The truth about the 2020 presidential election continues to dribble out, slowly and inexorably, and none of it is favorable to the Democrats and their corporate media organs.

Nor is the truth favorable to Joe Biden, the gaffe-prone, basement-bound, then-77-year-old Democrat who ran the most listless and least inspiring presidential campaign in our lifetimes and still hauled in more votes — a lot more votes — than any candidate in history. We were forbidden from even asking questions about that election — an election that the mainstream media quickly and shamefully proclaimed to be “the most secure in American history.”

Vindication has come much too slowly for the tens of millions of Americans who just knew in their gut that something wasn’t right about that election, but vindication has come nonetheless. It has come over time with the irrefutable evidence that Big Tech and the deep state colluded to interfere in the election on behalf of Joe Biden and against Donald Trump by suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell.

And now it has come in a new 36-page policy brief from The Heartland Institute. That document, titled “Who Really Won the 2020 Election: Measuring the Effect of Mail-in Ballot Fraud in the Trump-Biden Race for the White House,” concludes as follows: “Had the 2020 election been conducted like every national election has been over the past two centuries, wherein the vast majority of voters cast ballots in-person rather than by mail, Donald Trump would have almost certainly been re-elected.”

No, as we’ve written before, it wasn’t those Dominion voting machines. That theory was a bright, shiny, unfortunate distraction.

Instead, it was a well-orchestrated and magnificently funded takeover of the voting operations in the urban areas of the key swing states, much of it due to the scare of the COVID-19 pandemic and the unconstitutional bulk-mail balloting scheme that ensued. Three of those swing states — Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — went to Joe Biden by just 43,000 votes. In an election of more than 155 million total votes, that’s one vote for every 3,600 cast.

This new paper stems from a collaborative poll conducted late last year by Heartland and Rasmussen Reports. That poll “attempted to assess the degree of fraudulent voting that took place in the 2020 election.” The results of the survey found that “a massive number of voters who cast ballots by mail admitted to committing at least one form of voter fraud in the 2020 election.” Specifically:

• 21% of mail-in voters admitted that in 2020 they voted in a state where they are “no longer a permanent resident”
• 21% of mail-in voters admitted that they filled out a ballot for a friend or family member
• 17% of mail-in voters said they signed a ballot for a friend or family member “with or without his or her permission”
• 19% of mail-in voters said that a friend or family member filled out their ballot, in part or in full, on their behalf

Having analyzed the raw survey data, the report’s authors concluded that 28.2% of respondents who voted by mail admitted to committing at least one kind of voter fraud — which means that more than one-fourth of the ballots cast by mail in 2020 shouldn’t have been counted. But they were counted, and they benefited Biden in a huge way.

The authors write: “Because Joe Biden received significantly more mail-in votes than Donald Trump, we conclude that the 2020 election outcome would have been different in the key swing states that Donald Trump lost by razor thin margins in 2020 — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — under the 28.2 percent scenario. We also analyzed the electoral results for those six swing states under every integer from 27 percent fraud down to 1 percent fraud, allowing readers to see the impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots might have produced under each scenario.”

As the authors conclude:

Ultimately, our study shows that of the 29 different scenarios presented in the paper, Trump would have won the 2020 election in all but three (when mail-in ballot fraud is limited to 1–3 percent of the ballots counted). Hence, even if the level of fraud detected in our survey (28.2 percent of all mail-in ballots) substantially overstates the actual level of fraud that occurred, Trump would likely have won the 2020 election anyway. We have no reason to believe that our survey overstated voter fraud by more than 25 percentage points, and thus, we must conclude that the best available evidence suggests that mail-in ballot fraud significantly impacted the 2020 presidential election, in favor of Joe Biden. In other words, had the 2020 election been conducted like every national election has been over the past two centuries, wherein the vast majority of voters cast ballots in-person rather than by mail, Donald Trump would have almost certainly been re-elected.

It’s difficult to say what can be done legally at this point. After all, we’re in uncharted territory where American presidential elections are concerned. Free, fair, and secure elections, though, are the sign of a healthy republic. And if our most recent presidential election is any indication, we’re a sick society indeed.

Going forward, the Heartland paper’s authors have some suggestions at the state level, which they’ve broken down into two groups: proactive policies and preventive policies.

Among the proactive suggestions are updating and verifying election registration rolls annually, requiring a valid ID to vote, encouraging in-person voting, requiring a witness or notary signature on all mail-in ballots, and minimizing mail-in voting by requiring a valid excuse for doing so.

Among the preventive suggestions are outlawing ballot harvesting, forbidding unattended and unsecured election drop boxes, requiring signature verification for mail-in voting, establishing agencies to investigate claims of election law violations, and passing state and federal laws that impose harsh penalties for voter fraud.

It’s our admittedly cynical sense that Republican-controlled states will take these suggestions to heart and try to implement them, while Democrat-controlled states will ignore them. After all, the easier it is to vote, the easier it is to cheat.