If Our Smallest Counties Botch the Vote, How Can We Trust Any of Them?

Topic: Elections

Some positive news on the anti-corruption front is front and center in Texas today.  County Citizens Defending Freedom (CCDF), an organization I have supported with my work, has succeeded in advancing a petition that may result in the removal of corrupt, Soros-backed Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzalez.

Colby Wiltse, CCDF’s Texas State Director and the original lead for the organization in Nueces County, has been pivotal in pursuing the action to remove Gonzalez and has received backlash for doing so.  I spoke with Colby this morning and informed him of another discovery that must be pursued in South Texas, and he indicated that his election integrity team will indeed seek clarity and resolution.

President Trump made major strides with the Latino working class, and these results were clear in South Texas, where he won one county that had been Democrat for an entire century (Zapata County), and trended others dozens of points in his favor, in some cases.  These improvements were enough to give him a little breathing room in Texas, which appears to have run one of the most disgusting elections in 2020, resulting in the tightest Republican margin of victory in a quarter of a century.

In assessing a long stretch of counties that show a “clean trend” in the 2020 election, I made my way into the Rio Grande Valley and was surprised by what I found in tiny Willacy County, population 20,164.  President Trump lost the county, not won by a Republican since Nixon did the trick in 1972, by 36.8% in 2016, but limited Biden to a margin of victory of only 12.0% in 2020.  Trump surged so heavily with the Latino working class that he won the Election Day vote and caused the Democrats to drop nearly 10% of Hillary Clinton’s votes from four years prior.  These factors caused me to identify Willacy as a “clean” county for 2020, but what follows will justify why very few trust elections in Texas and beyond.

5,549 votes were certified as cast in Willacy County’s 2020 presidential election.  The certified results from the Texas Secretary of State are below.

Strangely, the certified vote totals include zero votes for candidates not named Trump or Biden.  That makes Willacy County the only county in Texas except for King County (total of 159 votes, 96% in favor of Trump) to not record a single “other party” vote.  Even Loving County, with its 66 votes, recorded two in support of other candidates.

Well, maybe that’s just how 5,549 votes came in, with not a single vote for an other party candidate, Seth.  Stop being a conspiracy theorist.

Then why does the unofficial results report from November 3, 2020, show 41 other party votes, with 25 for Jorgensen and 16 for Hawkins?  From the Willacy County website:

In the certified results, Trump gains 4 votes, and Biden gains 11, probably due to the final reconciliation of provisional ballots slightly altering the count.  So, what happened to the 41 other party votes?

In this Wikipedia snapshot, which I’ve verified on the Secretary of State’s website for accuracy, the reader can clearly identify that Willacy County always has other party votes, even when George W. Bush is on the ticket, and especially when elections are unconventional, featuring a Perot or Trump.  The 41 other party votes found in the unofficial results snapshot fit right into the pattern for other party votes in the county found from 2000 to 2012.

So What?

Is this evidence of a grand conspiracy?  Absolutely not.  If corrected, it moves Biden’s margin of victory from 12.0% down to 11.9%.  This all goes back to the golden issue of transparency.  Without it, we don’t have a system of elections anyone can trust.  Two-thirds of Americans already don’t trust a system of elections that decides presidential races by millions of votes.  With school board or city council races often decided by tens of votes, what does a tiny county losing track of 41 votes, and the state rushing to certify obvious errors that can be discerned in a few internet searches say about the legitimacy of our elections?

Willacy County will have the opportunity to address this, and I believe the issue will be acknowledged as the open and shut, black and white one that it is.  This will certainly not be reflected in any certified result, but the looming question raised in everyone’s minds should center on the counties with hundreds of thousands (Bexar or Travis, for instance) or even millions of votes, like Harris County, which is so corrupt that even Governor Abbott has stuck his nose into the electoral fray.  What are they doing to fudge and pencil-whip numbers that permanently alter the state’s political landscape?  What are mega counties like Fulton County or Hennepin County in Minnesota doing to ensure their counties gain a competitive edge over those counties opposing their political persuasions, perceived or legitimate?

Discrepancies can be found in the most inconsequential political counties within minutes of comparing ledgers.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, if even our smallest counties are misreporting their vote totals, imagine the damage being done by counties known to be corrupt, who ensure they have weeks to count and report votes while managing mainstream media output to justify the results.

Our elections are in dire straits because of a transparency and oversight crisis.  Let’s see what CCDF comes up with here.