Our Rigged Election Paradox

Why Bother to Vote if Our Elections Are Fixed?

The argument goes by different names.  The chicken-or-the-egg syndrome (as in, which came first?).  The vicious circle.  Or the one that fits best here:  the paradox.  For most voters on the Right today, it is the heart of the matter, and most politicians and commentators shy away from addressing it squarely:  Why should we continue to vote if election fraud is thwarting the will of the people?

Call it the rigged election paradox.  A paradox is a statement that’s seemingly contradictory or opposed by common sense yet may be true.  It poses challenging questions.  There are Zeno’s famous paradoxes of ancient Greece (including Achilles and the Tortoise), and more recently the Liar’s Paradox or Pinocchio Paradox (if a known liar says, “This statement is false,” or Pinocchio says, “My nose will grow now,” are those statements true?).

Interesting mental puzzles these are.  Yet the one we’re dealing with is not just the stuff of philosophers, but a conundrum that may well decide the 2024 elections—and all elections afterwards.

It seems illogical to vote if our elections are fixed.  That’s what President Trump alleged of the 2020 elections, and what Arizona MAGA leaders such as Kari Lake contend happened again in the 2022 elections.  There’s a boatload of evidence supporting their claims.  Yet the courts uniformly have turned tail and refused to acknowledge this.

Has voting become an exercise in futility?  If our elections are rigged, there seems no point in voting.  However, if we don’t bother to vote, the outcome is certainly predetermined.

The Bloody Battlefield of American Elections Today

Trump and his supporters credibly claim the 2020 election was stacked against them.  Examples of skullduggery range from Republican election observers being ousted from vote-tabulation centers throughout swing states (complete with pipes bursting mysteriously in the middle of the night), to bizarre statistical anomalies in critical swing counties across the country, to other matters the Department of Justice failed to investigate properly, such as interstate mail trucks hauling ballots across jurisdictions and alleged illegal harvesting of votes.  Others have limited their claims to the admitted and self-described “cabal” of leftist Big Tech moguls, local leftist election officials and the fake-news media working blatantly to deny reelection to Trump.

In 2022, GOP candidates who were skeptical of the 2020 election results and lost their races, by and large, have not claimed their own elections were stolen.  Not so for MAGA leaders in Arizona.  This crucial state, where I once had many high-profile political contests, has become arguably the pivotal battleground for the entire country.  There, Republican candidates have a lot of ammunition to back up their allegations.

GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and other Arizona MAGA conservatives point to the systematic jamming of voting machines on Election Day when GOP stalwarts were highly likely to vote.  Serious questions were raised and evidence supplied about county election officials violating state laws governing proper chain of custody for cast ballots.  One expert witness for Lake testified under oath that such a massive scale of ballot-machine failure could only have been intentional. 

Few attorneys have dared to scrutinize the pro-Democrat results of the 2020 elections, knowing they risk reprisal from the left-leaning legal profession if they do.  The most striking example of such cowardice was the refusal of U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the election-fraud claims of the very president who appointed him, even while claiming publicly that he had.  Barr ultimately became one of the main pitchmen for the establishment, to which he comfortably returned after the election.

Two prominent officials who did attempt to investigate questionable election practices in 2020 met with brutal lawfare that severely damaged their legal careers.  In Wisconsin, even a former justice of the state Supreme Court, Michael Gableman, could not escape the searing wrath of the ruling class.  Appointed to investigate election-fraud claims, Gableman was attacked and obstructed from the outset of his efforts.  The Speaker of the State Assembly fired him (conveniently) right after the Republican primary elections.  Gableman then saw his reputation ravaged further.  Fellow judges blasted his nationally acclaimed conservative lawyers for making “phony” arguments and removed them from his team.  Gableman’s office was held in contempt of court, and sanctions imposed against him in the amount of $24,000.

In Arizona, the Republican state Attorney General, Mark Brnovich, faces even more ominous dark clouds.  An establishment Republican aligned with the late Senator John McCain, Brnovich ran for the U.S. Senate in 2022 while simultaneously trying to conduct an investigation of Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020.  Brnovich now faces no fewer than 17 State Bar complaints (the Left always piles them high) and growing calls for his disbarment.  Brnovich’s offense was failing to reveal more fully the results of his investigation of the 2020 elections—and not fully denouncing MAGA “election deniers”—until after he had lost the Republican primary last September.

For her part, Lake had trouble finding any lawyers willing to represent her following the 2022 elections.  She complained at one point she might have to settle for “Better Call Saul” because lawyers feared threats to their livelihood.  The attorneys who eventually signed on as her counsel were not even experts in election law.

Despite a great deal of compelling evidence for their claims, Lake and the other statewide MAGA candidates lost all their lawsuits challenging the election.  Renowned conservative attorney Robert Barnes has bravely exposed these court rulings as cowardly and dishonest.  Another prominent conservative attorney, Tom Renz, also courageously called out the “absolute travesty” in Arizona.  Adding insult to injury, and presumably to deter any future MAGA litigation questioning election results, a federal judge imposed sanctions against Lake’s lawyers, including no less than Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.   A state judge granted a $33,000 costs judgment against Lake’s team.  Now Dershowitz and the other lawyers face complaints and looming investigations from Arizona’s State Bar, arguably the most viciously left-wing in the country.

Why We Should Still Vote

All of this adds up to ample evidence of electoral chicanery—and no-holds-barred aggression against those few public officials or attorneys who dare to question it.  A tough situation indeed.  It’s fair to ask, in view of all this:  What’s the point of voting?

I say we continue to vote for two reasons.

First, it’s the right thing to do.  It’s our patriotic duty to vote.  The Founders of this Republic put everything on the line to create and leave this legacy for us.  Millions in the armed forces have given their lives or limbs to secure this heritage.  Unless the fraud reaches the point that voting is plainly counterproductive or futile, not to vote is morally wrong.

Second, voting still makes a difference.  Not everywhere and not in every election.  But it matters in enough places that we must keep trying.

Voting is what citizens of a Republic do. Giving up this birthright at this stage would be a betrayal of our compact with generations of Americans before us.

Let’s use the examples at hand to see the difference voting makes.  Compare the legal landscape in two crucial states, Arizona and Texas.

In Arizona, judges and the State Bar work together to punish lawyers who question election results that favor Democrats.  That’s not happening in Texas.  Recently Sidney Powell defeated the effort of the left-wing 65 Project and their allies, who are seeking the disbarment of her and other Trump election attorneys.

Powell just beat back their baldly political attempt to drive her from the legal profession, winning her case.  Republican Judge Andrea Bouressa threw out the Commission for Lawyer Discipline’s case against Powell, citing “numerous defects” in the Commission’s case filings. 

The difference?  In Texas, judges are elected by the people.  In Arizona, they’re selected through an insider system which goes by the Orwellian title “merit selection.”  It’s a system of, by and for legal insiders for which there is no accountability; judges there are notorious for politically correct decisions and for sweeping ethics complaints against their fellow judges under the rug.  In Texas, judges must earn the votes of the people, and the system works fairly.

This starkly different judicial reaction to the legitimate concerns of Republican voters who believe they’ve been disfranchised, as played out in two states, reminds us of the importance of elections and holding our leaders accountable.

Voting is what citizens of a Republic do.  In time, we may break through in states and jurisdictions where things today are very dark.  As discouraging as things look now, persistence must be the watchword of patriots today.  It would be a betrayal of our compact with those generations before us who made great sacrifices for us to relinquish this birthright, the hallmark of our citizenship, so easily.