Before a single vote was cast, the 2020 election was baked into the cake. America’s political and media establishment were not going to let what happened to them in 2016 happen again.
Don’t take my word for it. TIME Magazine published an article in February of 2021 called “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” which describes a vast effort by a network of partisan political operatives, union leaders, and business titans to create a mail ballot “revolution” to oust Trump.
This is, quite literally, a plan hatched by a highly motivated and well-funded few to undermine American democracy as we know it.
Yet, it is not well understood exactly what the American left did and how they pulled it off, and scarier still, how much of it is still legal to this day.
And, oh yes, they are going to use the same playbook again in 2024.
Telling the true story of the 2020 election was one of the most critical sections of my New York Times bestselling book Breaking the News, which was re-released this week (with new material) for the 2024 election year.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump supporters distracted themselves with far-fetched conspiracy and other unprovable theories that voting systems (allegedly developed by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, or owned by Communist China, or serviced by a company called Dominion) flipped the exact number of votes necessary to beat Trump. All of that was a non-sensical waste of time.
Yet, the election was manipulated in two critical ways: First, the government dishonestly used the coronavirus pandemic to make wholesale changes to our voting rules that made it easier for Democrats to amass ballots; and second, the establishment media combined with the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe swamped the public with misinformation and impaired voter’s access to true information, leaving them distracted and misinformed. Together, this is what delivered the election for Joe Biden.
I cover each of the two major manipulations extensively in Breaking the News, but I will share some crucial details here.
Cheat by Mail
In Breaking the News, I list a number of statistical anomalies surrounding Joe Biden’s victory against Donald Trump. Aside from getting a record number of votes for an incumbent president, Donald Trump also saw his support rise with blacks and Hispanics; he won the traditional bellwether states of Iowa, Ohio, and Florida (all by greater margins than the polls predicted); and he won a stunning 83 percent of American counties. The list goes on.
So, how did he lose?
The answer is what became know as “cheat by mail,” and there is no individual who was a bigger part of this plot than Mark Zuckerberg. (More on his role momentarily).
An election worker wearing protective gloves sorts through mailed-in ballots in the King County Elections ballot processing center on March 9, 2020, in Renton, Washington. Election officials mandated the precautionary measure for workers handling ballots in this year’s primary election counting process due to the coronavirus outbreak. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Widespread mail voting surged in the 2020 race. According to Pew, for the 37 states (and the District of Columbia) where data is available, mail-in ballots accounted for over half of all primary votes cast. This number surged ostensibly so that people would stay safe from COVID, but it’s obvious that the main purpose of the mail-in ballots was to put Democrats at a massive political advantage.
Ballotpedia approximated that about 40 states made changes for the 2020 general election in response to the coronavirus pandemic. That chaos allowed Democrats to bag more votes.
Ballot Harvesting
“In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote. About a quarter voted early in person,” according to TIME Magazine. “[And] only a quarter of voters cast their ballots the traditional way: in person on Election Day.”
It is much easier to turn in a less-than-legal ballot than it is to over-turn one.
With new voting “drop boxes” in place (more on those later), the Democrats were practically invited to “ballot harvest.” Ballot harvesting is when a third party (read: political operatives) is allowed to handle your vote (i.e., collect your ballot and turn it in for you). This comes with a number of major pitfalls. With mail-in voting there is, naturally, no on-site monitoring. This means that intimidation, coercion, forgeries, or even bribery can take place without anyone ever knowing about it.
Activists can easily approach low-civic-engagement voters, convince them to vote for Democrats, and then turn in their ballots with the public being none the wiser.
Politically speaking, widespread ballot harvesting is more likely to favor Democrats, who have vast, well-funded networks of “community organizers,” people who are paid to make ballots get turned in. Though rules vary from state to state, take California for example, where there is no limit to how many ballots a harvester can collect. In fact, there no way to learn anything about who the harvesters are, who is paying them, or how prolific they are.
A voter places a ballot in an official mail-in ballot drop box outside of the L.A. County Registrar’s office ahead of Election Day on October 14, 2020, in Norwalk, California. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Utah County Election workers gather ballots from a drop box on October 26, 2020, in Springville, Utah. Utah is one of several states that has recently moved to mail-in ballots for presidential elections. (George Frey/Getty Images)
While ballot harvesting may be legal in some areas of the country, it is clearly not in the spirit of free and fair elections. In fact, it’s almost impossible to ascertain how widespread the tactic is being used. Considering that Joe Biden got more than 15 million votes in 2020 than Barack Obama got in 2012, and given the sheer volume of mail-in votes turned in, it would be shocking if the Democrat’s ballot harvesting machine was not a major explanation for these massive gains.
It should go without saying that the more people who handle your ballots, the more opportunity there is for fraud.
Yet, there are people who even now advocate for loosening restrictions on who can access your ballot, which is a blatant invitation for coercion and other unethical activity.
In America, we call these people Democrats.
COVID Fake News Leads to Real Votes
Allegedly due to the coronavirus pandemic, a Michigan judge ruled that postmarked mail-in ballots can be accepted for two weeks after election day. North Carolina accepted ballots for nine days past the November 3 election. Wisconsin allowed an extra six days to stuff letter boxes with ballots and then count the vote. When Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court said that mail-in ballots could be counted for three days after the election, I began to inform loved ones that I was of the opinion that Trump was probably going to the lose the count.
Cheat-by-mail was going to be the difference.
Chester County election workers process mail-in and absentee ballots for the 2020 general election on Nov. 4, 2020, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
Most states have different rules about postmarks and signatures, making the fog of war intense around election day. Wisconsin doesn’t even appear to require a postmark at all! Pennsylvania’s new voting rules also didn’t require evidence the ballot was postmarked on time.
Most, if not all, of the problems with mail-in balloting are still with us and will remain that way through this year’s election. In Breaking the News, I offer up what I believe are necessary solutions and mitigation strategies for our new low-integrity era of elections. It starts with restoring the rules to their pre-pandemic norms and enforcing voter-ID laws that include a picture and a signature, among several other examples.
But first thing is first: Republicans must find a way to win enough elections to get any reforms implemented before the Democrats create a permanent majority.
Tech Manipulation
After Donald Trump and conservative media – especially Breitbart News – dominated social media in the run-up to the 2016 election, the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe vowed that their platforms would not ever again be used against their broader globalist ambitions. Twitter, as just one prominent example, colluded with the deep state on a censorship campaign to minimize political damage inflicted on Democrats from Hunter Biden’s Laptop from Hell.
Even Wikipedia editors labeled the New York Post’s initial Laptop from Hell stories as debunked.
At one point or another, Donald Trump was banned or restricted by Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Shopify, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Google, and most famously, from his beloved and powerful Twitter page.
But this is only part of the story.
(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik; NY Post; BNN)
Of all the wild corruption by and on Twitter and Facebook, Google’s role in manipulating the election got far less attention than it deserved. Here are a few noteworthy details:
As reported exclusively by Breitbart News, Google Vice President Kent Walker stated in a tearful all-hands company meeting just after the 2016 election that the company intended to make populism and nationalism a “blip” or a “hiccup” in the march toward “progress.” They certainly backed that up.
Search engine expert (and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden voter) Dr. Robert Epstein, the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, said that he believed Google shifted a full six million votes or more in the 2020 election toward Joe Biden. The real number might be closer to 15 million, he says.
A man checks his phone near a Google Corporate Office on April 13, 2021, in New York. (John Smith/VIEWpress)
“We also found what seems to be a smoking gun,” Epstein told Tucker Carlson. “We found a period of days when the vote reminder on Google’s homepage was being sent only to liberals—not one of our conservative field agents received a vote reminder during those days.” Epstein had hundreds of field agents deployed across battleground states collecting hundreds of thousands of data points.
This is one of several tactics apparently deployed by Google to swing votes.
We at Breitbart experienced Google’s manipulation first-hand. Google began purging Breitbart’s content from search results starting right after the 2016 election. Our search visibility in July 2020 versus 2016 was down 99.7 percent. That means the likelihood that you find a Breitbart article when doing a routine Google search without the word “Breitbart” in the search term is almost zero. Google, nonetheless, emphatically denies that there is political bias in their search engines.
On May 5, 2020, Google killed all of Breitbart’s traffic on stories about Joe Biden. We went from tens of thousands of impressions on searches for “Joe Biden” to literally zero. Google simply flipped a switch and turned off the search traffic.
A cursor moves over Google’s search engine page. (AP Photo/Don Ryan, File)
A search engine expert with decades of experience in the industry told us that he’s never seen anything like this: “The sheer fact that there are thousands of pages of Breitbart content that reference Biden that were ranking before May 6, that now have no rank or impressions on search is a sign of manipulation, not algorithmic devaluing.” Mind you, none of these stories were false, but rather, they were deemed to be damaging to Biden’s election prospects.
Or just call it what it really is: trying to gain control over our electorate.
Facebook has tried numerous tactics to suppress the reach of conservative pages. They ban, “deboost,” and censor content that pushes narratives unfavorable to the Democratic Party. They even, at one time, maintained a “hate agents” list that was (is?) loaded with conservative and anti-establishment accounts. They launched an oversight board, colloquially known as the “Facebook Supreme Court,” ahead of the 2020 election. Naturally, they staffed it with assorted leftists, including a member of George Soros’s Open Society network.
Facebook actually beat Google to the punch in terms of suppressing Breitbart. After a 2017 study by Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School, showed that Breitbart dominated the right-wing media sphere in the 2016 election, we saw our reach on Facebook begin to diminish.
At Breitbart, we do nothing if not persevere; so these days, we are often found at or near the top of Facebook’s publisher rankings, but we are getting a relatively big slice of a tinier pie.
Zuckerberg and company turned down the volumes on our megaphones since Joe Biden’s election, assuring that the president’s infinite number of embarrassing moments and policy failures would never go viral. It is far, far more difficult to get political content to trend in 2024 vs. past election years, and that is Facebook’s design. As it became clear that the free exchange of ideas and robust debate did not help them achieve their political goals of protecting Democrats, it was time to limit those types discussions on the platform.
The logic is clear: Facebook executives are often a part of Joe Biden’s inner circle. Jeff Zients, a former Facebook board member, was Biden’s COVID czar. Erskine Bowles, another former Facebook board member, advised the transition. Jessica Hertz, formerly a government affairs executive at Facebook, served as the Biden transition team’s general counsel.
Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, left, testifies before the House Financial Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on Oct. 23, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
(Facebook is not alone in this regard. There appears to be a revolving door between Google and Biden world. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, for example, has ties to both Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Microsoft was the original partner of NewsGuard, which is another tool the globalist left is using to interfere in elections by destroying conservative publishers by demonetizing them. Much more on this theme can be found in Breaking the News.)
The list goes on.
It is well known that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s soft-money contributions to Joe Biden go far beyond what he did online. He infamously pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for “safe” election administration, ostensibly to protect the world from COVID. The centerpiece of the effort were COVID-safe “drop boxes.” These were bins that look like aluminum public trash cans, strewn throughout the country, largely unprotected and unguarded, mostly in precincts that favor Democrats, particularly ones that were likely to have close races and where it was most crucial for Biden to turn out votes.
These boxes were the crown Jewel of the Cheat by Mail operation.
Zuckerberg claimed he was trying to keep people safe while he was carrying out an attack on democracy.
Tech Titans Triumph
Taken altogether, I believe the Masters of the Universe were the single biggest deciding factor in the 2020 election. Between the constant manipulation of their platforms to benefit Joe Biden and Mark Zuckerberg’s last minute cash dump in certain districts favoring Democrats, I the evidence supports the claim.
I remind readers of this now in 2024 for one simple reason: most of these tactics appear to be legal and are still in place for this election year.
Hunter Biden holds up his father’s hand in Wilmington, Delaware, on November 7, 2020, after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election.(JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
It needs to be a top priority for President Trump, should he win this election, to crack down on the Big Tech oligarchy to ensure that free and fair elections are restored in this country.
But the first order of business is that he and other strong conservatives have to win this time. And given the level of interference that will occur, he’s going to need to win by a lot.
Consider this a warning. Unfortunately, it’s a similar warning to the one we gave voters in the run up to 2020. Hopefully it won’t be necessary to repeat it ever again.
Alex Marlow is the Editor-in-Chief of Breitbart News and the New York Times bestselling author of Breaking Biden. His first bestseller, Breaking the News, has been re-released in an updated paperback. You can follow Alex on Facebook, Instagram, and X at @AlexMarlow.