I’VE WATCHED the 2020 US presidential elections since it began, and from what I’ve seen, the amount of cheating involved would make the most corrupt Filipino politicians blush. Here’s how the event went down.
Trump was in the lead and projected to win the presidency when voting was shut down in the middle of the night. It was unusual but at that point, everybody thought it was just a glitch.
Then, hours later, vote counting resumed, and hundreds of thousands mail-in votes were coincidentally found. The influx of new votes seemed to go one way only: for Biden. Whenever Trump seemed to be gaining, more were surprisingly found.
And instead of concluding the election count in Nov. 3, everything had to be stalled for days to count the mail-in ballots. If that happened in the Philippines – delaying election results for days – I think most people would say that something stinks.
But that’s not all. There were also videos of ballot counters filling out ballots; public records of dead registrants who voted in the election; videos of legal observers in certain states and urban cities were removed from polling places and ballot stations being walled off from outside observers.
Mail-in ballots are one thing but all these other cases amount to voter fraud. Trump and his team have filed lawsuits, but who knows how things will turn out.
One thing’s for certain. The situation has become existential for America’s various factions. There’s even rumors of a new American Civil War.
I don’t know how things will turn out but it feels like an era just died, and not only because the US has lost the moral virtue to lecture other countries on democracy. The desperation to keep Trump out of office forced a lot of powerful people to cross certain lines, and in the end, those lines will only lead to more escalations from which it’s impossible to go back from./PN
