How the 2020 Election Was Rigged

We are a year overdue for the true story of the 2020 elections. Mollie Hemingway has at last delivered it to us in one tidy volume.

It’s a complex story, which makes for a weighty book. The research is thorough, the writing is evidentiary, the style is clinical—like investigative journalism and social science used to be. The endnotes alone run nearly 100 pages.

Reading Rigged, one isn’t jarred by hyperbole, conjecture, or spin. Hemingway is unequivocal on progressive malice, yet she can be scathing of Republicans, too. She is particularly critical of Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to publicize fraud nationally, thereby undermining prior case-by-case efforts to get particular state courts to recognize particular violations of particular state laws.

Overall, the story reads like a tragedy. One alternates between anger and consternation that bleeding obvious facts were not reported by the mainstream media at the time.

Some evidence of election irregularities broke through mainstream censorship: the strange spikes in votes counted for Biden overnight in counties with unusually strong Democratic Party governance and histories of criminal mishandling of votes (Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Fulton County, for example).

Over subsequent days, a news consumer with time and effort could piece together strange disputes. Official election observers were denied access, or kept so far away they could not see any ballots. They sought emergency court orders, but some courts set hearing dates weeks in the future or simply denied jurisdiction. Even if observers did obtain a court order, election officials claimed not to understand it (as in Philadelphia).

In Georgia, observers were told that counting was being suspended overnight, but a surveillance camera recorded video of four persons pulling boxes of ballots from beneath a cloaked table for unobserved digital entry. Still, Georgia’s officers continued to claim that voting had been suspended overnight. Surely this was a story worthy of investigative reporting? The mainstream media preferred to report all the disputes as conspiracy theories.

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