Defy The 'Big Lie'; Control The Present

We Need 'Smart Elections' and 'Smart Elections' Needs Us

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

― George Orwell, 1984

It feels like George Orwell’s 1984 has shown up unsafe, unsound, and fully realized four decades later.

Since, and presumably before, a Dec. 4, Pew Research Center poll reported that 88% of the voting electorate feel the 2024 election across the United States were "run and administered well," folks seemingly have crawled back into their Fox News holes, assimilated into their shiny, happy protective bubbles.

“Large majorities of voters express confidence that both votes cast in person at polling places and those cast by absentee or mail-in ballot were counted as voters intended this year,” reported the Pew Research Center.

Cased closed. The self-obsessed traitor to the American Republic who signed, sealed and delivered a lethal, bloody insurrection at the Capitol – injuring and traumatizing some 140 police officers as they defended the Republic four years ago – won the 2024 presidential election fair and square.

After all, why would a lifetime grifter, impulsive big liar, and Russian puppet with the moral compass of a garden snake – who was facing possible prison time – cheat?

All’s fair in love and war. And dirty tricks. All the in-your-Facebook deception and enduring Russia-infused meddling was simply a necessary means to an ugly end that no one knew they desired.

In this alternate Twilight Zone reality, greed is good. Compassion is weakness. Crooks are winners. Justice is a joke. The righteous shall be damned. And delusion is your friend. The truth is just a lie if you so choose to believe that.

The GOP's and Donald Trump's Russia-assisted long game swindle keeps paying destabilizing dividends. With all the treachery of the devil, Trump employed Adolf Hitler’s lesson in deception well: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

The biggest of the big liar’s big lies has metastasized and mutated into a grotesque “truth” for all future ill intent and malicious purposes. As the same seditious autocrat who orchestrated a deadly coup attempt on the Capitol right before our eyes – committing the greatest domestic act of traitorous terror against our nation – four years later to the very dark day readies to be certified as president once again, there are no words to describe the degree of disgust. “Grotesque” barely approaches my sense of loathing.

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth,” Orwell, 1984

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The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Fingers firmly inserted in ears, the average Joe or Jan, Republican or Democrat, that I’ve encountered anyway since the Nov. 4, shocker election that crowned Trump king and Elon Musk his Rasputin, doesn't want to hear a peep about any legitimate efforts to expose a rigged election.

Not again. The deflecting and protecting of the petulant Donald, the boy who strategically cried wolf so many times, impulsively regurgitating his “big lie” with not a shred of evidence, has exhausted the citizenry's tolerance for concerns about election integrity. Just when it’s most vital. And that was the plan all along.

“Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” – Orwell, 1984

Never mind if concerns rooted in the reality of documented breached voting system software along with veritable myriad election anomalies, including unprecedented under votes tallies – in the hundreds of thousands – favoring a convicted felon for commander-in-chief, beg for closer inspection. Americans are pleading: “mercy.”

A recent poll reported by the Associated Press confirms that Americans, due to “overload,” have curbed their intake of downer political news coverage since the election (affecting primarily MSNBC and CNN viewership).

Disturbingly, Fox News, a genuine hardcore right wing propagandist outlet that from the get-go electrified, enlivened and fed the Trump monster, felt a post-election bump and finished 2024 with record ratings. Seems folks – despite, or perhaps due to these troubling times – still can’t resist a peep under the sideshow tent.

As the World’s Greatest Showman P.T. Barnum succinctly said well over a century ago: “The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived.” That quote has always explained much about Trump’s circus sideshow barker-like appeal.

It’s why tens of thousands gathered on the beach during his Wildwood Boardwalk hustle rally last May in my neck of the woods. And it’s why, after satisfying their voyeuristic impulses after say an half hour, many promptly moved on to the next boardwalk sideshow attraction.

Anyway, who can blame anyone for tuning out to the caustic news? I’ve done the same to some degree – just caught clips as necessary on the suffocating garbage about the tyrant-in-waiting’s alleged mandate and nutso unqualified plutocratic cabinet picks.

But tuning out entirely and resigning yourself to the metamorphosing big lie equates to checking out from your responsibility as an American, and as a human being, thus consigning our Republic and our fellow citizens to a doomed fate.

How many fed up Americans will never again fully engage – just as Putin, Trump, Musk and all their fascist sycophants want?

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance,” wrote famed playwright George Bernard Shaw. Indeed.

Complacency is complicity. We can’t afford to ignore our compromised voting system, particularly with Project 2025 waiting in the wings. Who will be left to guard the chickens and the eggs as the ravenous wolf paces outside the hen house?

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We Need ‘Smart Elections’

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s administration issued additional sanctions against Russia and Iran for attempting to influence the 2024 election through thousands of AI-generated fake news stories weekly posted to social media and phony “news” sites.

Will the defense of Democracy end there – with a slap on the wrist?

A couple days later on Jan. 2, President Biden awarded citations to leaders of the Jan. 6 investigative committee. Yet Democrats so far, publicly anyway, have appeared uninterested in challenging or investigating the many troubling aspects of the 2024 election.

Dual "Duty To Warn" letters in November from cyber security experts urging Vice President Kamala Harris to demand hand recounts in swing states based on past voting system breaches and weird algorithmic split ticket voting patterns, failed to prompt any coordinated review of election results before state presidential electors cast their votes Dec. 17.

Of late, there’s been rumblings that Democrats, based on the former President’s ineligibility as an insurrectionist under the 14th Amendment, Section 3, may be working behind the scenes with some Republicans to challenge the electoral vote certification of president–elect Trump during the joint session of congress tomorrow, Monday Jan. 6.

Since Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, any objection to Monday’s scheduled electoral vote certification based on the 14th Amendment, would require “at least one-fifth of the duly chosen and sworn members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate” to stand. Then a ⅔ vote majority of both houses would be needed to declare Trump ineligible and remove him.

A long shot, perhaps. Nonetheless, a shot that our congressional representatives who swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” are obliged to take.

Outside of that, the only other visible hope to resolve unanswered questions around the 2024 election and secure our voting system for the future, lies with Smart Elections, a non-partisan group still scrutinizing the past election.

Smart Elections has promised additional reporting on bomb threats during the election; audits following the election; internet connectivity of the voting machines; cellular accessibility to voting machines; and statistical analysis of election results.

“The analysis SMART Elections has done showing the extreme and unbalanced drop-off rate between Trump and Harris and between swing and non-swing states does concern us, and we’re continuing to look at that and other data,” posted Lulu Friesdat, Co-founder and Executive Director of Smart Elections in December on Substack.

Smart Elections has been working on both sides of the political aisle for the past 4 years for a more secure election system and are “now poised to become a truly trans-partisan force for improved election security and oversight,” wrote Friesdat.

Smart Elections’ new Substack site reportedly received more than 100,000 views in the last 30 days or so and organizers are inviting the public to engage, volunteer, and donate to further their worthy cause.

“As one of the few organizations offering honest and accurate information about U.S. election security weaknesses, we've become the center of gravity for many people seeking to understand what may have happened in the election,” posted Friesdat, New Year’s Eve on Substack.

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“Do Not Obey in Advance”

In his 2017 New York Times best selling book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, historian Timothy Snyder mines the recent past’s lessons that demand citizens confronting tyranny "Do not obey in advance."

Nevertheless, it certainly feels like a majority of Americans, the Democratic Party and the formerly esteemed Fourth Estate, is doing just that.

“Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked,” writes Snyder. “A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

Snyder's Substack video from October cites the damaging repercussions of once prestigious unflappable journalistic institutions, The Washington Post and The LA Times, effectively obeying Trump in advance and bowing to tyranny, by not endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. Instead, they played it safe and endorsed neither candidate.

Pre-election reports from CNET among others, quoting voting experts who assured that the 2024 elections would be “fair and secure” arguably promoted a false trust and placated the masses.

Even The Brennan Law Center For Justice seemed preoccupied with deflecting Trump’s predictable fear mongering about a stolen election, and lost focus of unresolved software breaches like the one in Mesa County, Colorado which resulted in the conviction and sentencing of an election official in August.

After the breach in 2021, a Mesa County voting system password appeared on a QAnon website. The cat was out of the bag.

Which begs the question, when they knew voting systems in several states had been breached and operating software copied, what did U S. Attorney Merrick Garland and his justice department do about it – if anything?

Cyber security and voting experts who a year ago warned the Biden Administration, justice department and intelligence agencies about “serious threats” to the 2024 election due to copied voting system software, never got satisfactory answers.

In the meantime, pundits still are tripping over themselves trying to explain the surprise results of an election without even remotely questioning whether the vote was accurately tallied. Did Dems really lose the middle class? Is the minority vote slipping away? What if it's all just another Trump illusion?

What if all the talking points on the elections such as in this Nov. 25 NBC news report “5 Democratic assumptions shattered by the 2024 election” are based on half truths or a lie sealed as gospel in the aftermath of a compromised election that no one wants to consider?

The late American writer Gore Vidal rightly scolded: “We are in the United States of amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.” Unfortunately, that resoundingly rings true today.

The truth is that whether or not the elections, despite the 70 some distracting bomb threats linked to Russia, were administered relatively smoothly as that December Pew Research Center poll suggests, that doesn't negate the possibility – in this case the mounting logical likelihood that Trump and Republicans as typical – are guilty of playing dirty pool.

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What's up with Trump’s “Co-president”?

Whether you like it or not, numerous questions revolving around the 2024 election persist. In my book, one of the most nagging thorns in the side of present day election integrity is Elon Musk.

Take Musk’s Starlink and million dollar daily giveaway roles in the election. Quite convenient. And worth exploring – particularly amid ongoing alleged security violation probes into Musk's empire and recent concerns in India alleging drug smugglers and insurgents are using Starlink. Controversy follows Musk around like a bad habit.

Presently, Musk who spent more than a quarter billion dollars to get Trump elected is facing harsh criticism from Germany for meddling in German politics. Concerningly, the billionaire Telsa CEO has been denied U.S. special security clearance even while the United States works to implement Musk's much-trumped SpaceX spy satellite program.

And don't forget the scrutiny Trump’s "Mini Me" faced in March after allegations that Russia was using Musk's Starlink in Ukraine.

Cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore in his "Duty to Warn" letter to Vice President Harris spit balled how Musk’s lottery giveaway could have been a means of acquiring names and addresses for potential Trump “ghost votes.”

Additionally, asserted Spoonamore, E-Poll books containing voter registration data are typically linked to the internet through wireless networks such as Starlink. In a subsequent Substack post, Spoonamore questioned why hundreds of people who never registered for the Musk PAC lottery giveaway received $100 checks? Those are some the things election volunteers are working to make sense of.

Such manifest conundrums are why Smart Elections needs our cooperation – as it works towards “improving audits so that they are meaningful and robust” and setting up election observation teams “to monitor, verify and protect elections,” as Smart Elections’ Friesdat promises. Again, connect here: smartelections.substack.com.

As greedy kleptocrats circling Trump for their undeserved slice of the dwindling American pie conspire to rewrite our history – for good, we need a citizen-grounded outlet like Smart Elections more than ever. What good has Orwell's foreboding words from his powerful prophetic dystopian novel 1984 done us if it still falls on deaf ears?

Famed astronomer Galileo Galilei of the 16th and 17th centuries who enlightened us on the intricacies of the universe immediately encompassing planet earth, once stated: “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

So, let’s discover them.