Election judges process ballots in the basement level at the Chicago Board of Elections in Chicago’s Loop on Nov. 3, 2020. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

By ya’ll I mean all you Democrats and Republicans, liberals, progressives and conservatives. President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden and your campaigns.

Just about all of you stated as fact prior to the election that it would be rigged. Obviously, whoever lost would keep up the drumbeat while the winner would dismiss the possibility of a rigged election as fanciful, conspiratorial and nutty.

Then this Sidney Powell shows up giving credibility to the the charge of a conspiracy, by a bunch of commies working out of Venezuela, reigniting  my awful memories of Sen. Joe McCarthy who found a “red fellow-traveler” hiding under every State Department desk.

The Biden stalwarts wallowed in their own fantasies, about, for example, Trump stripping the streets of those blue mailboxes to stymie mail-in ballots for Biden.

Speaking of Biden, let’s not forget the major media that allowed a presidential candidate–a presidential candidate, for God’s sake!–to get away with without answering tough questions. Any claims by the media of professionalism is a steaming pile of crap.

Speaking of Biden, he’s the beneficiary of the most corruptible electoral system ever devised outside of the Kremlin. Spreading unrequested ballots across the countryside like manna from heaven, allowing political hacks to collect the ballots and a host of other “progressive” steps designed to make voting as simple as A,B and C are so obviously corruptible as to make the system’s supporters appear to be fools or shameless partisans.

The days that it has taken to count some of the ballots is evidence by itself that the ballots are so insecure and the results so challengeable as to make any claims otherwise laughable. And scary.

It opened the door for Trump supporters to spend the next four years claiming that the elected was indeed rigged, a claim that is not without merit. It allowed Trump to initiate legal challenges in the battleground states, a right that he is and was fully entitled to exercise, despite the ridicule of his opponents.

Trump, of course, made himself look like a petulant child who didn’t get his way and is going to “show them.”

If this election proves anything, it’s that elections are fragile and that the number of ways the “will of the people” can be subverted are innumerable. The first order of business of the new administration and Congress is to return to secure, sensible ways to protect the ballots.

They can start by returning to in-person voting with a requirement for an ID. Mail-in votes should be reserved for deployed military and people who genuinely won’t be around on election day. They can make the deadlines for accepting ballots real deadlines. They can require that all ballot counting be open to inspection by both partisan and neutral observers.

And most of all, they can and must stop insisting that voting has been “fraud free. Designing a system of voting based on that preposterous and naive fantasy is at the root of the unprecedented problems we’ve experienced over the past several months. We deserve better.