What It Would've Taken to Actually Steal the Election

First, a little about me, in case you’re wondering how I know what I know.

I was an Associate Director at NSA, Associate Director of the US Intelligence Community (ODNI), contract cyber analyst at CIA, and have spoken and written extensively on election security. I have also been very active in predicting election results through the analysis of hundreds of billions of Internet searches. My last analysis ("Google search predicts big surprise in November election"), which—contrary to most polls—predicted a Trump win, came shockingly close to being accurate.

That out of the way, let’s get down to the facts.

The narrative of the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and multiple high-profile Trump supporters goes roughly like this: Democrats fueled hysteria about a tempest-in-a-teacup pandemic in order to discredit Trump and shift voting to mail-in ballots that were trivially easy to steal, fake, delete and alter for the Biden-Harris ticket.

In the global intelligence world, such an operation is usually called “Covert Action.” Russian spies call it “Active Measures”

And the putative Democratic Party mission to corrupt mail-in votes would have to have been a covert action plan like no other in history.

Simultaneously targeting mail-in ballots in (at least) Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, the Dems alleged mail-in ballot campaign succeed spectacularly despite violating every single principle of successful covert missions (more about that later). To pull off this campaign it was necessary to:

1. Gain access to—or to counterfeit- millions of mail-in ballots nationwide under the nose of Postmaster General Louis De Joy, a Trump appointee who slowed down mail processing in advance of receiving the biggest mail-in ballot volume in history and refused a court order to quickly search for as many as 300,000 mail-in ballots that had not been confirmed as arriving at their destination.
2. Bribe, blackmail or persuade Republican Secretary’s of State in charge of vote counting in Nevada and Georgia (not to mention Republican governors in Arizona and Georgia) to turn a blind eye to ballot fraud in their states and to ensure that numerous election employees and volunteers under them executed the fraud.
3. Predict the voting results and voting volume in at least 8 states with astonishing accuracy to insure just barely enough Biden votes to achieve credible razor-thin margins instead of bigger margins that would invite widespread skepticism.
4. Recruit hundreds—if not thousands—of operatives nationwide to subvert hundreds, if not thousands of post office employees, senior election officials, and vote counters
5. Circumvent each and every anti-fraud system (audits, ballot tracking, bi-partisan vote-counting monitoring, etc) in the targeted states
6. Succeed in having each and every one of the hundreds or thousands of conspirators in on the fraud to keep their mouths shut to family members, friends, and the press so that there were zero leaks.
7. Cover their tracks so thoroughly and completely that not a single piece of evidence of the sweeping campaign could come to light. Despite a need for close communication and coordination of the complex operation, to have no emails or text messages among conspirators, no recorded conversations and no secret memos come to light.
8. Eliminate intra-organizational squabbles among competing factions (say, progressives and moderates in the Democrat party) so that at least a few of the hundreds or thousands of conspirators, bitter at maltreatment at the hands of other participants, did not leak details of the operation to exact revenge.

Of all the accomplishments of the supposed conspiracy, reducing internecine squabbles to zero in an incredibly fractious party, was by far the most impressive achievement, especially in politics where leaks are as much a part of life as breathing.

Here are some “rules” about conducting secret missions that we must believe Democrat operatives threw out the window

1. Keeping the number of people aware of the operation to an absolute minimum in order to eliminate both intentional leaks and, unintentional mistakes and missteps that plague almost every mission.
2. Not planning for good luck. For instance, only by luck would every single post office or election official who was approached to participate in the conspiracy agree to help, or if they declined to help, not report the attempted subversion to the authorities
3. Keeping the operation simple. The broader the scope, the wider its sweep, the more things can go wrong. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is the motto of all successful covert ops.
4. Training and rehearsing in secret. A complex operation involving so many people cannot be pulled off without covert prior coordination, training, and rich communication among conspirators. So far, no evidence of such a broad-ranging training exercise has emerged

Taking all of the above into account, the probability that the Democrats pulled off the most audacious, massive, sweeping, complicated covert action plan in history without leaving a trace—while breaking all the rules of covert action—is vanishingly small.

But then we live in a country where, according to Pew Research, 25 percent of the population believes that election fraud is a serious problem, and where many believe QAnon assertions that a cabal of pedophile satan-worshipping Democrat elites is out to get Trump.