Something really interesting is happening post-election: for the first time I can remember in my 10 years or so of working in and around politics in DC, people are talking about election integrity in more than hushed tones. Prior to Nov. 3, 2020, the topic was seriously discussed by serious people, but conservatives always saved discussion of it for known allies, and even then with caveats about avoiding conspiracy theories, etc.

Not anymore, it seems. A lot of people who watched the late mail-in ballots counted at a snail’s pace and decimate Trump’s lead in several key states are speaking of the possibility that our electoral system might be vulnerable to fraud in open forums like social media, and aren’t qualifying the discussion with anything more than, “I mean…the math doesn’t really add up.”

And it’s good to see, no matter what happens with the Trump campaign’s legal challenges to the vote counting. Hans Von Spakovsky, who has long been a serious scholar of electoral vulnerabilities in the system, said this about the Biden/Trump race:

Vote dumps entirely for former Vice President Joe Biden are not credible, assessed Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, offering his analysis on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Marlow asked about reports of drastic spikes in vote counts for Joe Biden in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

“If those reports are correct, I don’t understand it. The way you do counting is you simply count all of the ballots,” Von Spakovsky said. “You don’t divide. They’re not divided up between the candidates. So the [precinct] reporting that’s coming in ought to be reporting of the total vote count, regardless of who it’s for. So again, if it’s confirmed that there are these weird reports coming out of votes only for one candidate and not the other, you’ve got to question, what exactly is going on?”

Which is to say, those late ballots breaking for one candidate over another in huge dumps seems…weird.

And there are other weirdnesses, too. Software glitches, dead people voting, efforts to hide the counting as it was happening, etc.

What it all points to is a protracted (as much as a few weeks will let something be protracted) court battle and a new embrace of the idea that perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at how we handle elections in this country. And make some serious changes.

Donald Trump, even if unsuccessful in his bid to remain president, will have done the country one last great service before departing (and may actually be something of a force to be reckoned with as a private citizen unencumbered by the restrictions of regulation and bureaucracy), and for that he’s owned another debt of gratitude.

But the left, oddly sour about their presumptive win, is already talking about making lists of those who supported Trump. Because that is what the Democrats wanted in office, I guess. We may never truly understand why because — and watch the next four years go on — no one will be better off for it in some very serious ways.

I talk about all that on the show today, as well as the Hollywood filmmakers who worked with the (hopefully finally toothless Never Trump wing of politics) to create political ads to defeat “Trumpism” — out of the goodness of their own hearts, of course. Oh, and I review “Truth Seekers” (trailer below), a new Nick Frost/Simon Pegg series on Amazon that is the perfect escape from all this political madness.

The show lives below on Spotify and you can also find me at iHeart radio, Apple Podcasts, FCB Radio’s Spreaker, and Deezer.