Most attempts to claim the election was not stolen for Biden demand you ignore its blatant statistical oddities – so are wholly unconvincing. J. Christian Adams has been fighting voter fraud corruption since long before Eric Holder shut down his cast-iron case against the Black Panthers over ten years ago. Christian makes the statistical oddities a key part of his theory – that what happened is “sadly, generally legal”.
Two things happened in 2020. First, COVID led to a dismantling of state election integrity laws by everyone except the one body with the constitutional prerogative to change the rules of electing the president â the state legislatures.
Second, the Center for Technology and Civic Life happened. … left-leaning donors Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan gave $350 million to an allegedly ânonpartisanâ nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which in turn re-granted the funds to thousands of governmental election officials around the country to âhelpâ them conduct the 2020 election. … billionaires made cash payments to 501(c)(3) charities that in turn made cash payments to government election offices. … It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout machines. …
As far as it goes, this is sadly sensible. My sole but absolutely central criticism of the argument of Adams (whom I respect) is that it cannot go so far without going further. US politicians have been trying to build formula 1 turn-out machines for two centuries. The law of diminishing returns means that turning-out actual voters gets harder and harder as the percentage racks up. The obvious shortcut of just turning out votes is very much easier – and has also been practiced for two centuries. Adams provides a context for poll workers cheering as Republican observers are excluded – but that’s also the context for what happens after they are removed. Wealthy Dem donors can build this machine but there is a psychological improbability, which in today’s cancel culture becomes a psychological impossibility, that they could build a machine that would turn out inner city voters in such numbers while at the same time respecting their secret ballot choice, freedom from fear of its compromise, and so on.
This psychological impossibility is fully matched by statistical rebuttal of any claim that they did. Adams analysis provides a counter-argument to “the bizarre turn-out percentages alone prove fraud”. But by the self-same token, it provides a counter-argument only to “the bizarre turn-out percentages alone prove fraud”. The statistics of ratios and co-anomalies are just as telling as before. The machine did indeed go thus far and much further. It was criminal even in its own corrupted terms.
All this is probably not fair to what Adams actually meant when he said “sadly, generally legal”. Firstly, because he well knows that
fraud was a problem. …Mail ballots went to dead people. Mail ballots went to abandoned mines in Nevada. Mail ballots went to vacant lots in Pittsburgh. Mail ballots went in the garbage. Mail ballots were voted by people other than the voter.
Secondly because he probably just as well knows that a law on the books says that you cannot visit a Minneapolis minority suburb and burn down properties, but if the operation of the law means the perpetrators predictably evade penalty and the owners as predictably fail to gain remedy, then there is sadly a sense in which it is legal. Laws in various books say the secrecy of the ballot must be respected, and all and only legal ballots counted, but if ignoring secrecy sleeves carries no penalty even when seen, if poll counters (not just formula 1 turnout machines) act location-aware, and reported examples gain no remedy, then it could be said that, like some of Trump’s tweets, Adams “sadly, generally legal” should be taken seriously if not literally.
This is why I said earlier that we lost this battle, not on election day, but back when so many jurisdictions altered their rules to make these things “legal.”
The term “illegal” ends up being overused in this context. It doesn’t mean “statistically improbable.” It doesn’t mean “this don’t seem right!” It means “it violated duly-passed legislative prohibitions.” But the legislative prohibitions had been removed before we voted. And so we voted in a manner that left us, two days after the election, unable to point to specific votes for a specific candidate and say “that vote was improper.”
So, not “legal” or “illegal.” It was all a political question – that huge exception that allows courts to (rightly) evade having to rule on the correctness of duly-enacted laws. As per Scalia, our Constitution allows for stupidity in government.
When we set up a system in which we all throw our anonymous ballots into a big drum, we lose all control once we allow you to throw in your vote. If we were going to check your status as a real, live, proper voter, we had to do it before you threw your ballot in. And we did away with those controls in some cities. We did this on purpose – as a legislative, political choice.
And now we can’t expect a court to look back on those legislative choices and overturn them. We have to do that ourselves, in the political system. The USSC did what it had to do.
Yes the election was rigged – and quite blatantly so.
But that is not the most important thing – the important thing is how the establishment is entirely fine with the election being rigged.
This reveals what many of us have long suspected – with the endless farce of the nonaction against the obvious crimes of the Democrats (including Mr Biden and Mr Obama) in relation to the Russia Hoax – the SYSTEM is corrupt.
People often say that “the system is corrupt” – but they do not really grasp what that means.
It means that that the judge (any judge) is going to give a legal double talk and then do NOTHING about the Election Fraud or anything else.
The same with the FBI and everyone else.
Of course they justify it to themselves – people always do that.
They are civilized people – and President Trump is “vulgar” and he stands in the way of a lot of vital, and long standing, international agreements of the international community.
You can read my words above – but most readers will not grasp their full meaning.
You do not, yet, understand what it means to say (and mean) “the SYSTEM is corrupt”.
bobby b, but, but, but there is now no next time. 15 million new voters via illegals being granted amnesty. The vote counting machine is now fully entrenched. Big Tech will tighten its grip. Any election that matters will forever be at least 65-35. Or 60-40, whatever they decide.
Voting no longer matters. Courts no longer matter. The Constitution is finally and truly dead.
Why are none of you who admit to what was done not admit what has to happen next? Its the only way.
Talking or blogging don’t matter and will soon be outlawed anyway.
I usually think Paul Marks is a bit over the edge–my apologies to Paul. He is entirely correct and mostly in what he is implying but too wise to put into writing.
How am I wrong?
GregWA:
Keep in mind – election of the prez is a unique thing, because of the electoral college. How each state determines its electoral votes is a matter entirely within the discretion of each state’s legislative process (so long as, once they choose some system, it doesn’t violate US Constitutional protections like Equal Protection, etc.)
A state could decide, through its own lawmaking process, to simply have its governor choose how to vote its EV’s without asking the voters. Wouldn’t be politically palatable, of course, but it could.
So, take PA. Presumably, if the PA system PO’ed enough PA voters by delivering EV’s NOT in accord with how the voters desired – i.e., if the delivered EV’s went to Biden while a true majority of PA voters didn’t, as we suspect – and if this is determined to be a result of a messed-up system of unverifiable votes – the voters of PA are going to be doing something about this in the near future.
I note that Republicans control both the state senate and the state house in PA. This is a big thing. They’re going to fix this for their own state EV system because they have the power to do so.
I note also that both Georgia and Arizona are considered to be Republican Trifecta states – Republicans hold Senate, House, and Governorships in those states. They’re also going to be fixing their systems if the vote was truly fraudulent – because if the vote was indeed fraudulent, they have the numbers to fix this.
States control this prez-selection system, not the feds. States are going to address this. I think we write off this four-year term – we got taken, to our shame – and look for voter anger in PA, GA, and AZ to reverse their hastily-imposed unverifiable voting systems that were put in place very quickly, right before the election, with the believable excuse of Covid!! ™
Trump’s continuing fight – which I don’t think is going anywhere in terms of this election – is still important, because he’s looking to make it explicitly clear to (for example) PA voters that their politicians prostituted their voting systems. If this becomes too obvious to ignore, it pushes PA voters to push to fix their system for the next time around.
Of course, this has to all be taken with a grain of salt, as I thought we’d have enough votes to overcome the fraud. Oops.
Please, the election was not stolen. None of Trump’s claims have been validated in any court. Even the Supreme Court, with a 6 to 3 majority of conservative judges, doesn’t think there is anything to investigate. I, a libertarian, do not think there was the massive fraud that Trump claims. (Small-scale fraud on both sides, yes.) Am I happy with the result? No. But I hoped that both sides would offer better candidates. And, as a libertarian, I would have liked to have a Libertarian candidate to endorse!
@bobby b
A question – what about the argument that much of this legislation violated the relevant state’s constitution?
Doesn’t that say that
a)the system is more than messed up;
b)the TPTB will do whatever it takes to make sure it’s not fixed by the state’s electorate?
(I’m trying to suppress my amazement at the US’s tolerance for 3rd world levels of corruption, fraud and sheer incompetence here).
Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker) Gray (December 14, 2020 at 8:18 am), you come across as really not getting what bobby b (December 13, 2020 at 9:29 pm) was saying when his explanation ended “The USSC did what it had to do”.
The issue with Hillary Clinton’s private email server was not that it is innately evil to have a private email server. I have one. Maybe you do too. The law was put in place because “Abuse of power is greatest when the laws do not anticipate it” (Montesquieu). If elected officials handle government business on unarchived servers, fraud will be very hard to prove. I know, and I trust you know, that Hillary did not break this law in order to exchange emails about yoga and recipes, nor delete them all lest people criticise her yoga technique. But I also know, and I trust you too know, that is is immensely improbable that knowledge could ever be expressed in a judicial verdict precisely because she broke this law. The law that was put in place to make fraud less safe was broken to make fraud more safe.
Had the law been suspended, on the grounds that Hillary had to work from home lest she catch the virus, and remote login inconvenient because … reasons … , the effect would have been the same.
(From the moment the Texas suit was launched, it was openly being said by those who hoped most from it, that it was a ‘Hail Mary pass’ as regards sundry procedure, precedent and judicial deference concerns. You called them ‘conservative judges’ but it is more exact to call them originalist justices – and faithful to that, you can now argue to any PC haters of them.)
Arguably the more effective argument is that, on a partly-wrecked base provided by stampeded legislatures, various governors and judges grossly exceeded their powers to demolish safeguards the legislatures had deliberately left in place. (Of course, if that is the constitutional violation you mean, then we are agreeing!)
Legislatures may not relish being told they broke the constitution (we might be the first in other cases to note the oddity of the constitution being violated and this not noticed if it were for a much longer period of time) so strong cases only may be best there.
Legislatures may be readier to resent their powers being usurped by others.
The upcoming sessions at least are proof against new-minted voters. As bobby b (December 14, 2020 at 4:26 am) said, the campaign to have them resurrect sane voting law is important.
How incredibly naive of you @Nicholas, to imagine that Dementia Joe and his lacklustre campaign can legitimately conjure up something like 12 million more votes than Obama first time around? The whole election stinks of voter fraud across the board. That Team Trump have been unable to get any court to actually accept that is a separate matter.
Maybe we should revert to ancient traditions and refer to Dementia Joe as “His Fraudulency”?
We should also start referring to Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin as ‘the Fraud States’.
Which is part of the reason why i no longer identify as a ‘libertarian’.
@Niall
Yes, that’s what I meant. I can’t remember which American I read referred to that as (state-level) constitutional violations, but if you prefer “various authorities acted ultra vires” then I’m happy to go with that.
@Nicholas Grey:
Very few of Trump’s claims have been tested in any court – most have been chucked out due to supposed lack of either timeliness or standing.
Even the Supreme Court refused to hear the one case brought before it.
bobby b, soundly argued as always. But consider this: some of the Republicans in the States you mention may have also benefited from the Dominion enabled rigging–we’ll never know because sure as hell all the evidence is about to get shredded. And your arguments assume, I think, that these problems can be addressed by a political system riddled with corruption on all sides, legislatures, governorships, R, D, courts, etc.
I really hope you’re right and, for example, PA, WI, MI, AZ etc fix their systems. But it still won’t matter: Biden will create 15M (20M?) new D voters by granting amnesty. Big Tech will tighten its grip enormously.
I assume you believe that the Constitution and the law generally do not require suicide, if so, where is that line in all of this? I would really like to hear your view of what the other side can do that is going too far.
Of course Mika is a Plank, and as we would say, have trouble figuring out how to pour piss out of a boot. Don’t fall for her false premise that the institutional Republican party embraced Donald Trump. They did not. He hijacked their party. This explains the lack of outrage and the lack of will to fight back and expose the rigged election. These people exist through out the courts, bureaucracy, and legislatures, at every level. They don’t even have a record for fighting on behalf of their own so how likely are they to stand up for DJT?
Let’s talk about evidence again. Who has the smoking gun evidence? Answer: The election officials, who, contrary to past election years, are stonewalling its release. The purpose of some of the law suits was to compel discovery, especially for signature verification audits. In a normal election cycle, 6-7% of ballots are discarded, this year, in some locales, less than .1%, and in others, 0. In GA, all the voting records were digitized and would be available at the push of a button, per Robert Barnes, attorney. I’m not saying that the Republican officials participated in fraud; I think this is more a CYA, due to embarrassment.
Richard Baris, of the People’s Pundit, has examined what records are available in Michigan and has discovered legions of deceased voters. What is more disturbing is that these records had been deactivated in the past and were reactivated in time for this election. Some of the records, that he discovered, are in the process of being deleted revealing consciousness of guilt. Don’t worry, he had taken screen shots.
To be clear, I don’t think Donald Trump has any hope of retaining the presidency but I absolutely support the continuing exposure of election “irregularities”.
(Iâm trying to suppress my amazement at the USâs tolerance for 3rd world levels of corruption, fraud and sheer incompetence here).
Luckily, for TPTB they had covid as the pretext.
Imagine their shock in 2016 when Hilary did not win despite having the money, the ground game, academia and other institutions, the media, and social media in her corner.
BTW: off topic but take a look at this parody Time “Person of the Year” cover from a Canadian website. It says it all. You have to scroll up to the top.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2020/12/11/person-of-the-year/#comment-1384296
This is great and should go viral. I love that Xi is listed first. I think the image would be more realistic if XI were taller and given greater prominence; heâs the winner after all. The Sellouts should be in the shadows, too bad they couldn’t include Pierre. Some people call this Cover “Xi and his Bitches”.
I think that a point of confusion I hear a lot is: “Trump hasn’t proved his fraud claim in court, therefore there was no fraud.” This is on its face a ridiculous claim. Lots of wrongdoing happens that can’t be proved in court because the standard of “proof in court” is very, very high, and what counts as acceptable evidence is narrowly constrained. Furthermore the law can only determine action if there is some remedy that they can offer. The USSC did not say that the claims in the Texas lawsuit were lacking merit, they simply said that Texas did not have standing to make them.
So the conclusion is not that there was not fraud, but that the fraud was very well executed. There was a crime but it was covered up to the point that it could not be prosecuted. This was done in really three ways:
1. Changing the law to strip away the normal protections that prevent fraud, consequently increasing the amount of fraud
2. Restricting direct fraud to a very narrow set of locations (some specific counting centers in half a dozen cities) conducted by highly committed partisans.
3. Disregarding the law and the courts in such a way that there was no remedy.
Each of these things is extremely hard to fix, and hard to detect except in bulk — and the courts can’t convict on “statistical anomalies” rather they convict on the provable, beyond a reasonable doubt, actions of individuals.
The fact that there was massive, election changing fraud is manifest by the statistical realities and the massive amount of eye witness testimony. However, the fraud was conducted and designed to be such that it is almost impossible to remedy in court. So fraud it may be, but brilliantly executed fraud.
BTW, on point two, some have said, much like the moon landing hoaxers, if there was massive widespread fraud there would be too many people to keep quiet, and it would inevitably leak out. But this is part of the great design of point 2. There was massive fraud, but it wasn’t all that widespread (outside of point 1.) It was concentrated in a few counting locations, conducted by highly partisan actors, and manipulated to eliminate the normal safeguards. What you would expect in such a case is a deliberate narrowing and restriction of the number of people who can see what is going on, and also a lot of people swearing out affidavits that they witnessed such fraud. That is exactly what we have.
Very very interesting reading the comments below this (exerable) article in DT today:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/14/hunter-biden-just-latest-long-line-embarrassing-political-relatives/
Actually quite encouraging to see the unanimous view in the comments that the election was completely borked and that the “revelation” now, post election, of the Biden family corruption is profoundly disingenuous.
There is hope for us yet.
âTrump hasnât proved his fraud claim in court, therefore there was no fraud.â
This is true. I like the “body in the library” analogy. It’s like pointing to a body, face down with hands tied behind his back and a gunshot wound from the back but, because you can’t prove WHO did it, there is a denial that there is in fact a body lying face down with a gunshot wound to the back. That’s the disconnect.
” There was a crime but it was covered up to the point that it could not be prosecuted.”
But I disagree here. There appears almost to have been no attempt whatsoever to cover it up. Rather the opposite – the problem is that it is so widespread that you can’t pin it down in any way that’s useful: you could, possibly, nail some lowly operators, but that’s “just a few votes here and there” so “is not enough to swing the election”.
We have actually watched Yes Minister’s “four stage strategy” play out in just the last few weeks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXIetP5iak
This.
And, importantly, it is an intra-state argument. If somehow the PA election system has delivered EC votes in a way that does not reflect the true democratic will of the PA voters, there’s no injury to me, in Minnesota. It’s entirely a PA state legal/political problem. I really have no standing to complain.
And, whether PA fraud was by one vote or by tens of thousands, the effect on the national election is the same – the EC votes for PA go to the wrong choice. I, in Minnesota, am no more aggrieved by this wholesale fraud than I would have been had one fraudulent vote made the difference, so the impact on me is limited.
The impact on PA citizens, however, is rather huge – they look really stupid. And that, I think, is what will drive them to fix their system. And so the investigations need to continue, so that it becomes more and more apparent to PA citizens that they’re being scammed by the Democrats.
Niall Ferguson wrote:
‘Arguably the more effective argument is that, on a partly-wrecked base provided by stampeded legislatures, various governors and judges grossly exceeded their powers to demolish safeguards the legislatures had deliberately left in place. . . . .’
Not to mention Federal election laws, which specify ‘safe-harbor’ timelines during which no changes to election processes may be made. Multiple governors, secretaries-of-state (or whatever they are called in a specific state), down to relatively low-level civil servants, made and enforced wholesale changes to election procedures in open contravention of Federal election laws – and nobody has a word to say about it.
Incidentally, the report of the forensic analysis of voting in Antrim County, Michigan, using Dominion voting systems, was made public today. It is absolutely-damning. Parts of it are worded in terms which lead me to believe that the authors are completely unconcerned about libel or defamation suits, so strong is their evidence. Don’t go looking for it in the mainstream media, and, as the Pedant-General observes, we are now at Stage 4 of the Appleby Continuum. The Electoral College meets today, no doubt Biden will be acclaimed as the President-Elect, and that will be used as another reason to sweep all challenges to the election under the rug.
If I were President Trump, at this point, I’d resign, and have Vice-President Pence likewise immediately resign. That makes Speaker Pelosi the President, and she and her party immediately own the whole mess. President Trump can’t achieve much more legislatively anyway, and anything executive he wants to do (pardons, etc) can be done in a day. If they want it so badly that they’re prepared to do what they’ve done to get it, maybe the Sun Tzu move would be to give it to them. The Monkey’s Paw.
llater,
llamas
https://www.scribd.com/document/488080093/Antrim-Michigan-Forensics-Report-121320-PRELIMINARY?secret_password=6tgofj7cUYx1kQwElves#fullscreen&from_embed
There is one major point that all fraud claimers and lamenters here overlook or ignore: the very small margins or differences. In the 4 crucial states – the difference between Trump and Biden votes were less than 1%.
In such cases the election result might logically be declared a tie, and the decision – a toss of a coin.
This difference is less that the accuracy possible in counting votes.
Every measure, in every domain has an accuracy margin. It depends on the measuring instrument and procedure. There is no such thing as absolute precision in measuring or in vote counting.
In every election this tight – the losing party will always claim fraud, and never be able to prove it.
On the other hand – it is totally obvious that mail voting is unsafe and invites fraud. The Democrats always claimed (correctly) that hurdles have been erected (historically) against minority voters (hurdles such as requiring Id to vote, or intimidation). They favored mail voting as a means to “bring out” all voters. Why Republican administrations in states like Arizona and PA have adopted this universal mail vote rules is beyond my comprehension – but I don’t think Democrats are to blame.
Anyway – these were the rules, and Trump needed to play by the rules: i.e. flood the states with hundreds of “volunteers” or community organizers, to harvest the mail ballots, fill them out and send them in. In this field battle Trump lost. He wasn’t aware or capable of organizing his troops and do the hard work. So, the election was decided by a toss of a coin and Trump lost.
What I mean: you can’t scream: A STEAL. The election wasn’t Trump’s by clear margins – then stolen. It was a tie at most. So – the STEAL claim is an emotional over-reaction not a hard fact.
@ Jacob – Nonsense. On stilts. Sorry to be so blunt.
You can ‘harvest’ all the votes you want. But it will boot you nothing when your opponent is prepared to create as many votes as necessary to exceed the number of votes you can ‘harvest’. And when election officials and workers in the districts necessary to ‘win’ the election are quite prepared to connive at such activities. Having carefully-prepared the ground beforehand by creating voter rolls so corrupted with unverifiable ‘voters’ that it’s virtually-impossible to know how many voters there are or how often they voted. In such an environment, you can simply create as many votes as you need to win, both by the creation of actual, physical ballots or electronic ‘records’ of votes.
As Stalin is said to have observed – it doesn’t matter who votes. What matters is who counts the votes. Once the vote counters are prepared to manipulate the vote count, the election becomes – meaningless. At that point, a toss of the coin would actually be a more-fair way of deciding the outcome- at least both participants have an equal chance of winning. Under the system we have just seen performed in the US, the ‘winner’ has little or nothing to do with the voters anymore.
llater,
llamas
From the Adams article:
“The important point to understand is that elections are messy, …. Elections are also complicated, and you donât always need outright fraud or communist hackers to craft a scheme to defeat Donald Trump. Why take that risk when you can do it all mostly legally by simply fundamentally transforming the entire process?”
Correct.
Elections are messy and complicated.
You need to be alert and fight all the way, create a favorable process and organize hard before the election not just cry “a steal” after you failed.
Mr Gray – none of the “claims” of fraud have been proved in court because the courts will not allow the evidence to be presented.
Think about that Sir. If the establishment believed that the evidence could be refuted – they would allow it to be presented in court and then refute it. But the evidence that the election was rigged is OVERWHELMING – so they can not do that.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I WATCHED (in real time) some of the rigging take place – namely Republican poll watchers not being allowed to examine mail-in ballots (I could see what was happening via the cameras in their mobile phones – they were sometimes not even allowed in the counting BUILDINGS). Yes they took to the courts demanding access – but it was too late then.
Do not tell me the election was not rigged. It was rigged.
The Democrats have done this sort of thing many times – but never before on this scale. It was a blatant and massive Election Fraud.
America is dead.
“opponent is prepared to create as many votes as necessary”
Why is the opponent “prepared” and able and you not? What has kept you from doing what it takes? In Republican controlled states?
“And when election officials and workers in the districts necessary to âwinâ the election are quite prepared to connive at such activities.”
Well, who put these “election officials and workers” in place? Why didn’t Republicans put better (i.e. more Republican oriented) workers in place?
As I said, elections are complicated and are not occurring automatically. You need to get the vote, true, but also to organize the election, set-up the rules, nominate election officials etc. etc. In this comprehensive and complicated process Trump failed.
“Mr Gray â none of the âclaimsâ of fraud have been proved in court because the courts will not allow the evidence to be presented.”
The courts are right. You can’t litigate an election for years like is usual for other issues in the courts. You need a result by Dec 14. No time for litigation. The courts can’t solve all our problems. In fact they can’t solve anything. It is correct and practical for the courts to meddle as little as possible.
Jacob, you are proposing that elections be won by whoever can cheat best, penalising the lest-skilled vote-faker for their poorer performance. Our current system for choosing our leaders does not give perfect results, but yours does not strike me as likely to improve that – rather the reverse.
This could of course be put more strongly. đ
Whether Biden was already honestly within striking distance when the post-election day oddities occurred, or had only got there by earlier mass exploiting of mail-ballot opportunities is also a point on which we may differ. Your argument accepts post-election fraud while assuming no serious pre-election fraud. You should not be surprised that some here do not find the assumption of that dichotomy a robust step in your argument.
This also could of course be put more strongly. đ
Honor?
“The election wasnât Trumpâs by clear margins â then stolen. It was a tie at most.”
lmao Xiden won fewer counties than Hilarity and more votes than Baracky while spending most of the campaign drooling in his basement.
âWhy is the opponent âpreparedâ and able and you not? What has kept you from doing what it takes?â
Honor?
Well, ok then. You can enjoy your honor under the Biden presidency, that is – as long as they let you.
Honor is good and well but wars are fought to win. Let the other guy congratulate himself on HIS honor.
“Jacob, you are proposing that elections be won by whoever can cheat best, penalising the lest-skilled vote-faker for their poorer performance. Our current system for choosing our leaders does not give perfect results, but yours does not strike me as likely to improve that â rather the reverse.”
Mr Naill, you have in mind some ideal, imaginary election and voting system. This is not what exists in the real world. Perfect systems exist in school textbooks only.
In the real world – no perfect system exists, or CAN exist. The election system is what it is. You may dream of a better system, but in the actual world you have to recognize what is and act within the rules and limitation of the system as it is.
You or we (the Republicans) might, and should, try to improve the system. In my opinion it is necessary to limit mail voting to a very restricted number of cases. Why PA republicans (for example) accepted universal mail voting is a mystery to me. Maybe because they are dumb – the only possible explanation I can imagine.
But, you go to an election with the system and rules you have, not the ones you wish you had. So, you need to do the best you can under the existing system. It is not even illegal or fraudulent to harvest mail ballots, fill them and mail them in. It only takes hard work.
It is ok to cry “Stolen election” and campaign hard for better rules for the next elections. It is a pity, though, that this election was lost. It didn’t have to be.
Jacob:
Just to be clear, I have stopped reading your rubbish, and you are not nearly as clever as you think you are.
Have a nice day.
Jacob – as you concede this election to the Democrats, why should they agree to any of the changes for future elections that you propose?
Indeed why should they not just frame you for some crime you did not commit, and laugh as you are raped to death in prison?
Why not?
Once you have allowed Election Fraud on this scale (and this blatant) you have given them the Green Light to do ANYTHING they feel like doing.
After all you stand in the way of totalitarian “Sustainable Development”, so (to the followers of “Inclusive Capitalism”) you are not a human being anyway.
Some Republicans may be allowed to win elections in future – but only as long as they support totalitarian “Sustainable Development”, “Stakeholder Capitalism”, “Build Back Better”, “Great Reset”.
In short future elections are going to be a pointless farce.
Oh by the way Jacob…
The mass mail-in ballots without any real I.D. checks were already unconstitutional (illegal) in many of the States that used them.
Why talk about changing the law, when you are not going to enforce the existing law?
And why is not Mr Joseph Biden not in prison for the bribe taking (using his son Hunter as the “bagman”) he has been engaged in for many years?
Again what is the point of “changing the law” if you not going to enforce the existing law?
The “Justice” system, including the FBI, is utterly corrupt.
I must admit that i find Jacob’s claim, that the Republicans deserved to lose because they did not cheat, quite hilarious.
That raises a few questions, of course.
For instance: why is Jacob bullshitting about very small margins? because he cannot possibly know what the margins would have been without fraud.
Another question: is there so much election fraud in Israel that the 2020 US election looks normal to Jacob? (Who i understand resides in Israel.)
I myself have long regarded US elections as somewhat farcical — even compared to Italian elections, with which i have some slight familiarity.
But this latest election was not somewhat farcical: it was entirely farcical.
Yet another question: does Jacob not realize that, if Republicans tried to cheat, the American media would be all over it?
Snorri:
The obvious reason why counting was stopped in the key cities in the key states was to find out how many “votes” needed to be manufactured to “win”. For the increasingly bizarre Jacob to claim that the results were “close” is to disregard this obvious truth. However many votes Trump received, the corrupt Democrat voting officials just needed to make sure Biden had a few more.
Trump was well ahead of Biden before the corrupt officials stopped the count, it was not close at all, but by the time the counts reopened the next morning, the voting fairy had delivered Biden the “votes” he needed to “win”. Jacob poses as some sort of cynical man of the world, in reality he is an idiot whose opinion is of less interest than a Joe Biden speech.
Article III Section 2 of the Constitution says:
The Judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority; âŠto Controversies between two or more States;
To me this says that Texas has standing to have it’s complain theard by the court.
To me this seems to support Alito and ThomasâŠtell me why Iâm wrong.
You are not wrong. Standing, not to be confused with cause of action, is a bogus doctrine that is not in the Constitution or the Federalist papers. It didn’t emerge until the 1920s and is used by the courts to dodge political hot potatoes. Alito was signaling Trump that there would be no relief from the courts and that his 3 SC picks look to McConnell, not him.
The only court with the jurisdiction to weigh a contract dispute between the states is the Supreme Court. Don’t forget that the federal government is a product of a contract between the states as determined by the Constitution. The plaintiff states were suing the defendant states for failure to comply with the electors clause. I don’t know what the consequences are for the SC’s failure to uphold and enforce the contract; an unenforceable contract is moot; it’s just a piece of paper.
My explanation is a poor substitute for Robert Barnes. His commentary on the TX suit starts at about 22 minutes in to the podcast. I wish he would have addressed the long term consequences for elections if the elector’s clause is gutted. Will elections become a free for all? It seems to me that they either are all obligated to comply or none have to comply; I don’t see how it can be enforced selectively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5IPEvYchMo&t=33s
I see a lot of defeatism amongst so called conservatives, they seem to forget that Trump is a fighter to the end. The election was never going to be overturned in the courts because the courts were captured by the deep state long ago.
Trumpâs destiny is to fill the breach. He has taken an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, and he has the presidential powers to do so.
Trump should use those powers as president to safeguard the future of our republic and arrest those who have conspired to commit election fraud (this includes most democrat operatives and the RINO traitors who have facilitated them). The Insurrection Act enables Trump to use the military to seize the key electoral evidence in contested states, this is what I believe he will do next.
Trump would act to restore the rule of law and save the republic.
If he fails to do so America is finished
If Joe and Suzy enter into a contract and Joe breaches that contract I can’t sue Joe for that breach. I have no standing in that controversy.
If the politicians in Pennsylvania figure out a way to submit electoral votes on behalf of their state in a manner that screws the majority of Pennsylvania citizens, and I’m not a citizen of Pennsylvania, I can’t sue those politicians because I have no standing in that controversy.
“is there so much election fraud in Israel that the 2020 US election looks normal to Jacob? (Who i understand resides in Israel.)”
There is no election fraud in Israel. And there are no mail ballots in Israel.
America’s ( I mean the US) election system is indeed a farce. (Of course, the US is not Israel… it is much more complicated).
So what do you do about it? Wail about stolen elections after the fact or try to fight the best you can under the existing, farcical, rules?
William A. Jacobson:
In many other states, legal and political battles were fought strategically by Democrats over the several months leading up to the election. Democrats organized for a mail-in election, Republicans didnât. Republicans were out-organized, out-hustled, and out-lawyered.
It is a lamentable fact that conservatives and libertarians are a minority in the population, an ever diminishing minority.
On top of it they are poor organizers and street brawlers.
By the way: in several crucial states the libertarian candidate got more votes than the difference between Biden (the winner) and Trump.
Bobby b:
Electoral votes cross state lines. Mail in ballots were accused of being tampered with. mail fraud is a Federal offense. If criminal action was organized over telecommunications then wire fraud is a Federal crime.
So with the Constitution stating that the Supreme Court is the venue for “…Controversies between two or more States…” there is more then enough to justify standing.
The Courts were cowards and punted.
Bobby b:
There is a scene in “Don Quijote” by Cervantes:
Joe and Suzy (husband and wife) got into some kind of brawl or fight. Don Quijote was just passing by, and as he always sought to do good, intervened and tried to protect Suzy, the weak one. Upon which Joe and Suzy forgot about their dispute and united both and beat up Don Quijote with their sticks.
The results were close in 2016 too, when Trump won, and nobody (but the Democrats) claimed fraud.
Jacob (December 16, 2020 at 2:47 pm), that is a half-truth. Many Republicans claimed Trump had won in spite of extensive vote fraud. Because of this, an attempt was made to remove duplicate and dead people from state voters rolls. The Dem states’ utter refusal to cooperate is part of the evidence that the Rep view, unlike the Dem view, had content. Unwisely, as I thought then (and still think đ – unless Trump was still trying but unable to fix it), Trump did not vigorously pursue the matter.
No, I have in mind the voting system of 2012, when “Republicans felt disappointed but not cheated” over Obama’s win, or of 2016, when there was even more fraud but not an order-of-magnitude(s) change. The virus-justified transforming of voting makes a whole new ball game. I’ll gladly take better than 2012 if some incremental process of reforming that can further improve things, but for now I’ll settle for the voting system before the virus.
I could of course, say the same for a great many other virus-caused things. Life was not perfect before we were all locked down and put into masks, but that is not a good reason for seeking to escape this virus-justified world and get back to 2019. My desire to do this is – obviously I would have thought – not in expectation of thereby reaching perfection either in voting systems or anything else.
Jacob:
Being (thankfully) neither a US citizen nor a US resident, i can do neither.
What would i do if i could do anything?
Wail about a stolen election for 4 years, for sure. But without feeling angry about it: just to get under the skin of the other side.
Also, do the outmost to show evidence of massive fraud.
—-
Let’s be realistic: at this point, it is best if Biden becomes “president”. Then we can enjoy his humiliation, and the humiliation of everybody who will have to pretend that he is not demented.
That doesn’t mean that it is not necessary to show evidence of massive fraud.
Niall: “The Dem statesâ utter refusal to cooperate ”
Well, at least in PA and GA it was Republican administrations that adopted mail-vote and refused to heed Trump’s demand to disallow them.
It is also Republican election officials who claim there was no wide-spread fraud and no investigation needed, and the procedure was ok.
You might prefer the 2012 election procedure… but, for whatever reasons – the procedure in place in 2020 was different. You need to go to the election and organize according to the procedure in place. Maybe in 2024 there will be a better procedure, maybe not, but that’s irrelevant to the 2020 election. (The 2012 election was not close or tight – in such case procedures don’t matter. As I said, it would have been better for Trump to win by KO, and not have to struggle in a close election…).
Trump, opposing mail vote called on his supporters to vote in person. That is fine… but about one third of eligible voters don’t vote normally (maybe it was more like 25% this time). The Trump camp (which does not include all Republicans) needed to organize thousands of volunteers (or hire paid operators) to go from house to house, find all the non-voters, fill in their mail ballot and send it in. It was an operation-organization failure on Trump’s part.
Letâs be realistic: at this point, it is best if Biden becomes âpresidentâ. Then we can enjoy his humiliation, and the humiliation of everybody who will have to pretend that he is not demented.
Biden is not demented, don’t believe election propaganda. Biden is an idiot and a fool (unlike Obama) and was such for all of his 47 years’ career in the senate (long before he reached dementia age).
Early onset dementia đ
But he does seem to have gotten worse.
It stands to reason that Americans, consuming relatively large amounts of seed oils and refined sugars (especially HFCS), are more susceptible to dementia than most other Westerners. Statistically speaking.
See also this:
What is to be done? Step one is for Republicans to get better at âballot harvestingâ themselves. Game theory would recommend this. There is some evidence that they have in some places. Two years ago the California GOP was shocked when it lost several congressional seats due to late-arriving ballots that had been harvested by Democrats under the new rules. The GOP got several of those seats back in this election, in part because the California GOP figured out that both parties can play at this game. Like gerrymandering, which became an offense to democracy for liberals only when Republicans got good at it, if Republicans get good at finding more votes Democrats might actually have to agree to reforms to make elections more transparent and secure.
Jacob: I already saw that essay thanks to Instapundit. But thanks anyway.
Another thought — related to my previous comment, not to the essay.
Some people say that “we” should not de-legitimize American democracy and American institutions by questioning this particular election. (As i understand it.)
But, as a philosophical anarchist, I see no reason to preserve the legitimacy of the American government, or any other government for that matter. I see plenty of reasons to question it.
“Some” people have a point. In democracy you should accept an elected government and compromise as much as possible with it. Otherwise you are in civil war territory. Pity those “some other people” did their best to delegitimize and topple Trump.
You don’t owe these “some other people” anything, still, avoiding civil war is quite important.
Elections will never be perfect, and you should fight over them only that much, and then compromise.
I agree that is one step, and the California Republicans are already there; they owe some 2020 wins to that.
However some points should be noted.
– Firstly, just because in WWII we eventually got much better than the Germans at bombing cities doesn’t mean we wanted to spend our time doing that. The aim of getting rid of ballot harvesting should remain even if the Republicans could do it as ‘well’ as the Democrats.
– Secondly, the Republicans can never exploit it as fully as the Democrats unless they start practising the twin elements of intimidation (implicit or explicit) and violation of the secret ballot. Some antifa/BLM-supporting types turn up at your door and say, “Hey man, you forgot to vote – let us help.” How safe do you think it would feel to tell them to get stuffed, or even to decline their offer to ‘check’ your ballot for you lest you have missed something, or to refuse to give them the completed ballot, or to assume that they will not open and reseal an envelope and remember your address if its contents displeased them?
– Thirdly, over and above that point, ballot-harvesting provides a great cover for outright fraud and a longer timescale in which to do more of it.
So, long-term, not a good solution because it markedly increases that “margin of fraud’ which the unwoke must get past to be declared the winner. But, like the CA Reps, I recognise one may have to play on the tilted playing field if there is no other hope of one day making it less so again, while also playing the game of fighting against laws that enable fraud, as J. Christian Adams did with some success in Virginia, and as I suggested above Trump was too slack in doing.
I see your point of course. Merely in the spirit of historical remark, I note the US would not exist if its first citizens had seen that as final.
And no civil war ensued.
And yet, now you seem to be losing sleep about the possibility of civil war.
Why should i worry about an unlikely civil war in another continent??
The technical response is: You’re speaking of criminal law. Standing has no place in criminal law. So what you say is true.
But it doesn’t matter, because there is no remedy for the vote fraud to be found in criminal law. We can punish the fraudsters – but that’s it. All avenues to a change in the vote go through the civil courtroom. Or, they don’t, as the case may be.
In what i would consider a “normal” country, i would expect the entire election to be declared null and void by the courts, and a new election called. But the US Constitution does not allow that remedy.
Still, this should be pursued in criminal courts. There are at least 3 important, distinct reasons to go to court, which i leave as an exercise to the reader.
Nial,
It would be better, of course, to allow no mail votes (except few exceptions), and to require advance registering (not same day register), and demand a valid photo ID, and cross check voter registration between states to avoid double voting, and clean up registration lists to remove deceased people and double registered ones etc. etc.
What needs to be done is clear. Only “other people” have other ideas, and they insist, and managed to pass, the current rules (which are insecure).
We do not debate what is the desired election system. We debate what is to be done given the system that is in place.
USA elections rigged?
In 2008 (Barack Hussein Obama) a 61.6 % of the voting eligible population turned out to vote. This was the highest turnout since 1960.
In 1960 (John Fidgerald Kennedy) a 63.8 % of the voting eligible population turned out to vote. This was the highest turnout since 1908.
In 1908 (William Howard Taft) a 65.7 % of the voting eligible population turned out to vote. This was the highest turnout since 1900.
In 2020 (Joe Biden ?) a 66.2 % of the voting eligible population turned out to vote. This was the highest turnout since 1900.
In 2020 the US had a population of 330.6 million people and 213.8 million of them were eligible to vote.
Since the turnout was 66.2 % it follows that 141.5 million votes were cast.
Of those 74.2 million were obtained by Donald Trump.
The Libertanian and Green party and such obtained about 3.1 million votes.
That leaves 64.2 million votes for Joe Biden. However the actual official results credits him with 81.1 million votes. The difference is 16.9 million votes. What could explain this difference?
If the 81.1 milion votes for Biden stands then the turnout was 81.1 + 3.1 + 74.2 = 158.4 million or 74.1 % of the eligible voting population. This is even higher than the 1900 turnout (73.7 %) and approaches the level of the turnouts between 1870 and 1900.
This stinks.
[…] was not news to me, of course, but the spin may be a bit of a whiplash for some. I agree with Neo’s take: it was […]