An oft-quoted statement usually attributed to Josef Stalin runs like this: “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” Whether Stalin actually spoke those words is questionable; nevertheless, the implications of that thought are deeply disturbing. We should be grateful that Canadian federal elections are still conducted using paper ballots that are manually counted by human beings. Yes, Canadian elections are flawed. They’re not as fair as they should be . . . and voters are subjected to a lot of misinformation . . . but there is still reason to believe that the men and women who take their places as Members of Parliament actually received a plurality of the votes cast. So far . . .

In many places around the world, this is not the case. Voters in places like Venezuela, China and Cuba have good reason to believe that their ballots may never be counted or that ballot boxes may be stuffed with illegitimate ballots from nonexistent voters.

Even in the United States of America, there is strong evidence that the 2020 Presidential Election may have been rigged in several key states. While the governing bodies in those states and the electoral commissions established by them to administer and supervise elections have not accepted the claims of election tampering, many Americans believe the published polling outcomes do not accurately reflect the will of the people. In fact, they believe there was deliberate manipulation and a subsequent cover-up.

In the 2020 US Elections, there was a significant increase in mail-in ballots, advanced polls and “ballot harvesting.” This was partly attributed to COVID fears and restrictions. Whatever the cause, any voting system that reduces eye contact and allows voters to submit their ballots remotely, introduces some risk of fraud. People can and do create multiple identities. A mail-in ballot can be forged so that the name on the ballot is not necessarily the same as the name of the person who filled it in. People have voted more than once in multiple locations.

In this regard, “ballot harvesting”—the collection and delivery of multiple ballots—is certainly the most problematic method of transferring the wishes of the voters to the ballot box. For instance, a person may legally collect the advanced or special ballots of family members or even casual acquaintances in nursing homes, hospitals and universities and deliver them in bulk to drop boxes. In most cases, this is legitimate and the person dropping off the ballot is simply performing a service for a friend or family member. However, it could happen that a staff person at a care home or a visitor with partisan motives could collect dozens of such ballots and deliver them selectively, based on the known political inclinations of the citizens for whom they are performing this service. Dinesh D’souza made a very powerful case that there was abuse of ballot drop boxes in his powerful video, “2,000 Mules.”

In the 2020 US Election, there were also many questions raised about the Dominion voting machines being used in some states. It turned out that the software that was supposedly foolproof had a number of vulnerabilities that rendered the results less than convincing. Although it is vociferously denied by mainstream defenders of the system and the Joe Biden Presidency, critics claim that there was online access to the machines during the election, both by technicians present and by online hackers. Some of the voting patterns that abruptly changed during the Long Night of Voting give anecdotal and circumstantial weight to the opinion that the votes tallied did not seem to represent the public sentiment visible during the campaign. In a number of counties, voter preferences changed dramatically during a period of time in the night when poll watchers were told that counting had ceased for the day and to come back in the morning. In the morning, polls had shifted significantly from leaning toward Donald Trump to a sudden rise in favour of Joe Biden.

The story of election fraud in the 2020 US Election has been completely smothered by both media and government, even the courts. If you search for terms like “election fraud,” you will find an overwhelming majority of media articles will refer to “baseless claims of election fraud.” Some of the top lawyers and Trump team advocates are now pleading guilty in cases being brought against them relating to their involvement in seeking to reverse or delay the ratification of election results. But does that mean that the claims are baseless? What are the implications of a guilty plea? Some of the defendants have lives to lead and careers to follow. They may have seen the writing on the wall and are just ready to plead guilty to get the state off their backs. The US Justice Department has made it a high priority to prosecute those involved in attempts to investigate the 2020 election. Big business and big media have colluded to punish all those involved. Mike Lindell, inventor and CEO of MyPillow, has been the victim of economic warfare as large chainstores have dropped his products and pulled his contracts in an attempt to silence him. But Mike Lindell and many others have remained steadfast defenders of the research and analysis that indicates substantial election fraud in 2020 . . . enough to change the outcome. If they’re right, Joe Biden should never have been sworn in. If Donald Trump were still in office, many believe the wars in Ukraine and Israel might never have started. No major wars were initiated while Trump was in the White House. But what’s done is done.

I began this article by saying we should be thankful that Canadian ballots are still paper ballots counted by hand rather than by potentially programmable mechanical tabulators. But that is changing; while Elections Canada spokespeople retain a commitment to hand-counted paper ballots, the rising trend towards mail-in and drop-off ballots portends potential avenues of fraud . . . and in at least one province, those paper ballots in the next provincial election (scheduled for October 2024) will be mechanically tabulated. What could go wrong? They also plan to introduce voting by phone, another innovation fraught with potential for abuse.

It’s time we Canadians put our foot down and stop allowing corrupt politicians to tamper with an electoral system that’s already under siege. Our future may depend on it.