Eyes On | The IO on Election Integrity

An article appearing in the New Yorker, written by the award-winning journalist, Jane Mayer, recently rocked the political news cycle, painting voters pushing for statewide audits as conservative rubes.  Mayer, who has done some impressive work in the past – most notably, her story, “The Secret Sharer” that documented the government’s illegal and reckless pursuit of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, herself appears to have unwittingly fallen victim to an Information Operation.

In the article, Mayer attempts to discredit several new voices who’re speaking out on election integrity.  Whether or not this upstart group of conservative election integrity activists are legitimately and painfully navigating the learning curve of election processes, or if they are knowingly running some huge psyop or grift, may be legitimate questions to ask. But Mayer appears to buy into something decidedly more sinister.

Mayer quotes from and places Michael Podhorzer, the AFL-CIO special advisor to the President, on a hyped-up pedestal in her article.  And Podhorzer flat-out relegates those concerned with election fraud and pushing for audits as … racists. In Mayer’s article, Podhorzer states,

“What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.”

Mayer then legitimizes this analysis; “This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”

But it’s a mistake to discredit the large percentage of people interested in election integrity this past cycle as racists.  That is not what is driving the heart of this debate on the conservative side.

Most are interested because the extraordinary events of 2020 led them to question whether the process had been compromised. Why?

We watched the mass mail out of paper ballots to highly inaccurate voter records, the harried installation of ballot drop-boxes privately funded by billionaire tech magnates, the hundreds of legislative changes, lawsuits, and consent decrees that fundamentally altered election processes, and more. All of it came together in 2020, under the fog of COVID and lead to an outcome that was as historic as it was unlikely.

So, they have questions – questions that are not easy to answer.

Having studied election process for decades, our team is well aware of the pitfalls associated with the US’s uniquely insecure approach to elections. We knew that attempts to prove certain types of election malfeasance would fail, so we chose instead to focus on the frauds that would necessarily leave trackable data trails. Our team dug down on a data set of trillions of cell phone signals in highly contested states around the country to see if there were, in fact, irregularities that could equate to fraud.  Post-election, no other organization has done this geofencing analysis that matches one's cell phone with an individual.  By doing so, we can trace the action (such as stuffing drop boxes with ballots at 4:00 am and identify the individual signal engaged in the action.)  Working with local and federal law enforcement, we built a legitimate hypothesis with data and video evidence and have been methodically advancing state by state.

So, in light of Mayer’s article, we reached out and offered the New Yorker full access to review our data for themselves, but they wanted no part of it instead.  Instead, they encouraged us to take our evidence to other outfits.  They didn’t want to engage at all. And therein lies the tie-in to the Information Operation.  The most important rule of an Information Operation is never to engage in substantive debate, but to double down on the allegation or smear.

The Information Operation dismisses and destroys anything it cannot control. The movement for election integrity cannot be controlled.  Stay alert.  This is far from over.