. They had sued Wisconsin to force it to clear its voter rolls, and that case went all the way to the state supreme court.
Their review reported that three thousand seven hundred eighteen ballots came from addresses on Wisconsin's movers list. That twenty-three thousand voters failed a data check against motor vehicle records. That thirty-one thousand more turned up in the Postal Service change-of-address file. And the report used the phrase unlawfully cast votes.
Here is what else is in that same report. That fraud cannot be inferred from any of those numbers. That there is not much, if any, evidence those voters did anything intentionally wrong. And that when the firm hand counted about twenty thousand ballots across twenty wards, it found no fraudulent ballots at all.
Both halves are in one document, written by people who wanted a different answer than the one they got. Only one of those halves travels.
And understand where those numbers came from. That movers list is the output of the tool the states built themselves, the one I talked about in the first of these. It is a list of records somebody ought to open and check. Wisconsin had already learned the hard way what happens when you treat that list as a verdict — it took three hundred thirty-five thousand people off the rolls in 2018 and had to put twelve thousand of them back on within ninety days.
So three thousand seven hundred eighteen is a lead. It is a list of files somebody needs to go look at. Calling a lead proof does not make it proof. That is not an argument. That is magical thinking.
And I want to be careful here, because the people who repeat that number are not fools. The number is right there. It is printed. It has a decimal-point kind of authority to it. Going and looking takes work, and most of us do not have the afternoon.
But that is the whole job. A flag says go look. A finding says here is what I found. The difference between them is the work in between, and there is no way to skip it.
What I cannot tell you is how many of those three thousand seven hundred eighteen were anything at all. Nobody ran them down one by one, or if somebody did, they did not publish it. I would read that report. I would like to know.
What I can tell you is that when somebody did do the work — in two counties in this state, with a hundred and forty-two interviews and four days of testimony — they found it, they proved it, and a bipartisan board of five people threw out a congressional election over it.
The system works when you work it.
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.
Martin Ginsburg is a cardiac critical care nurse and an Air Force veteran. He was a carpenter before he was a nurse.
Pre-Record Fact Check
Bladen County / 9th District 2018 — every figure
Unofficial margin 905 votes. State Board of Elections ordered a new election on a bipartisan 5-0 vote, 21 February 2019, in the 9th Congressional District and two Bladen County local contests. Staff investigation: 142 voter interviews, at least 30 subject and witness interviews, subpoenas of documents including financial statements and phone records, four days of testimony. Investigators' characterization: a 'coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme' in Bladen AND Robeson counties. NC law permits only the voter or a near relative to return an absentee ballot. Testimony described collecting unsealed ballots, falsely signing as witnesses, and filling in blank contests using similarly colored pens. The leading candidate called for a new election on the hearing's fourth day. The operative was indicted 27 February 2019 on seven felony counts.
Bladen — the three contests
The State Board ordered new elections in THREE contests: North Carolina's 9th Congressional District, Bladen County Commissioner District 3, and Bladen County Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor. The down-ballot races are why the pens detail matters — a crew working somebody else's absentee ballot works the whole ballot, not just the top of it. A fourth contest was under investigation and never resolved: the earlier Republican primary, where the same candidate beat the sitting incumbent by 828 votes while taking 96% of the absentee vote in one county. The general election was voided before that question was answered; do not assert anything about the primary beyond that it was being examined. Residents of Bladen County had been the subject of at least five separate elections investigations since 2010.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty
WILL is a conservative public interest law firm in Milwaukee. It sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission to force deactivation of the 2019 movers list; the case reached the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Its 2020 election review reported 3,718 ballots cast from addresses on the 2019 Mover's List, 23,361 voters who failed a DMV data check, and 31,664 appearing in the National Change of Address database, and used the phrase 'unlawfully cast votes.' THE SAME REPORT STATES that fraud cannot be inferred from these figures, that there is not much if any evidence these voters did anything intentionally wrong, and that a hand count of roughly 20,000 ballots across 20 wards found no evidence of fraudulent ballots. RULE: quote the caveat alongside the figure or do not use the figure. Expand the firm's name in full before any short form.
Wisconsin 2018 callback figures
335,702 initially removed after the October 2017 flagging of 341,855 registrants; 12,133 proactively reactivated by the Elections Commission between January and March 2018. The script says 'within ninety days,' which is accurate for a January-to-March reactivation window. Full sourcing is in piece one's fact check.
The 2019 Wisconsin movers list
More than 232,000 flagged in 2019. The Elections Commission declined to deactivate before the 2020 election, citing the 2017 errors. By its late-2020 report the list had shrunk to 71,578, none of whom voted in 2020, and nearly 17,000 people on the list had not moved and re-registered at the same address, over 7% of the original total. Not in the script; hold for questions.
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