Catherine Engelbrecht: Voter Fraud Has Been ‘Institutionalized’; Corrupt Politicians Will Be ‘Tempted to Exploit the Weaknesses’
True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about voter fraud in the 2016 election.
Engelbrecht said her organization takes reports of fraud seriously, including recent accounts of voting machines in Texas marking Hillary Clinton for president on “straight Republican” ballots.
“What we’re hearing out of the counties now is that the vote switching is being chalked up to user error,” she reported. “Maybe, maybe not, but it was good to see the county official come out and make a very important statement, and that is for all of us: when you go and vote, make sure that your ballot reflects the people that you intended to vote for, and if it doesn’t, don’t leave the polling place and say, ‘Gosh, I hope somebody figures that out’ because it won’t be cast correctly.”
“It’s really no surprise that we’re seeing these kinds of problems. We’ve got a process that is prehistoric by comparison to other countries, in the way that we’ve let technology get away from us. It’s engineered obsolescence, and we played right into it,” she said.
“I think one of the challenges that we face is that we have electronic systems that are out there new in the field, that have been put out by George Soros’ companies, and then we have other systems that are out there, like here in parts of Texas, where I’m calling from today, that haven’t been updated since Windows XP. That’s their operating system underpinning, and that’s not even supported. Great news is you can’t hack those,” she said with a laugh. “That’s the range of disparity along this continuum.”
“I spent some time two years ago – I went to Mexico City to understand how they vote in Mexico. Frankly, it was because I got sick of the rhetoric, all this pushback about voter ID, and that people coming in from Latin-American countries couldn’t possibly get ID. Well, the reality is, every industrialized country in the world has a mandatory form of voter ID, except the United States,” Engelbrecht said.
“In any case, I went to Mexico to see how they did it. They use paper ballots, but the paper ballots are encrypted at a level of sophistication equivalent to legal tender, with the strip that runs through, with the programming specific to one ballot. It’s a very sophisticated system, and they found a balance of security and liberty,” she concluded.
“I think that’s really our challenge in the coming months and years, is to make this a priority,” she urged. “Easy to pay it lip service, when we’re in the straightaway now of a major election, but mark my words: everybody that gets elected gets elected, and all of a sudden they turn their attentions to other things; the system works for them. Anybody that loses and talks about it, well, they’re crying over spilled milk. What that really means is, it’s up to the citizens to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, if it was important before the election; it’s still important now. And if there were no solutions, then we still have this open wound that has to be dealt with, because it’s the underpinning of everything else we discuss. It’s a very real problem.”
Engelbrecht found early voting “problematic from top to bottom.”
“I understand the convenience, trust me. It’s great for people that want to go and volunteer to work on Election Day because they can vote first. I get all of that. However, what we’re seeing is this slide where you’ve got well over half – seventy, eighty percent – of states that are voting before the debate’s over, if you will, before we’ve really had an opportunity to kind of set the table of ideas. You’ve got states that are voting a month before Election Day,” she said.
“Further, you’ve got states that are all mail-in, so there’s never an opportunity to go and see eyeballs of another citizen working at the polls, and have that experience,” she continued. “What happens in those environments is a lack of check and balance that erodes the security, the stability of the process. You have no way of really knowing who’s casting those paper ballots in that mail-in fashion or early elections. You have no way, really, of capturing the full attention because it’s going on for so long.”
She cited studies that show “longer early election periods actually diminish turnout because it has an impact on people that signal to them it’s not important because it just kind of goes on forever, and it loses its significance.”
Engelbrecht talked about VoteStand, a new smartphone app released by True the Vote that will allow users to report voting irregularities.
“We developed this app really as an outfall of our own volunteer experiences, where people go to the polls, they see things that happen in the flash of an eye, they don’t know how to capture the correct information that we can then take and use it as action, to move forward and take it to the proper election officials,” she explained. “So we developed an app that would help people – empower them, really – when they go and vote to, if they see something, capture it and get the word out. If you see your ballot flipping on a screen, capture it and get the word out.”
“We also are streaming all of that information so that on Election Day – well, and even now, as reports are already feeding in through VoteStand – you’ll get a sense of what’s happening where not only locally, but nationally. It’s incredibly important that we have the ability to archive this information so that you have empirical evidence to support the reforms that are so desperately needed,” said Engelbrecht. “If you don’t have that kind of proof, it’s far too easy to just chalk it up to hearsay. We’re past that.”
“The fraud has been institutionalized,” she warned. “That’s the biggest problem that we face. You look at corruption to nuts in this government, and the thought that on Election Day, when we choose the leaders arguably of the free world, they’ll be tempted to exploit the weaknesses.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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Source: Breitbart
