Women behind election integrity group dismiss critics, raise alarm over 2020 vote

A group of women leading an election monitoring group is dismissing their critics and raising the alarm over what they see as a threat to the integrity of the upcoming 2020 elections.

"We've identified what we call the California model," said president and co-founder of the Election Integrity Project California (EIPCa), Linda Paine.

"There is a pattern that began to become very clear... it's bad laws that weaken integrity in the process, it's bloated voter rolls with no mechanism to remove those who are ineligible to register to vote, and then it's people willing to step through the weaknesses in the laws and manipulate the system," she said on Fox Nation's "No Interruption with Tomi Lahren."

The Election Integrity Project-California, founded in 2010, is a non-partisan, non-profit volunteer organization that advocates for citizens to become active participants in the electoral process, according to its website.

"Every state that follows the California model will become like California because the citizens in California really in many ways have lost the right to self-governance," continued Paine. "If we can't choose those who represent us and remove those who we feel are doing a bad job, then we are not functioning as a republic."

"The message from the left is that anything that you guys and other groups are doing to observe, to gather facts and to combat this voter fraud epidemic [is] labeled racist, bigoted, disenfranchisement... it just squashes anything that you guys are trying to do," observed Lahren.

"We have found in our work that when we're talking to just regular people, regardless of party affiliation, they really do want fair and honest elections," added Paine. "They want to know that if their candidate lost -- that they lost because the process was fair and honest. What we're seeing is the lack of integrity in the process."

In fact, Paine argued, blatant election fraud is "what causes people to not engage, to not vote, to sit it out."

"We've got a big election coming up," said Lahren, turning to EIPCa's vice president, Ruth Weiss. "What are you most concerned about going into the 2020 election?"

"I think all of this," said Weiss, referencing critics allegations against voter integrity groups. "I think the fact that the narrative has been owned to [allege]... voter suppression."

"In a state like California and many other states across this nation, there is no voter ID required in order to go in and cast a vote," she added. "That makes it easy to vote in anybody's name when you want to to create phony voters that don't exist and never did."

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EIPCa has identified the practice of "ballot harvesting" as one of the most alarming laws, introducing new opportunities for voter fraud into an already weakened election system.

"Ballot harvesting" is the practice by which organized, predominately partisan, groups collect absentee ballots from voters and deliver those ballots to polling place or election offices.

In 2016, former California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the law making "ballot harvesting" legal by eliminating existing rules, which restricted the practice of delivering another voter's ballot to relatives or those living in the same household of the voter.

"All of those elements of the chain of custody prevented someone from taking a vote by mail voter's ballot and getting rid of it," said Paine. "California's new law eliminated all of the chain of custody language and replaced it with anybody."

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A 62-year-old man pleaded guilty in Feb., to a large-scale, illegal "ballot harvesting" scheme to pay homeless people living on Los Angeles' infamous Skid Row to forge hundreds of signatures on ballot petitions and voter registration forms, during the 2016 and 2018 election cycles. The man was sentenced to one year in county jail and 100 hours of community service.  Eight other faces various charges affiliated with this scheme.

Another glaring problem in the California electoral system, according to the EIPCa, is that the voter rolls are filled with ineligible voters.

"We recently published a study where we looked at how many registered voters there were in each county of California," said EIPCa's chief analyst, Ellen Swensen. "We found eight counties that had more registered voters total than eligible citizens. And in those eight counties, the ineligible population added up is over almost a million people who are ineligible, but they're registered to vote."

The issue of illegible voters on the rolls was also highlighted by a study by the non-profit Honest Elections Project, which found suspiciously high voter registration rates in the key swing states of Florida, Michigan, and Colorado, ahead of the 2020 election. In some cases, there were more registered voters in some counties than there were actual eligible voters.

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Fox News Ronn Blitzer contributed to this report.