Commentary: Post-Election Audits Should Be the Norm for Every State

I may be dating myself, but the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

We can get much more than an ounce’s worth of prevention by engaging in post-election process audits. It is much easier to fix process problems early before they blow up and become problems that require litigation and other nasty fixes. Ahead of the 2024 election, state legislatures should require full process audits to ensure transparency and build trust in our elections.

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CBO Says IRS Will Audit Americans Making Under $400K

Internal Revenue Service

Despite claims from Biden administration officials that new funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will not increase the auditing burden on individuals and small businesses, a Friday letter from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reveals new auditing activity targeting taxpayers who report less than $400,000 per year will be expected to contribute to about $4 billion in revenue.

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Ohio Republican Party State Central Committee Member Calls on Chair and Treasurer to Resign over Party Finances

An Ohio Republican Party (ORP) Central Committeeman sent an email to party associates on Monday calling on ORP Chairman Bob Paduchik and Treasurer David Johnson to resign.

Mark Bainbridge, an accountant who represents ORP’s State Central Committee District 16 and who has led the committee’s reform caucus, wrote that the state party has suffered a decline in net worth that is “shrouded in secrecy.” Specifically, he stated, ORP reported a net gain of $147,259 through 2021 when it allegedly should have reported a loss of $162,088. He concluded that $309,347 in net expenses are absent from the organization’s profit and loss statement and that ORP had equity totaling $2,568,530 at the end of 2021 compared with $2,730,618 at the end of 2020.

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Analysis: Americans Overwhelmingly Oppose Plan to Hire IRS Agents to Audit Citizens

Outside of IRS building

Included in the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act currently before the U.S. Senate is a proposal to allocate $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service to hire nearly 87,000 additional agents – a plan opposed by a majority of voters recently polled.

The BBBA proposal also comes after numerous reports show years of examples of agency problems costing taxpayer money.

According to a new HarrisX poll, 58% of likely voters said they think increased enforcement would impact middle class taxpayers the most; 23% said it would only impact the wealthy.

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Pennsylvania GOP Senators’ Internal Battle Over Imperiled Forensic Election Audit Goes Public

An internal fight among legislators over a forensic election audit is spilling into public after Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Gettysburg, accused leaders in his own party of stonewalling his investigation.

The senator made the comments during a Thursday interview with One America News Network that he later doubled down on in a lengthy statement posted to his social media pages the following day.

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Vehement Anti-Trump Group Donated $85k to Atlanta Election Judges, Now Auditors Want Some Repaid

A liberal nonprofit that accused President Donald Trump of unleashing a “surge in white supremacy and hate” donated $85,000 last fall to election administrators in Georgia’s largest county as part of a campaign to turn out black votes in the 2020 election. Auditors now want some of that money returned.

The Fulton County Auditor declared this month that county election officials failed to spend all of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s grant for buying absentee ballot drop boxes and did not comply with one of the grant’s primary requirements to publicly disclose how many ballots were collected in the boxes.

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Lawsuit to Inspect Fulton County Mail-In Ballots Amended to Include New Evidence Hand Recount Audit ‘Was Riddled with Massive Errors and Provable Fraud’

Petitioners in a lawsuit to inspect Fulton County mail-in absentee ballots from the November 3, 2020, election have added new claims and provided new evidence that the hand recount audit was riddled wth massive errors and provable fraud.

VoterGA, organizers of the lawsuit, made the stunning announcement on Tuesday that revealed “a whopping 60%” error rate in Fulton County’s hand count audit held on November 14 and 15, 2020.

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Georgia Audit Documents Expose Significant Election Failures in State’s Largest County

Documents that Georgia’s largest county submitted to state officials as part of a post-election audit highlight significant irregularities in the Atlanta area during last November’s voting, ranging from identical vote tallies repeated multiple times to large batches of absentee ballots that appear to be missing from the official ballot-scanning records.

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Arizona Rep. Mark Finchem in Tennessee: Our Elections Have Been Open to Manipulation and for Much Longer Than We Knew

FRANKLIN, Tennessee — Arizona State Rep. Mark Finchem (R-District 11) told a group of nearly 100 gathered in middle Tennessee that it has been revealed that our elections have been open to manipulation and for much longer than we knew, long before November 2020. 

Finchem said that “While many might think it’s a curse, America has been given a gift.”

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ODH Data Generally Accurate, But Could Use Improvement Publicly, State Auditor Says

Although the Ohio Department of Health published mostly accurate coronavirus data over the past year of the pandemic, the department could have done better with the specificity of that data and disseminating it to the state’s residents, according to an audit by the Ohio Auditor of the State released this week. 

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Governor Kemp Breaks Silence Again, Says He’s Always Asked for a Complete Audit

Governor Brian Kemp called for a complete audit of absentee ballot signatures late Thursday evening. The governor appeared on Fox News to express concern with the findings presented during Thursday’s Georgia Senate hearing.

“I called early on for a signature audit. Obviously, the Secretary of State per the laws and the Constitution would have to order that – he has not done that. I think it should be done. I think, especially from what we saw today, it [the evidence presented] raises more questions. There needs to be transparency on that. I would, again, call for that.”

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Georgia Secretary of State Says Trump Should Give Up and ‘Leave Quietly’

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stated that President Donald Trump should give up and “leave quietly” from the White House. The secretary of state made these comments in an interview with Atlanta Journal-Constitution published Saturday.

“When you lose an election, you should leave quietly. It’s the will of the people that has been expressed,” stated Raffensperger.

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Ohio Commission Wants Independent Audit of FirstEnergy

The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio again took aim at the company at the heart of the state’s controversial nuclear bailout bill.

The PUCO initiated an audit of FirstEnergy’s compliance with corporate separation laws and regulations. Already, the commission is investigating the company’s Ohio distribution utilities’ political and charitable spending.

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Tax, Legal Experts Agree Leaker of Trump’s Tax Returns Could Face Prison Time

Tax and legal experts say the leaker or leakers who took President Trump’s personal tax returns and gave them to The New York Times, committed a felony punishable by prison.

Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia who has advised Trump on some legal matters, told Just the News that the leaking was “definitely” a crime that could be liable for both criminal and civil legal actions.

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Ohio Lawmakers Propose Protecting Elections with Civilian Cyber Militia

The Ohio State Senate’s Committee on Government Oversight and Reform took up a bill Wednesday with a unique solution to protect the ballot box in the next election. Senate Bill 52 (SB 52) will authorize the creation of the “Ohio Cyber Reserve,” a new division of the Ohio National Guard…

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