Is Trump right to fear election fraud? Cheating has never looked easier

Does this mean that the 2020 vote was rigged? Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who founded the Election Integrity Network, framed the problem cautiously on social media. “The election process was taken over by leftwing activist groups who had burrowed into election systems across the country by the time of the 2020 election,” she wrote recently. “And they manipulated the election system in myriad ways in state after state.”

Perhaps the most significant of these tactics was mass mail-in voting, instituted ostensibly to accommodate voters’ concerns about public gatherings during the pandemic. Previously, Democrats and Republicans agreed that mail-in ballots facilitated fraud. A 2005 bipartisan report chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and one-time Secretary of State James Baker assessed that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud”.

But that was all memory-holed for the 2020 vote — indeed, it was censored. The Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies banned social media posts questioning the integrity of mail-in voting. The reality is that the Covid-era measures made voting by mail even more susceptible to fraud.

Previously, states required voters to file a request for a mail-in ballot and sign it. That signature was the baseline against which to check the signature on the final ballot. It was hardly a foolproof method, but it was at least a check against fraud. The Covid-era voting procedures eliminated even that. Rather than requiring voters to submit their signed requests, state election officials mailed out ballots to everyone registered to vote, which meant there was no baseline signature for comparison. The new voting system made it hard, if not impossible, to prove fraud.

And it was all done under the veil of law. No one voted to compromise the integrity of presidential elections by eliminating signature verification, but state party officials across the country took it upon themselves to send out bushels of ballots indiscriminately, while Left-wing judges turned a blind eye. Trump spoke up — then he was banished from Facebook and Twitter after the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021 turned violent. Trump took to social media to counsel his supporters to stay peaceful but was nonetheless exiled to digital Elba.

“I had no voice,” Trump told me. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said, “because I have so many things to say, and I have so many people that want to hear them, and I had no voice.” By continuing to talk about the 2020 vote long after it was possible to do anything about it, he wasn’t looking backward, as his aides feared; rather, he was mobilising his supporters for the next round. Thus, by spring 2021, he’d locked up the Republican Party’s nomination long before the primary season began two years later.

Will this election be different? Mitchell writes: “We are working hard to make sure that it does not happen again this time. We haven’t fixed everything in elections that the leftists spent billions of dollars breaking. But at least we know what to watch for in 2024.”

Federal and state officials appear determined to validate voters’ fears. California recently passed a law preventing local governments from requiring voters to present identification in order to vote. The Department of Justice has filed suits against the states of Alabama and Virginia to keep them from purging ineligible voters, including non-citizens, from its voter rolls. Investigations are underway in Pennsylvania where two counties are reporting evidence of large-scale voter registration fraud. And, according to Michigan officials, there is a “nationwide issue” with voting terminals preventing voters from making certain selections on their ballots.

It seems that, as in 2020, the 2024 election will stretch out past election day. Officials from key battleground states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, have already warned of delays in announcing results. Fox News Channel’s Decision Desk anticipates at least a four-day delay before it makes a final call. To mollify, or mislead, voters, Pennsylvania’s Department of State posted on X that “Pennsylvanians won’t always know the final results of all races on election night. Any changes in results that occur as counties continue to count ballots are not evidence that an election is ‘rigged’.”

But delaying the announcement of election results is typically seen the world over as evidence of fraud. US officials once saw it that way, too, at least up until the 2020 election when contesting election results became grounds for indicting Trump, his lawyers, and other top aides.

For instance, delays in announcing the results of the first round of Peru’s 2000 election — which included three days for the presidential race, more than a month for congressional contests, and a “mysterious” lapse in the transport of ballot boxes to vote count centres — caught the Clinton administration’s attention. A State Department spokesman warned the Peruvian government “to take every possible measure to ensure that the next round of voting fully meets democratic standards of openness, transparency and fairness”.

The Peruvian campaign was marked by other irregularities, too, as watchdog groups found evidence that incumbent Alberto Fujimori’s operatives had manipulated the media, forged voter registration signatures, and transported pre-marked ballots. The reason those sound like the irregularities identified in the 2020 US elections is because the distinguishing characteristics of election fraud are always the same. There are not that many ways to rig an election, and it does not take a professional election monitor to recognise fraud.

Delayed election results are correlated not only with fraud but also with violence. According to a study of African elections from 1997 to 2022: “The length of time between elections and the announcement of the official results acts as a signal of possible voter fraud, thereby increasing incentives for post-election violence.”

Likewise, paused ballot-counts and lengthy delays in announcing results in Honduras’s 2017 presidential elections led to widespread violence and 17 deaths. Here again, the US State Department took note. The irregularities, said US diplomats, indicated that “much-needed electoral reforms should be undertaken”.

Could the promised delays for this election cycle provoke further political violence? With two attempts on Trump’s life already, Kamala Harris raised the stakes when she compared him to Hitler. In a recent Atlantic article, former Trump administration officials allege that their ex-boss spoke favourably of the Führer, claims that the Harris team rolled into a press conference essentially warning against a Hitler presidency. Only Harris, her campaign promises voters, is capable of “defending democracy” — effectively the central plank in the party’s platform — against your Nazi neighbours.

The idea that Trump is a tyrant in the wings is of course absurd. But it is no more dangerous than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign propaganda claiming that Trump was controlled by Vladimir Putin. US intelligence services used that fabrication as a predicate to investigate Trump during the second year of his presidency.

Through three election cycles, from 2016 to the present, the Democrats have sought to present Trump, a political outsider, as somehow fundamentally un-American. At best, the Democrats dismiss Trump’s supporters as unwitting accomplices of a foreign agent; at worst, they denounce them as collaborators in a fascist plot to undermine democracy. This has proven to be the most destructive propaganda campaign in US history. No foreign power has ever divided the American public so successfully.

The catch is that Harris doesn’t have many options. Some say the Hitler ploy is evidence that her campaign has run out of steam, but the problem is more fundamental: owning the Democratic Party’s signature policy initiative from the last four years would be disastrous. Since Biden took office in January 2021, the administration has ushered millions of illegal aliens across the southern border. Because no one is stopping the migrants from crossing and record-keeping is deliberately careless, no one knows how many have entered, though estimates range between seven and 25 million.

Even officials in Democrat-run polities such as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles are starting to have second thoughts about their status as “sanctuary cities” now that illegal aliens are exhausting their resources while also spiking crime rates. The proliferation of cheap, undocumented labour has suppressed the wages of working-class Americans or pushed them entirely out of the workforce. And because no Democrat in their right mind wants to take credit for burdening taxpayers with billions of dollars in public services for non-citizens, no one dares look into the future when automation will make millions of illiterate foreigners redundant.

Trump’s plan, the cornerstone of his campaign, is to send them back. If they want to move to America, they have to go home and start the process lawfully. In the meantime, Republicans are worried that illegal migrants are being registered to vote and their harvested ballots may help Harris win battleground states.

However, some GOP officials I’ve spoken with say there’s little evidence yet of mass registration of the Biden-Harris administration’s illegal migrants. At present, say my sources, the migrants are largely being relocated to Democrat-run states and cities, replacing Americans who vacated these areas in the last few years, driven out by draconian Covid lockdowns and mandates. These millions of Americans have left the Democratic enclaves on the East and West coast and moved to the sunbelt and other Republican-dominated regions to free themselves from the policies that have made life more dangerous and expensive. To win elections and hold power, so the theory goes, the Democrats need to keep the borders open, maybe forever.

This is why Trump supporters believe that the election will decide whether America remains a real country, with secure borders and secure elections, or is destined rather to become a tax farm for oligarchs in a geographical zone ruled by a single party. It’s no wonder Americans are on edge — Harris voters are worried that Hitler will be re-elected, and Trump supporters fear a repeat of 2020 that will lead to an unrecognisable America. Accordingly, voters are more galvanised by the electoral process than ever before, watching polls like political professionals.

Americans aren’t accustomed to this level of political urgency. For much of US history, most voters assumed that regardless of the outcome, the ship of state would rest in relatively steady hands whether it was a Democrat steering it slightly left or the Republicans charting a centre-right course. After the eight-year campaign targeting Trump, his aides and supporters, hardly anyone believes that anymore. Today, there’s little voters are willing to take for granted, including evidence of Trump’s growing lead as we head into Tuesday’s election.

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Lee Smith is a columnist and bestselling author whose latest book, Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic, came out last month from Encounter Books.

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