Everybody Knows the Fight is Fixed, Everybody Knows the Vote was Rigged

“THE ELECTION IS RIGGED,” Donald Trump kept saying, in the last days of his campaign, when every poll on earth showed him losing to Hillary Clinton by a comfortable margin.

The President-Elect [sic] has elevating lying to an art form, but maybe, just maybe, this time he was telling the truth.

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The head of the National Security Agency is on record saying Russian tampering with the election is a concern. There isn’t a scintilla of doubt as to which candidate Vladimir Putin prefers.

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The Republican game-plan for winning elections hinges on making sure people of color don’t vote. This outcome is achieved by restrictive voter registration laws of the kind exposed this year in North Carolina as egregiously targeting blacks.

Investigative journalist Greg Pallast calls this “Crosscheck,” and it allows Republican overseers to invalidate voter rolls of certain voters (i.e., black ones) by nefarious methods known as “caging” and “purging.”

Republicans claim that the purpose of these laws is to prevent election fraud—individuals voting “early and often,” as the saying goes. The opposite result is achieved; by disenfranchising voters of color, the elections are fraudulent.

Babe Ruth is only the best baseball player of all time because the powers that be didn’t allow black players to play.

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Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote by a million votes and counting. (Not “millions” and not “two million.” Present the facts accurately, please).

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Exit polling in key swing states does not correlate with 1) pre-election polling, or 2) final vote counts in those states. While there are some reasons why this discrepancy might happen, it remains highly unusual. Here is a table, which I’ve borrowed from this helpful study by Jonathan Vankin at Heavy, which shows the razor-thin results:

FLORIDA — 29 Electoral Votes

(numbers equal percentage points)

Exit Polls: Clinton 47.7, Trump 46.4 — Clinton wins by 1.3

Actual: Clinton 47.8, Trump 49.0 — Trump wins by 1.2

Trump gain between exit polls and actual results: 2.5

NORTH CAROLINA — 15 Electoral Votes

Exit Polls: Clinton 48.6, Trump 46.5 — Clinton wins by 2.1

Actual: Clinton 46.1, Trump 49.9 — Trump wins by 3.8

Trump gain: 5.9

PENNSYLVANIA — 20 Electoral Votes

Exit Polls: Clinton 50.5, Trump 46.1 — Clinton wins by 4.4

Actual: Clinton 47.6, Trump 48.8 — Trump wins by 1.2

Trump gain: 5.6

WISCONSIN — 10 Electoral Votes

Exit Polls: Clinton 48.2, Trump 44.3 — Clinton wins by 3.9

Actual: Clinton 47.6, Trump 48.8 — Trump wins by 1.2

Trump gain: 5.1

Vankin says: “With 270 of the 538 available required to win the presidency, Clinton fell 38 electoral votes short of victory. If the exit polls had reflected actual results in any three out of the four swing states — Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Clinton would be president-elect today. Also, if exit polls had been correct in Florida and only one of the other three swing states, Clinton would have won the election.”

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Edward Snowden showed a video on how easy it would be to hack a voter machine, for a total budget of $30.

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Maybe the pollsters, and all the experts, were not wrong. Maybe the candidate who won the most popular votes won the antediluvian Electoral College tally as well, only the votes were not counted accurately.

If so, neo-Fascist Donald Trump, the least qualified and most dangerous presidential candidate in the history of this country, is the beneficiary of a right-wing coup. He’s grabbed the highest office in the land like he grabs….well, you know.

Enough with post-mortems on why Hillary lost (she won), or whether Trump voters are all racists (they are, whether they admit it or not), and let’s expose this ultimate of grand larcenies. Democrats capitulate far too quickly, and are too eager to make nice-nice. Let’s fight this injustice, before it’s too late. Let’s make damned sure that the election results are true.

A few months of chaos and uncertainty are preferable to four years of chaos and incompetence—and, quite possibly, the death of the republic. Because that’s what’s at stake here.