Source: Unz.com
VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow writes: When the 2020 election controversy erupted, I decided that VDARE.com would not focus on it. VDARE.com’s Letitia James-drained resources, I thought, should be concentrated on our key issue: Immigration and the survival of the Historic American Nation.
The MSM and Big Tech, of course set up an echo-chamber of sloganeering and shadow-banning. But the major Conservative Inc. outlets, to my surprise, did very little.
Meanwhile, by eliminating Border enforcement, the Biden Administration has embarked on what must be most sweeping flouting of law by any Administration in U.S. history. And the most consequential.
I ask myself: if they can do this to Immigration law, why wouldn’t they have done this to election law?
And what about 2024?
For anyone not a rabid Democrat, late on election night November 3rd/4th 2020, the strong stench of fraud swirled across America:
As Mr. Trump walked out to speak to the media in the early hours of November 4, TV news tickers showed the President with a comfortable lead over Joe Biden in nearly every key battleground state.
Pennsylvania, 56-43, a lead of just under 700,000 votes. Georgia, 51-48, a lead of nearly 120,000. Michigan, 53-45, a lead of nearly 295,000. Wisconsin, 51-47, a lead of more than 116,000.
[US election: What happened in key battleground states on election night? by Frank Chung, News.com.au, November 22, 2020. Links in original]
The impression then was given by the MSM that counting was stopping for the night. Subsequently, this was disputed. Some stoppages were partial, in some cases all that was stopped, for some reason, was the reporting of the vote.
News.com’s Frank Chung, cited above, provides this Tweet:
States that won’t be called tonight, due to vote counting delays:
– Georgia
– Pennsylvania
– Wisconsin
– Michigan
Go to sleep.
— Rob Tornoe (@RobTornoe) November 4, 2020
But when reporting/counting resumed, Biden suddenly jumped into the lead. Eventually he was declared the winner with these majorities:
- Pennsylvania 81,660 votes
- Georgia 11,719 votes
- Michigan 154,188 votes
- Wisconsin 20,608 votes
I believe I have watched every Presidential election count to the death since 1968. I cannot recall any with such a hiatus in counting/reporting, nor one with such decisive late reversals.
Very many others held the same opinion. They would very likely have joined with President Trump in being suspicious. This crucial subjective aspect has been largely memory-holed by the MSM.
This pattern of the Democrats almost invariably winning close protracted counts has become more glaring in recent years. In 2018 even Speaker Paul Ryan was jolted into comment:
“We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race. This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is.”
[Ryan casts doubt on ‘bizarre’ California election results, by Scott Wong, The Hill, November 29, 2018].
(Having accidentally raised this critical question, Ryan characteristically wimped out.)
On further contemplation, the aroma of the 2020 election got worse. On November 23, 2020, The Federalist published a seminal article by J.B Shurk:
Candidate Joe Biden was so effective at animating voters in 2020 that he received a record number of votes, more than 15 million more than Barack Obama received in his re-election of 2012. Amazingly, he managed to secure victory while also losing in almost every bellwether county across the country. No presidential candidate has been capable of such electoral jujitsu until now.
While Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals in every urban county in the United States, he outperformed her in the metropolitan areas of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Even more surprising, the former VP put up a record haul of votes, despite Democrats’ general failures in local House and state legislative seats across the nation.
…the former VP managed to gather a record number of votes while consistently trailing President Trump in measures of voter enthusiasm. Biden was so savvy that he motivated voters unenthusiastic about his campaign to vote for him in record numbers.
[5 More Ways Joe Biden Magically Outperformed Election Norms]
The Federalist’s Shurk highlighted historical anomalies:
Biden is set to become the first president in 60 years to lose the states of Ohio and Florida on his way to election. For a century, these states have consistently predicted the national outcome, and they have been considered roughly representative of the American melting pot as a whole. Despite national polling giving Biden a lead in both states, he lost Ohio by eight points and Florida by more than three.
For Biden to lose these key bellwethers by notable margins and still win the national election is newsworthy…
Even more unbelievably, Biden is on his way to winning the White House after having lost almost every historic bellwether county across the country. The Wall Street Journal and The Epoch Times independently analyzed the results of 19 counties around the United States that have nearly perfect presidential voting records over the last 40 years. President Trump won every single bellwether county, except Clallam County in Washington…. Bellwether counties overwhelmingly chose President Trump, but Biden found a path to victory anyway.
Randy DeSoto noted in The Western Journal that “Donald Trump was pretty much the only incumbent president in U.S. history to lose his re-election while his own party gained seats in the House of Representatives.” Now that’s a Biden miracle!
[Links in original].
In essence, the 2020 election saw a radical departure from normal American voting patterns. Certain Democratic areas produced hugely more votes, both absolutely and relative to other areas, than normal. Was this just otherwise undiscernible but unprecedented enthusiasm for the Biden/Harris ticket. Or could fraud be involved?
To my mind, the most valuable contribution to evaluation the question of 2020 election fraud is Debunked?: An auditor reviews the 2020 election-and the lessons learned by Joseph Fried[Email him]. (Website here, Substack here). The publisher is Republic Book Publishers, in case Amazon or Barnes & Noble are pressured into dropping it.
Debunked was ignored by the media including supposedly “conservative” platforms. (An honorable exception was FrontPageMag.com’s Auditing Biden’s ‘Victory’ by Bruce Bawer March 23, 2023).
At present it languishes at 102,377 in Amazon book sales.
Although lucidly and even wittily written, this is a grueling read. Partly because it is highly statistical but, at least speaking for myself, I found wading through the flood of brazen dishonesty that Fried reveals to be debilitating.
One currently valuable service Fried performs: refuting the lie that Trump lost all his legal challenges.
A review of ninety-two cases by the organization, Promoting American Election Integrity, shows that only thirty were decided on merit, and Trump and/or his supporters won twenty-two of these cases.
(P267) See https://election-integrity.info/2020_Election_Cases.htm
Perhaps the most important service of the Trump Administration: demonstrating the startling news that the FBI is controlled by extremely unscrupulous Leftist activists. Perhaps the most important service of the 2020 Presidential Election: demonstrating that the state and Federal judiciary is packed with unrestrained Leftist partisans. In most of the Trump cases, these judges simply refused to consider the evidence on extremely dubious technical grounds.
To its eternal shame, this path was also followed by the U.S. Supreme Court. In my opinion SCOTUS, by literally denying Trump’s supporters their day in court, is the major culprit in the subsequent events of January 6th.
(This is not to say the Courts should have reversed the elections. They could have followed the precedent of the 2018 election in the 9th District of North Carolina and forced the queried elections to be rerun.)
Another key debating point that Fried obliterates: the oft-quoted assertion by Christopher Krebs, formerly Director of Cybersecurity for Federal Government that:
The November 3rd election was the most secure in American History
Joint Statement from Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council & the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees, November12, 2020
Subsequently, Krebs has been a go-to talking head for the MSM when it needs an apparently impressive disparager of President Trump’s election arguments.
Fried cheerfully points out that, in a brutal Senate hearing on December 16, 2020, Krebs unwillingly admitted he was only referring to cyber security—not to election fraud as a whole (P273). Fried then notes that, on Krebs’ watch as Director of Cybersecurity, there were two massive cybersecurity breaches. One directly involved the 2020 election: Iran hackers stole US voter data, posed as Proud Boys in effort to influence 2020 election: feds, by Ben Feuerherd, New York Post, November 18, 2021. The other, discussed in The Untold Story of the Boldest Supply-Chain Hack Ever, by Kim Zetter, WIRED, May 22,2023, was on a staggering scale and was detected by a private sector company—not the Feds.
Krebs clearly needed a new profession.
Reported in Fried’s book are myriad questionable events and dubious actions by Election officials. But the single most consequential issue is: the security of mail-in ballots.
Mail-in ballots were tremendously expanded for the 2020 election under the pretext of COVID. (But here is little willingness to roll-back the changes: Nevada, which in 2020 promiscuously mailed out actual ballots to all registered voters, whether requested or not, has now made this change permanent. P163). According to the United States Census Bureau
In 2020, 43% of voters cast ballots by mail and another 26% voted in person before Election Day. In 2016, 21% mailed in their ballots and 19% voted in person prior to Election Day.
Majority of Voters Used Nontraditional Methods to Cast Ballots in 2020 by Zachary Scherer, Census.gov, April 29,2021.
This means some 68.1 million votes were cast by mail in 2020, 39.5 million more than in 2016.
That is a lot of votes about the integrity of which to be so certain.
At this point it is worthwhile to consider what Joseph Fried means by an “audit.”
An audit is not just counting. An important aspect is looking out for anomalous numbers, which might suggest questionable activity.
Such a case occurred with the overseas military vote in Maricopa County AZ (subject to the Uniformed And Overseas Civilian Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA). In 2016 there were 1,600 such ballots, but in 2020 there were 9,600. They went 95% for Biden. The net 8,000 votes for Biden compare with his state-wide “victory” margin of 10,457 (P78-9).
Such a glaring anomaly cried out for investigation. So did a large number of other oddities. But, as Fried documents in detail (P 79-106), Maricopa County fought furiously to prevent this, enlisting the Biden Justice Department and a couple of Congresscritters. They were successful.
The other aspect of auditing: evaluating the “chain of custody” for valuables or sensitive documents such as ballots. The fact that the chain of custody is weak is not proof of fraud—but it does raise the possibility of fraud. An analogy would be an Auditor pointing out that a shop’s cash is being kept in an unlocked and unsupervised cash register. In itself, this is not proof that there has been or will be theft. But it identifies the possibility.
Basically, chain of custody provisions in the states which pushed mail-in ballots strongly were weak to the point of non-existence.
At this point, it is worth considering how other countries approach the chain of custody issue with mail-in ballots.
In general, they approach it by banning mail-in ballots:
Besides the United States, there are 36 member states in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Fifty percent ban absentee voting unless the citizen is living abroad, and an additional 38% require a photo-ID to obtain a absentee ballot. Fourteen percent of the countries ban absentee mail voting even for those living abroad…
These countries have learned the hard way about what happens when mail-in ballots aren’t secured. They have also discovered how hard it is to detect vote buying when both those buying and selling the votes have an incentive to hide the exchange.
France banned mail-in voting in 1975 because of massive fraud in Corsica, where postal ballots were stolen or bought and voters cast multiple votes. Mail-in ballots were used to cast the votes of dead people.
Why do most countries ban mail-in ballots?: They have seen massive vote fraud problems by John R. Lott Jr, President, Crime Prevention Center August 3, 2020.
In 2005, the issue of mail-in voting was considered by the Commission On Federal Election Reform, co-Chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker: Building Confidence in U.S. Elections September 2005. Fried notes that the report said
Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud
and also says that
The Commissioners said that, if absentee ballots are to be mailed out, it is important for the states to strengthen voter registration from handling the ballots. Unfortunately, for the 2020 election this advice was completely ignored in some States…All the concerns of the Carter-Baker report applied—plus, there were now unmonitored drop boxes. (P 29).
In order to demonstrate the opportunities created by having vast numbers of ballot applications (in Nevada’s case, actual ballots) sloshing about, Fried supplies a remarkable New York Post story—pointing (P32) out that it was published on August 29, 2020, “…before the subject of election fraud became verboten in the United States”:
A top Democratic operative says voter fraud, especially with mail-in ballots, is no myth. And he knows this because he’s been doing it, on a grand scale, for decades.
…the political insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears prosecution, said fraud is more the rule than the exception…
The whistleblower — whose identity, rap sheet and long history working as a consultant to various campaigns were confirmed by The Post…would have his operatives fan out, going house to house, convincing voters to let them mail completed ballots on their behalf as a public service. The fraudster and his minions would then take the sealed envelopes home and hold them over boiling water.
“You have to steam it to loosen the glue,” said the insider.
He then would remove the real ballot, place the counterfeit ballot inside the signed certificate, and reseal the envelope…
The tipster said sometimes postal employees are in on the scam.
In some cases, mail carriers were members of his “work crew,” and would sift ballots from the mail and hand them over to the operative.
Confessions of a voter fraud: I was a master at fixing mail-in ballots by Jon Levine
Levine’s illuminating story deserves to be read in full.
The Democrats imposing loose mail-in ballot regulations in 2020 were deliberately paving the way for fraud.…