Introduction and Background

This work on unified, comprehensive reform of our vote began just after Arizona’s 2016 Primary disaster and right before the New York and California primaries joined Arizona and other states in blowing up our election crisis, election theft and end of a Democratic Republic based on trustworthy, transparent, functioning electoral process.

After a couple of calls to Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, who offered some foundational points she felt must be present to take back this situation at the polls and a few of her friends and co-workers on this issue to connect with I, then, started to work – more research, writing, reaching out, along with other primary election commitments, working overtime, hoping to impact better primary results in the still-to-come primary election and then general election, which showed me just what we are up against in this broken election process.

I called and found the Carter Center Director (name*) said they would NOT send monitors to U.S. elections, citing, then, the broken, patchwork and many differing codes for elections across the U.S. I realized they were right. If we ever wanted or needed oversight on a large scale, we would need large numbers of trained teams who could step up at a moment’s notice, even if ‘we’ did this ourselves, which we need and must plan to do, we needed a uniform election day process and much more. So, it became apparent we needed to do what it takes to reform our elections and unify! It also made sense, at the same time to implement ‘best practices’ in a very comprehensive, sweeping, unified election code; and that ‘we’ –‘We the People’, could do it. Not only can we, but WE MUST, and soon!

Here we will have to address unified, comprehensive codes and reform as some may not see the problems and desire things to be left as they are, unable to see or acknowledging the depth of our election problems; some will want only local control; others think they already have the best; or, it’s: ‘don’t tell me what to do’… and so forth! Hopefully, the positives will outweigh the negatives and concerns for unification as we become aware we need it. The biggest positive is securing our Democratic Republic and self-governance, via needed oversight to help get us out of this governance crisis and re-establish true ‘self’-governance. Another positive is up-grading—for most of us—to necessary ‘best practices’, even if a state or locale is ‘pretty good’, then, we can still improve, become models, become better ourselves and together, work to take back democracy, via accurate and honest elections and our vote.

We will work together ‘hashing-out’ best practices and agreed upon language for implementation.  We have not gotten the reforms we want and need in this area and many others at the federal level for many years and the next 2-4 years, more likely 4 years, it looks to be more of the same. For this reason we must take the direct democracy, direct ‘self-governance’ route via statewide ballot initiatives.

Our strategy will be highly successful, if we agree to take ownership of it and its success. Join the work at any stage along the way, now starting phase 2 of hashing-out language and changes, building our buy-in and coalitions! We just started an online working group for really serious policy people and the leaders of this movement at Take Back Elections on Facebook. We have working calls and online meetings to support our online and e-communications to educate, grow, gather steam and help us coalesce on this language for our state constitutions, and ultimately the federal constitution. Bring friends and your energy to this work! Start building coalitions where you are and doing research in your states, now, for this process!

We will discuss how we will proceed. Many thanks for all your hard work to today** We CAN, together, build an exciting, new and better future!

With Deep Appreciation and Warm Regards,

Monta Welch

Take Back Elections.org