An Outside Look at Election Fraud
An Outside Look at Election Fraud
Differentiating between "there was fraud" and "there was centrally organized fraud of such a magnitude as to swing the election."
This article was originally published on Medium November 8th 2020. It’s relevant now as Tucker Carlson and friends identify clear instances of fraud in Georgia and other states, as predicted in the article.
I voted.
I’m not telling you who I voted for, but it wasn’t Biden.
Unlike basically everyone, I don’t really care who won, nor do I really care what happens with the court cases and election fraud accusations that are going on right now. As someone who doesn’t care, I figured it might be instructive for folks who do care who wins to get an outside perspective on the case that the election was stolen. So if do you care who won, this article is for you.
Time Honored Tradition
Bitching about losing and claiming an election is illegitimate and suing and recounting and re-recounting and involving the courts in the election process is a bipartisan time honored American tradition, and was going to happen this cycle no matter who won. It happened last election cycle, it happened in 2000, it happened other times too. Just let it happen. It’s part of what we do around here.
In 2016, the Democrats kept insisting that the election was illegitimate but couldn’t articulate why, eventually settling on “Russian interference” as the story they told themselves, which was so mathematically impossible it was laughable. That led to all the “not my president” stuff.
In 2004 the Democrats insisted that the voting tabulation in Ohio was crooked because the CEO of the company that provided the tabulation machines promised to deliver Ohio to Bush.
In 2000 Gore lost by about five hundred votes in Florida, entering us into a great morass of what exactly qualified as a ‘vote,’ and suddenly everyone in the country had to figure out what the heck a “Hanging Chad” was. We should all be thankful 4chan wasn’t around then.
1960 may very well have been decided by fraud. There’s a lot of fascinating deep research on this one, which is the root of the “Dead People Voting Democrat” meme.
My point here is not to bash Democrats for being hypocritical for not wanting Trump to do any recounts. I live in a state that I expect to be recounted. I only bring these examples up to point out that (1) fraud happens, (2) recounts happen, (3) people scream about this crap all the time, and (4) we should have expected it one way or another.
Mathing The Dilbert Guy
Scott Adams, a man who’s fame was at least doubled or tripled by his successful prediction of Trump’s 2016 win and his lengthy articulation of why, has become by this point a favorite among conservative pundits. He tweeted the following today:
To believe Biden will be sworn in as president in January, one must believe at least one unlikely thing:
1. Despite being brainwashed to believe Trump is Hitler, Democrats in key cities did NOT attempt a large-scale voter fraud to save the country, or. . .
2. Democrats did commit major voting fraud to remove “Hitler” but for some strange reason all the geniuses looking for indications of it can’t find any confirmed evidence and there are no whistleblowers, or. . .
3. Democrats WANTED to commit major fraud to get rid of “Hitler” but there is no practical way to do such a thing and hope to get away with it, or. . .
4. Democrats didn’t REALLY think Trump was so bad that it was worth cheating to remove him.
Remember, it’s still #2020.
I think this is a fantastic thought experiment, and when we run some mathematics on it, I think we land on a blend of #3 and #4.
Here’s the AP map, stolen from Google, on November 8, 2020:
When 538 did their election forecasting, they ran 40,000 simulation runs. Trump won ten percent, Biden won 90 percent, and they stuck up a fun little graphic showing 100 sample runs you could click on. Here’s the sample run that turned out to be correct, if the AP map above doesn’t end up changing over the next month and a half.
You can see in this graphic that Trump did better in real life than the average simulation, but not good enough to win. You should go to that page and play with their web tool a bit, hovering over the different simulations, and return back. That’s important for the next step in the discussion, because we are going to examine the case for fraud critically.
I am sure there was fraud this election. I don’t see how there couldn’t be fraud, and Scott Adams makes a clear case why we should expect there to be fraud. I don’t think Trump is Hitler, I think he’s sort of a used car salesman who fell ass first into the presidency because Hillary Clinton was truly horrible. But I know people who are absolutely sure he’s Hitler, and if you think someone’s Hitler, you’d be willing to do anything up to potentially violence to get him out of power. But the level of fraud necessary to create these election results would be of such an incredible scale it belies the imagination.
Let’s say a time traveler from the Two Term Trump Future knows the 2020 election map turned out like this:
That map is a lot like what we were seeing before a lot of the mail in ballots got counted. Let’s say the time traveler hops into his Wayback Machine, meets the Democratic National Committee in a secret bunker in Area 51, and puts together a plan to flip the election. He would have to flip Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Here are the margins in those three states:
You’d need a little over 70,000 ballots to flip those three states from Trump winning each by 1 vote to get what we see. But in the Two Term Trump Alternate Future from which our spaceman time travelled back, Trump probably didn’t win those states by one vote. He probably won them by some larger margin, say for instance the margin we see Biden winning them by. They’d have to stuff 140,000 ballots in those three states, not just 70,000.
But this fraud scenario has a crucial tool that the Democrats don’t have — it has a time traveling spaceman that tells them exactly which states to flip. A centralized fraud effort in the real world, lacking any alien interference, would have to span any number of other states to be sure they successfully flipped the states they needed to flip. If we use 538’s predictive model from the prior link, we can look at other states that they projected might go red in a Trump win, where the Democrats might also try to run fraud. Some of those had Maine and New Hampshire red, so add those to the list. Some had Wisconsin and Michigan. Some had Nevada. A couple had Minnesota. The most pro-Trump model in the grab sample had everything listed here. Not only that, you’d have to figure they’d try and get Florida at least, since every Trump win scenario had Florida.
The actual operation would have had to try and provide a blanket percentage of fake votes across all those states, to ensure they covered enough ground to net the important ones. This is what that model looks like, with our current results:
Let’s walk through this. If the Democrats were crafty enough to pull off a massive voter fraud scheme that kinked the vote counts in those ten states by 0.65%, then they would have flipped Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania (barely), and Wisconsin. That fraud scheme would involve stuffing over a quarter of a million fake ballots into envelopes. But again, they wouldn’t know that 0.65% was their target, so they probably would have shot for 1%, which would be an operation totaling almost half a million fake ballots. In such an operation, one out of every fifty Biden votes in those states would be a fake vote.
Iowa
During the Iowa caucus of 2020, the Democratic Party couldn’t even figure out how to count their own votes for two days. They hired some crony to develop an app who’d apparently never even coded before, because the code was as if someone was following a basic computer science tutorial. It was rife with security flaws, hard-coded API keys, and god knows what other sort of bugs. There were over one hundred precincts with incorrect results. It is impossible for me to believe for one moment that the sorts of people who would make mistakes that egregious could have orchestrated a ballot fraud initiative of the sort of magnitude necessary to change the outcome of this election.
Was there fraud? I bet there was. I bet there were Democrat true believers who slept well on November third knowing they did their part to bring down the Great Nazi Evil of Donald Trump. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out there were pro Trump people doing similar stuff. But unless the CIA was involved, and running the fraud effort, there’s no way that whatever fraud is eventually found could have given Biden the election. He won by too much. I doubt even the CIA could pull it off.
Biden is the president, and unfortunately we’re going to have to grind through weeks if not months of disbelief, and possibly even some identified instances of real voter fraud, before we settle on this fact. But it is a fact, whether that fact makes you happy or sad.
In any case: universal suffrage on the scale of the US population, combined with the reach of mass media and facebook-assisted individually targeted advertising, adds up to antipopular despotism. The hazard of enfranchising vast herds of stupid adults isn't well-intentioned poor decision-making, but easily manipulated decision-making. That the source of disillusionment with our system is, for many, a perception of procedural fraud rather than its failure to serve the people, itself further serves the regime, as a distraction and as a charge which is answerable with promises of reform.
Electoral procedure can be reformed, but there is no solution to the ever-increasing ability of the powerful to manipulate the stupid. Right now, someone is probably shoving Facebook data into an algorithm that can turn the midterms on ads and reordered search results: what is "election fraud" then?
I only wish your analysis helped. As you note something on such a scale would require considerable organization. So we see that https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ by Molly Ball. In that article the legal changes assisted in how ballots were used. Such an effort took a lot of money and effort. Getting the cooperation of the Chamber and the AFL/CIO was quite an accomplishment. So businesses were somewhat coerced into cooperation by the implied protest threats. And then the election observers were limited by more coercive threats to election officials. Nor much of a stretch to imagine the Time election group seeing 538 maps and creating enough ballots to gain an advantage exactly where the advantage was needed. Money and organization were obviously in place. So I can't just let those facts go away.
In contrast, if we examine that no defense was mounted against changes in the election rules, we see a political party not particularly interested in re-election of their own President. Observers not allowed to observe should have had US Marshals on stand-by to require adequate surveillance. Counting should not have preceded without observers. Perhaps the scale of the effort was unknown to the Republicans but that remains unclear as well. Perhaps the Republicans are, in fact, that clueless.
At any rate, Mr Biden played rope-a-dope well. Mr Obama has managed to hold his team together, at least until the next election. Everybody understands that turning the DC huge morass is a terribly slow process. But the election has left a bad taste behind that the public is not particularly happy about, at least the part who even care about politics.