Now Comes the Hard Part
Will the truth that dare not speak its name jeopardize the election?
If you’re as old as I am, you remember the election of ‘76.
No, not 1976…1876.
OK, just kidding, but if you’re one of those still stewing about Donald Trump’s so-called ‘fake electors,’ you should have been around for the Rutherford B. Hayes campaign. Indeed, contested states in 1876 submitted competing elector ‘certificates’ cobbled together by partisan canvassing boards, Attorneys General, Secretaries of State and even outgoing Governors.1
Denied at the time by a Republican-leaning institutional press, historians now agree the election was stolen from Samuel Tilden in favor of Hayes.
Despite media gaslighting, election irregularities have a long history in America. From Tammany Hall in New York to Chicago’s ‘city bosses’ (Cook County, anyone?) to ‘landslide’ Lyndon Johnson’s shenanigans at the ballot box during his 1948 Senate run-off in Texas.2
So why would so many people, on the left and right, treat ballot integrity as the proverbial elephant in the living room?
Especially since COVID-era changes to election law ushered in drop boxes, early voting and record numbers of absentee ballots with unusually low rejection rates. All engineered, as we’ve noted in Jason’s Newsletter, by folks determined not to let a good crisis go to waste.
Well, you know why.