Captain Keshel and Co. American Election Integrity HQ

I long for the day in American political discourse in which the primary focus is America. A standard day - more Middle East, Ukraine, Taiwan, foreign news media drama. All so exhausting.

When reverse psychology works🤣We’ve come full circle y’all!😁👏 https://x.com/hmkesler/status/1988038641093144827

White Dems from Minnesota are speaking Somali and you’re black pilling? God couldn’t give you dumber enemies. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/11/09/watch-minneapoliss-reelected-democrat-mayor-jacob-frey-delivers-victory-speech-in-somali/

Trump just rolled the ever living hell out of the Democrats on the shutdown. Avoid the highest highs and lowest lows and you can survive.

🚨BREAKING: Historic Pardons End Witch Hunt on 2020 Election Heroes! 🇺🇸 Trump electors, attorneys & supporters freed from partisan attacks. From rigged mail-ins to suppressed truths—time for healing & justice! https://x.com/hmkesler/status/1987852623790129426?s=46&t=nFWKfKwNhY22NjYno2m2eg Congrats to all patriots! Thanks Ed Martin & President Trump! 🔥

Substack live for paid subscribers at the top of the hour (6 EST). Will be taking all questions about this week’s elections and making sense of what lies ahead. Link: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/76989?

High alert in MAMDANI’s New York City today. There are reports of a Viagra truck being stolen. Police are saying they are on the lookout for hardened criminals.

And just so I’m clear, I don’t think any elections with auto registration, mass mail balloting, and harvesting are “fair.”

  With Trump gaining almost 300,000 votes over Romney’s total and Clinton falling further from Obama’s 2012 performance, the state narrowly flipped, going to Trump by 0.7%.  There were 8.7 million registered voters (fewer than registered in 2008), and 6.2 million votes (70.8% turnout). The four elections spanning 2004 through 2016 all had between 5.8 and 6.2 million votes, with no less than 8.4 million registered and no more than 8.8 million.  Turnout spanned from 66.7% to 70.8%.  After the passage of Act 77 in 2019, things changed drastically. ·      In 2020, despite a Republican registration gain of greater than 21 to 1 in net new registrations, and Trump dwarfing his own net gains from 2016, Joe Biden leapfrogged Trump’s new vote record in the same election and won by 1.2%, with 9.1 million registered voters and over 6.9 million votes.  Turnout, or “turnout,” leaped to 76.4%. ·      In 2024, with little fresh population influx to draw from, Trump made a modest gain of just shy of 170,000 net new votes, riding a voter registration gain even stronger than the gain leading into 2020.  Harris finished over 45,000 above Trump’s 2020 total, which should have been enough to win Pennsylvania in a landslide without the changes to state law.  With 9.2 million registered voters and almost 7.1 million votes, “turnout” jumped to 76.9%. I suspect Trump’s substantial gains in the eastern portion of the state, which countered stagnant or even declining margins in the incredibly pro-Trump western counties, had the most to do with Trump carrying the most critical slate of electoral votes anywhere on the map.  Harris, running behind on margin in Philadelphia and its collar counties, and with minority populations scattered throughout places like Berks County, didn’t make her quota of expected votes, and therefore couldn’t get over the top once fortification was complete. Trump, at least this time around, was “too big to rig” in Pennsylvania, and not by much.  We can’t say the same for Eric Hovde in Wisconsin, who fell to same-day voter registration, or Mike Rogers in Michigan, who walked away after the absentee counts piled up in Detroit.  Sam Brown’s lead in Nevada gradually dwindled until Rosen was called the winner late on November 8.  Arizona’s slow count twisted the knife for Kari Lake’s supporters, who were already fed up from the 2022 campaign; they were offered no choice but to put full faith in a process that is choked with dishonesty, and had to accept that she ran almost 8 points behind Donald Trump.  Arizonans hadn’t seen a Republican win a presidential election and a Democrat win a concurrent U.S. Senate race in 36 years. Despite the first Republican popular vote victory in 20 years, and a commanding 312 to 226 Electoral College victory with wins in every widely accepted battleground (but not my own in New Hampshire), Trump would be limited to just 53 Republican Senators and a House majority so narrow it would hardly be of any use at all.  It had indeed been “too big to rig,” but not in the fullest sense, and despite the monumental win, those committed to the fight for free and fair elections knew there was way too much work to do, and not enough time to do it. The 45th, and soon to be 47th, President had survived Butler, outlasted the lawfare, commanded the narratives leading up to the election, and was all set to join Grover Cleveland as only the second man to win non-consecutive terms in the White House.  And for that – tens of millions of Americans gave thanks and prepared to bid farewell to a president who supposedly garnered over 81 million votes without waging a serious campaign.  We were accused of being sore winners – and we didn’t care one bit.

  Alaska Republicans foolishly introduced Ranked Choice Voting to the Last Frontier, and it paid immediate dividends by making sure one of the weakest Republicans in politics, Lisa Murkowski, held on to her Senate seat, and in the same year cost Sarah Palin the state’s At-Large U.S. House seat after Don Young’s death.  Palin and Nick Begich, who won the seat alongside Trump in 2024, combined for nearly 60% of the vote in the first-choice round of balloting, only for Democrat Mary Peltola to eventually emerge the winner. These items, combined with prolonged counting of ballots and what I call “unique corruption” to assess features relevant to election manipulation that are notable for only a single state, make up what I consider the Eight Cardinal Sins of election administration: ·      Automatic Voter Registration ·      Universal Mail-in Voting (or excessive mail-in voting) ·      Ballot Harvesting ·      Same Day Voter Registration ·      Prolonged Counting ·      Unique Corruption ·      Ranked Choice Voting ·      No Voter ID Comprehensive Exercise Nevada excepted, there is no battleground state that pulls everything together quite like Pennsylvania, which is only in its infancy when it comes to the operation of Automatic Voter Registration.  Many of its counties, especially its large urban ones, start mailing out ballots in September of an election year.  While Pennsylvania forbids ballot harvesting, except for the tightest restrictions assisting certain voters like family members, drop boxes litter the landscape and offer a tailor-made vector for ballot stuffing.  The most significant change to Pennsylvania’s election code came with the passage of Act 77 in 2019, signed into law by Governor Tom Wolf and allowing no-excuse mail-in balloting with inclusion on an automatic mail-ballot list. Like rain in a parched wasteland, the boom in mail-in balloting was a welcome relief for Democrats, who remain on a steady march toward political extinction in the Keystone State, made obvious through a review of voter registration by party.  Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, a Democrat, ignored the law and voted to allow the counting of improperly signed provisional ballots more than a week after Election Day 2024, doing all she could to save long-time U.S. Senator Bob Casey’s seat, which was imperiled because of Trump’s statewide victory and gains in Eastern Pennsylvania.  Republican Dave McCormick prevailed by 0.2%, just15,115 votes, when it was all said and done, but without the alterations to election law, would have coasted right behind Trump’s margin, which was whittled down to 1.7% when it had been comfortably high on election night.  In contrast, Trump won Ohio by 11.2%, or 9.5% right of Pennsylvania.  That is close to the 9.2% split in 2020, one year after no-excuse mail-in balloting hit the Keystone State.  The two states were 7.4% apart in 2016, but prior to that, you’d have to go all the way back to 1984 to find a wider gap between the two – and only because Reagan won Ohio in such a lopsided fashion. Starting in the 2004 presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry, the political trend of Pennsylvania is consistent and easily predictable for four consecutive elections: ·      In 2004, with 8.4 million registered voters, Kerry beat Bush by 2.5%, with 5.8 million votes cast (68.9% turnout as traditionally measured). ·      In 2008, with a hard shift toward Democrats in registration, Obama beat McCain by 10.3%, the largest presidential landslide in the state since 1964; there were 6 million votes cast with 8.8 million registered voters, for 68.7% turnout. ·      In 2012, with Republicans making a slight gain in voter registration as a percentage, Romney cut five points off Obama’s margin.  Obama won by 5.3%, with 8.5 million registered voters and 5.8 million votes cast (66.7% turnout).  Obama lost almost 300,000 of his 2008 vote total. ·      In 2016, Republicans surged in voter registration and cut the Democrat advantage drastically.

In 2022, Governor DeSantis signed Senate Bill 524, banning ballot harvesting and instituting other measures to secure Florida’s elections, which were corrupt enough as late as 2018 to nearly keep him out of office altogether.  The passage of this bill, naturally, required Republican dominance of state government, which is lacking in the deep blue states in which ballot harvesting is both a way of life and a pathway to one-party electoral dominance.  Florida’s legislature used precedent from its urban areas, particularly those in South Florida, stretching back decades to bolster public support for the measures, and immediately, Florida became an overwhelmingly Republican state, first in the 2022 midterms and then in 2024. Lesser forms of corruption are spread throughout the states.  Voter turnout is traditionally calculated by taking the number of ballots cast and dividing by the number of registered voters.  Wisconsin reported 3,658,236 voter registrations on November 1, 2025, just before Trump’s narrow win (and Hovde’s narrow “loss”).  There were 3,422,918 votes cast for President, which yields a turnout percentage of 93.6% as calculated traditionally.  For perspective, Arizona reported 4,367,593 registrations in its final update, and with 3,400,726 votes for President, has a much lower turnout percentage at just 77.9%.  Wisconsin’s workaround to lower its eye-popping turnout rate is its robust same-day voter registration capacity, which yielded 219,042 such registrations in 2020, and an alarmingly high 331,384 in 2024, bloating the voter roll by nearly 10 percent in one day and artificially lowering the official turnout numbers.  Iowa, Wisconsin’s smaller political cousin, added just 17,635 new registrations between its October closing report and its certified election turnout totals.  If Iowa, with 60% as many electoral votes as Wisconsin, would have had a proportional change in registration with Wisconsin, we should have expected 198,830 new registrations on the books. To avoid Soviet-level turnout statistics, many states have moved to estimating turnout by taking the number of votes and dividing it by the eligible voting population, which naturally drives the turnout percentage total down.  These efforts are blatant attempts to make people with a nose for analysis lose the trail on statistics that are easy to trace given enough continuity.  States like Wisconsin, with a hard organic trend against the Democrat establishment present for over a decade, leverage same-day registration to inflate the counts in two key counties, Dane and Milwaukee, and Republicans in the state fail to learn the lesson despite dropping election after election to late note ballot dumps in both Democrat strongholds. Most blue states pass laws against Voter ID, but I don’t think that is why they are blue.  I think they, given the inherent disregard for the rule of law, naturally omit such a commonsense reform from election law.  Trump won just two states, Nevada and Pennsylvania, without Voter ID.  Part of the the 2020 steal of Wisconsin relied on the classification of certain voters, or registrations supposedly assigned to real voters, to “indefinitely confined” status, and provided a workaround to Voter ID requirements. Ranked Choice Voting, a complicated method of voting in which votes are redistributed from losing candidates until one candidate finally takes a majority of the vote, was smacked down in numerous states on 2024 ballots (including blue states like Oregon).  It the latest fad Democrats have found useful for hanging on to close seats or flipping red seats altogether.  Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, won by Trump in all three of his races, has continued to be a narrow hold for Democrats in the House thanks to Ranked Choice Voting.  Democrat Jared Golden held it by the slimmest of margins in 2024, right behind Trump’s win in the district and in the state with worst election laws in New England.

  It is fully legal to operate a corrupt system automatically registering citizens and non-citizens alike to vote, to mail that registrant, or any duplicate record listed as a registrant, a ballot, and to permit harvesters to collect those ballots over a lengthy period preceding the election.  If that doesn’t work, and it appears the state may vote in an undesirable fashion, there are always courts to provide room on the back end, as well.  Brown, as I predicted both before the election and on November 6, had been Laxalted, and no one could do a damn thing about it. Ballot Harvesting In the old days, which weren’t so long ago, a candidate with the “it” factor, who had the gravitas to lead a nation, didn’t have a hard time getting people motivated to go vote for him, rather than against his opponent.  Ronald Reagan was one of those candidates for the Republican Party, but in my lifetime, Barack Obama was the best example from the other side of the aisle.  In 2008, he benefitted from an eight-year shift away from the incumbent president’s party, massive disapproval of that president, two unwinnable conflicts raging overseas, an economic collapse, and his own narrative of “hope and change” that hoodwinked millions.  To top it off, Democrats still held the high ground with the white working-class, which elected Trump eight years later, commanded the minority vote with a record share of a record turnout, and hit it big with urban and suburban moderates, who are often thought of as swing voters in modern elections.  The 2008 version of Obama still campaigned and worked for the votes, and combined with the factors above, John McCain’s uninspiring campaign, and the public’s willingness to move in a different direction, the result was 69 million votes and a massive landslide. In baseball terms, Obama hit .350 with 40 home runs that year.  No one was going to beat him out in 2008, and he didn’t need to game the electoral system to get his margins.  Good baseball teams have a guy or two who hits .300, and maybe a couple who hit 30 or more home runs.  Elite teams have more of each, but imagine if a manager could apply a cream to his light-hitting shortstop who only makes the lineup card because of his glove work and turn him into a .300 hitter and an all-around offensive threat. Such is the nature of ballot harvesting, which began to take root in California, now America’s Democrat Petri dish, during the Obama era.  Ballot harvesting allows even the most uncharismatic candidates to pile up gaudy vote totals they would have no ability to win if voting were conducted like it was not even two decades ago.  Elections are still won with the ballots of low propensity voters, which left- and right-wing organizations alike chase .  It makes perfect sense that base voters of both sides will get out to vote in big elections.  It’s the vote of the working man who gets home at 5:45 p.m. and says, “Hell, I like that guy and I need to go vote for him so we don’t miss out,” that wins the field. Ballot harvesting, the third-party collection of ballots, goes as naturally with mail-in balloting as infantrymen go with tanks in urban combat.  Corrupt administrators send out the ballots in shotgun-style, to the entire roll, then the lengthy window of time from that point until Election Day permits what is no different than an adult Easter egg hunt to commence.  The only difference is that one side has the data detailing which ballots are available for collection, as the feds found out when they were investigating the local election corruption cases of Democrat on Democrat crime in New Jersey and Connecticut during the Biden years. California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington consider ballot harvesting as American as apple pie and have no laws restricting that activity.  Florida and several other states, on the other hand, consider ballot harvesting a felony.  Why the difference?

  I used the 2024 data from all 56 races to contrast outcomes with the two previous Trump races, and found that states are most easily predicted when viewed through the lens of which laws they keep on the books.  Three election laws in particular represent the unholy trinity of electile dysfunction: Automatic Voter Registration If you want to create a permanent blue state, there is nothing better for the long-term than to usher in Automatic Voter Registration.  Biden carried 18 of 20 states, plus Washington, D.C., under Automatic Voter Registration in 2020, 243 electoral votes to 9.  After seeing the success and accurately perceiving a Republican shift present in almost every state, Delaware, Hawaii, Minnesota, and most importantly, Pennsylvania, shifted to Automatic Voter Registration in the years following Biden’s inauguration and before November 5, 2024.  Trump managed to carry Pennsylvania, which was “too big to rig,” and flip Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada among Automatic Voter Registration states he had “lost” in 2020, but still lost them 18 to 6, or 221 electoral votes to 64.  The most startling map is that of the states not running Automatic Voter Registration, which Trump won by an astounding margin of 248 electoral votes to Harris’s 5. 25 states not operating Automatic Voter Registration went to Trump.  Only New Hampshire and the 2nd Congressional District of Nebraska, centered on metro Omaha, went to Harris in this grouping.  Automatic Voter Registration allows for states like Michigan to bloat voter rolls to a number higher than the number of eligible voters living in a state, and when combined with Universal Mail-In Voting, or simply states with excessive mail-in voting like Pennsylvania, is a recipe for disastrous levels of election manipulation. Registration, no matter if you lean more toward electronic or manual means of how elections are defrauded, is undoubtedly the foundation of election corruption.  Blue states have adopted this policy in the last decade more than any other policy, a telltale sign that they recognize the electoral benefits of having such a policy on the books.  Like a frosty beer with a plate full of spicy wings, it pairs naturally with the oldest trick in the book. Universal Mail-In Voting Oregon was the first state to convert to all-mail elections, and ran the first such presidential race in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly defeated George W. Bush.  The practice had been dabbled with at a more local level, like when Maricopa County Republicans allowed the practice as early as 1991, but mass mail-in voting is a new thing.  Colorado, Utah, and Washington were the next three states to switch to Universal Mail-In Voting after Oregon, and those states were joined in by California, Hawaii, Nevada, and Vermont, who largely used COVID-19 as an excuse to entrench the practice. Things are so out of control in mail-in heavy states.  In the 2024 campaign, King County, Washington, resident Jami Visaya reported having 16 ballots sent to her address in Bellevue.  Stunned by the carelessness of it all, she said, "In 30 years of voting, I've never had that many ballots that don't belong to me, you know?"  This author finds it unsurprising that Washington hasn’t had a Republican governor since John Spellman skipped out of Olympia on January 16, 1985 – the day I turned two months old. About three-quarters of the vote in Arizona is cast by mail, but what distinguishes a state with too much mail-in voting from a Universal Mail-In Voting state is that in the latter, a ballot is fired off to every registration on the voter roll.  Naturally, the Universal Mail-In Voting states are overwhelmingly blue, going 6 to 2 for Harris, 91 electoral votes to 12, an improvement for Trump from 2020 only because he managed to flip Nevada.  Nevada Democrats, however, managed to fully erode and surpass Sam Brown’s lead in the 2024 U.S. Senate race against Jacky Rosen, who has the charisma of a bullfrog, because their legislature had codified the entire 2020 cheat code into law.

1% to the right, and resulted in many county flips for Trump, including a flip of the overwhelmingly Hispanic Imperial County, which last voted for a GOP presidential candidate 36 years before.  An impartial observer with a general knowledge of U.S. politics would assume a candidate running in her own home state and underperforming the previous party nominee by 1.8 million ballots would deflate any hopes of her party flipping House seats Republicans won in an otherwise disappointing midterm cycle two years before.  John Duarte (CA-13) and Michelle Steel (CA-45), the Republican House members evicted from by Democrats Adam Gray and Derek Tran, respectively, after weeks of counting, found out exactly why international watchdog organizations consider slow counting a telltale sign of cheating in elections, but limped way without a fight. I thought through the most effective way to map data for the 2024 election, and with Harris lagging Biden’s national ballot count by more than 6 million, it wasn’t going to be by flagging states, counties, or even precincts red on a map for inconceivably high vote totals that were obvious in places like Maricopa County four years earlier.  National elections operate like the dimmer on a light switch; when a candidate is hot, they’re hot everywhere.  When the candidate is cold, they’re cold all over.  When Obama was a can’t-miss candidate in 2008, he shifted almost every state to the left and gained votes everywhere, blowing away all previously-held national popular vote figures and landing at a total that wouldn’t be eclipsed for another 12 years.  In 2012, 43 states shifted back to the right, as Obama hemorrhaged much of his support form four years earlier, putting the Midwest on a collision course for flipping for the right candidate.  Romney’s problem was simple in that he couldn’t capitalize on Obama’s losses and bring enough defectors to his side. Kamala Harris lagged Joe Biden’s ballot count in 44 states and Washington, D.C.  Her collapse helped erase a decade of Democrat inroads into Texas, send Florida off into the Republican stratosphere, and solidify Iowa and Ohio as GOP strongholds.  In Ohio, she failed to match John Kerry’s vote total from 20 years earlier, yet miraculously nearly equaled Biden’s ballot count in Pennsylvania.  She probably would have surpassed it and made it a photo finish with Trump had she not lost considerable minority support in eastern Pennsylvania and left a ton of votes on the table in Philadelphia County, where she lagged Hillary Clinton’s ballot count from 2016.  Did Shapiro call off the ballot collection network to clear the path for his own ambitions?  That is something no data analysis can confirm, but considering that Harris nearly matched Biden in Michigan, as well, only to see her margins go severely backward Wayne County, where the monster Democrat vote was, it makes a man wonder just how much backroom politicking was going on as Harris’s Democrat peers watched her struggle to match Trump’s charisma. As I’ve already discussed at length, it shouldn’t be hard for a freshman in a dorm room to pick three-quarters of the states correctly just by looking at a map of elections in the 21st century.  The real skill comes in once the race is down to the wire in the decisive states.  All it took was a continued shift of Latino voters, an influx of Republicans from failed blue states, and the tightening of mail-in balloting procedures to turn Florida into a GOP romp.  I ran into Iowa Treasurer Roby Smith, an avid follower of my research who had once been a state legislator, at an event in Davenport in July 2025, and he shared with me that Iowa’s election laws were tightened a little bit at a time in the years leading up to the 2020 quasi-election.  That would explain why Iowa, even if it suffered from an abundance of mail-in balloting, had some of the most believable and trend-aligned results of any state in that year’s race.

One of my first emails on November 6 was to Stuart Thompson, the New York Times journalist who had thrust me into the den of lions with his October feature piece.  I was, naturally, crowing about my predictions.  Stuart had other ideas, and instantly came up with a concept for an article that would frame “election deniers” as unconcerned for election integrity as long as their own side emerged victorious.  I knew where his mind was going immediately, and agreed to be interviewed on my drive home without hesitation. I had already watched Wisconsin move from a lead of several points favoring Trump, with Dane and Milwaukee Counties all but exhausted, to one inside one point, making it five of seven presidential elections decided so narrowly.  The collateral damage had been Eric Hovde’s bid for U.S. Senate, which would have fattened up Trump’s majority in that chamber and made it that much easier for confirmations, legislation, and other matters to get through a body compromised by dead weight Republicans like Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell, and what was certain to be the vast majority of Democrats on every conceivable matter. I gave Thompson a bunch of specifics, which wasn’t what he expected given how counts were still ongoing, and would be until December in places that run unacceptable elections, like California.  Rather than getting into specifics, Thompson gave me a pass: Seth Keshel, an election denier from Arizona who spent years touring the country with voter fraud claims, found a way to thread the needle: He said he believed Trump won fairly, but suggested there may still have been some fraud in down-ballot races where Democrats were leading. “I believe the outcome is correct,” Keshel said in an interview.  “I don’t believe that every state is right.” I had good reason for those claims.  Logically, with Trump the winner through the battleground states in the east, there would be very little reason to pull out all the stops to prevent him from winning the electoral votes of Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, or Nevada.  To do so would invite unwanted scrutiny into elections in all four states.  The follow-on mission in light of Trump’s election, given the likelihood of the right letting its guard down out of relief, would be to find a silver lining by throwing a wet blanket on Trump’s down ballot success.  Remember, even in the quasi-election of 2020, Republicans gained seats in the U.S. House, which flew in the face of any logical explanation of Biden’s blowout popular vote win.  This time around, with Trump the popular and Electoral College winner, Americans were being fed a narrative that this time around, Americans would want Trump surrounded by Democrats to encourage responsible behavior. Slotkin and Baldwin had already been declared the winners in Michigan and Wisconsin, respectively, which had been placed officially into the Trump ledger by the end of November 6.  Hovde, the Republican challenger in Wisconsin who had run just behind Trump all night, was up in arms and ready to run through a brick wall to prove how Baldwin had ripped the election right out from under him.  In Nevada, Sam Brown held a narrow lead over Jacky Rosen, and was optimistic he would ride Trump’s coattails to victory.  Kari Lake, running for U.S. Senate in Arizona, had told me her internal polling showed her running only two points behind Trump statewide, but early returns as Arizona trickled out ballots had her down to Ruben Gallego as it was apparent Trump would win the state in a walk. It would be several weeks until I could make an honest assessment of the 2024 election from the presidency all the way down the ballot, and even longer until I could write up California, which saw two Democrats declare victory in December for U.S. House seats held by Republicans.  The most curious thing about California is that Harris, despite it being her home state, lagged Joe Biden’s 2020 ballot count by more than 1.8 million, while Trump gained fewer than 100,000 from his own 2020 performance.  Harris’s plunge alone pushed the state 9.

I’d like to share something personal that may lift your spirits. Earlier this summer, I posted an address for Craig Downey, an Air Force Veteran with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). You guys sent him so many cards and notes he texted me this on July 30. I never heard from Craig after, and he died on August 16. You can ALL do good for someone who needs your positivity and encouragement.

I can’t reiterate enough - if you’re in a foul mood or constantly worrying over news cycles, stop sitting on X. It is designed to feed you negative click bait to fuel their growth. Spare me the “in the trenches of the information war” narrative. The world will go on arguing without you when you croak and won’t miss a beat. Trust me.