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One Year Later: What Do We Know?
Not nearly enough. I’ve been analyzing various election fraud allegations as well as I can given the limits of my time, my abilities, and the amount of information available to me. It’s a mess.
No, not the election itself. Well, that was a mess too. But I mean the election allegations are a mess. And so is my analysis: It’s big, it doesn’t have enough pictures, and the big post here (or, for off-Ricochet, here) could use some serious rewriting and reorganizing.
Hey, I’m trying, I’m trying — just like the T-Rex in that Far Side cartoon, except that my arms are much longer, and that thinking through election shenanigan allegations is a much, much, MUCH bigger pile of potatoes.
So What Are We Talking About Here Exactly?
Let’s get this out of the way first: There’s not just one claim, like “The election was stolen.”
There are dozens of claims; nay, there are scores — probably hundreds!
There’s this claim about electronic fraud, this other claim about electronic fraud, and then some other claims about electronic fraud. And there’s a whole slew of different claims about Georgia. And there’s a whole slew of slews of other claims for other states.
Some claims pan out, and some don’t. And some claims don’t yield a simple, binary “Yes, fraud” or “No, fraud” answer. And not all the claims are even about fraud as such. And most of them have to be considered individually.
There are also some interesting, big summary statements that can only be handled by handling a bunch of other allegations that work into them.
Here’s a nice summary statement of which I’ve become persuaded by the available evidence: Votes illegally cast or improperly counted (and probably illegally counted, although that depends on the details of the relevant state laws) exceeded the Biden margin of victory in multiple swing states.
I used to say something rather different, by the way, which Ricochet members can check up on by going to comment Nos. 35-36 here. But that was before I’d heard about interesting claims from Just Facts Daily, Davis, Raffensperger, Stenstrom, Kamzol, and others. More information came in, and I had to change my mind. (Dang.)
This post will be a short introduction to some of the inputs that, from what I can tell, lead to this conclusion, as well as some others that don’t. Specifically, let’s look at a few claims concerning Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.
This post is a sequel to “Intro to Eight Election Fraud (and Related) Claims.” Like that one, this is only a short sample. There’s lots more fun in the aforementioned big post; and, although it is way too big, you can still go there and CTR+F for keywords.
Weirdness in Wisconsin: Bad Policy, but Not Necessarily Illegal
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Good grief, but there is a lot to say about Wisconsin. It’s not great, but it’s not all bad.
Some of the major concerns in Wisconsin include:
-About 65,000 votes cast in outdoor dropboxes.
-About 54,000 votes that circumvented the voter ID requirement.
-About 17,000 votes in the city of Madison cast through the Democracy in the Park initiative.
-Election workers fixing the mistakes of witnesses who didn’t fill in their addresses properly.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission was behind most of this stuff. These things went all the way to federal court, with former President Donald Trump’s legal team challenging the WEC. Most or all of the underlying facts were agreed on by both sides. A judge named Brett Ludwig (a Trump appointee) ruled against the Trump legal team, and Andy McCarthy at National Review Online gave some commentary on the decision.
Ludwig and McCarthy strongly emphasize their view that it’s totally legal for the WEC to give elections guidance that adds to the details in written state laws. This, of course, is not the same thing as giving advice that goes against those laws.
I checked the laws myself, and I came to the following conclusions.
First, the Good
Ludwig and McCarthy are right about that standard: It is ok for the WEC to have policies not in state law. State law gave them that responsibility, and 2020 was a heckuva time to use it.
It’s not ok for them to go against state law, but you have to look at the details of each situation to see whether they did.
The law says that these ballots were to be delivered in person to the city clerk. But I figure it’s OK to deliver them in person to the clerk’s office and hand them over to someone who works for the clerk, or to put them in a dropbox there.
And if that’s OK, then it should be OK to hand them over in person to the same clerk’s employee or to the same clerk’s dropbox located outdoors. From what I can tell, that’s exactly what happened with the outdoor dropboxes and with Democracy in the Park.
So those things were legal.
And the voters who circumvented the voter ID requirement also did so legally. The law in question gives more than one way of procuring an absentee ballot. Those 54,000 ballots were procured in a way that, as it happens, does not require a voter ID.
And one more piece of good: I can’t see anything wrong with election officials fixing an address that a witness didn’t fill in properly. If, for example, a witness testifies, signs, and gives an address without a zip code, I don’t care who fills in the zip code.
Now, the Bad
But the election officials didn’t just fill in missing zip codes. They filled in entire missing addresses; they’ve been doing that since 2016. The law in question is here, and it states specifically states that “The witness shall execute the following.” Then there’s a colon, and then there are several things that fall within the scope of the colon. The law says:
The witness shall execute the following:
I, the undersigned witness, subject to the penalties of s. 12.60 (1) (b), Wis. Stats., for false statements, certify that I am an adult U.S. citizen** and that the above statements are true and the voting procedure was executed as there stated. I am not a candidate for any office on the enclosed ballot (except in the case of an incumbent municipal clerk). I did not solicit or advise the elector to vote for or against any candidate or measure.
….(Printed name)
….(Address)***
Signed ….
This is pretty straightforward. “Execute” means “do,” and what the witness is supposed to do is everything following the colon. So the witness is supposed to give the address; adding the address for the witness after the witness has signed produces a ballot that has not been cast in accordance with the law.
I fear the WEC doesn’t understand how punctuation works. Some number of ballots were not legally cast, were improperly altered by election officials in this manner, and were still counted. I don’t know what that number was, however.
And there’s more bad. Let’s go back to the 65,000, 54,000, and 17,000.
Another unknown quantity of illegally cast votes is everyone who dropped off a ballot at an outdoor dropbox on someone else’s behalf. Seems innocent enough in and of itself: You’re walking down the street to the dropbox with your ballot, and your wife/husband/mother/father/brother/sister/roommate asks you to save her/him a few minutes and take her/his ballot and drop it off with yours, and you’re a nice person, so you do it, and you don’t mean anything bad by it.
But you did break a law there. And you and the other person both knew it was illegal, or at least you should have known it because there are instructions on how to cast your absentee ballot in Wisconsin.
Not that this is fraud as such, but it is illegal, and you can also see why the law exists: Without that requirement, fraud is that much easier for the real jerks out there.
And that easing of fraud goes for every one of the 65,000 outdoor dropbox votes. And for the 54,000 circumventions of the voter ID requirement. And for the 17,000 Democracy in the Park vote — a bunch of extra people were recruited to collect ballots on behalf of the city clerk and to act as witnesses. A little incompetence, or a little corruption on a small scale, would go a lot further to enable fraud in these circumstances.
With any set of 65,000, 54,00, and 17,000 votes, I would assume there is some number of fraudulent ones. With these sets, the number is sure to be higher. We just don’t know how high.
In a better year, these issues in Wisconsin would seem like a bigger deal. And they were a big deal: a few illegalities and bad policy that made fraudulent votes easier in big categories of 17,000, 54,000, and 65,000 votes. But at least the 17,000, 54,000, and 65,000 are not, as such, categories of illegally cast or illegally counted votes. Things could be worse.
Pennsylvania Problems: A Massive Chain-of-Custody Problem and Some Bad Fact-Checking
I reckon I can do this one a bit quicker.
We’re getting into more serious, but less complicated, issues here. Gregory Stenstrom witnessed a lot of weird stuff as a Republican Party observer in Pennsylvania, and his oral testimony as well as his contemporaneous, sworn written testimony are available online.
In one incident, he says that he and a Democrat observer witnessed around 60,000-70,000 ballots that were uncounted — after the counting had stopped. Obviously, it is important to follow up with this other guy and get his account, but, like the friends of Ford Prefect at the end of the book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” our journalists and other people with the responsibility to check up on this sort of thing seem to be suffering from an acute case of no curiosity.
In another incident, Stenstrom says he saw some votes being brought in via USBs without a proper chain of custody. About 50,000 of them. This incident was fact-checked. FactCheck.org looked into it, consulting a representative of the county where this happened.
The fact-check is a dismal flop. It includes these straw-man fallacies against Stenstrom:
1. It portrays him as having needed to provided evidence of fraud with these USBs, when in fact his only relevant claim was that there was no proper chain of custody.
2. It portrays him as having said that someone from the warehouse (which I believe means the warehouse that houses voting machines) uploaded the votes from the USBs, whereas Stenstrom only says that he was told by someone else that that was the case.
3. It construes Stenstrom as touting some conspiracy theory. In fact, Stenstrom’s main case is only for the conclusion that there are chain-of-custody issues. This conclusion comes from the premise that he saw what he saw and was told what he was told.
![Image - 566702] | Morgan Freeman | Know Your Meme](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/566/702/3f2.jpeg)
Stenstrom may personally think this all points to fraud, but if so, he barely manages to imply it while explicitly disavowing any theory of a conspiracy of any significant size. He says it “Only takes a couple of people” to cheat when you have votes being uploaded from USBs with a bad chain of custody. (He’s right, you know.)
The really important thing is the Stenstrom claim about the chain of custody itself. The fact-check does not refute this claim at all. It settles for objecting to some straw men.
To be fair, the fact-check does include some information about fail-safes that are available in case of problems. But there is no suggestion that anyone applied the fail-safes here; to the contrary, it appears that no one with authority to do so ever did, and there is no indication they even thought about it. If there had been one or two or three fraudsters present, the fact-check gives us no reason to think the scum did not get away with it.
The fact-check, in fact, leaves us very secure in our belief that one of the first walls of defense against fraud — a clear chain of custody — was not in place for these roughly 50,000 votes in Pennsylvania.
Further Fallacious Fact-Checking: The Nevada Upgrade
The name “Jesse Binnall” matters in Nevada, but I think his actual role was mainly to be the lawyer for the formal statements of some investigations done by another Jesse: Jesse Kamzol.
Kamzol did a bunch of stuff tracking lots of evidence for election shenanigans.
Well, that’s one story. The other story is that it’s all nonsense.
Let’s be fair to the critics. I believe that in one incident in court, Kamzol couldn’t give a lot of details on the method he’d used to track about 42,000 double voters. Not that that means his evidence is useless; it only means that when he was put on the spot, he personally couldn’t remember a lot of details, and that wasn’t up to the exacting standards of the court. Maybe he remembered 20 minutes later, maybe his staff were kicking themselves at the time because they knew it all perfectly but weren’t allowed to talk. It’s disgraceful that (apparently) no journalist has followed up to investigate further.
And when I say we should be fair to the critics, I mean it. That means we have to fairly criticize the critics.
From what I can tell, a different Kamzol claim was never seriously addressed by anyone. But it was, very unseriously, addressed.
To be precise, a USA Today fact-check employed a straw-man fallacy against it.
The claim: About 19,000 people illegally cast ballots in Nevada from out of state.
The fact-check’s claim: There is no evidence that people voted in Nevada who also voted in other states.
The straw-man fallacy is clear: Kamzol didn’t say that; they misrepresented his claim, refuted the misrepresentation, and ignored his actual claim.
That means that a claim about 19,000 votes cast illegally in Nevada has survived a round of fact-checking. Using my imperfect system for classifying election fraud and related allegations, this sad fact allowed for an upgrade of the 19,000: from merely “still standing” to “survived some level of fact-checking.”
Not that that proves that Kamzol’s claim is true. But the best the fact-checkers could (or would) say against this claim was, as with Stenstrom, a fallacy. As a result, this claim is somewhat more likely to be true than it would have been otherwise.
How likely? Difficult to say with any precision, but I would say somewhat more likely than not. Someone who can should check with Kamzol and check Kamzol’s own sources for this claim.
What Conclusion Should We Draw From All This?
If you want something simple like “The election was illegally stolen!” or “No, it wasn’t!”, I can’t give it to you based on this information alone.
The simplest thing I have, based on this information, is “The 2020 election was a mess!” The next-simplest thing is something I’ve been saying for a while: There is some evidence that votes illegally cast or counted by the traditional election shenanigan methods (i.e., not electronically) and by people acting with little or no coordination rivaled the President Joe Biden margin of victory in some swing states. (You can also add an “exceeding it in some cases” phrase to the end if you add some other claims, like those considered in the “Intro to Eight” post.)
That conclusion is somewhat tentative, and could change over time. My mind changed a lot already just to get here; I used to say the opposite a year ago!
Even way back then, I was already saying what I still say now:
We have to make distinctions. Not every claim of election shenanigan fits a simple narrative like “Shut up, conspiracy theorist!” or “Them Democrats stole the election again!” Paul says it well in 1 Thessalonians 5, even if he is talking about prophecies and theology instead of about the 2020 election:
Published in General… test everything; hold fast what is good.
As always this is great work and you deserve kudos for doing it.
My main complaint with the 2020 election isn’t with ballot fraud per se, but the systematic organization of public and private entities that sought to influence the election both directly and indirectly. We assume that the private media companies will work for the Left, and we assume that, given the chance, the Left will use the organs of govt to bend the rules in their favor. What we didn’t expect was the private companies like Twitter, Facebook, Alphabet, etc. “shaping” data on social media. We didn’t expect those same groups spending millions on facially non-partisan voter enablement programs that only benefited Dem areas. We expected that the Left would glass over any shenanigans, but what many didn’t expect was that the GOP would do the same. That they would see the exact same evidence of gross manipulation and just choose to ignore it. I used to think it was because they didn’t want to call the integrity of our elections into question as that would have serious detrimental effects on our country, but I’ve come to instead believe that they were OK with it because they were happy to be rid of Trump. Allowing such gross manipulation to pass unremarked was a small price to pay to rid themselves of the thorn in their side. Now, it’s a return to normalcy in their eyes and they trust the Left won’t do it again because Trump was an “exestential” threat to both the Left and the GOP.
Exactly.
I think this may be right. I think that many Republicans really do believe that Trump was a special case, and cheating was ok to get rid of him. They forget what the left thought of Reagan, and Bush II, and others. They forget how JFK won his election over Nixon.
But never mind – now the Democrats will return to allowing elections to happen honestly. Thank goodness that unpleasantness is over.
Right.
Right. The mostly legal election theft/rigging Mollie Hemingway has looked into is pretty darn well established.
Yeah, and they may be right, to a point. It appears in VA that the Left didn’t try and grossly manipulate the election, and NJ is well, NJ. What happens in 22? If the GOP picks up 30-50 seats then the steal from 20, will be complete and any talk of audits or security will die. But the next time the GOP comes close to real power, that gross manipulation will be there and the GOP will have enabled it through their inaction and fecklessness.
So, Bergen county in New Jersey found another 40,000 votes for Murphy overnight… after previously reporting that their votes were 100% counted.
Nothing to see here. Move along. Cleanest elections in history.
Those setting the agenda have no problem with Republicans winning elections so long as they’re the right kind of Republicans. Remember, Brian Kemp was a trump endorsed Republican. It’s when a truly transformative one comes along that the machine kicks into gear, because they can’t have that. McConnell, Romney, Graham? No problem. Youngkin? Wait and see I guess.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/04/audit-wisconsin-could-have-counted-enough-illegal-votes-to-tip-the-2020-election-to-biden/
All we have seen makes it clear that the election was such a mess that there is no way to prove who won. It is clear that leftists forces worked to get every illicit advantage they could and that votes that should not have been counted were. There is the clear appearance of fraud.
And
The Power that be, on the left and the right, and right here at Ricochet, have labeled what I just said beyond the pale.
3x points for triple negative in a single clause.
I’m not sure we know that. Attempted murder is a crime, too.
I watched the returns until 2100 MST or so, and I saw the same old blue creep / red fade dynamic unfold. Happens every time. Is that really probable or innocent, that it happens in every election of significance?
No, it is just that in every single GOP dominated district, the votes get counted faster than in every single Democrat dominated district. Every time. The Democrats are just slower to count. And every single time there is a late break it is always for the Democrats, That is just how it is.
“And if you believe that, I have several bridges to sell you…”
The chaos is by-design.
I recently adopted a difficult dog. A mutt less than 2-years old who had been hit by a train and lost a leg plus now carries a broken tail. This happened in Mexico. Three surgeries later, and somehow our paths crossed. I named him Lucky. Back to difficult: he was scared of people and other dogs after having so much significant trauma during such a short life, so his impulse was to bark, display aggression and try to scare off new encounters (sound familiar?). One technique I used to train Lucky was to take him to a dog park with many dogs. I cut him loose. There were so many dogs Lucky simply did not know what to do, he could not focus on any one dog, so he blended in and became one of the group.
It appears the dozens or scores or hundreds of election fraud claims might very well be by-design, and like Lucky at the crowded dog park, with the intention of preventing focus on any one claim by introducing overwhelming possibilities.
Lucky:
Is this why President Depends and #bidenpoopypants are trending on twitter?
“She fell.”
That’s more credit than I’m ready to give them. It implies there’s a supra-corrupter sitting at the top. I’m still seeing them as more of a forest of corruption, not yet a single tree. I suppose it’s possible, but they’d have to be really good to avoid exposure for this long, and I just don’t think they’re that good.
“Into a barrel of acid.”
“In pieces.”
They may not have a supra-corrupter, but they do have supra-facilitators — the “news” media. They are compelled to sustain the narrative for the sake of their own bloated existence.
We can start by putting people in state prisons for breaking state laws after state prosecutions. Decertification after that maybe, but let’s start with perp walks by state police and county sheriffs.
That would be nice, but remember that most of those people you are asking to do the arresting are perfectly fine with the fraud, and even if they did, no DA would prosecute them, for the same reasons.
Yes, for now, but we need to keep calling them out and shoving in their faces. History will judge all of us on what we did during this time.
Are you familiar with that Russian tic, where when a thing disappoints, they say the name of that thing with a sardonic sort of finality, like they’ve added it to a list?
Nope.
And none of this is final.
Yes, I read several years ago that google actually bragged about finding that they could swing votes by (I don’t remember now but I think it was) 15 or 20%. This worked so well that even the developers couldn’t see the algorithm skewing the results when doing their own test searches. This has probably been used in the many US elections but certainly in the 2020 fortification process.
So even without electronic shenanigans the voting process was corrupted.
Yes, but they are legitimately afraid if they allow the question to be debated, they will be shut down, so… it’s complicated.
Great looking dog. And that’s a pretty interesting analogy. You’re not by any chance a non-computer programmer are you.
… into my vat of sulfuric acid!!! I told her the bannister was loose.
I think that the Time article about various entities coordinating to “fortify” the election against Trump, demonstrates that they admit to a coordinated strategy, and therefore there’s at least one coordinator, probably a board of coordinators.