US election count: broken election system needs radical reform

The “narrative” being peddled by America’s mainstream media and associated liberal elites, condemning the Republicans’ legal contesting of the election results and President Trump’s refusal to concede, demonstrates the total lack of self-awareness of the Left.

The claim that Donald Trump should have conceded the election on 4 November and gone quietly comes implausibly from the people who refused to accept Trump’s victory in 2016 – remember the protests, the “pussy hats”, the whole rejectionist circus, culminating in a travesty presidential impeachment. Nor is there any truth in the myth that Trump’s resistance is “unprecedented”: as long ago as 1876, the disputed presidential election between Tilden and Hayes took more than four months to resolve.

It is not “subverting” the constitution, the law, or democracy to invoke those institutions to establish the legitimate outcome of an election. It is what the courts and the law are for: coronation of a presidential contender by the media has no validity in American law.

When allegations of voting improprieties began being freely traded on 4 November, the reaction of the mainstream media was unanimously disdainful. The message conveyed by the voice of authority – or, rather, of entitlement – was clear: “The US presidential election of 2020 has been impeccably conducted, its results are beyond reproach. Nothing to see here – move along, please.”

But parts of the American public declined to move along and are persuaded there was much to see and insisted on seeing it. Where the media and the Democrat leadership misread the situation was in imagining the controversy over voting was exclusively about the outcome between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In fact, it is about something much bigger: the integrity of the voting process that is the foundation of America’s democracy. That is why some registered Democrats have recently been found among the demonstrators demanding electoral transparency.

America, unlike Britain, does not have a neutral head of state who stands above politics, no Zadok the Priest and religious anointing, nobody to hold the ring when the political process is deadlocked: the Founding Fathers threw all that out when they gave George III his congé. In its place they substituted an enduring Constitution, a growing corpus of law and a sophisticated electoral system. It is that 1789 settlement that is now in jeopardy and it is that, and the freedoms it embodies, rather than the career of Donald Trump, that is energising millions of Americans to rise in its defence.

The question of whether America has fair elections embraces much more than just the voting system or alleged fraud in its operation. Yet that issue cannot be ignored. Is it as watertight and secure as patronising liberal elitists assure their countrymen? Well, to start on the nursery slopes, at the Looney Tunes level, consider a recent development in California. Consider the case of the exotically named Carlos Antonio De Bourbon Montenegro, a self-described “ceremonial high magician”, who finds himself in some difficulties with the authorities.

Last Tuesday, this magician was accused of conjuring more than 8,000 false voter registration applications for “fictitious, non-existent or deceased persons”, to advance his campaign to become mayor of Hawthorne, in Los Angeles county. He was indicted on 41 charges, along with an accomplice facing lesser counts. This alleged fraud has nothing to do with the Trump/Biden contest and so can be viewed objectively. Its significance is this: if someone can progress so far in an attempt to steal a Mickey Mouse local election, what scope must there be for major party machines armed with enormous funds and high-tech expertise to intervene in an election where the Oval Office and the nuclear trigger are among the prizes?

Pace the po-faced elites, dead people voted in this presidential election: the evidence has been produced. However, it is not a credible mechanism of manipulation on any considerable scale and it would be sheer fantasy to imagine it changed the outcome of the election. It remains significant, however, as an indicator of a flaw in the system, at least, and potential fraud. By far the most potentially powerful factor is electronic voter fraud – or even genuine error.

Take the electoral audit in Georgia. In three counties – Walton, Fayette and Floyd – a total of 5,487 missing votes were discovered. In all three counties those votes heavily favoured Trump over Biden: in Walton by 176 over 108, in Fayette by 1,577 over 1,128 and in Floyd by 1,643 over 855. When reinstated, they represented a net gain of 1,305 votes for Donald Trump, previously ignored. The complacent tone of election officials discernibly changed after the exposure of this scandal and the election director in Floyd county has apparently been sacked.

Democrats still insist “Nothing to see here”; after all, what does a puny stack of just 5,487 votes amount to, in a state where Joe Biden has a comfortable lead of more than 12,000 out of almost five million votes? The fact remains that 5,487 Georgia electors would have been disfranchised but for this audit. How much confidence can Americans have in an electoral system that produces such discrepancies?

The towering issue is electronic voting. Some of the mythology surrounding the Dominion voting system has been dispelled; but nobody apart from a handful of pointy-head techies can speak with genuine authority on the reliability or otherwise of that system and they are not speaking with one voice. The hard reality is that parts of the American electorate now will never trust the Dominion system.

Covid has been used as the pretext for innumerable modifications of normal electoral practice – illegally, in some instances, as we saw in Pennsylvania. Only by returning to hand counting of votes and restricting postal ballots to rare and well-defined circumstances can confidence be restored in American electoral outcomes. By extending voting deadlines to extravagant limits, encouraging early voting, making absentee ballots too accessible, even by sending mail-in votes to people who did not request them, America’s core democratic exercise has been reduced to a state of incoherence and anarchy. That is hugely dangerous.

Many election officials have shown themselves shamelessly partisan. Why else would they bar Republican observers from counts, board up windows and indulge in all the other inappropriate antics, caught on omnipresent video, that have persuaded some voters that Trump’s denunciations have some basis in fact? They have brought upon themselves the suspicion of millions that is now paralysing American democracy.

Joe Public is by instinct sceptical, both of authority and of contending political parties. He is liable to judge the situation by key factors that do not rely on intricate investigation. Mainstream America has fastened onto one decisive fact: whenever a cache of uncounted votes is uncovered, it is invariably favourable to Trump: what is the mathematical probability of that occurring by accident?

But fair elections are about more than the vote count. How fair is an election where every major television network, except Fox, is biased against the Republicans and has been demonising them for four years? When social media are actively censoring conservative views, even from the President of the United States? When mad amounts of money are lavished on every Democrat candidate, down to dog-catcher?

In Detroit, for example, if you live in a Democrat neighbourhood you are never far from a drop box for ballots – you could vote half a dozen times on your way to the drugstore; if you live in a Republican area, you could walk for miles without finding one.

It is this all-enveloping environment of pro-Democratic partisanship, rather than any detectable mass misappropriation of votes by electronic means, that disadvantages Republicans. It was instructive to watch Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, being grilled by the relentless GOP Senator Josh Hawley, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Facebook’s censorship mechanisms.

Apparently, the worst technophobe on earth knows more about the internal workings of Facebook than does Zuckerberg. Ducking and weaving ineptly, he failed to give a straight answer to questions; always, he would have to consult and get back to the senator and his colleagues on their queries. After all, what would he know? – he is only the chief executive.

In this hostile climate it is remarkable that the Republicans have probably held the Senate, made good gains in the House and contested the presidency down to minimal margins of votes. This election is tainted in the eyes of Americans; Biden’s victory could not be more Pyrrhic. His campaign’s tactics have compromised his legitimacy; the Trumpists are united in an angry and revanchist conviction of having suffered an injustice. The urgent need is to restore public faith in the voting system: that can only be done by far-reaching reforms and it seems unlikely that Biden, the beneficiary of the current set-up, will meet that need.