Vindication
The First Step Towards Secure Elections
President Trump stood before the American people on July 16 and began to prove what many of us had said for six years. The 2020 election looked stolen. The skeptics were called election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and threats to democracy. They were censored, deplatformed, and investigated. Some faced grand juries. Some lost their licenses to practice law.
On July 16, the truth started coming out. Communist China obtained the voter registration files of some 220 million Americans. Electronic voting machines run proprietary software no citizen may inspect. Hardware components come from China. Mail-in ballots are easier to counterfeit than a twenty-dollar bill. The system as built is not defensible.
Vindication is not victory. The same weak architecture still stands. It will face the voters again in November 2026 and in 2028. China and other foreign malign actors have not retired from the field. They are still at war with the United States.
Here’s the bottom line up front: Congress must act!
Join the fight
The SAVE America Act must pass.
States like Washington that refuse basic citizenship verification and paper-ballot accountability must face real pressure. Minimum national standards are both constitutional and overdue.
Congress must pass the SAVE America Act requiring proof of citizenship and continuous roll cleaning. It’s time to treat elections as critical national security infrastructure under active foreign attack.
Set aside a few minutes each day to make phone calls to our Senators.
To call Senator Patty Murray use (202) 224-2621. For Senator Maria Cantwell call (202) 224-3441. Make the calls, do the work and turn the results over to God.
Start with your full name and city/ZIP code (this proves you’re a constituent). Keep it short and clear (30–60 seconds is ideal). State what you want them to do (e.g., “Please support the SAVE America Act”). Be polite and firm. Make these calls each day, until the SAVE America Act passes!
Mail In Voting is an Indefensible System
An election run on foreign-made software machines, flooded with tens of millions of unverifiable mail-in ballots could not honestly be certified as secure. No serious person could call that process fair.
The President confirmed what honest observers already knew. The machines contain concealed vulnerabilities. The architecture itself is the problem. A software-driven counting process sits between the voter and the result. It is exposed to nation-state cyber capabilities no county can detect or defeat. No cybersecurity professional can guarantee such a system against a determined attack.
Mail-in balloting remains the largest single source of potential fraud, as the bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission concluded in 2005. A ballot carries none of the security features of currency. When a foreign adversary holds the names of low-propensity voters, counterfeit ballots become frighteningly simple.
The fixes are clear. Outlaw electronic machines and replace them with paper ballots marked in person and counted by hand at the precinct on election night. Observers from both parties should watch. Limit mail-in voting to the deployed, the infirm, and those genuinely abroad. Signature verification and chain of custody must be rigorous.
This Is Not a Partisan Demand
Americans already agree on the basics. A February 2026 Harvard-Harris poll found that 85 percent of voters say only U.S. citizens should be allowed to vote, including strong majorities across party lines. Seventy-one percent support the SAVE America Act itself, including half of Democrats, 91 percent of Republicans, and 69 percent of Independents.
Three-quarters back proof of citizenship. Eighty-one percent support voter ID. Eighty percent want states to remove non-citizens from the rolls. Fifty-eight percent of voters believe there is at least some voter fraud in U.S. elections. Nearly three-quarters say all ballots should be counted within 24 hours of Election Day.
These are not fringe positions. They are majority positions held by ordinary Americans who still believe citizenship and honest counting matter.
Washington’s Own Warning
These dangers are not abstract in Washington State. We have lived them.
In 2004 Republican Dino Rossi led Democrat Christine Gregoire by 261 votes, then by 42 after the machine recount. Democrats paid for a hand recount. King County “discovered” hundreds of previously rejected ballots. The state Supreme Court allowed them. Gregoire won by 129 votes. A later challenge found at least 1,678 illegal votes had been cast, yet the result stood.
That was before Washington made all-mail voting permanent. Today every registered voter receives a ballot automatically. No photo ID is required. Identity rests almost entirely on signature comparison, a subjective process that varies by county. No proof of citizenship is demanded. Automatic registration has enrolled foreign nationals. Ballots can arrive and be counted long after Election Day. Chain of custody is broken at multiple points.
Washington perfected the risks the president called indefensible. Rural and Eastern Washington voters must trust a process designed by Olympia. In 2004 a 42-vote margin was reversed. In today’s system the same problems, or worse, are far more likely.
The Stakes Ahead
Communist China and other malign actors are not going to give up on influencing our elections. November is mere months away. The media will spend the coming days dismissing the evidence and assuring Americans there is nothing to see.
But now, due to the newly declassified information released by President Trump, it is the defenders of this indefensible system who must explain why the world’s oldest constitutional republic counts its votes on machines it cannot inspect, by mail it cannot verify, under the gaze of an enemy it will not name.
Washington voters, especially those in the rural eastern counties, have skin in this fight. Local control and honest elections are not optional extras. They are the foundation of self-government.
Common Sense Still Lives
We do not re-litigate 2004 or 2020 for sport. We establish the truth so it can never happen again. The purpose is secure elections in November and in 2028.
Common sense still exists in the cattle country and the small towns that keep this state fed and free. We must loudly and persistently demand paper ballots counted in public under bipartisan eyes. Demand proof of citizenship. Demand that Olympia stop treating election security as a partisan inconvenience.
Small things grow great through concord. If we do nothing, nothing will change.
Secure elections start with citizens who refuse to look away. The Republic still belongs to those willing to defend it. Set aside a few minutes each day to make a phone call to Congress. Be persistent: Support the SAVE AMERICA ACT!
Nancy Churchill is a writer and educator in rural eastern Washington State, and the chair of the Ferry County Republican Party. She may be reached at DangerousRhetoric@pm.me. The opinions expressed in Dangerous Rhetoric are her own. Dangerous Rhetoric is available on Substack, X, and occasionally Rumble.
SOURCES:
1) Brian T. Kennedy, “Vindication But Not Yet Victory,” Lyceum, July 17, 2026. https://bit.ly/4foMS4B
2) Feliks Banel, “Memories still raw for candidates from 2004 race for Washington governor,” MyNorthwest, November 5, 2020 (updated). https://bit.ly/4c5HK30
3) Harvard-Harris Poll, “Most Voters Back the SAVE America Act, Believing Only U.S. Citizens Should Be Allowed to Vote,” Press Release, February 2026. https://bit.ly/4wYOyrd
4) President Trump Delivers an Address to the Nation, Jul. 16, 2026, The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/president-trump-delivers-an-address-to-the-nation-jul-16-2026/
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I bought The Deep Rig by Patrick Byrne in early 2021 and followed the website hereistheevidence.com that whole period. It's been amazing to me that there are people who refuse to even suspect foul play in the 2020 election. It's high time for election reform. However, the Save America Act concerns me. States will have to turn over their voter rolls to Homeland Security. States have the constitutional responsibility to run their own elections, and I firmly believe in subsidiarity.
**Letter to the Editor: The "Hack" That Wasn't, and the Bill That Won't Fix It**
Nancy Churchill wants readers to treat a primetime campaign speech as holy writ. It is not scripture. It is spin, and it does not survive contact with its own footnotes.
Start with the "hack," since that word is doing all of Churchill's work for her. At least one of the declassified documents behind Trump's July 16 address describes voter files pulled from **commercial data brokers**, the same public marketplace any campaign, pollster, or junk-mail outfit already buys from ([PBS NewsHour](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-trumps-address-on-china-the-2020-election-and-what-documents-show)). That is not a hack. That is a receipt. Calling it "Communist China obtained the voter registration files of some 220 million Americans" takes a mundane fact about American data markets and dresses it up as a spy thriller, timed for maximum effect five months before a midterm. Worse: a similar assessment was already in a classified Intelligence Community report given to Trump on January 7, 2021, back when the director of national intelligence was John Ratcliffe, the same man who now runs the CIA ([FactCheck.org](https://www.factcheck.org/2026/07/factchecking-trumps-election-security-speech/)). A declassified version of that assessment came out in March 2021. So the "cover-up" was public knowledge more than five years ago. If the deep state buried this, it buried it on the front page.
Second, the SAVE America Act is not just "proof of citizenship and continuous roll cleaning," Churchill's own phrase. Strip the euphemism and it is a documentary-proof requirement, presented **in person**, every single time a citizen registers or updates a registration. No driver's license. No REAL ID. A passport, or a birth certificate that matches your current legal name. The [Center for American Progress](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-save-act-overview-and-facts/) puts the number of American women locked out by that second condition, women who married and took a spouse's name, at roughly 69 million. Add the 140 million Americans of any gender who hold no passport, weighted hard against the working class: only one in five people earning under $50,000 has one. Add the Black Americans born before hospital birth records were routine, the tribal members whose IDs carry no citizenship marker, the rural voters two hours from the nearest passport office. This is the coalition Churchill's bill quietly disenfranchises. And for what? [Utah just ran the most exhaustive citizenship review any state has attempted](https://www.vote.org/save-act/), more than two million voters, and found exactly one confirmed noncitizen registration and zero instances of noncitizen voting. One registration, zero votes. A law built to strip documentation from tens of millions of citizens, to catch a problem measured in single digits, is not security. It is a poll tax with a badge pinned on it.
Third, Churchill's own centerpiece example convicts her. The 2004 governor's race is not the ghost story she wants it to be. Rossi led by 261 votes, then by 42 after the machine recount, then lost the hand recount by 129, a swing of roughly five one-thousandths of one percent out of 2.8 million ballots ([HistoryLink](https://www.historylink.org/file/7405)). Yes, Judge Bridges found more than 1,600 ballots cast illegally after a two-week trial. But only five of those ballots revealed who they were cast for, and four of the five went to Rossi ([KING 5](https://www.king5.com/article/news/politics/closest-governors-race-the-trial/281-db263147-348d-4377-91cd-4bc0830b9adf)). Read that again. The one piece of hard evidence Washington's own courts produced on illegal 2004 ballots cuts against the Republican candidate's opponent, not for her. Churchill cites this race to indict mail voting. The record she's citing indicts her argument instead. Signature verification, bipartisan canvassing boards, ballot tracking, and post-election audits are Washington law today, not the free-for-all she's describing twenty-two years after the fact.
None of this requires pretending election administration is beyond criticism, or that foreign data harvesting is nothing. It requires refusing a bad-faith trade: a documented crisis of a few dozen cases nationwide, exchanged for a documentation regime that burdens tens of millions of citizens who never did anything wrong. Security and access are not opposites, whatever this column implies. A bill that treats them as opposites is not protecting the ballot. It is deciding, in advance, who gets to hold one.
Tony Teso
Camas, WA