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The 2020 US presidential election was many things.

Weird, bizarre, absurd, ridiculous, inexplicable – all these descriptions and more still would not be enough to fully emphasise just how wrong the whole thing felt.

In the aftermath, of course, the declared winners were quick to quash any talk of suspect behaviour, lest it undermine their victory. Even mentioning the word ‘fraud’ was enough to set the establishment media and their ilk into a frenzy, insisting that the 2020 election was the most free and fair in history.

Many people, especially outside the United States, simply don’t know much about the administration of American elections (or any elections, for that matter), and so when the old experts and trusted sources all trotted to defend that election, the masses could do little but shrug their shoulders and assume they must be telling the truth.

But for those paying attention, it was plain to see that something was wrong with what went down in the early hours of 4 November 2020. Mysteriously appearing ballots, unexplained pauses in counting, mathematical improbabilities, a litany of eyewitness accounts of procedures not followed correctly – all these pieces of circumstantial evidence led many to conclude that that the dice were loaded, and to fear they may be loaded again in the future.

The most ridiculous thing about the refusal from the establishment at large to even consider the possibility that their preferred candidate may have been a beneficiary of fraud is that the history of American elections is overflowing with such cases. I will briefly cover some of it, but recently I wrote a longer article detailing that history further (though still not completely, which would probably require a whole book to cover). You can read that here.

At Any Cost

Early in the history of the Republic, there was Alexander Hamilton’s attempt to game the Electoral College to get an unexpected third-place getter, Thomas Pinckney, into the White House in 1796, which set the stage for how elections were to be treated from then on: a game to be won at almost any cost.

The invention of the now 200-year-old practice of gerrymandering in 1821 solidified this mindset, as seen in the fact that it continues to be used by both parties across the country, despite everyone recognising it as a bad thing.

The existence of actual fraud in elections – the logical extension of electoral gamesmanship – came about with the extension of the franchise in the mid-1800s, which occurred simultaneously with the Industrial Revolution and a large spike in immigration. With these new voters came the implementation of political machines, groups that would act as a kind of election mafia, organising votes (and “votes”) for candidates that would be most beneficial to the machine – mostly for the leaders, but also to the rank-and-file factory workers and street sweepers and the like.

While ballot stuffing and voting multiple times was happening in urban areas, the post-Civil War South was seeing the opposite take place, as voting was made almost impossible for many African Americans in particular through things like moving polling stations to unknown locations, or ‘running out’ of ballots in areas where they lived in large numbers. Later on, this was formalised with literacy tests and poll taxes, as many were illiterate and poor.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended many of these practices, but rigging by political machines was harder to stop. While New York’s Tammany Hall was brought down in the 1940s, the existence of other machines was still an open secret long into the modern era. The most infamous of these was Mayor Daley’s machine in Chicago, which almost certainly helped John F. Kennedy win the 1960 presidential election from Richard Nixon, alongside Lyndon Johnson’s Texas machine.

Don Rose, a Democratic Party operative who worked under Daley, explained in a 2016 interview the kinds of things they would do to rig elections for Democrats. They would provide illegal assistance, with election judges pulling the voting levers on old mechanical voting machines for able-bodied voters, and all those votes would end up with the Democratic Party. They would tamper with machines, having votes registered for the Democrats before election day even began. They would manipulate those same machines to prevent Republicans from being voted for in particular races on otherwise straight Democratic tickets. They would buy votes, they would threaten to have voters thrown out of public housing, they would get them to impersonate other people on the electoral roll, they would have judges call in wrong voting tallies to the electoral board.

It was a smorgasbord of fraud, and it was happening within living memory. In 2008 and 2012, the Republicans would occasionally accuse Barack Obama, one-time Senator for Illinois, of “Chicago-style politics” – the implication, which everyone understood, being that he used and approved of this kind of election manipulation alongside the myriad other corrupt practices the Daley machine engaged in.

While this was obviously countered by Democrats, who argued that Obama had more legitimate means of ensuring his popularity among his base, they never countered by saying that electoral fraud didn’t exist in the United States. Indeed, Chicago remains suspected of being home to such practices by many today, alongside other urban strongholds like Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Minneapolis.

What’s more, it would’ve been particularly hypocritical if the Democrats had argued in 2008 that fraud didn’t exist in American elections, because in both 2000 and 2004, it was the Democratic Party, quite rightly, crying foul over electoral practices.

Mind-Boggling

The mystery of Florida in 2000 is well known, and indicative of one of the biggest issues with running a clean national election in the United States. Every state has their own rules for running elections – their own voter rolls, registration systems, and so on – and each county is tasked with running elections in their area, deciding their own procedures for counting, and for printing ballots, and where to put voting stations, and so on.

This means that every presidential election has thousands of different procedures according to 50 different sets of rules. In a close election, in a large state, with national officials needing to know who the winner is quite soon after election day so that the inauguration can be prepared, this makes life quite difficult. Because ballots are non-standard, and election officials are all partisan and have a vested interest in having recounts take place or not take place, there is a lot of room for different kinds of fraud to happen. Litigation can help, but often takes too long and is easily dismissed by courts for any number of reasons, without passing judgement on the veracity of the case.

This is what happened in 2000, and it was such an embarrassment for Florida that, as of today, they have changed the laws so that their elections are among the cleanest, quickest and most smoothly run in the country.

The same is true in Ohio, which gained the ire of many suspicious Democrats in 2004. A certain Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. even wrote a detailed article in Rolling Stone magazine which argued the case that the state (and the election as a whole) had been stolen from John Kerry by the Republicans through decisions of the Ohio Secretary of State, and other election officers in charge of voting machines, ballots, and other matters of election administration.

But while Florida and Ohio may have changed their procedures to prevent such situations from ever occurring again, the same cannot be said for other parts of the country. Indeed, many of the problems that were raised by Democrats in 2000 and 2004 cropped up again in 2020. But for all the problems that occurred that year – too numerous to mention or cover adequately, again due in no small part to the thousands of different county processes that would need to be understood and examined – the largest issue revolved around just one issue: mail-in ballots.

Other countries have postal voting, but in most places specific reasons need to be given by the voter as to why they cannot vote in person. Australia is a world leader in ensuring the security of mail-in ballots.

The United States is not a world leader on this matter, and in 2020 this was on full display. Some states chose to send a ballot (not a form to request a mail-in ballot, but an actual ballot) to the address of every voter registered on their voter files, resulting in some houses receiving literal piles of ballots, none of which were for the current resident of that house.

The only security measure used in many of these states was signature matching, which is notoriously unreliable when used on its own. One Nevada journalist did a test of the system, and of the nine ballots sent that he had signed for (technically legally), only one was rejected, despite none of them being his own ballot.

This leaves the door wide open to be used for fraud. In Michigan, for example, over 7 million ballots were sent out, but only half of those were returned. That’s a lot of a ballots just lying around, potentially able to be used nefariously with no-one any the wiser.

To compound the madness, states like Nevada and Pennsylvania allowed mail-ins to be returned after election day, without a postmark. Pennsylvania also processed mail-in ballots after election day ballots.

Given that Team Trump was encouraging his voters only to vote on election day, you can see where this may cause problems. If you’re a Democratic poll watcher in Philadelphia, you’re going to know by the early hours of the morning how many votes the Republicans have left, and you have days to make up ballots that aren’t going to be properly checked by other Democrats, using the millions of remaining ballots available.

Pennsylvania was especially bad for its never-ending trickle of votes coming in from Philadelphia and surrounds in the days after the election, and two years after the election, a former US Congressman from Philly was found guilty of leading an electoral fraud operation in elections prior to 2020. It is not difficult to imagine the same things happening in other places around that same city.

The fraudulent use of mail-ins didn’t necessarily require many people to be aware of what was going on, either. Polling from Rasmussen found that 11% of voters “say a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance has admitted to them that they filled out a ballot on behalf of another person in 2020,” 10% “have a relative or acquaintance who has admitted that they cast a mail-in ballot in 2020 in a state other than their state of permanent residence” and 8% “say that a friend, family member, or organization, such as a political party, offer to pay or reward them for voting in the 2020 election.”

The actual numbers don’t need to be that high to have changed the election. It only took a handful of counties to flip the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and all of them bar Michigan were extremely close contests when the final results were confirmed. Given that the problems with electoral malfeasance really only emerged in urban areas where Democratic Party voters are most likely to live, and that Democratic voters were much more likely to use mail-in ballots, simply using Occam’s Razor is enough to draw a conclusion of foul play.

Massive Support

In the lead-up to 2024, this led many Trump supporters to fear that it was going to happen again. But while some states that caused problems last time, like Pennsylvania, did not make anywhere near as many changes as they should have, there were nevertheless a few crucial differences in most states, including in the key swing states. Not all implemented all these reforms, but many implemented the majority. For one thing, mail-in ballots were not sent out en masse. Secondly, mail-ins were counted first, rather than election day votes. Thirdly, postmarks were generally required.

Fourthly, the Republicans made better use of early voting to draw in low-propensity voters that otherwise wouldn’t vote, and to make it more difficult (because early voting statistics are collected) to allow a narrative to emerge about Democrats swamping early voting. In fact, four of the seven swing states showed that more Republicans had voted early than Democrats, which means that the counting of the votes had to closely reflect that known truth.

Fifthly, Republican poll watchers and lawyers – and isn’t it a sad reflection on America’s electoral system that the latter are even necessary, let alone numbering in the thousands – were far more prepared than in 2020. They have just this week fought against the Bucks County electoral board in Philadelphia, where Democratic board members voted to – in their own words – break the law and continue counting votes that the state Supreme Court had already deemed illegal.

But above all, the most important difference in 2024 was that voters came out in vast numbers that really did make the election too big to rig, just as Team Trump had been pushing. The margins in some of the swing states seem much too marginal compared to Florida and Ohio, which are relevant not just because of their excellent voting systems, but also because they have been the two swing states that decide the election for so many years. They reflect the US in ways that many other states don’t, so it looks a little unusual to have Trump win them both by double digits, yet still only win certain swing states by one or two points.

But then, it was unusual that he won them both in 2020 but lost the election, just as he won 19 of the top 20 bellwether counties that year. Unsurprisingly, he won them all again this time around. But this time, unlike the two prior elections, he brought out a voting coalition that could not be argued against. Men and women, rich and poor, multi-ethnic, multi-party, his support was simply too large to overcome without having near-infinite mail-ins left in the tank. Whether the margins in the swing states are legitimately that close or not, it doesn’t change the result: Trump won.

With the scale of this coalition, the attempt in Pennsylvania to do to the Republican winner in the Senate race, Dave McCormack, what has been done to other Republican Senate candidates in Arizona and Wisconsin just doesn’t seem legitimate to anyone, not even to The Washington Post. Quite rightly, the state Supreme Court has ended the continuing count, and even the state governor, Josh Shapiro, weighed in to say he expected county officials to follow the law.

But the most important part of that voting coalition, as far as voter fraud goes, is that it puts paid to claims that trying to clean up American elections is an attempt at voter suppression. This claim has ground to stake its claim if poor, ethnic minority voters all vote for the Democrats while the wealthy whites vote Republican. But when the former shift to the Republicans, as they did for Donald Trump, while the latter vote for the Democrats, suddenly the claim is on much more shaky territory, and revealed for what it often is: a myth designed to circumvent attempts to bring American elections up to the standard of their western counterparts.

There may never be a better time to implement nationwide voting reforms that allow American elections to finally overcome two centuries of gamesmanship and manipulation, to instead become a commonly agreed-upon process that is truly free and truly fair.

Let us hope and pray they can get it done.

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Image courtesy of Adobe.