Was the fraud just at the fringes? Or was there fraud on the rampant scale former Illinois governor and convicted corruption connoisseur Rod Blagojevich suggested on Friday?
“My fellow Americans, the people of this nation have spoken. They have delivered us a clear victory. A convincing victory,” Joe Biden proclaimed late Saturday night after news outlets declared him the winner of the 2020 election. Biden’s speech came while several battleground states remain mired in too-close-to-call tallying and litigation, and while recounts promise to delay the official outcome in the additional states Democrats claim as securing Biden 279 electoral votes.
If history is a guide, the certified winner will match the press’ preordained victor, but all Americans should nonetheless want the process to proceed because we know there was a fraud and we know there were illegal votes tallied (see below). The only question is how much and who was complicit.
Was the fraud just at the fringes? Or was there fraud on the scale former Illinois governor and corruption-connoisseur felon Rod Blagojevich suggested on Friday?
“If the question is are the Democrats stealing votes in Philadelphia, my answer is, ‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ It’s a time-honored tradition,” Blagojevich said. “Big Democrat-controlled cities like Chicago, my hometown, Philadelphia, to do precisely what they’re doing now I’ve never seen such a magnitude because this I think is an indication of just how widespread it is, how deep it is.”
“And I don’t think it’s just confined to Philadelphia. My instincts, again coming out of Chicago Democratic politics, my instincts tell me it’s going on in Atlanta, it’s going on in Detroit, it’s going on in Milwaukee, it’s going on in Las Vegas,” Blagojevich continued. “It’s like what Justice Powell said about pornography: ‘You can’t define it, but you know when you see it.’”
“And coming out of the Democratic Chicago political establishment, I know how they operate. They control polling places, they stop votes when their candidate’s behind, and then in the wee hours of the morning, in the dark of night, the stealing starts. And we’ve seen that in big numbers, unprecedented numbers in this election in Michigan and Philadelphia. It’s outrageous, and the fact that they’re doing it with impunity . . .”
Again, we know there was a fraud, for instance, with the dead rising from the grave to vote and Pennsylvania election officials tossing military votes for Donald Trump. The problem with fraud, though, is proving it, and that’s what Trump’s legal team is attempting to do with recounts and litigation throughout the country.
“There have been disturbing reports of fraud and procedural irregularities in key states, and on top of that, election officials in Democrat-controlled jurisdictions have put illegal roadblocks in the path of Republican election observers,” Michael Thielen, executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association, told The Federalist. Thielen added that while “election observers from both parties are authorized under state laws to view the voting and counting process to provide sunshine and ensure the rules are being followed, the Trump campaign has repeatedly had to go to court to allow Republican observers to see the processing of ballots.”
One of the main focal points for Republicans in Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes, which Trump won in 2016, but with the uncertified count for 2020 putting Biden ahead by about 20,000 votes currently. While much of the focus in Wisconsin is in the Milwaukee area and the capitol, Madison, another area of concern is Green Bay.
Green Bay, Wisconsin, rests in Brown County, where Biden reportedly accumulated a 10,000-plus surplus over Trump. Andrew Kloster, a long-time attorney volunteering with the Republicans, has been on the ground in the Green Bay area for nearly a week.
“It’s bad,” Kloster told The Federalist, detailing multiple voting irregularities. “We had two [George] Soros-connected guys handling ballot boxes and instructing poll workers,” Kloster noted until one of the activists was removed. “We had a chain of custody issues. We had workers curing Biden ballots,” the D.C.-based attorney noted.
While addressing voter irregularities there may be unlikely to change the outcome, as former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wrote last week on the need for a recount, both mistakes and fraud may be at issue. In one earlier election, about 7,500 votes “from the City of Brookfield were found to have never been submitted to the Waukesha County Clerk.”
And then there was the 2000 election that pitted George W. Bush against Al Gore. While that fight ended up playing out in Florida, Republicans had considered Wisconsin for a recount. “We had, on video, images of a Park Avenue socialites going to Milwaukee area homeless shelters and offering packs of cigarettes for people who voted early for Al Gore,” Walker detailed.
Yesterday, John Solomon’s new venture, Just the News, reported in more depth on the illegal “curing” of ballots in Wisconsin. “Curing” is when officials count a ballot that is legally disqualified or difficult to read.
“Wisconsin Statute 6.87(6d) stipulates that any ballot ‘may not be counted’ if it is missing the address of the voter’s witness,” and in August, the Wisconsin Elections Commission “issued a directive to voters that reaffirmed that statute: ‘If [the witness signature and address] is missing, your ballot will not be counted.’” But then, according to Just the News, “in mid-October, the Wisconsin Elections Commission issued a directive to the state’s county clerks appearing to give them the authority, in contravention of state law, to fix incomplete (or ‘spoiled’) ballots that are missing witness signatures.”
Trump is seeking a recount in Wisconsin and will likely push to have ballots that failed to comply with the requirements established by the legislative body tossed as illegal votes.
The illegal “curing” of ballots in Pennsylvania appears to have gone a step further, with the secretary of state instructing election officials in Democratic-run areas to “cure” votes in violation of state law, while not providing election officials in Republican areas the same directive.
Those Democratic counties then contacted voters to fix mistakes that would have rendered the ballots invalid, while voters in Republican areas lacked this same opportunity, a local Republican election official told The Federalist. The Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore held that using different standards within the same state violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, suggesting possible recourse in Pennsylvania, which is also facing a court challenge to the state’s extension of its voting deadline beyond Nov. 3.
These challenges may be unlikely to change the outcome in Pennsylvania, but they prove up the problem of changing the rules mid-course. And while the media (and some courts) may view curing ballots as protecting voters, absent a clear, pre-defined set of standards by the state legislature, the franchise (or disenfranchisement) of voters will rest in the hands of partisan officials.
Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan are also in the mix, with a recount in Georgia permitted if a margin of 0.5 percent or less separates the candidates. Michigan allows a recount either if winner and losers are separated by 2,000 total votes or less, or if there is a “good-faith belief that but fraud or mistake, the candidate would have had a reasonable chance of winning the election.”
Arizona, however, seems unlikely to qualify for a recount, as under state law, “an election has to be decided by 200 votes or less, or one-tenth of one percent of the votes cast, whichever is the smaller number,” and the margin between Trump and Biden is currently too large to merit a recount.
Notwithstanding these legal challenges and rights to recounts, calls are being made for Trump to concede. Americans are understandably wary of relitigating the election, especially after Democrats subjected the country to four years of resistance to his win in 2016.
But just as Trump exposed “Fake News” and “the Swamp” and began to peel back the shroud of the D.C.-establishment, such as the Biden and Kerry families enriching themselves by selling access, if these prove to be the waning of the Trump administration, the president’s last hurrah should be to spotlight the crumbling legitimacy of our voting system.
Of course, the usual suspects will chastise Trump if he continues to question the outcome of the election. And some of Trump’s more vocal supporters may well join in the calls for him to accept defeat, casting his comments challenging the election as unpatriotic or dangerous.
However, it is not unpatriotic or dangerous to question the integrity of an election; it is unpatriotic and dangerous to not protect the integrity of elections because your team won. Well, that, and faking a Russia conspiracy theory to oust a duly elected president, and then when those efforts failed, impeaching him on trumped-up “whistleblower” charges.
