Rigging and reality: How much do we need to worry?

I recently read an article about the most creative ways people have cheated on tests. They ranged from the utterly amazing, like this:

“In Spanish class we hid an actual exchange student from Mexico in the supply closet, gave her a copy of the test, and she whispered the answers to the people sitting in the back row next to the closet. My teacher had no idea.”

To the incredibly complex, like this:

“A classmate of mine carefully removed the label from a Coke bottle and scanned it as an image file, opened up Photoshop and replaced the ingredients paragraph with notes from the test and reprinted it on glossy paper. After careful cutting and gluing it back onto the bottle, it looked exactly like an inconspicuous bottle of Coke that he just kept on his desktop during the exam.”

I kept thinking about this as I saw article after article telling us what insanity it is for Donald Trump to claim that the elections could be rigged in Hillary Clinton’s favor.

(Full disclosure: it’s not the campaign strategy I would have brought up a couple weeks out from D-Day. But be that as it may … here we are.)

What amazes me about these articles is the utter unwillingness to address even the possibility that politicians (especially ones like Clinton, who amazingly evaded indictment for crimes that other people have gone to jail for) could maybe, just maybe—play dirty.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton shake hands after the Presidential Debate at Hofstra University on September 26, 2016 in Hempstead, New York. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Remember now, in Clinton, we’re talking about a politician whose emails reveal a be-all-end-all level of sleaziness; whose campaign actively targets Catholics as the enemy, and in need of government-run reform; whose operatives help the candidate cheat in the debates by feeding her questions; whose party rigged its nomination for her… no—they’d never do anything to demean the dignity of the electoral process.

For crying out loud, people: people cheat. All the time. They’ll cheat in anything, for anything, and no matter the stakes. The hilarity of the article I showed you earlier is the creative extent to which people go to make their cheating work out. And that’s just for a measly test. When it comes to something far more important (like, say, a presidential election) what in the world would possess us to think it wouldn’t or doesn’t happen with regularity in political elections?

While there are plenty of people who will run around saying that it’s irresponsible to suggest that that dirty tricks do and may take place, what’s infinitely more irresponsible is pretending that they don’t. Or never could.

Guys, in my home state we’ve got a former Saturday Night Live performer and Playboy “Porn-O-Rama” author as a senator—thanks grand part to shenanigans.

A quick history lesson:

Democrat Al Franken beat Republican Norm Coleman by 312 ballots. Oh and by the way, 1,099 felons voted in that election.

Granted, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that those 1,099 felons didn’t all necessarily vote for Franken.

Fair enough.

Except, according to a recent study, felons “register Democratic by more than six-to-one.” According to the same study, in states where felons can vote after leaving jail, “73 percent of convicts who turn out for presidential elections would vote Democrat.”

Keep that in mind as you consider that in April 2016, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (and close friend of the Clintons) gave voting rights to 200,000 felons, even those who didn’t live in Virginia when they committed their crimes.

(McAuliffe also happens to be the guy whose PAC donated half a million dollars to the senatorial campaign of a woman whose husband was also coincidentally a “key manager of the FBI leadership team overseeing the probe of Clinton’s use of a ‘home-brew’ private email system and server…”)

And it’s not just felons we’ve got to be worried about.

As CBS report reveals, there’s been a decided spike in illegal immigrant crossings in direct correlation to the election:

“The smugglers are telling them if Hillary [Clinton] gets elected, that there’ll be some sort of amnesty, that they need to get here by a certain date … They’re also being told that if [Donald] Trump gets elected, there’s going to be some magical wall that pops up overnight and once that wall gets up, nobody will ever get in again.”

If that’s true, not only would it behoove them to get here now, but it would behoove them to make sure Donald Trump isn’t elected, right?

Keep that in mind as you consider that 12 states and the District of Columbia allow illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses—and when all it takes to vote is a driver’s license and a personal attestation that you’re a citizen (thank you, John Podesta) … well, you can do the math. (Or you could just watch this video of Democrats “encouraging people they believe to be illegal aliens to vote.”)

But what if everything’s above board when it comes to who is voting? Let’s talk about voting machines:

“The U.K.-based Smartmatic company posted a flow-chart on its website that it had provided voting machines for 16 states, including important battleground states like Florida and Arizona.”

Smartmatic also happens to have direct ties to billionaire and mega Clinton fan George Soros. And is substantially rumored to have played a role in “several landslide (and contested) victories by President Hugo Chavez and his supporters." While the Smartmatic has since removed the flowchart from its site, Lifezette’s Edmund Kozak makes a great point: “Why, then, had Smartmatic bragged about providing over 50,000 voting machines for U.S. elections?”

Keep that in mind as you consider the recent concerning developments out of Texas, where “Chambers County election officials have switched to emergency paper ballots after technical glitches with the electronic voting machines during early voting.”

And no, Texas isn’t one of the states originally listed by Smartmatic, (and apparently no machines with Smartmatic ties will be used in this year’s election) but that’s not the point: if we’ve learned one thing from the tsunami of WikiLeaks-hacked emails, no electronic process is totally safe from manipulation—especially if people at the controls have a penchant for a certain candidate.

Still, despite all of this, people will still point to the fact that an infinitesimally small number of voter fraud cases have actually been prosecuted—so, you know, it’s not a problem. But as The Federalist’s John Gibbs puts it so well: “Let’s follow this logic. Does the fact that 109 people were cited for jaywalking in Seattle in 2009 mean that only 109 people jaywalked in Seattle that year? Does the fact that 103,733 people were cited for driving without a seatbelt in Tennessee in 2015 mean that only that many people were driving without seatbelt in Tennessee in 2015?”

Bingo.

Let’s head back to my home state for a moment. Al Franken’s contested (stolen) election was so much more than simply a seat in the hallowed halls of Congress. His vote gave the Democrats filibuster-proof status as they pushed Obamacare through. And that little gem may very well irreparably change our country forever. In fact, it already has.

Just apply a little common sense here, people. The race is tightening, especially in swing states. And when you can win a measly Senate seat with just a few hundred illegal votes, are you going to sit there and tell me the Clinton machine couldn’t do the same in a couple swing states?

Keep that in mind.

Mary Ramirez is a full-time writer, creator of www.afuturefree.com(a political commentary blog), and contributor to The Chris Salcedo Show (TheBlaze Radio Network, Monday-Friday from 3 to 5 p.m. ET). She can be reached at: afuturefree@aol.com; or on Twitter: @AFutureFree

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