According to the report of the audit in RealClearInvestigations by author and researcher John R. Lott Jr. — president of the Crime Research Prevention Center and adviser to the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy under the Trump administration. An audit effort began in Montana when a group of Missoula County voters were concerned about the integrity of mail-in balloting formed in October
In November, they approached Republican state Rep. Brad Tschida, who agreed to take on their cause. Together with lawyer Quentin Rhoades, they got Missoula County Elections Administrator Bradley Seaman, a Democrat, to agree to a volunteer-conducted audit of ballot envelopes legally counted in the 2020 election.
The first problem in counting the ballot envelopes? The number that were absent, for starters.
According to Lott, “4,592 out of the 72,491 mail-in ballots lacked envelopes — 6.33% of all votes.”
“Without an officially printed envelope with registration information, a voter’s signature, and a postmark indicating whether it was cast on time, election officials cannot verify that a ballot is legitimate. It is against the law to count such votes,” Lott noted.
The problem may have been even worse than the auditors found, given that county employees told auditors that some of the envelopes may have been double-counted. Ironically, Missoula County Elections Administrator Bradley Seaman tried to wave away the lack of ballot envelopes by saying that a “double-check process” had been part of the reason for the numerical discrepancy.
According to Lott, when Rhoades told Seaman that election staffers thought they had undercounted the number of missing envelopes — leading to the possibility of a larger discrepancy, not a smaller one — the lawyer said “Seaman appeared extre
mely nervous and had no explanation.”
There were further issues beyond the envelopes, too.
“Auditors also tested a smaller, random sub-sample of 15,455 mail-in envelopes for other defects,” Lott wrote. “Of these, 55 lacked postmark dates, and 53 never had their signatures checked — for a total of 0.7% of all ballots in the sample. No envelope had more than one irregularity.”
Another major issue was the fact “[d]ozens of ballot envelopes bore strikingly similar, distinctive handwriting styles in the signatures, suggesting that one or several persons may have filled out and submitted multiple ballots, an act of fraud.”
One auditor found that 28 of these ballots, with signatures that looked “exactly the same,” came from a single address — a nursing home, Lott wrote. Another auditor said she saw two different, distinct signatures that kept recurring on the envelopes she reviewed.
Nursing homes, it’s worth noting, have also been a popular target of ballot harvesters.
In an August report published in the New York Post, a Democratic operative who had decades of experience committing vote fraud in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania elections, said nursing homes were prime targets for fraudsters. In those cases, the insider said, paid operatives would “literally fill it [the ballot] out” for residents.
Montana elections can be close. Now-former Gov. Bullock himself won his first term in 2012 by just 7,571 votes out of over 500,000 cast. In 2020, House District 94 was decided by 435 votes out of more than 6,000 cast, and House District 96, 190 votes out of more than 7,000 cast.
As Lott wrote, discrepancies like those turned up in the audit that “could have easily swung local elections” this year alone.
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