According to a recent poll by Politico, 61% of Americans believe that some cheating may have affected the 2020 election, and only 40% believe that the upcoming 2026 election is “unlikely to be stolen.”
Ouch.
That’s a leftist organization admitting that Americans don’t trust the election process.
Here in Santa Barbara, our elections are seriously flawed. In the past three election cycles, I have received four mail-in ballots for people that don’t live at my house, including one for my son who has never lived in Santa Barbara County. I can also name 12 other people that have received illegitimate ballots at their home address. This ticked me off, so I started to show up at the SB County offices during elections as a poll observer. Here are some of my notes from the 2024 election: Multiple precincts had more votes than registered voters. Specifically:
Precinct 20-0614 had 631 votes with 523 people pre-registered.
Precinct 23-2071 had 159 votes with 62 people pre-registered.
Precinct 50-5140 had 51 votes with only one person pre-registered.
Changes and Deletions
I noted these precincts and registration numbers on 11/5/24, but in the results currently available on the SB County website, these precincts have been inexplicably changed or deleted from the list.
1) I personally observed 3,000 ballots being printed on Election Day (November 4, 2024), because the Isla Vista precinct “ran out” of blank ballots. These were not handled as required by two people in a sealed bag, but by a single guy putting them in a manila folder and leaving the building with them.
2) I visited the SB County office and checked their numbers on 11/25/24, three weeks after the election. The county’s internal records showed 18,215 in-person ballots cast, and 84 ballots unaccounted for. But the 11/21/24 report on the SB County website listed 23,236 in-person ballots cast. The math is screwy and the public reporting doesn’t match the internal tracking sheet.
3) I submitted a Public Records Request (number R011748-010625) on 1/6/25, to ask for the reconciliation sheet. I wanted to understand the discrepancies with lost ballots, damaged ballots, provisional ballots, and others. The response was that they don’t have records, so sorry.
During 2/11/25, two months after the results were certified, there was still a discrepancy on the county’s working tally of in-person ballots, including a difference of 116 ballots between the number of paper ballots ordered and the number of ballots actually tabulated.
The number of mail-in ballots is always much higher than the number of in-person ballots. While I was able to work with county officials to review the reconciliation of in-person ballots, there appears to be no process at all to reconcile the mail-in category.
Nobody counts the number of envelopes received. Nobody counts the number of signatures that are verified. The County simply trusts the Dominion scanner to report the number of votes, without double-checking anything. In other words, if somebody chose to put 10,000 extra ballots into the hopper, the county would have no way to know that it happened. Another possibility: if the rumors of hacking Dominion software are true, the County would never know it was happening.
Despite all these problems, in each “Election Summary Report,” from November 5 to December 3, the County showed a perfect match between the number of “Cards Cast” and the number of “Voters Cast.” This is complete fiction; there was never a match between the number of voters and the number of ballots, even after the results were certified.
Is it intentional?
Is it simple incompetence?
It’s hard to know.
It’s Not All Bad News
The county staff that I visited were very polite. The signature-verification process looks pretty robust and accurate. In fact, I tested the signature verification step in November 2024 by deliberately printing my name in block letters instead of my normal signature. My ballot was correctly rejected for the non-matching signature. My personal conclusion is that the working-level staff members are doing their best, but the overall system is flawed.
Where Do We Go From Here?
This month, we have two candidates running for SB County Clerk-Recorder. The incumbent, Joe Holland, has been unresponsive and very unhelpful in my efforts to understand these ballot discrepancies.
Yesterday, I met with Melinda Greene, the challenger, to highlight the problems that I have observed. She agreed that reconciliation should be an open, public process. I believed her when she said that she would give observers better access to watch how the votes are counted and reconciled. So, although I am disappointed that we can’t get a conservative candidate on the ballot, I will be voting for Melinda Greene.
Fixing our county’s elections process will not happen quickly. The system is broken and we will need at least 2-3 cycles to implement and test solutions. But I am hopeful that with an army of volunteers, we have an opportunity for change.
We need volunteers to observe the specific precincts with large numbers of same-day registrations.
We need volunteers to watch over the flow of mail-in ballots, as they progress from signature verification to the envelope-opening machine to the Dominion tabulation machine.
We need dozens of people submitting public records requests, in a coordinated way, to prod SB County into taking action.
If you can help, please contact me at jmelectionintegrity@gmail.com.
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