Review: ‘[S]election Code’
My Pillow Guy documentary asks who’s counting?
“Politicians and the media have done a pretty good job of wiring our minds to distrust anyone who thinks differently. It’s always been a game of divide and conquer.”
So says Tina Peters in the opening setup of [S]election Code, the new election-fraud documentary bankrolled by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Lindell made headlines in September when the FBI confiscated his cellphone at a fast-food drive-thru in Minnesota. Peters made similar headlines when FBI agents searched her Colorado home for three hours and seized digital devices in November, 2021.
A grand jury has indicted Peters on 10 different counts related to election equipment tampering and official misconduct during her tenure as Mesa County Clerk and Recorder (she has pleaded not guilty - she gave voter files to an outside computer expert only to reveal fraud). Like Lindell, she is a hero among Donald Trump supporters for trying to prove that the 2020 election was rigged.
[S]election Code begins with Peters’ dispassionate defense of election integrity, common ground for all voters in a democracy. “Once you drop that ballot off, you’re trusting someone else to record your vote for you in the manner that you cast it.”
Peters’ reasoned neutrality continues through a well-documented historical roundup of how voting machines were introduced into the election process and how concerns have been raised for decades about possible election tampering. Like all good county clerks, Peters believed her administration of the 2020 election ranked “gold standard” – Trump won 63 percent of the vote, as expected. No fraud here.
Then came the Grand Junction City Council election of April, 2021. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Democrats won a “nonpartisan” election that had been considered safely Republican – and somehow they knew about their victory a half-hour before Peters publicly released the numbers. At least, that’s the story according to Peters’ trusted community activist, MAGA stalwart Sherronna Bishop.
Tina Peters (front, far right) and Sherronna Bishop (left of Peters) pray at a Dec. 1, 2021 rally outside the Mesa County Old Courthouse. Photo by Colorado Times Recorder
The balance of the film follows Peters’ hunt for the culprits, identified as Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (a Democrat) and voting machine vendor Dominion Voting Systems. A trio of IT experts – Walter Daugherty of Texas A&M, Jeff O’Donnell of Ordros Analytics (“Our goal is simple: Fix the stolen 2020 Election and safeguard all future elections from similar crimes”), and Clint Curtis (who claimed Florida Republicans hired his employer to write code "to control the vote" in West Palm Beach in 2000) – build an argument that the Dominion system in Mesa County could have been programmed to flip the vote counts. They imply the state came in to wipe the evidence under the pretext of upgrading the software.
Right about the time they reenact Peters sobbing over the FBI ransack of her son’s personal effects (Remington Peters was killed in a freak skydiving accident in 2017), I started wondering when the filmmakers would interview the FBI and Colorado officials for comment about Peters’ claims.
That moment never comes. As with Dinesh D’Souza in his popular 2000 Mules documentary, a one-sided case is built for a sinister election-fraud plot but the supposed perpetrators are never allowed to respond. Law enforcement or other third-party players are never consulted. The essential question – “Who is doing the programming?” – is left up to the audience to surmise.
Challenging elections
Anywhere in the world where people vote, claims of fraudulent elections follow. In Ukraine, for example, pro-Western former prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko claimed the 2010 presidential election was rigged and pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych was “not our president.” Tymoshenko boycotted Yanukovych’s inauguration.
Recently, four Russian-speaking separatist regions of Ukraine – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – conducted five days of voting on whether or not to become part of Russia. Russian speakers have been threatening secession from Ukraine since Yanukovych lost the 2004 presidential election, finally declaring break-away autonomy after Yanukovych’s overthrow in 2014.
Ukraine and most international observers oppose secession and the September referenda were declared rigged before the ballots were even printed.
Crimean electoral commission members count ballots following a referendum on seceding from Ukraine and joining of Russia. Photo by Reuters
The U.S. is no stranger to election wrangling. The last four presidents were declared illegitimate by the losing parties. The 2000 election was clouded by a botched recount in Florida. George Bush’s initial 1,784-vote margin triggered an automatic machine recount, with Al Gore requesting additional hand recounts in four heavily Democratic counties. Florida’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris (co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign), halted the recount on Nov. 14, the statutory deadline.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld halting the recount and Bush was declared the winner. Twenty Democrats, however, raised objections to the electoral votes of Florida when the House of Representatives met to certify the Electoral College vote. No senators co-sponsored the objections and they were dismissed.
“I feel that Vice President Gore won this election,” Florida Democrat Alcee Hastings told her colleagues. “While the rules may prevent the hearing of my challenge, they do not relieve me of my responsibility to the voters in my constituency who stood in line to make their voices heard only to find their voices had been muted by injustice.”
In 2008, GOP candidate John McCain warned during a presidential debate that the election could be marred by voter fraud, claiming that ACORN, an organizing group in minority and low-income communities, was “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country.”
Trump predicted the 2016 election would be rigged but, to even his surprise, he won. While Hillary Clinton conceded on Nov. 9, she insisted for the next four years that Trump was an “illegitimate president," citing Russian interference and hacking. “Our government finally acknowledged that the Russians were in the county election systems of every county in Florida,” Clinton said at a Time magazine event in 2019.
Claims of voter fraud reached a fever pitch after the 2020 election, with Trump launching numerous legal and political strategies to overturn Joe Biden’s election. A recent poll indicates that almost a third of Americans — including 61 percent of Republicans — believe the election was illegitimate.
“Rigged Election Claims” by Matt Orfalea
Documentaries like [S]election Code, while failing to offer compelling evidence, represent widespread distrust in the election system. Is there anyone out there counting votes who doesn’t care which party wins? Neutrality is not only an elusive art, but I’m wondering if it’s even an American value.
MORE: The Elusive Art of Neutrality
Conspiracy theories swirl around damaged pipeline
On Sept. 26, seismologists in Denmark and Sweden registered powerful blasts in the Baltic Sea, close to the two Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that – when operating – deliver Russian natural gas to Germany. While German, Danish and Swedish authorities investigate the incidents, Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of sabotaging its own pipeline to disrupt European energy markets. U.S. and EU officials have implied Russian involvement without saying the country’s name – so far. Russia has pointed back at the West. "The sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons: they moved onto sabotage," President Vladimir Putin said. Germany’s Der Spiegel cited unnamed sources that the CIA warned the German government of a possible sabotage to the pipelines "weeks ago.” No one is pointing the finger at Ukraine – yet – but the country’s far-right nationalist Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh reportedly threatened to attack Russia's overland gas pipeline in 2014. Russia blamed Yarosh, who has claimed to be an advisor to the Ukrainian military, for two bombings of the Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod pipeline that year.
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