Focusing on the wrong things

I would be totally naïve to say that there was no voter fraud this past (or any recent) election cycle. Of course there was. Where I break from many of President Trump's supporters is I believe it wasn't on a scale to sway the election to Joe Biden. And the kooky statements coming from Trump's legal team as well as Trump himself has only underscored that belief. 

All that said, there are nefarious reasons why Trump lost, but it has nothing to do with fraud.  

Indeed, something profoundly fishy happened in the 2020 election, but it wasn’t the Kraken or Venezuelan communists running remote software when they can’t even make the red lights work in their own country. Those shiny objects will play out with time and examination of evidence.

What happened in 2020 is something more fundamental and profound. What happened in 2020 is cultural and systemic, and sadly, generally legal. Until Republicans, and more importantly Trump supporters, understand what happened to them this year, it will happen again.

Two things happened in 2020. First, COVID led to a dismantling of state election integrity laws by everyone except the one body with the constitutional prerogative to change the rules of electing the president – the state legislatures.

This should have been addressed through the legal system the millisecond any state's governor or secretary of state unilaterally changed election laws. Thankfully here in Minnesota there were judicious individuals who rightfully took exception to Secretary of State Steve Simon extending the deadline for absentee ballots. And the good guys won that suit. However, all GOP held legislatures have to make election integrity a top priority this year. The first place to start is obvious. Sh*t can "mail-in voting." 

There is a long list of things being reported as fraud that are not fraud that will need to wait for another day to address, but the singular fact is the rush to mail balloting created weaknesses all across the system.

Mail ballots went to dead people. Mail ballots went to abandoned mines in Nevada. Mail ballots went to vacant lots in Pittsburgh. Mail ballots went in the garbage. Mail ballots were voted by people other than the voter.

I successfully argued in court that Virginia election officials violated Virginia statute when they issued rules that ballots can arrive late and without a postmark. But sadly, that case was one of the few instances of success at blocking the Democrats’ frenzy to throw out election integrity laws. By and large, the Democrats succeeded in tossing out state laws related to absentee ballot verification, deadlines and a whole range of laws all in the name of COVID. By and large, GOP efforts in court failed. It was a courtroom bloodbath that created vulnerabilities across the system.

Given that Trump garnered the largest share of the non-white vote of any GOP presidential candidate since 1960, how is it he still came up short?

Well......

 

(T)he Center for Technology and Civic Life happened.

If you are focused on goblins in the voting machines but don’t know anything about the CTCL and what they did to defeat Donald Trump, it’s time to up your game.

The Center for Technology and Civic Life and allied groups are responsible for building an urban get-out-the-vote-machine of the sort that Democrats could only dream up on a bender fueled by jugs of Merlot and all the legalized pot they could smoke.

The Capital Research Center has this deep dive into what the Center for Technology and Civil Life did in just Georgia. It starts with this:

 

This year, left-leaning donors Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan gave $350 million to an allegedly “nonpartisan” nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which in turn re-granted the funds to thousands of governmental election officials around the country to “help” them conduct the 2020 election.

 

“Help.” That’s a good one. What these grants did was build structural bias into the 2020 election where structural bias matters most – in densely populated urban cores. It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout machines. The hundreds of millions of dollars built systems, hired employees from activist groups, bought equipment and radio advertisements. It did everything that street activists could ever dream up to turn out Biden votes if only they had unlimited funding.

In 2020, they had unlimited funding because billionaires made cash payments to 501(c)(3) charities that in turn made cash payments to government election offices.

Flush with hundreds of millions in new cash, government election offices turned those donations into manpower, new equipment, and street muscle to turn often sluggish and incompetent urban election offices into massive Biden turnout machines across the country – in Madison, Milwaukee, Detroit, Lansing, Philadelphia, and Atlanta among dozens of others.

The kicker is that such practices aren't illegal. So how does the GOP combat this going forward? I honestly have no idea. But in order to address this situation, it at least has to be engaged in. Sadly I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of that at this point in time. 

-----------------------------------------------------