The issues that plagued the 2020 election haven’t gone away — in fact, Democrats have spent the past four years vigorously working to double down on those efforts while employing an entirely new set of tactics to rig the 2024 election. Republicans can’t win until they understand the threats this election faces as a whole new host of rigging tactics play out, not the least of which is Democrats’ attempt to jail their political opponent.
The “Zuckbucks” schemes of 2020 pale in comparison to Biden’s mobilization of the federal government to drive voter turnout in ways that help Democrats. And as damaging as the Russia-collusion hoax was for the country, Democrats have topped it by attempting to throw their top political opponent in jail.
As my colleague John Daniel Davidson put it: “Much like the 2020 election, which wasn’t stolen so much as rigged months in advance to give Joe Biden an advantage that all but guaranteed his victory, the 2024 election is being rigged to ensure that Trump either cannot run or, if he does run, cannot win.”
What’s New?
In a move that will define this new American era, Democrats are trying to throw their chief political rival in jail.
A Soros-funded Manhattan district attorney cooked up charges that no one can properly articulate before presenting it to a jury selected from a pool that voted overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020. A Biden donor then oversaw the show trial against Trump that was nothing more than an extension of Democrats’ 2016 election denialism.
At this point, we can’t assume the left-wing judge won’t sentence Trump to actual jail time. Trump also faces three other criminal lawfare cases that seem unlikely to make it to trial by November, including one case in which Biden’s DOJ authorized an unprecedented raid on Mar-a-Lago — during which agents were authorized to use deadly force — to find documents that government prosecutors later admitted they tampered with.
The purpose of these trials is at least twofold. First, they are meant to drain Trump’s resources and interfere with his ability to hit the campaign trail and interact with voters. Second, as evidenced by Democrats’ immediate use of the term “convicted felon” to describe the former president, the trials are designed to assassinate his character and make him appear a less appealing alternative than Biden, whom many voters have soured on.
Democrats also sought to keep Trump out of the White House by simply removing him from the ballot under the auspices of an obscure legal theory that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected.
And if lawfare can’t kneecap Trump in time for Nov. 5, certainly the weaponization of federal agencies to target Democrat-leaning voters will give Republicans a run for their money.
Upon taking office, Biden issued Executive Order 14019 which essentially directs federal agencies to use taxpayer funds to interfere in elections. One agency by which this is being done is the Department of Education (DOE), for example. The DOE issued a memo in February announcing Federal Work-Study funds could now be used to employ students at government agencies to register voters or serve as poll workers. College-aged students and recent graduates are statistically far more likely to be Democrats.
In addition to the DOJ’s role in the get-Trump lawfare, Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland has declared the department would challenge state laws related to voter ID requirements or safeguards put in place for mail-in ballots and the use of drop boxes.
Meanwhile, even individual states are taking steps to rig the election in Democrats’ favor. Pennsylvania, for example, has partnered with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — which has been described as the “nerve center” of government censorship — to target speech it deems a “threat” ahead of the election. Nevada’s legislature passed a law in 2021 that closely mirrored a temporary pandemic-related measure that extended the mail-in ballot deadline during the 2020 election. Republicans have challenged the new law.
What Did Democrats Do in 2020?
As Democrats ramp up efforts to rig the 2024 election, many of the tactics deployed in 2020 haven’t disappeared. The 2020 election was marred by both maladministration of election laws and flat-out sidestepping of said laws.
Take Wisconsin for example, where Trump lost by roughly 20,000 votes, and where unelected officials expanded the use of ballot drop boxes during the 2020 election. Two years after the election, the state Supreme Court ruled those officials lacked the authority to usurp the legislature when it issued guidance permitting the expansion in direct contradiction to state law. Left-leaning cities like Milwaukee had more than a dozen of these illegal ballot drop boxes. Biden beat Trump by more than 100,000 votes in Milwaukee alone.
Then there was Pennsylvania, where election officials unlawfully permitted the counting of ballots that were either missing a date or were incorrectly marked. “Thousands” of such ballots were received in both the 2020 presidential election as well as the 2022 midterms, according to a ruling from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2020, many of these ballots were counted.
But it wasn’t just overt manipulation of election laws that tilted the outcome of 2020. Big Tech also played a part, largely through its censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and other stories that damaged Democrats. The New York Post first broke the laptop story weeks before the election, prompting Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to throttle users’ ability to share the story that had been falsely tagged as “disinformation.” Meanwhile, corporate media outlets like NPR flatly refused to cover the story.
The FBI was aware of the laptop’s authenticity in 2019 but still worked with Big Tech to cast a shadow of doubt on its legitimacy. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan that federal authorities warned Facebook to “be on high alert” due to a potential “dump” of “Russian propaganda.” Zuckerberg said Facebook then approached the laptop story as “potentially misinformation, important misinformation” and subdued its reach.
But Zuckerberg’s impact on the 2020 election extends far past his tech platform’s censorship of factual information. Zuckerberg and his wife dumped more than $400 million into the 2020 election — dubbed “Zuckbucks” — that went disproportionately to blue areas of battleground states via left-wing nonprofits under the auspices of so-called “safe election” grants. As my colleague M.D. Kittle reported, “in many cases the grant program was a privately funded get-out-the-vote campaign to drive swing-state Democrat voters.”
At least 28 states — mostly red states but including swing states like Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania — have banned such private cash infusions from infiltrating their elections. But even without “Zuckbucks,” other Democrat-aligned groups, like the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, are working to interfere in local election administration. The Center for Tech and Civic Life — which partnered with Zuckerberg in 2020 to upend local election administration — is now working with the Alliance in their efforts.
As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood explained, “existing Zuckbucks bans wouldn’t necessarily prevent local election departments from contracting with the Alliance” to get legal or political consulting or guidance on recruitment and training.
Most of the tactics that were deployed in 2020 — or new versions of them — are still in effect. But now, they’re coupled with blatant lawfare and the deployment of federal agencies to turn out votes for Biden.