Eugenio Magdalena
2 min readJul 29, 2020

A sign of fascism…

Beware of Fraud at the November election!

… that most authoritarian Governments employ.

Unfortunately, President Trump continues to add authoritarian (fascist, say many) signs to his already long list of totalitarian symptoms.

And it is well known the aversion of totalitarian and fascist regimes towards popular manifestations, and towards elections, in general. In fact, extreme dictators of the right and the left, like Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, and Stalin in Rusia, just as an example, plotted systematically against free, democratic elections in their respective countries.

Disrespect of the dictator Stalin for clean elections. Photo:https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/51/6/510355530-stalin_voting.jpg

If we add to that, that Trump is below Biden in recent polls, it seems reasonable then to expect some sort of tricky maneuver by Trump’s camp in the upcoming presidential election in November.

Given that we will probably be amidst the coronavirus pandemic by the time of the Presidential election in November, it seems reasonable to expect a high % of the votes being cast by mail, or by absentee means.

Given that absentee ballots, including mail votes, seem to be more vulnerable to fraud, that is the area in which detailed care and attention must be placed.

The National Vote at Home Institute, which advocates postal ballots, analyzed all states in 2020 and found that 32 states “are missing major pieces of policy or best practices that ensure a secure mail ballot process such as a sufficient data integrity process, signature verification processes and/or a signature deficiency cure process.”Among these 32 states, 15 lack steps to verify voters’ addresses before mailing them ballots, 17 states do not mandate a signature verification process, and 30 do not have adequate options to cure defects in voter signatures. Often voters have no way to cure signature mismatches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting_in_the_United_States#Reliability_of_postal_ballots

Now, President Trump has been very vocal against mail votes:

President Trump has declared, without evidence, that mail voting is an open invitation to fraud and will be used unfairly against him this fall. He has tweeted that mail voting would make this the “most rigged” election in history

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/508928-america-has-to-be-ready-for-mail-voting-to-avert-an-election-crisis

His words can be an omen of what could happen: During the election of 2016, Hillary Clinton won by far the mail-voting election, so anticipating that something similar could occur in the upcoming November election, but with a much larger number of votes this time, like a sore loser, President Trump could cry fraud!, expecting the resulting controversy to be resolved in his favor by his cronies at the Supreme Court, and therefore staying in power.

Alternatively, fraud in mail voting could be committed by his sycophants, and he could claim his innocence, as he announced with priority the possibility of fraud in votes by mail.

Eugenio Magdalena

Eugenio is a disabled Economist (UCAB, Caracas), cursed a post-graduate Diploma in Marketing (Strathclyde University, Scotland, UK), and an MBA (England, UK).