Remember when Al Gore fought the 2000 presidential election result, tooth and nail, claiming he had been cheated? How about when Hillary Clinton claimed that Russian hackers had “stolen” the 2016 election – and her supporters staged violent riots? All just politics as usual, according to the media.
But when Donald Trump made the same claim, and his supporters rioted, it was an “insurrection”.
The even bigger lie, parrotted ad nauseum, is the lie that the election fraud claim is “baseless” and “without evidence”.
While it is true that there is no proof, proof is not the same as evidence. Evidence is simply ground for belief or disbelief: data which may or may not establish a proposition.
And, as it happens, there is plenty of evidence of at least some level of malfeasance in the 2020 election. Enough to flip the result? Maybe not, but what is absolutely beyond dispute is that the American electoral system is an absolute mess. In what is supposed to be the world’s leading democracy, the shambolic state of its electoral system is a scandal all on its own.
Trump screened and lauded a new documentary, 2000 Mules, at his Florida mansion for prominent friends and fans last Friday night. It was produced by conservative provocateur and author Dinesh D’Souza and a Texas not-for-profit, True the Vote.
Using vast troves of anonymised mobile phone location data – the kind that helped police arrest rioters on Capitol Hill on 6 January – the documentary suggests at least 2000 individuals in five key swing states visited at least 10 voter drop boxes and five left-wing activist organisations during the voting period. Some “mules” – those dropping off multiple ballots – visited drop boxes more than 50 times, it claims.
The show also presented CCTV footage of people dropping multiple ballots off at strange hours, some wearing gloves (and a T-shirt; it clearly wasn’t to keep warm) at all hours of the night.
All up, the supposed mules could have made the difference in critical states such as Pennsylvania and Arizona, which Biden won by only thousands of votes, D’Souza argues.
While the film is tantalising, it still doesn’t prove anything – except how little confidence Americans can have in the system that elects the most powerful person in the world.
The integrity of US elections is a longstanding problem and shouldn’t be a priority only for Republicans.
Historians still debate whether Illinois and Texas Democrats nefariously won John F Kennedy the 1960 presidential election. Some Democrats claim the 2000 presidential election was stolen by George W Bush. And new White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has claimed Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp stole the 2018 state election.
A commission led by former Democrat president Jimmy Carter and former Republican secretary of state James Baker in 2005 recommended states introduce voter ID, limit mail-in voting and tidy up electoral rolls, which, by 2012, were a dog’s breakfast, with one in eight voter registrations not even valid according to the independent Pew Research Centre.
But 2022 Democrats and their media lackeys would be screaming at 2005 Jimmy Carter that he’s a “racist”.
The party has slammed Georgia’s modest attempt to improve the integrity of elections, including introducing voter IDs, as “a return to Jim Crow” – a ludicrous claim no fair-minded person could entertain.
Even if it cannot be proven that the 2020 election was rigged, there is no doubt that a great many very powerful people and insitutions wanted it rigged and did everything in their considerable power to rig it. We know this for a fact because they’re telling us, with no apologies. Time magazine openly boasted of the secret, “well-funded” “shadow campaign” to “save” the election (by which they mean, ‘get Joe Biden elected’). In Time’s own, bizarrely triumphant, words, “There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes… [whose] work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.”
Those changes included a massive expansion of absentee voting and an astonishing proliferation of unattended drop boxes (absolutely illegal in Australia, for instance). At the same time, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg splurged nearly half a billion dollars to groups almost entirely run by Democrat activists to harvest votes in key states and counties.
If 2020 was the safest and most secure election in US history, a claim repeated constantly in the media, it certainly wasn’t the most independently administered.
The Australian