REBECCA MANSOUR and JAMES P. PINKERTON
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Democratic political operative Rahm Emanuel famously said. The former Chicago mayor’s point was that a crisis gives political players the opportunity to bend, and maybe even break, the normal rules.
Today, the country is facing a Covid-19 crisis, as well as a crisis of rioting in the streets and a spiking crime rate, and now even a vacancy on the Supreme Court. But as far as Democrats are concerned, the real crisis is Donald Trump, and these other crises provide an opportunity to defeat him.
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Democratic political operative Rahm Emanuel famously said. The former Chicago mayor’s point was that a crisis gives political players the opportunity to bend, and maybe even break, the normal rules.
Today, the country is facing a Covid-19 crisis, as well as a crisis of rioting in the streets and a spiking crime rate, and now even a vacancy on the Supreme Court. But as far as Democrats are concerned, the real crisis is Donald Trump, and these other crises provide an opportunity to defeat him.
With less than 40 days until Election Day—and with early voting starting even sooner—Democrats and their media allies (or the “Democrat-Media Complex,” as Andrew Breitbart liked to call them) are not wasting these crises in their quest to win back the White House.
We can see a seven-step Democratic strategy emerge to win the election by unleashing chaos in our voting system, violence in our streets, and a legal fight that could lead all the way to highest court in the land, which is currently missing a member.
1. Never let a Covid crisis go to waste! Use the pandemic to push for a nation-wide vote-by-mail scheme.
By now we’re all familiar with the inequities, even idiocies, of the Covid-19 lockdown rules. In many states and cities, it’s forbidden to have normal assembly for social gatherings, businesses, church services, and even hospital visits.
On the other hand, it’s okay to have massive Black Lives Matter protests, Antifa riots, and anything else the left approves of, at least tacitly. Obviously, such unequal treatment is a formula for societal frustration, rage, and, yes, chaos.
And what a friend the Democrats have in crisis and chaos!
In fact, Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris has said that this sort of chaos is likely to continue—and should continue—through the election. “Everyone beware because they’re not going to stop,” Harris said about the (often violent) protests erupting in American cities. “They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day.”
But according to the Democrats, the only certainty in all of this chaos is that Americans—who are safe to take to the streets in mass protests and riots—are not safe to vote in person on November 3. We must vote by mail, they tell us.
Mail-in voting is “essential from a health reason because we want to keep people at home to vote without having them all collect on Election Day,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last month. “People should not have to choose between their health and their vote.”
If you’re still scratching your head wondering why it’s safe to riot but not to vote, veteran political consultant Dick Morris explained the Democrats’ game plan: “If they feel they’re legitimately losing the election, [they] are going to use the excuse of the Covid virus—nobody can come out and vote in person, they claim … and they’re going to deliberately game the system by sending out millions and millions of mail-in ballots for people that don’t exist or have already voted.”
“And the states will not verify the [mail-in ballot] signatures because they are under the control of Democrats,” Morris added.
2. Enlist all the messengers at your disposal (Hollywood, Corporate Media, Big Tech, Pro Sports) to push for vote-by-mail.
The Democrats are using every tool in their considerable arsenal to push the vote-by-mail messaging, including multi-million-dollar super PAC ad campaigns. Former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar has teamed up with failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to mandate a national vote-by-mail system, and a group called Stop Republicans has launched a digital blitz to push for the idea.
But the Democrats’ favorite tool is, of course, Hollywood and pop culture.
As early as April, about a month into the coronavirus shutdown, the Hollywood wing of the Democrat-Media Complex kicked into high gear to push vote-by-mail.
Actor Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, who were among the first big name figures to contract Covid-19, teamed up with former First Lady Michelle Obama and former Obama White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett in April for an ostensibly non-partisan virtual voter registration drive that encouraged states to loosen vote-by-mail requirements.
In August, a group of A-list celebrities hosted a virtual “United to Save the Vote” gala—which they claimed was “fiercely nonpartisan”—to raise money to “protect the 2020 election” by, in part, increasing trust in mail-in voting. The virtual roster included Jennifer Lawrence, Jamie Foxx, Dave Matthews, Ed Helms, Jennifer Lopez, Alicia Keys, Sia, Jake Johnson, Sarah Silverman, Kenan Thompson, Chelsea Handler, Gloria Estefan, Randall Park, Erich Bergen, Nick Kroll, Sophia Bush, Jonathan Scott, Kenny G., George Lopez, etc. You get the picture.
According to the event’s website, these zealously anti-Trump “fiercely nonpartisan” celebs gathered virtually to counter the efforts of “politicians who are undermining the security and validity of mail-in voting.”
Meanwhile, the Democrat-Media Complex is engaged in a bit of journalistic jujitsu churning out stories about how the Republicans are the ones who plan to steal the election. Here’s a headline from the Washington Post: “Republicans’ long-term vote heist matters more than Trump’s tantrums.” And here’s one from Rolling Stone: “The Plot Against America: The GOP’s Plan to Suppress the Vote and Sabotage the Election.” But it’s hard to top this headline from the Daily Beast: “This Is How Republicans Steal an Election, and Maybe Kill Some Dems in the Process.”
At the same time, the Democrat-Media Complex is also celebrating the new wokeness of pro sports, which is busy helping Democrats win in November. On September 7, Politico asked, “Could LeBron James Defeat Donald Trump?” As has been widely reported, the National Basketball Association has agreed to set up a “social justice coalition” to help get out the (Democrat) vote.
3. Get millions of questionable mail-in ballots into the system.
Here we might pause to note the distinction between the various kinds of voting by mail.
It is true that absentee voting by mail has been with us for many years. Even President Trump has voted by mail, and our active duty military regularly votes by mail. In fact, Republicans have been quite successful in the past with absentee voting. In Florida in 2016, for example, more Republicans voted by mail than Democrats, and Trump carried the state. There is even legitimate concern that any disparagement of mail-in voting could unintentionally hurt Republicans in November because their voters like voting by absentee ballots. Indeed, there are sincere and legitimate reasons for why absentee voting should be available during the pandemic.
However, there is a big difference between allowing absentee ballots as an option for people who are unable to make it to the polls and mandating that an entire election be done by mail-in voting.
And there is a really big difference between the long-standing practice of sending absentee ballots to voters who take the initiative of requesting them and the new Democratic proposal to mail out unsolicited ballots (or applications for ballots) to every registered voter regardless of whether those voters are still alive or eligible to vote in that jurisdiction. And, as we shall explain, this new effort to mail out ballots to every registered voter is coupled with the left’s years-long fight to prevent these same voter rolls from being updated to remove dead and ineligible people from the lists.
And to make matters extra complicated and chaotic, every state has a different standard for mail-in voting. Some states have more safeguards in place than others. For example, some states require that every mail-in ballot include a verifiable signature, additional witness or notary signatures, and even an enclosed copy of the voter’s photo ID. Some states have few, if any, such safeguards. Some states are loosening or experimenting with the rules for the first time due to the coronavirus pandemic.
And then there is the issue of sending all these ballots through the mail. Can the U.S. Postal Service process them all in a timely manner? Every state has a different deadline for when these ballots need to be postmarked. What happens if they don’t arrive in time? Can election officials process them all in a timely manner? Counting mail-in ballots is much more time-consuming. It can involve matching signatures, checking postmarks, flattening out ballots that were crumpled in the mail, etc. If the recent primaries in Wisconsin and New York are anything to go by, mail-in ballots will take weeks to process and that process will be fraught with problems and potential for fraud.
(To give you a flavor of the postal chaos to come, the chief clerk for Brooklyn’s Kings County Board of Elections testified in federal court last month that in 2018, the USPS delivered “several hundred absentee ballots from the previous November” — which was “five months after Election Day.” And in Wisconsin this week, three trays of mail, which included absentee ballots, were found in a ditch.)
There is also the issue of how voters can apply to vote by mail and who is eligible to do so. According to FiveThirtyEight, nine states and the District of Columbia will simply mail every registered citizen a ballot. In another 14 states, authorities will mail everyone an application to vote by mail. (Although, as we shall see, some states take a generous view of who, or what, might be eligible to receive such applications if outside interest groups decide to mail them out.) In 16 states, nothing is automatically mailed to voters, although voters can apply online to vote by mail. In six states, voting by mail is permissible only with a “valid excuse.” And the remaining states are some hybrid of the preceding categories.
All of these different rules provide plenty of opportunity to game the system on questions ranging from the verification of identity, addresses, and signatures to the timeliness of postmarks and the ability of the postal service to deliver ballots in a timely manner. Because there are so many “moving parts” to the vote-by-mail process, mail-in ballots are fraught with the potential for fraud. Yes, we’ve seen voter fraud before, but we ain’t seen nothing yet. The further we get from requiring that voters go to the polls to vote in person, the more we expand the avenues for fraud.
Consider, for example, the fraud potential that comes with mailing ballots to every registered voter. Back in 2012, a Pew Center study found that ener external noreferrer">1.8 million dead people were still registered to vote and that 24 million voter registrations were un-confirmable.
Though some states have made progress in updating their voting rolls since the 2012 Pew study, a comprehensive analysis conducted this year by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) found that 349,773 apparently dead people still remain on the voter rolls across 41 states. And apparently the dead still vote! The report also discovered a surprising number of people who apparently voted more than once.
The report found:
During the 2018 General Election, 37,889 likely duplicate registrants are apparently credited for casting two votes from the same address, and 34,000 registrants appear to have voted from non-residential addresses. Additionally, 6,718 registrants were apparently credited for voting after death.
According to the report, New York, Texas, Michigan, Florida, and California were the top five states with dead voters on the rolls, accounting for 51 percent of all the dead registrants. The crucial swing states of Michigan and Florida had 34,225 and 25,162 dead registrants respectively.
That would seem to be a serious indictment of the system and a warning against mailing unsolicited mail-in ballots or even mail-in ballot applications to everyone on the voter rolls. But Democrats are working hard to bulldoze the path for vote-by mail, or, as Breitbart News often calls it, cheat-by-mail. Democratic governors in New York and Pennsylvania have already moved to ease vote-by-mail, as have local officials in Harris County, TX, population 4.7 million. Oh, and did we mention that in Nevada’s June primary, more than 223,000 ballots in Clark County (Las Vegas) went to a bum address? That means almost a fifth of all the ballots mailed out in the county went to a bum address.
But, you might ask, why don’t we just make sure the voter rolls are accurate by removing people who have moved or died? Why don’t we have a standardized signature verification protocol and a requirement for an additional witness signature and photo ID for mail-in ballots to ensure they are legit? Good questions. The answer is the left fights these reforms.
Left-wing groups want to expand access to voting by registering as many people as possible, but they also fight to block meaningful efforts to ensure that only eligible American citizens are voting. When Republicans enact legislation to encourage transparency and accuracy in our voting process by removing dead or ineligible voters from the rolls or mandating some form of identity verification, left-wing activists challenge these initiatives in court to stop any reform.
Eric Eggers, the author of Fraud: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election, explained to Breitbart News how left-wing interest groups have fought for years to keep the loopholes that could potentially create a “tsunami of voter fraud” in November.
“Organizations that are funded by George Soros both fight to keep those vulnerabilities in place, as in Ohio, by trying to prevent efforts to pass voter-ID laws or to make the voter rolls more secure,” Eggers said. “But then they also — and this is really the insidious part — they fund organizations that go out and round up voters, regardless of legality of their status, and force them through the vulnerabilities in the system.”
“There are 248 counties in this country that have more registered voters than actual citizens of legal voting age,” Eggers said. “It’s a problem because it creates opportunity for organizations like the formerly known ACORN and La Raza — they’re all funded by [billionaire George] Soros — to go and figure out where the vulnerabilities are and force the voters — whether they’re legal or not — through the gaps.”
But according to the establishment media, the instances of mail-in voter fraud are “infinitesimally small.” And to prove this, the media loves to quote the “non-partisan” Brennan Center for Justice. What the media fails to tell you is that the Soros-funded Brennan Center is leading the charge to expand mail-in voting. They don’t just have a dog in this fight — they have a whole kennel! Quoting the Brennan Center to deny the reality of mail-in voter fraud is like quoting Big Tobacco to deny that smoking causes cancer.
And yet when Donald Trump or any Republican points out the obvious vulnerabilities in our voting system, the Democrat-Media Complex quotes biased sources to vilify Republicans. Nancy Pelosi actually called President Trump and Republicans “enemies of the state” for expressing concerns about vote-by-mail’s fraud potential.
It seems fair to say that Democrats are making sure that the system works for them. Recently, Politico headlined a long piece, “Inside the Democratic Party’s plan to prevent vote-by-mail disaster,” detailing the efforts of the party, and its well-funded allies, to win the November mail war.
A key part of that plan is legal challenges. For instance, in Georgia, the American Civil Liberties Union accused the state government of wrongfully purging nearly 200,000 voters from the rolls. In this legal battle, the ACLU is joined by the Palast Investigative Fund, one of the myriad “non-partisan” foundations that the Democrats always have at their side.
Yet in the meantime, the ACLU has nothing to say when we discover, for example, that during the 2020 Michigan primaries, the number of ballots counted in 72 percent of Detroit’s absentee ballot precincts didn’t match the number of ballots cast. And the votes counted in 46 percent of all of Detroit’s precincts–both absentee and in-person–didn’t match the number of ballots tracked in the precinct poll books. For perspective on what such abnormalities might portend for the next election, we might observe that Detroit has a population of 670,000. In 2016, Donald Trump won Michigan by a mere 10,704 votes.
Oh, and did we mention that a federal lawsuit filed last year alleged that the city of Detroit had over 2,500 dead people still registered on its voter rolls, and about 4,788 registered Detroit voters were flagged as having potentially registered to vote twice or even three times. But I’m sure none of those dead people will vote by mail, right?
Oh, and while we’re on Michigan, we should also mention that Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State who was endorsed by Joe Biden and was a featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention, misprinted the ballots that were created for Michigan voters serving in the military overseas. Guess which candidate was listed incorrectly? You guessed it: Trump! The bad ballots list the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential candidate as President Trump’s running mate instead of Mike Pence. But don’t worry. The spokesperson for Michigan’s Democratic-Biden-endorsed-DNC-speaking Secretary of State has assured us that clerks “will be instructed to duplicate a vote for Trump” for any military voter who mails in one of these misprinted ballots.
In the face of all this potentially embarrassing data, the Democrats have decided that the best defense is a good offense. For instance, Joe Biden stays on the offensive, regularly accusing President Trump of seeking to squelch vote-by-mail; but he never allows that vote-by-mail might need to be reformed. Biden charged on September 7 that Trump “wants to make sure those mail-in ballots don’t get where they’re supposed to get.”
We might wonder: If Biden routinely accuses Trump of cheating, should we be surprised if Democratic activists get the hint and decide that they could, and should, cheat on Biden’s behalf? After all, they might rationalize these efforts as fighting fire with fire.
Cheat-inclined Democrats might draw inspiration from an anonymous Democratic consultant in New Jersey who recently confessed to the New York Post that “fraud is more the rule than the exception.” The consultant explained the various ways in which political operatives can harvest mail-in ballots, change them by inserting different ballots into the envelope, use friendly postal workers to disappear ballots in neighborhoods that lean Republican, and so forth. A few hundred bogus ballots here and there can change an election.
“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes — it can make a difference,” the Democratic operative said. “It could be enough to flip states.”
Indeed, even Democratic pets can make a difference—and they don’t even have to be alive! Recently in Atlanta, a family got a voter registration application in the mail for their deceased house cat named Cody.
How did that happen, you ask? Well, outside third-party groups can rent mailing lists and randomly send everyone on the list an absentee-ballot application or voter registration application that they downloaded from the state’s election website. Have you ever used your pet’s name to subscribe to something because you didn’t want junk mail in your own name? If so, don’t be surprised if Fluffy or Spot gets a voter registration or absentee ballot application in the mail.
Georgia’s election officials assure us that Cody the cat would not have been able to vote at the polls in the Peach State because the cat doesn’t have a license or state ID. But one wonders if he would be allowed to vote by mail, assuming his registration application cleared. And, of course, not every state requires a photo ID to vote like Georgia does.
Speaking of Georgia, its Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger, announced on September 8 that his office had identified 150,000 Georgians who had applied for an absentee ballot and then showed up at the polls to vote in person in the June primary; that is, they wished to vote, carelessly or purposefully, for a second time. This in a primary in which a little less than 950,000 people voted; in other words, the attempted (or at least potentially attempted) double voting accounts for around a sixth of total ballots cast. Of these 150,000, Raffensberger added that perhaps 1,000 had actually succeeded in voting twice.
Were these innocent mistakes? Simple confusion? Or guilty action? Whatever the truth about these would-be double voters and actual double voters, we should applaud Georgia authorities for minimizing what could have been a major electoral debacle; thanks to their good work, it was only a minor electoral debacle. In any case, the Georgia ACLU has nothing to say about that.
Voter fraud exists even when you vote in person, but mail-in voting blows the doors wide open in fraud potential. And the Democrats are ready to fight for every ballot—pets and all!
4. Send Democratic lawyers into key districts to fight for every challenged ballot. Use the courts and progressive election officials to keep the count going as long as possible with as little verification as possible.
As we have seen, each mailed-in ballot has the potential to foment a legal fight over its validity. In fact, the Washington Post reported on August 24, that more than 534,000 primary votes in 23 states have been rejected for one reason or another:
Democrats and voting rights groups are now waging court battles to ensure that absentee ballots are not discarded on technicalities, pushing to require that ballots postmarked by Election Day be counted and to make signature-matching laws more voter-friendly.
Meanwhile, in Indiana, a federal judge ruled that Hoosier election officials cannot reject ballots for dissimilar signatures without notifying the voter and giving him or her—aided, of course, by partisan pals—a chance to “cure” the ballot. In fact, 20 states allow a voter to attempt to cure a faulty ballot so that it can be counted. That might be a good idea, but we can see that each “cure” will take a lawyer, not a doctor.
In fact, with such legal fights in mind, the Biden-Harris campaign has already built a SWAT team of 600 lawyers, expecting many more recruits to come.
And just on September 14 came this headline, courtesy of the New York Times: “Biden Creates Legal War Room, Preparing for a Big Fight Over Voting.”
According to the Times, two Democratic legal veterans–Dana Remus, who has served as Biden’s general counsel in the 2020 campaign, and Bob Bauer, a former Obama administration White House counsel–will co-head this legal effort. Others involved include former Obama attorney general Eric Holder and two former solicitors general in Democratic administrations, Donald B. Verrilli and Walter Dellinger. In all, the Times tells us that “hundreds of lawyers will be involved, including a team at the Democratic law firm Perkins Coie, led by Marc Elias.”
The name Marc Elias might ring a bell because, as Breitbart News has reported, he was in the middle of the infamous fake-news Christopher Steele dossier, having retained the firm of Fusion GPS on behalf of the Democratic National Committee. And come to think of it, Bob Bauer, mentioned above, was also a longtime Perkins Coie lawyer, having been there, alongside Elias, during the 2016 presidential campaign and its Steele-y aftermath.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris herself is keeping up the drumbeat, warning Democrats of the many bad things Republicans are thought to be doing.
“There will be many obstacles that people are intentionally placing in front of Americans’ ability to vote,” Harris said. “We have classic voter suppression. We have a president who is trying to convince the American people not to believe in the integrity of our election system and compromise their belief that their vote might actually count.”
By “voter suppression,” she means any effort to make sure that only eligible living non-pet American citizens are voting in November.
But while we’re on this topic, we should note that the Department of Justice announced this week that it’s investigating reports that nine military mail-in ballots were discarded in Pennsylvania. Seven of the ballots were cast for President Trump; the contents of the other two are unknown. Yes, it’s only nine ballots, but the campaign season is young, and there are lots of places where marked ballots can be discarded.
And the crickets you hear is the sound of Democrats, normally so up-in-arms about vote suppression, now being oh-so-quiet about vote destruction.
Democrats are armed and ready for a vote-by-mail total war. We can expect they will have a ground game in every district. Every disputed ballot will get its own Democratic lawyer. Every critical district and state will see litigation over signature-matches, addresses, postmarks, and anything else that might affect Democratic balloting.
In fact, the Democrats’ legal team has already scored potentially game-changing court victories in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina on how long ballots can be counted after Election Day.
In Wisconsin, a federal judge ruled Monday that mail-in ballots can be counted up to six days after Election Day, and a ballot can be counted even if there is no “definitive” sign of a postmark on it.
In Pennsylvania, the state’s Supreme Court ruled last week that mail-in ballots can be received up to three days after Election Day; and, similar to the Wisconsin ruling, these ballots can be counted even if there is no evidence that they were postmarked on time. (The Pennsylvania court handed the Democrats a second victory by keeping the Green Party candidate off the ballot; thereby preventing the Greens from peeling off any progressive voters. We note that the court didn’t grant the GOP a similar favor by kicking the Libertarian Party off the ballot.)
The Pennsylvania Secretary of State also issued an order last week instructing clerks not to conduct signature matches on the mail-in ballots – which means that Pennsylvania essentially nullified signature verification because the state’s election officials won’t be verifying anything.
In Michigan, a judge ruled that postmarked mail-in ballots can be accepted up to 14 days after Election Day, and third parties are allowed to deliver these ballots. This fraud-friendly delivery service is commonly known as “ballot harvest.” It’s all the rage in California and other third world countries.
In North Carolina, a coalition of Democrat-aligned special interest groups got the state to agree to accept mail-in ballots up to nine days after Election Day and to allow voters to “cure” any problems with these ballots. North Carolina election officials also agreed to create vote-by-mail ballot “drop-off” stations, which is essentially an invitation for “ballot harvesting.”
You’ll notice that these are all swing states, and three of them – Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan – were the Rust Belt blue wall states that put Trump over the top in 2016. He won them by 22,748 (WI); 44,292 (PA), and 10,704 (MI) votes. And the Democrats are stopping at nothing to win them back.
Of course, these court victories were concerned with when the mail-in ballot delivery window will close. Let’s not forget the question of when the in-person polls will close. It’s a safe bet that Democratic lawyers will argue—and even sue, as they have in the past—for extra hours in places where their voters might come straggling in late. After all, many protestors and rioters seem to be night people.
5. Set expectations that the election will not be decided on November 3. Plan for mass protests in the streets. Scare people into believing that Trump won’t leave office (should he attempt to challenge the results).
Remember that celebrity “United to Save the Vote” virtual gala? One of the goals of the organizers was to ensure “that everyone knows it will take a week – not a day – to get results.”
One week might be too optimistic. As we noted above, counting mail-in ballots is more time-consuming than regular ballots, and recent court cases have ensured that these ballots will be accepted days and even weeks after Election Day. And, of course, all of these lawyered-up ballot brouhahas will take time.
The American public has become used to getting election results within 24 hours of the polls closing. So now the Democrat-Media Complex is hard at work setting expectations that we won’t know the results for days or weeks or possibly months.
Oh and they want us to know that even if it looks like Trump won on election night, we shouldn’t believe our lying eyes until all of the ballots are found … I mean, counted.
On August 30, Josh Mendelsohn, head of Hawkfish, a Mike Bloomberg-funded Democratic technology company, warned of a “Red Mirage” on Election Day. Mendelsohn argued that Trump might well win the vote on November 3, but that he would not win the overall balloting, including mail-in votes:
We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump. When every legitimate vote is tallied and we get to that final day, which will be some day after Election Day, it will in fact show that what happened on election night was exactly that, a mirage. It looked like Donald Trump was in the lead and he fundamentally was not when every ballot gets counted.
At one level, this is an interesting argument, bespeaking changing trends in voting. And yet at another level, it’s pure Democratic spin, or, should we say, pre-spin.
Indeed, we should bear in mind that Democrats have a history with long counts (and recounts).
For instance, back in the 2008 U.S. Senate election in Minnesota, creative counting cost Republican incumbent Norm Coleman his seat; it was awarded, instead, to Democrat Al Franken. As recalled by Bob Anderson of The Federalist:
On the morning after the election in November 2008, the official tally showed [Coleman] with a 725-vote lead out of 2.9 million total votes cast. Coleman claimed victory. But Democrats flooded the state with lawyers to challenge the outcome. After the first recount, his lead was down to 206 votes, but things were just getting started. Caches of ballots showed up late. Eight months later, the resulting litigation finally ended when Al Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn in July 2009.
Yes, it took the Democrats eight long months, but it was worth it—they had their senatorial victory. Anderson adds that subsequent study found that 1,099 felons had illegally voted–which means that more than three times as many illegal votes were counted than the number Franken won by. But by then, Coleman was out and Franken was in.
This year, the New York Times recalled the 2018 midterm Congressional elections, when Democrats were energetic about “ballot harvesting,” and so, as time went by, their results kept getting better: “As mail ballots were tallied in the days and weeks afterward, Democrats kept winning close races. Their net gains in the House went from an apparent 26 seats on election night to 41.”
(When it comes to recounts, a bag of uncounted ballots always seems to fortuitously appear to tip the race for Democrats. Alas, Ballot Santa never comes with a sack full of gifts for Republicans.)
No doubt with that pleasing prospect in mind—good things come to those who wait—Hillary Clinton has urged Team Biden to carry on the struggle by any means necessary, even if their man seems to have lost on November 3. “Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually, I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch,” she said. “This is a big organizational challenge.”
Hillary is hardly alone in making this charge. Indeed, Democrats and Never Trump Republicans have set up something called the Transition Integrity Project, which has conducted many “war games” in which #Resistance figures role-play various scenarios.
Given the likelihood of difficulties on and around Election Day—who can forget, for example, that back in February, it took the Democrats a full 26 days to decide who had won their Iowa caucus—it might seem reasonable to think that such gaming and planning could be useful civic exercise. Except, of course, we know that the lessons learned will only be applied to the mission of getting rid of Trump. If Trump wins, the Transition Integrity Project will likely have nothing to say about the inevitable Antifa protests, etc.
In fact, now everyone seems to be on message that we should pay no attention to the results on Election Day because the real count will be yet to come. Hence Mark Zuckerberg, whose Facebook empire is in the middle of everything political these days, said recently, “What we and the other media need to start doing is preparing the American people that there is nothing illegitimate about this election taking additional days or weeks to make sure all the votes are counted.”
Facebook has also reportedly announced that it may “restrict the circulation of content” following the election in order to curb civil unrest if (when?) things turn violent. And perhaps this also an example of pre-spin.
Meanwhile, a massive network of well-funded left-wing groups are organizing to take to the streets to make sure the results are in their favor—while claiming that they are simply preparing in anticipation of Trump supporters’ being violent.
On September 8, the increasingly woke Daily Beast bannered: “The Left Secretly Preps for MAGA Violence After Election Day.” As the article detailed, a left-wing group founded after the 2016 election, boasting the militant name of Fight Back Table, has just founded an even newer left-wing group, the Democracy Defense Nerve Center, which is already prepping for Election Day trouble. As one activist told the Beast, the group has been planning out how it can “occupy shit, hold space, and shut things down, not just on Election Day but for weeks.”
The article identifies the point person of these efforts as one Deirdre Schifeling, described as “a former top official at Planned Parenthood,” and adds:
The coalition includes labor groups, like SEIU and the American Federation of Teachers, social justice entities like Color of Change, and progressive movement outfits like Indivisible and MoveOn. It is also collaborating with mission ally Protect the Results, a group of 80-plus left-of-center and some NeverTrump entities that are also planning mass mobilization in more than 1,000 locations across the country.
Reacting to the article, conservative Michael Brendan Dougherty tweeted mordantly, “If one major party is constantly signaling its commitment to the strategy of precipitating a regime crisis, maybe the regime crisis is already upon us.”
Indeed, as Breitbart News reported, one group tweeted out a call to action to “get in the streets” starting on Election Day:
“On Nov. 3. After you vote, get in the streets! Donald Trump must go and we must make it happen!” reads a post tweeted in August by the far-left ShutDownDC, an “organizing space” partnering with Protect the Results which plans to “rise up to confront the Trump administration’s attacks on democracy” and offers training sessions for coalition members to prepare to take “direct action.”
These mass (and potentially violent) demonstrations will serve as a show of force. They will function as a grand intimidation tactic to make Biden’s victory a fait accompli by using the loudest voices to preemptively drown out any opposition — which is awfully easy to do when your opposition is known as the “silent majority.” When masses of people take to the streets–breathlessly reported on by the media–the message will be that the country is burning in righteous outrage to oust Trump.
And, of course, the message for American voters: If you don’t want your neighborhood burned down, you better vote Trump out.
In fact, a recent essay by Shadi Hamid in The Atlantic argues that “Democrats May Not Be Able to Concede.” Hamid candidly tells us that there will be mass rioting if Trump wins; and, therefore, Republicans might want to vote for Biden if they don’t want to see their neighborhoods burn: “For this reason, strictly law-and-order Republicans who have responded in dismay to scenes of rioting and looting have an interest in Biden winning—even if they could never bring themselves to vote for him.” Subtle!
And in case the rioters need a reason to burn things down, these Democrat shock troops have been led to believe that Trump won’t leave office. “Orange Hitler” will simply refuse to concede and cling to power illegitimately—even if he loses. And so, naturally, these left-wing apparatchiks will feel justified in burning down the country and firing on their proverbial Fort Sumter should Trump even contest any ballot fraud.
In fact, one MSNBC pundit actually predicted that Trump-supporting militias would be “showing up at vote counting places threatening people.”
“We have to remember, the fear that I have is not just that he won’t leave, but remember, because so many of these ballots are going to be coming in by mail, we’re not going to have a new president on election night. It’s going to take weeks,” MSNBC political analyst Jason Johnson told host Nicolle Wallace.
“You going to have militia showing up at vote counting places threatening people,” he added. “We are in for a very, very difficult couple of months. We may be comfortable at the polling numbers now, but we have to remember that we have a president that is a proto-dictator and will do anything in his power to stay out, regardless of what the numbers say.”
The message for the Democrat shock-troopers: You are justified in rioting to oust the “proto-dictator” and cheating to disenfranchise his voters.
6. Challenge the results in court with the help of election officials and district attorneys that George Soros has spent years getting elected.
As we noted, the Biden campaign has assembled a Murderers’ Row of Democratic legal talent, which can be expected to have a great effect when vote-counting controversies find their way into the courts.
Democratic lawyers will likely soon be in front of district attorneys and judges, demanding judicial relief for anything they don’t like.
Interestingly, many of those DAs—including in such big cities as Orlando, Philadelphia, San Francisco—are of the new breed of George Soros-funded wokesters. In fact, Soros has spent at least $13.4 million, across dozens of states, in pursuit of his vision of Democratic electoral victories.
While these Soros-funded DAs might not be directly involved in any election legal fight, they will likely decline to prosecute any of Democrats’ shock troops who set fire to our cities (and Democrat donors will happily provide the bail money for for any election rioters.) These DAs could also decline to prosecute anyone engaged in voter fraud or voter intimidation on behalf of Democrats. There are any number of ways a Democrat-friendly local official can assist even indirectly, which is precisely why Democrat donors like George Soros are willing to spend millions on races that are way down-ballot.
Consider, for example, the Soros-funded Secretary of State Project (SoSP), which was created to elect secretaries of state in swing states. The Democrats realized that elections can be won or lost depending on who counts the votes and who enforces–or doesn’t enforce—election laws.
Remember the infamous Al Franken race we mentioned earlier? Guess who helped elect the Minnesota Secretary of State who oversaw that fiasco? You guessed it! He was a George Soros-funded SoSP alum.
Oh, and remember Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic-Biden-endorsed-DNC-speaking Secretary of State who had a big oopsy with the military ballots? Yes, she was also endorsed by the George Soros-funded SoSP back in 2010.
As you can see, Democrats play the long-game, leaving nothing to chance. As the Washington Post recently explained—or should we say, anticipated:
Election experts said that the combination of the hotly contested White House race and millions of first-time mail voters could lead to a record number of ballot rejections and trigger a searing legal war over which are valid—and who is the ultimate victor.
“Who is the ultimate victor.” Yes, that is the question. And here should note that the Secretary of State Project was born of the angst Democrats felt after losing the 2000 presidential race.
Even today, the Democrats shudder when they think back to that hotly disputed 2000 election—when it took 36 days to resolve the victor, George W. Bush—and thus they resolve, Never Again.
7. Let Chief Justice John Roberts (or the new Justice?) pick the next president. Or let Nancy Pelosi do it.
As with many fights they have won in the last six or seven decades, Democrats will surely look to the courts. The combination of smart lawyers, friendly DAs, and helpful judges usually get them the victories they want.
Of course, that game plan didn’t work for the Democrats in the 2000 election, when the U.S. Supreme Court, led by an immovable chief justice, William Rehnquist, who took a no-nonsense approach to the Democratic Party’s appeals to keep the Florida re-count chaos going until enough ballots could be “counted” in Al Gore’s favor.
Today, the court is led by a new chief justice, John Roberts, who ostensibly is one of the court’s five conservative justices appointed by presidents Bush 41, Bush 43, and Trump.
However, Roberts doesn’t appear quite so conservative these days. In recent years, he has proven himself to be movable on such issues as DACA, the Second Amendment, and presidential powers, much to the delight of the Democrat-Media Complex. As CNN’s Elie Honig cheered in July, “Roberts defied conventional wisdom and entrenched ideology to join with the court’s traditionally liberal bloc.” By contrast, Vice President Mike Pence has bluntly labeled Roberts “a disappointment to conservatives.”
So if the 2020 presidential election proves to be anything like 2000 in terms of disputed ballots or other irregularities, it’s entirely possible, even likely, that a case or cases will end up before the Roberts court.
If that happens, you can bet that Roberts will once again be exhorted by the Democrat-Media Complex to “defy conventional wisdom and entrenched ideology” by voting with the liberals on the court. And if Roberts wants to eat lunch at all the cool places in Washington, DC, that’s exactly what he’ll do; by contrast, if he votes with the conservatives and thereby helps elect Trump, his name will be mud inside the Beltway.
Would Roberts stick his neck out for Trump?
Actually, what if he doesn’t have to? What if his swing vote isn’t the deciding factor?
The court is now missing a member with the death of Justice Ginsburg; and if the Republicans are successful in confirming her replacement, this new justice will finally, definitively, tilt the court in favor of conservatives. And this new justice could also cast the deciding vote in a 5-4 decision, if Roberts joins the liberals.
In fact, President Trump has noted the likelihood of the Supreme Court having to decide the election as reason to fill the Ginsburg vacancy before Election Day.
“I think this will end up in the Supreme Court, and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices,” he said, adding that he thinks “having a four-four situation is not a good situation.”
Will the GOP be able to nominate a replacement before the election? What happens if they don’t?
What happens if the currently configured eight-member court splits 4-4 in a decision?
“Any time the justices divide 4-4 in a case, the lower court ruling remains in place. If say, the court were to split that way in a case involving the election, the tie would ratify whatever the lower court decided,” the Associated Press reports.
What’s the likelihood that Roberts would join the conservatives in a 5-3 vote? What’s the likelihood that a new justice will be seated in time to cast the swing vote in a 5-4 decision?
How crazy (or crazier) would the Democrat-Media Complex and their shock troops get if a new Trump-appointed Supreme Court justice–seated days before the election–casts the deciding vote in favor of the man who just gave her her job?
On that last point, James O’Keefe offered a speculative response to one left-winger’s call to “burn the entire fucking thing down” if the GOP tries to replace Ginsburg.
“Just imagine what they’ll do with absentee ballots,” O’Keefe asked.
Yes, indeed.
If the Democrats’ chaos strategy unfolds as we imagined, it’s possible that history will record this as the Trump-Biden-Roberts (Barrett? Lagoa?) election.
But perhaps history will record this as the Trump-Biden-Pelosi election.
The Supreme Court doesn’t have to decide the election. In fact, some believe that the court shouldn’t have intervened in the 2000 election at all because the Constitution and existing federal law already gives Congress the power to settle an electoral dispute.
As Justice Breyer explained in his dissent in Bush v. Gore, the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 give Congress the authority to count electoral votes and “resolve remaining disputes” after the states “have tried to resolve disputes (through ‘judicial’ or other means).” This is as the Founders’ intended, Breyer argued, because Congress “expresses the people’s will far more accurately than does an unelected Court. And the people’s will is what elections are about.”
If the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene (or if the court is split in a four-four decision) and neither Trump or Biden has an Electoral College majority by December 14 (the date Electors must cast their vote), the House of Representatives could decide the election.
The 12th Amendment states that if no candidate has an Electoral College majority, “the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.”
As Breitbart’s Joel Pollak recently noted, the word “immediately” suggests that the current Congress – led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi – could choose the president in this scenario.
But, as Pollak points out, there is a catch: The 12th Amendment makes clear that “in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote.” (emphasis added)
So, even though the House has 435 representatives (the majority of whom are Democrats), there will only be 50 votes cast—one for each state’s delegation.
And here’s the kicker … wait for it…
The Republicans control more state delegations than the Democrats!
Republicans are currently the majority in 26 delegations. Democrats are the majority in 23. Only the Michigan delegation is evenly split 7-7 (but Michigan’s Trump-hating libertarian Rep. Justin Amash will undoubtably throw in with the Dems.)
The Pelosi-led House could, of course, engage in all sorts of gamesmanship to create chaos and delay the inevitable. But even if they try to deny the House a quorum by refusing to show up to vote, the 12th Amendment specifies that a quorum for this purpose can consist of a single member from each state’s delegation. So, if the Democrats decide to skip town, one single Republican congressman from these states could represent the entire state and vote for Trump.
But, of course, with the Democrats controlling the House, they could try to change the House rules to stall for time — all the while whipping up the violence and hysteria of their shock troops in the streets.
As we explained, chaos and crisis are the Democrats’ friends. And we should never underestimate the left’s penchant for chaos, as the violence currently erupting across America’s cities has shown.
In the meantime, we should ask: Are Republicans prepared to deal with the legal chaos vote-by-mail balloting will unleash?
Our advice to the GOP: Lawyer up!
Rebecca Mansour is a Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News. Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.
James P. Pinkerton is a Breitbart News contributor and a veteran of the Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses. Follow him on Twitter at @JamesPPinkerton.