Opinion: Will The Election Be Rigged?

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

One of the big questions this year – and every year, frankly – is this: Will there be vote fraud again? Will they steal it again?

Unfortunately, that’s the wrong question.

Imagine looking at an economy and asking, “Will there be any bankruptcies this year? Will any factories have layoffs? Will retail or restaurant chains close any locations?”

You can’t judge it that way, can you? In all economies, strong or weak, some businesses will go under, some plants will have layoffs, and some chains will have to close some sites. Even in boom times, this happens.

You judge whether it’s a boom time or a recession by the number of such calamities. Are business failure rates relatively low or unusually high? Can good people who want to work, find worthwhile jobs?

Elections are much the same. The last few cycles, we have seen unusually high levels of obvious vote fraud. There is always some vote fraud baked into the system, because partisan Democrat operatives, controlling so many of the levers of election procedures, have been able to lock in methods that virtually automate so many kinds of fraud.

The question, in this or any election, isn’t whether there will be fraud at all, but whether the side of right can overcome what political activists call “the margin of fraud.”

We should explain.

Too many Americans believe that vote fraud is limited to the old-fashioned concept of a Chicago precinct captain copying down names from the tombstones in a cemetery, registering them to vote, and then casting ballots in those names during the lulls on election day when nobody’s watching.

While that probably still happens, to some extent, it’s a minimal share of the modern vote fraud system. Consider the following.

We now have “Motor Voter” in place, which automatically registers people to vote as soon as they get their drivers’ licenses – felons, green-card-holders, people who spend their time at a different address – no matter whether they’re entitled to vote from that address or not.

Some states now have drop boxes for voting without anyone ever checking anything at all; no state employee vets the ballots or even looks at them; people are just able to drop stacks of ballots into an unattended mailbox at all hours of the night, and the ballots will be counted.

We now have decades of unlimited immigration, both legal and illegal, that have flooded our nation with people who are not yet citizens and maybe never will be, but who don’t know our Founders’ design for the country and often don’t even know they aren’t allowed to vote, but they do anyway.

We have computer-programmed touchscreen machines instead of ballots, which are so easy to program wrong, either intentionally or accidentally, that countless votes either don’t get counted at all or even get counted for the opponent.

We have seen a shocking trend to paint any effort toward ballot integrity as “racist,” causing both honest politicians and good government advocates to back down from responsible efforts to vet registration lists in advance of elections, to require Real IDs and signature verification, and to limit same-day registrations that are impossible to verify until it’s too late.

Perhaps most offensive of all is the fact that some states are abandoning the traditional integrity of the secret ballot, allowing political machine staffers to make people fill out their ballots under their supervision, and allowing these machine hacks to collect and deliver such stacks of coerced ballots.

There are dozens of ways to steal or fabricate ballots, as there have always been. The person with two addresses who votes from both, the landlord who casts ballots on behalf of former tenants who’ve moved away, the precinct captain or corrupt poll worker who takes advantage of his position to vote on behalf of the people on the list who don’t show up, the nursing home administrator who casts ballots on behalf of dozens of senile or drug-addled residents in their charge.

These forms of vote fraud have always been present, but outside the biggest cities, they used to contribute a small number to the total ballots cast. A strong candidate could overcome that margin of fraud with a good campaign and a solid organization.

But today? On top of all the dozens of traditional ways, we have this flood of illegal aliens, the elimination of verification, the drop boxes, the computerized polling places. When such industrial-level operations are combined with the low-tech old fashioned kinds of fraud, there is no way to defeat it – except to enforce the law.

The one thing America has going for it is that they can’t make it legal to commit vote fraud – non-citizen voting must always be illegal (at least in federal races); voting multiple times in the same election must always be illegal; forging someone else’s name to vote must always be illegal, etc.

But the Left has become brazen and incredibly successful at making it illegal to prevent such crimes, making it impossible to prosecute them, or making it impossible to undo the damage once the vote has been cast.

The solution for the side of right – and frankly, the only hope that the side of right has in this environment – is to counter those measures in the only ways available to us. In the red states where the Republicans hold the levers, we can and must implement safeguards. Whatever branches of government are still honest, whether they be counties, state legislatures, local village boards or the Supreme Court, they must all be single-minded in their efforts to do whatever they can to promote ballot integrity.

The Left will take every opportunity available to them, and some are impossible to stop because of the Left’s power. There are big cities that are lost causes in this regard, but even there, it’s worth campaigning, it’s worth trying.

We can still beat the margin of fraud if the side of right refuses to give up any demographic, any geography, any issue. There is no sane reason for anyone to vote Democrat, so the GOP needs to stop forfeiting so many areas and groups. So what if we can’t win 60/40? Losing 80/20 in some areas is better than losing 90/10, because then our 70/30 wins in other nearby areas will be enough to make up for it.

But this election has to be like the house-to-house guerrilla fighting of a modern war. In this city, we tackle the corrupt nursing homes; in that city, we tackle the precinct workers bribing voters with box lunches and bottles of whiskey. In this county, we tackle the double and triple voting of college students; in that county we tackle the buses driving homeless people and patronage workers from polling place to polling place..

The Left doesn’t use one method to steal elections; they use dozens, so the GOP must fight them all.

But there’s one more critical method that nobody talks about, and it may be the lynchpin to the whole question:

We must make the perpetrators of vote fraud stop wanting to commit it.

This may sound like the hardest sell of all, but it shouldn’t be. Even the employees of the Chicago machine – even the managers of the nursing homes and the landlords of college student housing – have all seen the world collapse under the four insufferable years of the Biden-Harris regime.

Even if they have government paychecks themselves, they have relatives and friends who are suffering from this out-of-control inflation, who can’t afford to buy a home when they get married, who can’t afford a new car when the old one isn’t worth repairing anymore.

Even the employees of the DNC must have friends who’ve been robbed by gang members whom Democrat governors have set free, friends who’ve lost children to fentanyl poisoning because of the open border, friends who’ve lost their jobs because their employers have gone bankrupt in this nightmare of an economy.

We don’t have to win them over to our side completely; that might be too high an order to hope for.

But if they – the people who commit the fraud – just this once, decide “Maybe it’s not worth it this time. Maybe this time, let’s let the Republicans back in for a couple of years, to fix this mess.” If they are just demoralized enough to stand back this time, and just not steal as much as they could, this will be a Republican landslide.

And everyone, on every side of the aisle, knows in their heart of hearts that’s what America needs.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo