Elkton's city council appoints "election denier," Rick Weible

I want to introduce you to Rick Weible. He is the most recent addition to the city council of Elkington, South Dakota, after receiving an appointment by that council.

Mr. Weible is one of the country’s leading election security experts. (The “election denier” label in the title to this post is completely in jest, as Mr. Weible has been labeled this or similar by newspapers including the Star Tribune to downplay his efforts—but so far none of those same papers have denied any of the following bullet points.)

Rick Weible will be a household name in the coming months.

A few things Mr. Weible has been up to in recent years:

• 2016: as Mayor of St. Bonifacius (Hennepin County), declined the KnowInk poll pad contract after hacking into it within minutes, in 2016 (every other municipality in Hennepin County signed the contract)
• 2020: received the voter histories from the November 2020 General Election for Minnesota on November 29, which was 5 days after the MN State Canvassing Board certified the election, only to discover 38.9% of the voter histories were yet to be input, casting doubt on how the Board managed to certify the election with over 1/3 of data not yet available
• 2020: in reviewing this and related data sets, found that 734,000 absentee ballots were not yet connected with a voter in the Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS) - again, 5 days after the MN State Canvassing Board certified the election on 11/29/23
• 2021/2022: acquired voting systems from each of the major vendors for testing
• 2021/2022: visited dozens of counties for commissioner meetings, city council meetings, and township supervisor meetings to educate local officials on major gaps in their election process and security risks to their networked and internet-connected systems
• 2022/2023: acquired and reviewed cast vote records which the MNSOS seemed to deny existed in Minnesota
• 2023: purchased thousands of ballot stock from SeaChange and printed thousands of ballots (using ballot images from publicly available cast vote records on Dodge County, Wisconsin’s website), and then conducted two hand county studies in Sioux Falls, SD and Brookings, SD on June 7, and June 10, 2023, which revealed significant issues such as folds disrupting how tabulators read ballots

These are just a few things Mr. Weible has done. The full list is much longer. Some of these required great professional if not personal risk and it is why I am grateful for people like Rick.

I’m also personally thankful for everything I’ve learned from him. Among his greatest qualities which are not listed above is his generosity and humility and willingness to teach, no matter what questions you have. If you prefer to learn about all this by yourself first, start at https://midwestswampwatch.com and see the menu for “Tools you can use”.

In the spirit of thankfulness, I also want to thank all of you for reading and passing this journal along. Even with sparse postings, in the last 30 days there have been 17,000 views of articles here. Even if you cannot do much to support this fundamental cause, sharing even one article with a friend who is new to all this will help a great deal. Eventually we have to come together on obvious solutions available to us.

More on that coming soon, as in addition to the recent hand county studies done by Rick and others in South Dakota, there are great things brewing in Texas regarding hand counts led by Mark Cook, another top election security expert who recently provided a video presentation to two commissioners in Anoka County.

Ps If you are new to Substack, remember you can search terms like “CVR” or “Rick Weible” or “Mark Cook” in the search bar here to see previous articles on those topics.