So we’re all clear that they don’t get to call us conspiracy theorists anymore, right? The Observer‘s audio clip of Hillary Clinton openly advocating the rigging of elections means that the burden of proof that America’s votes aren’t being tampered with now rests on the shoulders of its government officials. They don’t get to run a powerful candidate from a powerful family, who’s already been involved in a scandalous and illicit Democratic primary, who said with her own mouth that she favors rigged elections, and then call us all paranoid when we demand proof that they’re not rigging the elections. They don’t get to do that. That’s not a thing.

It is now up to the government of the United States to provide a very clear, well-documented paper trail of all our voting behavior by having all polling stations switch to their backup manual voting processes in all 50 states. There is literally no reason for us to trust a government that we know has been lying to us with the media’s help, and there’s literally no reason for them to feel entitled to that trust. If they refuse to switch to hand-counted all-paper ballot voting across the board, they’re like the sleazy guy at the shady pawnshop on the street corner refusing to give us a receipt.

“Why should you want a receipt?” the sleazy pawnshop owner asks us.

“Forget that! Why don’t you want to give me one?” we must reply.

Hand-counted paper ballots are the hardest to tamper with, since the sheer number of counters involved puts too many eyes on any manipulators who might try anything funny. We’re all learning together that the more eyes we put on these people, the more light we shed on their mischief, the harder it is for them to deceive and manipulate us. That’s why WikiLeaks has them in such a freaked-out frenzy.

We already know for a fact that some serious foul play occurred during the Democratic primaries, such as DNC staff violating the Impartiality Clause of their Charter when they conspired to thwart Bernie Sanders’ bid for the nomination. But there were a lot of other highly suspicious voting anomalies that occurred with the votes themselves, such as Election Nightmares’ report that Clinton edged out Sanders by 1.42 percent in Massachusetts when Sanders beat her by an astonishing 17 percent in districts that had hand-counted paper ballots. Reader Supported News reports that a paper co-authored by Axel Geijsel of Tilburg University and Rodolfo Cortes Barragan of Stanford University found that primary election results in states with the most vulnerable and hackable voting machines and without a paper trail overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton 65 percent to 35 percent, whereas Sanders led Clinton 51 percent to 49 percent in states where the vote count could be verified with a paper trail. Embols reports that in the primary election where Hillary’s attack poodle Debbie Wasserman Shultz defeated Berniecrat challenger Tim Canova in his bid for her Florida congressional seat, a study has found evidence that suggests “vote flipping” may have occurred in electronic voting machines. Check out Election Justice USA’s report if you’re hungry for more info about this stuff, because there’s lots.

These are all officially very valid concerns now. Nobody gets to tell us that they aren’t. Trust is earned. Ours was betrayed. Repeatedly.

Last month a Princeton University professor showed Fox News that he’d figured out a way to quickly hack a voting machine to count its votes differently using nothing but some know-how and a four dollar computer chip. If he could do that, what could someone with intimate knowledge of the machines and institutional access to their software do? Say what you want about O’Keefe’s Project Veritas videos, they unquestionably revealed a lot of highly secretive, highly organized operations going on in the dark underbelly of the Democratic establishment that “nobody’s supposed to know about.” Why should we believe that they’re not manipulating votes, too?

Seriously, why? These people have shown us that they’ve got the means, motive and opportunity to steal an election. They’ve shown us that they’re corrupt and amoral enough to do it. Hillary Clinton straight up sang the praises of rigging a government’s election to favor the interests of her allies. You guys, if this was an episode of Law & Order, the bad guy would be in cuffs in the first five minutes and the remainder of the hour would be those boring courtroom proceedings. Jeffrey Dahmer left less evidence of his criminality.

There. Is. No. Reason. To. Trust. Them.

We need to all come together on this one, Greens, Libertarians, and Republicans alike, and make it as hard for them to manipulate this thing as we possibly can. The fact that the drums for a war with Russia are already beating means that the oligarchs have a lot to gain by getting their girl into office, so we need to shed a ton of light on this thing so they won’t be able to rig it without getting caught. The Boston Globe calls twice-counted paper ballots “the gold standard for counting votes,” and insists it that can be done. That, implemented in every single district, combined with rigorous exit polling should ensure that the manipulators have to extend too far out into the light to avoid being seen. If they try it, we’ll nab them, and we’ll get a much clearer view of the face of whatever this is we’re dealing with here. If they don’t try it, even better.

Either way, they don’t get to dismiss us by calling us crazy conspiracy theorists for loudly demanding that these changes be implemented. They never, ever get to do that again.

And if they refuse, that will show us even more. What was that line the establishment Democrats and Republicans used to justify Obama’s NSA surveillance program? Oh yeah, I remember: if they’ve got nothing to hide, they’ve got nothing to fear.

[Featured Image by Susan Schmitz/Shutterstock]