As a long-time observer of US elections in my lifetime, and with great interest in their history, leading to being an avid reader of books like Down For The Count (Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America) by Guardian writer Andrew Gumbel, I got quite a kick out of the sudden and dramatic turnaround of the US Democrat Party, the MSM and all “balanced and impartial observers” with regard to claims of election corruption in the wake of the 2020 US Presidential election.

Suddenly all those claims about corruption and cheating in the 2000, 2004 and 2016 US elections started to get memory-holed. It’s perhaps not surprising then that the book quoted above, first published in 2005 and updated in 2008, does not have a Wikipedia entry (it’s also known as Steal This Vote)!

However, perhaps the reason is that the people who won the election for Joe Biden in 2020 actually didn’t keep quiet about it, but burst forth into print just a few months later to boast about their efforts in the now infamous TIME magazine article, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election. Rather than memory holing, the tactic was blatant spin as the election was “fortified” (not stolen you see).

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

You see! It was Trump that was stealing the election and the USA was “saved” by all these brave and honest billionaires and Democrat activists.

Also “behind the scenes” since then has been a major effort by the Republican Party across the USA to fix up the process and make sure the sort of crap pulled in 2020 does not happen again, at least not on as large a scale and not in swing states. Interestingly the progress that has been made shows up the same things that the TIME article noted – except from a POV that they were corrupted things rather than good ones.

First up is a Wisconsin legal decision on ballot drop boxes:

A judge in the state of Wisconsin ruled on Thursday that the use of ballot boxes in the 2020 election was, in fact, illegal. Joe Biden was declared the winner over Donald Trump in the state by 20,682 votes.

This stunt was pulled in various places leading up to the 2020 election: various election practices not approved of by the state legislature as legally required. In this case simple instructions issued by election bureaucrats, along with no legal requirements on what a drop box could be, on protecting them or even having a chain of custody log or ballot count.

The Healthy Elections Project reports that, during the 2020 election, “only eight states explicitly permit[ed] or require[d] ballot drop boxes by statute or regulatory guidance,” but that drop boxes were nonetheless available to voters in at least 19 states. In other words, under the umbrella excuse of COVID!, at least 11 states used drop boxes without legislative authorization to do so.

By an odd coincidence, Wisconsin is one of a handful of swing states where “midnight magic” occurred on election night. These were the states where, at some point in the wee hours, massive vote dumps produced huge jumps in Biden’s, and only Biden’s, vote tallies.

Associated with this was testimony from former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who led an audit of the 2020 election in his state, that the election was so corrupt that the state legislature should “take a very hard look at the option of decertification of the 2020” presidential election. Purely symbolic at this stage re “President” Biden of course and it’s more important to focus on future elections.

Then there’s another big swing state, Pennsylvania, where the ballot mail-in laws have been found to be unconstitutional:

This will be bittersweet news for a lot of people. A five-judge panel has ruled that Pennsylvania’s universal mail-in voting law violates the state’s constitution, an argument conservatives have been making since it was enacted in 2019. That election law went on to play a pivotal role in delivering the state for Joe Biden in 2020, who trailed on Election Night, but pulled ahead as more and more mail-in votes were counted.

Now this is not the end of the matter. Democrat Governor Tom Wolf will appeal the decision and it will make its way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where the Democrats have a majority so it will likely be reinstated. I’d like to think that it will then be taken to the US Supreme Court, given how important it is, both as an election-corrupting law in general and as an example of how constitutions don’t matter a crap to the Democrat party unless their ox is being gored.

We live in an era where the judiciary is simply an activist wing for Democrats. While you are always holding your breath on how a Republican-nominated judge will rule, those put in place by Democrats typically vote in lockstep.
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The idea that the “right to vote” only exists in the absence of any and all guardrails is moronic. But that’s the argument Democrats are making all over the country, including in Pennsylvania. By their logic, why not let people vote on their phones? Heck, let’s have a full year of early voting. If all procedures and protections qualify as voter suppression, as Democrats claim, then what’s the argument for not just blowing up everything?

As an addendum to this, recent video and audio recordings from the state’s Delaware County (3rd largest in Pennsylvania), have revealed ever more systemic problems with the voting than previously suspected:

To date, the videos have exposed a wide array of problems with election integrity, including on-tape admissions that the election laws were not complied with, that 80 percent of provisional ballots lacked a proper chain-of-custody, that there were missing removable drives for some of the voting machines, and that election workers “recreated” new drives to response to the Right to Know request.
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With boxes of voting sheets lining the basement floor of a Delaware County building, the election worker tells Miller, “There were six precincts in one location and all of the machines were, all of the scanners were, programmed to accept any ballot of those six precincts.”

“It was a nightmare,” the Delaware County official explained, adding that “you couldn’t, there’s no way you could reconcile” the results.

To a certain extent what is described there is little different than what Gumbel describes in his hilarious (and hair-raising) chapters on electronic ballots, mail-in ballots and scanners, starting in the 1970’s. This is just bigger than the elections he looked at.

They’ll be more stories to come from many US States as they repair the system and with Chinese Lung Rot in abeyance the primary reason for mail-in ballots, ballot-harvesting and the like will also recede. One note not mentioned in these articles or cases is that while the number and proportion of mail-in ballots showed massive increases in 2020 the error rates collapsed:

  • Georgia: 6.5% rejections in 2016 to a mere 0.2%, more than 30 times lower.
  • Pennsylvania: 1% in 2016 to 0.03% this year.
  • Nevada: 1.6% in 2016 to around 0.75% this year.
  • Michigan: 0.5% in 2016 to 0.1% this year.
  • North Carolina: 2.7% in 2016 to 0.8% this year.

The folks at FiveThirtyEight provide several sober reasons for this incredible improvement in quality control, but given the screwups in so many other areas of the election that looks like special pleading that would not be used if Trump had won.

We’ll have to wait for the 2024 elections to see if these miracles re-occur.

Meantime I’m reminded of a line from Down For The Count where the advisor of one long-forgotten losing candidate’s said of his opponents: “They cheated fair and square”.