You could say the 2016 election was stolen when the Republican FBI director James Comey sent an extraordinary letter to Congress a week before Election Day to announce nothing of real importance regarding Hillary Clinton’s email. That gave our corporate media the chance to flog the email story one more time, convincing more than 78,000 wavering voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to abandon the candidate everybody thought was going to win. The 46 Electoral College votes from those three states put the Republican candidate in the White House.
You could say the Republicans stole that election, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate, because it’s doubtful the dimwitted, self-righteous FBI director was trying to steal the election when he ignored a Justice Department rule and made his last-minute, election-altering news. He was simply trying to cover his ass, fearing that his Republican friends in Congress would be upset with him if he didn’t tell them what he knew a week before the election and their guy ended up losing.
No, it was the 2000 election the Republicans actually stole.
I’d forgotten how blatant the theft was until I stumbled upon a 2001 article in the London Review of Books by law professor Bruce Ackerman. The article is called “Anatomy of a Constitutional Coup”. It explains in detail how the Republicans stole that election. Here’s the last paragraph:
Suppose I had been reporting on the recent election of Vicente Fox as President of Mexico. I would have described how a mob of Fox’s partisans stopped the vote count in Mexico City, how Fox’s campaign chairman used her authority as chief elections officer to prevent the count from continuing, how Fox’s brother exercised his position as governor to take the Presidential election out of the hands of the voters, how the Supreme Court intervened to crush, without any legal ground, the last hope for a complete count. Would we be celebrating the election of President Fox as the dawn of a new democratic day in Mexico?
Replace Mexico with the US, Mexico City with Miami, and Vicente Fox with George W. Bush and that sums up what happened to us in 2000.
If you have the intestinal fortitude to read Professor Ackerman’s fascinating article, you’ll understand why (assuming they don’t win the old-fashioned way), Republicans will almost certainly try to steal the presidential election in 2024. They got away with it in 2000. A mob of Republicans intimidated election officials in Miami; Florida’s Republican Secretary of State interfered with the vote counting; Republican Governor Jeb Bush got the Florida legislature to create an “alternate” slate of electors; and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court used their august authority to finish the job.
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 