Over a century ago, scientist John Scott Haldane, recognizing the danger of carbon monoxide in coal mines, introduced the use of pet canaries as an early warning system for miners.  The concept caught on quickly, and for three quarters of a century, coal miners would come to trust their pet "canary in the coal mine" as their potential lifesaver: carbon monoxide would kill the bird first, giving the men time to escape the mine before the deadly gas could get them, too.

Former President Donald J. Trump is the Republican Party's canary.

In the "pandemic year" of 2020, Democrat bureaucrats across the country took advantage of public fears of Covid-19 to scare millions of people out of the traditional American election practice: in person, at a polling place, where each voter could at least potentially undergo an identity check as protection against vote fraud.

In 2020, numerous state, county, and city governments authorized such corruptible concepts as mass mail-in ballots, unguarded non-mail public drop boxes, and virtually unlimited ballot harvesting.

In Wisconsin, for example, the program known as "democracy in the parks" enabled Democrat activists to turn in tens of thousands of ballots that they claimed without evidence to have collected from hobos on park benches in the state capital of Madison.  Nursing homes were told by the Wisconsin Election Commission that they could go ahead and cast votes on behalf of their patients, however conscious or unconscious they may be, without state officials supervising the voting to ensure that the actual voters' wishes are the ones being recorded.  Both practices are gross violations of Wisconsin state law, and likely resulted in tens of thousands of invalid votes being cast for Joe Biden in 2020...  easily enough to change the statewide result in that narrow-margin election.

The same can be said of many states.  There are dozens of different kinds of vote fraud, from the patronage worker bus tours of Chicago and New Orleans, to the late-night polling place openings judicially mandated in St. Louis, to the hundreds of thousands of votes cast by non-citizens,  from green card holders to illegal aliens in sanctuary cities.  There are states where poll workers traditionally take advantage of lulls on Election Day to cast ballots in the names of registered no-shows.  There are college towns where votes are cast from dorms and student housing in the names of students who graduated and moved away years before.

Every state has a broad mix of these and other methods.  No two states are identical.

There have been a host of election process investigations since November, 2020, when Donald Trump, who won 74 million popular votes, was declared to have lost to Joe Biden's alleged 81 million, in a total purported voting population of 158 million.  This would be an increase of 22 million over the turnout in 2016, in a country in which the only significant population demographic that's increasing is that of non-citizens. It is statistically dubious, leading to the logical conclusion that a lot of those votes, certainly millions if not tens of millions, were fabricated.

What have almost all the investigations found?  Even the most cursory review of their findings shows numerous opportunities for fraud -- the lack of ID checks, the opportunity for round-tabling, the lack of any chain of custody in most non-election day voting... dozens of methods putting tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of votes per state in question. Nonetheless, these reports always conclude that they cannot "prove" that fraud occurred.  They can show that opportunities exist ad infinitum, but they cannot establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that corrupt actors actually took advantage of these millions of opportunities.

Why?

Because of the secret ballot.

In any traditional audit, from an ISO-9000 audit at the plant to an IRS tax audit at your small business, a spot check is used to see if the intended results match the real recorded results.

The secret ballot makes such an audit impossible.  A definitive election audit would not check the total ballots cast against the total count; it would check the ballots as processed against the actual will of the voters.  And this is impossible because we don't know who cast which ballot.  We cannot determine if John Smith and Mary Jones cast that ballot, or if a different one was substituted for theirs, because their ballot was not signed, and in fact could not be, by law. 

Our system recognizes the risks of a publicly known ballot - the risk of discrimination, for example, by a corrupt local political machine - so the secret ballot is rightly sacrosanct.

But what this means is that few election integrity studies can ever conclusively state that they have "proven" that an election was stolen.  All they can do is show the overwhelming risks in an intentionally compromised system, and trust that the reader can figure out what it means.  We must prevent vote fraud in advance, precisely because we cannot usually catch and prosecute it after the fact.

How does the press report it, though?  Without fail, the mainstream media - and their clients in the political class, from elected officials to the deep state denizens who rule them - report that yet another study failed to prove vote fraud.  They can report, again and again, that the claims of fraud are all "unproven," smirking under their Covid-19 masks in the knowledge that they're reporting the exact opposite of the study's real findings.

Vote fraud in America has been well known for generations, but the Democrat party has successfully managed to trick the public into believing that it's limited to known dens of iniquity like Chicago and New Orleans. They hid how widespread it was.  Until 2020.

With the 2020 election, everything was exposed.  The tools used against Donald Trump, from 2000 real mules to 20,000 fictional hobos, smacked of desperation.  They succeeded, but at great cost: they replaced incumbent Donald Trump with a basement-dwelling dementia patient who couldn't fill a New Hampshire diner let alone a stadium rally.  The canary in the coal mine - the Trump presidency - was extinguished.

But there is a value to that canary.  In the coal mine, the loss of the canary was a warning, a beacon to everyone else around.  It warned them of the danger that could quickly defeat them as well if they didn't act with urgency.

Since November 2020, has the Republican Party acted with urgency?

Has the GOP, at either the state or federal level, risen to the challenge, and begun to clean up our election practices, state by state, to ensure that it would never happen again?   The GOP doesn't have the power in Illinois, California, Maryland or New York. But in most states, especially in the ones where fraud was most blatant in 2020, little has been done despite Republican strength in elective office, even with majority legislative control and governors’ mansions.  Too many states continue to allow - or have simply failed to enforce the laws that already forbid - the corrupt and corruptible tactics now commonly used to stuff ballot boxes.

Presidents, senators, governors, and legislators are all on the same ballot, after all. Do these Republican politicians think that criminals who fill in a ballot - in the name of a former resident or a nursing home patient or a dead person - are going to stop at voting for the president?  They usually make the ballots believable; as long as you're voting in one office, you vote for the others, the same way.

How many Democrat congressmen or senators, county commissioners or state assemblymen, are in seats today that ought to be held by their last Republican opponent, where the Republican thought he lost fair and square, but in fact he was just swamped by the Democrat fraud that focused on the top of the ticket?  And how many of today's incumbent Republican officeholders will be next to go?  How many Republicans who eke out a 52-48 win will be swept out by a five percent "margin of fraud" next time?

Frankly, the shock should not be that Donald Trump was "beaten" in 2020. With an election process with such gaping holes, it's no surprise.

The shock is that so many Republican politicians are in denial, happy to pretend to themselves the measures used against their President in 2020 won't be used against the rest of his party in 2022 and 2024.

The canary died in his cage.  The miners all saw him fall over.  And inexplicably, for over 18 months now, lots of the miners have stayed down below, blissfully unconcerned that the carbon monoxide is eventually coming for them too.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional.  A one-time Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available on Amazon.

Graphic credit: David & Angie CC BY-NC 2.0 license