There is a significant chance that Democrat Party operatives stole the election from Donald Trump. The implications of such a theft are interesting.

The Democratic Party hoped to gain control of the country for a generation by fundamentally changing the American people, Congress, and the Supreme Court. It hoped to change the American people by amnestying tens of millions of illegal aliens and reopening the immigrant spigot. The amnestied aliens would turn Republican strongholds such as Texas and Florida into Democratic states similar to what they did in California. When chain migration is added to the effect – the average immigrant sponsors 3.5 family members – the American people will be irrevocably changed. The Democrat Party hoped to add two states: Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, thereby ensuring their control of the Senate. It hoped to transform the Supreme Court by packing it with new justices. Depending on how the Georgia runoff elections turn out, the Party might still accomplish these goals.

On the night of Nov. 3, the American citizens went to bed with Trump ahead in the vote count in the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, election analyst Robert Barnes noted, the vote was halted, and several thousand votes later conveniently found that put Biden ahead.

There were troubling vote irregularities in battleground states. (1) In the major metro areas, Big Data Poll’s Richard Baris reports that Biden got fewer votes than Hillary Clinton did except for the biggest metro areas of the battleground states (Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia). (2) The Republican Party alleges that in Detroit, Las Vegas, and Philadelphia, Republican, poll watchers were prevented from watching the vote count.

In Philadelphia, a Pennsylvania appellate court judge had to order that watchers not be blocked. It is unclear if the order was too late because contestable ballots were no longer checkable. (3) The Washington Times’ S. A. Miller and Alex Swoyer report that poll workers, post office employees and certified election observers filed affidavits that state that they observed suspicious-and-illegal conduct in the handling and tabulation of ballots in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. (4) The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel reports that for Wisconsin not to have a suspiciously large voter turnout nearly 900,000 (30% of Wisconsin’s voters) would have had to registered to vote on election day. This, she claims, is very unlikely. (5) The Nevada Republican Party sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding 3,062 instances of voter fraud. It predicted the number of instances of fraud will grow.

Adding to the suspicious pattern, some of these cities – for example, Detroit and Philadelphia – have a history of election difficulty and fraud. In 2019, for example, the Public Interest Legal Foundation sued Detroit because among other problems, it had more registered voters than eligible voters. A federal court convicted and sentenced an elections judge, Domenick Demuro, for accepting bribes to cast fraudulent ballots and certifying false voting results in Philadelphia during elections as recent as 2016.

All of this was aided and abetted by the rushed attempt to switch to a mail-in ballot system and weaken the deadline, voter-identification, and signature-checking requirements that prevent election fraud. At this point, it appears there was fraud. The issue is whether it was widespread enough to flip the election. As of now, we cannot answer this question.

If there were widespread election fraud, this would have been the third coup attempt. The first attempt was the Russia-Hoax criminal conspiracy. At present, not even the FBI leadership who were in the middle of the conspiracy are defending the FISA warrants central to it. The second attempt was the crassly political impeachment attempt that focused on Trump’s stated preference that Ukraine investigate Biden-family influence peddling. Hunter Biden’s computer and the evidence it unlocked make it abundantly clear that such influence peddling occurred. In addition, there was no evidence – zero – that Trump’s preference was anything more than that. Such a request would have been legally and morally permissible. Sadly, it was not made.

Stealing an election through widespread fraud is equivalent to a bloodless coup. One problem with such a theft is that it undermines government legitimacy. Government legitimacy concerns the right of the government to coerce the people. It is closely related to the people’s duty to obey the law. The problem is that if the government is legitimate, and not merely an organ of naked force, the people have to validly consent to it. The people have neither consented to a government that took power through fraud nor to a fraudulent electoral procedure.

An illegitimate government is a problem. Similar to the apartheid practices in the American South, the destructive-and-illegal Vietnam War, and weaponization of the government during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, election theft does and should undermine faith in the American government. We cannot be proud of a county that has dirty elections.

A second problem is that the perceived election theft will intensify the politicization of American life. The election fraud, if it occurred, went hand in glove with Big Tech censorship, politicized corporations (especially Silicon Valley and Wall Street), suffocating ideological chokehold in academia, and thuggery (Black Lives Matter and Antifa). The politicization will increasingly force citizens to choose sides. Americans live, play, and work together and no one wants our lives increasingly politicized. Nor should they. No one enjoys yelling at Thanksgiving dinner.

A third problem is that the changes that went into this election will haunt the country for years to come. The American people do not want internet censorship, corrupt election practices, and politicized corporations. Americans will rue the day these things became part of American life.

In short, election fraud, if it were widespread enough, undermines the legitimacy of the American government. The fraud along with the forces that allowed it will further politicize American life and change the country for the worse. And for what?

Stephen Kershnar is a philosophy professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com