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STEVE JESSEN and Steve McNally (front, from left) were spokesmen for the Patriots United members who met with the Madison County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday about steps they want taken to ensure the integrity of the 2022 general election.
STEVE JESSEN and Steve McNally (front, from left) were spokesmen for the Patriots United members who met with the Madison County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday about steps they want taken to ensure the integrity of the 2022 general election.
MADISON — More than 20 members of the Patriots United organization met with the Madison County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday to seek cooperation to ensure the integrity of elections.
Patriots United describes itself “as a group of concerned citizens who have joined together to become informed and address mandates, fight medical tyranny, government overreach, voter fraud, the deterioration of educational standards and protect the most vulnerable in our society, our children.” It also supports conservative candidates in Nebraska.
One of the group’s two spokespersons on Tuesday, Steve Jessen of Norfolk, said the group wants to verify that the ballot counting machines are not being tampered with.
Jessen said the group had received information that there were discrepancies in the 2020 election ballot counts. Without citing the source, he said according to reports the group received about the 2020 presidential election, 648 of 15,000 ballots cast in Madison County were “flipped” by the machine from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
Jessen said the group wasn’t casting doubt on the integrity of Madison County Clerk Anne Pruss, who is the election commissioner, or the election workers.
“We feel you (county) and Anne have done everything above board 100%. What we don’t trust are the machines used to count ballots, and we have no way to access the machines other than through you,” he said.
Wherever audits of election results have been done, discrepancies in the vote totals were found, Jessen added.
“We do have proof they (machines) can and will be manipulated,” he said.
Members of the group suggested hand-counting the ballots, at least for the governor’s and congressional offices, before they are fed into the machines and then checking the results to see if both vote totals matched.
Board chairman Troy Uhlir and Pruss reminded the group that requests to hand count would have to be made to the secretary of state and state Legislature because state laws govern election procedures.
Uhlir was open to the county working with Patriots United to take its hand-counting request to the Legislature.
“If the secretary of state says ‘no,’ at least you tried,” Jessen said.
Pruss said the county runs four tests of the ballot counting machines before each election. Several sets of ballots are marked by her and three others, and each set is hand counted and machine counted.
“I will tell you that what we’ve found is that any errors in the counts are from us as individuals and not from the machines,” Pruss said.
Jessen said he had a problem with those test counts because information Patriots United had received was that the vote counting equipment could be tampered with remotely from somewhere else.
“What we’re being told is that during the election, they (machines) are being messed with and someone can actually change the count for a candidate remotely,” Jessen said.
Steve McNally of Norfolk said he appreciates the board’s willingness to hear the group’s concerns. He also thanked Pruss and Madison County Attorney Joe Smith for their prompt and thorough replies to information he sought from them.
Smith said he and Pruss had agreed to another request from the group, that being to preserve the ballots cast in the 2020 general election for at least three years. State law says they need to be saved for 22 months.
McNally said he had learned a lot from attending the past two county board meetings, and he is more confident in the county’s handling of issues because of it.
“An informed and involved citizenry is your greatest asset,” he told the board. “The ones not knowing what’s going on are the ones creating false narratives.”
The group also asked about how election poll workers are chosen, with Jessen saying state law allows political parties to submit a list of names of those they would like as poll workers to the county election commissioners.
The Daily News learned such a law does exist.
Cindi Allen, deputy secretary of state, said the county clerk/election commissioner is not obligated to hire the person whose name was submitted by the political party, but names could be submitted. The clerk/election commissioner also may solicit and hire others to be poll workers.
Pruss said no names of potential poll workers had been submitted to her by the political parties, so she recruits the poll workers.
Uhlir said he appreciated the group’s approach Tuesday in that its members weren’t attacking the county and its election officials, adding the county also wants to make sure the machines are accurate.
He said that’s the same way the state would need to be approached about any hand-counting requests.
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