The November election is shaping up to be a repeat of the one in 2000 when recounts of the presidential vote tally dragged on for five weeks. There’s even a new website called “The Recount.” But it’s not a recount that Americans are being conditioned to accept as normal, this time it’s the initial count. It’s the initial vote count that Democrats want to drag on and on; perhaps past the Electoral College deadline in December and even past Inauguration Day in 2021. And if the initial counting drags on for long enough, there won’t be time for any recounts. That’s because just like the proverbial show, the government must go on. And you can take this to the bank: if the counting produces a Biden win, Democrats will declare victory and attempt to stop the counting cold.

On August 24, The Recount ran a 2:27 minute video of Hillary Clinton urging that “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances.” (Just after she says that, Democrat strategist Jennifer Palmieri raises her arms in triumph.) Clinton then says that the vote counting will “drag out.” Republican vote counters, poll workers, and lawyers should adopt Clinton’s tactics and iron will.

Democrats are preparing voters to expect a Trump landslide on the night of the election which will be undone when mail-in ballots are counted. On September 1, Fast Company explained the “red mirage”:

The term describes an election outcome in which early results appear to favor President Trump, but then tip toward a decisive victory for Joe Biden as more mail-in ballots are counted… In one modeling outcome, Trump could see a projected 408 electoral votes on election night, compared to 130 for Biden, but that’s with only 15% of the mail-in votes being counted, Axios reports. The tide could then turn to favor Biden as we count more votes -- polling data shows Democrats are more likely to vote by mail.

Even before the advent of “universal mail-in voting,” there was already a lot of doubt about America’s elections. Since 1996, it’s been illegal for foreigners to vote in elections for federal officials. Even so, several states have instituted “automatic voter registration,” including the state with the most votes in the Electoral College, California. If foreigners are present on the registries of such states, how can their registries be used to mail out mail-in ballots? Indeed, how can such states use their registries to conduct federal elections of any kind, even in-person voting?

On September 3, the Daily Caller ran Vince Coglianese’s “There’s Only One Way To Avert An Election Disaster -- Open The Polls,” a fine article that everyone concerned about election integrity should read. It’s also very sobering:

In a bipartisan war game conducted in June, Podesta reportedly played the role of Joe Biden. In one scenario, Biden narrowly lost the election. Podesta -- acting as the septuagenarian -- refused to concede and tried to manipulate votes in the Electoral College. “In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office as planned,” The New York Times reported. “The House named Mr. Biden president; the Senate and White House stuck with Mr. Trump. At that point in the scenario, the nation stopped looking to the media for cues, and waited to see what the military would do.”

In other words, Democrats are willing to bring America “to the brink of civil war” to fill and satisfy that gnawing hole in their lives: their need to rule. Coglianese asserts that the only way to “prevent chaos” and give confidence to Americans “is by reopening every available polling place in America” and that “Congress should act swiftly to compel the nation’s governors to open the polls to in-person voting.”

And Coglianese’s right; that is what should happen. But the U.S. House is controlled by the vain ridiculous power-mad Nancy Pelosi, and she’s not going to do anything remotely like what Coglianese is proposing. Nancy would prefer the nation slide into civil war than lose her position as Speaker of the House.

So it’s highly unlikely that Congress will do anything to salvage the 2020 election. Perhaps the executive branch of the federal government might do something, after all, there are federal statutes that pertain to elections; perhaps those laws could be enforced. But it’s doubtful that anything to salvage the election will be coming out of the Swamp. So in accordance with the 1996 statute (see § 611. Voting by aliens, page 26) that forbids aliens (i.e. foreigners) from voting for federal officials, Republicans should demand that the citizenship of voters using mail-in ballots be established beyond a doubt.

Of course, this will elicit much moaning and micturition by Democrats in states that have moved toward mail-in ballots. But Republicans need to adopt Hillary’s stance: “don't give an inch.” Regardless of whether a state uses mail-in voting or in-person voting, here’s what should happen to salvage the 2020 elections and prevent a civil war:

1) Congress would require voters to use their SSNs to vote in federal elections (i.e. for federal officials), and their SSNs would go on their ballots. Voters would use the de facto national ID as their voter ID.

2) Congress would require the states to conduct federal elections separately from all other elections; that is, only federal officials would be on the ballot. Without having to vote for state/local officials and initiatives, in-person voting will go much faster.

3) Congress would require the states to put all their ballots in a federal election into a single file and give a copy of that file to the feds. This would provide the best way for verifying the citizenship of voters and for detecting double voting, as the feds would put all the state ballot files into a single national file, then a computer program would read through the national file while verifying the SSNs against the SSA database. By requiring the SSN, the states won’t even need to use their corrupted voter registries to conduct federal elections.

If one were to deliberately devise a system to facilitate the theft of elections, it’d be mail-in ballots. Democrats have actually succeeded in making elections more suspect than they were in 2000. Republican vote counters must be prepared to challenge each and every mail-in ballot. The citizenship of every voter casting a mail-in ballot must be confirmed. Anything short of that makes a mockery of our democracy.

If Democrats had any interest in democracy, they’d have made some minimal effort to ensure the integrity of the vote with their infernal mail-in ballots. But what the states have done is create systems where the legitimacy of ballots can be neither verified nor falsified, at least in any timely manner.

How is a vote counter looking at a mail-in ballot supposed to know whether it was even used by the person it was sent to? Are the states going to have handwriting experts to confirm all the signatures? Signatures can be forged. With their universal mail-in voting and automatic voter registration, the Blue States are trying to disenfranchise the Red States? The only way around it is to use the SSN to vote, which is much less “subjective” than handwriting analysis.

Congress and the states have had 20 years to make changes that would give the American people confidence in the legitimacy of the vote, so good luck on getting anything out of them in the less than two months before Nov. 3. But when one considers how expeditiously President Trump ramped up the production of PPE and ventilators (a complex piece of machinery), one would think Congress and the states might have enough time to do something to salvage the 2020 election, were they so inclined.

Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON OPINION is a programmer from Kansas City. (My most recent articles on election integrity are HERE and HERE.)

Image: Pikist