Long before Trump pushed the Big Lie beginning on election night 2020 he had begun sowing doubt about the upcoming election. It was nothing new; going back to the 2016 election he had whined about the election being “rigged” for Hillary Clinton.
“Mail Voting is a Fraud”
Probably knowing he was headed for defeat in 2020, he reprised that line, specifically claiming that there would be nefarious activities with mail-in voting, which expanded greatly because of Covid, but in fact had been well-established long before that…
“…As TIME reported in its recent roundup of state laws for voting by mail in 2020, five states were already holding entirely mail-in elections before the pandemic—Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah. Twenty-nine states and Washington D.C. allowed “no excuse” mail-in absentee voting, and 16 states allowed voters to cast a ballot by mail if they had an excuse. In the 2016 presidential election, about 1 in 4 voters cast their votes via ballots mailed to them. Despite claims of vote fraud when voting is conducted outside of polling places, only 0.00006% of the 250 million votes by mailed ballots nationwide were fraudulent, according to MIT political scientists who analyzed numbers from the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database.” (emphasis mine)— TIME, September 28, 2020, Voting by Mail Dates Back to America’s Earliest Years. Here’s How It’s Changed Over the Years
“Stop the Count!”
Trump had been told by his advisers that the election results would begin with a “Red mirage” because Republicans — especially after hearing Trump call mail voting into question — would vote in person on election day while a far higher percentage of Democrats voted by mail, a condition that would artificially inflate Trump’s early margins because mail-in ballots generally were counted after the on-the-day votes. Knowing that, he — incredibly but not surprisingly — called for the vote counting to stop (Trump calls for vote counting to stop as path to victory narrows, Biden urges all to 'stay calm' ).
“Stop the Steal”
After Biden was declared the winner came the shenanigans of calling in GOP state legislators to cajole and arm-twist them into refusing to certify election results; doing the same with secretaries of State and Governors (recall the infamous call that GA SecState Brad Raffensberger recorded and released “ …I just need 11,780 votes”; the lies about election machines that flipped votes (that cost FOX “news” three-quarters of the billion dollars for aiding and abetting those lies), and about election workers in GA (which has bankrupted Rudy Giuliani for his slander)…of course, this all resulted in the tragic outrage of January 6…and the subsequent lies that these hoodlums were heroes.
Look for January 6 to supplant July 4th if these people ever taste power again.
Thanks for reading Out-Takes and Sidebars! Subscribe for free…and SHARE to spread the word.
IT’S GONNA HAPPEN AGAIN…
The main purpose of this post is to point out to you that the Big Lie is being rolled out again, with Trump telling his cult that the only way “we” can lose is if there is rampant fraud, highlighted by “illegals” voting. He started this cycle at least as early as the New Hampshire primary:
While Trump generally refrains from claiming voter fraud in elections he wins, he spends plenty of time laying the groundwork to cry fraud should he lose an upcoming vote. He’s already been doing that with an eye toward November’s general election.
“They used COVID to cheat. And they did a lot of other things, too. We’re not going to let that happen,” Trump said of Democrats in his Tuesday night speech to supporters in New Hampshire. “You can never forget history, because if you forget, you never, you never recover from it. And you repeat.”
For months, Trump has been alleging that he could be the victim of fraud in November, making the same sort of explosive, groundless allegations that fueled the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and have continued to spark a wave of threats against election workers nationwide. Trump made similar allegations before the 2020 election, predicting for months there would be widespread fraud that November and contending he could only lose if the election was stolen from him.
“He’s doing it out in full view,” said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and coauthor of “The Big Truth,” about Trump’s 2020 election lies. “If he is the Republican nominee, he has made clear that he’ll lie about an election that he’s lost.”
So we have to turn out voters in such large numbers as to make it that much harder to peddle these lies. And we need to remind our family, friends, acquaintances of this tactic so as to inoculate the (sane portion of) the population against these lies.
We’re in this fight together.
Thanks for reading Out-Takes and Sidebars! If you found it entertaining or informative I hope you’ll sign up for a free subscription.
Thank you for reading Out-Takes and Sidebars. If you were entertained or informed by it, pass it on to a friend and/or share it on Facebook.
Solid concise overview of the ominous threat to our sacred elections. Thanks. But I don't know how we can ever get even one a single solitary Trump supporter to ever read a full page of facts.
Solid concise overview of the ominous threat to our sacred elections. Thanks. But I don't know how we can ever get even one a single solitary Trump supporter to ever read a full page of facts.