How to Steal an Election
In America, the chickens have come home to roost
In 1948, Rep. Lyndon Baines Johnson (D-Tex.) won the Democratic Senate primary race in Texas, guaranteeing his victory in the general election because the Republican Party had no serious voter base in Texas during Jim Crow. LBJ’s victory entailed counting the votes of people long deceased, and he ended up winning the primary run-off by 87 votes. “Progressives” today are surely relieved that someone less overtly “Dixiecrat” than LBJ’s opponent, Coke Stevenson, won back then. The end justified the means.
LBJ would reach the Oval Office in another 15 years. Within two more, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops would be fighting in Vietnam, half a million before the end of his presidency. About 58,000 Americans and probably over a million Vietnamese would die during active U.S. military operations and occupation there.
Over a half-century later, the presidential race between Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore was so close in Florida that Bush’s campaign sued the state to force several Florida counties to count the ballots of overseas U.S. military personnel (many serving in Yugoslavia’s recently NATO-occupied province of Kosovo). After some 1,500 of these ballots were rejected, the “Bushies” hyped patriotism and solidarity with America’s men and women in uniform, making sure their votes “counted.”
The Florida counties had the law on their side. The absentee ballots hadn’t arrived by the required deadline, and many of the ballot envelopes either lacked a postmark or bore signatures that didn’t match those on the ballot request forms. But after Gore’s hawkish running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman, weighed in that late ballots should be counted out of respect for the military, the state authorities (headed by Bush’s brother Jeb) counted them, putting Bush over the top by a tiny margin of 537 (0.009%), giving him the win nationwide. Soon America would be mired in unending war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Did all these ballots represent an actual voter consciously choosing one or another candidate? Or did many reflect fraud? Maybe ballots were cast for servicemen who, to this day, never knew they voted and never checked. In a system where ballots are “secret,” it’s very difficult to tell, especially in an electoral media climate always characterized by a need to “hurry up” and declare an official winner.
Two years later, ostensibly to remedy the chaos of 2000, some Florida districts had introduced “touchscreen” voting machines, supplied by a subsidiary of Diebold, Inc. All voter data was stored on some sort of server, and the workers in the polling places each had a laptop in front of them to look up the voter’s name on the roll. No paper trail at all.
The voter then proceeded to the machine, went through the touchscreen motions, and left. I watched “cartridges” resembling big 8-track tapes unplugged from voting machines as a poll worker told me “virtual ballots” were going to the precinct election commission. It was all so “reassuring,” so “high-tech.” Thus, Jeb Bush became the first incumbent GOP governor in Florida history to win reelection. Diebold’s criminal prosecution for corruption would occur long after he left the Tallahassee statehouse.
Touchscreen voting machines are alive and well in 2024. In Tennessee, election officials are expressing concern over voter complaints that, when casting their vote by touching the screen, they’ve watched their vote suddenly “jump” to another candidate. Oh, well. The Volunteer State will surely figure it all out.
Election Denialism
The “election denier” label usually gets applied to anyone questioning the integrity of the 2020 presidential poll. But some of us are “denialists” in a more general sense. Made passively cynical by experience, we’ve lost much faith in the truth or justice of the election system, always suspecting a “scheme” afoot to secure victory — by hook or by crook.
Undeniably, 2020 proved exceptional, and not just in scale and circumstances. “Vote by mail” had long been an option in most jurisdictions and was on the rise. But in 2020, 46% of all votes were cast absentee. Furthermore, at least 40 million people — according to mainstream reporting — received absentee ballots automatically, without even asking for them. In the past, you had to make a special request ahead of time to vote absentee. In 2020, successful dissemination of tens of millions of unsolicited ballots heralded the advent of a new system, if you could call it that.
The authorities could have directed all voters to follow established procedures in requesting absentee ballots, and to cast them according to publicly available instructions. After all, the government declared the pandemic early in the year, plenty of time for voters to order ballots during the COVID-19 “emergency.” Instead, election authorities facilitated chaos at best, at worst fraud. I know someone who received two mail-in ballots. Some didn’t receive a ballot yet resided in the same state as people who did.
2020 also saw increased use of “same-day voter registration,” in practice meaning registration concurrent with voting itself. This effectively did away with provisional balloting, whereby someone whose status can’t be immediately verified uses a special ballot to vote, and their vote’s validity is established later.
In 2020, the authorities could send a mail-in ballot to any voting-age citizen, whether unregistered or trying to vote in a precinct where they didn’t legally reside. This time, the mail-in ballot could be examined for validity once it was returned. We just had to trust that it was all done properly. I just read that Pennsylvanians have reintroduced the provisional ballot for 2024. Didn’t they have confidence in the mail-in balloting system?
Ballot Insecurity
In November 2020, I was overseas. I had to order a ballot by email, wait a month to get it, print it out, fill it in, and put it into a little unlocked wooden box on a wall outside the U.S. embassy. Anyone could have opened the old and creaky box, and since the instructions were only to “fold” the envelope along the dotted lines, around the ballot, anyone could have opened it, thrown my ballot away, and replaced it with one filled out more to their liking. The instructions were very clear: do not seal the envelope. The ballot itself had no identifying information, only the envelope, so who would have known but the crook?
The “security” measure for my manifestly insecure ballot was the signature of a “witness” on the folded envelope. I signed, then my American friend co-signed. But I had to print my name at the top as well, and he only had to sign (not print) his name. His signature turned out to be little more than a wavy line, unintelligible as any name. While I thanked him, it quickly occurred to me that I could easily have produced a witness signature myself.
My ballot probably wasn’t counted anyway. Overseas ballots aren’t meant to be counted unless the result at home is very close, as in Bush vs. Gore in 2000, and as we know, Joe Biden won by a landslide seven million votes in 2020 with a 6-7% increase in voter turnout over 2016. But I went through the trouble anyway, just for fun.
A recent headline from mainstream media that popped up in an online search was even more fun. An NBC News piece from October 2020 reads: “If you vote by mail in this election, your signature may be checked.” In other words, it might not be checked too. Forget about the signature of the “witness.” Even the voter’s might not be verified.
When you open the article, however, all fears are laid to rest.
The headline now reads: “80 million Americans may vote by mail in this election. Here’s how most states verify their identities.” The subheading: “President Trump has voiced his concerns – unsupported by evidence – that signature verification practices create opportunities for fraud.” Trump dared suggest that Americans involved in elections might take advantage of mail-in ballots to engage in skullduggery. Have you no decency, sir?
The reassuring paragraph comes early:
In the process of “signature verification,” election officials compare a voter’s signature on a ballot’s security envelope with a past signature on file, often from the state department of motor vehicles or a voter registration form. However, the practice varies state by state and in some cases between counties.
In 2020 we had a system combining same-day voter registration with ballots sent by mail or placed in “drop boxes” in unsealed envelopes. What signature was “on file” for an unregistered voter? We’re supposed to believe that provincial election commissions received tens of thousands of mail-in ballots, and these sweaty and nervous commissioners — under pressure to produce a winner and a loser as soon as possible — all took the time to verify every signature and witness’s signature? Pull the other one.
‘Harnessing’ the Vote
On a recent “Gutfeld!” show, a co-host asked President Donald Trump how he could “harness” the votes of Evangelical Christians in November. His questioner noted “ninety million Evangelicals in this country, forty million of whom don’t vote, and fifty million of whom aren’t even registered to vote.” Trump responded cheerfully that Evangelicals were “great people” who supported him “ninety-five percent,” but said they “don’t vote.” Trump never actually answered the question, maybe believing that griping affably on a popular TV show would suffice to galvanize the people he was complaining about.
But the question remains: How do you “harness” the votes of non-voting Americans?
“Stealing” an election means winning through subversion of the bedrock principle of “one person, one vote.” We really need to refine that to “one conscious eligible voter, one conscious eligible vote,” because if I were figuring out how to steal an election using mail-in ballots, I wouldn’t care about people who actually vote. Instead, I’d want to know who’d been eligible to vote for a while but never voted and showed no intention of voting. People who don’t vote or pay attention to elections won’t care if a ballot gets cast in their name.
In fact, they’ll never even find out.
Voting history isn’t difficult to obtain. Actual voting choices are nominally secret, but the number of times a person has voted isn’t particularly confidential. Find out where the non-voters reside for voting purposes, and you can start shaping a strategy for the steal.
If I were going to be retained by a client to steal the presidential election in 2024, and I had to choose between the Republicans and the Democrats, I’d want my client to be the Democratic Party. Apart from anything, people who vote Republican are more likely to conceive of voting in the “traditional” way, and “traditionalists” imagine a civic duty like voting by picturing a booth in a polling station, where they show up on Election Day, fill out a piece of paper with no one watching, and put it in a box or machine. That doesn’t help me craft my scheme. I’d want state governments to collude with me in a mail-in ballot operation that didn’t involve voting booths. People stuck in the past pose a disadvantage.
There’s another problem with the Republicans as a client. With them, I’d be going after the votes of the Evangelicals that Trump talked about on Fox News, trying to get mail-in ballot packages made up in their names and cast for the three-time GOP nominee. A Republican-dominated state government apparatus might help me out, but the thing is, the Evangelicals already live in “red” states, and while the popular vote doesn’t matter nationally, on a state-by-state basis, it’s everything. Trump already has a lock on the “red” states through the popular vote in each. They’ll go his way in the Electoral College anyway.
So, I want my client to be the Democrats. I’ve already got the three biggest “blue” states — California, New York and Illinois — locked up. These have the three biggest metropolitan areas in the country, with a combined population of about 48 million. Entrenched Democratic Party machines control all of them. Millions of residents of these gigantic sprawls don’t vote and don’t care — but I know where they all live.
True, the populations of New York, L.A. and Chicago have each shrunk alarmingly since 2020, as people flee crime and urban blight. But people escaping to safer, more orderly locales aren’t the kind of voters I could rely on anyway. I’m after residents left behind in the big dead-zone dumps, the ones worrying about where to get the next meal, drink, or bag of dope. If you told them after an election that they’d voted for Sparky the Clown, it wouldn’t mean a thing to them. Most have no idea who their elected representatives are.
If I can establish places of residence for these citizens and crank out ballot packages for them, I can put millions of extra votes in my swag bag. California, New York and Illinois still account for over 100 Electoral College votes, over 37% of the 270 needed for the steal. Since all my votes will come from urban areas, I need to replicate the strategy in as many areas outside America’s vast “red zone” as possible.
What would really help, however, is clinching at least one state that leans heavily “red” and accounts for a ton of electoral votes. That would deliver a landslide, impress my client, and might even nab me a plush administration post. There are two such states — Florida and Texas — which together account for 70 total votes. I haven’t given up on them at all. A couple of years ago I visited friends in Bradenton, Florida, a quiet and clean Gulf Coast community of fewer than 60,000. My hosts often visited St. Petersburg, about half an hour north, but neverTampa, a distressed den of grunge another half hour away. Miami offers prospects too. In 2002, I drove past legions of eligible voters under downtown bridges at night there, crack pipes glowing firefly-like in the dark.
The same year, I had the chance to stay a couple of nights in downtown Dallas, Texas, with adjacent Fort Worth forming a metro area of over eight million. Only five blocks from Dealey Plaza, the bleak and desolate district felt very insecure, even in daylight. But local eligible voters were still congregating on street corners, and there must be even more of them in Houston. Together, the metro areas of Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Miami and Tampa are home to about 19 million citizens old enough to vote.
But here’s the kicker. Since I can count on the Evangelicals in the respective states to ignore the election, why not create and control ballot packages for them in Florida and Texas too? None of them will ever check that they voted, and with 2020-style ballot insecurity, my teams can fill out the ballots. If I need witness signatures, any illegible scribble like my overseas friend’s will do. This way my strategy has a chance of raking in possibly hundreds of thousands — hell, millions— of votes in the big GOP strongholds. Just one of these two states going “blue” could deliver victory to my client’s candidate.
The Rule of Law
In creating and distributing my mail-in ballot packages, I’d want to use state “proxy voting” laws to their full potential to serve my client’s interests. Proxy voting — a euphemism for “ballot harvesting” — is like proxy voting by corporate shareholders, where an “authorized person” votes on someone else’s behalf. “Block voting” in labor unions, where the leadership votes on behalf of all its lowly members, is similar.
Ballot harvesting is legal in most states, and since the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v FEC (2010) that a “person” doesn’t necessarily mean an actual living human being, “legal persons” can harvest my ballots. I also need nice-sounding democracy-promotion NGOs – “organizations” and “associations” – to cast ballots for all those who will never receive, see, or fill out a ballot, but will nevertheless vote for my client’s candidate. “Progress the Vote” is a name I thought up myself.
I know, I know. I can’t cast absentee ballots exclusively for the votes I want to use for the steal. If I don’t want the scheme to attract too much suspicion, some have to be cast for the opposing candidate too. In Pennsylvania in 2020, under prevailing law, voters had to actually request an absentee ballot. But they had the option of requesting them online and receiving them by email. So, to harvest ballots in Biden’s birth state, lots of fake email addresses would have had to be set up to create a record of voters ordering and receiving them. They shouldn’t have had to print them out, fill them in and send them back. “Progress the Vote” could have saved them the trouble — in the name of democracy.
It already looked dodgy in the Keystone State in 2020, where some precincts tallied ballots over 90% in favor of Biden. So even though Trump won the in-person vote on Election Day by over 30%, Biden still won the mail-in vote by over 50%, giving my client’s candidate a 1.2% victory margin statewide. Legacy media proclaimed it all totally above board, of course, but I’ll need to make sure at least some ballots are mailed back for Republicans, just not nearly as many as for my hordes of walking dead.
I know what you’re thinking: this operation would require such vast collaboration, I could never pull it off. Too many people would have to risk getting caught. Wrong. I can assemble huge teams with the budget the DNC will give me, and no political organization has as much power and money as the Democratic Party. Client confidentiality will be the order of the day, so I can swear my team to secrecy. You might say I can’t legally enforce a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) in furtherance of a crime, but where’s the crime? It’s all “legal.” It’s just the way America’s “democratic process” has evolved.
Remember, 11 states require no photo ID to vote, and another 15 states (plus DC) require no ID at all, meaning you can’t legally demand one from a voter in a polling station. “Progress the Vote” can mobilize all sorts of people in these places to “vote early, vote often,” and with state ballot harvesting laws, universal mail-in voting, and “progressive” democracy-promotion NGOs on my side, only sore losers could complain.
Plus, if I can dump millions of mail-in ballots on election commissions across America, I can overload the system. DNC-friendly legacy media will trumpet any delay in calling a result as “voter suppression,” and the longer it goes on after Election Day, the louder the media outrage will grow. States will be “shamed” into a rushed decision, as election commentators play on the public’s aversion to the unfolding can of worms.
This way, I’ll already have created the opacity needed to generate hopeless confusion among the enemy and install the fabulously unpopular Kamala Harris in the Oval Office over the heads of idealistic, law-abiding Americans. The Republicans are always behind the 8-ball anyway. DNC-friendly media say they even believe the Earth is flat.
Stealing Elections
In my case, a seminal loss of faith in electoral fairness came about twenty years ago, after trotting around Europe’s former “Socialist Bloc” for five years as an accredited election monitor. One of the enduring memories from my time as a democracy and human rights worker were stories, in every instance, of voters who said they had shown up to their assigned polling station to vote on election day, only to be told they’d already voted. If they asked for whom, the election authorities politely replied that they had no idea.
Such reports have been muted in America, but they do crop up, especially when absentee voting predominates. Though rare, a few microbes will always get through among those who have never voted but suddenly feel like showing up in person at a polling station.
America’s evaluation of “freedom and fairness” in polls in the former Socialist Bloc rested on our corporatist government’s stake in the outcome. We paid lip service to “democracy,” as America defined it, but when things didn’t go “our way” — because indigenous voters didn’t like “our guys” after intense (and expensive) election engineering and “civil society” promotion — our leaders made their indignation loudly known around the world.
Sometimes we flew in Sen. John McCain and other Western officials to appear on expensive rock concert stages in the capitals, yelling into microphones about freedom and democracy. A few thousand urbanites in places like Georgia and Ukraine cheered on tawdry televised “color revolutions” and US-backed regime change.
Memories of these hype-heavy upheavals with their brightly colored paraphernalia have faded with time. Johnny McCain is dead, Georgia is experiencing civil unrest again, and Ukraine is languishing in the most costly and destructive war the European continent has seen since World War Two. Did America contribute to this tragedy by interfering with elections in foreign countries we formally viewed as sovereign nation-states?
Back in America, official voices questioning electoral freedom and fairness have grown bolder since well before Election 2020, when the official loser, Donald Trump, alleged the poll was rigged. Four years earlier, Democrats had questioned Election 2016, then found legacy media conveniently forgetting their “election denialism” once the media declared Biden to be Trump’s legal successor. The establishment branded Republican charges of widespread irregularity “treasonous,” and the toxic polarization spiraled into January 6th.
Over the last 30-plus years, Washington’s hate for political leaders and parties in other countries has manifested itself in U.S. election tampering and collusion to keep popular forces out of power. That hate is now “blowing back” from overseas, as the globalist chickens come home to roost. The “little people” don’t get it.
But they don’t matter anyway. I don’t have time to worry about any of that “democracy and the rule of law” hoopla. “One person, one vote” is receding into a forgotten pipe dream now, and as a dutiful consultant, I’m concerned with serving my client. With legacy media and corporate polling agencies already on my side, history can write me in as a winner.
The world is mine.
---------------------- How To Stop Vote Stealing -----------------------------------------------------
With paper ballots, it would be tedious to go to an office and plow through the paperwork to see how your vote was actually handled. And, you couldn't cross-check the tallies of other people's votes unless you manually recounted each one. In the modern computer era, it is a lot easier to use computers to check up on institutional computers. Set up properly, if they tried to change even one vote it could be caught.
How to beat the thieves so they can't steal any more votes:
1- Enter polling place and go to ballot dispensing computer, where you pick your secret ballot number off the screen.
2- After all of 5 seconds, out comes your ballot printed with your secret number that you picked.
3- When your ballot goes into the voting machine to be counted, you get your anonymous xerox copy on secure paper in another 5 seconds.
4- Now you can go to any computer anywhere, type in the number of your polling place, and scroll to find your ballot number, as tabulated, without snoops knowing which ballot results you are examining.
5- If your vote hasn't been counted correctly, the Deep State guys who stole it are in trouble, answerable to you. You can show your xerox copy to police, prosecutors, journalists, or friends (and see theirs if they want you to see whether their vote was stolen or not).
6- Your ballot number is secret unless you are the one revealing it, not a problem if revealed since a third of all ballots are already cast absentee and those ballots can be shown to any third party before the ballot is cast. If we fear bribery and blackmail by third parties we have to get rid of absentee voting.
7- We already vote by anonymous computer methods every time we vote for numbers at the lottery, and we know the technology is by now easy and cheap to do and verify. Every lottery ticket has scads of verification numbers and letters on it to control for counterfeiting. Ditto can be done cheaply for elections, and you the voter only put in 10 seconds to have proof that keeps aspiring vote stealers honest or else in jail. This isn't difficult or expensive to do, as the lottery systems prove abundantly all over the United States.
8- If you have rudimentary computer skills you can tell the computer to totalize the results of the precinct or county or whole state, and you can see for yourself who really won the election. Which is why crooks don't like this proposal and try to invent excuses to cover it up and not do it.