California’s gubernatorial recall election is officially September 14, but “Election Day” has ceased to have any meaning, Mail-in ballots were automatically sent to every registered voter on August 16. Return postage is “free,” pre-paid by California taxpayers. The registration deadline was August 30, but you can still register to vote “conditionally” and cast your vote immediately, right up to and including on the 14th.
Mail ballots do not have to be received by “Election Day.” Ballots received up through September 21, a week after the election, will still count. Which gives the people in power plenty of time to correct any “mistakes” revealed by the initial vote tallying on September 14.
You will recall that a drug-addled miscreant was recently apprehended in his car with 300 stolen mail-in ballots. The police found these ballots not due to brilliant detective work but because someone reported a man passed out in his vehicle. “Police are working with officials to ensure that all voters affected by the thefts get new ballots,” reported the Los Angeles Times.
The Times concludes its story with the line: “The incident isn’t tied to additional ballot thefts, police said.”
That’s right! No chance any other ballots have been tampered with. They’ve nabbed the ballot-stealing mastermind who passed out in his car. He must be the mastermind because the police tell us this incident isn’t tied to additional ballot thefts. How lucky we are that they have now found all the ballots that were stolen, and without even investigating. You can be confident the police will just as tirelessly not investigate further vote fraud issues.
I was going to suggest that this recall election was a test not of Governor Gavin Newsom’s popularity but of democracy in America—that is, a test of whether the will of the voters can still have any effect on government. But who are we kidding? You need only look at the rules for this election—the month-long voting window, the automatic mail-in ballots, the legality of ballots received a week after election day, plus that little incident of 300 stolen ballots being discovered entirely at random—to know that this election has already been rigged. Democracy has already been tested in California and has already failed—we need only wait until September 21 for official confirmation.
The real purpose of this recall election has nothing whatever to do with democracy or even with Newsom. The election is intended simply to keep the people of California quiet. It will enable the state’s leaders to say, “You’ve had your chance at voting, and look, we won! So calm down and continue to follow our orders.”
Ultimately, this election will test whether Americans will accept a dictatorship.
America had its preliminary test following the November 2020 elections and, by and large, we failed. The best of us went to protest in Washington, but now many of those who did are being held in an especially barbaric prison where no Republican senators, and damned few Republican congressmen, lift a finger to help them. To the people who rig elections for a living, this result is very encouraging: The cheating in 2020 was so blatant they never expected to get away with it. But they did. So now they can amp it up even further. From no-excuse mail-in voting we go to automatic mail-ballots sent to all voters: Voilà, California.
Many of my friends—good people—accepted the 2020 election because they believed that, while unlikely, it was at least plausible. And it is much more comforting to think your candidate lost, rather than to think your vote had no meaning. Many Americans—perhaps even most—will continue to believe our elections are free and fair as long as they possibly can. Give them even a shred of hope, a straw of faith in election integrity, and they’ll grab it.
But what happens when the will of the voters diverges so far from the ruling class that elections become utterly implausible? What happens when, in a few weeks, they tell us that the people of California have spoken, and, though it was close, they opted to retain the governor who can’t keep the electricity on? What happens when they tell us that voters have rejected the “black face of white supremacy”?
The California politicians have already placed their bet. What happens when we steal elections? They bet: Nothing. Nothing at all happens. Politicians and political operatives in Washington and across the country are watching—not to see the results, but to see how we react to the results. Are we willing to accept democracy in name only? I vote no.