CPAC: Mollie Hemingway talks about problems surrounding 2020 election

On Saturday, The Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway sat down with Conservative Political Action Coalition chairman Matt Schlapp to talk about her latest book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections and problems surrounding the 2020 election.

Hemingway's book looks into the 2020 presidential election and attempts to answer the question "what really happened?"

In regards to the title, Hemingway said that she was "so frustrated by the corruption of our media, the corruption of Big Tech, and it turned out to be the perfect title because I ended up digging into election laws and seeing just how completely the 2020 election was controlled by things that aren't really a great thing for us to have in this country."

"If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime that some people have asserted in the last year or so, the entire Democratic Party and the entire media establishment would be rotting in prison right now," she added.

Hemingway continued on to say that Democrats have not accepted an election that they have lost since former President George H.W. Bush.

"They made documentaries about the 2004 election where they claimed that Karl Rove had hacked machines to get into them, but nothing compares to what happened in 2016 when the entire establishment refused to accept the results of a presidential election," said Hemingway.

"They lost, and they fell into this — they invented this incredibly delusional conspiracy theory that Donald Trump had stolen the election by colluding with Russia," she continued, adding that they kept pressing the story.

"And that is an important part of understanding why also they were willing to do so much in 2020 to make sure he did not continue."

Schlapp noted that "what they accuse us [Republicans] of doing they're guilty of."

Hemingway continued on to say that the 2016 and 2020 elections were "horrific" and had "real ramifications for trusted media and trusted institutions."

The conversation pivoted to talking about the state of Nevada immediately following the 2020 election, with Schlapp saying that Ambassador Richard Grenell told him to come to Nevada right after the election during the recount. He said that "we found enough fraud, that I believe Donald Trump won Nevada, and not Joe Biden."

"People keep saying there's no evidence of any fraud, you guys made this up, because none of the judges look at the evidence," Schlapp continued.

In regards to her book, Hemingway said she looked into states other than Nevada in regards to the election.

"But one of the problems with what happened in 2020 was this widespread manipulation of our election laws," said Hemingway, who added that according to the Constitution, election laws must be changed through state elections.

"Sometimes that happened in the lead pop to 2020, frequently it didn't," she added.

Hemingway said that this was part of a "widespread concerted effort by Democrats" to change voting laws, to increase the availability of mail in ballots while they simultanously "decreased scrutiny of mailing ballots," which, in conjunction with "incomprehensibly large private funding…enabled a takeover of our government election offices.

She continued on to note that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave around half a billion dollars "to takeover government election offices, to run Democrat get out to vote operations in the blue areas of swing states."

"This mean that people were involved in everything from ballot design, ballot translation, registering Democrat voters, to reaching out to Democrat voters, being involved in the ballot counting, they just kind of took over key placed that enabled this, this really dramatic result," said Hemingway.

"Don't you have to explain what happened and the legal activity so that it never happens again?" Schlapp questioned in regards to the media.

Hemingway stressed that the election affected both the presidency and control of the Senate, and issues like the currently conflict and invasion in Ukrainian are results of this election.

"If you enable a corruption of the election system, if you enable this widespread problems that lead to distrust and lack of confidence, that's a threat to our republic," said Hemingway.

"The bedrock of our Republic is that we must have elections that are free and fair and transparent and trusted, and we — this was something that we've had to fight about throughout the whole history of our Republic," said Hemingway.

Hemingway then stressed the importance of having election security, slamming President Joe Biden's claims that voter ID laws are "Jim Crow 2.0," noting that at least 80 percent of the country supports these laws.

"They don't want to have voter ID. They want to make it easier to have manipulation of elections and not be able to trust them, and so that is a threat to the Republic," said Hemingway.

In regards to Georgia, Hemingway said that the funding from Zuckerberg impacted not just the presidential election, but the control of the Senate as well.

"You look at Florida, which had less of this type of funding. It went you know, one point Republican to three points Republican in those four years. Georgia went from five points Republican to one point Democrat. It was because of this Zuckerberg finding and it was because of a focus on this, that people really need to be aware of and they need to be monitoring it so that it doesn't happen in the future so that they can trust the election," said Hemingway.

Hemingway continued on to stress that the right needs to become as invested in elections as the left.

"There is something to be said about how people on the left have really invested in this issue. People in the right need to invest on it — in it as well," she said.

"People who care about elections need to be involved and need to be engaged in community oversight. They need to know what the laws are in their, in their state, in their community. And they need to be there. You know, people think of, for instance, being an election watcher or election judge, that happens on election day, but in many states it can happen for weeks or even months prior to election day. It's important that people who care about their country be witnessing that rather than not," she said.