“A Republic, if you can keep it”

Election theft is a venerable American tradition. In 1992, the Collier brothers documented many examples in which elections were rigged the old fashioned way, stuffing ballot boxes by hand. Theft of the 2000 presidential election was out in the open, when our Federal Supreme Court ruled that Florida had no right to re-examine its own state vote counts. The Florida debacle was used to pass the Help America Vote Act, which computerized voting all across America. Since 2002, it has been possible to change vote counts remotely with software, no need to stuff ballot boxes by hand. G. W. Bush stole the 2004 election from John Kerry in this way, from a political IT consulting office in Chattanooga, TN. Across the country a Republican thumb was placed on the scale of most Congressional races thereafter. This history is related in articulate detail by Jonathan Simon. A Collier daughter has summarized and updated their 1992 book.

The Democrats were mysteriously silent about this development, and even contributed to discrediting the election integrity movement. Presiding over a joint session (Senate + House) as VP, Al Gore acceded to the 2000 theft that deprived him of the White House and silenced Congressmen who did not want to certify the vote. John Kerry knew that the 2004 election had been stolen from him, but would not say so in public, according to Mark Crispin Miller, who personally handed Kerry his book on the 2004 election. In 2016, Hilary Clinton stole the primary from Bernie Sanders, and then Trump stole the general election from Clinton. 

I have personally been associated with groups that carried evidence to Congressional Democrats, to the NYTimes, and to prominent Democratic think tanks in Washington, but all were curiously uninterested in pursuing accountable elections. Jimmy Carter’s Center for Democracy has monitored elections in many countries around the world, but he has said that America’s procedures for tallying votes preclude the possibility of independently checking the vote count in his own country.

After elections were computerized, exit polls became the best available barometer for election anomalies in America, but in 2020, COVID ushered in the option of voting by mail. When Republicans chose disproportionately to vote in person, exit polls became useless, and were abandoned by the NEP consortium in most states. Thus the 2020 presidential election became the least accountable in American history. Donald Trump became the first presidential candidate to question the vote count publicly, and he was vilified for “preventing the democratic transfer of power.”

In my account, January 6 was not an “insurrection” but a mostly-peaceful gathering in which (finally) American citizens demanded transparency and accountability in the process of counting their votes. Once again, it was the Democrats who delegitimized any call for reform in the way votes are counted. (To their credit, these same Democrats have been activists for ending vote suppression, which is another very real and very American problem, but these same activists are in denial about electronic vote theft.)

If we ever did establish honest elections in America, Democrats would benefit across the board. Perhaps the reason Democrats resist this reform is that both parties would be taken over by populists in a blow to the corporations that dominate both political parties. 

Today we are again being gaslighted by our Liberal Press, which tells us it’s crazy to question the vote tallies in the World’s Greatest Democracy.

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Several years ago, I wrote a four part series on the history of vote theft in 21st Century America (one, two, three, four), but if you want the full story, I recommend Code Red by Jonathan Simon.