The 2020 presidential election was “the most secure in American history.” We know this because the Department of Homeland Security — specifically, the members of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council — told us so on November 12, 2020, nine days after the election.

So it must be true, right? After all, nine days is plenty of time to conduct a thorough investigation and forensic examination, right? Right?

And yet. We keep hearing about election fraud. As columnist Betsy McCaughey noted recently, “Never-before-seen emails released by the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 6 reveal that a government-sponsored task force is muzzling public figures, thousands of ordinary Americans, and media outlets like Newsmax and The Babylon Bee when they report election irregularities.”

Why might a government task force do such a thing if not to protect a narrative, a narrative that Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats want us all to believe? Indeed, in the days following Tuesday, November 5, 2024, when it becomes clear that Joe Biden — or Gavin Newsom, or Michelle Obama, or whomever they choose at the Democratic National Convention next August — has won a narrow victory over Donald Trump, they’ll want us to believe it again.

But we won’t believe it, and for good reason. Because no sentient being can explain how, in an election that was, in the words of South Dakota Republican Senator Mike Rounds, “as fair as we have seen,” Donald Trump could’ve earned 12 million more votes than any Republican candidate in history and could’ve handily carried an astounding 18 of 19 “bellwether” counties across the nation, and yet still get seven million fewer votes than gaffe-prone, basement-bound, cognitively challenged Joe Biden — a guy whose candidacy was so awful, so utterly uninspiring, that he finished a dismal fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire primary before getting his clock cleaned by 26 points in Nevada by Bernie Sanders.

Somehow, though, Biden inspired more population-adjusted Americans to vote for him in 2020 than rock-star Barack Obama did in 2008. And we’re expected to believe it was all on the up-and-up.

As for electoral shenanigans, we need only look at Pennsylvania, one of the “blue wall” swing states Trump won in 2016 but lost in 2020. As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editors put it in a piece about a mail-in voting time bomb: “The saga of Pennsylvania’s undated ballots since the Covid pandemic is worth unspooling, because it shows how litigation puts indeterminacy into the election system. State law is unambiguous in saying that absentee voters must ‘fill out, date and sign the declaration printed on such envelope.’ This requirement has gone to court repeatedly for three years, with frustratingly inconclusive results.”

What part of “must” don’t these Keystone Coppers understand?

The case of the adjustable ballots is especially frustrating not just because such sloppiness could decide a presidential election but because our system of checks and balances doesn’t seem to be working in this case. We have a 5-3-1 “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court, and yet the justices keep dodging this critical case and others like it. As the Journal’s editors continue: “The nightmare is that control of the White House or the U.S. Senate could be decided after Election Day by a Supreme Court opinion on missing dates, incomplete witness addresses, or other ballot defects. That’s why the Justices should quit dodging these cases. The time to settle voting rules is when the stakes are low, which is to say, well in advance of Election Day.”

Hear, hear. What on earth is the Supreme Court waiting for? The clock is ticking, and Republicans have less than a year to wake up and fix what’s broken — especially in the Democrat-controlled urban centers of the swing states. Remember: Biden didn’t win the 2020 election in a runaway. He won it by 43,000 votes spread across Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. If Democrats again are free to administer the election, and flood the zone with their bulk-mail balloting scheme, and count the votes in Phoenix, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia — we can expect another narrow loss.

Unless it’s not close. Unless the American people are so sick of Joe Biden that the polls clearly show him trailing Donald Trump rather than, as in 2020, narrowly leading him. If that’s the case come next November, no amount of electoral mischief will help the Democrats. As Hugh Hewitt put it in the title of his prescient 2012 book, If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat.

All this leads us to wonder: What sorts of things might the Democrats have up their sleeve for 2024? If we know one thing about Democrats, it’s that they live to win elections. That’s why they’re starting to freak out about the age and incompetence and awful polling of their 81-year-old standard-bearer.

Perhaps a new lockdown regime is in the offing. China, which was rooting hard for Biden in 2020 and no doubt wants him to win again in 2024, has reintroduced its American electoral roadmap by bringing back masks and social distancing in response to a new and mysterious outbreak of bacterial pneumonia that has echoes of the COVID lockdowns beginning nearly four years ago.

“How are they gonna cheat this time?” is the burning question that columnist Stephen Green ponders. He notes that the COVID lockdowns and the Georgefloydian racial demagoguery and the cynical abuse of state election laws are cards that were all played in 2020. But that doesn’t mean the Democrats won’t try to trot out variations on those themes next year.

“They need something new,” Green writes. “Maybe the shiny new thing will be a convention switcheroo this summer of Biden for Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom. The party mechanics — and that ‘civil war’ between the Newsom and Kamala Harris factions — would be tricky to navigate. But, honestly, Dems excel at that kind of thing. Maybe it will be some massive new public scare. COVID is out … but a war might do.”

The point to all this is that, while those of us on the Right are watching the polls and rubbing our hands with glee, the Democrats are plotting and scheming. And if we don’t learn from recent history, we deserve to repeat it.