Commentary

Over the years, we’ve watched elections as not only a newspaper interested in reporting the results, but as community-minded individuals wishing for the best when the public’s vote is needed, for instance, for a bond issue.

Those Election Eve results come in and, biting nails, the measure we were so hoping would be approved is agonizingly close, yet trailing the required 60%.

Well, we hopefully think, there’s still so-and-so number of absentee ballots out and there’s enough there to swing it to the positive.

I don’t remember that every happening, although in the history of elections around the United State, I’m certain somewhere, sometime, it has happened.

Statistically, it is unlikely. The trend found in the ballots counted on Election Day almost unerringly can be applied to the smattering of ballots counted afterward.

Which conjures up recollections of the 2020 presidential election. Every four years, for as long as anyone could remember, any presidential candidate, with a known number of states “called” for them and only a few remaining to be decided yet were in the positive for the candidate, could go to sleep that night assured of the win.

The same was true for Donald Trump. All of the indicators were in his favor when he turned in for the night and in the wee hours, something happened to change it all.

Dinesh D’Souza’s latest documentary, 2000 Mules, chillingly shows how to steal an election.

A mule is some nondescript individual, someone who is able to freely come and go “under the radar” or without attracting attention, to move illegal drugs from Point A to Point B.

In the case of the 2020 presidential election, someone paid so-called mules to stuff ballot boxes in at least five battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

One has finally grown a conscience and talked.

First, an organization dubbed True the Vote purchased the geotracking data for the United States for a period of time including October, 2020 until after the election in November.

If you’re like me, you are aware that carrying a cell phone on a pocket can be revealing to those who provide the cell service. It’s called geotracking, and the cell-phone system keeps tabs on your cell phone every time it checks in with a cell tower.

One experiment I’ve been made aware of involved an investigative reporter who took two phones, an Apple and an Android, and carried them around Washington, D.C. before they were activated for service.

Back at his office, a cell phone expert was able to capture the files that are sent from the phone when they are initialized. Without being activated, Google was able to pinpoint every location that person visited.

True the Vote put all the geotracking data into powerful computers. Then they added the latitude and longitude of ballot drop boxes in selected cities in those battleground states.

Then they programmed the computer to see if any of the massive geotracking data matched those ballot drop boxes, and there were lots. The computer was programmed to filter out everything but cell phones that visited 10 drop boxes.

Big deal, you might say.

But then, True the Vote then accessed the video camera footage from ballot drop boxes. Sure enough, people stopped at hundreds of locations and may be seen on camera, at two and three in the morning, pushing numerous envelopes into ballot receiving points.

In Arizona, the evidence shows this was rampant until a story appeared in the media about police identifying a ballot-box stuffer by fingerprints. The very next day, as the mules traveled around stuffing votes in boxes, they were wearing gloves. One mule walks straight to the box, stuffs the envelopes, and then quickly turns to peel off the gloves and throw them in a garbage can, which he didn’t even look at when he first appeared on camera. He had been there before and knew the garbage can was handy.

Long story short, as revealed in D’Souza’s documentary, conservative estimates of the number of ballots alleged to have been illegally placed in ballot boxes show that there could have been enough votes, had they gone to Republican candidate Donald Trump, to affect the outcome of the election.

I recommend that everyone watch D’Souza’s “2000 Mules.” It’s jaw-dropping.

Here in Washington, people are eligible to register to vote up to and including election day. Ballots are mailed to registered voters, but not on a “per request” basis. For most honest people, it is simple and effective.

But what if you wanted to cheat?