The 2026 Midterms: The Casino Is Still Rigged
by
Election officials control the evidence, obstruct scrutiny, and leave voters with little recourse.
The American people are being robbed in broad daylight. Federal dollars move by the billions into loosely audited programs diverted to support illegal aliens and private pockets. When questions arise, the ballots are returned to the officials who certified the election and then destroyed on a short statutory clock. The scoreboard is certified. The evidence is gone. People do not like being swindled by a con game.
Riverside County, California, showed how it works. Sheriff Chad Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots from the November 2025 Proposition 50 election with search warrants after discrepancies were found. The California Supreme Court ruled the seizure unlawful on custody grounds, ordered the ballots returned, and directed Bianco to pause his investigation and turn the case file over for Attorney General Rob Bonta’s review. The ballots went back to the Registrar on September 29th. Within two weeks, Bonta’s office and the Secretary of State cleared the ballots for destruction. By October 13th, the ballots were destroyed under Elections Code §17302(c).
The short window from court order to clearance to destruction is the tell that no separate investigation was going to happen. Bonta’s office blew it off. Bianco called it destruction of evidence. Returning the ballots to the Registrar is putting the wolves in charge of the henhouse. No independent forensic review of the ballots or machines is allowed. The same pattern has appeared in Fulton County, Georgia, where process fights and contempt sanctions kept the physical record out of reach until the window closed. Cases that raise machine or ballot questions are routinely bounced on procedure. Findings on the facts are rare. That is the design.
The same window-closing is happening with federal data and monitors. Eighteen days before the election, the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted to bar its 1,800 municipal clerks from using the federal SAVE database for citizenship checks. The decision rested on a letter that omitted the state statute allowing restricted voter data to be shared with law enforcement. In Virginia, the Attorney General and Department of Elections issued a 10-page directive telling local officials they can deny ordinary DOJ election monitors access to polling places, should ask federal agents to leave and call local police, and should document badge numbers, weapons, and movements.
In other blue states, secretaries of state and election officials have directed local clerks to refuse or slow-walk federal requests for voter rolls and lists of purported noncitizens, citing privacy so ICE cannot locate illegal aliens. Lower officials hold the restriction while the decision that closed the verification window sits higher up. Whether the federal government is entitled to the data under existing statutes or state privacy rules control is unresolved. When a check is offered, and the response is to keep clerks from using it or turning over the rolls, the window for independent examination is shut the same way the Riverside ballots were returned and then destroyed. That pattern of pushback keeps the casino open.
Minnesota is the clearest current exposure of the same pattern. Federal agents have searched Ilhan Omar’s home, served multiple warrants, issued grand-jury subpoenas to relatives, and are building a case that sources say extends well beyond familiar immigration-paperwork claims. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has called it strong and said a grand-jury presentation is expected. The open question is whether the same sequence will run in California or other blue states before the midterms. The Department has no shortage of predicate on California Governor Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Rob Bonta, and the surrounding apparatus if it chooses to use it.
Bonta’s public posture has been openly defiant. A recent letter from acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter warned California election officials that knowingly counting ballots cast by people federal agencies have identified as likely noncitizens could subject those officials to prosecution as aiders and abettors. The letter followed the Department’s lawsuit seeking to block the state from counting mail ballots from roughly 20,000 individuals on a federal list until citizenship is verified. California officials have rejected the demands. It is a game of chicken.