It’s a painful subject but Mollie Hemingway has delved into how recent elections have been cooked. From David Gordon at mises.org:
Rigged! How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections
by Mollie Hemingway
Regnery Publishing, 2021, 432 pp.
Mollie Hemingway, an editor of the online magazine The Federalist, calls our attention in this well-researched book to a problem of vital significance. She is a supporter of Donald Trump, though not an uncritical one, and writes from this point of view, but whether you like the former president or not, you cannot ignore her message.
She begins the book with a paradox. Almost all the polls predicted a decisive win for Biden in the November 2020 presidential election, but in fact the result, setting aside altogether the allegations of rigged voting by the former president and his supporters, was very close: “The political class, the corporate media, and their pollsters were all dramatically wrong, and yet Biden would eke out a presidential victory of just under 43,000 votes across three states, out of a total of nearly 160 million.”(p.36. All page references are to the Amazon Kindle edition.) Why were the polls so inaccurate?
One answer would be mistakes in the way in polls were conducted, but Hemingway sees something more sinister in the errors. The inaccurate polls were part of a massive campaign by the government and corporate elite to ensure Trump’s defeat in the election. This campaign continued the efforts by the same elite to secure his defeat in the 2016 election; and, when those efforts failed, to derail his presidency.
Hemingway stresses especially one tactic used in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. In previous elections, most voting took place on the appointed day in November, and although some people cast absentee ballots, these were of minor importance. No longer is this the case, and voting by mail now predominates. “’No excuse’ absentee voting allows citizens to cast their ballots early. With the widespread adoption of this practice in recent years, the United States can no longer be said to have an election day in the strict sense of the term. The country has a months-long voting season. . .In 2016, absentee and mail-in ballots accounted for roughly 33 million of the 140 million ballots counted. In 2020, more than 100 million of the 159 million ballots counted were cast prior to Election Day, including by early voting.” (p.222) This is of great significance, Hemingway says, because fraud is much easier with this sort of voting: it is much harder to verify signatures and voters’ addresses.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 