I did not expect to see anything like this on a fairly mainstream site like “Conservative Woman”: “Mystery of Andrew Bridgen’s vanishing votes” (Via Sara Hoyt on Instapundit.) Andrew Bridgen, for those not familiar with him, is the former MP for North West Leicestershire. He has had a chequered career. He was expelled from the Conservative Party after criticising the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. He then joined the Reclaim Party but resigned from it a few months later. He then lost his seat in the 2024 election – which in itself was no surprise, but the spectacular scale of his loss, dropping from 63% of the vote to 3.2%, was unusual.
I said I did not expect to see this piece on the CW website. I would not be entirely surprised if I am soon unable to see it anywhere but Twitter/X. After the US election of 2020, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (before it was owned by Elon Musk) had a policy of deleting any discussion whatsoever of the possibility of electoral fraud. Even arguments that fraud had not been significant were censored. Most of the UK media followed suit, as it usually does.
If anyone reading this has power or influence over the censorship policies of British media organisations, I humbly beg you not to repeat that mistake. My argument does not depend on taking any view on how many votes Andrew Bridgen got in the UK election of 2024.
When “Stop the Steal” and similar Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members were deleted overnight after the American election of 2020, what effect do you think it had on the beliefs of members of those groups? Do you think they concluded that since they could no longer discuss their suspicions, those suspicions must be groundless?
Of course it had the opposite effect. A majority of US voters think it is “likely” that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 election. That includes 45% of Democrats. The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and of the hypothesis that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a laboratory (the first of which is no longer contested and the second of which is accepted as a probable hypothesis by the US and UK governments) only reinforced this.
Censorship destroys trust, and the loss of trust is not limited to the subject being censored. Once people know they are being censored in one thing, they inevitably ask, “What else aren’t they telling us?”
And they can work out that if all accusations of a particular crime are censored, it makes it more likely that that crime will be committed in future.
Related posts here, here and here. In fact, that entire category of “Deleted by the Woke Media” is related.
Edit 25th September: The man who replaced Andrew Bridgen as Conservative candidate in North West Leicestershire, Craig Smith, has responded strongly to the Conservative Woman piece:
Mr Bridgen seems to overestimate the weight of any candidate’s personal vote. In elections most people vote for the party with a personal vote of – somewhere around – a couple of thousand votes for the candidate themselves. It’s arguably why I did marginally better than Conservative candidates in demographically similar constituencies elsewhere, because I had something of a personal vote as a truly local candidate. A personal vote is why Mr Bridgen received around 1,500 votes. To provide Mr Bridgen with a similar example to his own in 2015 Rochdale’s MP, Simon Danczuk, then standing for Labour received 20,961 votes. In 2017, expelled from Labour and and standing as an independent he received 883 votes. Using Mr Danczuk as a base Mr Bridgen could argue that he outstripped expectations!
Mr Smith goes on to say that of course he was not happy with the result – he lost to Labour – but he is convinced it was fair. He then makes some quite detailed observations about electoral procedures, both in general and specifically for that constituency. I thought he came across well. His use of Simon Danczuk in Rochdale as a comparator for assessing whether it is credible for an MP expelled from their party to have such a large drop in votes was reasonable.
That is how it should be done. That is how it should have been done in the US. Don’t forbid discussion, contribute to it. I repeat my plea for there to be no censorship of the claim that the election was rigged against Mr Bridgen.
I seem to recall that when Nigel Farage stood for election in Kent in 2019 the ballot boxes similarly went AWOL for several hours.
I remember when ballot boxes were impressive things of black japanned steel, closed with wax seals. The ballot boxes in my locality now seem to be made of nylon, and have a zip opening. Not exactly the same.
Everything about our system of voting depends on the integrity of the local government officials who administer it, basically on trust. Once upon a time, when we were a homogenous and largely law abiding society, that would have worked. Now?
JohnK
What happened in Kent in 2019 was indeed somewhat troubling – and the law in the United Kingdom has been tightened up since then, especially when it comes to what we call postal votes, and what the Americans call mail-in ballots.
What happened in some (some) areas of the United States in 2020 and 2022 was outrageous (terrible) – with mail-in ballots being a very important, but not the only, aspect of the criminal mess.
The media demand evidence – but when presented with it, turn their heads away.
But that is nothing special to the media – the courts have the same attitude, and will use legal trickery to avoid (yes avoid) hearing evidence.
“Lack of standing”, sometimes even the candidate in the election will be declared to “lack standing” to be allowed to present evidence in open court, is a favourite legal trick.
Another one is to say that it is too soon to complain about mail-in ballots and machine voting BEFORE an election – as “no fraud has occurred yet”, and too late to complain about mail-in ballots and machine voting AFTER an election – as “the election has already happened”.
Notice the trick there – the courts (including Chief Justice Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court) will not allow a candidate to successfully complain either BEFORE or AFTER the election – thus making honest elections impossible.
Widespread election fraud was prevented in Texas in 2020 by Attorney General Ken Paxton – and then (“by coincidence”) there was an establishment move to remove the elected State Attorney General with false charges, and there was also remove the power of a Texas State Attorney General to prosecute election fraud cases.
The establishment, including the RINOs (“Republicans In Name Only”) make it horribly obvious that they do not want honest elections.
In Arizona in 2022 the election in the largest population county was run by people who had actually created a “PAC” (Political Action Committee) to defeat a candidate – Kari Lake. A clear legal conflict of interest – but, like everything else, ignored by the courts.
When Republicans went to vote on election day they were told that there were problems with the electronic voting machines (machines that the establishment had insisted on using), and there was, of course, the now normal tidal wave of fake mail-in ballots.
The solution to all the above is obvious.
Paper ballots cast after showing proper I.D. (including proof of citizenship) and counted in public.
Both the Democrats and the RINOs claim they want honest elections (that they do NOT support election fraud) – but they oppose the only steps that will ensure honest elections.
Paul:
It is indeed sad that the courts in the US have been too pusillanimous to become engaged in the fight against electoral corruption. Their cowardice on this front is self-defeating. If they want a quiet life, recusing themselves from involvement in politics, they may well end up precipitating a civil war. I cannot imagine Trump supporters will allow themselves to be cheated of victory a second time. Fool me once…
Just looking at the voting figures on the Wikipedia page it is easy to account for Bridgen’s 60% loss, 51% went to the Conservative and Reform candidates and Labour had a 9% swing.
It may be the case Bridgen thought he was a saint but as is more often of not people think otherwise but hold their nose and vote for the correct coloured rosette.
There are exceptions, Corbyn, Galloway, Bell, etc.
It’s my belief that exclusive political parties wreck democracy, the candidate is decided by a small cabal and dressed in the party uniform and funded by the party coffers, abolish that mechanism and you’ll go back towards de Montfort parliament of individuals representing their voters.
I am not in favour of censorship, daylight is the best disinfectant, but it seems to me that Bridgen is quite obviously peddling a conspiracy theory, if he’d lost by a few thousand and Conservative and Reform got nowhere then maybe that would have legs.
One has to remember that over 90% of the UK population over the age of 12 had at least one covid vaccine shot. And the percentage in the older age groups (who vote more than the young) will be approaching 100%, with many still taking them today.
So the vast majority of the electorate have no interest in being told they may have been incredibly stupid in taking them, and have been duped. Either because they think Bridgen is a crank peddling lies, and actively oppose his views, or because deep down they suspect he is right, but don’t want to admit they were taken in. Either way he’s just not going to get the level of personal votes one might expect for a long standing MP who hasn’t been found with his hand in the till, or involved in some sort of criminal behaviour. The vast majority of the UK voters don’t want to be reminded of Covid, how they behaved or the attitudes they took and supported during that period. I think for many people its a sort of shameful episode they’d much rather was memory holed. They really were not going to vote for Bridgen who was actively trying to bring facts and issues to the surface most people would rather never saw the light of day again.
I sincerely doubt 90% is actually true.
“I sincerely doubt 90% is actually true.”
You are probably correct, in that the authorities either don’t know how many people there are in the country, or if they have an idea, they aren’t letting on officially, or when it comes to working out statistics. But regardless I suspect that 90% of those who vote had at least one covid jab, and my points about the voter’s distaste for being reminded about the whole episode still stand.
@Runcie Balspune
It’s my belief that exclusive political parties wreck democracy, the candidate is decided by a small cabal and dressed in the party uniform and funded by the party coffers, abolish that mechanism and you’ll go back towards de Montfort parliament of individuals representing their voters.
This is even more true in the USA. Here one of the primary purposes of political parties is to undermine the checks and balances, where power can be horizontally integrated across separation of powers and vertically across federalism for the different sovereigns. Of course we Americans have that greatest of blessings which is rather harder to find in the UK, namely “divided government”.
However, the truth is that in both countries the true power resides in the sprawling mass of unelected bureaucrats that people the civil service. Take “Yes Minister” and replace the humour with malice and you’d have it about right.
I know enough people personally who remained unjabbed to suspect the official numbers are self-serving & bogus, nowhere near 90%. But clearly a majority of people did choose (or were pressured) into being jabbed, that I do accept.
I also agree a great many people just want it to vanish down the memory hole.
Speaking mostly for state politics in the US, I’d complete this sentence by saying ” . . . the candidate is decided by a small cabal of those people who actually bother to show up early and often and uninvited for party conferences and caucuses and committees, who volunteer for work, who canvas, who fundraise, and who get their names out there among the other people doing the same thing.”
IOW, there’s nothing exclusive about entering these cabals, aside from having (and choosing to spend) the huge amount of time it takes to do so.
And the rest of us maybe vote in a primary if it’s convenient, and make more of an effort to vote in the general, and then we wonder why those other people seem to have so much influence.
We do tend to get the party that we deserve.
In the times of trouble coming Samizdata is best done with paper, hand to trusted hand.
JohnK.
The RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) lose either way – if Trump/Vance win in spite of them, then they will be out of the loop when it comes to power (Donald J. Trump will not make the mistake of appointing people to high office who hate him – such as the wretched Attorney General Bill Barr, whose first thought when dealing with crimes, even murder, was “how do we cover this up”).
And if the left (and Harris/Walz are very much the left – for want of a better word) win – the help that Chief Justice John Roberts (to name one leading RINO) gave them in the past (for example by refusing to do anything about mass mail-in-ballots, and by refusing to to look at the false conviction for the “murder” of Mr George Floyd – who was NOT murdered) will earn them nothing.
“Gratitude is an emotion felt by dogs” – as “Stalin” is supposed to have said.
The help that RINOs have given the left in the past (in order to get a quiet life) will NOT mean that the left will not utterly destroy them.
I hope the RINOs finally realise this – before it is too late.
Donald J. Trump may, quite rightly, despise the RINOs – but he will not HURT them.
The left will HURT the RINOs – regardless of how much help the RINOs give the left.