In the four years since the last presidential election, national and world events have given the American politi-sphere plenty of reasons to forget some of the many, many details of the days that immediately followed that election. Between then and now, Russia launched the largest European land invasion since World War II. The fight against COVID became the fight about COVID, from its origins to relevant treatments and vaccines. The Middle East is closer to full-scale war than it has been in decades. We finally beat Medicare.
Compared to major issues such as these, one could hardly be blamed for not continuing to ponder the failed electoral investigations in Arizona or failed electoral lawsuits in … just about everywhere. Donald Trump’s extraordinary efforts to prove that he didn’t lose in 2020, perpetually hampered by the fact that he did, slowly faded into the background. But with the next moment when America Decides now upon us, looking back upon the particulars of those efforts is also, very likely, also a method of looking forward, as the Trump campaign and its affiliates have spent months laying the groundwork for the argument that the only way Trump can lose another term in the White House is if the election is stolen from him. You know, again… sort of.
As they say, past is prologue, history rhymes, all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again, etc. Many Americans may not realize just how much they’re living through a replay of 2020, when Trump used the exact same playbook to sow doubts about the election long before any votes were cast. Thus, without further ado, a refresher on just some of the assertions that were made in 2020 and could very well be mimicked if Kamala Harris breaks the 270 electoral-vote mark at some point in the next week.
Hugo Chávez reaches out from the grave
The primary target of Team Trump’s 2020 ire was Dominion Voting Systems, the company that provided voting machines to all or parts of 28 states that year. But, for reasons that have never been adequately explained, it was not enough to merely claim that Dominion was inherently corrupt, or that its machines were easy to hack — rather, Trump’s lawyers stated that Dominion was secretly owned by another company, Smartmatic (it was not), that Smartmatic and Dominion were both founded by the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (they were not), and that Smartmatic developed software to rig Venezuelan elections before Chávez’s death in 2013, software that was subsequently installed on Dominion machines (it was not) in order to shift the 2020 results in favor of Joe Biden.
Oh, and Cuba and China were also involved. Somehow. Don’t ask for details.
Italian space lasers rig the vote
Have you ever suspected that a prisoner in a mid-tier European nation had always wanted to determine the outcome of an American election, but could only do so from space? Well, you’re not alone, as members of both the executive and legislative branches pressed for (and got) the Department of Defense to investigate the theory that an Italian hacker who was already behind bars for other crimes had managed to access his country’s military satellites, then used the intricate connections those satellites would obviously have had with U.S. voting machines to change the counts in places like Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It’s surprising that anyone even demanded evidence to support the claim, as it simply made too much sense. But quite a few “anyones” did, and despite the fact that two unidentified American officials somehow managed to sneak into the prison where the alleged hacker was being held and interrogate him about the plot (yes, what you just read is part of a real sentence about something that really happened), the prisoner staunchly refused to admit his part in handing the election to Biden, and the trail went cold from there.
The great Sharpie plot
In one of the earliest tales to come out of Arizona, Trump supporters alleged that Republican voters were given Sharpie pens for the purpose of filling out ballots, and those ballots were subsequently tossed out because machine counters couldn’t read Sharpie ink. Despite state officials from both parties explaining that machines could indeed read such ballots, a woman named Staci Burk quickly filed a lawsuit regarding the issue. Unfortunately for Burk, the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court ultimately determined that she lacked standing to file such a suit, because she hadn’t even bothered to register to vote in the election she supposedly cared so much about.
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Mighty Morphin Cyber Ninjas
While they may sound like a lame competitor to the Power Rangers, the Cyber Ninjas were actually a company hired by Arizona Republicans to conduct a “forensic audit” of the state’s ballots after standard recount practices were deemed to be insufficient, likely because those practices didn’t find any evidence of widespread fraud. What qualified these masters of digital martial arts to perform such a task? Well… nothing. Cyber Ninjas had, up until the audit, done occasional work providing security measures for random individual apps, offering this service through a website that featured people wearing actual ninja costumes and wielding katanas. The company had never been involved in any election, in any capacity. It was based two time zones away in Sarasota, Florida, although nobody in Florida politics had ever heard of the Ninjas.
Have you ever suspected that a prisoner in a mid-tier European nation had always wanted to determine the outcome of an American election, but could only do so from space?
The strangeness extended to the corporate “structure,” if you could call it that, for a business hired for such an important and complex task. According to CNN, “Cyber Ninjas exists mostly in virtual reality, with its chief executive, Doug Logan, also serving as, well, pretty much everything. On recent calls to the company’s automated answer line, pressing ‘3’ for sales led to the answering message for Logan. So did pressing ‘4’ for human resources. And pressing ‘5’ for purchasing. And ‘6’ for the general mailbox. Go to the address for Cyber Ninjas’ Legal Department, listed on its audit contract with the Arizona Senate, and you’ll wind up at a rented mailbox in a UPS Store in Sarasota, Florida. The company’s business address registered with Florida’s Secretary of State, also in Sarasota, was sold last December, and now sits empty.”
The most significant qualification that Cyber Ninjas had with respect to this particular job seemed to be the fact that their CEO was already convinced of the outcome: “I’m tired of hearing people say there was no fraud. It happened, it’s real, and people better get wise fast,” Logan tweeted in December of 2020. Still, after months upon months of overtly seeking out any possible justification for declaring Arizona’s election results to be falsified, the Ninjas ultimately found … no evidence whatsoever. Nada. Zilch. In fact, the final report stated that Biden had actually won Arizona by several hundred more votes than initially tallied, an outcome that can only be described as illegally ironic.
The bamboo-ballot switcheroo
One of the more bizarre rabbit holes the Ninjas fell into (which is saying a lot) was the theory that Arizona’s numbers were thrown off by the clandestine inclusion of tens of thousands of fake ballots that were created in China, smuggled into the U.S. and strategically placed by undercover operatives in election centers around the state. Leaving aside the fact that the details of this method would have made it so egregiously complicated that it would have been rejected by the writers of “Ocean’s Eleven,” the Cyber Ninjas announced that they could hunt for these fake ballots by looking for paper containing bamboo fibers — because if paper was printed in China, it must, of course, be made of bamboo. (Except most of it isn’t.)
This should go without saying, but no bamboo was ever found.
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Decease the Kraken
In late November of 2020, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell announced that she would "release the Kraken," in the form of lawsuits across the country that would (according to Powell) definitively overturn Biden’s victory. Unfortunately for Powell, the barrage of suits turned out to be less of the mythical sea monster and more of the mythical Leeroy Jenkins, with the not-exactly-official presidential attorney rushing headfirst into conflicts she clearly had not prepared for and had no chance of winning. Among the many, many glaring problems with her efforts were the inclusion of congressional candidate Derrick Van Orden in a Wisconsin suit without his consent or even knowledge (he heard about it from social media), a reference in another filing to a nonexistent county in Michigan, and a different reference within a Wisconsin case to severe voting irregularities that had supposedly occurred in … Detroit. Every “Kraken” suit eventually failed, including numerous appeals rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, which, with its 6-3 conservative advantage and three Trump-appointed justices, was nevertheless described by Powell as ”the rubble of a sinkhole of corruption.”
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This list could go on for pages and pages, but examining all the questionable actions taken by Trumpworld in 2020 is not the point here. The point is to highlight the fact that there really is no barrier to entry once a critical mass of people believe that an election was stolen, egged on by figures such as Kraken-custodian Sidney Powell herself, who say one thing in press conferences and very different things in court. Any theory, no matter how absurd, can fly when given the green light by those who should know better.
Gird your loins, everybody. This week — and perhaps next week too — could be a nightmare.
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