Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
Ensuring the integrity of West Virginia’s elections is part of Mac Warner’s job, but the secretary of state has been just as zealous about protecting national elections from unfair meddling.
Now in his second term as the Mountain State’s top election official, Warner has cleaned up West Virginia’s bloated voter rolls and severed the state’s ties with leftist-linked voter roll groups. Even political opponents have credited Warner, who is running for governor as a Republican, with being “vigilant” to make West Virginia elections “very secure.”
Warner, 69, has also crusaded against federal intelligence agencies’ meddling in the controversial 2020 presidential election — an election the conservative unabashedly asserts was “stolen by the CIA.” Such statements have earned him the ire of corporate media outlets, which, as dutiful public-relations agents for the Democrat Party, have dubbed the secretary of state an “election denier.”
“Secretary Warner’s work on election integrity and security has set the example for what is needed right now across this entire country,” Ret. Lt. General Michael Flynn, war hero and former national security adviser for President Donald Trump, said in endorsing Warner in West Virginia’s 2024 GOP primary race for governor. Flynn, in case you’re scoring along at home, had his life and reputation ripped apart by Democrats and their allies in the deep state and accomplice media as part of their Russia-collusion hoax.
Calling Out the ‘Worst Election Interference’ in U.S. History
Warner has been the rare voice among his peers in vehemently calling out the Big Brother censorship operation known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” Warner told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the February meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired’s Eric Geller. While Geller did his best to defend the federal agency — under the suggestive headline, “How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security” — its history of censorship and election interference validate Warner’s concern.
CISA, as The Federalist has extensively reported, was established in 2018 to ostensibly “protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats.” It moved into the nefarious business of information management by partnering with Big Tech to silence speech that it deemed to be “disinformation,” “misinformation,” or the Orwellian-sounding “malinformation.” CISA labored behind the scenes to censor those who questioned everything from the administration of the 2020 elections to the government’s iron-fisted handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Warner spoke out against the agency and the federal intelligence apparatus in late December during a West Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidates debate. He was, of course, vilified by the usual suspects for asserting the Covid-tainted 2020 election was “rigged.”
“The election was stolen,” Warner said, “and it was stolen by the CIA.”
To explain what he meant, Warner cited forming Acting CIA Director Michael Morell’s testimony under oath to the House Judiciary Committee that then-Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken had “reached out” to Morell after a damning story sourced to Hunter Biden’s laptop broke. Blinken’s outreach, Morell testified, “set in motion the events that led to the issuance of” a letter attempting to discredit the laptop story.
“Yes, [Morell] colluded with [now-Secretary of State] Antony Blinken to sell a lie to the American people two weeks before the election for the very purpose of throwing the presidential election,” Warner explained. “And the FBI covers it up. And Mark Zuckerberg pays $400 million to put his thumb on the scales. That’s not fair.”
Morrell told the Judiciary Committee that he pushed the letter, which was signed by 51 former intelligence officials, to help then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, “because I wanted him to win the election.” The letter, released not long before the 2020 general election, falsely claimed that the New York Post’s bombshell report exposing the damning contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop appeared to be “Russian disinformation.”
Warner also noted the unprecedented use of Zuckbucks — hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to leftist groups by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — to infiltrate swing state elections offices in 2020.
The West Virginia secretary of state has courageously spoken out against such alarming practices and other forms of election interference.
“Folks, this was the worst election interference in the history of the United States, when our own 300 agencies lied to the people of America with the expressed intent of throwing a presidential election. It doesn’t get any worse than that,” Warner said during a press conference last summer on the U.S. Capitol steps in support of the American Confidence in Elections Act. The legislative package “equips states with election integrity tools, implements key reforms in D.C., and protects political speech,” according to a press release from House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, a Wisconsin Republican.
Cleanup at the State Level
Warner hasn’t just made election integrity a priority on the national scale. Since he was elected in 2016, West Virginia has cleaned up its voter rolls, removing more than 400,000 names of voters who died, moved, were convicted felons, or showed up multiple times in voter registration records, Warner told the West Virginia Record’s readers. When he entered office, Warner said, he heard from county clerks about the bloated voter rolls, including four counties where there were more registered voters than people registered to vote.
Last year, West Virginia joined a growing list of states in rejecting the controversial Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). The interstate voter list “maintenance” organization has come under fire for its mission creep voter registration efforts and its leftist leadership, including ERIC founder and Democrat operative David Becker. In his column for the West Virginia Record last June, Warner noted ERIC’s usefulness has “significantly decease[d].” Data-sharing agreements with bordering states will “prove more effective,” he wrote.
One of Warner’s opponents in the governor’s race praised the secretary of state’s leadership on securing the state’s elections.
“I believe that if every state would conduct their elections like we do here, we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” Moore Capito, son of U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, said during a December debate in which the moderator demanded the Republican candidates answer whether they believe the 2020 election was “stolen.”
Attorney and election law expert Cleta Mitchell called Warner a “national hero and a treasure.”
“He speaks the truth — he is a true patriot and I only wish we had 50 state election officials just like him,” Mitchell told The Federalist.
Warner appreciates the kind words, but he says he’s just doing his job.
“I just want good and fair elections,” he recently told The Federalist.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.