Is Britain’s Conservative Party planning to take another leaf from the Trump playbook in one last, desperate, attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in the 2024 election? “They’ve already tried voter suppression with their whole ‘Voter ID’ nonsense and more recently they’ve tried playing the age card by labelling sixty one year old Labour leader Keir Starmer ‘Sleepy Keir’, implying that he’s too old and decrepit to fulfil the duties of prime minister,” explains top political analyst Sir Jim Curtains, Emeritus Professor of Political Propaganda at Littlehampton Institute of Fisheries Protection. “While none of these Trump-style tactics have been effective, some of their campaign strategists have lately become much enamoured with some of the tactics used by Trump to try and deny the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election.” Chief amongst these were the allegations that many Republican voters had been diverted to ‘fake’ polling stations, with the votes they cast there being destroyed, while those of any stray Democrats who walked in by mistake being forwarded to legitimate polling stations for counting. “Where do you think all those bundles of votes that kept appearing, all for Biden, were coming from?” says self-styled ‘journalist’ and ultra-Trump supporter Laura Looney in a recent video on her You Tube channel. “It’s quite obvious that they weren’t, as claimed, postal votes – it’s just yet more blatant cheating by the Democrats to deny President Trump his rightful victory!”

According to completely unverified reports assembled by Looney, the level of sophistication of the supposed ‘fake’ polling stations varied considerably. “I followed the signs for the polling station and ended up standing in a long queue for over six hours, before the guy at the front realised the ‘door’ was just painted on to the wall of a building!” claimed Deke Ziggwalt, an unemployed pig sexer resident in Fuckle County Tennessee, of his 2020 voting experiences. “By the time we’d found the real polling station, voting had closed! I’m telling you, all them people in that queue were, like me, planning to vote for Trump!” None of the others supposedly waiting in the queue could be traced for comment and Trump carried Fuckle County, which only has two registered Democrats regardless of any alleged electoral shenanigans. Other reports speak of far more elaborate deceptions, with complete polling stations being set up as part of the deception. “It was clearly one heck of a sophisticated operation, which involved fake polling cards being sent out to registered Republicans, sending them to a false address,” alleges Ron Nutt who, in an interview on Looney’s channel, tells of how some California Republicans were, in 2020, deceived into casting their votes into oblivion. “When I got there, it looked exactly like the real thing – ballot boxes, tellers, the whole lot, they even checked my ID against the register before I cast my vote. But when the votes were counted and Biden won, I knew something was amiss, so I went back to the polling station – there was no trace of it and the owners of the building it had been in denied any knowledge of there having been a polling station there!” Again, neither Looney nor Nutt could offer any verification of the latter’s claims.

“Obviously, as the Tories face possible electoral wipe out, the idea of invalidating the whole election seems increasingly appealing to some of their strategists,” opines Curtains. “Let’s not forget that they’ve experimented with election denial before – in the aftermath of this year’s London Mayoral contest there were all sorts of allegations on social media– all from anonymous accounts of course – flying around, alleging all sorts of unspecified electoral irregularities. Moreover, the defeated Tory candidate kept trying to claim that she had run Labour’s Sadiq Khan a close race, despite his winning margin being quite significant. So don’t be surprised if you start seeing claims post-general election of Tory votes being stolen by fake polling stations.” The academic, however, suspects that the sheer desperation of the Tories’ position and the fact that these earlier attempts at election denial failed to gain any traction, might move them to take far more radical measures on polling day. “There have been rumours that they have plans to deploy their own fake polling stations across the country, to try and lure in unwary non-Tory voters in order to neutralise their votes,” he explains. “Apparently they already have a fleet of vans, full of ballot boxes, counterfeit ballot papers and electoral registers, folding tables and the like, just ready to go out and set up in pre-rented empty office spaces and shops.”

Investigative journalist Arnie Peeker claims that the Tories have already tried using fake polling stations, alleging that his investigations have uncovered a Tory plot to use the recent local elections as a ‘dry run’ for their nefarious scheme. “There were reports from all over the country of people arriving at polling stations, only to find themselves directed to what turned out to be fake polling stations, set up in rooms at the same venue as the real one,” he says. “The people doing the redirecting, who voters assumed were electoral officials, were actually Tory Party workers!” Any non-Tory votes collected in the fake ballot boxes were subsequently destroyed, with the Tory votes surreptitiously added to the legitimately collected ballots before being sent for counting. Peeker – who has so far failed to sell his story as an exclusive to any news outlet – claims that the Tories engaged in further electoral subterfuge by sending out fake ‘official cars’ to pick up elderly and infirm Labour and Lib-Dem voters and take them to what turned out to be fake polling stations. “I’ve spoken to a number of volunteer drivers for Labour constituency parties who reckon that, on numerous occasions, they arrived at addresses only to be told that the voters they were to have collected had already been picked up by the official party driver!” he says. “Aparently, these fake drivers all looked pretty shady – unkempt and unshaven. At least one group of voters picked up in a fake car claimed they were also sexually assaulted. Although, to be fair, when the perpetrator was arrested, he turned out to be an opportunist sex offender with no known political affiliations – but I’m sure that if he had ever voted, it would have been Tory.”

Many political commentators have cast doubt on Peeker’s claims, pointing out that the Tories suffered significant losses in the local elections, indicating that if they had been deploying fake polling stations, it had been a hugely ineffective strategy. Nonetheless, Sir Jim Curtains still believes that the Tories are currently so desperate that they might just be tempted to try the strategy on polling day this general election. “They’re looking down the barrel of a gun, facing a crushing defeat,” he points out. “They aren’t going to go into that night quietly. They’ll do absolutely everything they can to hang on to all their privileges, all that public money they can siphon off to their buddies in big business, all the expenses they can claim. If they can nobble this election, they will! So, on 4th July, beware those phantom polling booths!”