If you do all of these things, your candidate may be declared the winner; but you can rest assured that doubts and resentment will linger for years.
If, for some bizarre reason, you would like for your candidate’s apparent victory to be widely viewed as illegitimate, there are many things you can do. Based upon our national experience this year, here are 27 ways you can help ensure that outcome.
In the years prior to the election, lay the groundwork.
1. Ensure your party reflexively opposes any and all anti-vote fraud measures even if they are popular, such as voter ID laws.
2. Make sure your party repeatedly refuses to accept its candidates’ losses.
3. Have a shady billionaire try to elect friendly secretaries of state – the officials who oversee elections in their states.
Choose your nominee carefully.
4. Nominate the oldest, least coherent major party candidate in history.
5. Nominate a career politician who has accomplished virtually nothing after five decades in government.
6. Nominate a candidate who knowingly and willingly hung out with racists and even eulogized a former KKK leader while your party claims to be “woke.”
7. Nominate an out-of-touch candidate who advises parents to play a record player for their kids at night.
8. Nominate a candidate who tells stories from way back in the day about colorful characters, like Corn Pop, and who uses hip terms, like ‘malarkey.’
During the campaign, do the following:
9. Have your party file lawsuits to weaken election integrity laws.
10. Have allies in social media censor and “fact check” your opponent and his supporters.
11. Make sure that your candidate has relatively few people watching his social media events.
12. Organize the worst national convention (by a major party) in history.
13. Make sure your candidate spends most of his time in his basement and attends few events.
14. Organize the most boring campaign events imaginable in empty fields, back yards, and parking lots.
15. Make sure your candidate’s events are sparsely attended.
16. When your candidate speaks at events, make sure that he does not know where he is or even what office he is running for.
17. Make sure your candidate is combative with average voters.
18. Make sure your candidate avoids as many serious journalists as possible.
19. Make sure your candidate who will not answer key questions.
20. Make sure your candidate uses a teleprompter for softball interviews.
21. Allow billionaires to determine which county election offices receive additional funding.
During early voting and on Election Day, do the following:
22. Ensure that voter turnout during a pandemic is fantastic – the best since more than 100 years ago when we had fewer states and a much smaller population.
On election night, do the following:
23. Have election officials tell observers that they are done counting ballots for the day, then have the election officials sneakily restart counting in the middle of the night.
24. Have suitcases filled with mysterious ballots hidden away, then bring them out and count them after the observers leave.
25. Make sure your candidate’s vote totals spike – with few votes going to your opponent — while no one is observing the vote counting.
In the wake of the election, do the following.
26. Have officials in a key county refuse to comply with a subpoena seeking information about the election.
27. Have party officeholders go to court to try to suppress an audit of controversial voting machines.
If you do all of these things, your candidate may be declared the winner; but you can rest assured that doubts and resentment will linger for years. But what difference will it make? After all, your candidate’s family may be able to cash in for four more years; your party may be able to defund the police, pack the Supreme Court, assault both religious freedom and gun rights, hike taxes, kill millions of American jobs with regulations and offshoring, soften our country’s policies toward China and Iran, and subsidize a whole new generation of green energy “success” stories like Solyndra. So it would all be worthwhile, right?
Richard McCarty is Director of Research at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
