Why People Question the 2020 Election

You can't blame people for thinking that whatever happened in 2020, it was not a meaningfully democratic presidential election.

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Let’s begin by noting something that’s easy to forget: Before the pandemic hit, Donald Trump’s term in office had been a successful one. You might even say he was thriving.

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. His support among Hispanics expanded to 32% (even more among Hispanic men), while his support among blacks increased by 50%.

• Trump won Iowa, Ohio, and Florida by much larger margins than the polls predicted. It is a basic fact that certain American states almost always go with the winner in presidential elections. Ohio and Florida are at the top of the list, in part because they reflect the demographic composition of the U.S. When you add Iowa, it is possible to predict with high confidence that whoever wins these three states will also win the presidential election.¹ Not only did Trump carry these states, but he won them comfortably (Ohio and Iowa by about 8%, Florida by over 3%).

• 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 the enthusiasm gap between the candidates.²

More “irregularities,” as highlighted by political science professor Claes G. Ryn:

• There is a particularly persuasive measure of who the winner of a presidential election is, and this measure indicates that there was something very strange about the outcome of the 2020 election in the swing states. There are 19 bellwether counties across the country that almost always vote for the winner. It has been assumed that if a candidate carries 15 to 16 of these 19 counties, he is also bound to be the winner of the presidency. But in 2020, 18 of these 19 counties did not vote for the winner, but for Trump. In fact, Trump even improved his performance in these counties compared to 2016. Examples:

  • Valencia County in New Mexico had mirrored the outcome of every presidential election since 1952. Trump won it by 10% in 2020.

  • Indiana’s Vigo County had voted for every presidential winner except two since 1882. Trump won it by 15%.

  • Westmoreland County in Virginia had failed only twice since 1928 to vote for the winner. Trump won it by 16%.

• Notably, Biden won a record-low 17% of America’s counties. Obama won 873 counties in 2008; Biden barely captured 500 in 2020. Trump, meanwhile, won 2,550.

• Winners of the presidency routinely pick up seats for their party. Biden lost 13 seats.

• Biden’s percentage of the vote per state did not even match that of Hillary Clinton. Indeed, he underperformed in the bigger cities, Democratic strongholds that are crucial to Democratic election victories. This is where the most remarkable feature of the 2020 election comes into play: The paradoxical exception to Biden’s weak national performance occurred in the battleground states, which he absolutely had to win to capture the presidency. As mentioned above, Biden only won one of the 19 battleground counties around the U.S. But he managed to dramatically reverse his substandard trend in the rest of the country and win all of the battleground states. How? By performing far better in the bigger cities of the battleground states than in the bigger cities elsewhere.

  • Seems pertinent to mention here that even in large states like Florida and Texas, which have many large cities, the vote count was completed on Election Night. But this was not the case for cities in the swing states, where counting was suddenly stopped and most election observers and others were sent home. Before the lights were turned off, Trump held large leads in key states like Pennsylvania,³ Georgia, and Michigan; in the morning, Biden was ahead in all. You cannot blame people for thinking something nefarious occurred. Claes G. Ryn notes that “CCTV captured what happened then at a voting place in a convention center in central Atlanta, Georgia. A few election workers stayed behind, pulled out suitcases with ballots from under a covered table and, without the legally required election observers, fed them into the voting machines into the early morning.” Every media “fact-checker” has said the footage has been debunked, but in my opinion that’s not saying much considering that the fact-checking industry is “the Democratic Party’s new official-unofficial, public-private monopoly tech platform censorship brigade,” as Jacob Siegel puts it.

  • Ryn writes, “In Sweden of all places, an expert on American elections published a series of articles showing that Biden’s win in the swing states simply could not be explained without assuming major fraud.” His piece in The American Conservative, in which he explains why he believes there was “organized manipulation on a large scale,” is worth reading in full.⁴

Changing the Rules

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.” The nature of the hundred-plus lawsuits filed by Democrats and their ancillaries was obvious. 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.

The numbers aren’t important. What matters is that establishment governors, often over the protests of state legislatures, used the pretense of covid⁵ 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.

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 would 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 the 2020 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 “more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.”

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 have potentially decided the presidency.

The point is that mail-in voting never should have been permitted 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 tens of thousands of 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. 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 have likely been nullified to give Trump the state.

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? 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.”

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. Recall that 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.

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 put it, “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 had 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 have come up with something that closely resembles the Russian collusion hoax. It wasn’t just a narrative purveyed by the mainstream media with near-canonical certainty for years, but an actual scheme coordinated by powerful bureaucrats. The FBI, the Clinton campaign/DNC, and the left-wing commentariat all worked 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, it had already been 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; that the anti-Clinton information which 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 decade or so has 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.

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 occurred, 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.⁶

And then the Hunter Biden laptop story happened. It is impossible to overstate how big of a deal this was—not because it would have necessarily swung the election in Trump’s favor (though it absolutely would have hurt Biden), but because the Regime, out in the open, ran a coordinated censorship campaign against one of the oldest newspapers in the country and used propaganda to protect the Biden/Harris ticket.

Here’s the thing: It’s unlikely that Trump’s supporters will ever know for sure whether fake ballots, vote-by-mail violations, and voting machine manipulation 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. We have lived through years of deep, protracted, intense hostility toward Trump; he’s been characterized as such an “existential threat” to Our Democracy™ that it has justified ruthless, coordinated attempts to cripple or get rid of him. Considering these circumstances, can you not understand why some might think it’s plausible that there was a conspiracy to commit election fraud in 2020?

So in conclusion, if the question is why do people feel that whatever happened in 2020, it was not a meaningfully democratic presidential election, then my answer is: all of the above. This is 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.

1. 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.

2. Literally no one showed up to at least one Biden/Harris event that took place in Arizona, a state that the Democratic ticket carried.

3. Pennsylvania was a real eyebrow-raiser. Joe Torsella, the Democratic secretary of state, widely considered a 2022 gubernatorial candidate, lost to a Republican challenger by nearly 80,000 votes. It was the first time since 1994 that a Republican beat an incumbent Democratic statewide officeholder and capped a brutal election cycle for Pennsylvania Democrats in down-ballot races. A Republican won the state auditor’s race by 200,000 votes. And the Democratic minority leader of the Pennsylvania state senate, a thirty-year incumbent, lost to a Republican. So, quite the “Red wave” in the state of Pennsylvania, but Biden still managed to win by 80,000 votes.

4. I should note that I found it frustrating because he doesn’t cite or link to a lot of information that should be cited or linked to. I couldn’t find these Swedish articles he mentions, for example.

5. 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.

6. Kavanaugh, Rittenhouse, the Covington high school kids, etc.