Connecting Dots about Elections and Irregularities

September 21 | Posted by mrossol | American Thought, Deep State, Election Issues, Fraud

A thought experiment built on confirmed reporting. The facts are real. The connections between them are mine to draw, and yours to judge.

ADA NESTOR SEP 21, 2026

I started putting this piece together three weeks ago, at the end of August, right as the Fulton County machine story broke. I’ve been sitting on it since, watching to see what would happen next before I published. A lot happened next, and some of it changed how I think the pieces fit together. So before anything else, an update on what’s changed since I started writing, because the honest version of this piece includes what came in while I was building it, not just what I knew at the start.

My Reflections From The Edge is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Upgrade to paid

Here’s the problem nobody wants to say out loud, so I’ll say it.

By the time Trump took office again, 2024 was already cooling. The evidence of what may have happened in our elections, the machine irregularities, the data anomalies, the six to eight years of patterns election integrity researchers have been documenting since long before I started writing about this, a lot of it was gone or going. Logs get overwritten. Machines get recertified and wiped. Chain of custody problems don’t stay problems forever, they become closed cases. He wasn’t in charge of the federal election system in November 2024. He is now. That gap matters.

So what do you do if you’re convinced something happened but the proof window on the last cycle has mostly closed?

How do you convince well meaning people of the fraudulent nature of our elections, without the evidence, in black and white?

I originally framed this next part as a deliberate trap, one they set on purpose because it served them better than moving early. I don’t think that’s the full picture anymore. I think it started as the plan they actually wanted, the clean version, done through legislation and normal jurisdiction. I think door number two is what’s left after door number one got kicked shut, over and over, by people with the power to kick it shut.

Door Number One

In March, Trump signed Executive Order 14399, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” It directed DHS to compile citizenship lists of voting-age residents state by state and told the Postal Service to develop new rules for mail ballots. This was the normal path. An order, through existing executive authority, aimed at the mail-ballot pipeline everyone in election integrity circles has been flagging for years.

A federal judge in Massachusetts, an Obama appointee, enjoined the core provisions for twenty-three states and D.C. in June. The administration took it to the Supreme Court on the emergency docket and won a stay in late August, but that win turned out to be narrower than it looked. The Court lifted the injunction mainly because USPS hadn’t published its final rule yet, which made the challenge premature. It never ruled the plan was lawful.

So they published the final rule. States would have to hand over lists of mail voters’ names and addresses and meet new envelope barcode requirements, or USPS would simply refuse to deliver their ballots. Challengers went straight back to court. Two judges blocked it almost immediately, Talwani again in Boston, and separately Judge Carl Nichols in D.C., a Trump nominee, who found USPS has no legal authority to refuse ballot delivery over states’ compliance with a federal wish list. On September 14, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s request to lift that block. Not a procedural punt this time. A real no, for this cycle, from the same Court that had given them a win three weeks earlier.

That’s not one loss. That’s a loop that ended in a wall. Win a procedural victory in August, get the real rule blocked again within days, publish it anyway, get blocked a second time by two separate judges including one of his own appointees, and lose the final appeal to the Supreme Court in September with the midterms already underway. Add to that a Congress that hasn’t moved election integrity legislation in any serious way this session, and door number one isn’t a door anymore, it’s a wall with a plaque on it. On August 31, in the middle of all this, Trump renewed the standing national emergency on foreign election interference that’s existed since 2018, a mechanism that’s been sitting there unused for the aggressive version, extended again rather than invoked. If you were waiting for the sweeping national emergency declaration and the executive orders election integrity researchers expected, that’s the closest thing you’ve gotten. A renewal notice, not a mobilization.

When the legislative and judicial channels both close, hard, and repeatedly, in the same summer, capped by a Supreme Court “no” that landed while I was writing this piece, what’s left isn’t a calculated ambush. It’s whatever’s still standing.

Door Number Two

Look at what’s actually at stake for Democrats in 2026. The House. The Senate. And with both, the votes to impeach a sitting president and spend his last two years neutralized instead of dismantling what he’s spent this term calling the deep state. That’s not a normal midterm. That’s survival math for people who know exactly what a second Trump term with a hostile Congress does to them.

If door number one, the courts, the legislation, the clean executive path, is genuinely closed for this cycle, and as of September 14 it is, then whatever happens in November has to be handled differently. Not with the paperwork prepared in advance, but with the tools still available once the paperwork gets blocked: investigators, federal law enforcement, machines secured before they leave the state, a coordinated readiness to move the moment something happens rather than a declaration made before it does.

I don’t think that’s the plan they preferred. I think it’s the plan they’re left with. A last effort, not a first move. Show them, because showing them through the courts didn’t work.

The Surge Nobody Was Supposed to See Coming, Three Weeks In

When I first drafted this section, the DHS surge was still a plan on paper, internal guidance CNN had just gotten hold of. It’s been running for three weeks now, and two more things broke since then that belong in this piece, not left out of it.

First, the results so far are thin. States targeted in the nine-state surge are reporting single-digit numbers of possible noncitizen voter cases, nowhere near the tens of thousands the administration has claimed exist. Some states say they haven’t even heard from Homeland Security yet.

Second, and this is the part that actually matters more, a whistleblower disclosure landed with Senators Padilla and Schumer on September 8. It alleges USCIS officers working the fraud hunt were given a quota, five investigations an hour, twelve minutes each, and that naturalized citizens are being flagged and logged into federal law enforcement records without being told or given any way to correct the data. The disclosure claims this could follow people to a port of entry on their next trip home from vacation. That’s not a minor process complaint. That’s the federal government building error-riddled files on citizens who did nothing wrong, under a deadline that makes accuracy close to impossible.

Here’s where I honestly land on it. Thin results and a rushed, quota-driven rollout fit the door-number-two read better than they fit a calm, patient trap. This doesn’t look like a plan executed on someone’s ideal timeline. It looks like a plan running on the only timeline left, understaffed and moving too fast to be careful, because the courts didn’t leave room to move slow. That doesn’t mean it isn’t positioned for what November actually brings. Three weeks of thin noncitizen numbers doesn’t tell us what three weeks of active balloting will turn up. I’d rather tell you the surge looks messier and more improvised than I first described it than pretend the mess isn’t there.

The Machines That Didn’t Get Wiped

Here’s the part that changes my confidence in this theory, and it broke the same week I started writing this piece.

Fulton County, Pennsylvania sued Dominion Voting Systems back in September 2022, alleging fraudulent inducement in the sale of the county’s machines and pointing to an unauthorized machine used in the 2020 count. The suit leaned on a 2021 expert declaration from J. Alex Halderman documenting real security vulnerabilities in Dominion’s ICX software, vulnerabilities that would let someone install malicious software with either physical or remote access. A follow-up forensic report described external USB drives inserted into the machines with no record of authorization, more than 900 new files and links created after the software was installed, and an external IP address traced to Quebec, Canada showing up in the adjudication workstation’s logs. The machines were also found running antivirus software that hadn’t been updated since 2016.

A federal judge dismissed key claims in 2023, and an amended complaint was thrown out with prejudice in August 2024 on standing grounds, county commissioners weren’t parties to the original 2019 contract with Dominion. Fulton County was also sanctioned roughly a million dollars over the whole affair. The case looked dead. The machines were headed back to Dominion.

Then, according to Fulton County attorney Peter Ticktin, he raised the issue directly with Attorney General Todd Blanche. Ticktin says Blanche stepped in to make sure the machines got secured before Dominion could take them back, and Ticktin has since said publicly that Blanche’s office now has, in his words, its feet on the ground and moving.

Do you know what that means? Machines that survived four years, a change in county leadership, and a dismissal with prejudice, machines that were about to be handed back to the very company being sued over them, got pulled back at the last minute by the sitting Attorney General. Not new evidence. Old evidence, the kind everyone assumed was already gone the way the rest of 2020’s paper trail went. It wasn’t gone. It was sitting in Fulton County the entire time, and now it’s not going anywhere.

If evidence from 2020 can still turn up intact in 2026, the “everything’s already destroyed” assumption I opened this piece with needs an asterisk. Some of it survived. Which raises the stakes on 2026 even higher, because now there’s a real precedent for what happens when this administration decides to secure something instead of letting it walk out the door. And now there’s a federal surge landing in the same state, in the same window, aimed at the exact kind of fraud those machines are accused of enabling, messy rollout and all.

The Distraction

We’ve all been consumed by Iran. Months of war coverage, gas prices climbing, a strait half-closed, casualties and diplomacy dominating the news cycle for most of this year. I’m not saying that war isn’t real or doesn’t matter. It obviously does.

But I’ve learned to ask a second question whenever the entire country is staring at one thing. What’s happening in the room nobody’s watching?

While Iran ran the clock, Maduro sat in American custody. Since January. Facing narcoterrorism and drug trafficking charges that, notably, have nothing to do with elections on paper. He’s pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers are contesting the legality of the operation that brought him here, arguing he’s immune from prosecution as a sitting head of state, technically a former one now, since his own vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, has been running Venezuela as interim president since his capture. That fight is still working through a New York courtroom. In late August, with almost no warning, Trump announced a deal putting the U.S. in control of sixty-five billion barrels of Venezuelan oil.

The official reason is gas prices and energy security. Fine. Maybe that’s all it is.

But what if it isn’t the whole story?

Closer To Home

I started a piece months ago and published it this weekend, asking a simple question. If the United States spends billions shaping elections, political parties, and civil society in other countries, who elected us to run everybody else’s democracy? I traced how USAID financed election-monitoring efforts abroad through the International Organization for Migration, CARE International, and the International Republican Institute, tens of thousands of election observers deployed under an operation that looked less like humanitarian aid and more like electoral infrastructure. I held that piece for months before publishing it, because I wanted to see what happened next in my own backyard first.

Now I know.

In June, Chester County appointed Michele DiCaprio as the new Director of our Department of Voter Services. She started July 20. DiCaprio spent her career as a foreign service officer, most recently as a senior U.S. diplomat in Mozambique, where she directed seventy million dollars in federal assistance aimed at governance, human rights, and democratization work, the exact category of election-shaping programming I’d spent months documenting overseas. The county’s own announcement praised her background in election operations and counterterrorism program evaluation on the international stage as the reason she’s qualified to run voter services here.

USAID is gone, dismantled, folded into the State Department. But someone who spent her career running that exact kind of democratization and election-infrastructure work overseas now sits in the chair overseeing voter services in Chester County, Pennsylvania, one of the nine states on DHS’s fraud surge list, in the same state where Blanche just secured the Fulton County machines, heading into the same midterm this entire piece is about.

I don’t know what that means yet. I’m not accusing Michele DiCaprio of anything, I want to be completely clear about that. But I spent months asking why the machinery built to shape elections abroad should stay confined to elections abroad, and now that machinery’s résumé is running my own county’s elections. That’s not a coincidence I’m willing to file away and forget about. That’s a thread. And threads get followed.

The Last Piece

Venezuela’s fingerprints on Smartmatic, on election machine software used across multiple countries including the United States, are not new territory for anyone who has followed this fight for the last six years. What’s new is that the man who ran that country through the years those machines were built, sold, and deployed is sitting in a New York courtroom right now, fighting extradition-adjacent legal battles instead of quietly waiting out a sentence, which tells you he still believes he has leverage to use.

What if Maduro isn’t just a narcoterrorism defendant? What if he’s the last live witness to exactly how the machine infrastructure moved, who touched it, and where it went, and what if a not-guilty plea and an immunity fight are exactly what you’d expect from a man negotiating from strength rather than one with nothing left to trade. What if the oil deal isn’t the transaction. What if the oil deal is the cover for the transaction, the public reason a private conversation gets to happen without anyone asking the real question out loud.

I don’t know that. I repeatedly want to be completely clear about that. The pieces I’ve laid out above are confirmed. What I’m about to do with them is not, it’s a thought experiment, not a claim. But if you put the pieces next to each other, a clean legislative path that got blocked in court, rewritten, and blocked again, ending in a Supreme Court “no” that landed while I was writing this, evidence gone from 2020, 2022, and 2024, a midterm that looks less like bait and more like the only remaining option, a federal fraud surge now three weeks into a messy, quota-driven rollout in nine states including Pennsylvania, a year defined by a distraction in the Middle East, Fulton County’s machines getting pulled back from the brink at the last possible moment, a career democratization officer now running my own county’s voter services, and the one man alive who could confirm what happened to the machines still fighting his case in a New York courtroom instead of folding, it stops looking like coincidence and starts looking like a sequence. Maybe not a plan anymore. Maybe just the last thing left to try.

And sequences don’t need a press release to be real. They just need someone willing to say what they look like before the ending gets written.

We’ll see soon enough whether 2026 confirms it or breaks the theory apart. Either way, I’d rather have said it out loud now than pretend I didn’t notice.

This story is far from over. Stay tuned for what I uncover next.

Subscribe to get the news first.

Better in their words…