(NRSC News) – The last two US election cycles have caused Americans to doubt the integrity, safety and security of elections in America. Does anybody really, actually believe that Joe Biden managed to get millions upon millions more votes than former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump who were both wildly popular and charismatic?
There have been good reasons to doubt the integrity of elections. There has been a lot of really suspicious chicanery over the past few years. Now state officials are investigating a claim that ballots were shredded on election night last year in Carbon County, Montana.
The complaint filed by Carbon County poll watcher Chip Bennett and his wife, Lisa Bennett, was originally filed locally but now KTVQ reports it is in the hands of the Montana Division of Criminal Investigation.
Chip Bennett contends that a portion of surveillance video shows Carbon County Elections Administrator Crystal Roascio shredding documents that the Bennetts believe were ballots.
“We see our election administrator shredding what appears to us to be absentee ballots,” Lisa Bennett said. She acknowledged that a privacy screen prevented a full view of what was going on. Despite the partial view, she believes it shows 21 batches of documents being put through a shredder.
“We know that there are multiple pages going through. We can’t quite tell how many pages that she’s counting,” she remarked.
Carbon County Attorney Alex Nixon, however, noted in a statement that there was no wrongdoing that took place.
“The shredding undertaken by the Carbon County elections administrator, which is depicted in the circulated video, is the shredding of ballot copies received via email from Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act voters,” the statement declared.
Christina Barsky, a professor of public administration and policy at the University of Montana School of Law School, says she believes there were no ballots shredded. Not based on any evidence, mind you.
“You won’t see things shredded that are official documents, things like ballots or affidavits of any kind. Those all have to be retained on the retention schedule,” she asserted.
She added that emails received with overseas ballots are a different matter.
“If they printed off of a printer in the elections office and then put it on the paper ballot, that printout could be shredded because it’s not a voted ballot,” Barsky insisted.
The Bennetts are standing by their concerns.
“What we see in the video does not match up with what they claim it is,” Lisa Bennett commented.
“I’m personally hoping that there’s a good explanation for this that it makes sense,” she stated. “But I’m not hopeful.”
This isn’t the first time the Bennetts and Roascio have clashed.
The Montana Free Press revealed that last year, Roascio dismissed challenges to about 300 voters that were filed by Lisa Bennett. While Western Montana News reported that in 2021, Chip Bennett was at odds with Carbon county officials over the retention of election records.
“Carbon County makes it a priority to not save electronic records and to dispose of all records immediately at 22 months; sometimes sooner,” he wrote in an Op-Ed.
“Yet, we are to just simply ‘trust’ them that our elections are safe and secure. Without digital records how can we audit our voting equipment?”
You’d think with all the suspicion surrounding US elections that those responsible for overseeing and conducting elections would be extra cautious and want to hold on to documents for as long as possible, just in case.
The opposite appears to be the case more often than not. It seems those responsible for elections are in a hurry to dispose of any and all records. Why are there even shredders at election sites to begin with?
We can only hope Montana officials can get to the bottom of the Bennetts’ claim.
Copyright 2023. NRSCNews.org
I live in Az and watched the hearings on election fraud here in 2020 and nothing was done about it, so now in 2022 the fraud was even more brazen and nothing is done about….why bother voting…let the dems just claim they won because thats what they are going to do anyway!
Republicans must take control of the US Senate and the Presidency in 2024 !!!
If you are manufacturing ballots and there is no proof they are legal because you shredded the evidence then you can manufacture as many ballots as you want. Instead of claiming ballots were shredded you should be claiming ballots were illegally manufactured which we already know to be the case. No mention of what happened to the actual emails, of course I’m sure those could be manufactured also.