Who Stole the Election?
Separating truth from imagination
As most Idahoans went to bed on the night of November 3, 2020, President Donald Trump was cruising to reelection. He had huge leads in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Conservative Republicans across the country breathed a sigh of relief. After a year full of social upheaval and unrest, an unprecedented worldwide lockdown, and one in which the president hosted massive rallies while the challenger hid in his basement, everything was going to be okay.
By the time the sun rose on Wednesday, November 4, everything had changed. Suddenly, Joe Biden was in the lead, and his final victory was all but certain.
What happened? How could we have possibly lost? Who stole the election?
A lot of things happened in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Lawsuits were filed against counties and states that had changed their voting laws or switch to mail-in ballots. We saw videos of election workers seemingly recounting ballots multiple times. Graphs were made showing how the vote count for Biden apparently spiked in the middle of the night. Allegations were made of secret servers and hacked voting machines switching votes from Biden to Trump.
One by one, federal courts struck down the lawsuits. The Supreme Court wanted nothing to do with the battle. I said at the time that the media was doing their best to present the election as over, a fait accompli, convincing judges and elected officials alike that they must not overturn what had already been portrayed as the clear outcome.
Then the January 6th protests happened, taking the wind out of any remaining effort to contest the election. However, theories continued to grow on the right. Trump attorney Sydney Powell threatened to release a “kraken,” local officials such as Representative Wendy Rogers of Arizona pushed for recounts and audits of the vote in their states, and pillow salesman Mike Lindell put together a team that promised to expose how foreign agents hacked into Dominion voting machines to steal the election.
Mr. Lindell went further than anyone else with his claims. He hosted a “Cyber Symposium” last August, promising that the evidence he presented there would induce the Supreme Court to vote “9-0” to reinstate President Trump. But when symposium came, his evidence was lacking. He had promised to share the actual packet capture files documenting the alleged hacking, but failed to produce them when the time came. He did present a matrix of numbers showing how the vote count was allegedly altered in every single state, every single county in America.
Mr. Lindell published his numbers for the alleged vote shifting in the state of Idaho, all the way down to the county level. Lindell's team said that the vote shift occurred in every single county, with numbers ranging from 4.35% in tiny Clark County to 11.89% in liberal Blaine County. Overall, his numbers showed that 6% of Idaho votes in the presidential election were shifted from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
Where did Lindell get these numbers? I have no idea. The fact that at least seven of Idaho’s forty-four counties are so small that they have no election machines and count every vote by hand should call them into question. However, many conservatives were motivated by this apparent fraud to act, contacting elections officials throughout the state and demanding audits and recounts.
Secretary of State Lawrence Denney ordered a hand recount in Butte and Camas counties. Whereas Mr. Lindell had accused these two counties of changing 170 votes, the hand recount found only ten errors.
While I believe that Lindell’s heart is in the right place, I suggest that he has been misled by opportunists who took advantage of a wealthy patriot who wanted to find evidence of vote tampering. His “tech guys” told him what he wanted to hear, and he ran with it. The result of his endeavor, rather than helping fix the problems with our election systems, has been instead to tar anyone pursuing election reform as a conspiracy theorist.
I believe that the allegations made by Mike Lindell, Sydney Powell, Ali Alexander, Patrick Byrne, and many others who gained notoriety in the aftermath of the election are red herrings, taking our attention away from what really happened and the concrete steps we must take to secure our elections.
Last fall, author and journalist Mollie Hemingway published a book called Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. You will not find anything in this book about secret NSA servers or foreign hackers changing votes in Dominion voting machines. Instead, you will read a well-researched investigation into exactly what went on throughout the fateful year of 2020.
In the prologue, Mrs. Hemingway explains how the stage was set for the greatest theft of a presidency in American history:
The powers that be did whatever it took to prevent Trump from winning his re-election bid in 2020. They admitted as much in a victory lap masquerading as a news article in Time magazine that referred to the individuals and institutions behind the efforts to oust Trump as a “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.”
The structure of the steal was spread out over months, even years. Mrs. Hemingway goes into great detail about how Democratic lawyers pushed states to alter their voting laws, using the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse. Election Day, which is mandated by the US Constitution, became Election Month. Mail-in ballots, which are banned in many other countries and had been decried by the New York Times of all things just fifteen years ago, were established throughout the country. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg distributed $400 million throughout the country to take control of local election systems.
How did Biden win, despite such massive public support for Trump? Remember that elections are not so much about persuasion as they are about turnout. The side that wins is the side that motivates more of their voters to go to the polls and cast a ballot. For you and I, that seems obvious. If you are reading this newsletter, then chances are you are already very politically involved. You care enough about your community and your country to go to the polls and cast your vote.
But most Americans are not like this. Most Americans just want to go about their lives. They try to ignore politics most of the time, perhaps turning on the news now and then to see what is happening in the country. And what was the news telling people in 2020? That President Trump had bungled the pandemic response. That he was extreme and dangerous. That Joe Biden would bring America back to normalcy. You and I know that was absurd, but for the average American who mostly ignored politics, it sounded like a good deal.
The second half of the equation was mail-in ballots. Before, if you wanted to take part in the election you had to care enough to take the time to register to vote, then go to your polling place and cast your ballot. In 2020, low-information voters simply had a ballot dropped in their mailbox. Democratic activists, who usually had to persuade such people to make plans to go vote, now only had to show them the ballot that came in the mail and tell them to fill it out. They might even offer to deposit it at a drop box for them.
How did Biden win? Because millions of people who never before cared enough to pay attention to politics, much less actually vote, had ballots drop from the sky. These mail-in ballots had no protection against fraud, no chain of custody. There was almost no way to know if the person whose name was on the ballot actually cast that vote. Activists harvested thousands of ballots from crowded cities, drop boxes were not monitored, and there was no telling how many hands touched ballots that were sent through the mail.
One of the few methods that was in place to maintain ballot security was signature verification, where the signature on a ballot was matched with the same signature on a voter registration card. Democratic lawyers and Zuckerberg-funded activists pushed to significantly reduce or even remove signature verification in many counties throughout America.
The Zuckerberg connection might be the most damning thing in Mrs. Hemingway’s book. Throughout the year 2020, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $400 million to nonprofit groups that aimed to change the way elections were handled at the local level. Chief among these groups was the Center for Tech and Civic Life. Prior to 2020, the CTCL was a little-known organization with a tiny budget, but Mr. Zuckerberg funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into it, turning it into a major player in the election system. The CTCL thereafter distributed that cash to state and local election offices in the form of grants. Those grants had strings attached, however: anyone taking CTCL money had to abide by CTCL terms, which included having CTCL employees actively involved in running state and local election offices.
Mrs. Hemingway digs into how the CTCL used its power over these offices to nudge the election. For example, they gave tons of money to heavily Democratic districts, but just a few pennies to heavily Republican ones. This means that deep blue areas were outfitted with many more drop boxes and get-out-the-vote campaigns, which naturally increased turnout for the Democrats. Also, the CTCL shared their inside knowledge of voter lists with Democratic activist groups, allowing them to use that data for targeted campaigns. On Election Night, CTCL employees were often involved with the actual vote counting process.
Some Republican lawmakers are working to stop private groups from exerting this much control of our elections. Mrs. Hemingway writes:
Democrats were willing to take extreme measures to keep the privatized funding that enabled their political activists to embed in the election system. After the Wisconsin legislature passed a bill banning private funding of election operations by a 60-36 margin in the state assembly and by an 18-14 margin in the state senate, Governor Tony Evans voted the ban. Without tech oligarchs’ buying the administration of the state’s elections, Democrats stand to lose.
This has a local connection, as records show that Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane accepted nearly half a million dollars of Zuck Bucks from the CTCL in October of 2020. Mr. McGrane is currently running for Idaho Secretary of State. More on this in a future newsletter.
Now that we know how the left stole the election, what can we do?
First, we must look ahead, not behind. 2020 is done. While audits and recounts are valuable for learning how to better protect our future elections, we cannot redo the last one. There is no possibility that any court or legislature will do anything that results in that election being somehow undone and President Trump returned to office.
Here are some concrete things we can and must do:
We must protect the sanctity and security of the vote. It should not be an easy or trivial thing to cast a ballot in an election.
We have to ban mail-in voting, except in the case of active duty military. Voting must occur at a polling place, with designated poll watchers of all interested parties, and voters must show a government ID before casting a ballot.
Vote harvesting must be banned. The chain of custody of a ballot must go from the voter to a locked box at the polling place, not secretly handled by activists with an incentive.
We should also ban early voting. The US Constitution establishes a single day for elections; not a week, not a month.
We must also ban private organizations such as Mr. Zuckerberg’s foundation or groups like the CTCL from having anything to do with our elections.
There are a lot of good conservative politicians and activists working on this, but these efforts are not as sensational as stories of secret servers and hacked voting machines. We must maintain focus on what is real and what is possible, not get distracted by sensationalism.
Contact your representatives and share some of these solid proposals for election reform. That is how we win; that is how we protect our republic.