Why Computerized Election Theft Is Worse Than Martial Law

The worm has turned, but can it vote, will its vote count, and what will happen if it doesn’t?

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There is rank uncertainty, as we head toward November 3, about what kind of election it will be, how free, how fair, how democratic. And that is exactly how Donald Trump likes it: chaotic.

You can trace back to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War the dicta to “keep ’em guessing” and “keep your options open.” Trump, for whom life itself is one endless war, is apparently a fan of the great power-theorist, posting “‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.’ — Sun Tzu” on Twitter in 2014.

Trump cannot govern his way out of a paper bag, but he cheats and crimes with the best ever to play those wargames. And for him, this midterm election is a wargame for both political and psychic survival.

A Party Tied to the Tracks

One thing that is not uncertain about the election is how it would turn out if it were free and fair.

Just about everything aboveboard is lined up against Trump and his wholly owned and operated Trumpublican Party. Even passably popular presidents’ parties historically expect midterm losses, and Trump is not passably popular. In fact, he heads into this election with the lowest approval rating of any midterm-bound president in 80 years.

And he has nevertheless proven himself determined to make these midterms, in which he is not on any ballot, all about him — a referendum on the success of his great administration in bringing America into the golden age he promised. “Vote as if I were on the ballot,” he tells anyone who might be listening, even as his mega-litany of sins, failures, controversies, broken promises, lies, grifts, insults, and cruelties keep coming home to roost.

So the problem for Trump is that, with an approval rating in the 30s and headed toward the 20s, and with “strong disapproval” over 50 percent, there will be a lot more angry than happy voters voting as if he were on the ballot — i.e., voting for Democratic candidates as the best hope to stop the madness.

And not all of those angry voters will be Democrats and Independents — some MAGAs seem at last to be waking up to what The Real Donald Trump is doing to them. Which means that, as the polls are showing, a lot of traditionally red House and Senate seats are now in play.

There are no signs that he can turn any of this around, and just about everything he does now backfires. It’s really quite bizarre. Some have even speculated that only someone out to destroy the Republican Party would be behaving and campaigning as Trump is.

We’re now four weeks out from Election Day, and every day it seems to get worse, more desperate. This is what a tsunami election looks like. You should be able to stick a fork in it.

If the election is free and fair and reasonably democratic.

How Will He Try to Rig It?

So another consensus has emerged: Few, if any, now question that Trump will try to steal the election, by one means or another. The only real disagreements are about what tactics and schemes he will turn to, and whether he will succeed. How will he do it?

With targeted purges of voter rolls?
ICE at the polls?
The FBI?
The USPS?
A national emergency?
The Insurrection Act?
Pete’s “warfighters”?
A January 6-like refusal to seat Democratic winners?
A combination of some or all such stunts?

Each one has its tactical pros and cons, and each one is being taken seriously enough that both the Democrats and pro-democracy forces have been preparing defenses against it.

Voters are double- and triple-checking their registrations and documentation and making plans to vote early and/or use drop boxes; election administrators are fortifying their operations against anticipated federal interference; pro-voting groups and state officials are preparing to go to court as both plaintiffs and defendants; media attention is split between the horseraces and the electoral IEDs.

Trump, for his part, is ruling out nothing. Citing what he sees as an inevitable third impeachment if the GOP loses the House, and reiterating his mantra that all the polls are “fake,” he said in an interview last week that declaring a national emergency and invoking the Insurrection Act were both still very much on the table, depending on “how it goes” at the polls and in the courts.

That, of course, is real reason for alarm. Indeed, some in the military who value our democracy seem to already be gaming it out. Russ Baker, WhoWhatWhy’s editor-in-chief, based on personal conversations with highly placed military sources, concluded: “The role of the military under a deeply flawed, unhinged commander in chief is very much on their minds and being intensively explored, albeit carefully — and quietly.”

Thumbs on the electoral scales — ruthless mid-decade gerrymandering, a panoply of voter suppression schemes, disinformation — are bad. Extracurricular tactics, such as interrupting the electoral process or overturning the results by force-backed edict, are worse.

Why Nullify What You Can ‘Win’?

But there is a still worse exploit and outcome that is getting little or no attention from the folks at the adult table: outcome-altering covert votecount manipulation.

I devoted my most recent column to historical and numerical analysis establishing that this threat needs to be taken seriously and prepared for.

What I want to do now is explain why this covert threat, while harder to imagine than the attacks Trump is openly contemplating, is more dangerous than any of them.

Any exploit that is visible, even if it is successful, comes with a very public asterisk: Yes, that candidate or party “won” the election, but look at how that “win” was achieved — by distorting and thus thwarting the public will!

Voters were openly gerrymandered into insignificance, bamboozled by a disinformation campaign, had their registrations targeted and purged, were blocked at the polls, etc.

And if it goes beyond that, as many now fear? If Trump’s FBI or DHS goons seize ballots and voting equipment? If, when it convenes in January, the new Congress refuses to seat winning Democrats, leaving the Republicans in the majority? If Trump gins up and declares a national emergency, imposes martial law, invokes the Insurrection Act to set the troops of Hegseth’s ideologically purged military against protesting masses? If he cancels or nullifies the election?

As anyone who hasn’t been assiduously ignoring the whole drama will know, some awfully dire scenarios have been forecast.

But, as Sun Tzu tells us and Donald Trump, “To win a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence; the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy’s army without fighting at all.”

Any or all of Trump’s overt power-flex schemes would, once and for all, expose the rot, the desperation, the fascism that too many Americans, not to mention the Republican Party itself, have for too long continued to ignore or excuse.

Trump’s rule and regime would lose all legitimacy — he would have to rule by force as a naked dictator or not at all.

Now contrast that scenario with a Republican “victory” that — as improbable as it would seem in light of historical patterns, polls, fundamentals, and punditory consensus — is beholden to none of these visible intrusions, which all turn out to be look-at-the-squirrel misdirection, but rather is just the shocking outcome of what appears to be a free and fair democratic election. A victory won digitally in the darkness of cyberspace without fighting at all.

The voters have spoken, their verdict is in, ours is not to question why.

We, the media, are just here to explain it. I can hear the talking heads now:

Well, Jim, those pathetic polls were way off yet again! There was no ICE at the polls, as some on the left had feared, no equipment seized or batches of ballots undelivered or disqualified, no Insurrection Act or martial law.

Just a clean Republican victory, as MAGA voters came out in droves and Democrats and anti-Trump voters, perhaps overconfident, stayed home. Turnout was low among women and young voters, Jim, a pattern oddly pronounced in the battleground states and districts where this election was decided. Now let’s look at 35-to-49-year-olds without a college degree who said the US was on the wrong track…

Get it? An electronically stolen election — one that appears free and fair, democratic, legitimate — would register as a massive national endorsement and affirmation of whatever the hell Trump and his MAGA GOP have been doing for the past two infernal years.

It would usher in not two more years of the same, but something immeasurably worse — Trump truly, finally, absolutely unbound, with the opposition bewildered, chastened, and impotent, and no one in his own party willing to even clear his or her throat whatever he does, however destructive, abominable, or obscene. The people, after all, have spoken!

AI and global warming? Hoaxes!

Rule of law? For losers and sissies!

Dictators? Role models!

Allies? Enemies!

The US Treasury? My piggy bank!

Rights? Only for those who like me!

Lies and Consequences

Elections matter. If they didn’t seem to matter all that much in the halcyon when Jimmy Carter faced off against Gerald Ford, they sure matter now. Even midterms — and, God knows, these midterms.

Collectively, the elections of the Computerized Voting Era spanning the last quarter-century have brought us, as predicted, to this benighted place and the edge of this cliff.

Readers of my work know that I believe there is profound analytic reason to be concerned that our rightward national veer has its roots in several elections whose results raised serious red flags for mistabulation and warranted deeper investigations, with access to the “hard” evidence of voter-marked ballots and voting computer coding and memory cards.

That access has been, and continues to be, denied — even, as we saw in 2020, to Donald Trump — and the result has been essentially faith-based elections.

My abiding concern found expression in 2012 in the first edition of my book CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy:

Our biennial elections, far more than the endless parade of opinion polls, define America — both in terms of who occupies its seats of power and as the single snapshot that becomes the enduring national self-portrait that Americans of all stripes carry in our mental wallets until at least the next election and often for an era. It is also, needless to say, the portrait we send abroad.

False elections bequeath to all Americans — right, left, and center — nothing less sinister than an illusory collective identity and the living of a national lie. Think of altered electoral choices as a testamentary letter that goes out, over our forged signature, to the world, to the historians, to our children.

In the case of Election 2026, the bequest sharpens: a fascist dictatorship, here, in America, the Land of the Free.

And two years like no one’s ever seen before.