The Shadow Campaign to Save the 2020 Election

I was surprised at how smoothly November's US election proceeded. To be honest, I expected quite a bit of civil unrest, especially in the two months following the election. That didn't happen, with the notable exception of the January 6th insurrection. 

The smoothness of the electoral process wasn't an accident. As this article from Time Magazine shows, it was due to a concerted and largely hidden effort by a large number of people from diverse social and political groups acting in concert over the last year. 

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

I don't like the slant that the article put on the events. Calling it a conspiracy is extremely provocative and negative. However, the rest of the article is much more balanced. 

It is worrisome that something like this had to happen to ensure that a fair election took place. I hope that over the next four years that there will be reforms in the process to remove some of the barriers to ensuring that all votes are counted and that everyone who has the right to vote can do so without obstruction.