Gearing up for civil strife. US election day may be the start of the battle, not the end.

Kerry Wakefield I 2 November 2024

A New South Wales Electoral Commission inquiry last year rejected electronic voting as inherently risky and urged paper-based voting be maintained for security and transparency. To quote electoral commissioner John Schmidt, ‘Global experience demonstrates that TAV (technology-assisted voting) has inherent risks… around technical non-performance, transparency, verifiability of votes and cybersecurity.’ We all understand ticks in boxes on paper ballots, but what goes on in your computer is one of the mysteries of the universe to all but a few.

Yet next week the leadership of the free world will largely be determined through electronic voting machines which even the geek’s geek, Elon Musk, has deplored as a voting system. The great tragedy of the United States’ flawed, over-complicated and incomprehensible suite of state voting machinery and laws is that no one will have confidence in the outcome. Whatever happens on 5 November, whichever side technically ‘wins’, many voters will refuse to accept the results. Some may say this is Donald Trump’s fault for refusing to accept defeat in 2020, although Hillary Clinton still refuses to accept her 2016 defeat, and disputing election results always happens – remember the hanging chads crisis election of 2000? Recent Rasmussen polls showed that 66 per cent of US likely voters think cheating will affect the outcome of the 2024 election, including 83 per cent of Republicans, and around half expect violence no matter who wins. Tammany Hall and Mayor Daley in Chicago have gone into the history books as examples of Democrat cheating; there’s history behind the Democrats being known as the crooked party, and the GOP the stupid party.

In an X sub-community called Election Integrity, where posters report 2024 examples of fraud, malfeasance and voting problems, we already see reports of voting machines switching votes, postal workers dumping ballots, the dead being registered to vote, non-citizens voting and much more. Many of these instances won’t be genuine but some will. Will they be sufficient to affect the outcome? Given the non-transparent nature of many US state elections, how will voters, or anyone, ever know? Pundit Scott Adams argues US elections are non-auditable by design; their non-verifiability is a feature not a bug, convenient for those in power. Paper ballots can be checked by scrutineers, but there is no effective way to satisfy voters of an electronic system’s accuracy.

Without litigating old results and arguments, for which please see my previous articles on this subject in the Speccie, the point here is to think past the sale. Given the extraordinary level of polarised hostility, unprecedented lawfare, media hoaxes, assassination attempts and more over the last eight years in the USA, a cessation of hostilities on 6 November is too much to hope for.

Were Kamala to prevail, especially with more 2020-style shenanigans such as late-night ballot drops, pipe leaks in voting centres à la Fulton County, dirty voter rolls, long delays in counts (Maricopa County voters must wait 10 to 13 days for a final result from a mere two million voters) then the MAGA movement will be infuriated, especially given Trump’s surging momentum; his Joe Rogan interview scored a stunning 34 million views in a couple of days. Trump supporters will conclude the rot goes so deep that no Trump-like figure will ever be allowed to win, so what point is there remaining within the system?

The Democrats, conversely, if Trump wins, will rage in their own way. They already want to do away with the Electoral College, and there will be a blizzard of electoral litigation, with every chance of mass protests, perhaps turning into Black Lives Matter-style riots that will make 6 January look like a Sunday school picnic.

There is no doubt that they have been wargaming a Trump win for years, scouring Congressional powers and federal laws for possible levers to use, and devising every manner of Plans B, C and D to stymie a Trump presidency. Who would have anticipated the Democrats launching the Russia collusion hoax, via the intel agencies, against Trump before 2016? More impeachments perhaps?

As evidence I adduce two pieces of information. The useful Molly Ball Time article outlining how the 2020 election was stolen (or ‘fortified’, to use her term) included the information that activists had lined up 400 post-election demonstrations were Trump to win; ‘…the left was ready to flood the streets’. She also noted much wargaming of a Trump victory, with new organisations and strategies created to pressure the process. It would be naive to imagine the same is not happening again.

Secondly, leading Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin infamously told a Washington bookshop event earlier this year that it may be up to Congress to disqualify Donald Trump from the presidency in early January at the counting of Electoral College votes. He went on, ‘… which really could lead to something akin to civil war’. More lawfare, more electoral shenanigans or worse, JFK-style assassination attempts, who knows what is in the playbook of those who feel they are saving their country from Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini rolled into one?

I recently spent a weekend dealing with a crying one-year-old, and found myself automatically ‘shushing’ her cries, with what amounts to the vocal equivalent of white noise. Crying children get even more worked up by hearing their own cries, which is why drowning out the shrillest notes helps calm them. US Democrats have been doing something similar, whipping themselves into a frenzy within their own salons for years, ever since Trump had the temerity to win, and they are now in a full-blown tantrum. Some may be prepared to do the unthinkable to stop Trump. Prominent reporter Matt Taibbi, once of Rolling Stone and no conservative, said a few days ago he had heard so many crazy things about behind the scenes manoeuvring in Washington that he didn’t know what to believe, but ‘it’s clear we’re headed for some kind of historic confrontation. I have trouble believing institutional America will really reverse course after eight years of dystopian lunacy’.

Which implies that the fifth of November will be the start of new hostilities, not the end.

Author: Kerry Wakefield