or…Will we ever have secure elections in Oklahoma?

by Wendi Montgomery Dial, Oklahoma State Director for Restore Liberty

This is an analytical, fact based piece based on research conducted by Oklahoma Liberty and Integrity Group.

As many readers of this Substack already know, besides being the state director for Restore Liberty, a mission I am so very humble and proud to have been asked to take on, I am also one of the two principal co-founders of Oklahoma Liberty and Integrity Group. My partner in this endeavor and I worked over a period of three years together analyzing election data, and we continue to pursue separate tasks. Our main function through the course of 2022 was to collect data on Oklahoma elections and inform the public of our findings and analysis. In 2023 we began touring the state presenting our findings to the public and whatever lawmakers would listen.

The public is very interested in this information. The lawmakers? Not so much. 

I have been holding on to this data to see if any public official would show interest in looking into the many problems with our elections to the point where I would feel confident showing this data to them, knowing an investigation would ensue and the data would not disappear or be buried. I am still waiting. That being the case, it is time to publish this data for the public, especially in light of the report from the Governor’s task force on elections. When the parties in charge of a process are allowed to investigate themselves, instead of having neutral, uninterested parties investigate a matter, it’s not surprising that they find information to point to and place in a report that reinforces to the unsuspecting public that they are doing their jobs and that, above that, miraculously, they’ve done nothing wrong. 

Last month the constitutionally questionable Governor’s task force into election integrity, composed of who, we are told, are the foremost election integrity experts in the state, released their report on Oklahoma elections, where they make several recommendations AFTER claiming to have thoroughly looked into our elections. Looking at the members and who they consulted two things stand out.

  1. Not a single citizen investigating Oklahoma data and voter rolls from the last three years was included in these interviews or on the task force. It was packed with people who have been in charge of Oklahoma elections for many years, who have a vested interest in finding nothing wrong with our elections. The system has investigated itself. It appears from the report that the task force was stopped from recommending legislation censoring citizens knowledgeable in Oklahoma election data and voter rolls only, unbelievably, by lawyers who had to inform these American officials that censorship isn’t allowed under the First Amendment to the US Constitution and Article 2 Section 22 of the Oklahoma Constitution. 
  2. They have decided that one way to fix the elections is to pour MORE MONEY into the system and get rid of restrictions on election campaign financing, which would result in candidates being able to handsomely reward campaign consultants who spend their time fabricating information on political rivals and opponents. There’s a saying about the love of money……

I was holding out a little hope, foolishly, I suppose, that the task force would be serious about election integrity in Oklahoma. Unfortunately, for the citizens of Oklahoma, the whitewash Oklahoma’s elections continues. 

Shall we get serious, Oklahoma?

We have vast problems in our state that continue with each election. These range from anomalous data to election boards that aren’t equipped to follow Title 26, Oklahoma’s election code. This was pointed out very recently by two Oklahoma County Election Board officials, who were unceremoniously fired and are currently under investigation for their efforts to bring the issues at the Oklahoma County election board to light. Read our Substack on this matter here. We have suspicious circumstances being reported in a few counties with mobile ballot boxes disappearing into offices without supervision or mobile ballot boxes just disappearing or being ‘misplaced’ only to be found later, with no substantial charges being brought against the people responsible for these circumstances. These instances are being sold to the public at large as ‘mistakes.’ 

I wonder what this will be sold as.

On the evening of the primary elections, June 28, 2022, my partner at OKLIG and I were collecting data as it was reported in real time from the State Election Board website. I keep an eye on the absentee ballot numbers and I noticed something right away, a little after 7:30pm, that indicated a situation that I thought, according to our State Election Board, was impossible.

The absentee ballot numbers were changing as the reports were released. Not once, but twice in an hour. By the end of the evening we had a situation were some absentee ballot numbers had changed nearly 60% from where they started at the first drop of the results after 7 pm. 

According to elections workers in several counties, the absentee ballot numbers should be reported, in total, shortly after 7pm when the mobile ballot boxes are opened and the state machine scans all 77 county machines for those numbers. They are the first returns the state reports on election night, before the election day numbers begin to come in. There is only one report for these numbers on election night and it is the first report of the evening. 

To reiterate, as this is key: As the returns come in for election day, the absentee ballot/early vote numbers remain the same after the initial report, as the numbers are reported in full at that time. 

The State Election Board website gives users the option to save election results in files by state, county or local results in PDF, XML, or CSV files, zipped. As results are reported files with those numbers at that time may be saved, and the files are date and time stamped. 

This was the initial drop of results with the absentee ballot counts captured and downloaded from the state election board site shortly after 7pm on June 28, 2022. First on the list is the Governor’s race.

At 7:35pm I downloaded the file below from the state election board website of the same statewide races. Note the numbers in the Governor’s race for absentee and early vote totals.

At 8:04pm I again downloaded the files from the State Election Board website when another data drop was completed.

The next day I downloaded the CSV file of the final results, again from the State Election Board website, shown below.

Please note the very small changes in the absentee ballot and early vote numbers between the 8:04 pm drop and the final numbers. 

When analyzing the data for further analysis in September of 2022, I decided to see how the absentee/early vote totals changed over the course of the evening. I did those calculations by hand on paper. These are shown below. Using the formula Final-Initial/Total, I could find the percentage of change of the absentee/early vote totals from the beginning of the night to the final numbers at the end of the night.

Note that the initial drop totals and the final totals for election night in absentee and early votes change as much as 60% or more over the course of the evening. 

There is one race where the initial drop of the absentee and early vote didn’t change at all. That is Jake Merrick’s Senate District 22 race. In that race the results were delayed during election night by as much as 30 minutes while the results in other races in the same area were being reported. 

These differences in the absentee/early votes as a percentage of the total number of votes was posted on social media in September of 2022. Curiously, in November of 2022 the initial drops for the absentee and early vote totals were exactly the same as the final totals at the end of election night and have been in every election since June 28, 2022. 

Is there a rational explanation for this? I do not know. We have changing numbers in an election where the numbers should remain fixed. Using machines to count our votes lends itself to the situation where we have non transparent elections using a language very few people understand, and as such, doesn’t meet the definition of ‘fair’, or I could venture a well educated guess to answer that question. The machines also remove the ability to hold anyone accountable for manipulation. Which seems to be a convenient set of circumstances for anyone wishing to manipulate our elections. 

In the past three years we and other election integrity researchers have logged and documented multiple anomalies in our elections in the state of Oklahoma. Whether it is in the data on election night, the procedures used for absentee ballot counting, or the way voter registration cards and our voter rolls are handled or mishandled, there are many reasons to be concerned about whether our elections are indeed free, fair, and secure. We do not know why these events are happening or continue to happen, but we will, at Restore Liberty Oklahoma, continue to ask for investigations into the data and the elections themselves. 

It has always been up to our officials to prove to us that our elections are free and fair. It’s never been the job of the citizens to prove they are not. Call, write, and continue to call and write and insist our officials do their jobs and cooperate with a full OUTSIDE investigation into our elections and a financial audit of the state election board and all county election boards.

This article was originally published here for Restore Liberty Oklahoma.

It is reprinted via R3publicans in its entirety with the author’s permission.