By John F. Di Leo –
The May 7 Presidential election in France gained the notice of American media far more than any other French election in fifty years. The American press is notorious for its poor coverage of world affairs, so the rare times that the MSM does choose to shine their light on a foreign country, it merits comment.
In this case, the reason is easy to see: the press didn’t pay attention to France because of its geopolitical importance, or our shared history with the country, but because they had a chance to design a narrative that matched their politics: they imagined a similarity between the LePen campaign and Donald Trump’s, and hoped for a chance to use that election as a vehicle for spreading their bias.
So we all watched the election, and the press certainly cheered when Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen, as we knew they would. While Le Pen has very little in common with Donald Trump outside of three or four key issues, the press insinuated that the French had the sense to defeat their monster and we didn’t, so the French indeed ARE better than we are, after all (as the media has always believed).
But all that was to be expected. The interesting thing about the May 7 election wasn’t who won, but the story about the ballots.
The Tale of the Ballots
When we were told that France voted down the daughter of a man pilloried as a bigot in the global press for a generation, it was no surprise. Her loss was hardly “news” by the common definition. They have no tradition of a “limited government” party in France as we do here, so they may try to pretend that the conservative party lost, but the story has no legs, at least, not with anyone who knows France.
But one offshoot story from the election was indeed fascinating to note:
The French declared that voter disgust – strong enough to lead them to refuse to participate – was four times the standard for a French election.
Now, in the USA, we have three standard ways to symbolize voter disgust with the choices for any office on the ballot: vote for a third party candidate, vote for a write-in candidate, or skip the office and vote the other races on the ballot.
The French have two other ways: turning in a blank ballot (similar to ours) or turning in a spoiled ballot, which can be as simple a method as tearing a corner.
We are told that 25% of the French electorate skipped the Macron/Le Pen runoff, and this should shock us. It probably doesn’t, as more than a quarter of our electorate skips elections occasionally too, for a myriad of reasons.
But we are told that 8.6% of those who did vote either sent in a blank ballot or tore their ballot this time. The press reported that these two kinds of objections were four times the usual.
This raised alarm bells in the media – “the public is disgusted with the choices” … “the supporters of the even-more left-wing party were angry about being left behind,” – they don’t even consider that some in the public may just be tired of having to choose between two big-government leftists all the time, and the nation that produced Bastiat and Revel might actually like a limited-government advocate for once.
But the story raised a different alarm bell to people from Chicago, and St Louis, and New Orleans, and Los Angeles, and everywhere else that’s familiar with the American epidemic of rampant vote fraud.
Vote Fraud in America
The American press has always tried to convince the public – and it often succeeds – that there is only one kind of vote fraud: a corrupt precinct captain copying names off the tombstones in a cemetery, registering those names for the vote, and then casting ballots in their names during lulls on election day, when nobody’s looking.
And yes indeed, that method is still used, and does still produce results for the Democratic Party.
But election-watchers know that there are dozens of other methods, as well. Illegal aliens, as well as legal immigrants who are not yet citizens, illegally vote in our elections all the time… people with multiple addresses vote from each of their homes in the same election… corrupt city governments pack buses full of patronage workers and their families, sending them from polling place to polling place all day, each one to vote a different identity every hour. Felons who’ve lost their voting rights blatantly cast ballots anyway, without consequence…
There are dozens of such methods, in use across the country, varying by region, as well as by city size and demographic. And there are prosecutions, and people do occasionally go to jail for it, but not nearly often enough, and it’s rarely covered in the national news when it happens. So the consumers of news tend not to know about it at all.
Vote Fraud in France
And so we come to the week in France, this time in context.
When American election watchers, particularly those of us in the big cities, where vote fraud has always been most rampant, heard these news stories on Sunday, our eyebrows were raised at this part of the story.
8.6%?
We’re supposed to believe that nearly ten percent of voters did take the trouble to participate in the election, but then spoiled the ballot, rendering their participation a waste?
Something about this doesn’t ring true.
The French say this has long been a tradition there – and yes, it is – but the numbers this time were amazing.
We must therefore ask, how sure are we that the voters spoiled the ballots? How sure are we that it wasn’t the election workers themselves, who might have added their own rips to the corner of the Le Pen ballots (or Macron ballots, for that matter), in order to render them uncountable?
The French rule is that any damage to a ballot voids the ballot. A corrupt election worker might therefore rip some of the other side’s ballots, with no fear of being caught if he does it when nobody’s watching.
Are we saying that all 8.6% said to be protests perhaps weren’t? No… But maybe, just maybe, some weren’t. Maybe only half of those protest votes were real, and corrupt election workers swapped out blank paper for real ballots when they could get away with it, or ripped the corner of their opposing candidate’s ballots when nobody was looking.
It’s impossible to believe that – with vote fraud made so easy – at least some percentage wouldn’t take advantage of that ease.
Nobody is proposing that Le Pen would have won without fraud… the discrepancy between her was too great. He had 20.75 million, and she had 10.64 million in the final count.
But if the alleged quadrupling of the protest ballot ratio is in fact untrue – if the protest percentage was in fact more like the French norm – then her loss wasn’t as lopsided as it looks… and it would mean that the establishment misread their public, and was nowhere near as confident of a Macron victory as they should have been.
One is reminded of the Committee to Reelect the President back in 1972. The Nixon campaign won in a landslide; there was no need for chicanery whatsoever… but they were so nervous that summer, they authorized a minor break-in and a subsequent coverup that brought down the entire administration.
Might the French establishment have been similarly nervous of a loss, nervous enough that they told their election workers to grab every opportunity to spoil the enemy’s ballots? In a close election, just a small percentage of vote fraud can make the difference.
The Problem with Statistics
And all this brings us to one more, critical, final discovery.
What good are statistics, really, in this context?
They tell us that the incidence of blank and spoiled ballots was four times the norm this year. But for that to be meaningful, we have to know what the norm is, and we have to trust that the norm itself is honest.
In a truly scientific experiment, in a lab environment, there is a control with which the test can be compared. We have no such control in the world of electoral politics. We know our past experience, but that may be suspect as well.
What if 50% of the ballot-spoiling that normally takes place is actually vote fraud? Or perhaps even 75%? Or maybe there’s usually no fraud at all, and any fraud this time would indeed stand out as the kind of “belt and suspenders” precaution taken by a government in unjustified fear of a losing position?
There is no way to know, because a system that voids ballots so easily is just ripe for vote fraud. The temptation for an immoral actor must be irresistible. There must be some fraud there, but whether it’s a huge percentage or a tiny percentage is impossible for us, an ocean away, to estimate.
We in the United States should learn from this as well. Our elections are compared with past elections. Our exit polls – and indeed all polling – are based on past results, on formulas that take past results and extrapolate from them. If past results were pure, then a scientific poll today can be reasonably accurate… but if past results are impure, then even the most scientific poll today is tainted by the bad data of the past.
We look at a 95% Democrat vote in an African-American precinct in Chicago or Cleveland, for example, and we are alerted that this sounds impossible… so we check past elections, and we find that they’ve voted in these percentages for several cycles, so there’s nothing to worry about.
But what if the honest vote is actually 85-15, or 80-20, or even 75-25, but stolen, padded, spoiled or falsified votes have been padding that number all along? Then by just leaving the vote fraud in place at the standard rate, the corrupt politicians responsible are able to slide, confident that the unchanging voting patterns over the years will protect them from their fraud being uncovered.
This is why there is only one solution to the problem of vote fraud: We must remove the temptation.
As long as easy ways to steal remain in place, people capable of covering their tracks may do so, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to catch them all.
But if we eliminate the easy ways to steal – for France to eliminate the blank ballot and the disqualification of ballots that are torn – and for the USA, the concepts of month-long voting opportunities, voting without an ID, mail-in balloting, and similar invitations to fraud … then and only then will we be able to have confidence in our elections.
We in the United States suspect massive fraud, but we can prove little, because in most of our most populous states, the only way to prevent against it would be by sacrificing the concept of a secret ballot.
If we want to retain the sanctity of the secret ballot – and yes, in a country with ever-more powerful government bureaucrats, we must – then the only solution is to remove the invitations to fraud.
Stop inviting people to cheat; stop making it so easy for them… and most of the fraud will cease at last.
As indeed it must, if we hope to save our country, the last home on earth for Western Civilization.
Copyright 2017 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade trainer, writer and actor. A former Cook and Lake County precinct captain and Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has now been a recovering politician for twenty years.
Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided the IR URL and byline are included.
