Fraud Denier Attacks!
Possibly out of panic, Democracy Docket, the organization founded by legendary infamous Democrat voter-fraud denier, Marc Elias, has launched the kind of attack on yours truly, VIP Co-Founder, Jay DeLancy, that merits a response.
As you may recall, the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) hurled a certain thought-terminating cliche at people like me who dared question the veracity of Joe Biden’s scandal-plagued 2020 election.
That term was “election denier,” and the Left is still at it. This time, they’re screeching the term in a desperate attempt to shame NC’s Council of State official, Auditor Dave Boliek, and the NC GOP for not blocking my appointment to the Lee County Board of Elections (CBE).
Quoting from their recent post, Democracy Docket contributor, Billy Corriher featured me in his latest missive:
In Lee County, they chose Jay DeLancy of the Voter Integrity Project (VIP). DeLancy has pushed election-related conspiracy theories for years. He started VIP to “watch” the people counting the votes. And over the years, he has spread “voter fraud” conspiracy theories about people in North Carolina, Georgia, and other states.
Hat tip to Billy for the terrific scare quotes, but so far, so good. In truth, or perhaps laziness, much of his article was lifted from a real journalist, Sarah Michels, at Carolina Public Press, about House Bill 958, an omnibus elections bill.
One aspect of HB958 served to correct some of the excesses last session’s Senate Bill 382 (State Law 2024-57), an omnibus bill that included an election-fraud remediation measure that created an impossible situation for county election boards.
When the dust settled, election officials realized this could mean CBE members could possibly spend election night counting absentee ballots.
This may seem like a good idea, but those same CBE members have a job to do on Election Day that begins at 0630 hours, when we deploy across the county, delivering voter list updates to precincts and certifying that the precincts have met certain statutory standards.
To be clear, Sarah Michels gave fair coverage of my ironic position. As a board member, I wouldn’t want to stay up for 24 hours, counting ballots!
At any rate, cooler heads prevailed at the Legislature and something reasonable will result.
While Ms. Michels did her best to use my quotes in context, Democracy Docket’s approach left any context on the newsroom floor in writing this:
After DeLancy spent years criticizing election administrators, the tables turned. He is now the one administering elections in his home county. Of course, he quickly changed his tune about the job.
“The things election integrity people like me have been complaining about were not all put there for nefarious purposes,” DeLancy said in a recent interview with Carolina Public Press. “Now we’re having to see, oh, it was done for a pragmatic purpose, just so we have time to count [the ballots].”
Anybody who knows me also knows that I have not “changed my tune,” but one significant change has altered my approach to the vexing problem of election integrity: The change in NC law that shifted control of elections away from the Governor has resulted in the firing of former State Board of Election Executive Director Karen Bell, and the resignation of her legal back-up, Paul Cox.
As I asserted for years, those two public servants have “serviced” the voters like stud bulls service a cow and their departure makes me believe we have a better chance at cleaning up some of their chaotic policies.
The most annoying part of the DD hit piece involved the personal attack Corriher then leveled at me:
Maybe DeLancy will reflect on the fact that the cause he dedicated the last 15 years of his life to — accusing election administrators of doing something “nefarious” despite a lack of evidence — was based on a harmful lie or, at best, a misconception.
As a public service to anybody who’s curious about some of my criticism of Bell and Cox, here’s a link to some of the stories we’ve covered over the years.
As to the “lack of evidence” slur, we’ve provided plenty of evidence over the years that our “friends” at WRAL have either ignored or attacked.
I’ll close with a few of our greatest hits.
- Bell, Cox and their “Republican” predecessor, Josh Lawson all sought creative ways to deny the civil rights poll observers, under the “cover of law.” I called them all sorts of ugly names for this illegal observer suppression and wrote several posts on it. Here’s a link one of them.
- The 2018 “ballot harvesting” scandal in Bladen County was another area of hot concern for me, because of the way (then) Director Kim Strach, Josh Lawson, and a retired FBI agent named Joan Fleming, handled that case. One aspect involved a Republican absentee voter, whom election officials tried to use as a victim of a crime. She had turned in her ballot, but officials claimed she hadn’t. This helped stoke the flames against that year’s Congressman-elect, Mark Harris, until somebody “found” that very ballot. They couldn’t undo the smear, but could quietly correct the record.
- Also in the Bladen scandal, the leader of a shady civil rights mafia organization called Bladen Improvement Association, admitted he had been “tipped off” about an investigation into rampant ballot harvesting that had been going on in that county since 2010. We still don’t know which election official broke the lay by tipping them off.
- Lest we forget, just prior to her being fired, Director Strach admitted there was no “widespread” fraud and Harris had lost his “nearly 2000-vote” victory because of “possibly one or two” illegal ballots.
- I could go on all day with this, but I’m cutting me off at five. This involves how Fleming ran a targeting exercise against a key republican political consultant, the late McCrae Dowless, and they completely ignored testimony in open court when one witness, named Precious Hall, explained how another Bladen Improvement Association leader had simply “taken” her ballot after arriving at her door to “help” her fill it out. This was exactly the crime Strach and Fleming had accused Dowless of doing, but the Democrat lawyer Harris had employed deftly helped Marc Elias change the subject and move on.
Bottom line to the guys at Democracy Docket: Not sorry. My efforts will now be directed at reforming from within.
~ jd