Make a wrong turn on a dirt road and go into the trees.
“In late 2021, a group of volunteers turned onto Coulter Creek Road on a mission to uncover fraud and incompetence in Mason County elections,” a Seattle TV station says. They found an empty lot where, they believed, four people were registered to vote. And another vacant lot where two more people supposedly were registered to vote.
Those voters aren’t Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, who registered to vote at a dilapidated shack (photo below) where he never spent a night (details here). They’re real, and they’re registered to vote where they live.
The voting fraud vigilantes (photo, left) were on the wrong road.
Calling themselves the Mason County Voting Research Project, they went door-to-door, then flagged 239 voter registrations in a report that KING 5 News found riddled with errors (story here).
Of course they found a “dead” voter, too. But the neighbors say he was alive in November 2020. He apparently still is, down in Arizona; the county elections office received a change of address notification from the post office in 2021.
Bogus “dead voter” claims are a staple of rightwing election bleating. For example, Trump claimed 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia, but the actual number was 4 (see details here). In Arizona, the incompetent GOP “audit” that gave Biden a 360-vote wider lead than the official tally also flagged 282 “dead” voters, of whom 281 were found alive (details here). In short, don’t believe Republican “dead voter” claims. For an excellent Gary Larson “Far Side” cartoon addressing the stupidity of assuming people are dead when they’re not, go here and scroll down.
This is why we don’t let amateurs run elections or manage voter registrations. And as for their “research,” it isn’t worth a teacup of warm spit. Keep that in mind when rightwing election vigilantes claim an election was “stolen.”
Mason County voters also need to keep that in mind when they vote in November, because the guy behind this group is running for county auditor. His name is Steve Duenkel, and on his website (here), he says “every legal vote is sacred and should be treated as such.” Really? His party doesn’t think so. They spend millions on voter suppression campaigns, and they’re hatching legislation to throw out election results.
Duenkel doesn’t tell you on his website he’s a Republican. To confirm he is, I went to the primary election results here, where he appeared on the ballot as the Republican candidate for Mason county auditor (you’ll have to scroll down). Given the sloppy job he did of “auditing” Mason County voter registration lists, I sure wouldn’t put him in charge of them, no matter what his party affiliation was.
But spare us the hypocrisy, please. And if you want to know who the cheaters are, use the search function at the top of this page to look up “voting fraud.”
