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Two Years Later: How To Think About Election Cheating in 2020
Carefully–that’s how!
Allegations of election illegality in 2020 must be considered on a case-by-case basis. They vary in at least ten important ways:
- Some are about perfectly ordinary, well-known, and even predictable human corruption; some are about other, more sophisticated schemes.
- Some are about electronic shenanigans; some are not.
- Some claims are about election fraud as such, and some are about lesser forms of illegality.
- Some specifically involve Biden votes, and some do not.
- Some come with a chance of counting, or at least estimating, the number of votes involved. Some do not.
- Some involve votes illegally cast. Some involve votes illegally counted.
- Some have been subjected to some level of fact-checking or critical scrutiny. Some have not.
- Some that have been thus subjected have survived that fact-checking or critical scrutiny. Some have not.
- Some that have survived have been positively verified. Others have merely had the good fortune of, apparently, only being challenged by goofballs who misrepresented them before refuting the misrepresentation and calling it a day.
- Some that have been positively verified have been verified in court. Some have not.
That’s a lot of ways allegations can vary. The results are interesting, and here are some examples.
- Gregory Stenstrom’s 50k votes with a bad chain of custody in Pennsylvania: survived a round of fact-checking in which it was misrepresented, and was largely verified, but never went to court apparently. Not necessarily fraudulent votes by category.
- Something like 30k votes in Michigan with a bad chain of custody: verified in a state Senate report, but apparently never went to court, and not necessarily fraudulent votes by category.
- Mark Davis’ work, the cream of the crop, tracking votes illegally cast outside of the voter’s jurisdiction in Georgia: 50k double-checked, over 12k verified, but apparently never taken to court, and illegal but not fraudulent as such.
- Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission in Wisconsin: applies to something like 54k votes illegally counted and improperly (but not illegally) cast, not fraudulent as such; verified by the state Supreme Court.
- Illegally cast mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania: about a 1.1 million Biden advantage in this category, verified up through the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, in violation of the state Constitution but in keeping with lesser law, fraud-enabling but not fraudulent as such, almost certainly an illegality flipping a swing state, but probably votes that should still be counted and for which voters personally should not be prosecuted.
- A guy in Pennsylvania saying they weren’t letting observers see what was going on: didn’t exactly survive a round of fact-checking, so unless we learn more I think we’d best just let this one go.
- A bunch of votes cast illegally by non-citizens: nothing you could bring to court, but a decent probabilistic argument from Just Facts Daily based on sociological data from earlier elections applied to more recent census data and indicating a lot of bad Biden votes, including more than double the Biden margin of victory in Georgia and Arizona.
- Steven Crowder’s observation of about 174,000 votes without voter registrations in Michigan: It looked good at first, but this could be nothing; these were at artificial and temporary precincts for counting absentee ballots, and they presumably had access to the registration information from the real precincts. Still, 97% voting for the same guy is a ratio even Democrats wouldn’t believe–if it were an election in Russia, Iraq, or Zimbabwe.
- Some claims about well over 100,000 ghost ballots in Michigan: Incomprehensible to me. Who knows what they were even talking about?
And on.
And on.
And on!
Over time, the stronger allegations rise to the top. They show that the 2020 election was an epic disaster. Although we still don’t know nearly enough, the claims that are still standing and which have some numbers available indicate more than enough illegalities to flip swing states. More than double the Biden margin of victory, in fact, in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.
We can narrow that down to just the claims which have survived a round of fact-checking, and we still have more than double, in the same five states.
If we narrow it down to just a few which have been verified, we still have more than the Biden margin victory in three states (Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).
And how about just the ones verified in court? That’s still more than double in two states (Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).
And note well: All of these involve well-known, perfectly ordinary human folly corruption–no big secrets or conspiracies, no hacked voting machines.
In short, without even considering the ways in which the election was rigged and without even checking the allegations about the voting machines (something I’ve been meaning to re-do soon), the American election system is broken and systematically vulnerable, and the 2020 election was a colossal disaster.
So how should we think about allegations of election illegalities?
On a case-by-case basis. Taking the problem very seriously. With attention to the differences between claims. Very carefully. Slowly if possible. And continuously. Even two years later, we have barely begun to figure this out.
—
This post is a continuation of a series. Since the week of the 2020 election, I’ve been trying to keep track of different allegations of election illegality and, as much as possible, make sense of them. That means figuring out, where I can, the sort of things listed above. Some of the unfinished results of this ongoing work are below.
First up is the core, but it’s big and unwieldy.
- Keeping Track of Election Fraud Allegations (available off-Ricochet here in a Microsoft Word version). (This is the biggest
- Let Us Hear the Conclusion of the Whole Matter (available off-Ricochet here in a Microsoft Word version)
- Some Evidence that Illegal Actions Flipped Swing States (or Were Enough To) (available off-Ricochet here in a Microsoft Word version)
- Where Do We Go From Here? (available off-Ricochet here in a Microsoft Word version)
And then there’s the right frame of mind for thinking through the electronic allegations (but not a word about 2020 as such):
- G. K. Chesterton’s Take on Electronic Voting Systems (available off-Ricochet here in a Microsoft Word version).
And then there’s a string of more readable intros to some of the specifics.
- Intro to Eight Election Fraud (and Related) Claims
- One Year Later: What Do We Know?
- Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission
- The Quest and Questions Continue: Some Election 2020 Updates
- Who Fact-Checks the Fact-Checkers?
And then two bonus analyses:
And on we go! I think we’re just getting started.
Published in Elections
I have been listening to Hemingway’s Rigged and her dissection of some of these same topics is spot on, just as yours has been.
What I love is how the same issues that drove the left to decry the elections prior to 20 became taboo when they liked the result. It’s almost like they didn’t care about the integrity of elections until they lost, and then claimed that the elections were spotless when they won.
Excellent posts, thank you.
It struck me the other day that almost all of these anomalies (mistakes, fraud, whatever) have one thing in common: they favor Democrat candidates. In a statistical universe we could expect unrelated incidents to benefit both sides, not necessarily to balance out, but at least to have a 60-40 or 75-25 Democrat-Republican benefit. Nope. The number of anomalies that benefit Republicans is vanishingly small.
Is this so obvious that no one bothers to point it out?
If nothing else, it’s a strong argument that the anomalies are not random.
Get out and vote, folks. If it’s not close, they can’t cheat, as a wiser man than I once said.
My new pet peeve is when people on the Right refer to 2020 and “changed election laws”, when they are actually refering to changed election procedures. There in lies the problem. The laws did not change, but the procedures were changed such that they did not conform to the laws. The procedural changes were done by Democrats to help Democrats.
I think it is “stealing an election”, when the FBI and CIA worked with media oligarchs to suppress Biden’s treasonous activity with China just before the election.
I think we’ve figured it out. It’s just that One Dare Not Reveal The Truth.
Which is what throwing the True the Vote people in prison was all about. Can’t let it be known that Democrats stole the election. Even Republicans fear going there. I think they worry about what it would do to the country if the Truth were known. But not telling the truth has its own dangers.
And ain’t that the hell of it? Republicans can’t just get more legitimate votes. They need to get well past the margin of fraud.
Yes, and it’s important to remember what was being covered up.
Did GW Bush’s DUI from thirty years ago have any bearing on his fitness to be President, a concern for voters?
Does Hershel Walker’s past mistakes from years ago regarding an abortion for a girlfriend have any bearing on his current character and fitness to be a Senator, a concern fror voters?
However, on the laptop were records and suggestions of recent, maybe even current, improper and possibly illegal secret dealings with our strategic enemies, and the very real possibility that Biden might be utterly compromised by Chinese influences. This was kept from people who were considering him for President. It was a great crime, not simply a deft political save, to keep this information from the voters.
Same with Clinton and her emails. A great crime.
It’s a fair opinion, but it’s yet another example of the double-standard that plagues Western politics.
Everything in the OP screams “systemic” corruption, but the Right dares not use such language.
The Left gets to call things they don’t like “systemic” but when the Right does it they’re “conspiracy theorists”.
And when the Right suggests that things the Left doesn’t like should be treated on a case-by-case basis it’s just evidence of “systemic racism” or “systemic sexism” or “systemic homophobia” etc. etc.
Outstanding post, SA. At some point, all of this needs to come out. Publicly. For everyone. Keep at it!
The OP is about occurrences in a small number of states, and often in a fairly small number of jurisdictions within those states. So I don’t think that this “screams ‘systemic’ corruption.” It does raise concerns.
The counterargument is that Republicans aren’t looking for anomalies that benefit Republicans and only Republicans are looking.
Completely agree.
If there were significant examples of cheating that benefitted Republicans, you don’t think the MSM would be trumpeting it?
Nah, I’m just going to stick with loud, wild bombast. Facts and nuance are for losers.
2000 Mules?
I have seen and been impressed by this documentary. Has anyone seen it debunked or even examined by the other side?
There have been minor instances in which Republicans committed election fraud, though. A college acquaintance of mine was in fact arrested and convicted in one such case. The salient difference is that Republican or conservative organisations such as the Heritage Foundation report them.
There was one superficial attempt to debunk it in The Bulwark (natch), but I’m not aware of anything in serious detail. The criticism seems to focus on the accuracy of GPS, but the True the Vote people have pushed back.
There ‘s an element of “Ignore it and it may go away.”
As for the media, I found media reports (e.g. on CNN) about Republican cases of voter fraud. All those cases were minor. Their reporting on Ozzie Myers was surprisingly open. They did not trumpet the story- or any other incidents of Democrat voter fraud- from the rooftops, though. Now hanging chads…we heard about them for years.
It only matters when its a statewide vote based on popularity. Where less than a handful of corrupted Urban areas can push close elections with an extra 1% maybe 2% that will swing who wins. This is why federalism and more regionality (more elector college-like systems that are more regional not less) is a good thing.
I think California actually has a huge problem. It just was not going to change the direction of the President or Statewide offices. But it really affects local and state legislative elections.
I would expect there to be some examples of both sides committing fraud in the statistical universe. It still seems that the overwhelming number of fraud cases are intended to benefit Democrats.
I have not taken time to review Heritage’s entire database, but I think this is correct. Note also that they have found, to date, no Republican equivalent of Meyers. A Mayor in southern Indiana, a ward heeler here, a party canvasser on the Illinois border- sure. But local party chairs, party election foremen, congressmen? Those- all I have found- have been Democrats.
True in WI, and other places.
One big change in PA was to the laws.
I wasn’t being thorough. I never said we stop with the case-by-case analysis. But it is where we start.
Oh, I’d say it screams systematic corruption. Or ar least systemic reckless disregard for election laws. And I wouldn’t call 5 out of 5 of the election-deciding swing states a small number. And this stuff is nationwide even if I personally focus on the five key swing states.
It seems like pretty good reasoning to me. I have some notes in the big post.
I think the same unusual probability happened to the census where only liberal states were overcounted and conservative states undercounted.
Oh Well, wait 10 years??
Somehow this brings to mind “a voice crying in the wilderness”
Well done
You are probably thinking of universal mail-in voting, which was passed, but never legally in effect, since a constitution change requires passing by successive legislatures. “legal” is just a minor speed bump for Dems in PA.