Asking for a recount does not make you an election denier, it makes you a Democracy Defender!

Nearly 50% of Dems have questions about 2024 election

Let me start by saying: Democracy does not die when you ask questions about election integrity, it dies when you stop asking questions.

But the valid concerns voiced by so many in connection with the 2024 presidential election have been met by the corporate media and by even some fellow Democrats with an arrogant: “Shut up!” This is horribly wrong.

There’s a vast difference between good faith questions about election security versus Donald Trump’s post 2020 election BS. We all lived through Trump and his allies literally fabricating facts to support Trump’s claims of election fraud—from dead people voting to suitcases stuffed with ballots to sinister software flipping votes—which all fueled the Jan 6 terrorist attack upon our Capitol. I have not seen any Democratic activist go down that path—and none should.

However, many grassroots Democrats have raised sincere questions about 2024 election integrity. Backing that up is a new CBS poll released Sunday that found only 52% of Democrats believe the 2024 election was “full and fair.” This mirrors an Economist poll a week after the election that found only 52% of supporters of VP Harris believe Trump “legitimately” won the election.

When nearly 50% of Democrats have concerns about an issue this vital to our democracy, their qualms should be addressed. And I say this not because I’ve seen any credible evidence of election fraud that could change the results, but because we should want as many Americans as possible to have confidence in our election integrity. If not, people could give up on democracy meaning they either check out or be more open to supporting an autocratic form of government.

That is a big part of why I just interviewed Susan Greenhalgh, the Senior Advisor on Election Security for “Free Speech For People.” (In the past I interviewed lawyers involved with “Free Speech for People” since they played a big role in the effort to bar Trump—as well as Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene-- from the ballot by way of Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment for engaging in an insurrection.)

Greenhalgh is one of the election and computer security experts who signed a letter to Vice President Harris on November 13 that began, “We write to alert you to serious election security breaches that have threatened the security and integrity of the 2024 elections.”  In an effort “to identify ways to ensure that the will of the voters is reflected and that voters should have confidence in the result,” these experts urged Harris to “formally request hand recounts in at least the states of Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.”

Greenhalgh reiterated in our discussion a very important point in the letter, “We have no evidence that the outcomes of the elections in those states were actually compromised as a result of the security breaches, and we are not suggesting that they were.”  But still in the spirit of increasing election confidence, a hand recount was urged.

Greenhalgh explained that she and the other experts have grave concerns that the software of Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software—which she noted is used in 70% of our voting machines—were illegally accessed by Trump’s representatives after the 2020 election. For example—as noted in their letter—"in 2022, records, video camera footage, and deposition testimony produced in a civil case in Georgia disclosed that its voting system, used statewide, had been breached over multiple days by operatives hired by attorneys for Donald Trump.” Alarmingly, “the evidence showed that the operatives made copies of the software that runs all of the equipment in Georgia, and certain other states, and shared it with other Trump allies and operatives.”

The concern—as Greenhalgh detailed--is that if bad actors had access to the software code, “they could develop malware” and discover other “vulnerabilities” that could be potentially used to flip votes from one candidate to another. Greenhalgh explained her and other experts had flagged this by way of letters to the Biden admin in 2022 and 2023. She went as far as to personally meet with the FBI in July of this year to share their concerns. But in her view, the concerns were still not taken seriously.

Greenhalgh continued, “we're calling for hand counts because the machine counts the votes by computer. But the paper ballot is what the voter marked of their original vote, their vote voter intent their choice.” She added, “So if the ballots were hand counted, they would be able to know for a fact that the vote count is correct.”

Keep in mind—as the BBC quantified on Saturday--If just a little over 115,000 voters in total in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had voted for Harris instead of Trump, she would be the one being sworn in come January 20.  (So much for Trump’s “landslide.”) This was a close election.

Yet at this point, there appears to be zero interest by the Harris campaign to request any recounts. In fact, in many of the battlegrounds states the deadline for a losing candidate to request a recount has closed. (For example, the deadline was Nov. 19 for North Carolina and Wisconsin.)

In light of the concerns raised, Democratic leaders should be calling in a responsible way for at the very least a press conference by Biden’s DHS to address concerns and assure voters that the election was secure. Instead, we have heard nothing from them.  

We could and should email and call the offices of Democratic members of Congress urging them to address these concerns given nearly 50% of the Democratic base harbors them.

But the bigger lesson is that we need Democratic leaders who are fighters.  The day for the “go along, to get along” Democratic leaders must end.  My hope is that going forward, Democrats will chose candidates in the primary who both listen to the base and will ferociously fight for our interests. Those are the type of people who inspire people. And those are the type of people who win.

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