Right on time, the establishment media spill the juiciest story on the U.S. election, months after the contest.  Almost as if they were just another cog in the Democrats' machine.

Time magazine now confirms that there was a massive shadow campaign — a "secret cabal," as they say — made up of the unions, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Silicon Valley to take down Mr. Trump, change election laws, and stymie any lawsuits filed before or after the fact.  A lot of this was amazingly done in plain sight and may not be technically illegal, including the $400 million Mark Zuckerberg funneled into local election offices, which, I will explain, was crucial to the whole project.  That's a fact Time doesn't really understand  

You see, even as Nancy Pelosi was ripping into Mr. Trump at the Chinese New Year celebrations for scaring people about the Wuhan virus, the wise-guy Democrats had already figured out the angles on the scam they were to pull off.  Just a week later, Time tells us, the key political guy at the AFL-CIO, Mike Podhorzer, had a Zoom meeting to instruct his troops all around the country.  Podhorzer had been putting together an anti-Trump coalition since mid-2019, but he saw his golden opportunity with the virus lockdowns.

Turn Election Day into election months, he figured, to help the massive army of union-paid Democrat get-out-the-vote activists — organizations like the one Stacey Abrams runs for them in Georgia — then have a dozen weeks to harvest ballots and browbeat people into going to the polls. 

Democrat governors immediately started pushing back primary dates and issuing orders to allow expanded early and mail-in balloting.  Wisconsin was typical, the governor ordering last-minute election changes in a power play with the Republican Legislature, being denied only in the state Supreme Court.

But partisan Democrats in every position around the country used the primaries as a tune-up for further mischief in the November elections.  The Pennsylvania Supreme Court notoriously extended the absentee ballot receipt date, a blatantly partisan and unconstitutional action.

My home state of Kentucky was not at all different.  The Democrat governor had been able to push back the primary day and limit in-person voting for the primary.  He also wanted to make the general election all mail-in.  Fortunately, the secretary of state refused to go along, and the two remained deadlocked for months.  Eventually, a decent compromise was worked out.

But here's where Zuckerberg's money played the crucial role.  Elections are run by county governments in the U.S.  They don't have unlimited funds or unlimited personnel.  When the Democrats mandated full mail-in balloting and early voting to go with in-person voting, it threatened to be a disaster in many urban jurisdictions they hoped to carry.  These places often cannot execute a well-run election in a normal year.  Now they were being asked to run essentially three parallel elections at the same time.  The resources were not there, as proved by the mess in the Georgia primary in the Atlanta counties.

If big-city voters were turned away or their ballots lost, all the devious plans would have backfired, and Trump would win in a landslide.  Cue Mark Zuckerberg's checkbook.  A mysterious non-profit started handing out big bucks in the fall to local election offices all across the country, and it appears most of the money went to critical swing states.  It is unclear exactly where, as they don't have to report any of these contributions, and, in fact, Zuckerberg is eligible for a tax deduction, as this money went to government agencies, not parties or candidates!

Now, certainly we should get to the bottom of some of the more sensational charges in Election 2020.  But my hunch about 2020 is just to follow Prof. Occam and go for the simple explanation.  The Democrats did what they always do: fund an enormous GOTV and street money campaign, and this time they worked in more early and mail-in voting.  With Zuckerberg's money, they kept the knuckleheads who run America's big cities from messing it up.  

President Trump actually predicted many times last year that this is how it would happen.  Getting it stopped in time was another matter.  One bit of good news, though, is that having been hit over the head enough times, Republican legislatures are finally moving to crack down on early voting laws and make election day just that: a day, not a season.

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.

Image: Anthony Quintano via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.