By: Daniel John Sobieski

Fearing they will lose as their candidate’s polls sink and his cognitive abilities deteriorate before our eyes, Team Biden is assembling a war room of lawyers and Soros-backed local officials who will march before compliant judges in an attempt to duplicate the theft that in 2008 took a Minnesota Senate seat from a seemingly victorious Republican Norm Coleman and hand it to a seemingly defeated Al Franken.

The chaos and fraud of universal mail-in ballots sent to dead people and dogs in jurisdictions where there are more people on the voting rolls than live there thanks to failure to purge the lists, will add to the chaos of court challenges as votes are suddenly discovered in car trunks and hall closets while others legally cast are tossed out depending on which way the recount is going. We saw a preview of the Democrat’s 2020 game plan in Minnesota in 2008.

As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized in July 2009, an editorial reprinted by the website Huffington Riposte:

Incumbent Republican Norm Coleman in 2008 conceded re-election defeat in the mother of all recounts in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race after the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously rejected his lawsuit. Arguably, his seat may have been lost that day in 2006 when Democrat Mark Ritchie defeated two-term incumbent Republican Mary Kiffmeyer in 2006 to become  Minnesota Secretary of State.

It was Ritchie who orchestrated the recount that gave Democratic challenger Al Franken a lead some six weeks after incumbent Coleman appeared to win by 725 votes on Election Day, He has extensive ties to both the ACORN organization that was under federal investigation for vote fraud and was endorsed by the community activist group in 2006.

In 2006, the Minnesota ACORN Political Committee endorsed Ritchie and contributed to his campaign. Other contributors to his campaign included George Soros, along with the likes of Deborah Rappaport, a Saul Alinsky disciple who co-founded the Midwest Academy, a radical ACORN clone.

As Newsmax reported at the time:

“Mark Ritchie as we all know is a hard-core liberal who was endorsed by ACORN and funded by ACORN,” Matthew Vadum, senior editor of CapitolResearch.org, a nonprofit think tank, told NewsMax. “It is not surprising that he has a permissive attitude toward the recount process.

Also contributing to Ritchie was James Rucker, the former director of grass-roots mobilization at MoveOn.org and reportedly a cofounder of the George Soros-backed Secretary of State Project (SOS) that played a critical role in this and other elections.

Ritchie gave partial credit for his 2006 election to the liberal 527 organization, whose stated goal was to replace conservative secretaries of state with liberal Democrats. “I want to thank the Secretary of State Project and its thousands of grassroots donors for helping to push my campaign over the top,” Ritchie said in a posting on the project’s web site.

Coleman really never had a chance with the election machinery rigged against him.  In 25 Minnesota precincts, there were more ballots counted than voters who voted, a situation that exists nationwide.  Election officials had made copies of damaged ballots but then didn’t mark them as copies or sequester them from the originals There is also the issue of the 133 missing ballots from a heavily Democratic Minneapolis precinct that were nevertheless included in the recount.

It was in the thousands of rejected absentee ballots that Coleman’s election night victory might have been reclaimed. The state canvassing board ultimately allowed in a selected group of 933 such ballots which expanded Franken’s lead to its current margin, leaving some 11,000 ballots not included to be counted.

The left realized after recounts in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, both of which were key parts of two Bush victories, that who was Secretary of State was as important, if not more so, as which candidate got the most votes. Control the election process and you control the future.

The SOS project website opposed the likes of conservative Republicans Katherine Harris of Florida and Ken Blackwell of Oho and held them up as examples of the type of people they want to defeat. Naturally, Mark Ritchie was the type they want to elect. It was ruling-after-ruling by the Ritchie-led State Canvassing Board that went against Coleman that put Al Franken in the U.S. Senate.

In 2006, along with Minnesota’s Ritchie, the SOS project endorsed and helped elect Jennifer Brunner in Ohio. Democrats supported by that group also won that year in the key swing states of New Mexico, Nevada, and Iowa. In 2008, the group helped fund Democratic victories in Montana, West Virginia, Oregon, and Missouri, spending some $280,000, according to the watchdog group Center for Public Integrity.

Soros, then and now, and other liberal activist groups knew the importance of controlling local election machinery as well as key state-level and local offices. While Republicans concentrated on Senators and Congressmen, as important as they are, Soros and his ilk concentrated on the down-ballot offices a lot of voters and pundits overlook

Did I say New Mexico? As in the race that put Al Franken in the Senate, recounts and lawsuits will inevitably continue until the Democrat takes the lead, and then the counting will stop with nary a protest from the legacy media or the Russians.

Take the little-noticed flip of a Republican congressional seat in New Mexico after a supposed election night victory was announced by local and national media for the GOP contender. This was the announcement by ABC:

Wednesday 2:18 a.m. EST — Republican Yvette Herrell has defeated Democrat Xochitl Torres Small in New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District, ABC News can project. Herrell is the first woman to represent the district.

Not so fast. Before the echoes of that announcement had faded, missing ballots suddenly were reportedly found, just enough to flip the results to the Democrat. Amazingly missing ballots are seemingly never found that gives the lead to or increases it for the Republican. Herrell is not conceding the race:

In an interview on Fox News, Herrell told Judge Jeanine Pirro that after multiple media outlets called the race for her on Election Night, the secretary of state’s office called her and said, “they had magically found 4,000 ballots that had not been counted.”

Herrell said, about an hour later, the secretary state’s office called again and said they found another 4,000 ballots.

That second batch of 4,000 was enough to flip the election to the Democrat. As Mayor Daley might say, his voice rising from a cemetery precinct, just tell me how many votes do you need? Or as Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin once reportedly observed, “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

As in 2008, 2020 will see swarms of attorneys working with Democratic Soros-backed secretaries of state and liberal activist judges to finish the coup against Donald Trump. This is their ultimate insurance policy. Watch for and follow the likes of Democrat attorney Marc Elias, As TownHall.com notes, he is the ultimate “plumber” and “fixer”:

Back during the 2008 Democratic Primary when Florida was considering mail-in ballots, Obama specifically cited the need for signature verification, to ensure “they can check to make sure that the right people are voting.”

 Now, lawsuits brought by the George Soros-backed election lawyer Marc Elias are seeking to gut those requirements. A Democrat lawsuit in Pennsylvania is seeking to prevent election officials from rejecting votes even if a signature on the ballot is completely different from the voter’s signature on file.

  Want elections to be decided by the maneuverings of liberal election lawyers, where results are delayed for months, hundreds of ballots go missing, and duplicate votes are never scrutinized? That’s what happened in Minnesota, with Elias’s handiwork during the Senate recount in 2008. Seven months, “20,000 pages of legal briefs, and millions of dollars in election costs” later, Al Franken emerged the victor with results swinging by over 1,000 votes in his favor. It was once Elias’s proudest achievement before he represented a group that registered dead voters, helped Hillary Clinton take over the DNC, and smear her opponent with a dossier full of lies about President Donald Trump and Russia. When Democrats want to tilt elections in their favor outside the ballot box, they know who to call.

One way to avoid this planned calamity would be a Trump landslide victory so big and in so many states that it would take 747s full of newly discovered mail-in ballots sent from China to make a difference. The other way is to simply learn from the Franken theft 0f 2008 and prepare with our own army of poll watchers, election judges, and, yes, lawyers pledged not to repeat it.

* Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.