The Three Most Consequential Possible Changes to American Voting Laws

I spoke with Sandy Kiesel of the Election Integrity Force, who does great work in Michigan documenting voter fraud and encouraging the best and most effective reforms to voting laws in Michigan, but also nationwide.

Sandy and others at EIF, such as Joanne Bakale, are some of the few honest activists trying to work on this critical issue.

EIF is often competing for conservative media attention with other groups who, though they claim to do election integrity work, appear to be largely piggy-backing off of EIF’s labors.

Sandy Kiesel

One group, also in Michigan, I learned lacked the simple ability to even request a copy of the voter file in the state, known as the “Qualified Voter File” or “QVF.” So EIF is doing the real work, and other groups don’t even know how to get the relevant data in the first place.

In six years of doing reporting and writing on election integrity, EIF seems like the most honest, resolute, and diligent group trying to get to the bottom of not only the fraud that happened in the 2020 election, but also identifying the systemic weaknesses throughout American voting systems, and proposing the kind of reforms that could give America its Democracy back.

The question I had for Kiesel was simple: what are the ‘biggest bang for your buck’ reforms that people who want secure and safe election, should be pushing for.

Very quickly, she gave these three ideas, which are brilliant:

1. End No-Excuse Absentee Balloting altogether.

2. No Automatic Registrations: such as those that happen through the driver license registration programs.

3. Stop Complex Voting Machines - Those with complicated calculating software - nothing with proprietary software/black box machines for voting.

I agree with these three, but I think they also deserve a more thorough explanation as to the ‘how’ and ‘why’ they would be great reforms that would clean up the voter rolls and also the elections.

The argument and discussion about voter fraud is complicated by the way in which it happens. The mainstream media, of course, simply ignores it and just declares that it’s all fake and debunked. They practice outright dismissal of anything contrary.

Occasionally, left-wing minded folks can admit that one particular incident might be valid, but they then breathlessly claim, without evidence, that it’s the exception that proves the rule and that voting systems are the ‘safest and most secure’ in history. In this way, a kind of perverted logic, proof of individual incidents of voter fraud are never smaller reflections of larger pools of likely undetected fraud but, rather, the system competently capturing and preventing fraud.

When a Chinese national was found to be voting in the 2024 election in Michigan, it became, in the words of Michigan Attorney General Dana Michelle Nessel (b. 1969), paraphrasing, proof that the system worked. The Chinese national was allowed to flee to China and escape prosecution.

Mainstream Republicans and the Republican “establishment” treated voter fraud as a fringe theory by crazy people in 2020 through about 2023, and then did a hard pivot onto the issue, but still ‘gatekeep’ the issue by saying the problem is just about messy voter files. They refrain from actually claiming that widespread, systemic, fraud exists in the American political system. They are very careful to avoid saying that there’s enough fraud to actually change results.

Few are prepared for the realization not only that fraud exists, that it exists beyond the big cities and into the rural areas, but that the problem is so pervasive that it is likely not just affecting a few small local races but also affecting our entire political ecosystem.

The actual legitimacy of our government is at stake, and nobody wants to admit the obvious: the far-left has perfected a system that is a permanent way for their minority to maintain a majority.

The left doesn’t need to bother with widespread and expensive ‘voter outreach’ and ‘education’ campaigns anymore. They don’t have to do the grueling ‘door-to-door’ physicality of elections, instead they can simply print the ballots they need, and digitally alter the voting records to ensure that it roughly matches.

Democrat voter fraud out in the open: 1948 Texas

Voter fraud has evolved from the crudity of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s (1908-1973) allies writing in the same handwriting, in the same pen, in alphabetical order, voters in Precinct 13 for the U.S. Senate election in the 1948 Democrat primary.

It’s a bit more complex than simply using the same people to vote multiple times under different names, using the names of dead people, and more votes than a precinct has registered, as happened in the 1960 Presidential election where John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) stole the election by stealing Illinois from Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994) using such methods.

But there were other tactics as well: simply bribe the judges.

On page 65 of Robert David Novak’s (1931-2009) 2007 work “The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington,” he describes not only how Kennedy bought votes wholesale in the 1960 election by bribing election judges and local Sheriffs, but also about how the media covered it up by spiking the well-researched stories documenting the voter fraud.

If law enforcement is in on the fraud, there’s no way to say that an election is free of fraud: all enforcement of the law has gone out of the window.

If there are thousands of mail-in absentees who never have any chain of custody and are never verified, there’s no way to enforce the law even if one wanted to do so.

Modern voter fraud has to be a bit more complex than in the past, however. And it’s complex because a few things have to line up for fraud to be systemically occurring:

1. It has to be enough votes to affect an election, otherwise why bother.

2. It has to be somewhat hard to detect, since so few have noticed it so far.

3. It has to correlate with the physical record, since various recounts have been done in various places and the numbers have not wildly mismatched.

4. It has to work consistently with the electronic systems, since these systems ostensibly exist to prevent the kind of fraud we are seeing.

5. It has to be complex enough that it defies easy disclosure, or involve too many people where a participant might reveal the way in which the process works.

A threshold issue for most election integrity groups is that they ought to be able to answer the question, “what’s your theory of how systemic fraud is currently happening?” When groups can’t answer that, or answer it imprecisely, you can tell they have not been thinking about the topic for very long.

Which is a further reason why EIF is the real deal: they not only have a theory, they are confident enough to qualify it and explain the parts they cannot currently prove.

There’s enormous fraud occurring in the absentee ballot programs. It can be seen in the data in nearly every district.

The ‘voter registration’ scams are part of this process: the left is ballooning up the voter file in order to hide the fraud behind all of these fake registrations. They are confident in the fact that various laws, many of which are federal, help them to protect the fraud from being removed from the system.

And of course the absentee program makes it all very simple: just drop off the ballots in a mailbox. Wear gloves when handling illegal ballots. Use vacant addresses to grab the live ballots. Create a market for blank ballots to be sold at ‘midnight meetings.’

In 2024, the investigative journalism outfit Project Veritas reported, with accompanying video, evidence that Muslims in Hamtramck, Michigan utilized this very kind of systemic voter fraud using absentee ballots. It helped the Democrat Muslims displace the Democrat Gays, complained the aged Democrat Gays.

The media just said this was “fake news” and blithely moved on.

A year later, in 2025, there was an investigation into absentee fraud in Hamtramck.

And then a year after that, in 2026, all the felonies against the Hamtramck absentee ballot fraud crew were acquitted by a Wayne County jury.

What the left has learned through incidents like this, and the failure of law enforcement to investigate elsewhere, is that there are no actual consequences to absentee ballot fraud. It’s the perfect vehicle to generate positive electoral outcomes with the least amount of work: cheat.

This all relies upon, again, the artificial expansion of the voter rolls to hide the fraud. The flawed registrations might be challenged prior to the election, but post-election legal challenges that affect the outcome are almost impossible to get a judge to take seriously. No judge wants to ‘undo’ the outcome of an election and lacks the confidence to order a new election simply based on fraud.

So the system’s automated ways in which they add voters to the voting rolls presents a very real and significant danger: it’s giving the election cheaters the data noise they need in order to hide fraud. It’s ballooning up registrations to provide ‘low propensity voters’ meaning voters who rarely or infrequently vote, who likely won’t notice if their vote is fraudulently cast.

Election integrity groups, including EIF, went door-to-door after the 2020 election to ask people at their doorstep if they voted the way the voter file indicated. Many did not. Several such situations, including dozens of voters at a single household, were dutifully documented but no investigations followed. No investigations were opened. No subpoenas dislodged witnesses and data to prove the case. The documented fraud simply went ignored.

It’s so much work to find a single bad voter, and then when they are found wholesale, process, procedure, and precedent often limits the clerks’ abilities to fix the problems.

The Democrats in power consider it a form of ‘voter suppression’ to do this kind of work at all. It’s not taken seriously at best, and hated at worst, by the Clerks in the left-leaning Counties.

But when individual incidents of voter fraud are proven, they are arrogantly dismissed as irrelevant, minor, exceptions.

When larger rings of absentee fraudsters are uncovered, they are dismissed as having been properly prosecuted.

When major rings of voter registration fraud schemes, such as those in Muskegon County and the infamous GBI Strategies are uncovered, it is dismissed as ‘minimum wage commission-based employees making the mistake of submitting bad registrations,’ even though GBI turned in 8,000-12,000 voter registration applications to the City of Muskegon on one day, a jurisdiction that only had about 27,000 total registered voters.

The fraud is everywhere and all around us, and still we’re asked to continue proving it before any actions can be taken to remedy it.

Which is why Kiesel’s third important point is also so salient: removing the machines that hide behind complexity and algorithms to obscure an accurate count. Voting tabulation machines don’t need an ‘override’ or an ‘adjudication’ button to overrule the prima facie voting patterns on the ballot. Clerks and election workers are not so overwhelmed with spoiled ballots with coffee on them that they need a ‘ReliaVote’ machine to print new ballots, a machine that Detroit has admitted to purchasing.

A tabulation machine is an ornate counter. It’s a machine that ought to tell you how many of something you have in your hand. It doesn’t need to ‘read’ or process the ballots in any other way.

Dumbing down the machines, and, frankly, eliminating the machines altogether might make election administration slightly more complicated, expensive, time-consuming. But it would single-handedly eliminate a great source of potential systemic fraud.

I’ve never seen anyone, from President Trump on down, give such a solid and honest assessment of the three most critical reforms that need to happen to American voting systems.

When I asked Joanne if she thought there was anything to add to this excellent list, she simply said, “What Sandy said.” And I think she’s absolutely right.