The Times, they aren’t a-changing.

Indeed, The New York Times is stubbornly sticking to its story that the 2020 election was the cleanest and most secure in history, and the paper’s scribes can’t believe that the American people aren’t picking up what they’re laying down.

That’s right. The same people who uncritically peddled the whole Trump-Russia Collusion hoax are now upset because they’re losing the “disinformation” war. They’re upset because a majority of Americans don’t believe that the 2020 election was fraud-free, and they don’t believe that a basement-bound backslapper like Joe Biden could’ve possibly earned all 81 million of those votes on the up-and-up.

And why would the American people believe such things? The COVID-dominated 2020 contest was a Wild West freak show of an election, with a remarkable 43% of all ballots cast having been cast through the mail. That’s 66 million votes. And most of them were mailed in states where authentication of both the person casting the ballot and the person receiving the ballot wasn’t required. Or, as our Mark Alexander noted recently, “Of all those who voted in person, 66% voted for Trump versus 42% for Biden — which is to say that 58% of Biden ballots, almost 47 million votes, were cast by mail.”

What happened to Election Day, anyway? How did it become not Election Week, not Election Month, but Election Season?

No potential for fraud here, folks. Move along. That seems to be the message of a lengthy piece by the Times’s Jim Rutenberg and Steven Lee Myers, whose headline reads, “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation,” and whose subhead reads, “Their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online.”

We wonder: What “election lies” might these be? Lies about ballot fraud? Because according to a national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports and The Heartland Institute, more than 20% of voters who used mail-in ballots in the 2020 election admit they engaged in at least one form of election fraud. As the survey notes, “21% of likely U.S. voters who voted by absentee or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election say they filled out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child, while 78% say they didn’t.”

The Times might not want to admit it, but that’s ballot fraud. If only we’d listened to former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, whose bipartisan 2005 report from the Commission on Federal Election Reform warned, “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” Of course, Carter and Baker were referring to perhaps a few thousand absentee ballots here and there. We wonder what they’d think of 66 million such ballots spread across precincts throughout the country — especially given that the 2020 election was decided by fewer than 43,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Bulk-mail ballot fraud, anyone?

As for the Times’s article, we don’t know much about Myers, but Rutenberg is a real piece of … journalistic integrity. Recall that in August 2016, he penned a piece lamenting that Donald Trump “is testing the norms of objectivity in journalism.” Translation: Donald Trump is forcing us journalists to cover him differently than everyone else.

And now Rutenberg is at it again, celebrating in one breath the “groundswell built in Washington to rein in the onslaught of [Trump’s] lies that had fueled the assault on the peaceful transfer of power” in the wake of the January 6 riot, and then in the next breath lamenting that Trump and his allies “embarked instead on a counteroffensive, a coordinated effort to block what they viewed as a dangerous effort to censor conservatives” — an effort, say Rutenberg and Myers, in which Trump and his legions “have unquestionably prevailed.”

As evidence that the Times simply doesn’t get it, the article quotes none other than Nina Jankowicz, the Biden administration’s Ditzy Diva of disinformation and the short-lived leader of its Disinformation Governance Board. That Jankowicz believed the Steele dossier was real and Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake tells us all we need to know about her suitability for such a role.

Rutenberg and Myers refer to “Trump’s posts about rigged voting machines and stuffed ballot boxes,” but lumping these two phenomena together is simply sloppy. While allegations about some nefarious actors in Venezuela hacking into our voting machines seem deeply farfetched, allegations of ballot stuffing do not. With so many millions of unsecured ballots floating around the country, the kind of harvesting and stuffing chronicled in Dinesh D'Souza’s “2000 Mules” doesn’t seem so implausible at all, especially when we’ve not heard a single satisfactory explanation as to how Joey Baggadonuts got more population-adjusted votes than rock-star Barack Obama did in 2008. It just doesn’t pass the giggle test.

According to Rutenberg and Myers, “The biggest winner, arguably, has been Mr. Trump, who casts himself as victim and avenger of a vast plot to muzzle his movement.” We’re not so sure. No one in American political history has ever been the target of more mainstream media attacks than Trump.

As for this November’s election, it certainly seems like Trump’s to lose. In the RealClearPolitics average of polls, he leads Biden by two points nationally, by 2.3 points in a five-way race, and by 3.6 points in the election-deciding battleground states. For comparison, Trump trailed Biden by 4.5 points in RCP’s final 2020 battleground poll. That’s a shift of more than eight points, which is massive in electoral politics.

Still, Trump needs to strike a balance: He needs to continue to call out the very real possibility of bulk-mail ballot fraud, but he can’t do so to such an extent that it dissuades his own supporters from voting. “Too Big to Rig” is the phrase he’s unveiled in recent weeks. It’s of a piece with Hugh Hewitt’s book, If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat, and it reflects Trump’s belief that only a lopsided win can keep the Democrats from cheating.

“We want a landslide,” Trump said at a recent rally in North Carolina. “We have to win so that it’s too big to rig.”

In the meantime, The New York Times and its Leftmedia fellow travelers will head back to the drawing board, perhaps in collusion with Team Biden, and map out their next disinformation campaign.