President Trump shocked the world on election night, outperforming polls in all the right places. And then for some reason key districts stopped counting votes.
Two weeks earlier, Joe Biden bragged about his ground game on camera. “We have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics,” Biden boasted. When Republicans posted the clip, leftist “fact-checkers” warned listeners not to believe their lying eyes and ears. Democrats dismissed the statement as a “gaffe.” Perhaps it was a Freudian slip.
Three days before the election, Pennsylvania’s Democrat attorney general called the state for Biden. “If all the votes are added up in PA, Trump is going to lose,” he tweeted.
Biden promised the same on election night. “It ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted,” declared Biden. “We’re going to win this.”
In normal years, only ballots cast by election day can count. But thanks to a court ruling last week, Pennsylvania’s Democrat-run government can now count ballots that arrive up to three days after the election, even without a clear postmark.
Republicans decry the “irregularities, but rigging elections has long been a regular feature of our republic, a lesson Lyndon Johnson learned the hard way in 1941. As Johnson’s biographer Robert Caro details in Means of Ascent, the future president had prided himself on his skill in stealing elections since college. As a congressional aide, LBJ stuffed the ballot box in elections for the presidency of the Little Congress, a meaningless club for staffers. In 1941, Johnson struck crooked deals and bought off county bosses to rig his race for Senate. But his opponents cheated better, and Johnson lost the race. LBJ turned to his patron FDR for advice.
“Lyndon, apparently you Texans haven’t learned one of the first things we learned up in New York State,” laughed President Roosevelt, “and that is that when the election is over, you have to sit on the ballot boxes.”
FDR’s advice did not necessarily entail corruption. On the contrary, he recommended Johnson defend against potential dirty tricks. The constitutionally corrupt Lyndon Johnson had focused so much on stuffing the ballot box that he had forgotten to prevent his opponents from doing the same.
Johnson learned the lesson by the time he ran for Senate in 1948. The primary election in Texas, then dominated by Democrats, determined whether Johnson or his opponent Coke Stevenson would win the seat. The Democratic State Central Committee took a week to count the million ballots cast. In the end, Johnson won by 87 votes.
LBJ owed his victory to the political machine of Jim Wells County and specifically to Box 13, which included 202 fraudulent ballots all filled out in the same pen and handwriting, some by men who later testified that they had never voted in the election. Johnson combined his own corruption with the common sense counsel to defend against fraud, and he guarded Box 13 all the way up to Washington. Caro exposed Johnson’s crime in 1990, nearly three decades after LBJ left the Senate and 21 years after he left the White House.
The 2020 elections have introduced many unprecedented irregularities to American politics, from widespread, unsolicited mail-in voting to a lengthening of the election season that caused many voters to wonder whether they could change their vote. But fraudulent ballots have precedence — so much that a sitting president joked about it to a future occupant of that office.
The ballots that arrived beginning in the wee small hours of election night have broken in a curious way for Biden, and many ballots may yet arrive. We do not yet know if corrupt Democrat officials have tried to rig this unusual election. But the window to find out is dwindling. The election is over, the honest votes have been cast, and President Trump needs to sit on the ballot boxes, or he won’t be sitting president for long.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.