Everybody talks about election integrity, but Secretary of State Monae Johnson isn’t willing to spend real money on it. South Dakota’s secretive election-denier-in-chief sends poor flunky Rachel Soulek to stammer that paying the multi-state Electronic Registration Information Center an amount less than Secretary Johnson’s $103,105.64 salary is too high a price to ensure a clean voter registration list:
“South Dakota is not a member of ERIC and never has been,” Soulek told KELOLAND News. “Our office has no current intentions on joining ERIC as there is a significant cost to join and legislation would have to be changed to meet their requirements.
…“South Dakota has been involved in past multi-state voter information sharing to help clean our files and is looking into another one that would not have a cost associated with it,” she continued.
…Soulek said South Dakota would need to pay a one-time membership fee of $25,000 to join ERIC and pay annual dues to remain a member. Soulek said she didn’t know how much dues currently are. Information from 2021-2022 indicates they ranged at that time from about $15,000 to about $74,000 per year [Bob Mercer, “South Dakota Never Joined Group Sharing Voter Data,” KELO-TV, 2023.06.20].
Dues for Fiscal Year 2023 range from $26K to $116K, depending on citizen voting-age population. As South Dakota has the sixth-smallest number of people old enough to vote, South Dakota’s dues would be much closer to $26K than $116K, so probably only a fraction of Monae Johnson’s salary and less than the $46K Johnson gives election-law-breaker Logan Manhart to coordinate elections in her office.
Eight Republican-led states have withdrawn from ERIC this year citing concerns about data privacy but underlyingly bothered that ERIC requires member states to notify eligible but unregistered folks that they can register to vote. Remember, Republicans just want to purge the voter rolls, not improve and expand them.
In a March response to Republican squawking and balking, ERIC exec Shane noted that member states control the organization and set their own dues and ERIC staff keep voter data secure:
With recent misinformation spreading about ERIC, I want to set the record straight on a few important points.
ERIC is a non-profit membership organization created by state election officials to help improve the accuracy of state voter rolls and register more eligible Americans to vote. This has been our mission since 2012.
We are a member-run, member-driven organization. State election officials – our members – govern ERIC and fund our day-to-day operations through payment of annual dues, which they set for themselves.
We analyze voter registration and motor vehicle department data, provided by our members through secure channels, along with official federal death data and change of address data, in order to provide our members with various reports. They use these reports to update their voter rolls, remove ineligible voters, investigate potential illegal voting, or provide voter registration information to individuals who may be eligible to vote.
ERIC is never connected to any state’s voter registration system. Members retain complete control over their voter rolls and they use the reports we provide in ways that comply with federal and state laws.
We follow widely accepted security protocols for handling the data we utilize to create the reports. Our servers are housed in a managed, secure data center located here in the U.S. Secure remote access to the data center is limited to only employees who need it to perform their duties.
ERIC’s Washington, D.C. address is a mailing address only. Like other organizations, our employees work remotely. ERIC members are aware of this arrangement. This approach reduces operating costs without sacrificing security or our ability to serve our member’s needs.
We will remain focused on our mission by providing our members with actionable data they can use to keep their voter rolls more accurate, investigate potential illegal activity, and offer voter registration information to those who may need it [Shane Hamlin, open letter, ERIC website, 2023.03.02].
South Dakota could join this multi-state consortium to improve its voter registration data. We’d catch and clear more records of voters with multiple registration (like Logan Manhart himself, who tried to run for Legislature here in South Dakota while he was still registered to vote in Wisconsin, which belongs to ERIC, which—a-ha!—is probably another reason on top of all the conspiracy bunk that Logan is whispering to Monae, Don’t join ERIC!), and we’d have the chance to reach out to new residents and help them get on the voter rolls, all for less than the annual salary of any election official in the Secretary of State’s office. But Monae Johnson isn’t really interested in a robust and reliable voter registration list; she and her ilk just want to prevent as many people as possible from participating in elections.
South Dakota Democrats and the literally unaffiliated,
“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius
“I think not, therefore, I am not.” – Confuse Us (aka magat god of word salad)
Firmly rooted in the twentieth century and fondly looking backwards.
Republicans Caught Registering Dead People – (would your Monae Johnson have even said anything? – Alert – watch out for Wyoming’s Grassfire LLC petitioning firm)
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Tuesday announced his office has charged six Republicans for allegedly submitting petitions with forged signatures in an attempt to get a 2022 Republican congressional candidate on the ballot.
The six individuals — Alex Joseph, 28, Terris Kintchen, 27, Patrick Rimpel, 25, Jordahni Rimpel, 24, Aliyah Moss, 21, and Diana Watt, 55 — were paid circulators for Grassfire LLC, a Wyoming-based professional petitioning firm, the attorney general’s office said in a news release. All six, except for Watt, are cousins, investigators said.
Prosecutors charged the six circulators with one count each of attempt to influence a public servant — a class four felony — and one count of perjury, a misdemeanor.
https://www.courthousenews.com/contract-workers-used-duplicated-deceased-names-on-election-paperwork-colorado-ag-alleges/
November 2020, a “shadow election?” Was it? Who is saying that? The GOP?
“The summer uprising had shown that people power could have a massive impact. Activists began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election.” The GOP still compares it to Jan 6.
So no surprise that: In a release upon her nomination by the state Republican Party, [Monae] Johnson claimed that the radical left was continuing “its assault on election integrity.” She is one of many GOP secretary of state candidates who questioned the country’s election system. https://www.blackhillsfox.com/2022/11/09/south-dakotas-new-secretary-state-questions-election-integrity/
“Getting a direct answer [from Monae] on the 2020 election proved impossible.” Thus Cory’s quote of reporter Seth Tupper.
TIME (i don’t know who TIME is anymore, or if it is trustworthy) wrote, a very deep piece, on Feb 15, 2021:
“Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote. Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative …, began studying this problem a few years ago. The most important takeaway from Quinn’s research, was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse.
Democratic lawyers battled a historic tide of pre-election litigation. The pandemic intensified the parties’ usual tangling in the courts. But the lawyers noticed something else as well. “The litigation brought by the Trump campaign, of a piece with the broader campaign to sow doubt about mail voting, was making novel claims and using theories no court has ever accepted,” says Wendy Weiser, a voting-rights expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU.
“They read more like lawsuits designed to send a *message* rather than achieve a legal outcome.” (my emphasis)***
And “winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election. After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning the Electoral College and winning the transition–steps that are normally formalities but that he knew Trump would see as opportunities for disruption.”
And “…nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote. About a quarter voted early in person. Only a quarter of voters cast their ballots the traditional way: in person on Election Day.”
But, “winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election. After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning the Electoral College and winning the transition–steps that are normally formalities but that he knew Trump would see as opportunities for disruption.”
Concluding, “We won by the skin of our teeth, honestly, and that’s an important point for folks to sit with,” says the Democracy Defense Coalition…it’s a mistake to think that this election cycle was a show of strength for democracy. It shows how vulnerable democracy is.”
Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
Monea and the SD MAGA GOP are apparently still engaged in their own “lost cause”, their own “war against reconstruction” that confederate holdouts (even to this day) fought and won after Lincoln was assassinated. She parrots deep thinker Kristi Noem.
Hmmmmm…..I think I see Monae’s problem. It involves the “I” word – INTEGRITY.