The Left detests President Trump, but they can’t indict him just for being someone they don’t like, so they had to make up some kind of charges to file against him. In 2023, the route they chose for this witch hunt boils down to this claim: “He’s been lying about vote fraud.”
The level of chutzpah this path of pursuit requires is worthy of psychology textbooks. That the party known for over a century as being the masters of vote fraud would be the one challenging their opposition for it is the height of irony. But as awful as it is that the country must watch a recent president and dozens of his associates be unconstitutionally prosecuted in a desperate effort to keep him from a second term, it does pose a learning opportunity: It has all placed vote fraud in the eyes of the American public at a level unseen since at least 1960.
The importance of free and fair elections has been a fundamental of the American experience since the Founding Era, even as we have gradually broadened the franchise beyond landowners, to include both sexes, all races and creeds, and all income levels. Throughout, the practice of illegal voting has always been recognized as unacceptable.
If the vote itself is at the very heart of the American Way, then vote fraud must, by definition, be a fatal violation of it, the most un-American act imaginable.
While the modern Left claims that vote fraud is nonexistent, even going so far as to attempt to criminalize its very mention, the fact is that there are almost endless types of vote fraud in use today, as there have been for much of American history. It has long been well established that Congressional, Senatorial, and state-level races have often been won through the use of various kinds of fraud, since at least the days of New York’s Tammany Hall in the mid 1800s.
The only honest claim one can make to partially denounce the accusation is to say that it’s not easy to prove that vote fraud was sufficient to change the results. To get away with claiming that it doesn’t exist at all requires a population that has been unconsciously conditioned to shut their minds to the possibility.
Let’s consider just a few of the common ways that elections are meddled with, from the fabrication of votes to outright vote theft, from the abuse of the calendar to the manipulation of the news cycle. (note, this list will barely scratch the surface):
Motor Voter: Obviously, the only people legally allowed to vote in a US election are US citizens. But since the 1990s, most states have used their driver’s license lists to automatically register both citizens and non-citizens to vote. And with decades of open borders, we have tens of millions of illegal residents. We don’t know how many unqualified non-citizens take advantage of Motor Voter to vote, but statistically, the number of such abusers cannot be zero. The rule is clearly designed to enable fraud.
Multiple Residences: Obviously, a person can only legitimately vote once per election cycle, but this is largely on an honor system. Millions of Americans have multiple legal addresses – a first home and a country cabin, a summer home and a winter condo, etc. A retired grandparent who spends part of the year with one son’s family and part of the year with the daughter’s family. It’s easy to vote from either address, and there is no national system in place to prevent it.
We don’t know for sure how many such double registrations are used, but every few years, someone does a study. I recall one about a decade ago that revealed over 20,000 such dual registrations just between New York and Florida. The Democrats had to withdraw a congressional candidate from Maryland a few years back who was caught voting from both her Maryland home and her Florida condo in the same election. Yes, the candidate herself. How many family members vote on behalf of their nonresident parent, their moved-away child, their deceased uncle, on the theory that as long as the registration is there, why not put it to use?
College Moves: The American college student is a special example of the above risk. Think about how many addresses you had during your college years. Your freshman dorm address, your sophomore dorm address, your off-campus apartment during junior and senior years, all on top of your home address with your parents. It’s not unusual for a 25-year-old to have had six or seven legitimate addresses since getting the right to vote at 18. Even if this young person doesn’t abuse this opportunity himself, that’s a stack of opportunities for a corrupt landlord, dorm prefect, or local party organization to take advantage of.
Touchscreen Voting: The modern love of computers has prompted jurisdictions to offer touchscreen terminals as an alternative to traditional ballots. Like all touchscreens, the sensitivity range is programmable and is largely dependent on both the quality of the screen and how many races appear on the screen at once. There have been countless reports over the past 15 years of voters pushing the button for one candidate and a vote being recorded for the other. Sometimes they notice; usually they don’t. Is that faulty programming? Is it hardware error? Is it intentional manipulation? It’s difficult to determine – maybe purposefully so. As every criminal has always known, if you can just make a crime look like an accident…
Mail-in Ballots: There has always been a multitude of risks with mail-in ballots. They require people to vote early, perhaps before all the information of the election is in; they enable fraudsters to cast ballots on behalf of others because election officials aren’t present to confirm identity. Until the 2010s, most states therefore restricted absentee ballots to people who were sick or traveling, just to keep the number of such compromised ballots down. Since the pandemic of 2020, the mail-in ballot has exploded geometrically, vastly increasing this opportunity for risk. How many of the tens of millions of ballots delivered by mail since 2020 have been fraudulent, vs. how many have been legitimate? No way to know for sure. View the documentary “2000 Mules,” and judge for yourself.
Patronage Buses: Here too, it’s impossible to know how widespread the issue is, but it has long been well-known that in America’s political machine dominated cities, such as New Orleans and Chicago, party bosses often arrange busloads of their city employees and their families to drive from precinct to precinct on election day, using known dormant names on the voter roles to cast ballot after ballot all over the city. Forty people per busload, twenty or thirty polling places per day. It adds up. In how many cities does this happen? We don’t know. But there have been convictions in some cities, so it’s reasonable to assume it happens in many of them.
This barely scratches the surface. The popular methods of vote fraud continue to grow, as new methods arise, and there are convictions for it in every election, though they rarely make the news (see the Heritage Foundation database, here).
As the number of patients in nursing homes increases, the number of nursing home administrators casting ballots on their patients’ behalf increases as well. As the number of illegal aliens increases, the number of them who show up to vote – sometimes perhaps not even aware that it’s illegal – increases as well. As government bureaucracies get more tainted, their corrupt interference grows: when mainstream news broke on the Hunter Biden Laptop story in October 2020, for example, the DoJ made their corrupt partners in both new and old media bottle up the story until after the election.
Corrupt campaigns encourage it, facilitate it, even pay for it, sometimes amazingly blatantly. The Obama campaign famously bused college students from Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois into Iowa for the Democrat caucuses of 2008, thereby beginning his path to the nomination on a corrupt footing, and other leftist candidates have made use of such methods since. Socialist NGOs and PACs in the 2020 and 2021 cycles encouraged “progressives” all over the country to register to vote from Georgia friends’ homes, businesses, and colleges, so they could cast illegal absentee ballots on behalf of the socialist Democrat Senate candidates Warnock and Ossof. Such plans are often arranged on craigslist, reddit, facebook, and other social media sites to give the affected campaigns plausible deniability about the fraud being arranged on their behalf.
Note that most of these methods have been around for years, long before the 2020 election was likely stolen from President Trump and countless downballot Republicans. But there are new methods too; connecting ballot counting machinery to the internet to enable offsite manipulation of the counts, 2:00am deliveries of truckloads of freshly minted ballots, claiming to shut down counting for a water main break and then continuing to count once the newsmedia was off premises. The new methods are as plentiful as the old.
It is often difficult to prove these crimes; vote fraud usually takes place one by one and two by two; it’s an immense task to prosecute. The only real solution is to prevent them in the first place, to design election processes that restrict the opportunities for corruption. Require that an election be one single day, not a six week season. Require that people vote in person, with identification proving citizenship and residence. Threaten massive punishment for any caught violating these regulations, and carry it out.
And recognize that there can only be one reason for any politician to oppose such reasonable restrictions: opposition is proof that the person is an advocate of vote fraud.
Years and years of opinion polling clearly demonstrate that the majority of the American people support conservative public policy positions, even in our cities, and yet, leftists candidates who are 180 degrees apart from their constituents win elections again and again.
There is a reason for that.
As Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin proudly boasted, so many years ago: it doesn’t matter so much who votes in elections; what matters is who controls how the ballots are counted.
Copyright 2023 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available only on Amazon
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA
1 thought on “Vote Fraud and the American Way”