Cheaters Never Win (Hopefully)

Now that this grueling, era-defining election is over, let’s take a moment to reminisce.

No, not about the Trump presidency. We will be reliving that in our nightmares for the rest of our lives.

Instead, let’s fondly recall the myriad ways that the GOP tried to steal this election. Oh, I know that most Republicans are convinced that it was the Democrats who cast illegal ballots, threw out GOP votes, forged dead people’s signatures, hacked voting machines, or mumbled some satanic curse that fooled the media, election experts, and the majority of Americans into thinking Biden won the election. But that just shows how devious liberals are!

Because as we all know, there is just no way that a guy who lost the popular vote in 2016, was projected to lose this time, is reviled like no other president in recent history, and who never once cracked 50% approval for his entire term (a first in polling history) could possibly come up short. 

I mean, it’s just impossible. Right?

In any case, if politics were a football game, the GOP would facemask, eye-gouge, trip, elbow, spike toes, and throw punches in scums. They would do this nonstop. Then they would whine to the refs if the Democrats were off-sides once.

Consider that Republicans, without exception, do everything they can to make voting harder or limit who can vote. To them, voting is not a right. Hell, it’s not even a privilege. It’s a rare luxury reserved for conservatives, preferably white ones.

For example, in my current state of California, the GOP put out ballot boxes, marked them “official” (which they were not) and when caught, simply refused to “comply with an order from the chief elections official to remove the unofficial ballot drop boxes from counties with competitive U.S. House races.” Yes, the party of law and order defied the law and ignored orders. 

In my home state of Wisconsin, “a sophisticated and multi-front effort by Republicans to prevent many Wisconsinites from casting a ballot” was just part of the GOP’s plot to create the most gerrymandered state in the country.

And in Texas, the conservative governor didn’t like all those latte-sipping liberals in the big cities being allowed to vote easily. So Texas counties, regardless of size, were limited to “only one drop-off location for voters to hand deliver their absentee ballots during the pandemic.” Texas Republicans also tried to throw out 120,000 votes from “the state's most populous, and largely Democratic, county,” which I’m sure was just a coincidence.

Oh, and they also tried to disqualify votes in Pennsylvania, and to stop the counting of votes in Nevada.

When none of that worked, Republican senators just openly tried to “find a way to throw out legally cast absentee ballots.” And if you’re wondering, yes, that effort just might have broken “any number of laws.”

Even after the election was settled, Republicans in Michigan tried to block certifying the results “based on dubious claims of voting irregularities in Detroit.” And then after being shamed into doing their jobs, they attempted to rescind the certification, upon orders from their divine leader.

Of course, the president’s hapless, humiliated lawyers are enduring defeat after defeat, basically getting laughed out of court, as they try to conjure a world in which their delusional client got reelected. Indeed, “some of the lawyers at the firms handling the litigation work for Trump’s campaign or related Republican Party organizations are now raising concerns internally about the legitimacy and purpose of the legal claims they are currently being asked to advance.” The attorneys are concerned that they may run into ethical trouble for filing frivolous lawsuits. But to the GOP, that’s their problem.

However, all this Republican subterfuge really started before the election. After all, it was our neo-fascist chief executive who shrieked those “frequent and false claims of widespread voter fraud and repeated calls for his supporters to ‘watch’ the polls and stop it.” And as we know, conservatives need very little provocation to show up with guns and intimidate people.

Furthermore, it was the president’s supporters who sent threatening emails with the subject line “Vote for Trump or else!” to Florida residents. Opinions vary about whether the originator of the emails was the Iranian government or the Proud Boys (both are winning organizations). But in either case, the message “we will come after you” was pretty clear. 

And don’t forget that the fabled Hispanic vote — which was either a godsend or a major disappointment, depending on your point of view — was likely influenced by “a web of disinformation websites aimed at Latino Americans.” Again, it wasn’t progressives spreading the fake news.

You see, “the objective, pursued by Republicans in a seeming war of attrition, is to use a range of tactics and tools to reduce the number of votes cast by people of color.” The GOP dream is that young people, ethnic minorities, and anyone who lives in a city just shut up and let white rural Americans make all the decisions. 

And yet despite these gargantuan efforts, despite these desperate ploys and unethical maneuvers and pathetic illegalities, Trump still lost — solidly as it turned out.

So to my GOP friends, I must assert — without malice — that if you lie, cheat, and whine but still get trounced, maybe it’s time to admit the truth:

Most Americans just didn’t like your guy.