Are We Not Supposed to Take "Jealous Care" of Our Right to Vote and to Make Absolutely Sure That Each Citizen's Vote Counts Equally? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    We value our right to vote as one of our most important duties as an American. We were gifted a real gem - a republic where freedom rings. Liberty for all. But it won't remain so much longer unless we are all willing, at each election time, to vote responsibly for the good of our republic and the longevity of our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our longstanding principles. In fact, President Ronald Reagan gave us this warning: "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

    How important is it that each person have a vote and is able to cast it? And how important is it that each person's vote counts equally to the next person? (ie, all citizens' votes carry equal weight). Well, in the case of Anderson v. Celebrezze (1983), the US Supreme Court recognized that "in the context of a Presidential election, the impact of the votes cast in each State is affected by the votes cast for the various candidates in other States." The Court has long held this view. In 1974, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote the majority opinion in the case Anderson v. United States and asserted that the federal criminal statute 18 U.S.C. §241 ("Conspiracy Against Rights") applies to voter fraud cases. In that opinion, Marshall said that the "injury" under §241 is the dilution of votes. He wrote:

    "It has long been settled that §241 embraces a conspiracy to stuff the ballot box at an election for federal officers, and thereby to dilute the value of votes of qualified voters.... That petitioners may have had no purpose to change the outcome of the federal election is irrelevant. The specific intent required under §241 is not the intent to change the outcome of a federal election, but rather the intent to have false votes cast and thereby to injure the right of all voters in a federal election to express their choice for a particular candidate and to have their expressions of choice given full value and effect, without being diluted or distorted by the casting of fraudulent ballots.... The deposit of forged ballots in the ballot boxes, no matter how small or great their number, dilutes the influence of honest votes in an election, and whether in greater or less degree is immaterial. The right to an honest (count) is a right possessed by each voting elector, and to the extent that the importance of his vote is nullified, wholly or in part, he has been injured in the free exercise of a right or privilege secured to him by the laws and the Constitution of the United States."

    The result of all the tampering, irregularities, the software manipulation, the fake votes, repeat voters, dead voters, switched votes, pre-prepared drop off box of ballots, the highly probability of voter fraud with the massive mail-in vote initiative by Democrats (such fraud has been shown repeatedly yet Democrats continue to push for it), the counting of ballots in secret, the questionable drop-off boxes of forged ballots, and the allowing of non-citizens to vote all result in a dilution of the vote of good, ordinary, law-abiding American citizens - the ones who have the most to gain by having their voice heard at the ballot box.

    Top attorneys are reviewing the election results and investigators such as James OKeefe keep digging. I personally have not one shred of confidence in this year's presidential election results. I don't believe we can honestly, truthfully, and dutifully elect a new president based on such shameful, devious and ambitious shenanigans. I know I would have the hardest of times playing income tax to such a government and obeying its laws. An illegitimate president nullifies our allegiance to the government.

    I recently read the remarks of Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and was disheartened, to be honest, that of all the tampering and irregularities and scheming and premeditated election interference by self-professed political royalty and a dangerously-motivated political party in this year's presidential election, and the very possible political coup that may result from such tampering and interference and scheming, he chose instead to focus on the "malign foreign influence" in the election. Rosen essentially ignored the overwhelming, the shocking, and the unconscionable tactics of the Democratic party in this election and focused instead on something that seems a bit more benign and something we Americans have lived with for many years. Yet he brings up some excellent points. And for that reason, I want to highlight his remarks:


    Remarks of Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, delivered August 26, 2020:

    One thing that has not been much noted in recent years is that malign foreign influence in our elections has been a concern since the Founding of our Republic.

    Going all the way back in 1787, when the Founders were debating the merits of "our new Constitution," Thomas Jefferson told John Adams that he was "apprehensive of foreign interference, intrigue, influence." Adams too worried that "as often as elections happen, the danger of foreign influence recurs." Nine years later, the two squared off in the first contested presidential election in American history.

    The election of 1796 occurred while Britain and revolutionary France were locked in war. Adams favored the Washington Administration's pro-British trade policy, while Jefferson favored the French Republic. A few months before the election, in his famous farewell address, President George Washington issued a stern public warning: "Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake ...."

    Nonetheless, France tried to exert its influence. The French minister to the United States, Pierre-Auguste Adet, told his superiors that he could "get out the vote for a man devoted to France." He suggested that France should "adopt measures that will cause the merchants to fear for their property, and to make them see the need to place at the head of the government a man whose known character would inspire confidence in the [French] Republic." On the eve of the election, Adet sent the U.S. Secretary of State a series of letters effectively threatening that France would begin to seize American merchant ships and trigger war unless Jefferson were elected. Adet had them published in the Philadelphia Aurora, one of the most widely circulated and partisan newspapers of the era.


    Adams did not forget the risk that France's attempted coercion posed. In his inaugural address, he implored the American people never to "lose sight of the danger" that foreign influence, whether "by flattery or menaces, by fraud or violence, by terror, intrigue, or venality," presents to our "free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections." The next year, Jefferson, too, objected to France's continuing coercive efforts to stir up American partisanship, telling Madison that the efforts were "very unworthy of a great nation." He felt that they contributed to a mistaken presumption that Jefferson's supporters' "first passion" was "an attachment to France, and hatred to" Adams's party, rather than what American voters' passion really was: "the love of their country."

    Since the twentieth century, as the United States evolved into a superpower, malign foreign influence has been less about coercion and more about deceptive or covert efforts, meaning that the foreign government has tried to disguise or conceal its role. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany directed an extensive underground effort to influence U.S. public opinion. One German agent, for example, entered the United States claiming to be a clergyman and used Nazi funds to take over small, established newspapers and civic organizations until he was indicted for failing to register as a foreign agent and fled the country as a fugitive. Congress responded to these and similar activities by enacting the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1938, which requires disclosure of foreign influence activities. The Justice Department successfully prosecuted some of Germany's "most useful American agents" who tried to hide their activities.

    Germany also targeted U.S. elections, including the 1940 election, which occurred while World War II raged in Europe. Nazi leaders viewed President Franklin Roosevelt as pro-British and interventionist, so they employed several "schemes for influencing the outcome of our 1940 Presidential election, as well as the platforms of both major political parties."

    One scheme entailed forging documents and fabricating stories that they hoped would capture the American public's attention. In March 1940, the Nazis released diplomatic documents they had supposedly recovered from the Polish Foreign Office's archives when they captured Warsaw. The documents purportedly showed that the Roosevelt Administration had promised aid to Poland before the war and assured Poland that the United States would "finish" any war on the Allies' side. Germany's top diplomat in the United States, Hans Thomsen, called the documents a "bombshell," and two members of Congress demanded a congressional investigation. But most members of Congress and even the American press were more circumspect; they largely followed the advice that President Roosevelt gave when the story broke "to take all European propaganda at this time with a grain of salt," which he immediately amended "to stretch it to two and then three grains." In the days before the 1940 election, Germany tried to plant another fabricated story claiming evidence that Roosevelt had long been planning to intervene in Europe even before 1939, but no mainstream newspaper would take the bait.

    After World War II, the Cold War produced a whole new set of challenges from malign foreign influence. The Soviet Union employed covert or deceptive tactics as part of its so-called "active measures," a phrase it used to describe malign influence activities like disseminating forgeries, disinformation, and propaganda and sponsoring front publications to undermine American interests. Most active measures were directed abroad, such as when, just a few weeks before the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the KGB mailed athletes from Africa forged letters supposedly from the Ku Klux Klan with threats against them, or when the Soviets published stories in dozens of Soviet-controlled publications around the world claiming that the AIDS epidemic was started by U.S. military experiments. But the Soviets also used active measures to undermine public confidence or influence public opinion in the United States, including covertly forging documents and funding conspiracy-mongering books that supposedly tied the FBI and CIA to President Kennedy's assassination or tied FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the Ku Klux Klan.

    The Soviet Union also targeted U.S. elections. For example, during the 1976 Democratic primary, the KGB adopted a wide-ranging set of active measures to disparage Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a known anti-Soviet hawk, by instructing their agents to use confidential contacts to find "dark spots" in Jackson's background. When they did not turn up much, the Soviets sent a forged FBI memorandum dated June 20, 1940 to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign purportedly concluding that Jackson was secretly gay. Neither the journalists nor the Carter campaign published the phony document.

    After the 1980 election, Soviet leaders soon grew to loathe and fear President Reagan's administration, according to an ex-KGB defector, and they ordered the KGB to weaken his 1984 reelection bid. Intending to discredit President Reagan by portraying him as a McCarthyite, Soviet agents covertly sent American journalists a forged letter, dated October 15, 1947, supposedly from J. Edgar Hoover, that purportedly showed Reagan colluding with the FBI to root out Communists in Hollywood. The FBI publicly denounced the document when it surfaced in January 1984, explaining that it contained stylistic touches that Hoover would not have tolerated and violated rules for FBI correspondence. Soviet agents also covertly tried to develop contacts at the Republican and Democratic national party committees to find ways to subvert President Reagan's campaign. In addition, they developed a package of narratives to disseminate about President Reagan, trying to portray him as a corrupt warmonger who was subservient to the military-industrial complex and responsible for tensions with NATO allies. But all of the Soviets' efforts failed, and President Reagan was re-elected.

    Now let me turn to corrupt measures to influence elections. One attempt was apparently made in 1968, when, according to, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, "the top Soviet leaders took an extraordinary step, unprecedented in the history of Soviet-American relations," and ordered him to offer Vice President and Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey's campaign secret financial aid. But when Dobrynin asked Humphrey about his campaign's financial state, Humphrey replied that it "was more than enough for him to have Moscow's good wishes," and Dobrynin did not formally convey the offer. Six years later, Congress made it illegal for foreign nationals to make campaign contributions.


    By the mid-1990's, that again became important when the People's Republic of China (PRC), "undertook a covert program to influence the U.S. political process through political donations, and other means, during the 1996 election cycle." Over Beijing's strenuous objection, Taiwan's President was granted a visa in 1995 to speak at his alma mater, Cornell University, after Congress passed resolutions supporting the trip. The PRC then implemented a plan to influence the U.S. political process to be more favorable toward pro-Beijing policies by making campaign donations through middlemen who could provide access to, and seek to influence, candidates and elected officials at all levels of government. The Justice Department prosecuted a number of the middlemen who were involved, and a 1999 Congressional report identified the PRC conduct as "a serious threat to our national security."