The polls from the major networks and universities promised a blue wave. President Trump was down by at least 10 points nationally, and by nearly that much or more
in the major swing states. The few pollsters, including Trafalgar, who
got 2016 and 2018 right and called 2020 a close race, were widely
ridiculed.
Nate Silver, a leftwing poll analyst, was chief among the critics. Silver gave former Vice President Joe Biden a nearly 70 percent chance of winning Florida.
Immediately
on Election Day, turnout looked good for the GOP. Trump won Florida
decisively and by 8:30 p.m. Central Time, and made huge inroads in urban
areas. While Hillary Clinton won Miami-Dade County by 30 points in
2016, the 2020 Trump ticket was down only single digits in the county.
That’s because Trump made significant gains among nonwhite Americans, and according to exit polls
had the second-highest nonwhite share of the vote of any Republican
since 1976. Cuban Americans are a big reason for Trump decisively
winning Florida, but Trump’s gains with minority voters are a nationwide trend.
The flipside was lower black and Hispanic turnout for Democrats—except
for several major Democratic cities in contested swing states.
In other words, a significant margin of minority voters who didn’t defect to Trump decided not to vote. Indeed, a Bloomberg article
days before the election cited anonymous Biden officials who said the
campaign was worried about black and Hispanic turnout due to a lack of a
ground game in these traditionally Democratic strongholds. But the
warnings had gone unheeded.
Instead, the campaign hoped to make up these lost minority votes with gains in the suburbs,
particularly among white women. In the end, Trump gained among white
women compared to 2016, and only appeared to marginally lose votes from white men—many of which may have been upper-class suburban white men.
Back to Election Night
On
election night, Trump’s decisive win in Florida was a bellwether to
punters in the betting markets. The Trump campaign also seemed to
outperform Election Day voting in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania,
especially given the turnout seen in Florida. A shy Trump vote did exist, especially in the suburbs among women, and the GOP was morphing into a working-class, increasingly multiracial party. Betting odds swung in Trump’s favor, peaking at around 85 percent.
That’s when things went south for the Trump campaign. In a yet
unexplained move, states including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin
stopped releasing vote counts on election night. Fact-checkers have
noted that these states didn’t stop counting—fair enough—but not why
they stopped releasing the results of their counting.
Come 4 a.m. the next morning, huge amounts of fresh Biden votes were
reported. Trump’s betting odds plummeted, and days later the media
declared Biden to be the president-elect.
Except 70 percent of Trump voters,
who comprise half the country, are convinced of massive election fraud.
Yet corporate media has no intention of investigating claims of fraud.
Instead, it has pivoted from saying there is “no evidence” of fraud, to
saying that not enough evidence exists to overturn the results.
Contrary
to the hope of Trump supporters, the courts will probably be powerless
to sort these issues out. This is an incredibly dangerous moment for the
country and may be a pivotal point in the future of America’s
democratic republic. Did we just cross the Rubicon?
The Morning After
Before all else, we must go to the source of distrust over this
election. Whereas Florida finished counting votes on election night, and
has a system that knows roughly how many votes are outstanding and will
be counted before election night is over, in key states like
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin an unknown number of ballots could
come in at the last second. And they did.
For that, thank Democrat lawsuits to overturn state voting laws at
the last second, using COVID as a pretext. For those who doubt that the
suits were nakedly political, note that they looked like a wish list
based on a bill Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi authored in 2019 to accomplish nationwide mail-in voting.
Many of the suits were quarterbacked by former Hillary Clinton
campaign attorney Marc Elias, who was involved in manufacturing
Russiagate’s Christopher Steele “dossier.” Like most things rotten in
this country, particular blame should be placed on the courts that
decided bureaucrats could unilaterally rewrite state laws to turn
absentee voting into mail-in voting.
There
was no good reason to remove requirements that absentee ballots arrive
before the end of Election Day, nor to allow the fraud-welcoming
practice of “ballot-harvesting.” The John Roberts Supreme Court stood
idly by and let lower courts rip up longstanding state election law.
Democrats and the media complain that the legislatures should have
acquiesced and affirmed this judicial tyranny by changing the law to
allow ballots to be counted before Election Day. That would have only
put the legislature’s seal of approval on a mess that the courts
stupidly created.
Mail-In Balloting Is an Easier Fraud Mark
Regardless of the existence or level of fraud in the 2020 election, it is a fact that mail-in balloting opens elections to the likelihood of
massive fraud and chaos. First, there’s an easy opportunity for
cheating, given the unknown number of ballots that can come in. Because
ballots can be accepted after election day, an unscrupulous faction that
lags in earlier counting can come up with the votes to make the
difference.
Second, there’s less accountability for election officials. In a
normal election, it is possible to immediately tell how many votes are
cast and from where—once the votes are cast, all that’s left is to count
the votes, because officials know by ward and precinct how many votes
are in and what type have been cast (are the votes early in-person,
absentee, or election day in-person?). Not so for mail-in voting.
One can have a recount, but that will only recount the same bad ballots.
Then, once the counting starts, mail-in voting brings problems of a
haphazard chain of custody and reduced controls over voter-eligibility
verification. All this is why one can have a recount, but that will only
recount the same bad ballots.
The obvious problems with mail-in voting are not a rightwing conspiracy. France banned mail-in voting in the 1970s for these very reasons. In a recent New Jersey mail-in election,
about 20 percent of the ballots cast were found to be fraudulent. A
local New York election this year saw huge delays in processing ballots.
A 2012 article
in the New York Times warns that regular old absentee voting could
screw up the electoral process, let alone allowing ballots to come in
after election day.
Independent left-leaning journalist Glenn Greenwald writes
Georgia had an 80 percent chance to go for Trump on election night,
ostensibly because of a good Republican turnout. But so many ballots
came in for Biden the next morning that the state ostensibly swung to
Biden’s favor, due to major Democratic turnout in the Democratic
stronghold of Fulton County.
This doesn’t prove fraud, but Greenwald calls this seesaw process in
which many areas are counting votes nearly a week after the election a
“disgrace.” “Distrust in U.S. outcomes [under such a system] is
dangerous but rational,” writes Greenwald.
‘No Evidence’ of Any Fraud?
The media, Democrats, and many establishment Republicans have
reflexively repeated that “no evidence” of fraud existed. Yet evidence
does exist. The stories coming out of major vote-counting centers are shocking, and only add to the distrust. Dozens upon dozens of witnesses have signed affidavits attesting wrongdoing or highly inappropriate behavior from officials who are supposed to be impartial.
Detroit poll challengers have signed affidavits, under penalty of perjury, that they saw election workers counting ballots for non-eligible voters, and the double counting of voters.
These persons say they were harassed constantly, and that election
workers and Democratic operatives would get in their faces and start
screaming if they raised a concern.
Federal agents threatened one of these whistleblowers, in an effort to get him to recant his story.
Some “election workers” appeared to be AFL-CIO activists. If concerns
were raised, GOP poll challengers said, they were ushered from the room
by the police and the entire room would cheer. They say election
workers’ goal was to get as many GOP poll challengers as possible kicked
out of that room.
Poll challengers also allege that they were pushed out of the room
when the military ballots came in. Workers were sent to lunch; Democrats
ate inside the building and the Republicans ate outside the area where
votes were being counted, and the doors were locked so Republicans
couldn’t get back in.
Irregularities alleged by these challengers aside from counting
ineligible voters include ballots being dropped off by random vehicles, including a Mercedes Benz and a Ferrari, or arriving after the cutoff period. A sworn affidavit
claims ballots were being “fraudulently and manually entered” when the
person had no information and the birthdate was simply put as “1/1/1900.”
Another Detroit GOP poll challenger says she witnessed names on ballots
not coming up in the system but being counted nonetheless. When she
raised concerns, she says she was kicked out.
Sworn affidavits by several U.S. Postal Service employees, in at least Pennsylvania and Michigan, along with a city employee from Detroit, alleged they were asked to backdate ballots
(make ballots appear as if they were sent on election day) by their
superiors. It was later revealed that federal agents threatened one of
these whistleblowers, in an effort to get him to recant his story. A
Clark County Nevada elections department employee says that his
coworkers fabricated proof of residence data to allow ineligible voters.
In Philadelphia, GOP poll challengers had to sue to be allowed to
observe what election workers were doing. Democratic state officials
counter-sued to stop the access. While GOP poll challengers were moved
forward in the room, the vote counters were moved further away, a
mockery of state law that allows oversight of this process.
Photos of Philly vote counters show several women wearing Biden
masks. A Trump campaign lawsuit has a sworn affidavit from a person who
says he or she saw USB drives being delivered to the back of the room
where voting machines were housed, and where observers were restricted.
In Philadelphia, GOP poll challengers had to sue to be allowed to observe what election workers were doing.
Meanwhile, the Georgia GOP state party chair claims Fulton County
election officials told his observers to go home on election night
because they were closing up, but then continued to count ballots “in secret.” In Wisconsin, election clerks allegedly altered “thousands” of absentee ballots to make them eligible.
Add to this multiple videos
of what appears to be poll workers throwing away Trump ballots, and at
least a handful of examples of dead persons voting. A conservative
pollster, Richard Baris, claims to have found evidence of 10,000
deceased persons voting in Michigan. Others also claimed to have found thousands of dead voters in that state.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania far exceeded its record for 90-year-olds registering to vote. In Nevada, multiple witnesses signed sworn affidavits that they saw a “Biden-Harris” van filling out loads of ballots.
Yes, Republicans have at least anecdotal evidence of fraud, although
in one sense the media is right: these anecdotes are not evidence enough
to overturn the election. That’s because there’s no way to quantify any
of this evidence into an actual number of bad votes, even assuming all
these claims are well-founded.
Then There Are the Statistical Anomalies
There’s more than anecdotal evidence, however. Observers and experts
pointed out plenty of statistical anomalies. Some may turn out to be
innocuous, or easily explainable. Others have been less well-explained.
First, Republicans took issue with the massive vote dumps for Biden
that occurred overnight, in which Biden was getting nearly 100 percent
of the vote. One of these was attributed to an extra zero and human
error.
Michigan added almost 150,000 votes in one instance, all of which were for Biden except for about 6,000.
Silver tweeted that around 27,000 votes out of Philadelphia went “all for Biden.”
In the face of obvious wonderment of how Biden could get 100 percent of
such a large share of votes, Silver was quick to claim that election
officials “unintentionally enter vote updates one candidate at a time,
rather than entering all candidates together.” Maybe, but when votes
stop getting reported and reporting starts coming in early in the
morning with nearly 100 percent of votes coming in for Biden that justifiably raised eyebrows.
On a graph, these vote dumps in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and
Pennsylvania resulted in Biden quickly jumping above Trump, and the odds
of a Trump win plummeting. Michigan added almost 150,000 votes in one
instance, all of which were for Biden except for about 6,000.
On election night, Trump led in Pennsylvania by almost 800,000 votes.
The next morning, Trump’s lead shrunk to less than 100,000. Later,
ballots found, including those apparently lingering with the U.S. Postal Service, supposedly put Biden over the edge.
Biden received an unbelievable amount of the mail-in share in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Biden’s advantage in mail-in voting was to be expected, but the magnitude
of the spikes for Biden in these select states is worth scrutiny.
According to ballot requests across the country, GOP voters voted by
mail too, just not with the same intensity as Democratic voters.
But while Trump received a reasonable share of the mail-in or
absentee votes in places like Ohio, Biden received an unbelievable
amount of the mail-in share in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Biden’s
Pennsylvania mail-in total, excluding about 90,000 mail-in votes from libertarians and those with no party affiliation, equates to winning all the Democratic and Independent mail-in votes, and 9 percent of the GOP mail-in votes.
Said differently, Biden is up 60 points in absentee or mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, and up by almost 40 points in Michigan.
That’s not Biden receiving 60 percent of mail-in votes in Pennsylvania.
That’s Biden receiving 80 percent of the mail-in vote. Comparably,
Biden was only up single digits in absentee voting in most other
battleground states. Biden’s mail-in advantage was 15 points in Ohio and
5 points in Minnesota.
There’s no reason to think Pennsylvania and Michigan should be
outliers to national mail-in voting trends. Despite several comments by
the president, the Trump campaign ground game in these states encouraged
mail-in voting. In Michigan and Wisconsin, according to NBC News,
Republicans actually led Democrats in mail-in ballots requested and
returned. Yet the vast majority of the ballots that were counted after
election day in these states were for Biden.
A Weird, Asymmetric Surge in Only Some Cities
No, this Biden surge in cities wasn’t driven by the suburbs
abandoning Trump—Trump didn’t lose the suburbs any more than he lost
them in 2016, and losses there were more than replaced by gains in
working-class areas. These Biden votes were entirely driven by massive
turnout in select Democratic strongholds in swing states. As mentioned
before, this turnout was not consistent across the country. In parts of
these cities, there was more turnout than registered voters.
Biden only had a net gain of 4,000 votes compared to Hillary Clinton
in 2016 in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio. Yet Biden had a net gain
of almost 70,000 in Wayne County (Detroit), Michigan. In Minneapolis,
Democrats bragged of 88 percent turnout—extremely high relative to the rest of the country and the state.
These Biden votes were entirely driven by massive turnout in select Democratic strongholds in swing states.
Biden also outperformed past Democrats in places like Montgomery
County, Pennsylvania, where the population is declining. Barack Obama
received 233,000 votes in the county in 2012, while Biden received
313,000 votes. In Georgia, a handful of counties had massively higher
margins in terms of Biden votes compared to what Hillary Clinton
received in 2016—totaling a net gain of more than 200,000 votes.
It was alleged by some conservatives that Wisconsin had an unreal
amount of statewide turnout. That isn’t the case, but Milwaukee County did have sky-high turnout.
In Milwaukee, Biden received more votes than Obama did in 2008, even
though the population has declined by around 10 percent since that time.
Milwaukee “updated” voting data for its wards after a newspaper pointed
out that seven wards had more voters than registered voters, and
showing turnout well above 100 percent.
Another oddity was the large number of Biden-only ballots with no
votes down-ballot in these swing states, where courts had canned
existing election law (including Georgia).
For example, the difference between Trump and the GOP Senate candidates
in Georgia was around 1,000 votes. But Biden received nearly 100,000
more votes than the Democratic Senate candidates. Some of these were
split tickets, but the numbers suggest a huge amount of Biden-only
ballots.
In Michigan, Trump received 7,000 more votes than the GOP Senate
candidate. But Biden received 70,000 more votes than the Democratic
Senate candidate. Apparently, 450,000 ballots in swing states had only a
mark for Biden with no down-ballot votes. This amounts to a massive
increase in ballots cast for only the presidential candidate in these
states relative to history, and ballots like this were overwhelmingly of
the mail-in variety.
Ticket-Splitting Was Low, and Congress Trended Red
Anti-Trump establishmentarians claimed everything was attributed to ticket splitting—surely
a projection of their views onto the people of Middle America. But
ticket splitting was normal, minimal, and went both ways. In fact, this
year ticket-splitting nearly hit a historic low.
If anything, Trump outperformed the GOP senatorial candidates in states
like Michigan and Arizona. Either way, ticket splitting doesn’t explain
all the votes for Biden with no down-ballot votes.
Another headscratcher
is that, in what was supposed to be a blue-wave election, Democrats
beat no Republican incumbents. They also lost around 10 seats (possibly
more), and all but one of the nearly 30 races considered competitive.
Why does this matter for the presidential election? The only place
Democrats were turning out to vote was in Democrat-run cities in swing
states where election laws were thrown out. Again, contrary to the
narrative from some establishment types, this wasn’t Republicans
outperforming Trump. In the House Democratic campaign committee’s own panicked words, House Republicans were buoyed by Trump.
Republicans are more or less tied with Democrats in the national
House popular vote. Trump had at least 1.5 million more votes than House
Republicans, while Biden had 5.5 million more votes than House
Democrats.
Big Ballot Dumps Trended Biden
Other statistical anomalies have been noticed. In Milwaukee, the number of ballots that were reported in a single batch was highly correlated
with Biden receiving the vast majority of the votes—meaning, larger
reports of ballots skewed heavily for Biden over smaller reports. This
doesn’t prove anything nefarious, but it is an oddity nonetheless.
Biden votes appeared to surge
later in areas of Milwaukee where Biden was not performing well.
Although this could simply be due to unaccounted-for votes coming in,
the phenomenon appears concentrated among wards where Democrats were
underperforming, not where Democratic voters were most prevalent.
Ballots in Pennsylvania are also alleged to have arrived before they
were sent, arrived the same day, or arrived just one day after being
mailed out right before Election Day. A data analyst calls these
instances of “fast traveling” ballots suspicious. The share of these
fast-traveling ballots as a percent of overall mail-in ballots was
incredibly high in Pennsylvania, totaling up to 100,000 ballots in a race with a margin of much less.
Most came from Lehigh County and Philadelphia. Ballots defined as
suspicious were much more likely to be requested via mail instead of
online. The data analyst calls it odd that the quick turnaround time
would depend on how ballots were requested (mail requests somehow got
done in a day, compared to online requests, which were more normal).
Late-arriving ballots were apparently a huge percent of the votes
cast in several Pennsylvania counties. In general, these late-arriving
ballots reduce confidence in the election system, fraud or no fraud.
Information Chaos
There were still other things to set GOP voters’ minds ablaze.
Hilariously, Google searches for “election fraud punishment” spiked in
Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania several days prior to the election.
Aside from anecdotal evidence of deceased voters, some alleged many thousands
of deceased voters—a claim that has yet to be unproven. Former Democrat
governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, who was jailed for trying to
sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat, confirmed conservatives’ suspicions
even more. “In big cities where they control the political apparatus and
they control the apparatus that counts the votes, and they control the
polling places and the ones who count the votes, it’s widespread and
it’s deep,” Blagojevich said.
Still other examples appear to have been false alarms. One picture
showed voters with the birthdate listed as “1/1/1900.” While some poll
workers are alleged to have improperly entered this date, and other
birthdates have been found that can’t possibly be correct, some voters
who were subject to spousal abuse or have other reasons for privacy have
their birthdates entered as such. In another example, a viral video
showed a poll worker filling out ballot after ballot—yet the election authority says that this is a regular part of the process, and the pollworker is evidently duplicating “damaged” ballots.
The Much-Discussed Software Issues
The spookiest thing thrown about in conservative circles involves
allegations that Dominion, voting hardware and software used in a vast
number of states and in all the swing states, changed vote tallies from
Trump to Biden, or deleted Trump votes. What is certainly true is there
were several Dominion-related errors, all of which took votes from Trump and gave them to Biden.
Votes were switched in Michigan on at least two separate instances.
Dominion claims this was due to user error, but the Michigan GOP has
called for a statewide investigation. Even if this was user error, it
isn’t comforting that these errors could be so easily made using
multi-million-dollar electronic voting machines.
The only place Democrats were turning out to
vote was in Democrat-run cities in swing states where election laws were
thrown out.
The New York Times is quick to point out
that every confirmed error has been explained. But Republicans aren’t
satisfied with the explanations when all the errors went against Trump,
and speculate there could be many yet to be discovered. That’s because
when votes were switched, these errors were only identified by
authorities carefully tracking the issue—there was no clear-cut
mechanism to flag this problem, which means it could be magnified across
the country.
We also know that Dominion caused Georgia election-day voters to be initially turned away because of a glitch, which occurred in two Trump-leaning counties. A Georgia official said that Dominion “uploaded something last night, which is not normal, and it caused a glitch.”
A poll watcher in Georgia alleges that he or she saw
a “suspicious [and yet unexplained] shift in votes while monitoring the
interim election results on the Georgia secretary of state website.”
There were also problems with Arizona voting machines on Election Day.
Arizona’s secretary of state is refusing to investigate issues there,
and conservatives were quick to point out that she had previously posted
about Trump’s “base” being “neo-Nazis.”
Dominion has ties
to prominent Democrats, too, adding to suspicions. This includes an
overwhelming amount of donations going to Democrats, and a Dominion
employee in charge of vote security participating in Antifa calls.
Republicans aren’t satisfied with the explanations when all the errors went against Trump.
Conservative blogs have alleged that thousands of votes were switched in Wisconsin, enough to give the state to Trump if true. Another blogger alleges that millions of votes were switched by Dominion, and this claim was tweeted by President Trump on Nov. 12.
The president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is now saying that he has an
affidavit from a Dominion worker in Michigan that 100,000 ballots for
Biden were brought in the back door so they could “catch up with Trump.”
Prominent Republican lawyer Sidney Powell claims Dominion was hacked, and others noticed a subtraction of vote totals in the live data from Virginia.
A data scientist claims
there is a linear pattern of a declining Trump margin in more heavily
Republican areas—which essentially steals votes from red areas and
reduces Trump’s ability to run up the score there—in many key swing
states.
These claims are fanciful, to put it nicely, but they deserve
scrutiny and investigation. Dominion systems, at the very least, do
appear to be prone to hacking.
A federal judge and several senators, all Democrats, have criticized
Dominion for security problems in the past. Texas decided not to use
Dominion because of security issues.
Some allege that corruption was involved in granting massive
contracts to Dominion in states like Georgia. Dominion might be
completely unproblematic, but it is used in nearly 30 states, was used
in all of the swing states, and should be scrutinized.
Can You Blame Them?
Four years ago, Republican voters would have accepted the current
election results. That was before the Trump campaign was spied on, and a
constant coup was underway to remove Trump from the presidency. That
was before America saw massive riots and looting, resulting in countless
injured and dead cops and citizens, while the corporate media ran cover
for the rioters and looters.
Maybe Trump’s voters deserve to be skeptical about the outcome of
this election. Silver and the other mainstream pollsters didn’t just
promise that Trump and Republicans would be defeated soundly, they
ridiculed those who said it would be a tight race. Trump’s supporters
were again right to doubt the polls.
If Democrats believe half the things they are
saying about Trump or his supporters, why wouldn’t massive vote fraud be
justified and even moral?
The court-won destructions of state election law smacked Republicans
as nakedly political. Nobody seriously believes that allowing mailed
ballots to come in after the election has anything to do with actually
protecting people from the pandemic, especially when the same officials
applauding mail-in balloting have selectively applied coronavirus restrictions to reward their friends and punish their political enemies.
Democrats have compared Trump to Adolf Hitler and have widely called
his supporters white supremacists and fascists. If they believe half the
things they are saying about Trump or his supporters, why wouldn’t
massive vote fraud be justified and even moral?
The same people who ranted about Russia hacking the 2016 election—to the point where almost 70 percent of Democrats
falsely believed that Russia had hacked and changed vote totals—tell
Trump’s base that it is dangerous and unpatriotic to doubt the results
of this election. Russia, via a so-called troll farm, spent less than $100,000 on social media advertising before the 2016 election, but that didn’t stop House Democrats and many
Senate Republicans from treating this spending like it was the biggest
problem this country faced. The same people who think less than $100,000
of Russian social media advertising could sway an election say there is
no way the election could be swayed by fraud.
The same people who think less than $100,000 of
Russian advertising could sway an election say there is no way the
election could be swayed by fraud.
The censorship of any post questioning any part of the election on
social media and the denial and dismissal of obvious signs of fraud only
add fuel to the fire. These fly in the face of common sense. Consider
an article from the BBC
in September 2016, about vote rigging in Africa. The article says that
classic signs of fraud include “high turnout in specific areas,” and
“delay in announcing results.” Note that states like Florida had high
turnout, but it wasn’t hugely concentrated to certain areas and ballots
were counted instantly.
After the election the rejection rate of mail-in (absentee) ballots may have plummeted
in the key swing states, meaning officials there don’t appear to have
checked ballot validity, even though millions more mail-in ballots were
cast in 2020. Georgia is recounting votes, but not checking absentee
ballot signatures. And Pennsylvania officials appear to have destroyed
absentee ballot envelopes—in violation of state law—which are necessary
to determine the validity of votes in an audit.
The Threat to Our Democracy
Nothing here proves election fraud changed 10,000 votes or 1,000,000
votes, and that’s partly the point. It isn’t possible to know what
would have happened without a major recanvassing and audits. Even then,
unlawful votes are extremely hard to undo. People asking for definitive
proof of fraud that would result in a specific total of fraudulent votes
are asking for the impossible. The election is supposed to be secure
from the get-go.
Trump’s chances in the courts look slim, fraud or no fraud. The legal
system is probably not equipped to handle these matters, given the
alleged scale and egregiousness. Courts can’t go through ballot by
ballot and figure this out. Instead, they would apply brightline rules,
such as tossing out ballots in Pennsylvania that came in after a certain
date.
People asking for definitive proof of fraud that
would result in a specific total of fraudulent votes are asking for the
impossible.
But since Pennsylvania officials failed to segregate these ballots,
and corrupt officials violated the law and threw out the ballot
envelopes, are the courts really ready to invalidate whole categories of
votes from a swing state? The courts already failed the country by
allowing perfectly decent election laws to be ignored.
Consider too that if Trump does pull off a shocking victory, America
will see riots and violence in the streets unlike anything seen before.
According to PredictIt, this has at least a one in ten chance of
happening.
But if Trump loses his court challenges and recounts, his supporters
aren’t going to forget about this. People are angry unlike anything this
author has seen before. The Jeffrey Epstein affair, the FBI corruption,
and the riots have completely eroded trust in basic institutions,
especially on the right.
If the fraud alleged did occur, it was pre-planned, industrialized,
and brazen. This isn’t 1960, where John F. Kennedy received more votes
in Cook County than the number of people living there. It isn’t 2000,
where a legal battle is ensuing over one state’s balloting issues.
Quite obviously, this is not a healthy democratic republic. It will be incredibly hard to deescalate from here.
This is an allegation that there was massive fraud, on a scale never
seen before—and the allegation comes from about 50 million Americans.
The allegation is plausible because the establishment denying it has
hated Trump and his supporters from the get-go. Trump supporters deserve
to be paranoid—they have been neither accepted nor understood.
The Republican Party may not like that its voters believe this, but
at this point they are riding a tiger. Trump won’t go away, either. Yes,
Trump made plenty of mistakes—he tried too hard to work with an
establishment that viewed him as an existential threat, and realized only too late that it would never accept him—and in some ways governed too much like a traditional Republican.
But Trump is now inseparably tied to the Republican base, largely
because of how the establishment has brutalized him and his supporters.
Picture inauguration day: Biden is being sworn in, but Trump isn’t in D.C. Instead, he’s holding a massive
rally in the Midwest. Republican Party officials and most politicians
(privately at least) will screech at this, but at this point they have
no control. They are along for the ride.
Note that these things are happening when the economy is relatively
good for most Americans, despite the coronavirus pandemic. Imagine what
happens if this is no longer the case. Quite obviously, this is not a
healthy democratic republic. It will be incredibly hard to deescalate
from here, and that should terrify Americans.
Have We Crossed the Rubicon?
Let’s put this even more bluntly. After the election, Tucker Carlson
had a segment on how Republicans dodged a bullet in 2020 by holding the
Senate. But with mail-in balloting, how sure can Republicans be that
they will hold the two seats in Georgia?
Many establishment Republicans and party insiders are happy to move
on from Trump and have touted the good night other Republican candidates
had. The base isn’t going to move on from Trump, could care less about
Republican senators, and wonders if the country will have a fair
election again.
If mail-in ballots go away next time, all this worry was for nothing.
But Democrats are unlikely to give up mail-in balloting given the power
it provides. If cheating did occur, and it is unaddressed, it will
certainly happen again. Maybe Republican areas have 120 percent turnout
next election. See how this works?
Overall, people feel like America has been sliding for decades, and indeed the American working class has been
sliding for decades. If people begin to feel like elections no longer
matter, the only avenue to settle differences is through force and
violence. The far-left in this country has already skipped belief in the
electoral system and reached this conclusion. How else does a divided
people settle disputes without the ballot box?
At the Point of No Return?
The phrase “crossing the Rubicon” refers to the moment Julius Caesar
crossed the Rubicon River, which precipitated the Roman Civil War and
the end of the Roman Republic. It’s like saying “the point of no
return.” People can laugh at what this is implying, but America is
reaching a dangerous point if the people—on both sides—no longer trust
elections.
Only a few things can walk us back from the ledge. First, Democrats
need to drop the push for mail-in balloting. The fear, however, is that
Democrats won’t be able to resist the advantage this gives them. Trump
not leaving politics will provide moral ammo, in Democrats’ minds, for
not taking the high road. Plus, even when Trump does get too old for
politics, the movement he started isn’t going away.
Next, Biden should be calling for a full auditing of the election, especially in the swing states, if he really wants to bring the country together.
This is highly unlikely to happen, however, and Biden’s moves are being
closely handled even as D.C. is springing into action in anticipation
of the administration change.
Biden should be calling for a full auditing of
the election, especially in the swing states, if he really wants to
bring the country together.
Republicans in Michigan and Pennsylvania want a full audit before the
legislature certifies the results, which is both their right and good
for the country. But any audit that results in success for the Trump
campaign will result in chaos and violence, given how poorly the media
is covering these issues. And Democrats are fighting hard to pressure
the swing-state legislatures to certify the results without an audit.
No, there won’t be a revote. The small fraud
that got Democrats a new congressional election earlier this year can’t
happen for a presidential election, given timetables set by the
Constitution. No matter what happens, the courts won’t decide this in a
way that is acceptable to more than half the country.
So this is the massive risk our country faces going into the 2020s:
if one side no longer agrees to play by the rules of a game, the game is
over. It appears that with Trump as an excuse, the left believes the
rules of the game no longer apply. The political right is approaching
the point where they feel the same way.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/17/if-americans-can-no-longer-trust-our-elections-were-in-big-trouble/
