America is experiencing a color revolution. It’s time to admit it: voting was rigged and has been before.
By Bryson Piscitelli, Editor-in-Chief
This article was originally featured in our special election 2020 magazine, (p.3) released 16 November 2020, which you can view here.
Russian Collusion! For three years we were subjected to this in practically every headline, until it magically vanished from political discourse.
It cannot be overstated how unprecedented it was for every major media outlet to conspire towards having the President removed from office, and presumably, tried for treason. Despite the fact that the Russian Collusion stuff was hot air from the get-go, the Democratic Party had bought into it wholesale. Candidates ran on impeachment. And in 2019 they almost successfully impeached Donald Trump in a vote that fell along party lines. But do forget, I suppose, that the impeachment was not actually about Russia, but rather Ukraine. Or something. I’ve forgotten, to be honest.
Now the establishmentarian media has produced us a new fundament for the imaginary ‘national conversation:’ Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Every major network called it, after all! It would be anti-American, no, anti-democracy to not forget their near-unanimity in a complete ‘nothingburger’ only a short time ago.
Let’s put aside the sarcasm for a moment. The country is now split along ideological lines over a very simple question: Are our elections truly free and fair? My answer to you as a student of American history is: no, not really. And they never really have been. More specifically, the idea that voter fraud is a ‘conspiracy theory’ is laughable historically speaking.
Let’s start two hundred years ago. The Democratic Party’s old history was practically founded on voter fraud. Jacksonian democracy (franchising the masses as opposed to just the elite) quickly led to party machines growing in places like New York City where unions gave out pre-filled ballots to be turned in by less-than-literate members, allowing easy manipulation of election counts. Fraud was so rampant that Tammany Hall bosses openly boasted the phrase “vote early and vote often.”
Or take the 1876 election. (That’s post-Civil-War— some living people’s parents were alive then) where Rutherford B. Hayes made the infamous ‘corrupt bargain’ to exchange a rigged Republican victory for withdrawing troops out of the South and ending reconstruction.
If that’s too old for you, look to the 1960 election. John Kennedy (whose father was so corrupt that FDR famously put him in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission because of his insider knowledge on Wall Street’s criminal ways) beat Richard Nixon because of only two states: Illinois and Texas. In Chicago, the Mafia rigged the vote to win Illinois by a fraction of a percentage point. Kennedy’s running mate LBJ has long been speculated of dirty tricks in Texas, including running votes accords the border, to get the state to go for JFK. To political insiders the fraud was apparent, and Nixon was so traumatized by the stolen loss that he masterminded the Watergate scandal twelve years later to ensure victory. Another instance of a common corrupt element of Washington politics only controversial because it was revealed to the public.
1960 is still a while ago, you might say… but only when we college students were born, 2000, is another perfect example of a ‘rigged’ US election. We all know the infamous Bush v. Gore controversy in Florida. Studies showed less than a year after Bush’s inaugural that Gore actually won Florida by ~100 votes, despite the courts (and counties) intervening and making Bush win. If Florida was called correctly, in other words, Gore would have been President. So already we have a recent instance of a Presidential candidate having an election stolen from him.
But in terms of rigging votes, in the eve of the electors’ vote, Gore aide Bob Beckel failed in a secret attempt to sway electors to jump ship and vote for Gore. It even caused the RNC chairman to respond with an email asking staff to “Help Stop Democratic Electoral Tampering.”
But if you really want evidence of actual, hardcore ballot tampering in recent memory, just look 4 years back! Those familiar with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign remember (and not fondly) that Bernie’s primary votes were being stuffed everywhere except ballot boxes. Dumpsters, carted off in cars… it’s an open secret in the DNC that the vote was rigged against Bernie because he was too radical for the party ticket.
To make a long story short: American politics are corrupt. Election fraud is part of that. Many politicians and most of the legacy newsmedia are part of the ruling class of the American Empire; a class that profits from the public’s complacency and belief that the system is fair while our elite profits from pillaging 3rd world countries with wars and resource extraction. Donald Trump, while once part of this group, represents an enormous existential threat to our global empire’s continuity, globalization itself, and the elite’s safety. By believing a New York Times/Twitter/Google ‘fact check’ that election fraud is fake, you’re believing a lie used to keep the ruling political class in power.
Americans Who Don’t Trust Elections
Bryson Piscitelli is a Sophomore from Raleigh, NC studying Contemporary European Studies and Peace, War, & Defense. Besides serving as our Editor-in-Chief, he is a Philanthropic Senator in the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies on campus.