God Is Answering Our Prayers for Election Integrity

The 2020 election was exhausting, and very few of us are probably interested in revisiting the controversy and chaos surrounding it. Let’s be honest: How many of us stopped praying about election integrity after the inauguration on January 20, 2021? Granted, God may not have answered our requests within the time frame we desired, but God has been answering our prayers.

Let’s recall what we were praying for in 2020. In November I wrote:

Let us pray for an election result that honors God. If corruption is occurring, then let us pray that it will be exposed. If Joe Biden won the election fairly, then let us pray that it too will be revealed. Let us pray that this election will be scrutinized to such a level that we the American people will be compelled to accept the results—whatever they may be. Let us pray that our system of checks and balances will be permitted to run its course as designed so that we can be confident in the winner and preserve our trust in future elections. And let us pray that the uncertainty and insecurity we are all feeling in this process will drive us to seek refuge in the Lord rather than political figures (emphasis added).^[1]

This prayer should not be politically controversial as election integrity ought to be a bipartisan issue. Every American should be highly motivated to ensure that the process for electing our government officials is secure and does not favor one candidate over another. This should be especially true for Christians because God has informed us about His hatred of unequal standards that cheat one party (Prov. 20:23).

Tuesday concluded a weeks-long hand audit of 2.1 million ballots and 8 truckloads of voting machines in Maricopa County, Arizona where approximately 60% of the state’s ballots were cast. All that remains is the paper examination phase.^[2] The transparency, security, and accountability of our country’s first full forensic audit of an American election is unprecedented, and it is serving as a potential model for possible audits of the 2020 election in other states.^[3] Already, legislators from 13 states have toured Arizona’s audit.^[4]

Questions of election integrity in Arizona were never as great as in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Nonetheless, the Arizona Senate liaison for the audit tweeted in May, “As we open boxes of ballots delivered by Maricopa County, we are discovering significant discrepancies between the number of ballots therein and the batch reports included in the boxes.”^[5] According to a letter by Arizona Senate President Carol Fann to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, ballot batches have been discovered to be missing as many and 17.5% of the reported totals, while others have 9% more ballots than are recorded.^[6][7]

At the present pace, the results of the Arizona audit are expected to be released in about a week.^[8] Only then will we truly know whether or not all 2.1 million certified ballots could be accounted for. Regardless, God is answering our prayers that the election be scrutinized, and Arizona is only the beginning.

Pennsylvania and Georgia are both poised to begin their own audits of the 2020 election. In Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots were accepted at a rate of 30 times the rate predicted by historical rejection numbers—despite receiving an unprecedented increase in mail-in ballots due to COVID-19 safety concerns. Only 0.03% of Pennsylvania’s 2,614,011 mail-in ballots were rejected.^[9] And in Georgia, the Secretary of State certified Fulton County’s results despite an election official admitting that the legally required chain of custody documentation is missing from 24% of the ballot drop box transfers.^[10] Moreover, Georgia Star News reports:

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has taken no action in 156 of Georgia’s 159 counties to secure copies of any absentee ballot drop box transfer forms and review them for accuracy and consistency with reported absentee ballot vote counts. … More than seven months after the November 3 election, 28 Georgia counties have failed to respond at all to The Star News Open Records Requests to produce absentee ballot drop box transfer forms. … no chain of custody documentation has been produced for about 333,000 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes out of an estimated 600,000 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes during that election.^[11]

Not only are the election results beginning to be scrutinized, our nation’s system of checks and balances are running their course to help ensure the integrity of future elections. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been censured for “dereliction of his Constitutional duty” when he ignored allegations of election fraud in his state,^[12] the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of a pathway to repeal Governor Whitmer’s emergency power grab that changed election law in Michigan,^[13] and numerous states have either passed or are working to pass election integrity reform bills.^[14][15] The quantity and quality of these reforms will depend largely upon the involvement of the citizenry in each state, but we are seeing positive steps in the right direction.

And let us not forget the 12 election lawsuits that remain active among the 87 court cases filed regarding the 2020 election. The majority of these 87 cases were denied standing, permitting them to be dismissed on technicalities before being heard by a judge. Nonetheless, 24 cases were decided based upon the merits (Donald Trump and/or the GOP prevailed in 17 of those cases), and 12 cases remain active.

We may have abandoned our requests from 2020, but God has not forgotten our pleas. He is answering the prayers of His people, but are His people still engaged in the matter? How likely are these efforts to result in meaningful changes if the very people who requested them do not care enough to even pay attention?

In November, I wrote:

The Bible reveals that spiritual principalities war over the fate of nations (Dan. 10:20–21). America is no exception. A spiritual battle is underway, and the chosen battlefield is our 2020 election. Our nation is in the process of choosing who will set the moral course for the most influential country on the planet. Why wouldn’t we expect this to be a spiritual war not easily won? As Christians, how could we be so naïve as to believe all that would be required of us in this fight would be our vote? … By permitting this spiritual battle to drag out, could it be that God is preparing us for what lays ahead? Could it that God is teaching us how to look beyond our present plight and to hold firm to the hope of justice administered by our righteous God?^[16]

Election integrity is fundamentally a fight over how we determine who will set the moral course of our country. We must persevere in this. Too much is at stake. We need prayer warriors who will seek God’s supernatural intervention. We need activists who will pressure and hold accountable our lawmakers. We need people who will talk about these matters, write e-mails and blogs, create podcasts, and call-in to talk radio programs in order to increase awareness and to generate a political will for change. And we need men and women of integrity who will seek to serve on election boards, county commissions, city councils, and in high office.

Our spiritual war will never be won through political activism and politicians, but our government officials significantly influence our ability to spread the gospel, to live according to God’s ways, and to minister to others. If we fail to engage in this fight over election integrity because we are weary, we may soon have far greater battles to wage—battles like President Joe Biden’s drive to expand access to abortions, to teach our children that we should judge a person’s character based upon the color of their skin, and to see the Equality Act made law. And what makes us believe we will be any less weary to fight those battles?

Updated June 17, 2021: The original had the wrong date for the inauguration.