Cheating to Win the Election

Part #4 of a series on the 2020 U.S. election crisis

In the previous articles, I discussed Trump’s financial interests in maintaining the presidency, the foreign help he’s getting in the election, and how he’s trying to stop people from casting votes. In this article, I go more in-depth into different ways Trump can cheat.

This series of articles was first published on October 2 and was updated on October 17.

It could start with a tweet

In July 2020, cybersecurity experts were alarmed by a significant Twitter hack that targeted the accounts of politicians and billionaires. James Lewis, director of the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, asked us to imagine “the effect if you had some sort of damaging tweet on Election Day.” A hack could come from anyone who is technically able to do it.

So many ways to cheat

Trump has invested a lot of energy into election cheating. His “next step,” according to Ruth Ben-Ghiat in June 2020, could be “fraud, foreign-assisted infrastructural emergencies, voter suppression, martial law…”

At a closed-door gathering of the Council for National Policy in August, Charlie Kirk said they should aim to “keep the campuses closed” during the pandemic so that left-leaning students wouldn’t vote in-person which would be “a great thing,” while Tom Fitton spoke of the importance of…