It is well accepted by historians and biographers that Richard Nixon had ample ground for contesting the 1960 election results because of widespread vote fraud in Cook County, Illinois and several counties in Lyndon Johnson’s home state of Texas.

Nixon chose to not challenge the election–but not because of lack of evidence. He let it go because he feared it would tear the country apart. Well, that was then and this is now.

Barack Obama and his “transformative politics” have already torn the country apart. In 1960, turning the country over to John Kennedy was not selling America into socialist slavery and globalist cronyism. In 2016, the alternatives are starkly different.

Should anyone be surprised that Donald Trump will not allow Hillary Clinton’s army of fraudsters steal an election without a fight?

There are many different ways to steal an election. In the Jim Crow South, blacks were simply kept off the voter rolls by a combination of laws, threats and  intimidation. In the big cities of the North and Midwest in the 19th century, votes were simply bought and paid for by political machines. The guarantee of a secret ballot is not found in the original US Constitution; it developed a century later as one answer to the practice of vote-buying.

The Pew Center just last week published a report claiming there are 1.8 million dead people on the voter rolls, and another credible report puts the total of dead people and ineligible voters at more than 4 million. The question that arises from such startling information is a simple one. If our super-smart election officials have allowed such problems to accumulate for decades without fixing them– while all the time opposing a photo ID requirement for voting —  why should citizens have confidence they can weed out all the bogus votes from the honest ones on election day?

There are other, more sophisticated forms of election fraud besides counting votes cast by dead people. One of the most insidious and morally repugnant is being used in 2016 by the Democratic party’s propaganda arm, the American mass media: vote suppression. The media are telling millions of Americans over and over, day in and day out, they need not bother to vote because Hillary Clinton has already won the election.

That is what Donald Trump means by a “rigged election.”

When only one possible outcome is considered legitimate because the challenger has been labeled by the unified voices of the established institutions as illegitimate, can it be called a fair election? When tens of millions of voters are derided, insulted and delegitimized  as racists, “deplorables,”  rednecks,” “gun nuts,” and islamophobes — not only by the establishment’s anointed candidate herself but by her surrogates in entertainment, education and business, it is fair to ask, where is the level playing field?

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, some of the old tricks are still in fashion, like voting machines that count ballots a particular way. In 2014, some voters at the Schaumburg Public Library saw touch-screen voting machines that counted votes as Democrat even if you voted for a Republican candidate. The local election official attributed the problem to a “calibration error.” The funny thing is, there were no machines found that miscount votes the other direction.

Across the nation, literally tens of millions of ballots are already in the mail and will be returned by mail, with the only security tool being signature verification. That verification is by an election judge who is given an average of three seconds to compare the signature accompanying the ballot to the one in an electronic record.

In Billings, Montana, police are investigating reports of ballots being stolen from apartment mail boxes. In thousands of apartment buildings and nursing homes, millions of mailed ballots await pick-up by their owners– or by a  ballot harvester who will gladly vote the ballot or offer assistance in filling out the ballot and then delivering it to a polling place.

Is widespread vote fraud built into all-mail balloting? Is speed of counting more important to election officials than accuracy? Can you spell, willful blindness?

Donald Trump has said he will accept a “clear outcome” but reserves the right to challenge vote fraud. Yet, he is still being slandered for even raising the possibility of a rigged election. Let me suggest a different outcome will yield a different set  of heroes and villains.

What if Trump gets to 270 Electoral College votes by carrying key Electoral College swing states including Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Ohio. What if he repeats the Bush victory of 2000 by winning the Electoral College but loses the popular vote because of losing populous states like California and New York by wide margins? Will the progressives accept the election results as valid under our Constitution, or will there be massive riots and disruptions?

The 2016 election has been full of surprises from the beginning, and there may be on more surprise in store. It’s not really news that the establishment has attempted to rig the election against Trump from the beginning– both the media establishment and the Republican establishment. Yet, he has not only survived, he remains within three to five points of a majority vote in the dozen key states he needs for victory.

That’s why vote suppression is now the name of the game. For 16 months Trump has been dismissed as a hopeless loser. The truth is, three percentage points in any presidential poll is within the margin of error.   If every Trump enthusiast votes and those millions of votes are stacked up against the votes cast by a handful of Clinton enthusiasts, Trump will win.

Of course, we may still have to deal with a few thousand pesky voting machines that seem to have a mind of their own.