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Intro to Eight Election Fraud (and Related) Claims
We may as well face facts: You haven’t actually read my 70 or so pages of detailed analysis of election fraud allegations, have you? Well, you could always go here for the big post (or, for off-Ricochet, here) and read it all very slowly, followed by the other parts of the series.
But, again, we may as well face facts: You’re not really going to do that, are you? So here’s something easier: A shorter, manageable introduction to just eight interesting claims. We’ll start with my three favorite claims that didn’t pan out; then we’ll cover four claims I think should be taken seriously (ok, three claims and one set of claims); and then we’ll look at one claim that raises more questions than answers for me.
This is only a short a sample. There’s lots more fun in the original big post, and more details on the eight claims here! (You can just go there and CTR+F for key words.)
The Best Ratio of Entertainment-to-Likelihood: the Hammer and Scorecard!
Some Trumpists, including our illustrious ex-President, ran with every supposed Kraken sighting like it was Mary Magdalene saying “I have seen the Lord” or John saying “These things stand written so that ye may know.”
I think my overall favorite fraud flop–say that five times fast!–is Hammer and Scorecard: a magnificent conspiracy in which the CIA not only has the supercomputer the Hammer, and not only has the election-stealing Scorecard software–but also hacks into the Dominion machines so the Deep State itself can steal the election!
And that’s not even the best part.
The miniature civil war on foreign territory in which the US military has a gunfight with the CIA and liberates one of their servers–yeah, that was the best part.
The best I can say for this theory, beyond its immense entertainment value, is that the evidence for it is somewhat better than I would have expected–among other details, at least one person I deem reliable, Lucretia on the Powerline podcast, seems to think the Hammer at least exists.
Better than I would have EXPECTED, I say–but not good enough! I can’t say it ain’t possible, but I’m pretty sure it ain’t true.
The Second-Best Ratio: the Philly Mob Boss!
A close second for me would be the one about the Philadelphia mafia boss who manufactured hundreds of thousands of fake Biden ballots for money.
As I understand it, the Buffalo Chronicle, which reported this, is not a real newspaper. Even if it were, more evidence would be needed. Such sordid deeds would have put to shame the Michael Corleone of The Godfather II. For something like this, we need better evidence than what amounts to, “Some anonymous criminal told one of our guys that this happened and how amazing it all was!”
A+ for entertainment value, but not even a passing grade as far as evidence is concerned.
It Looked Good at First: 173,000 Votes without Registration in Michigan
I think my third-favorite election fraud allegation that didn’t pan out is the one about 173,000 votes without voter registrations in Michigan.
Much less entertaining than the last two, but what it lacks in entertainment value it made up for in actually looking good at first glance: MI really was reporting all these votes in precincts where no one was registered to vote! (Steven Crowder may have been the first to notice it, but others picked it up, and it was included in the Peter Navarro compilation.)
From what I can gather, MI reported these 173k votes in their Absent Voter Counting Boards–and no wonder that there were no registrations, because an AVCB is an artificial and temporary precinct for counting absentee ballots. They correspond to REAL precincts, which I daresay actually had the corresponding voter registration information.
Blame MI for a lack of clarity if you like, but this doesn’t look like mass election fraud to me.
The Best of the Best Claims: Mark Davis in Georgia
Now what allegations of election fraud or other shenanigans seem to actually hold water? Let’s start with the work of Mark Davis in Georgia, which I would classify as the best of the best. (Also a claim getting a somewhat wider audience now that The Federalist is reporting on it.) Here’s only part of Davis’ work.
In Georgia, if you move to a different county, you can’t vote in your old county. (There’s a grace period of 30 days.) Moving out of state: Same (or very similar) rules. And it turns out some people break that law. You can track them by comparing the GA voter records with the US federal Post Office records—because they filed Change of Address forms.
But what about people who were just moving to college for a bit, or moving temporarily to a military base? No problem; Davis just didn’t count them—not anyone who was moving to a college or military address.
Oh, but he counted alright!
About 15,000 who moved out of state voted absentee in their old county in violation of the law. Another 35,000 who moved in-state did the same. (The Biden margin of victory in GA: about 12,000.)
It gets better. After people change counties within the state, they eventually get around to updating their address for their GA driver’s license, thus confirming their long-term move and confirming that they did indeed vote illegally. When I spoke with Davis in early May, he’d tracked about 10,500 of these confirmations (from the 35,000 group, not from the 15,000 group), with more coming in every day (at a then-average rate of 57 per day).
Evidence that Biden’s team stole the election? No. (I don’t know how many of these illegally cast votes were for Biden. Davis himself made a point of not checking!)
Evidence that we have serious election integrity issues in the USA? Yes. Evidence that the GA results should not have been certified? So I am told–as specified in Georgia law when illegal votes exceed the margin of victory.
The Biggest Numbers, but Dang If It Ain’t Just Sociology!
Now for the Just Facts Daily claim. The idea is pretty simple: Some non-citizens manage to vote illegally in American elections, and you can get an estimate of how that affected the 2020 election using the number of non-citizens in a swing state in 2020 and sociological research on how non-citizens voted in past elections–how many voted, and by what margins they voted for Democrats.
The result: a Biden advantage of illegally cast votes more than double his margin of victory in both Arizona and Georgia!
The major weaknesses of this allegation:
–It’s nothing you could take to court. It’s not criminal forensics. It’s sociology.
–It’s based on past sociological research, of which there is probably not nearly enough and which is, in any case, fallible.
The major strengths of this allegation:
–It’s still a strong inductive argument: Given the premises, the conclusion is probable but not guaranteed.
–If the Biden margin of victory in AZ and GA was actually larger than the number of illegally cast votes in this category, then there would have to be something so dramatically wrong with the research that its estimates were more than double what they should have been! That is possible, but not very likely. (The only alternative I can see is that maybe there is some reason non-citizens were less likely to illegally vote Democrat over Republican in 2020 than in previous elections.)
This is not good evidence that an election should have been overturned—sociology, not forensics. But it is good evidence that America needs to clean up its elections, and that votes cast illegally could plausibly make a real difference in national elections. It also gives some degree of support to the conclusion that votes illegally cast or counted actually did exceed the Biden margin of victory in at least two swing states. (Unlike the Davis research in GA, this argument supports the conclusion that illegally cast Biden votes exceeded the margin of victory in these two states.)
Something To Take Seriously, but I’d Like to See It Verified
One interesting set of claims comes from the work of Jesse Binnall in Nevada. Some of his work uses the same methodology as Mark Davis of Georgia, which impresses me—and that affects about 19,000 Nevada votes. His other investigations affect about 43.5 thousand votes.
That said, I’ve never met Binnall, I know a bit less about him than about Davis, and I have not heard that the error-checks applied by Davis have been applied by Binnall.
Let’s Not Leave Out the Chain of Custody Issues
Here are a few:
–30,000 ballots with chain of custody issues in Michigan,
–about 110,000 ballots with chain of custody issues in Pennsylvania (including 60,000-70,000 that apparently disappeared),
–and about 28,900 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, with chain of custody issues.
The PA 110,000 claim relies on the testimony of Gregory Strensrom. As I recall, he mentioned in his testimony that a Democratic co-observer saw (at least some of) the same things. Obviously, there should be follow-up with this other guy; but I don’t know if anyone ever did follow-up.
The Fulton Co. 28,900 are actually the result of official state investigations.
Similarly, the 30,000 number for Michigan is a low estimate of some ballots which an important report from the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee concluded were not fraud as such. However, instead of announcing “No chain of custody issue here!” the report actually took the case as a reason to strongly emphasize the importance of keeping the chain of custody clean.
In other words, the report does not explicitly confirm that there is a chain of custody issue here, but it does not refute it and may be taken as implying a confirmation.
Would these ballots without a clean chain of custody involve some foul play? Some massive incompetence? Some of both? Hard to say for sure. But this is more evidence that the election was, in many places, a mess and that there were significant numbers of improperly managed ballots.
And What’s Up With All the Zombies?
Finally, a very serious allegation that, I deem, needs some real clarification. I’ve come across some interesting claims about the dead voting:
–as many as 17,327 zombie votes in Michigan based on comparing obituaries to voting records,
–40,000 in Pennsylvania by the same method,
–9,500 in Michigan by comparing Social Security Death Index records to voting records,
–another 1,500 in Nevada,
–and more than 8,000 in Georgia.
On the one hand, comparing voting records to obituaries and SSDI seems like a reliable method to me. You can explain away some of these zombie votes as typos or as genuine voters having the same names as their parents, but it does not seem likely that all 9,500-17,327 in Michigan were such cases.
But, on the other hand, here’s another method that looks pretty reliable: That important report in Michigan “Researched the claims of deceased individuals having a vote cast in their name by reviewing obituaries, various online databases, social media posts, as well as speaking with individuals who made the claims or were the subject of those claims.” Now these guys didn’t check 9,500 or more possible cases, but they did check over 200, and they did not find a single confirmed zombie voter.
0 out of more than 200 is a small sample set, but a heckuva ratio.
Also, Mark Davis in Georgia isn’t worried much about zombie voters.
I honestly have no idea what to make of all this. I suppose it’s possible someone somewhere is lying about something, but, absent dishonesty, I have no explanation for why these seemingly reliable methods would produce such dramatically different results in Michigan.
Do you know more? I’d like to learn if you do.
Now What about That Line I Like from Bible?
That would be Ecclesiastes 12 in the KJV: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter.”
Unfortunately, it’s probably still too soon for that! (I used the line myself to title an earlier essay on this topic–silly me!)
But here are some preliminary and very cautious conclusions:
There are several variations of “The election was stolen!” theories that are unproven at best. However, election fraud and related issues should be taken very seriously. There is actually some evidence that votes illegally cast or improperly counted measure up well to the Biden margin of victory in multiple swing states, even exceeding it in some cases. We still need to learn a lot more about what happened in 2020, and we need to do better securing future elections.
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So, SA, given what you know at this moment, did Donald Trump win?
I heartily encourage everyone to listen to Stefanie Lambert, attorney and former prosecutor, describe just today in a video interview some of the recent evidence and findings about what happened in Michigan during the 2020 election. Much of this is very new information and I touch on a bit of it below. I posted this also on Vince Guerra’s @vinceguerra post a few minutes ago:
Just to add…as I’ve been watching the video I cited above…that the attorney, Stefanie Lambert, being interviewed has stated that they have evidence that the Dominion machines and other voting machines were indeed accessible via the Internet during the 2020 election and were breached during the election…something that a prominent personality here on Ricochet emphatically rejected as untrue in comments here in the November timeframe.
Lambert has much more information on votes that were switched during the election and ballots that were triggered to go to adjudication. Lambert is relying on expert forensic analysis of the voting systems, as well as, sworn affidavits from elected election officials and hundreds of others. Her commentary about the unethical legal behavior of the Michigan Secretary of State is also quite interesting.
We’ve been told that we can’t change history. That may be true…unless, of course one is permitted to examine the historical record in detail and see where orchestrated and obvious election fraud has occurred. To that point – Lambert also has email evidence from at least 5 Michigan election officials who agreed to turn off the ballot image capture function of the Dominion machines during the election – turning off this function is absolutely forbidden by law. Ballot images are by law, to be preserved some 22 months after an election. One would hope that these officials will be prosecuted and sent to prison.
No.
“Where Do We Go From Here?” was about that.
But if you’re asking whether Trump would have won if we could somehow strain out every illegality, my answer is:
Probably. But there could be a lot of math.
My off-the-top-of-my-head estimates:
–Georgia: well over 95% odds that the state should not have gone to Biden. (Davis’ work is too good!)
–Arizona: maybe about 80%, maybe 70% on a bad day.
–Nevada: maybe about 70%, maybe 60% on a bad day.
–Wisconsin, Pennsylvania: I’d have to review a lot of notes!
–Michigan: Based on what little I can gather, it was probably ok!
A balrog, and I am already weary!
Well, maybe I’ll watch it and add what I find to the analysis. Thanks for the tip!
At the moment my only provisional analysis is:
–I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find some new melange of incompetence and corruption in Michigan,
–the big report from Michigan has what I thought was a very solid answer to foreign-server-Dominion-hacking claims (try CTR-F in the big post for “important report”),
–and I’d still like to have an explanation for claims of disappearing Trump votes. (Snopes explaining one incident in PA–just one–as a typo . . . is not enough of an explanation.)
Golly…you didn’t even give me a chance to say: “There will be a test.”
Thank you very much!
I clicked on it and was going to watch it, but then saw the words, “Bombshell report.” My experience has been that anything with that label is a waste of time. If it truly is important, it won’t have that label.
Your loss.
That’s the most frustrating part of this whole passion play. People want to have a smoke-filled room with gimlets of whiskey and someone saying “if you give me $2 million I can buy every vote in Long County” or something like that. They just can’t get it through their head that it is possible to have multiple tens of thousands of uncoordinated fraudulent voters based on just plain old fashion negligence and bad bad recordkeeping. Mark‘s analysis didn’t turn up any smoking room and any type of background coordination. At least not that we can see. Because we don’t see that 90% of the people wanna throw it out because they so desperately want to have a villain and so hardly believe that the villainy is distributed over about 35,000 negligent Georgians. But it is fraud. If you lost your right to vote, present yourself at the polls as a legitimate voter, and vote, then you are committing a fraud. There’s no two ways about it.
“The fraud is real, but nothing fancy.”
Agree with SA. He is at least 6 months ahead of me as I am just knee deep into Arizona and Georgia. The Davis information he provided is fascinating and more weird stuff coming out of Cobb county. So likely, if not yet provable, Arizona and Ga. were stolen. That would not have made a difference even with Nevada. And agree Michigan, for all its shenanighans, given Biden’s margin probably not a turn around. So focus will be on Pa. And slow Joe knows it. The one good thing is the state legislatures have woken up and doubt we will not have COVID type “flexible” voting rules in 2024.
I live in GA and have known Mark Davis for a long time. I take his concerns seriously and I think he’s identified a serious flaw in the system.
That being said, I think it’s dangerous to assume his information points to a true Trump victory in Georgia. I say that because over my many years of involvement in Republican politics in this state, I’ve heard plenty of Republicans tell other Republicans caught in the ‘I just moved but my registration hasn’t changed yet” situation to simply vote in their old precinct. Of course they were advising people to break the law, but hey, it happens, more than we want to admit.
I also know of poll workers over the years who have advised voters in this situation to go vote in their old precinct. In fact, an acquaintance reached out to me on November 3rd who was advised by the polling manager at her new precinct that she needed to vote in her old precinct. The poll worker at her old precinct told her, correctly, to go back to her new precinct and vote via provisional ballot.
The point is, I think Davis’ numbers are correct. However, voters are confused by the law, often given bad advice, Republicans are likely just as guilty as Democrats of committing this crime. and if you went to court on all this a Judge might not be so quick to toss these votes out because of all the confusion.
We need to find a better way to keep the voter list clean and accurate, right up until Election Day.
And the new Ga. law, Jim Crow nonsense notwithstanding, does that. Given the Supreme Court’s ruling in Arizona no chance it will be thrown out. And much more accommodating re; early voting and absentee voting than Sleepy Joe’s favorite state.
Yes, the Davis numbers (unlike some other allegations) do not point at all towards Democratic corruption. They point to the need to reform, etc., etc.
And, as I understand it, to an indirect GOP victory. I understand GA law states that the election should not be certified if illegally cast votes exceed the margin of victory.
So just to be clear, your claim is that the Georgia results should have been thrown out and its electoral votes not counted. You are not claiming Trump actually won the state.
If you discard Georgia and flip Arizona and Nevada to Trump, Biden still wins 273 to 249.
No, I believe in this scenario the state legislature gets to decide. The electoral votes would (presumably) go to Trump.
If that’s what the math says, that’s what the math says. (As noted, I think Georgia would not be discarded, but I think that makes it just a razor-thin Biden win.)
I guess I really would have to check my notes on WI and PA to get a more solid answer to the question in comment 1.
With respect for all the work you’ve put into it, you really need to keep up with the latest information. Most of what we knew it thought we knew (or what the MSM and NeverTrump media told us) has evolved over the last eight months. It changes daily. Trump won, I’m convinced of that, but beyond that nobody has been able (or willing) to verify that Biden has the totals they say he does.
As always, nice work, SA.
There were a lot of sketchy-looking things in this election, and you’ve acted as a kind of “Sorting Hat” in figuring out which are serious enough to warrant looking into and which are not. I’ve always been in the wait-and-see camp on this, while also believing that we’ll never really know who won. It seems even the best evidence that the election was stolen doesn’t reach the level of proof. That’s frustrating, but what isn’t? There is still a lot to examine in all this, so I’ll continue to wait-and-see. At the very least, we should keep pushing to clean things up for next time.
Based on Davis’ work alone, that is.
If the sociological research on illegal non-citizen voting in previous elections is not so flawed as to indicate more than double the correct number of such votes in 2020, then, in the thought experiment in which we can magically filter out all the illegalities, Trump wins Georgia outright.
Those aren’t my reasons for answering the question that way. (But it seems like an objection to take to that other post, “Where Do We Go From Here?”)
Yes, it changes daily, and it’s so exhausting. What do you reckon I need to catch up on the most (assuming I can find the time)?
Agreed.
Who “won” the (or any other) election is a unknowable as a matter of fact.
I’m wondering if anyone has read The Deep Rig?
I’m only part of the way through, and it’s very rough editorially, but it’s cheap and collects an awful lot of info/discussion, with usable external links in Kindle form.
I’ll try to remember to order it when i get to my computer.
Curses on Ricochet for its lack of a bookmark function.
As @brianwatt suggested, and if you have about an hour, I too recommend the Stefanie Lambert update out of Michigan. We need to treat this like a developing story and todays revelations can render moot all of the reports that came prior. As a rule, we should recognize that all of the official reports are invalid because no investigations were conducted. Case in point: Michigan. The official Holderman report found zero security breeches (after four counts) on the voting machines. Matt Deperno’s security investigators (Ben Cotton) discovered two: one on November 5th, and one on November 17. Stay tuned for more.
In Georgia just this week we learned that the Fulton county recount was riddled with fraud, incorrectly reported totals with an error rate of 60%. 60%?! Starts at around the 4:00 minute mark.
I remembered. It’s now on my Kindle.
I’m interested in what you think. If nothing else, it’s a compendium of various theories with links to the original research. Well worth four bucks IMO.
Again, I recommend STRONGLY that this post (as well as all of @saintaugustine’s work on this topic be elevated to the Main Feed.