We Must Restore America’s Faith in Its Elections

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November 4, 2022

Nearly two years after the shambolic 2020 U.S. presidential election, tens of millions of ordinary Americans still suspect the election was rigged—through a combination of Big Tech interference, mail-in ballots lacking signature verification, so-called “ballot harvesting,” and the private takeover of government election operations by nonprofit organizations controlled by partisan Democrats, funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

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A Monmouth University poll released in late September 2022 found that fully one-third (32%) of all Americans and 61% of Republicans still believe election interference was the cause of Donald Trump’s defeat—despite 23 months of non-stop and increasingly threatening media propaganda, a ludicrous Congressional show trial of “mostly peaceful” election protesters, and even calls by Democrat politicians to make questioning election results a crime.

According to a 2021 Rasmussen Reports survey, fully 56% of respondents said “it’s likely that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, including 41% who said it’s ‘very likely.’”

These are the incalcitrant “election deniers” Joe Biden has denounced as “semi-fascists” and a “threat to democracy”—including nearly 300 candidates for elected office across America.

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How can people hold such a ludicrous opinion, especially when every corporate-owned news outlet in America, and dozens of courts and citizen-watch organizations, insist the opposite; namely, that America’s elections have never been more secure and fair?

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Well, one reason is that Democrats and Big Tech oligarchs openly bragged about what they had done to “fortify” the 2020 election.

In a little-noted article in Time Magazine that appeared in February 2021, right after the 2020 election, a coalition of Democrat officials in state election offices, left-wing advocacy groups, Big Tech and media executives, and lawyers admitted boosting Joe Biden’s chances with methods that were effectively untraceable.

According to Time, Biden’s victory was the result of “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

“Steering media coverage,” of course, refers to the outright censorship of news articles about Hunter Biden’s corrupt business practices in China and Ukraine—and the possibility that Joe Biden himself received a 10% cut “for the big guy.”

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So, this “cabal” of powerful people working behind the scenes (1) “influenced perceptions,” (2) “changed rules and laws” and (3) “controlled the flow of information” but…didn’t rig the election? They only “fortified” it?

“Their work touched every aspect of the election,” Time concluded. “They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.”

In addition, Americans remain suspicious of mail-in ballots and the practices associated with them, particularly “ballot harvesting.”

It strikes many Americans as more than suspicious that Joe Biden just happened to win more votes than in any election in history during the one election in which massive, unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots were used.

According to the U.S. Census, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, an astonishing 69% of Americans in 2020 voted via “non-traditional methods”; that is, through the mail, the use of “drop boxes” or through early voting.

Images: Voting in Texas. YouTube screen grab.

Mail-in ballots are flatly illegal in most (67%) countries in Europe precisely because they “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud,” as the bipartisan 2005 report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform put it.

Plus, Democrat officials in key battleground states illegally changed the rules in the months before the 2020 election to actually remove the verification safeguards they insist are in place to make sure fraudulent mail-in ballots do not get counted. In some states, signature verification is not required at all on mail-in ballots.

By some estimates, as many as 10 million mail-in ballots did not have those safeguards or a real “chain of custody” record for recounts.

In many states, the “proof” of identity is on outside envelopes that are then set aside once opened. Supposed “recounts” and “audits,” therefore, prove nothing: they are simply recounting anonymous ballots that are impossible to trace to actual voters.

The truth is confidence in America’s democratic system is fading fast.

One Gallup poll found that 59% of Americans don’t have confidence in the honesty of their elections, while only 40% say they do.

The reason is clear: the very methods that Democrats push to boost their success—such as universal mail-in ballots, no I.D. to vote, and an “election season” that lasts for weeks to accommodate ballot-harvesting—undermine confidence that the elections are fair.

In Nordic countries, where elections are conducted with paper ballots cast in person, confidence in election integrity is very high. Fully 89% of respondents in Finland and Norway, and 87% in Sweden, say their elections are fair and honest.

For the sake of the country, therefore, politicians in both of America’s main parties should return to the commonsense system that worked well for 200 years—paper ballots submitted on a single day, in person. No electronic voting machines, no “drop boxes,” no ballot harvesting, no early voting.

If America continues on its current path, the only people who will believe in the legitimacy of its elections will be CNN pundits and others paid to do so. The people themselves will assume, as polls show they already do, that America no longer exists as a functioning democracy.

Robert J. Hutchinson writes about the intersection of politics and ideas. His latest book is What Really Happened: The Death of Hitler.

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