In the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his voters faced media interference, suspicious ballot dumps, politicized censorship of information, low-security election laws, polling place issues, and legally dubious Democrat get-out-the-vote operations.
In the 2024 election, Donald Trump and his voters faced media interference, suspicious ballot dumps, politicized censorship of information, low-security election laws, polling place issues, and legally dubious Democrat get-out-the-vote operations. On top of those, he faced two assassination attempts and a political lawfare campaign designed to bankrupt and jail him. The fact that Trump succeeded in making this election “too big to rig” doesn’t make those problems any less threatening to self-governance.
After 2020, concerned Americans started paying more attention to the security of our elections. Often on their own time, they perused voter rolls, filed public records requests, and researched election law. After 2020, they uncovered shady schemes like “Zuckbucks” — an effort to dump billions in “grants” into left-leaning jurisdictions in swing states to juice Democrat turnout — that had influenced that election.
By 2024, they had accumulated a body of research on proven or potential flaws in our elections. States that automatically register residents to vote, but don’t require proof of citizenship to do so, created opportunities for noncitizens to end up on voter rolls, sometimes unknowingly so. Overly broad laws governing overseas voters allowed people to vote in certain swing states despite never setting foot there. States with mass mail voting regimes ended up sending ballots to the wrong places, with no way to make sure they didn’t wind up in the hands of bad actors. Laws allowing undated ballots to be turned in after Election Day welcomed illegitimate behavior. States that don’t require ID to vote — or that treat noncitizen licenses as qualifying IDs — invited fraud and decreased confidence in elections. Election officials’ decision to keep dead, moved, or otherwise unqualified “voters” on the voter rolls practically invited abuse.
Despite the attention drawn to them, all of those problems still exist.
Other problems were reincarnated as new ones. As quickly as sunlight dried up the Zuckbucks pipeline, the federal government replaced it with something worse: a taxpayer-funded scheme to target likely Democrat votes. While Elon Musk transformed Twitter from the chief censorship engine to a free speech platform, actors like Facebook, YouTube, and Google doubled down. While alternative media outlets drew attention to election red flags, the legacy press labeled anyone who questioned the process “election deniers.”
Donald Trump’s win proved the Democrat election rigging machine isn’t impregnable. But it also showed just how much “rigging” you have to overcome to win. And in several Senate races around the country, other Republicans didn’t.
Hellbound and Down 