Did voter fraud occur in California during the 2018 Congressional election cycle? Absolutely, unequivocally, YES!

In the weeks following California’s 10th Congressional District Election, many claims of voter fraud and Election Day irregularities surfaced. As a seasoned veteran of many campaigns and a recent candidate in the June Primary for the 10th, the stories piqued my interest and sparked an investigation by my campaign team. Our conclusion, based on data pulled from actual June Primary results, is that Democrats, under the guise of Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts, ran a coordinated voter fraud scheme to steal a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Republicans in the California 10th. And it appears the same tactic was likely used throughout California to defeat several Republican members of Congress.

How could Democrats possibly commit election fraud you ask? Let me give you some facts before explaining what we know and how the test run of the scheme worked in the June 2018 Primary.

The undeniable facts are: The 10th Congressional District saw an unbelievably high voter turnout with over 207,000 votes cast in a non-Presidential Election. For historical context, this represents a 165 percent increase in voter turnout over the previous non-presidential election year of 2014. Within minutes of the Registrars of Voters releasing initial counts from Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties, Republican Jeff Denham led by more than 1,200 votes, or almost 2 percent. In our experience, there is a sufficiently large enough sampling of absentee and poll day votes counted by the close of Election Night that, unless a candidate has committed a crime in the waning days of a campaign, the final percentages rarely change by more than 1 percent. (In 2014, Denham’s Democrat challenger only closed the gap by 0.7 percent as the after Election Day count continued). Following Election Day there were an estimated 60,000 late absentee ballots and 19,000 provisional ballots left to count.

Provisional ballots are cast in California anytime a voter, who is not required to show ID, shows up at a polling place requesting to vote. The California Secretary of State’s website says: “Provisional voting ensures that no properly registered voter is denied their right to cast a ballot if that voter’s name is not on the polling place roster due to a clerical, processing, computer, or other error.”

Provisional ballots may be cast by individuals who truthfully or untruthfully claim to be registered to vote even though their names are not on the official voter registration list at a polling place; or by individuals claiming to be registered to vote-by-mail showing up at a polling place without a ballot. All provisional ballots cast will be counted so long as elections officials confirm that the name of the person given at the polling place is registered to vote in that county and the name of the person given did not already vote in that election. Provisional voting is not designed to prevent fraudulent voters from voting if they can provide a registered voter’s name and address!

By the time late absentee ballots and provisional ballots were done being counted, Jeff Denham’s lead evaporated and Democrat challenger Josh Harder held nearly a 6,000-vote lead. That means Harder received 7,200 more votes than Denham in the final 80,000 to be counted. An absurd 9 percent breakaway as the final ballots were counted in what had been a toss-up race is statistically impossible.

This was the second time Josh Harder pulled off such a miracle. In the June primary Harder clung to roughly an 800-vote Election Night lead for second place in a race too close to call for nearly a week. Harder’s second-place Primary election lead also grew by thousands of votes as late absentee and provisional ballots were counted. Crediting Harder’s second-place June Primary finish to superior voter registration or GOTV efforts is a myth. Looking at new voter registration numbers from early 2018 shows Democrats with less than a 600 new voter registration advantage and even then only about a third of new registrants actually turned out to vote in the Primary. Additionally, six campaigns ran GOTV efforts including both Republicans and three additional Democrats. One Democrat even had more union support than Harder.

The unexpected General Election win for Democrat Harder is difficult to reconcile against the fact that Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox won the district by nearly two percentage points! It was almost exactly the same percentage point lead Denham initially held over Harder on Election Night. Facts alone make Harder’s win look fishy but here’s where knowing your neighbors in small communities comes into play.

Observant poll workers have been talking about nearly 100 percent voter turnout in many Westside precincts, nearest to the Bay Area, and large numbers of people showing up at polling places with their names and addresses pre-printed out on labeled notecards. The observations of poll workers, coupled with actual voter data and statistical analysis, will almost undoubtedly prove the Harder campaign either directly ran or indirectly benefited from a well-funded, coordinated Democratic voter fraud scheme in the General Election just like they did in the June Primary test run. 

It is important to note than any qualified candidate or political party can legally obtain a master voter file from a county Registrar of Voters. That file contains a treasure trove of information on each registered voter including a voter’s full name, address, voter registration date and previous voting record broken down by each past elections. What’s of importance here is those records can be sorted in simple excel spreadsheets to define parameters of interest to a campaign like the “high propensity voters” or HPV. High-propensity voters show up every election and are whom most campaigns focus their mail and GOTV efforts on for cost effectiveness. This group of voters is high value to any campaign. For a campaign wishing to commit voter fraud the data can be sorted to generate a list of people registered to vote who have proven they won’t vote. These are registered voters who are likely deceased, moved away, off to college or just not interested in voting. These “no propensity voters,” or NPVs, would make a tempting target for unethical political operators.

There are also tens of thousands of registered low propensity voters (or LPVs) or NPVs in California’s 10th Congressional District. This applies across the state also.

Once a list is generated it can be further sorted by voter precincts. Individual names and addresses within each precinct can be exported an Excel .csv file then a Microsoft mail merge used to generate individual labels ready to be affixed to notecards. Each “volunteer” is then handed a stack names to go out and fraudulently vote for.

Something the Harder campaign had no shortage of was volunteers from all over the San Francisco Bay Area, where Democrats firm grip on regional politics renders Election Day activists unneeded. Hillary Clinton’s “Onward Together” organization funded numerous organizations like Swing Left and Indivisible who imported countless Bay Area residents for the Harder campaign.

Legitimate volunteers overseeing normal GOTV efforts, by marking voters off their lists who’d already returned absentee ballots or who visited polling places throughout Election Day to mark off poll voters that had already voted likely had no idea the data they were collecting was fed back to embedded collaborators who intended to cast provisional ballots for unlikely voters. What would that look like? The actual screenshots of the 2018 June Primary Election results paint a clear picture of what it looks like when thousands of voters who haven’t voted – sometimes in decades – suddenly materialize out of thin air to vote.

What are the odds that thousands of “no propensity voters,” if they even actually still live in the California 10th, suddenly decided to all start voting again in June of 2018 after years of not doing so? Our campaign statistician called the odds statistically impossible! So if these unlikely voters don’t vote, who does? How many people does it take to effectively steal an election by having collaborators casting provisional ballots for registered voters?

A single collaborator with pre-printed address labels, a map of poll locations and clear instructions could easily visit 25 polling places and vote provisionally under 25 different names. A highly motivated group of people can easily steal a tight election using this strategy simply because California requires no picture ID to vote. It clearly looks like the June Primary was just a test run for team Harder. Our team is convinced that once the updated master voter files are released by Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties, we will confirm the most flagrant case of organized voter fraud ever undertaken in the history of American elections!

We also stumbled across 118-year-old Stanislaus County Democrat Raul. An amazingly consistent Democrat absentee voter who never misses an election despite being six years older than the current oldest living American!

It is our team’s mission to follow up on this investigation as soon as the new data becomes available and conduct an extensive field investigation to document the fraud. Once confirmed, I will be petitioning the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice to investigate the voter fraud conducted in a Federal Election.

We will also be approaching California’s Republican leadership about qualifying a 2020 ballot initiative requiring proof of identity to vote in future California elections through a mandatory picture identification card.

Stay tuned for future updates.

Ted Howze is a former Republican candidate for Congress and a Turlock veterinarian.