We were warned back in 2016. Has it finally come to pass. A Princeton computer science professor showed how easy it was to hack a voting machine and urged Congress to secure voting. Less than two months later, Trump had won a surprise victory and there were deep concerns of Russian hacking. This led then Attorney General Jeff Sessions to launch an investigation, much to President Trump's chagrin. In Sessions' mind he was trying to assuage all the anxiety that surrounded an election in which Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million. The rest as they say is history. Or is it?
What's interesting to me is that Trump had virtually no coattails, similar to 2016. Republicans would have won these contested races with or without him, as Democratic senators were doomed in West Virginia and Montana and had only an outside chance in Ohio. If there was any senator who benefited from Trump's "surprise" victory it is Dave McCormick. He was projected to lose to incumbent Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, but managed to edge out the veteran senator by 17,000 votes, giving the Republicans a 53-47 majority in the Senate. Same as in 2016. As far as the House, it is going to shake out virtually identical to the last session.
In the five other "battleground states" that had statewide elections for senator and governor, Democrats won all of them. Other than North Carolina, the races were closer than anticipated but victories nonetheless. Three of the Senate races were won by women. Yet, Kamala Harris lost all five of these states.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories but it is exceedingly odd to me that Trump was able to outperform Republicans in statewide elections in virtually every state. Were there that many Democratic-leaning voters who chose to split their ballots? Surely they had to know the consequences of splitting their ballots. They may not like Kamala Harris for whatever reasons of their own but you would think the last person they wanted in the White House was Donald Trump.
What makes this so strange is that Trump chose to forsake a "ground game" in favor of a "virtual game." His voter outreach was almost exclusively through PACs that used social media as their primary means to get new voters. There were far fewer Trump volunteers going door to door than there were Harris volunteers. Not to mention, the Democrats were allegedly signing up new voters in droves, thanks in no small measure to Taylor Swift's endorsement. The Swifties were supposed to save the day for Kamala.
I admit I live in a bit of a bubble. I rely mostly on "liberal" media for my news. The closest I get to conservative media is Forbes and The Economist, but even they predicted Trump would lose. The Economist went so far as to endorse Harris because of the editors' contempt for Trump. You have to figure a lot of moderate Republicans were either going to vote for Harris or simply leave the top of the ticket blank.
Yet, Trump bettered his 2020 performance by 2 million votes! Mind you, 2020 had the highest percentage turnout in a century. Yet, Trump managed to retain all his votes from that election and then some, while Harris came up about 7.5 million short of Biden's mind-boggling 81 million votes. So much for the 47% ceiling. Trump cracked 50 percent to win the popular vote as well.
This is truly "unpresidented!" How on this green fucking planet can a guy who shifted so far to the right on virtually every issue better what was already a shocking performance in 2020, despite so many Republicans allegedly against him. Kamala Harris paraded no less than 20 former Republican leaders in front of a rally in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a week before the election and yet she lost the county to Trump, if only by 0.1 percent. No Republican presidential candidate had won Bucks County in 36 years!
Maybe it is as Jon Stewart facetiously said, the only thing you love more than having someone knocking on your door to discuss politics is the same person coming by two or three times. The Democratic Party could have learned a lesson from the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Still, the whole thing is hard to swallow. I know that election fraud is nearly impossible. We are told of the very low percentage of fraudulent ballots every election cycle. However, we are talking about a guy who looked so completely off the rails in the final weeks of campaigning that it appeared he had just given up and let whatever fly out of his mouth, like Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats. He was even caught dancing to his favorite songs at a town hall meeting rather than take any more questions. Maybe this endeared him to so-called undecided voters who like Trump had enough of all this campaigning and said, that's my guy!
But, and I say this with great trepidation, what if there was election fraud? What if his Silicon Valley bros found a way to game the system? What if they were able to siphon just enough votes off the top of the ticket to tilt this election in Donald's favor? You say no way, but that's what Trump and his minions have been saying for the last four years, so sure in their self-righteous indignation that Biden could have only won in 2020 by fraud because everyone loves Donald.
Well, one of these elections has to be fraudulent. How do you get such a tremendous swing nationwide that only seemed to affect the top of the ticket. There was no "red wave." Republicans took the Senate because the races favored them. Yet, they still lost Nevada and Arizona, which overwhelmingly went for Trump. Are you telling me that voters were fine with Jacky Rosen and Ruben Gallego but couldn't accept Kamala Harris as President? Tammy Baldwin and Elissa Slotkin squeaked by in Wisconsin and Michigan but Trump wins both states by similar margins. Hmmm?
Meanwhile, Democrat Josh Stein won North Carolina in a landslide and yet many of the same voters turned right around and voted for Trump. This after Hurricane Donald claimed former Governor Cooper's office was withholding aid to red counties in the state. Granted, Josh's opponent was revealed as a "Black Nazi" but were North Carolina voters really that gullible to buy Trump's claims even after state and federal officials showed up in the disputed counties, including Cooper, Biden and Harris.
Either his Silicon Valley bros found a way to bend people's minds in key voting districts or they were able to tamper the untamperable ballot boxes. OK, you ask how? Here are three ways. The article dates back to 2019 when the FBI was actively investigating if Russia had hacked the 2016 election.
The FBI ultimately concluded "cyber deception," which is basically finding ways to bend voters' minds through deceptive means. With the increased AI now available, this does make the most sense, and unfortunately is legal, relatively so anyway, as you aren't engaging directly with voter registration or the voting machines themselves. However, I thought we would have learned our lessons from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and that voters would be more aware of fake news this time around.
Attacking the voter registration process is not much of a stretch, especially since Russia allegedly did it in 2016, hacking into databases in two Florida counties. Once in, you can draw from the ranks of unregistered citizens and use mail-in or drop-off ballots to register these votes in their names. No one has to appear in person at a polling station. If the voter information and signature match the registration card you're good to go. The persons who had their identities lifted are none the wiser because they didn't show interest in the first place.
We already know about the massive purges of voter registration databases carried out by state officials in Florida and Texas, where Trump won overwhelmingly this time around. But, you need to win the battleground states. This requires a little sleight of hand. These states all saw surges in voter registration and had turnouts that matched or exceeded 2020. With all the news focused on the power of Swifties to boost voter registration, it was a perfect cover to load a few names favorable to your man at the top of the ticket.
The last option is probably the least likely as it would require persons engaging directly with the voting machines, either by infiltrating a supply chain, like Dominion, or gaining physical access to the polling booth itself and hacking the machine by inserting malware that manipulates the vote tally. You figure you might get away with this in a few isolated situations but not on a major scale.
My bet is on hacking the registration process. Elon had already been accused of skating on thin ice with his dummy registration websites. Perhaps a clever ruse, as he took aim at the actual registration websites themselves. I say this because these people are not playing by any rules other than their own and will stop at nothing to get the results they want. Elon himself facetiously warned that if Trump lost the election he would end up in jail.
In fact, they all could have very easily ended up in jail if Trump lost for a variety of crimes that extended far beyond election fraud. With Trump now in the White House, they can go after their perceived enemies, contriving false charges the way they contrived false claims before and using the Department of Justice as the political tool they condemned Biden for using in pressing charges against Trump.
We really do need to grasp the enormity of what's at stake here. Trump wants Matt Gaetz as his Attorney General, a vindictive little man, who is facing ethics violations of his own and barely managed to skate clear of sex trafficking charges with his underaged "girlfriend." This isn't going to be a normal White House by any stretch of the imagination.
In 2016, Republicans tried to put guard rails on Trump by pushing for a relatively stable cabinet culled from respected conservative ranks, virtually all of whom have spoken out against him since the insurrection attempt on January 6, 2021. This time around, Trump is drawing his cabinet almost entirely from the Fox Rogues' Gallery. What better way to cover up all the lies, deceit and I would go so far as to say election fraud committed during the 2024 campaign.
Anyway, I had to get this out of my system. Only time will tell if there was more to this surprise victory than meets the eye. In the meantime, I brace myself for what will be a very turbulent four years with the only hope of putting the brakes on Trump's wild ride is that the Democrats retake the House in 2026 like they did in 2018. If Trump's Silicon Valley bros were able to hack the system to get him elected then they will probably find ways to keep Congress red.
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