How to Rig an Election
Voting American Style
Rigging an American election does not happen the way most people think, because America does not have one big giant election. First, we have 50 state elections that all have to merge for one set of results. And those state elections get results from lots of counties. Each of these elections is an independent event with its own election commission, electoral authorities, and ways of doing things. States establish their own rules, so election rules in Michigan are different than rules in Louisiana.
So if you want to rig the Presidential election, you have to deal with the fact that there are thousands of individual, separate, unconnected elections.
A great website called HereIsTheEvidence details all of the many individuals pieces of evidence that the 2020 election was rigged. You’ll see that the list of links is vast and the site gets kind of boring, because there is no one big piece of evidence, no smoking gun. It’s thousands of little pieces of evidence. Sworn affidavits, documents, witnesses testifying about shenanigans they observed. None of them on their own would be even remotely sufficiently to overturn an election. It’s the volume that proves the election was stolen, but the volume is also the very reason people get bored going through the evidence.
But, relax, if you wanted to steal an election, you don’t have to fix thousands of individual elections. The way to fix an election is pick the vulnerable spots and mess around with those elections. Some states are “swing states” which means that they can go red or blue and races can be won or lost with razor-thin margins. Within those swing states, you can often find a swing county, a county that can sway the entire state results. For instance, if you can rig the election in Philadelphia or Chicago, you may be able to push the whole state of Pennsylvania or Illinois in the direction you want it to go.
Let’s start with popular vote. It’s not as easy to rig as you might think, but it definitely do-able.
One problem with rigging an election is that you are dealing with a finite pool of voters. In 2022, there were 161,420,000 registered voters in the United States. Let’s just say 161M for easier math. This is a lot; there were just 155M in 2020 and 138M in 2016.
Let’s say you want to rig the election against Trump. And let’s say the natural and unadulterated voting outcome is 120M voters for Trump. You can’t rig that election for Biden because the only way he could win is to get more than 120M votes and you don’t have 240M voters. So when it comes to the popular vote, you can get situations were an election win is “too big to rig.”
In the United States, we have an electoral college which gives us an interesting wrinkle in vote rigging. Each state is awarded a specific number of Electors based on state population. Some states get a lot—California has 55, Texas 38, Florida 29. And states with smaller populations get fewer, like Arkansas with 6, New Mexico with 5, and poor little old Maine with 4. When the state holds its Presidential election, the winner gets all of the electoral votes for that state. The winner is the candidate with at least 270 electoral votes.
The popular vote and electoral vote often produce the same results, but it is possible to win one and lose the other, as Hillary Clinton found out in 2016. Only the Electoral College counts, so savvy candidates develop strategies that go for the Electors. It’s why losing California is a big deal (you lose all 55 Electors) but losing North Dakota is not a tragedy (you lose all 3 Electors).
But let’s say the race in California is close, so millions vote for one candidate and millions more vote for the other, but the winner nabs all 55 Electors. This can set up a disparity because even though you lost 100% of the Electors, you may have gotten 49% of the vote.
Now considering that some states are very valuable in terms of Electors, you have to rig the election carefully. You want to pick vulnerable spots in high-Elector states. In 1960, when Joe Kennedy allegedly rigged the election with help from organized crime to put his son Jack in the White House, it was by rigging Chicago. That was all. Illinois is a high-Electorate state and Chicago is the lynchpin that can sway the vote. Kennedy was running against Nixon and they were running neck and neck. By just giving Kennedy a boost in Chicago, he took Illinois and walked away with the race. (Because truth and due process matter, the Kennedy vote-rigging scam never been proven but is widely alleged and is certainly possible.)
Let’s get back to corruption. So to rig an election, you need to find an election guru to know where to set up your operation.
Then you need a good method. Sometimes the old-school methods are the best: you can stuff the ballot box with phony votes (easy with mail-in voting) or you can double count votes. A new wrinkle is that you can claim a high number of mail-in ballots are illegible; in some states that kicks them into a pile for “adjudication” which means a poll worker looks at them individually and decides who they are for. And then it’s case closed. So a poll worker may make a good faith effort to adjudicate the ballots or he can simply award them all to his preferred candidate. There is no court of appeals. And while only a tiny number of ballots go into adjudication, in some districts in 2020, a very large number of the mail-ins were adjudicated.
If you go old-school and stuff the ballot boxes, it helps if you shut the counting place down while you haul in or “find” these extra ballots. In the 2020 election, several swing states mysteriously closed in the middle of the night. When they opened the next morning, each and every one had a victory for Biden although Trump was in the lead when the place shut down. You don’t have to do this everywhere, just the strategic places.
Now you may wonder why you’d have to shut down the polls to pull this off. The answer is that you do not know in advance how many phony ballots you have to create. For instance, let’s say Biden was winning 51% to 49% against Trump. You wouldn’t need to stuff the ballot box. But let’s say Trump was winning 51% to 49% for Biden. The election riggers would convert that into a numerical quantity of ballots and create only enough to push Trump out of the race. They might not need 100,000 phony ballots, they might just need 8,000. Stuffing the ballot box is fraught with peril because you must create enough bogus ballots to throw the election, but if you make too many, you can run into arguments of implausibility, such as when your district as 1 million registered voters who cast 1.5 million ballots. Some victories are just too big to rig.
Voting machines can not only automate this process, they can help rig even a landslide. Some voting machines are built so you can program them to count half-votes. For instance, a vote for Biden could count as 1.5 votes and a vote for Trump counts 0.5 votes. Why would anyone need a voting machine that records fractional votes? Ask Dominion. But such an option means that your total voters are going to come out accurate, but the votes are going to go disproportionately toward one guy.
Mail-in voting and drop boxes detach the voter from the ballot so that dozens of ballots can be deposited without any chain of custody. These piles of ballots will be counted as if we knew where the ballots came from. For instance, mail-in ballots can be sent out en masse. In 2020, I got five of them although I requested none and voted in person. The idea is that every mail-in ballot is verified against voter registration rolls and signatures checked. I doubt that this is any kind of rigorous practice. Here are some ways that corrupt precincts might get around that:
The voter rolls can be filled with ineligible voters, and that’s the easy part. Most precincts do not clean their voter rolls as a matter of principle or tradition. So there are dead people on the list and people who moved out of the precinct. Precincts that hold voter drives and registration events can use them to register lots of imaginary people. Many systems allow mail-in voter registration or online registration.
Here is how you’d do it. You’d get a physical address like the city dump. Let’s pretend that’s a house. No, it’s a mansion. Now make up 27 fake names and register all of them (not all at once, you have to be subtle) at that address. Sign the forms and you have 27 new imaginary voters.
Make sure you’re at the dump when they deliver the 27 mail-in ballots—you may even get more than that.
Now you can vote 27 times and every ballot will match the voter rolls.
You can also register dead people. This is actually done. Just go to the cemetery, get some names, and register them at the city dump.
If you know dead people who are still on the rolls, you can vote on their behalf. Just request a ballot for your dead uncle or neighbor and then fill it out. Many communities do not routinely remove people. To do this on a larger scale, you need to monitor the obituaries.
I cannot prove it, but I am not convinced all mail-in ballots are verified against the rolls or matched with signatures, so you may be able to just print up your own ballots. In other words, print up 10,000 ballots and send them in. They might not get checked (this takes some synchronization since the polling place has to be in cahoots with you).
You can also ballot harvest. For this, you would take a stack of blank ballots (which many polling places will provide). Then go to a nursing room. Bring some snacks or other items with you and then go around, bed to bed, and ask people who they want to vote for. You can even fill out the ballot for them, which is helpful if they are nonresponsive or in a coma. Bribe them with small tokens and attention. Then if they are able, get their signature, if not sign them yourselves. This is a proven method and if you are “nice” and fill out the ballot for them, it doesn’t matter who they tell you they want to vote for. You fill it out for your guy. Then you bring all 100 ballots or so the polling place. That’s ballot harvesting.
In Minnesota, they perfected a slightly different method but it involves felony counterfeiting. In this case you go to people who are registered to vote and who got their mail-in ballots but had not yet filled them in. This takes a little advance publicity. Now you ask them to sign their totally legit ballot but leave it blank. In return, you give them $200. You get a legal and signed ballot from a registered voter and you can fill it out as you please and send it in or drop it in a drop box. The way this worked in Minnesota is that the vote-grifters paid in counterfeit money.
But there are many other ways to steal an election. If you control social media, you can block stories that might negatively affect your candidate, which is what happened when the New York Post was kicked off social media for publishing an accurate report about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Or you can boost stories that favor your guy. Social media is full of bots or automated accounts—in 2017, Twitter (now known as X) was made up of up to 15% bots. So you can program the bots to say, “Biden is wonderful” and “Trump is a threat to democracy” 10 billion times, and they will. Bots thrive on redundancy.
If you’ve got fat stacks like George Soros, you can pay hacks and trolls and ne’er-do-wells to post inane content on social media, lauding your guy and criticizing your enemy. This is similar to the bot method but with a tad more finesse. You can also hire influencers and celebrities. I can’t believe Rob Reiner and Barbra Streisand post regularly to X, formerly known as Twitter, about how great Biden is because they believe it; I suspect they’re sponsored. And some people really will vote for the person their celebrity idol tells them to vote for or they will vote for a guy who seems to get a lot of favorable attention on social media.
Tell me Taylor Swift really is a political animal who lives to promote Joe Biden? I suspect she was hired to do her recent blitz of Biden-friendly messages. She’s a savvy business woman, and I think you could hire her to tell the world Joe Biden is awesome. And Biden voters apparently can be swayed by pop stars.
Remember I told you there were over 3000 counties in the United States? In 2020, Biden won just 17% of those counties and Trump took the rest. But when the total votes were county, Biden racked up 81M and Trump 74M.
This looks hinky. Obama, who was enormously popular, had garnered just 69M votes in 2008. That Biden and Trump would both outnumber Obama’s first term votes is rather extraordinary, but the argument is that a lot of people voted in 2020, far more than votes in 2008, 2012, and 2016. A massive uptick in votes looks suspicious.
You need to infuse a lot of votes into the system to rig an election. In fact, if you go overboard rigging an election you’re going to get absurdly high numbers. And it’s hard to believe we would have such high voter turnout in 2020 since COVID was still raging, many people were afraid to go out, and some people had serious health issues that caused a loss of interest in the election. The 2020 election should have had fewer voters than the 2016 election, but instead it set a major record. That suggests not all of the votes counted were legit.
And sometimes the cheaters go so haywire that more votes are cast than there are registered voters! That has happened, but it is more common in local or regional elections than for president. Rule of thumb: you should always have far more registered voters than cast ballots.
Those are the main ways to rig an election. So are our elections rigged? I doubt America has ever had a pristine election. Are elections rigged to the point that outcomes are changed? I think it is not only possible, I think it has happened. But I cannot prove it. There are ways to harden our elections to make them more bullet-proof, and, strangely, Democrats universally oppose them. That’s perplexing since they are always shouting how much they love democracy and how much Republicans jeopardize democracy. (And by the way, we’re a republic not a democracy, but that’s another story for another day.) But even Republicans aren’t that enthused about voting reforms or ways to prevent cheating.
Here are some easy ways to fix those who are trying to fix our elections:
Clean up the voter rolls on an annual basis. Remove the dead guys. Remove the people who’ve moved. Remove the guys who have been incarcerated. Impose penalties on city or local officials who do not maintain reliable voter rolls.
Mandate voter ID, signature verification, and thumb prints. Many advanced countries require thumb print records to prove you are who your ID says you are.
Require in-person voting for everyone except those who truly cannot come to the polling place (such as invalids, military service personnel, people traveling for business). In other words, no more mail-in convenience voting.
Make election day be a holiday and have everyone vote the same day.
Once counting starts, no polling place may be closed or go off-line.
Use only paper ballots, counted that same day.
Polls should be watched by bipartisan observers and monitored by video cameras. If a video camera is broken or fails to work, the counting must stop while the counting room put under lockdown under the police until the cameras can be restored. Meanwhile, emergency cameras film the repair or replacement. (No room for hanky-panky.)
All paper ballots or video tapes must be retained for at least 10 years after the election.
Paper ballots and video should be available (as copies) for review by those with legitimate requests. In other words, if Mike Lindell wants to recount the 2020 Presidential ballots, let him. What do we have to hide?
Mail-in ballots that require adjudication must be adjudicated unanimously by at least two poll workers representing different parties. In other words, it’s not a vote for Biden unless both a Democrat and Republican poll-watcher say it is. (And reducing the number of mail-in ballots will reduce these phony adjudication scams.)
Anyone caught tampering with the election—even just running one ballot through a machine twice or throwing one ballot for Trump into the trash—should be charged with election fraud and, if convicted, face a minimum prison term of 1 year and a fine of $1M and be banned for life from voting and working in any capacity with a polling place. The sentence will increase depending on the severity of the tampering. My reasoning is that most people who tamper with elections do so for money, not ideological reasons. If the risk is too great, fewer people will be tempted by a few hundred bucks.
Our elections are not on the up-and-up because our politicians don’t want them honest. Many politicians like crooked elections, even if they sometimes lose. We don’t have paper ballots, regulated voter lists, and voter ID for one reason only—our political class does not want them. We, the people, have to demand them.
One more thing. Who says voting has to be convenient? I say, let’s make voting inconvenient. It is not racist, xenophobic, or unpatriotic to expect people to have a voter ID and show up at a polling place to exercise the privilege of voting. Getting your drivers’ license renewed is not convenient. Why should voting be?
When Republicans take over in 2025, the first thing we should do is harden our elections so that they are less easy to fix.
And one positive note: It is going to be hard to juke this election because if Trump wins by a landslide, there aren’t enough fake ballots in the world to swing the vote to Biden. For instance, if Trump get 150M votes, there is no way for Biden to get 151M. There aren’t 301M American voters. So no matter what you think about voting, please vote. We need an avalanche to shut down the cheating.