From "Conservative law firm's review of 2020 election: No 'big steal,' but plenty of problems" (Wisconsin State Journal).
Here's the full report at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty website.
December 8, 2021
"10-month review of Wisconsin’s 2020 elections conducted by a conservative Milwaukee law firm... found no evidence of the kind of fraud being alleged by allies of former President Donald Trump..."
"... who falsely contend last year’s presidential election was 'stolen.'
At the same time, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty found 'it is almost certain' that 'the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.'
With the country’s two major political parties sharply at odds over whether the 2020 presidential election was legitimate, the review, released Tuesday, walks a fine line in asserting there were serious problems with the way elections were run in Wisconsin in 2020, but that it’s very unlikely those problems denied a Trump a second term.... 'I don’t think that you instill confidence in a process by kind of blindly assuming there’s nothing to see here,' [WILL president and general counsel Rick Esenberg said].
The report also says questioning an election’s legitimacy is not a one-party affair, pointing specifically to questions raised by some on the left about the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s election in 2000 and Trump’s in 2016, as well as voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams’ refusal to accept her loss in the 2018 Georgia’s governor’s race."
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112 comments:
At this point I’m happy if the consensus is “there were plenty of problems” with the way 2020 elections were administered. Then we need to fix the “wrong” and start to restore Public faith in our ability to HAVE free and fair elections.
Double-think.
This is why The Party is doing a re-make of 1984. It was inevitable, when you think about it.
From the report summary:
Widespread abandonment of proper procedures raises questions regarding the fairness of the process and the possibility for voter fraud that might not otherwise be detected. [lousy grammar, why? Because good grammar would be the possibility that voter fraud would go undetected]
We found areas in which processes are not secure, and that reasonable reforms might make such exploitation less likely without unduly burdening the right to vote. Although there may be little evidence that these vulnerabilities were exploited in 2020, reform is no less imperative.
We also found that private funding of election operations had a partisan bias and impact.
Since the processes were unable to verify whether the law was followed, it follows, as night follows day, that they would be unable to detect fraud. This was a rigged election, and whoever wrote the headline for the report rigged the headline and injected double-think.
I suppose now the over the top claims about theft will be used as an excuse not to fix a broken system.
so, let me get this straight?
There was NO FRAUD?
There 'were problems', but it’s very unlikely those problems denied a Trump a second term?
on the other hand...
there WERE a number of votes that 'did not comply with existing legal requirements'
And that that number, 'exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.'
what IS the definition of fraud?
how is it different from votes that 'did not comply with existing legal requirements'?
if they're not 'fraud', can we call them 'problem votes'?
if the number of 'problem votes' 'exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory' ...
Doesn't MEAN, that those 'problem votes' is what "denied a Trump a second term" ??
i guess, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"
So, is it okay to steal elections one way but not another?
The whole world is going to pay a giant price for the Dems cheating and installing this fucking idiot as POTUS.
Tl;dr: Safeguards that would have allowed us to detect widespread fraud were discarded; we didn't detect widespread fraud.
Had they only followed the rules, we could have caught them red-handed!
Reading Molly Ball's article about the "fortified" election convinced me that the 2020 election was rigged, not stolen.
One question I have is, "When is a cast vote invalid?" If a county clerk illegally mails ballots to all registered voters and some vote who otherwise would not have, are those ballots valid? What if it is an urban Dem clerk who does it, while no suburban or rural clerks do, not just boosting turnout but biasing it?
From what I recall, Wisconsin's election laws are both pro integrity (clean voter rolls; voter ID) and pro-access (same day provisional ballots.) Thanks for pointing the report out-I'll read it with interest.
This widespread adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes, not provided for under Wisconsin law, was correlated with an increase of about 20,000 votes for Joe Biden, while having no significant effect on the vote for Trump. WILL does not claim that the voters who used drop boxes were ineligible voters or should have had their votes rejected. But the ad hoc adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes without established rules, parameters, or security presents an election vulnerability and a challenge to state law.
That kind of shit just doesn't happen in the real world unless there is fuckery afoot.
If you brought it a disinterested observer, say from another planet, the conclusion they would come to was that this election was not free and fair.
Not even accounting for the fact that the news that Joe Biden is as corrupt a politician has has held high office in the United States since the Civil War was roundly suppressed.
What exactly is a ‘conservative law firm’? That mantra gets lots of repetition…
Like Lincoln Project conservative? Like that FBI marching troop conservative?
Why is the Biden administration still trying to prove their legitimacy? They won didn’t they?
Has anyone demonstrated a good reason not to audit voter rolls or enact voter reforms like voter id or audits?
"...who falsely contend..."
This framing has been used since long before anyone did any checking. It is more than annoying.
Sorry. Votes dont come in at 100% bunches for one candidate. Look at any cities most run down areas the last 100 years and you will still get people not voting for democrats. Until 2020. Then it was late nite 100% vote totals everywhere. As Stalin said, its who counts the vote. They make no secret of their adoration for the communist way of life. They are what we think they are.
One vote at the precinct I voted for was invalid because a neighbor died in between mailing in their ballot and election day. I worked in the afternoon and the absentees were tallied in the morning. (I looked the name up because I was curious) I told the person in charge that a dead person voted. I'm not sure what the outcome of that was.
Perhaps we as a state should return to paper ballots, no mail in ballots, no drop off ballots and strengthen our poll workers knowledge base of election laws and policies. I, for one, am tired of my constitutional rights being diluted by corrupt politicians on both side of the of the political spectrum.
The election was not stolen. Trump lost. The only reason Trump ever declared (and continues to insist) it was stolen is to assuage his own gargantuan-but-fragile-as-tissue-paper ego. He simply cannot accept that he lost, as that makes him a "loser," in his view, that the worst thing one can ever be.
Wisconsin denied Kanye’s name on the ballot because the paperwork came in minutes late. Meanwhile the same Wisconsin allowed over a hundred thousand more mail-in ballots than ever before due to claims of incapacity. There are many documented cases of said incapacitated out and about on Election Day with no issues. The perception was that Kanye on the ballot helped Trump, especially in Milwaukee, while incapacitated votes helped Biden big-time. I guess the letter of the law only matters when you think it helps a certain candidate. Is that cheating? Essentially, yes.
They cheated the way Dems always cheat: fair and square … except for unfair and un square cheating too.
Btw, the “conservative” law firm made me lol. Conservative like me or like Liz Cheney and the Lincoln Project?
Who benefits most from American's thinking our elections are fixed? Russia and China. Who is pushing the narrative? Trump, the foreign agent.
Is it ironic liberals use ‘conservative law firm’ to add an air of legitimacy?
'the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.'
It was obvious beforehand. Blatant illegality rather than "fraud" was the issue. But are requirements actually required if no one is actually required to comply? If there are no consequences whatsoever for supposedly "illegal" conduct?
Ann bolded..
'the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.'
huh - that's strange. I guess we are supposed to be OK with this?
As expected, I think. I am less concerned with the legitimacy of the election, more concerned with the incredible partisan split in attitude, whether there was good reason for conservatives to think that the election was done in a way they could not trust.
You can't run a democracy this way.
How can you control an election when there is no control over the ballots? Provide chain of custody for the ballots, and most objections about voting irregularities goes away. Remove chain of custody for the ballots, and who knows what shenanigans occur?
Anytime anyone says that there is "no evidence" of something, it is complete BS. It is spin and propaganda.
Read the 16 page summary at Ann's link before posting.
Robert Cook: "The election was not stolen. Trump lost. The only reason Trump ever declared (and continues to insist) it was stolen is to assuage his own gargantuan-but-fragile-as-tissue-paper ego. He simply cannot accept that he lost, as that makes him a "loser," in his view, that the worst thing one can ever be."
Stalinists learn from an early age not to address substantive complaints.
Cookies only real issue here: He cannot have people tossed in the gulag for questioning the People's Central Committee of Election "Integrity".
A lot of people voted who, under existing law, shouldn’t have. Felons, people who moved out of state and illegals were sent mail in ballots and they voted for Biden by startling margins. But what's missing from their report? Fraud in voting by mail is vastly more prevalent than in-person voting and compromised the integrity of last year's election.
I think we need to rely less on mail in ballots (because they suck). And voters should be forced to re-register every five years. And photo id's. We should also amend the Constitution. We need a process for dealing with obviously fraudulent elections (even if this one wasn't "obvious").
Interesting that the legislature passed an ordinance to cure the Zuckerberg problem in future elections but Evers vetoed it.
A common thread both in Wisconsin and other jurisdictions which have done similar reviews is that any attempt at reform is opposed by the Democrats.
What does that tell you.
Mollie Hemingway's book "Rigged" details how the Dems stole the election.
'it is almost certain' that 'the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.'
And that is the real issue....Trump has framed it terribly but most people know that the Dems created an environment that would allow ballots through that normally would be invalidated.
Sebastian said...
It was obvious beforehand. Blatant illegality rather than "fraud" was the issue
if i go to your bank, fill out a withdraw for your account... SIGN IN and receive money...
That's "fraud" right?
If, on the other hand
i go to your bank, don't fill out a withdraw for your account.. And DON'T sign it...
and the teller withdraws money from your account and gives it to me....
THEN,
i did NOT commit "fraud" right? Just 'did not comply with existing legal requirements', Right?
Is THAT what they mean, when they say there was no "fraud"??
It's NOT "fraud", when the fix is in?
From the link:
As recently confirmed by the Legislative Audit Bureau, the widespread adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes, encouraged by the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), runs afoul of state law requirements for the collection of absentee ballots.
This widespread adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes, not provided for under Wisconsin law, was correlated with an increase of about 20,000 votes for Joe Biden, while having no significant effect on the vote for Trump.
More than 265,000 Wisconsin voters adopted the ‘indefinitely confined’ status, meaning they received an absentee ballot and were exempt from the statewide photo ID requirements.
Many of these votes were cast unlawfully. Only those voters who are indefinitely confined “because of age, physical illness, or infirmity, or is disabled for an indefinite period” qualify. Fear of contracting a disease (such as COVID) does not qualify.
See- no big deal. Unlawful votes that went entirely to one candidate. It's all cool.
The "widespread" caveat should have the bullshit tag. Didn't need to be widespread.
oops one more
The votes cast by ‘indefinitely confined’ voters raise a number of red flags. 54,259 ballots were cast by individuals who have never shown a voter ID in any election. 3,718 were cast from addresses that were on the 2019 Mover’s List. 7,747 failed their DMV check when they registered.
How to skirt voter ID laws? Democrats can do it!
If you re-count fraudulent votes - and the recount is the same, I guess that makes it easy to say "We found no evidence of 'fraud'."
In other words ...
There was “no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”
There was just enough fraud to make a difference.
The focus on voting machines was always a red herring and it was foolish to make machine voting the issue.
It was the mail-in ballots that made the difference, and there's no way now to tell which were valid and which weren't.
Blogger Butkus51 said...
Sorry. Votes dont come in at 100% bunches for one candidate. Look at any cities most run down areas the last 100 years and you will still get people not voting for democrats. Until 2020. Then it was late nite 100% vote totals everywhere. As Stalin said, its who counts the vote. They make no secret of their adoration for the communist way of life. They are what we think they are.
12/8/21, 7:37 AM
—
Naw, it is he who harvests the votes. Of course, if they start harvesting (R), they’ll get the Kulak treatment …
One vote at the precinct I voted for
Err...worked at, not voted for. That comment was before today's coffee.
I've read Mollie Hemingway's book. The existing rules were a mess even before 2020. The Constitution leaving a lot of important electoral rules to the states is not a good idea, and then states delegate down to the local level. The Dems used money, electoral office and lawsuits to get new rules with the excuse of Covid, and then were much more clever than the Republicans at taking advantage of both the old and new rules. Courts are unlikely to help very much. This is all at least somewhat different from provable fraud; it creates opportunities for fraud, and Dems are clever at exploiting those opportunities.
'it is almost certain' that 'the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.'
Wikipedia summarized the results on its WILL page and left that point out.
So I guess it's not in there.
Don't try to change the entry unless you want to be banned.
81 million votes. LOL! More than Obama. Yeah, right.
"We found that 23,361 Wisconsin voters in 2020 cast ballots despite failing their DMV check this year, meaning their name, address, and/or birthdate doesn’t match what is on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).
We found that 31,664 Wisconsin voters were in the National Change of Address Database."
Yet they still claim that "It is still not possible to infer fraud solely from these unlawfully cast votes or failure to maintain voter rolls."
Baloney! Like several other states that Biden barely eked out, it was fishier than Shark Week.
Ballot Harvesting
The legislature must clarify that ballot harvesting is illegal
Senate Bill 203, one of the election reform bills passed by the legislature and vetoed by Governor Evers, clarifies the individuals who can drop off a ballot for another person, including grandchildren, children, and spouses
I read the summary and the article. Night and day from the stuff of Trumpist litigation. My favorite detail. Trump did better in the small number of locations using Dominion voting machines.
The report attacks ballot harvesting, which it defines as someone delivering another's absentee ballot to a1 polling place. It advocates for mailed inabsentee ballots, ie diliverung another's absentee ballot to a PO or mailbox. Huh?
There is no question in my mind that the Dems played their usual tricks in 2020: cigarettes for votes, sandwiches for votes, turn out the nursing home vote, turn out the homeless mission vote, 'help' the elderly fill in their ballot, etc. etc. The more blatant cheating -- multiple votes by the living, voting by the dead -- almost certainly occurred, too, but probably in fairly small numbers.
Was the combination of flagrant cheating and 'helping' certain groups of people to vote the 'right way' enough to get Biden more votes than Trump in WI? I don't know. Neither does anybody else. The practice should be stopped, but it won't be. The Dems have always done things that way in the big cities and nobody is going to stop them.
As ever, the GOP needed to win beyond the margin of cheating. Trump could have done that with a good campaign. He failed.
At the same time, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty found 'it is almost certain' that 'the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.'
Sorry, but when the number of illegal votes exceeds the margin of victory, and when the group pushing for the illegal votes (telling people they could get a permanent "disabled" absentee ballot and not have to send in a copy of their photo ID with the ballot if they were "afraid of Covid", despite teh fact that wasn't true, for just one example) is the group that "won", then yes, the proper belief is the election was stolen.
Milwaukee shut down their "vote count" the night of the election, while there were still votes to count. Then they kicked the press and poll watchers out.
Then the next morning they "discovered" that they had just enough votes to flip the State to Biden.
"votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements" is how the majority of vote fraud is done.
I said it before and I will no doubt say it again in the future- no analysis of this kind for 2020 election is meaningful without examining the signatures on the mail-in-ballots. No one has done this- every study so far has taken as a given that the signatures on the security envelopes on approved ballots are authentic. This would be case for any precinct that rejected 10% of the mail-in-ballots for improper signatures, or rejected none of them.
It was the mail-in-vote where the fraud occurred- it is why the Democrats everywhere in the country were eager to mail out ballots to everyone, and were eager to undercut all the regulations involved in such mail-in-voting- for example, eliminating the need, in Wisconsin, to provide ID before getting a mail-in-ballot. No one, apparently, wants to look at the signature verification done in the 2020 election- not even this "conservative" law firm. This is easy to do- the envelopes are suppose to still exist along with the registration files of the voters themselves, but the states refuse to give those up to anyone wanting to look at it.
MartyH said...
Reading Molly Ball's article about the "fortified" election convinced me that the 2020 election was rigged, not stolen.
There's no difference.
"Who benefits most from American's thinking our elections are fixed?"
Yes, it has "all the earmarks of Russian disinformation...." Yeesh! The best way to clear this stench is to fix the problems, don't you think?
"2020 election was rigged, not stolen."
Yes, and per the FBI, Hillary was "extremely careless," but not "negligent," because if she were "negligent," she would be in prison.
Re: the Biden presidency.
It is going to get worse. All the problems that are here and that coming were implicit in electing Joe Biden to the office of POTUS.
Trump was the better choice.*
*This is not an endorsement of Trump's behavior after the election, which has been execrable. And all of Trump's behaviors post-election were implicit in his attitudes and behaviors pre-election. He is and always has been a bad loser.
Notice that our contrarians do not address the substance of the report, which is all you need to know about heir replies.
"Who is pushing the narrative? Trump, the foreign agent."
Joe McCarthy, we barely knew ye. Except Joe McCarthy actually had evidence, so this is unfair to Joe.
The vote process made certain that envelopes were separated from ballots, making it impossible to audit for fraudulent votes. Thus, the standard claim that there was no evidence of widespread fraud is a canard. The lack of evidence was baked into the process by dems. The report summary documents the many areas where voting anomalies point to fraud which, again, cannot be audited under the dems illegally imposed 2020 voting process rules. If anything, the report supports widespread doubts about the Wisconsin election results.
10-month review of Wisconsin’s 2020 elections conducted by a conservative Milwaukee law firm
A 10 month review. A conservative Milwaukee law firm.
Who the fuck believes this shit!!
Recently, our Republican Washington State Secretary of State was rewarded with a new job in the Biden administration. She's in charge of election security. She can erase a 10 point lead overnight.
The head of the Employment Security Department was promoted to the Feds after she sent several millions of dollars of unemployment insurance to Nigeria to pay for Gov. Inslee's presidential aspirations. I'm sure those dollars came home to his campaign after a 50% discount.
Howard said...
Who benefits most from American's thinking our elections are fixed? Russia and China. Who is pushing the narrative? Trump, the foreign agent.
So Stacey Abhrams is a foreign agent? As are all the Democrats who complained about Bush's victory in 2000?
So, every single Democrat complaining about "voter suppression" is a Russian or Chinese agent?
Thank you for letting us know that, Howard
but that it’s very unlikely those problems denied a Trump a second term....
Shouldn't that be denied the Trump a second term?
rehajm said...
Has anyone demonstrated a good reason not to audit voter rolls or enact voter reforms like voter id or audits?
Well, the Democrats have demonstrated that they're convinced they'll lose a lot of elections if we have honest ones.
Thus their opposition to cleaning up the voter rolls, photo ID requirements, audits of who voted, etc.
As recently confirmed by the Legislative Audit Bureau, the widespread adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes, encouraged by the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), runs afoul of state law requirements for the collection of absentee ballots.
This widespread adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes, not provided for under Wisconsin law, was correlated with an increase of about 20,000 votes for Joe Biden, while having no significant effect on the vote for Trump.
More than 265,000 Wisconsin voters adopted the ‘indefinitely confined’ status, meaning they received an absentee ballot and were exempt from the statewide photo ID requirements. The number of indefinitely confined voters increased from 66,611 in 2016 to 265,979 in 2020. While certain local clerks initially said that COVID might render voters indefinitely confined, the state Supreme Court has said otherwise. Given the substantial increase in the number of such voters, it is almost certain that many voters improperly claimed “indefinitely confined status.”
State and federal law requires Wisconsin to maintain accurate voter rolls. But the Wisconsin Elections Commission and local clerks refused to take the required steps in 2020 to remove outdated and inaccurate voter registrations—resulting in tens of thousands of active voter registrations tied to old addresses.
We found that 23,361 Wisconsin voters in 2020 cast ballots despite failing their DMV check this year, meaning their name, address, and/or birthdate doesn’t match what is on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). 4,885 voters cast ballots with a driver’s license number that does not exist in the DMV system. 16,595 had names or date of birth did not match the DMV system. Democratic leaning counties were disproportionately represented among DMV checks.
Absentee ballot rejection rates were substantially lower in 2020 than in previous presidential elections. When voters cast absentee ballots, some percentage are expected to be rejected as a result of mistakes or missing information. But rejection rates for the 2020 presidential election were substantially lower than previous years. Either voters improved their capacity to avoid mistakes, or, more likely, election officials deliberately made efforts to ensure ballots were not rejected.
Private grants for election administration from the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), a non-profit largely funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, resulted in an increase in turnout in five Wisconsin cities—all voting heavily for Democrat Joe Biden. CTCL distributed more than $10 million to Wisconsin cities and municipalities in 2020 to assist with election administration and voter education during the pandemic. 86% of the funds were distributed to five Wisconsin cities: Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha, and Racine.
A statistical analysis finds significant increases in turnout for Democrats, approximately 8,000 votes statewide, as a result of the distribution of CTCL grants. Specifically, Biden’s vote increased by about 41 votes per municipality in cities that received CTCL grants relative to those that did not over 2016. No statistically significant effect was found for Trump.
it's like the conclusions to the ig reports, which ignored the underlying evidence,
There are 3000+ counties in the US that have to administer elections. Lots of workers, mostly temp on-call, lots of moving parts. Hard to rig a national election though it was surely possible it happened in 1960. "Winning" a county is not like winning a state.
Where you really have to watch out close is local elections, council wards and legis seats. That's big stakes somewhere like Paterson or Atlanta.
Missoula not so much.
Small stakes, it's bound to be sloppiness and wilful voter stupidity.
From the report:
We found that 23,361 Wisconsin voters in 2020 cast ballots despite failing their DMV check this year, meaning their name, address, and/or birthdate doesn’t match what is on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)
4,885 voters cast ballots with a driver’s license number that does not exist in the DMV system
16,595 had names or date of birth did not match the DMV system
Democratic- leaning counties were disproportionately represented among DMV checks.
We found that 31,664 Wisconsin voters were in the National Change of Address Database . Among the subset where a new address was known, 7,151 moved to an address in a different state.
...
State law provides no legal authority for local election officials to fix, or “cure,” defects, mistakes, or missing information on absentee ballots . But the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) said they could—resulting in some municipalities curing ballots while others did not . As a result of WEC’s lawless advice to local officials, no standard practices were employed to cure ballots.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission unlawfully suspended the use of Special Voting Deputies for nursing homes and assisted living facilities in 2020—shrugging off standards in state law for the distribution and collection of absentee ballots in those settings . WILL surveyed 35 Wisconsin communities and found just two could provide records for use of Special Voting Deputies in 2020.
"But there was no widespread fraud!"
The election was not stolen. Trump lost.
Joe Biden has dementia.
IANAL. But the following question is important here, and I don't know if anyone is addressing it: For issue A, B, anc C, what kinds of evidence would you have expected to see if that was a problem?
If you do an investigation that isn't going to be able to see evidence for a problem, you should not be reporting that "you found no evidence". This is what happens, say, with chain of custody issues.
I hasten to add that I know nothing about this and don't know what was the case here. I'm just saying that I don't see that being addressed anywhere ever.
See, this was the nice thing about the Mueller Investigation: There was a pretty specific long list of "suspicious things" that they tracked down, one after another, in great detail. When those were gone, obviously the obvious suspects came up with a new list of things that "remain suspicious". But the rest of us were done.
Jersey Fled said...
Read the 16 page summary at Ann's link before posting.
12/8/21, 8:30 AM
Why? the Wisconsin Institute for Law says it all (assuming AA is quoting directly).
"Almost Certain" it didn't happen, but if it did, there wouldn't be enough [votes] to overcome Biden's margin of victory.
In other words, if they looked, they might find that their statement is incorrect.
The illegitimate votes were sufficient to have illegitimately elected Biden, but they didn't.
I suppose that would be true if a sufficient number of them were more-or-less honest errors which, one would presume would break even.
Still, it would be nice to know if that were true.
Various reports of 100% Biden tranches cannot help but cause the raised eyebrow.
I expect, not too far in the future, the dems will be promoting the Big Steal, since nobody they know was dumb enough to vote for this shambling, incompetent, hugely corrupt, senile, kiddy groper.
'Conservative.' Ha!
There are many organizations that label themselves as conservative that are virulently anti-Trump.
The republican party among them.
The thing about elections is that they are not necessarily complicated. In fact, where election security is involved, it's generally true that the simpler the methodology, the more secure it can be made. The converse is also true, especially where electronic voting and absentee balloting have been facilitated to the point they were in 2020. Proving election fraud is notoriously difficult, and election fraud is structured to make it hard to discover in the first place, if not caught red-handed in the act.
A lot of the 2020 election fraud was un-provable because the methodology of the scams was designed to accomplish precisely that objective. But being un-provable in court is not the same as being proof it didn't happen. Destroying ballot evidence prematurely, in defiance of the law, is a good example of this.
Anybody who says the 2020 election was fair & square is either an imbecile, or is lying. Instead, people should be demanding transparency, and getting assurances in place ahead of time that absolute transparency with full-time cross-party representation without exception is guaranteed for 2022 ballot processing, and that absolute compliance with preservation of ballot evidence integrity is assured ahead of time. If you're having trouble getting transparency guarantees in your precinct, you have a future fraud problem.
"The election was not stolen. Trump lost. The only reason Trump ever declared (and continues to insist) it was stolen is to assuage his own gargantuan-but-fragile-as-tissue-paper ego. He simply cannot accept that he lost, as that makes him a "loser," in his view, that the worst thing one can ever be."
Will you say the same thing about Stacey Abrams?
Saying the election was "stolen" makes it harder to prove than just saying Trump actually won. It sounds more exciting to say it was stolen. There are real evildoers to hate, but there could just be mistakes and random things and sloppiness that close the gap between the 2 candidates. That could be enough to make the difference.
I think saying the election was stolen heated up emotional people and was intended to avoid the need to prove anything. It allowed irrational people to jump ahead and assume those really awful people on the other side were up to their usual cheating.
I agree, Bender. Nine times out of ten, there's SOME evidence, even if it's inadequate or the conclusion drawn from it is wrong. When someone steps in with a sweeping, "There's no evidence for [whatever]. . . ." I'm automatically on my guard that evidence is being ignored or swept under a rug.
Howard, if Trump is the agent of foreign tyrants, wouldn't that make him a good guy in the eyes of a State-fellator such as yourself? Just wondering.
"I think saying the election was stolen heated up emotional people and was intended to avoid the need to prove anything."
It also made it easier for the other side to dismiss genuine concerns about election integrity. Anyone who attempts to bring up the subject gets mocked as someone who believes the big lie of stolen elections. So yes, the heated rhetoric is not helpful.
MadisonMan said...
One vote at the precinct I voted for was invalid because a neighbor died in between mailing in their ballot and election day.....I'm not sure what the outcome of that was.
12/8/21, 7:41 AM
Much rejoicing in hell, I'd imagine.
Internet meme:
A few weeks ago, over 300 million lottery tickets were sold in 4 days. Within hours of the drawing, lottery officials knew how many winning tickets were sold and where the winning tickets were sold down to the specific store locations.
4 days after voting has closed, some voting officials don't know how many people voted, how they voted, who they voted for or what the accurate results are.
If the lottery were run like an election, somebody would inevitably find a trunk full of winning tickets days later.
The US election system is broken on purpose.
I don’t know enough about what happened with the ballots in the close and contested states, but it seems plausible that the media’s intentional overstatement of Trump’s evils and its whitewashing of the Democrats impacted the election. Is that “stealing”?
"Will you say the same thing about Stacey Abrams?"
I can't say. I am not following reporting about Abrams.
Circumstances differ in every case. Elections have been and will be stolen, but Trump has been unable to support his ego-salving claims that he is the rightful victor of the last presidential election. (I don't have a vested interest in defending Biden's victory, as I did not vote for him. I voted for the Green Party candidate, whose name I cannot recall. His primary appeal was that he was neither of the major party candidates.)
I don't think it fair to compare Abrams to Trump. Abrams had a factual basis for complaining about the election results based on her opponent's shenanigans as Secretary of State, and she felt strongly enough about electoral reform to take a pass on running in either 2020 Senate primary. Trump decided in advance, as he had decided in 2016, that he was not going to accept an election loss. But he had no factual basis, and turned to a cast of grifters and charlatans to try to back up his claims. What is terrible is that he did not leave it at that, but tried to get a mob of his followers and the GOP in Congress to overturn the result. What is really terrible is that the GOP remains in his thrall a year later.
the WILL group could only work with public information, it doesn't have subpoena power, like the racine sheriff has for instance,
'He simply cannot accept that he lost, as that makes him a "loser," in his view, that the worst thing one can ever be.'
Actually, being a brain-dead liberal is far worse...
Donald Trump = Stacy Abrams
That is the way I see it. Now Trump is improving chances for Stacy by backing Perdue against Kemp. Wasn’t Perdue the guy with his stock broker on speed dial? Anyone see anything wrong with Perdue?
Trump is many things, but he is mostly focused on Trump in some very destructive ways. I reach this conclusion more in sorrow than anger. We can’t let the lefty Dems continue in power.
You really have to wonder why the Republican party took this long to simply look into an obviously stolen election. It just confirms that they are LOSERS, who don't really about winning or doing anything except helping big business and rich people.
Shorter summary: "The 2020 election was probably stolen, but that's OK because Trump. Still, let's get a better handle on this next time, OK, fellas...?"
It allowed irrational people to jump ahead and assume those really awful people on the other side were up to their usual cheating.
So are you calling a majority of your commenters irrational, because most of them believe "really awful people on the other side" stole the election?
Ann:
The Dems refined and invented new ways to cheat. One example was how Mark Zuckerberg gave millions to Election Boards (governmental entities) which was used for partisan purposes.
If you're wondering if the general elections have been honest, just look at the Democratic primaries the last two cycles.
pious agnostic said...
"...who falsely contend..."
This framing has been used since long before anyone did any checking. It is more than annoying.
It does tell us who's not even trying to appear objective.
Blogger rcocean said...
You really have to wonder why the Republican party took this long to simply look into an obviously stolen election. It just confirms that they are LOSERS
To be fair, Republicans wanted Trump gone. He was a true threat to their seats between the cool kids table and the nerds. They did NOT want to go back to the nerds table.
So they aren't losers for not looking into the theft of a presidential election. They're losers in general. Which, I suppose, was your point.
*Shakes hand with rcocean. Parts as friends.*
Readering said...
I don't think it fair to compare Abrams to Trump; Abrams was a democrat
fify!
I do not believe that the non-campaigning Joe Biden (one of the biggest losers in politics) garnered an amazing record 81 million actual votes.
Biden did garner 81 million votes, but it seems extremely unlikely that more than 60 million people voted for him. The rest were manufactured in Blue cities. Fake votes have been going on in the lawless inner cities for decades. Good luck trying to find them after the fact.
All this happened in an election in which Republicans took 10 House seats away from the Democrats and Trump increased his vote totals by 10 million over 2016.
I suspect that the speculation over Dominion voting machines was a head fake that dumb Republicans fell for.
Ann Althouse said...
I think saying the election was stolen heated up emotional people and was intended to avoid the need to prove anything. It allowed irrational people to jump ahead and assume those really awful people on the other side were up to their usual cheating.
We were pointing out in the sunup to the election that the Democrats were ramping their usual cheating up to 11.
Then came election night, when Democrat "vote counters" in WI, MI, PA, and GA all decided to stop counting votes, and send the poll watchers etc how, while there were still votes to count.
Then, son of a gun, the next day they all discovered enough votes to flip their States for Biden.
And that's when all us "excitable" people decided that the Democrats were stealing the election. Because they did so, right there while we were watching.
No legitimate vote counter blocks poll watchers from observing everything the vote counters are doing.
No legitimate vote counter shuts down on election night while there are still votes in to count.
The only reasonable belief about the 2020 election is that the Democrats stole it, because if they were winning legitimately, they would have wanted everyone to know that their win was legitimate, so they wouldn't have playing teh anti-poll watcher games
Readering said...
I don't think it fair to compare Abrams to Trump. Abrams had a factual basis for complaining about the election results based on her opponent's shenanigans as Secretary of State,
I detailed why Trump has every right to believe the election was stolen in my last post. So this one I'll just focus on the joke that is Stacey Abrams.
What were the "shenanigans" that Kemp pulled? Why, horror of horror, he followed the law and cleaned up the voter rolls, removing people who hadn't voted in 8 years, and hadn't responded when the State sent them a postcard asking if they were still there.
The horror!
Everything you need to know about Democrats can be summed up by their claim that following a rational and reasonable law is "shenanigans".
“...who falsely contend....”
Interesting how the leftmediaswine use the terms “allege” or “allegedly” when dealing with criminal activities, but feel that Trump supporters are deserving of the conclusory accusation that they “falsely contend.” This is particularly interesting given that virtually no inquiry has concluded the the election was problem free.
Is there any doubt as to which candidate the vast majority of those ballots not meeting existing requirements went to?
State governments illegally changed election rules to allow as many ballots as possible to be counted (some did not, they made their changes through the legislature, the legal way), and then counted many, many, many thousands of ballots that did not even meet the extremely new relaxed rules.
But nope not a stolen election at all.
Think of the stolen election claims as demosprudence, intended to motivate voters light a fire under their politicians to force them to clean up the election process.
Clearly there is stuff to clean up, and Evers has already vetoed reform bills, so there is more work to be done once Evers is gone.
Yeah. About that....
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/huge-wisconsin-election-hearing-reveals-119283-active-voters-registered-100-years-video/
Blogger Readering said..."The report attacks ballot harvesting, which it defines as someone delivering another's absentee ballot to a1 polling place. It advocates for mailed inabsentee ballots, ie diliverung another's absentee ballot to a PO or mailbox. Huh?"
Well, I agree with your "Huh?", if that's what the report really said. Both should be illegal,
This is a direct quote from the report:
"Ballot Harvesting
The legislature must clarify that ballot harvesting is illegal
Senate Bill 203, one of the election reform bills passed by the legislature and vetoed by Governor Evers, clarifies the individuals who can drop off a ballot for another person, including grandchildren, children, and spouses" (emphasis added)
The opportunity for fraud in ballot harvesting is so obvious as to need no explanation. The bill Evers vetoed
would allow family members to deliver ballots for another, but would prohibit political operatives from doing so (as is already, apparently, illegal).
Please explain your opposition to this.
I'm past the 'studies' and reviews from various firms claiming to have the accurate account of that election. One key fact remains: Does any breathing adult think that Joe Biden received 81 million votes? This man, who could not manage to attract 35 people to a campaign rally, who had press lids at 9:30 am to avoid being asked questions? This man who, when he was asked a question would ramble on like some delirious old man (much like he does now)? This man, who was in business with his son to receive millions form both the Russians and Chinese, and to throw in a third, the Ukrainians?
More votes than Obama? Obama who had the most enthusiastic following of anybody I'd ever seen in my life- people fainting at the sound of his voice? Biden got more votes than him?
And Trump- who received more votes than any previous incumbent, who won the key counties in key states and who, up until 1:00 am had an insurmountable lead in 5 key states? Biden got more votes than him as well?
I don't care if this law firm is conservative, liberal, progressive, or made up of 25 Sotomayors- there is no way in hell this Joe Biden or any version of Joe Biden received 81 million legal, actual votes. That's the unfixable problem.
Readering said..."I don't think it fair to compare Abrams to Trump. Abrams had a factual basis for complaining about the election results based on her opponent's shenanigans as Secretary of State,…" (emphasis added)
Blogger Greg The Class Traitor responded..."What were the "shenanigans" that Kemp pulled? Why, horror of horror, he followed the law and cleaned up the voter rolls, removing people who hadn't voted in 8 years, and hadn't responded when the State sent them a postcard asking if they were still there."
This was my understanding as well, Greg. Perhaps Readering can explain how we got it wrong. If I got it wrong, I would sincerely like to be put straight.
"I do not believe that the non-campaigning Joe Biden (one of the biggest losers in politics) garnered an amazing record 81 million actual votes."
Biden didn't win; Trump lost.
People who hated Trump turned out to vote against Trump, not to vote for Biden. I'd bet many of Biden's voters were first-time voters. If his opponent had been anyone other than Donald Trump, Biden wouldn't have had any chance of winning the election.
I think saying the election was stolen heated up emotional people and was intended to avoid the need to prove anything. It allowed irrational people to jump ahead and assume those really awful people on the other side were up to their usual cheating.
Chicago Democrats boast about cheating and have been doing so since before 1960, but, per Althouse, Democrats “never” cheat in nearby Milwaukee. Uh huh. All of the “mistakes and random things and sloppiness” run in precisely one direction, but it’s “irrational” to believe that “those really awful people on the other side were up to their usual cheating.”
Readering said...
"The report attacks ballot harvesting, which it defines as someone delivering another's absentee ballot to a1 polling place. It advocates for mailed inabsentee ballots, ie diliverung another's absentee ballot to a PO or mailbox. Huh?"
I'm going to introduce you to an important concept: the chain of custody.
This is a list of all the people who have access to the "evidence" from when it's collected, to when it's used.
In the current case, we're talking about all teh people who touch an absentee ballot in between the person whose ballot it is, and the vote counters.
Because it's necessary to do so if you're going to have absentee ballots, we trust postal carriers to pick up your mail, including absentee ballots, and deliver them to the election office.
Because we're not insane, we do not trust a paid operative of a political Party to collect people's votes and deliver them, unmolested, to the vote counting facility.
If you steal 20 absentee ballots, fill them out yourself, and then try to mail them from home, and honest postal agent could report this vote fraud.
If you steal 20 absentee ballots, fill them out yourself, and then "turn them in" as aq "vote harvester", there's no way to tell that you filled out all the ballots on your own.
Or maybe you collect 30 ballots, hold them up to bright lights (or steam them open), and throw out all the ballots that don't have your candidates, replacing them with ballots that do.
"Vote harvesting" is an invitation to fraud. If you value people's right to vote, you want to protect them from having their vote neutralized by fraud.
Now, gosh darn it, kids--do you think a political party based on legalized plunder and whose standard bearer is one of the biggest liars in American politics would actually rig or steal an election? C'mon, man!
The bill Evers vetoed
The US Constitution says state legislatures make the rules for presidential elections, so why does the Gov. get a say?
n fact, where election security is involved, it's generally true that the simpler the methodology, the more secure it can be made. The converse is also true, especially where electronic voting and absentee balloting have been facilitated to the point they were in 2020.
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any shenanigans like what goes on in USA will result in blood and gore in Inida.
any deviation from the simple security chain of custody is ipso facto mal intent.
"Just in time" production is in trouble because of the supply chain problems. "Just enough fraud" may be doing just fine. It's likely that there were some serious "irregularities" in the states where it would make a difference. But the idea that Trump won the popular vote and even won by a landslide doesn't seem that plausible.
I don't know about the "81 million votes" thing. It seems like it would take some serious analysis to determine if it's possible that Biden got that many votes. Just saying that it's impossible that Biden could have gotten more votes than anyone else ever isn't in itself convincing. The population grows and mail-in voting made it possible for more votes to be cast, legitimately or otherwise.
I'm still up in the air about all this, and I don't think we'll ever know the real answers. That's the thing about voter fraud: it's hard to prove, especially if you do it well and have such an inclusive and extensive voter fraud organization. I'm reminded of the Obama birth certificate thing. I think the document was valid, but if you think it was a fake, you ought to at least admit that it wasn't an "obvious fake" that anyone could see through.
Those of us with a brain see what happened.
And we see, and are carefully noting, the piss-poor excuse-making for coordinated irregularities in 6 key states that clearly swung the election results. Zuckerberg bought himself an election and certain state legislatures and AGs used the cover of pandemic to take liberties they were not allowed to take by law.
In state after state we see the most partisan counties hold back their votes until they could see the margin of cheating required to put Biden over the top.
Many of Biden's "votes" are fraudulent and should be discarded and not included in his totals.
Trying to whitewash corruption by claiming it is a conservative law firm means nothing when so many fake "conservatives" were against Trump and for Biden. These sources are impeachable.
We see what happened here, and you can assume from Biden's 36% approval that many others see it also.
Many of Biden's policies (energy, immigration, mandates, economy, rent forebearance, Afghanistan ad nauseam) can only be explained as expressing goals against what America stands for.
81 million votes and 36% approval. A son and daughter with laptops and diaries full of steamy corruption and perversion.
If this pretender pushes beyond a certain point there will be pushback.
The funny thing about Trump is he lost the election AFTER the election, as much as before.
His failures as a leader in the days and weeks post-election were brutal. He couldn't put together a cogent case for declaring electoral fraud, he assembled a broken team of characters who subsequently failed to prove their case, and he used the last weeks of the presidential bully pulpit in a way designed to maximize tension and strife. A leader who had a case would've stood in front of the cameras, laid out the simple facts of fraud, and declared a path forward to resolve this matter in a way that avoids needless fracturing of our company.
To me, Trump squandered his opportunity to win post-election. And the funny thing is....there was enough actual shenanigan's that had he been focused in his efforts, communication, and points, he probably could've forced another election. PA, Wisconsin, and more were disasters - chaos in such purple states is not by chance, especially with secretaries of states violating state law to change election practices on whims and not through the legislature.
TreeJoe said...
The funny thing about Trump is he lost the election AFTER the election, as much as before.
That's not funny, it's sad. Very sad.
Now, I expected SCOTUS to step up and slap down the obvious fraud and illegalities (like the PA SC rewriting election law. Like all the "vote counters" who kept poll watchers from doing their jobs). It is a stain on the honor of most of the members of SCOTUS that they were willing to let America's electoral process be so damaged.
But yes, Trump's team f'ed up their response by the numbers.
The reason why I persist on this is because MY vote was stolen by allowing the Democrat vote fraud to go forward. Whether or not the candidate was willing to effectively fight the fraud does not take away my harm
"Many of Biden's policies (energy, immigration, mandates, economy, rent forebearance, Afghanistan ad nauseam) can only be explained as expressing goals against what America stands for."
What are his policies on these things, in your view, and how do they express goals "against what American stands for"? In fact, what, in your view, does American stand for?
I think we're supposed to assume that a significant portion of the 'problem votes' (that weren't legally supposed to count) were for Trump, so it's then okay that the illegitimate count exceeded Biden's margin of 'victory'. It's widely believed that the improper votes were overwhelmingly Biden, and if they want to make a claim about the legally correct disposition of electoral votes they should produce a convincing estimate to the contrary.
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