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This Wasn’t an Election

I am a libertarian—which is to say I believe the government should stay out of my life as much as possible. But until recently I was a conventional Republican. In fact, I spent a lot of time as a neocon. How did I get from there to here? It was the 2020 election.

On Election Day 2020, we went to bed with Trump as the obvious victor—he had to win only one of the several states still in play. We woke up with Trump as the likely loser. I had a feeling we’d been cheated.

Of course it was only a feeling, but I noticed it was shared by a surprising number of people in “deep blue” Connecticut: Enthusiasm for Trump 2020 had run higher than for any presidential candidate people could remember. Higher than it had for Obama the first time around. And it was all just a mirage?

I was—still am—a full-stack software developer. I got a call from a voter integrity nonprofit who’d been in business long before I’d considered voter fraud a serious problem. They asked me to put together an emergency team to analyze the 2020 election results.  

My team focused on statistical analyses—studies of the very unlikely. Trying to find explanations for why certain late-reporting precincts were three standard deviations from their neighbors (think 1-in-1,000 shot) in areas like ballot-splitting. We found state databases where votes that had already been counted were subsequently deleted, or where thousands of mail-in ballots were received back by the government before they’d even been mailed out (Pennsylvania).  

Other parts of this nonprofit were doing on-the-ground detective work: The confessions of dropbox stuffers in Georgia led us to track and identify hundreds of individual ballot carriers, as well as the organizations that paid them to drive all over the state, delivering the fraudulent votes that changed the outcome.

In Arizona, the most corrupt state in the nation, where dropboxes are unnecessary because it’s legal for one voter to deliver up to 10 ballots, we had video footage of Democratic Party poll workers paying voters to take a stack of 10 ballots and vote them. That video footage led to indictments—but only of the people actually caught on film. The people paying for and organizing the fraud remain at liberty. We know who they are. The FBI knows too, but it’s hard to tell whether they’re interested.

My guys were working day and night on this—we took leaves of absence from our other jobs. There was no time: We had to furnish conclusive evidence before the election was certified. But we worked with patriotic fervor and a sense of service, even of sacrifice, knowing that what we found might prevent our votes—the nation’s votes—from being chucked in the trash can.

But of course we were wasting our time. Because the national-level Republicans, all those prominent persons who had expressed outrage and said they looked forward to seeing what we found, disappeared. When it came time to act, they just melted away (with very few exceptions, of whom Doug Mastriano—a genuinely good man who just “lost” his election in Pennsylvania—was one).  

Mind you, this shouldn’t have been too surprising, given that we had plenty of evidence of Republican complicity. We even had a source in Arizona who fingered the late John McCain (“the worst senator Arizona ever had”) as a recipient of the services of the biggest fraud organizer in the state (a Democrat).  

Right before my eyes, the uniparty emerged like some swamp monster. I’d made fun of all those tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists for years, and now I was wearing the hat myself. But I’d seen it with my own eyes. I didn’t have the luxury of pretending that Trump lost.

It wasn’t the Democrats who stole the election in 2020. It was the politicians. The Democrats couldn’t have gotten away with it without the Republicans handing it to them and looking the other way.

I won’t be analyzing this election too, because I already know how it’s done. I’ve seen how the sausage is made. And I know there were no real election integrity reforms between 2020 and 2022 except in Florida—which is why, by total coincidence, Florida is the only state in which the “red tsunami” actually happened. But that’s also why I moved to Florida: I want the politicians we elect, not the politicians the politicians elect. 

And while this whole exercise may have fatally crippled my faith in our system, it did teach me a few lessons, and it has allowed me to answer this important question about election fraud: People want to know how election fraud efforts are coordinated at a national level. The answer is, they’re really not.

Election fraud is not about ideology. It’s about money. There is no ideological component to voter fraud whatsoever. Political corruption is simply one variety—the most powerful—of organized crime. It happens on local and state levels: The big cheese in a small town manipulates the election so he can control the school board, so he can get the government’s construction contracts. Even in a small town, that’s hundreds of thousands or millions in patronage. It’s real money—your money. And he takes it.

If you add up these local and state elections, you end up with a stolen national election. But with no coordination, and with no ideology behind it. Leftist politicians “believe” in big government because big government steals your money and transfers it to them. The Marxist university professors who endorse the results are just useful idiots.

The machine didn’t hate Trump because he wrote mean tweets or because he was a right-winger or a populist—they hated him because he’s not part of the machine. He has his own money. 

But this is all up to you now. I can’t pretend that Pennsylvania actually preferred a severely disabled stroke victim to a Trump-endorsed candidate. I can’t pretend that, while incumbent presidents lose seats in the midterms, Biden is so much more popular than Obama was that he escaped a similar “shellacking.” I can’t pretend that abortion was a bigger issue for the young voters than taxes, lost jobs, inflation and war. I can’t pretend this election wasn’t stolen. But you can.

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About Dan Gelernter

Dan Gelernter is a columnist for American Greatness living in Florida.

Photo: iStock/Getty Images

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