Why Folks Question the 2020 Election

The many irregularities.

---

One of the most striking features of the widespread questioning and outright denying of the 2020 election remains the simple fact that nobody’s really sold on the particulars; there’s no single theory as to what exactly makes the results null and void. And while some of the theories are outlandish, the exact reasons people sometimes point to — fraudulent ballots, hacked voting machines, corrupt ballot counters, etc. — in explaining why it was a “rigged” election don’t matter. What matters is the feeling. That’s the question that matters most: Why do people feel that whatever happened in 2020, it was not a meaningfully democratic presidential election?

Let’s begin by noting something that’s easy to forget: Before the pandemic hit, Donald Trump was thriving in the White House. He looked unstoppable.

The unemployment rate hit a fifty-year low in 2019, and black workers saw wages rising after a “decade of stagnation,” according to the New York Times. ISIS’s caliphate had been throttled and thoroughly defeated, and there was actual progress toward peace in the Middle East for the first time in decades. Trump had gotten more federal judges confirmed than any president in 40 years. NAFTA was replaced. Our southern border was looking a hell of a lot better than it has under Biden, even if “the wall” hadn’t been completed. Trump’s goals of undermining China’s ascendancy and the Big Tech cartel were by no means accomplished, but he definitely posed a much greater threat than any of his predecessors. And in many ways, the Bad Orange Man w/Mean Tweets exposed the mainstream media for the contemptible conglomerate that it is.

In December 2020 — one month after the election — Gallup released a poll showing Donald Trump was the man Americans admired most, supplanting Barack Obama, who had held that honor for 12 straight years. Joe Biden, meanwhile, ranked a distant third. Trump had triple the first-place votes of the man who’d beaten him just a few weeks earlier.

As Patrick Basham of the American Spectator pointed out, statistical anomalies from the 2020 election were many—with sketchy undertones, if I may be so bold:

• Trump received more votes in 2020 than any incumbent president in history.

• Trump received 11 million+ more votes than he did against Hillary Clinton in 2016. By comparison, Obama received significantly fewer votes in 2012 when he ran for reelection than he did in 2008.

• Trump’s support among minority voters rose significantly despite the constant hE's A rAcIsT! claims for four straight years.

• Trump won Iowa, Ohio, and Florida by much larger margins than the polls predicted. As Basham notes, “only Richard Nixon has lost the Electoral College after winning this trio, and that 1960 defeat to John F. Kennedy is still the subject of great suspicion.”

• Biden won the most votes in the history of American elections—by a considerable margin. He received roughly 11 million more votes than Obama received when he made history in 2008 by becoming the first black president. That’s a lot of votes for someone who campaigned in a basement, and particularly shocking considering literally no one showed up to at least one Biden/Harris event that took place in Arizona, a state that the Democratic ticket carried.

• According to Pew, 67% of Trump voters say they voted in person, compared with 42% of Biden voters.

• Biden won a record-low 17% of America’s counties.

In August 2020, three months out from the election, the New York Times reported that at least 160 lawsuits had been filed by Democratic “party organizations, campaigns and interest groups,” noting that the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee were “involved” in only 40, “some in response to Democratic lawsuits.” The nature of the hundred-plus lawsuits filed by Democrats and their ancillaries was obvious back then, and is all the more so now. All of them (and the covid response bills filed in the House by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats) were undertaken to game the system.

As the Claremont Institute’s Hans von Spakovsky mentioned, this would be true of any actors pushing to change the rules in this manner mid-game. They were trying to force states to mail absentee ballots to all registered voters, despite the known inaccuracies of state voter rolls, and they largely succeeded in addition to having other rules changed—everything from the centralization of voting centers to an extension of voting deadlines. Ultimately, 79 different bills were passed to “expand voting access.” ABC counted at least thirty states (plus D.C.) that made at least one change to their electoral system amid the pandemic, while Ballotpedia thinks about forty states made changes for the 2020 general election.

The numbers aren’t important. What matters is that establishment governors, often over the protests of state legislatures, used the pretense of covid¹ to change voting procedures, even axing existing voter ID and notarization requirements and lowering signature matching standards, among other changes.

I’m a strict Constitutionalist. I believe there’s a reason America has not only survived, but thrived for as long as it has, and it’s largely because of that document. And the fact is that the Constitution states plainly that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections. . . shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” As far as I’m concerned, Democrats cajoled state governors into unconstitutionally usurping their legislatures’ authority to unilaterally alter voting procedures just months before an election in order to help Biden make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system.

Voting By Mail is Every Bit as Sketchy as Trump Claimed

The widespread use of vote-by-mail was a boon to Democrats. As legendary California Democrat Willie Brown wrote in August 2020, “Democrats own the GOP in mail voting.”

There’s no doubt that they engaged in “ballot harvesting,” which is when a third party — any third party — is allowed to collect your vote and turn it in for you. It’s well-known that Democrats are better organized and more politically active at the local level than Republicans, and community organizers are known to approach low-civic-engagement voters, convince them to vote Blue, and then turn in their ballots for them—a practice that, though legal in many parts of the country, makes even more of an impact when you radically increase the number of mail-in ballots that can be collected.

I feel like this goes without saying, but putting your vote — a valuable commodity — into the hands of individuals who have a stake in the outcome of the election (activists, consultants, staffers, etc.) leads to predictable results. Just look at the 2018 election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. That election was overturned because of illegal vote harvesting that included a political consultant and his staff doing everything from filling out voters’ absentee ballots to forging voter signatures.

Although this is apparently still taboo to say in some social circles, there was fraud in the 2020 election. There’s fraud in every election. The question isn’t if, but how much.

An obvious example: If my brother doesn’t normally vote in elections, I can fill out a ballot on his behalf without anyone knowing. Or, ballots can be switched before being submitted. Even in places with “signature matching,” it’s not fail-safe. Personally, my signatures don’t always look alike. To say nothing of the possibility of coercion or even bribery. You know as well as I do that there exists a non-negligible number of people out there who’d vote a certain way in exchange for a BOGO Slurpee coupon.

Before the 2020 election at least, it was commonly accepted that mail-in voting practically invites fraud. In 2005, the Carter-Baker Commission Report, which was conducted after the 2000 election to rebuild voter confidence, concluded that mail-in balloting is inherently vulnerable to fraud and abuse. In fact, the report states that mail-in ballots are “the largest source of potential voter fraud.” And wouldn’t you know it, until this past election cycle the Carter-Baker Report was considered the gold standard for election integrity, and has even been cited by the Supreme Court. My how the times change. In 2012, the New York Times published a story entitled “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises.” That story’s conclusion? That “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.” According to the article, election officials reject double the number of ballots cast by mail than for in-person voting.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 10% of all ballots (just over 101 million) cast in the 2000 election were cast by mail. I couldn’t find the exact number for the 2020 election, but according to Pew only 54% of people voted in person. Since we know that 159,633,396 Americans voted, we also know that means there was an absolute avalanche of mail-in ballots. It’s not unreasonable to think that election law violations numbering in the tens of thousands occurred in several key states, and that this could’ve potentially decided the presidency.

Am I saying that Trump would have won if not for the tsunami of mail-in ballots? No. What I’m saying is that mail-in voting never should’ve been allowed to happen at such a scale, and that new laws had to be passed or standard laws executively subverted under the very thin pretense of “covid safety” in order for it to be possible. That this was allowed to happen means that, at a minimum, a significant number of Americans will forever lack confidence in the outcome of the 2020 election, and that kind of serious doubt about the legitimacy of an election gravely undermines our democratic republic and leads to events like 1/6.

It’s also profoundly telling that even though everything about the 2020 election was unusual — especially the part where half the country voted in the manner most susceptible to fraud — the mainstream media launched a propaganda campaign claiming that the election was the most well-run and secure election in American history.

Challenging the Results

There were six key states in question: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan. Lawyers supporting Trump, his campaign, the RNC, state Republican parties, or other candidates filed more than sixty lawsuits, a number that only undermined the legitimacy of the challenges; it was like they were just throwing things at the wall to see what would stick. As Breitbart’s Alex Morrow highlighted, many of these cases were brought by B-list or even C-list attorneys, and were quickly thrown out of court on technicalities or because they were suing the wrong people or asked for the wrong things. And every single time, it resulted in another headline à la “Trump loses again!”

The example of Georgia is particularly illustrative because it underscores the fact that, far from what the media reported, the Trump team wasn’t just blowing smoke or being “poor losers.” Unfortunately, however, Trump never got his day in court. More on this anon, but first it should be noted that the margin between the candidates in this state was less than 12,000. After weeks of research, Trump’s lawyers argued that there were at least 60,000 illegal ballots cast, including 2,600 ballots cast by felons, 15,700 by voters who moved out of state (of which 5,000 registered in their new state before election day), over 40,000 who moved from one place in Georgia to another but failed to reregister at the new address, 1,000 who listed a PO box as their residence, another 4,000 who listed no home at all, over 8,000 ballots cast by voters who passed away before election day, and up to 66,000 who may have been underage, according to the lawyers.

Under Georgia law, if a court finds that the number of illegal ballots exceeds the margin between the two candidates, the court is obligated to nullify the election result and order a new election. But the court in question was in Fulton County, AKA very-Blue Atlanta, and it never held a trial, let alone a hearing on the case. It wasn’t until January 4, 2021, that another court took the case and assigned a trial date of January 8th, which we all know was two days after the infamous 1/6 brouhaha. Following that, the case was withdrawn. The courts never ruled on who actually won the state in the election.

Under Georgia law, if you vote by mailing an absentee ballot, the signature on the ballot envelope must be verified against both the signature on the application for a ballot and also the signature on that voter’s registration file. This is no small matter:

“In recent elections, between 2.9 and 3.5 percent of absentee ballots got rejected during this verification process. But in 2020, one of the groups led by Stacey Abrams sued, and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger entered into a consent decree (an agreement to settle a dispute) that required only that the absentee ballot signature be checked against the application or the file, not both. As a result, only 0.34 percent of absentee ballots were rejected, according to Trump’s legal team. Just like that, evidence of mass mail-vote irregularities virtually vanished. At least legally speaking.” — Alex Morrow, Breaking the News

Given the ungodly number of mail-in ballots that were cast, under the normal rejection rate, Biden would have gotten at least 30,000 fewer votes, according to court filings by Trump’s lawyers, and the state would have tipped to the former president by about 20,000 votes.

I believe the case proposed by Trump’s lawyers was valid. The issue involves the Article II Electors Clause in the U.S. Constitution (“Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States”). It gets complicated, but as Trump’s lawyers explained, the original election law passed by the Georgia General Assembly required that all three signatures on the ballot envelope match, but someone who was not a legislator — Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger — entered into an agreement that rewrote the law so that “and” was changed to an “or,” meaning the three-part signature verification process was reduced to a two-way verification process:

“In the state of Georgia, if you vote by mailing an absentee ballot, the signature on the ballot envelope must be verified against both the signature on the application for a ballot and also or the signature on that voter’s registration file.”

Without that arguably illegal consent decree, an election challenge in Georgia would not have even been necessary because under the normal rejection rate — between 2.9 and 3.5 percent as opposed to 0.34 percent — enough Biden ballots would’ve likely been nullified to give Trump the state. Also without that fiat, it’s likely that David Perdue would’ve won his Senate seat on November 3; there wouldn’t have been a runoff for that seat and Republicans would still hold the Senate, which is obviously a big deal. The country would probably look a lot different right now.

Law might be open to interpretation, but Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution is clear-cut, and the vast majority of the changes that Democrats managed to impose by way of executive fiat were blatantly unconstitutional.

Even so, none of the cases brought forward by Trump’s lawyers ever had a shot. If you were a judge, would you be willing to stick your neck out for Trump and overturn the results in your state? Or would you have fiery visions of riots, and maybe of your own home burning down, courtesy of the same people who caused over $2 billion in insured damage across the country during the previous summer?²

The concern would not be baseless. We’ve seen one side of the political spectrum condone the intimidation of judges, and while it’s true that this wasn’t until more than a year after the election, it’s also true that political violence is okay so long as it’s committed by the Left: Staffers for Biden/Harris raised money to bail out those arrested during the Floyd riots.

And for those who would dismiss the possibility of another round of street riots, we know, courtesy of Time (“The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”), that during the summer of 2020, there were weekly conference calls involving members of the corporate media, BLM leaders, and local officials about the riots, and that they coordinated with Big Tech to shape the narrative around these events so as to maximize political effect and conduct damage control—PR damage control, that is.

Did you know that the 2020 election needed “saving”? Neither did I.

We also know that the same folks on these conference calls had “protesters” ready to be activated by text message in 400 cities the day after the election—but only if Trump won. As podcaster Darryl Cooper noted, “Every town with a population over 50,000 would have been in for some pre-planned, centrally-controlled mayhem. In other countries we call that a color revolution.” Yes, these were “protests” that were planned, but let’s not be so naïve as to forget the last time we had “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests. Per Time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was so concerned that another iteration of orchestrated rioting and destruction of property was imminent that it offered its assistance to this “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.”

So yes, I think it’s fair to wonder whether a judge might have serious reservations about being the one responsible for what would doubtless be framed as a kind of judicial coup, not just because he would be dragged in the media, but because his decision, even if completely by the book and constitutional, might bring about another round of sanctioned mayhem.

The Regime

In 2016, if you’d gone to the drawing board to brainstorm the most efficient way to instigate a crisis of trust and authority in American institutions, you probably would’ve come up with something that closely resembles the Russian collusion hoax. It was a narrative purveyed by the mainstream media with near-canonical certainty for years, and it was a scheme coordinated by powerful bureaucrats, with the FBI, the Clinton campaign/DNC, and the left-wing commentariat working together to undermine a duly elected president.

It was impossible not to pay attention to each development. The coverage was obsessive. The New York Times alone produced over 3,000 articles on the subject. Trump supporters may have followed along with apprehension, but follow along they did, and so they noticed when things didn’t add up.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Americans (at least those not afflicted with permanent left-wing ideological blinders) had already discovered that the FBI and other intelligence agencies conducted covert surveillance against members of the Trump campaign based on evidence manufactured by political operatives working for Clinton, both before and after the 2016 election, and that those involved with the investigation knew the accusations of collusion were part of a campaign “approved by Hillary Clinton. . . to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

Trump supporters were also paying attention when it was revealed that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was working with Fusion GPS, the political research and PR firm used by the Clinton campaign to formulate and spread the collusion accusations, and that the anti-Clinton information that was supposed to be the subject of the notorious meeting between her and the Trump campaign was provided by the same firm, and that Veselnitskaya had dinner with Glenn Simpson, the owner of Fusion GPS, both the day before, and the day after the meeting.

The same folks were paying attention when James Comey told Bret Baier of Fox News that even at the time of their interview in April 2018, he didn’t know who had funded the Steele dossier, only for the December 2019 DOJ Inspector General’s report to show that he’d been informed of the dossier’s provenance in October of 2016. Comey lied. He lied to Baier, and he lied to the American people.

And the whole time, even when ordinary Americans were well aware that the entire thing was a ridiculous, dishonorable sham, the mainstream media refused to ask even the most basic, most obvious of questions and gave themselves awards for covering the Trump presidency like it was a real-life version of The Manchurian Candidate, going above and beyond to attack any journalist who so much as pointed toward the truth.

Trump supporters gathered that Russiagate was too involved and complicated to have been carried out without some coordination across institutions. This wasn’t a couple of bad eggs. Liberals are dismissive whenever someone mentions “the Regime,” but it is very real. The past five years or so have made this irrefutably clear. One needn’t be a conspiracy theorist to believe that powerful people — people who think Trump supporters are stupid rubes who need to shut up and listen to their betters — coordinated at the highest echelons of society by way of vague threats, professional consequences, and implied incentives to actively subvert a sitting president with the help of a media class that literally threw every iota of its credibility behind the lies (and won Pulitzers for it, which were never rescinded).

Think of the opprobrium levelled against Trump backers during this period. Anyone who had cast a vote for him was condemned as an imbecile by Joe Shmoe liberals, while America’s elite institutions unanimously decreed that to support Trump was to support Putin and effectively made you a traitor to your own country. Being a Trump supporter was a thought crime in many circles; you ran the risk of being called a racist, fired, seeing your family harassed, and in extreme circumstances even killed.

So, after years of being persecuted, these folks were practically salivating over the reckoning that was sure to come once it became undeniable that Russiagate was a sophisticated lie. But just like with all the covid gaslighting that’s occurred over the past two years, no reckoning has come. In the absence of any accountability whatsoever, these folks shed many illusions about how power really operates in modern America.

Just as importantly, they’ve come to understand that mainstream media journalists are no longer actual journalists, because real journalists are supposed to have one bias and one bias only—against power. Journalists are supposed to look out for the little guy. But if Russiagate didn’t drastically, permanently alter their perception of the media for the worse, there’s zero doubt that the pandemic was the final nail in the coffin. The mainstream media is nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Regime. It’s no longer a matter of “liberal bias.” That’s not the problem. The problem is that we’ve been shown, repeatedly, that the media class will say and do anything to push a political agenda, and that they have no problem ruining someone’s life if it means achieving a political objective.³

And then the Hunter Biden laptop story happened. It is impossible to overstate how big of a deal this was—not because it would’ve necessarily swung the election in Trump’s favor (though it absolutely would’ve hurt Biden⁴), but because the Regime, out in the open, ran a coordinated censorship campaign against one of the oldest newspapers in the country (1801) and used propaganda to protect the Biden/Harris ticket. Once again, the morons who bleat most incessantly about dIsInFoRmAtIoN were the ones spreading it, telling the nation that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Here’s the thing: It’s unlikely that Trump’s supporters will ever know for sure whether fake ballots and vote-by-mail violations gave Biden the White House. But this is beside the point. After watching an entrenched bureaucracy and security state undermine their president with the help of the media, they know beyond any shadow of a doubt that these same people would lie to them if that’s what really happened. Moreover, Trump's supporters everyone with any shred of honesty in them knows that if the parties were reversed and it were the Democrats who questioned the outcome of the 2020 election, every single suspicion, no matter how absurd, would be taken very seriously. Q.v. — the 2016 election.

So, to go back to the question posed at the beginning of this post: Why do people feel that whatever happened in 2020, it was not a meaningfully democratic presidential election? My answer is: All of the above. That’s why people make vague claims about the election being “rigged” or “stolen.” The collection of theories people trade in are essentially a synecdoche, a gut feeling about something that, though difficult to describe, was very real, and which culminated with election day.

---

On a lighter note, skip ahead to 0:48.

1. They held an election requiring in-person voting during the 1918 Spanish flu; there was no reason to change the rules this time around for a pandemic that was far more mild.

2. To say nothing of the relentless pillorying any judge ruling in Trump's favor would be subjected to by the corporate media, the same corporate media that excused and encouraged the “summer of love.”

3. Kavanaugh, Rittenhouse, the Covington high school kids. . . the examples are too numerous to count.

4. Some glibly brushed aside the incident because, after four years of obsessing over the Trump family, they insisted they weren't interested in the behavior of a candidate’s children. We’re supposed to believe that the mainstream media, which had published as fact stories about Russian prostitutes pissing on Trump, would have been totally uninterested in a laptop of Donald Trump Jr.’s full of pictures of him smoking crack and emails which pretty definitively show family-wide political corruption.