You wouldn't know it to look at the temper tantrum of the foot-stomper in chief, but it was always Donald Trump and his party that was going to try and steal the 2020 election, and even succeed to a good degree. The shock and meltdown of the Trump campaign, his surrogates, and his White House stems in good part from the fact that they lost, despite having done their level best to rig the election. Their disbelief can be attributed to the fact that the rest of America showed up in numbers so large that we overcame their plan to steal the presidency in 2020.
The Trump-Republican plan to steal the 2020 election was a three-legged stool: Republican attack on the right to vote with surgical precision in the states, the Trump administration's post office fiasco intent upon disenfranchising voters who chose to vote by mail in the middle of the pandemic, and Congressional Republicans blocking legislation to secure our electoral system, including voting machines.
Rigging Through Voter Suppression
The modern GOP has always been the party of large scale voter suppression, and with a conservative Supreme Court in their Shelby v. Holder decision in 2013 invalidating parts of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of targeting Black voters with suppression measures, voter suppression measures adopted into state law exploded across states with GOP-controlled governments. Democrats have tried again and again to address the Supreme Court's decision and enact an updated Voting Rights Act since, and Republicans have been stonewalling those efforts for just as long. That's no accident.
States from Georgia and Florida to Wisconsin and Ohio have been advanced at light speed voting-restricting legislation ranging from voter ID laws that exclude college students to purging voter rolls prone to massive degrees of errors to reducing early voting that people of color and working people unable to take time off on a Tuesday are more likely to take advantage of. A federal appeals court found such a law in North Carolina so outrageous that it called out the law for targeting Black voters for suppression with "surgical precision." Even though the Court in that case restored six days of early voting in the state, Republican officials blatantly pushed county officials to structure that in ways to suppress the turnout of Black voters.
The long lines to vote early in diverse, urban centers across the country this year were hailed as a celebration of democracy, but at the same time, the lines were also a shameful blemish on the democratic process, laying bare voter suppression efforts that required people to wait for hours to simply exercise their franchise. As if that weren't enough, Republicans forced the closure of 21,000 polling locations across the country on election day.
Rigging Through Manipulating The Mail
Some of that closure was caused by the pandemic and was compensated for by a surge in mail-in voting as people chose a safer method in the middle of a pandemic, but Donald Trump and Republicans did their best to undermine mail-in voting as well. Trump-handmaiden US Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's manipulation of mail delivery has become infamous, but the fact that Republicans in Congress held up relief for cash-strapped state and local governments may turn out to be an equally large scandal in hampering the ability of those governments to properly resource this extraordinary and unique election. States and counties do, after all, bear the lion's share of the responsibility to conduct a free and fair election.
Just as Donald Trump ramped up his baseless attacks on the campaign trail against mail-in voting, his lackey at the USPS, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy created a parallel effort to gum up mail delivery to slow down the processing of mail-in ballots. In August, the USPS sent notice to 46 states and Washington, DC, that they may not be able to deliver ballots in time. The USPS - an entity that processes 20 million first-class mail pieces every hour - sounded the alarm that it may not be able to deliver 60 million ballots over a period of two and a half months. How is that possible, unless one is purposely dismantling post office capacity?
It turns out that is exactly what DeJoy was doing. DeJoy took office in June, and by early early September, on the heels of the ominous notice to states, the USPS had dismantled and removed over 700 sorting machines just as a surge of mail-in ballots could be expected. While removing and replacing old sorting machines is standard procedure, DeJoy expressly declined to replace the machines he removed. At the same time, USPS was removing mail collection boxes en masse until word spread like wildfire on social media and he was forced to put a stop to it. Trump and Republicans in Congress did their part, too, by holding up funding for the Post Office that was part of the Democrats' second coronavirus relief package.
Trump made no attempts to hide that it was a voter suppression tactic, saying at the time, "If we don’t make the deal, that means they can’t have the money, that means they can’t have universal mail-in voting."
On election day, as many as 300,000 ballots sat in post offices all over America, potentially without being delivered. To make matters worse, DeJoy thumbed his nose at a federal court order to conduct a thorough sweep and deliver all mail ballots on time. Perhaps not at all curiously, the resulting mail delivery slowdowns tracked with great precision in dense urban, Democratic areas just in time for mail in voting.
Rigging Through Defunding Voting Machines
The Trump administration and Republicans weren't content only from rank voter suppression and manufacturing problems with mail delivery, however. Their election fixing efforts extended to voting machines. In February, Republicans in the Senate blocked Democratic bills to bulk up security of voting machines. One of the Democratic bills McConnell blocked would ban voting machines from being connected to the Internet and from being manufactured outside the US (like the ones Ivanka Trump makes in China). Another would require campaigns to report foreign contacts to law enforcement.
And yet in another twist of fait, Trump and the GOP have been complaining aimlessly and without any hint of irony - or evidence - that voting machines altered votes after Joe Biden demolished Trump's hopes not just in the industrial midwest but in longtime Republican outposts of Georgia and Arizona. Not only has any of Trump's allies yet to provide any evidence of such alterations, the Homeland Security agency responsible for cybersecurity and infrastructure issued a categorical denial that any such thing took place at a widespread basis.
So, to recap. Donald Trump and his party ran a highly focused campaign to rig the election through high-precision voter suppression, targeted undermining the postal delivery of mail-in ballots, and doing everything possible to leave voting machines vulnerable. And all of that is to say nothing of the massive propaganda operations fueled by Trump himself, including a cadre of fake scandals the right wing heaped on Biden's family.
It still wasn't enough. It wasn't enough because the rest of America showed up in numbers too large to cheat. Trump, his campaign, and his enablers at the RNC are big mad because they were pretty sure their rigging was going to extend Trump's lease on the White House, and it failed in historic, spectacular fashion.
This is not just a victory over Trump. This is a victory over a system rigged to disenfranchise, disengage, and dishearten the true American majority.
Let's do everything we can to change that system.