Secretaries of State across the nation attended their National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) scheduled conference in Des Moines, Iowa in mid-August for what is normally a little publicized meeting. It was their first in-person gathering since Jan. 2020. This year the conference attracted more attention than usual due to the results of the November election and because it followed on the heels of Mike Lindell's election integrity symposium.
For those with election integrity on their minds, the conference was probably disappointing. Multiple media outlets indicated that the officials attending almost unanimously agreed that the theory that the Nov. election was fraudulent are merely conspiracy theories. Statements reported by the New York Times are illustrative of this point of view:
“There’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections,” said Frank LaRose, a Republican who serves as Ohio’s secretary of state. “The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.
”Steve Simon, a Democrat who is Minnesota’s secretary of state, said: “I don’t know of a single case where someone argued that a vote counted when it shouldn’t have or didn’t count when it should. There was no fraud.”
“Many of the claims against the commonwealth have already been dismissed, and repeating these false attacks is reckless,” said Jacklin Rhoads, a spokeswoman for Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who is Pennsylvania’s attorney general. “No active lawsuit even alleges, and no evidence presented so far has shown widespread problems.”
As reported by UncoverDC, elections in multiple states were, in fact, significantly affected by last-minute decisions by secretaries of state and were, in many cases, unconstitutional. They altered deadlines for ballots, extended early voting, approved mass mail-in voting and the installation of drop boxes, among other measures never seen before. Their decisions, they maintained, were due to the pandemic.
Trump's former advisor, Dr. Peter Navarro, wrote about the 2020 election in his extensive three-volume "Navarro Report" starting with Volume l called "The Immaculate Deception" in mid-December. Navarro discussed in detail the many ways the election was allegedly stolen. He highlighted the ways several secretaries of state circumvented the normal process of making and changing rules for elections.
On Wednesday, UncoverDC spoke with Arizona's top election integrity proponent in the State House, Rep. Mark Finchem. Finchem has been at the forefront of election integrity since he organized a well-attended election integrity hearing in November. Finchem's Ballot Integrity Project is an important component of his commitment to making sure the will of the people is never again hijacked by government officials who improperly overstep their authority in elections. Finchem is now running for Secretary of State in Arizona.
As Finchem stated in his press release, it seems the goal of the majority of the secretaries of state at the conference was:
“To create guidelines that would prevent a Maricopa-style forensic audit from ever happening again. Only West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner voted against the recommendations, and Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft abstained."
Many officials in his state have actively resisted the Maricopa County Audit, including Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Finchem's full press release is below.
https://www.scribd.com/document/521709813/20210825-Press-Release
