Mollie Hemingway: Rigged

  

In a post written in March 2021 I wrote: 

“President Trump did not lose the election, the Democrats won it. How they won it, with the most lackluster candidate in memory, is a story that remains to be told.”

Molly Hemingway’s “Rigged” a well-documented and carefully researched book on the 2020 Presidential election goes a long way toward telling the story. Early in the book she states her thesis by referring to a Time magazine article published on 2/4/2021 shortly after the inauguration of President Joe Biden.

 “Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump. Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests.” [36]

I recall that shortly after the election some news sources admitted that there had been fraud but claimed that it wasn’t enough to change the results.  Then, we were told that there was no evidence of “widespread” fraud. This latter claim soon became a kind of mantra even in respected newspapers like the Wall Street Journal.

But Mollie Hemingway’s book demonstrates that the fraud did not have to be widespread to steal the election. On the contrary, the efforts were targeted at a handful of key swing states with pinpoint accuracy. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona, key states that Trump had won in 2016, were the prime targets.

Hemingway describes the efforts of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to pour millions of dollars into these key states to generate votes in targeted Democratic districts under the guise of supporting increased voter participation.  Private organizations were set up to embed their operatives into the election process and even take charge of the processing and counting.

In Wisconsin, Hemingway notes that “After the Wisconsin legislature passed a bill banning private funding of election operations by a 60-36 margin in the state assembly and by an 18-14 margin in the state senate, Governor Tony Evers vetoed the ban. Without tech oligarchs buying the administration of the state’s elections, Democrats stand to lose.“ [222]

In Georgia, despite a Republican governor and secretary of state, the voting and counting in Fulton county with 1 million voters was controlled by Democrats. In chapter 10, entitled “The Trouble with Fulton County, “ Hemingway describes  the goings on in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena where hundreds of thousands of  absentee ballots were to be counted. She quotes a tweet from David Shafer, the chairman of the  Georgia Republican party.

“Fulton County elections officials told the media and our observer that they were shutting down the tabulation center at State Farm Arena at 10:30 p.m. on election night only to continue counting ballots in secret until 1:00 a.m. No one disputes that Fulton County elections officials falsely announced that the counting would stop at 10:30 p.m. No one disputes that Fulton County elections officials unlawfully resumed the counting of ballots after our observers left the center.” [290]

Here are some quotes from Hemingway’s account of  the election in Pennsylvania, a state with a rabidly anti-Trump governor, and a history of election fraud.

“In 2020, South Philadelphia judge of elections Dominick DeMuro pleaded guilty to taking bribes to stuff the ballot box in multiple elections.“ [252]

“Nearly $35 million in Zuckerberg funds flowed into government offices in Democratic strongholds of Pennsylvania to assist Democrats with their mail-in-voting push.” [256]

“The Democrats in Philadelphia did not have to allow the Trump campaign any observation of the vote counting. “ [260]

“That court’s ruling was overturned by the liberal Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which admitted that the ballots were violations of the election code but said that they should be counted in any case. “ [263]

According to Hemingway, Pennsylvania was crucial not only in the election but in the aftermath. She blames the Trump team for concentrating on minor issues like the thousands of dead voters on the registration rolls when it should have concentrated on the way in which voters and votes were treated differently in different parts of the state. This failure had great significance.

“By wasting time on less relevant claims, an important lawsuit failed. It had catastrophic effects for the remaining legal battles. Pennsylvania could have been the first domino to fall for the Trump campaign in a sequence of tightly contested courtroom victories. Instead, it was the beginning of the end for the campaign’s effort to hold Democrats accountable for foul play. It also had a ripple effect throughout the legal community. The media were soon dismissing all legal challenges as baseless attempts to prove widespread fraud ignoring more substantive claims. The avalanche of bad publicity scared off credible lawyers from participating in further election challenges on behalf of the Trump campaign, and it made judges inclined to view any such challenges, no matter how merited, with suspicion. [275]

Even the influential Wall Street Journal, my favorite newspaper, showed a reluctance to investigate claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Its news department, which has been leaning left in recent years, never did an independent investigation of the charges. The more conservative editorial page now just continually refers to charges of fraud as dubious. 

Now, charges that the election was rigged or stolen are regarded as unpatriotic or even treasonous. Former President Trump is routinely blamed  for continuing to dispute the legitimacy of the election, despite the fact that subsequent disclosures have backed him up. A court had ordered Pennsylvania  to remove over 200000 deceased persons from its voter rolls before the election, but the state only did so months after the election. Only after the Biden inauguration did the Washington Post admit that it had mis-quoted President Trump’s now famous phone conversation where he supposedly insisted an election official in Georgia find thousands of votes.

In a brief epilogue entitled, “Consent of the Losers,” Hemingway points out that consent of the losers to the result of an election is important in a democracy. However, she details have over the past few decades Democrats have repeatedly claimed that Republican presidential victories were illegitimate. The 2000 Bush-Gore contest is a case in point, but how can anyone seriously blame President Trump when Democrats from Hillary Clinton on down still refuse to accept the legitimacy of the 2016 election even after multiple investigations have shown that the Russia collusion charge was a hoax inspired by the Democratic party itself.*

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*Hemingway's sources and notes take up almost 100 pages.