The Inner Monologue

Every election cycle, like clockwork, a politician somewhere decides that the easiest way to explain losing is to call the entire American voting system a fraud. It’s a lazy, cowardly lie—and an insult to every voter’s intelligence.

Let’s be clear: meaningful voter fraud in the United States is functionally impossible. Not “rare.” Not “unproven.” Impossible in any practical sense that could change a national result. The system is simply too decentralized, too scrutinized, and too redundant to be rigged. You’d have an easier time counterfeiting the moon landing than faking enough ballots to swing Pennsylvania.

Every ballot in this country passes through multiple levels of verification—signatures, barcodes, audits, bipartisan observers. There are paper backups, public tallies, and cross-checks. You’d need an army of co-conspirators, all perfectly loyal, in thousands of counties, across red and blue states alike. And you’d need them all to stay silent forever. That’s not how humans—or America—work.

Yet, every few years, the same crowd starts shrieking that millions of “illegals” or “dead voters” are tipping the scales. And every time, when real investigators look, they find nothing—just the occasional confused grandparent who mailed a ballot twice, or a guy who thought his dead wife’s vote still counted as “keeping her memory alive.” The numbers are statistically meaningless—less than the odds of being hit by lightning twice.

Still, the myth persists because it’s convenient. Losing fair and square hurts the ego. So some politicians do what weak people always do: they blame the system. And they assume their followers are too stupid to notice.

That’s the quiet part they don’t say out loud—they think their base is made of morons. They assume you’ll nod along when they claim a vast, invisible conspiracy that somehow failed to leave a single shred of evidence, even after audits, recounts, and court cases. They assume you’ll ignore the Republican secretaries of state, the Trump-appointed judges, and the bipartisan election boards who all said the same thing: it didn’t happen.

They think you’ll rage instead of reason. That you’ll share memes instead of reading affidavits. That you’ll storm a building rather than look at the math. Because if you did look—really look—you’d see how utterly absurd the fraud fantasy is.

In truth, the real “fraud” isn’t in the voting booths. It’s in the manipulation—the way cynical politicians sell lies to the gullible to keep the donations flowing and the outrage machine humming. It’s a business model built on distrust. Every baseless claim of fraud is a dollar sign disguised as patriotism.

And yet, it works. Millions fall for it. They chant slogans about stolen elections while cashing Social Security checks that rely on the same government they claim is too corrupt to count votes. They insist the process is rigged, but only when they lose. When their candidate wins, somehow the system suddenly works just fine.

So yes, let’s say it plainly: if you believe in widespread voter fraud, you’ve been conned. Not tricked by a mastermind—but hustled by a grifter with a podium. Every false claim, every performative lawsuit, every “independent audit” that turns up nothing—it’s all a con game, and the suckers are the ones cheering loudest.

There’s no polite way to say this anymore: you have to be a moron to believe the United States can’t count votes. Not naive, not misinformed—a moron. You have to think every election worker, judge, journalist, and data analyst in all fifty states is lying, except the one guy who lost and threw a tantrum.

The miracle of American democracy is that it still functions despite the noise. Millions of ordinary citizens show up, register voters, count ballots, and defend the process against those who’d rather burn it down than admit defeat. The least we can do is defend them from lies.

If you truly love your country, believe in it enough to trust that your vote—and your neighbor’s—counts. Because when politicians cry fraud without proof, they’re not protecting democracy. They’re mocking it. And they’re laughing at you for falling for it.