08/23/2023
VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow writes: When the 2020 election controversy erupted, I decided that VDARE.com would not focus on it. VDARE.com’s Letitia James–drained resources, I thought, should be concentrated on our key issue: Immigration and the survival of the Historic American Nation.
The MSM and Big Tech, of course, set up an echo-chamber of sloganeering and shadow-banning. But the major Conservative Inc. outlets, to my surprise, did very little.
Meanwhile, by eliminating Border enforcement, the Biden Administration has embarked on what must be most sweeping flouting of law by any Administration in U.S. history. And the most consequential.
I ask myself: If they can do this to Immigration law, why wouldn’t they have done this to election law?
And what about 2024?
For anyone not a rabid Democrat, late on election night November 3rd/4th, 2020, the strong stench of fraud swirled across America:
As Mr. Trump walked out to speak to the media in the early hours of November 4, TV news tickers showed the President with a comfortable lead over Joe Biden in nearly every key battleground state.
Pennsylvania, 56-43, a lead of just under 700,000 votes. Georgia, 51-48, a lead of nearly 120,000. Michigan, 53-45, a lead of nearly 295,000. Wisconsin, 51-47, a lead of more than 116,000.
[US election: What happened in key battleground states on election night? by Frank Chung, News.com.au, November 22, 2020. Links in original]
The impression then was given by the MSM that counting was stopping for the night. Subsequently, this was disputed. Some stoppages were partial, in some cases all that was stopped, for some reason, was the reporting of the vote.
News.com’s Frank Chung, cited above, provides this Tweet:
States that won’t be called tonight, due to vote counting delays:
- Georgia
- Pennsylvania
- Wisconsin
- MichiganGo to sleep.
— Rob Tornoe (@RobTornoe) November 4, 2020
But when reporting/counting resumed, Biden suddenly jumped into the lead. Eventually he was declared the winner with these majorities:
I believe I have watched every Presidential election count to the death since 1968. I cannot recall any with such a hiatus in counting/reporting, nor one with such decisive late reversals.
Very many others held the same opinion. They would very likely have joined with President Trump in being suspicious. This crucial subjective aspect has been largely memory-holed by the MSM.
This pattern of the Democrats almost invariably winning close protracted counts has become more glaring in recent years. In 2018 even Speaker Paul Ryan was jolted into comment:
“We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race. This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is.”
[Ryan casts doubt on ‘bizarre’ California election results, by Scott Wong, The Hill, November 29, 2018]
(Having accidentally raised this critical question, Ryan characteristically wimped out.)
On further contemplation, the aroma of the 2020 election got worse. On November 23, 2020, The Federalist published a seminal article by J.B Shurk:
Candidate Joe Biden was so effective at animating voters in 2020 that he received a record number of votes, more than 15 million more than Barack Obama received in his re-election of 2012. Amazingly, he managed to secure victory while also losing in almost every bellwether county across the country. No presidential candidate has been capable of such electoral jujitsu until now.
While Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals in every urban county in the United States, he outperformed her in the metropolitan areas of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Even more surprising, the former VP put up a record haul of votes, despite Democrats’ general failures in local House and state legislative seats across the nation.
…the former VP managed to gather a record number of votes while consistently trailing President Trump in measures of voter enthusiasm. Biden was so savvy that he motivated voters unenthusiastic about his campaign to vote for him in record numbers.
[5 More Ways Joe Biden Magically Outperformed Election Norms]
The Federalist’s Shurk highlighted historical anomalies:
Biden is set to become the first president in 60 years to lose the states of Ohio and Florida on his way to election. For a century, these states have consistently predicted the national outcome, and they have been considered roughly representative of the American melting pot as a whole. Despite national polling giving Biden a lead in both states, he lost Ohio by eight points and Florida by more than three.
For Biden to lose these key bellwethers by notable margins and still win the national election is newsworthy…
Even more unbelievably, Biden is on his way to winning the White House after having lost almost every historic bellwether county across the country. The Wall Street Journal and The Epoch Times independently analyzed the results of 19 counties around the United States that have nearly perfect presidential voting records over the last 40 years. President Trump won every single bellwether county, except Clallam County in Washington … Bellwether counties overwhelmingly chose President Trump, but Biden found a path to victory anyway.
Randy DeSoto noted in The Western Journal that “Donald Trump was pretty much the only incumbent president in U.S. history to lose his re-election while his own party gained seats in the House of Representatives.” Now that’s a Biden miracle!
[Links in original].
In essence, the 2020 election saw a radical departure from normal American voting patterns. Certain Democratic areas produced hugely more votes, both absolutely and relative to other areas, than normal. Was this just otherwise undiscernible but unprecedented enthusiasm for the Biden/Harris ticket. Or could fraud be involved?
To my mind, the most valuable contribution to evaluation the question of 2020 election fraud is Debunked?: An auditor reviews the 2020 election-and the lessons learned by Joseph Fried [Email him]. (Website here, Substack here). The publisher is Republic Book Publishers, in case Amazon or Barnes & Noble are pressured into dropping it.
Debunked was ignored by the media, including supposedly “conservative” platforms. (An honorable exception was FrontPageMag.com’s Auditing Biden’s ‘Victory,’ by Bruce Bawer, March 23, 2023.)
At present it languishes at 102,377 in Amazon book sales.
Although lucidly and even wittily written, this is a grueling read. Partly because it is highly statistical but, at least speaking for myself, I found wading through the flood of brazen dishonesty that Fried reveals to be debilitating.
One currently valuable service Fried performs: refuting the lie that Trump lost all his legal challenges.
A review of ninety-two cases by the organization, Promoting American Election Integrity, shows that only thirty were decided on merit, and Trump and/or his supporters won twenty-two of these cases.
[See https://election-integrity.info/2020_Election_Cases.htm (p. 267)]
Perhaps the most important service of the Trump Administration: demonstrating the startling news that the FBI is controlled by extremely unscrupulous Leftist activists. Perhaps the most important service of the 2020 Presidential Election: demonstrating that the state and Federal judiciary is packed with unrestrained Leftist partisans. In most of the Trump cases, these judges simply refused to consider the evidence, on extremely dubious technical grounds.
To its eternal shame, this path was also followed by the U.S. Supreme Court. In my opinion SCOTUS, by literally denying Trump’s supporters their day in court, is the major culprit in the subsequent events of January 6th.
(This is not to say the Courts should have reversed the elections. They could have followed the precedent of the 2018 election in the 9th District of North Carolina and forced the queried elections to be rerun.)
Another key debating point that Fried obliterates: the oft-quoted assertion by Christopher Krebs, formerly Director of Cybersecurity for Federal Government, that:
The November 3rd election was the most secure in American History
[Joint Statement from Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council & the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees, November 12, 2020]
Subsequently, Krebs has been a go-to talking head for the MSM when it needs an apparently impressive disparager of President Trump’s election arguments.
Fried cheerfully points out that, in a brutal Senate hearing on December 16, 2020, Krebs unwillingly admitted he was only referring to cyber security — not to election fraud as a whole (p. 273). Fried then notes that, on Krebs’ watch as Director of Cybersecurity, there were two massive cybersecurity breaches. One directly involved the 2020 election: Iran hackers stole US voter data, posed as Proud Boys in effort to influence 2020 election: feds, by Ben Feuerherd, New York Post, November 18, 2021. The other, discussed in The Untold Story of the Boldest Supply-Chain Hack Ever, by Kim Zetter, WIRED, May 22,2023, was on a staggering scale and was detected by a private sector company — not the Feds.
Krebs clearly needed a new profession.
Reported in Fried’s book are myriad questionable events and dubious actions by election officials. But the single most consequential issue is: the security of mail-in ballots.
Mail-in ballots were tremendously expanded for the 2020 election under the pretext of COVID. (But there is little willingness to roll back the changes: Nevada, which in 2020 promiscuously mailed out actual ballots to all registered voters, whether requested or not, has now made this change permanent. P163). According to the United States Census Bureau:
In 2020, 43% of voters cast ballots by mail and another 26% voted in person before Election Day. In 2016, 21% mailed in their ballots and 19% voted in person prior to Election Day.
[Majority of Voters Used Nontraditional Methods to Cast Ballots in 2020 by Zachary Scherer, Census.gov, April 29,2021]
This means some 68.1 million votes were cast by mail in 2020, 39.5 million more than in 2016.
That is a lot of votes about the integrity of which to be so certain.
At this point it is worthwhile to consider what Joseph Fried means by an “audit.”
An audit is not just counting. An important aspect is looking out for anomalous numbers, which might suggest questionable activity.
Such a case occurred with the overseas military vote in Maricopa County, AZ (subject to the Uniformed and Overseas Civilian Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA). In 2016 there were 1,600 such ballots, but in 2020 there were 9,600. They went 95% for Biden. The net 8,000 votes for Biden compare with his state-wide “victory” margin of 10,457 (pp. 78-9).
Such a glaring anomaly cried out for investigation. So did a large number of other oddities. But as Fried documents in detail (pp. 79-106), Maricopa County fought furiously to prevent this, enlisting the Biden Justice Department and a couple of Congresscritters. They were successful.
The other aspect of auditing: evaluating the “chain of custody” for valuables or sensitive documents such as ballots. The fact that the chain of custody is weak is not proof of fraud — but it does raise the possibility of fraud. An analogy would be an auditor pointing out that a shop’s cash is being kept in an unlocked and unsupervised cash register. In itself, this is not proof that there has been or will be theft. But it identifies the possibility.
Basically, chain of custody provisions in the states which pushed mail-in ballots strongly were weak to the point of nonexistence.
At this point, it is worth considering how other countries approach the chain of custody issue with mail-in ballots.
In general, they approach it by banning mail-in ballots:
Besides the United States, there are 36 member states in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Fifty percent ban absentee voting unless the citizen is living abroad, and an additional 38% require a photo-ID to obtain a [sic] absentee ballot. Fourteen percent of the countries ban absentee mail voting even for those living abroad…
These countries have learned the hard way about what happens when mail-in ballots aren’t secured. They have also discovered how hard it is to detect vote buying when both those buying and selling the votes have an incentive to hide the exchange.
France banned mail-in voting in 1975 because of massive fraud in Corsica, where postal ballots were stolen or bought and voters cast multiple votes. Mail-in ballots were used to cast the votes of dead people.
Why do most countries ban mail-in ballots?: They have seen massive vote fraud problems, by John R. Lott Jr., President, Crime Prevention Center, August 3, 2020]
In 2005, the issue of mail-in voting was considered by the Commission On Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker: Building Confidence in U.S. Elections, September 2005. Fried notes that the report said:
Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud
and also says that
The Commissioners said that, if absentee ballots are to be mailed out, it is important for the states to strengthen voter registration [sic] from handling the ballots. Unfortunately, for the 2020 election this advice was completely ignored in some States… All the concerns of the Carter-Baker report applied — plus, there were now unmonitored drop boxes. (p. 29)
In order to demonstrate the opportunities created by having vast numbers of ballot applications (in Nevada’s case, actual ballots) sloshing about, Fried supplies a remarkable New York Post story — pointing (P32) out that it was published on August 29, 2020, “…before the subject of election fraud became verboten in the United States”:
A top Democratic operative says voter fraud, especially with mail-in ballots, is no myth. And he knows this because he’s been doing it, on a grand scale, for decades.
…the political insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears prosecution, said fraud is more the rule than the exception…
The whistleblower — whose identity, rap sheet and long history working as a consultant to various campaigns were confirmed by The Post…would have his operatives fan out, going house to house, convincing voters to let them mail completed ballots on their behalf as a public service. The fraudster and his minions would then take the sealed envelopes home and hold them over boiling water.
“You have to steam it to loosen the glue,” said the insider.
He then would remove the real ballot, place the counterfeit ballot inside the signed certificate, and reseal the envelope…
The tipster said sometimes postal employees are in on the scam.
In some cases, mail carriers were members of his “work crew,” and would sift ballots from the mail and hand them over to the operative.
[Confessions of a voter fraud: I was a master at fixing mail-in ballots, by Jon Levine]
Levine’s illuminating story deserves to be read in full.
The Democrats imposing loose mail-in ballot regulations in 2020 were deliberately paving the way for fraud.
A case in point: Michigan. There,
Democrat Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, mailed out ballot applications to everyone on the Michigan voter registration list…
On its face, Benson’s distribution of ballots was of questionable legality because all methods [of getting a ballot] specified in the Michigan Code… require initiation by the voter.
Fried estimates that more than half the applications went to people who had no intention of voting by mail. So they were floating around, like junk mail. He shows that the application form had no identification requirement at all — no driver’s license number, Social Security number, etc.
But the clincher: Although there was a signature requirement, Secretary of State Benson announced:
…that all signatures would be presumptively valid [JF emphasis] even if there were no more than “slight similarities” to registration signatures.
(Link added). Of this announcement, Fried continues:
there is no doubt that it affected the final vote tabulation substantially. The announcement was, effectively, an invitation to fraudsters to grab all the extra ballot applications they could find or buy. (pp. 138-141)
Fried reviews in detail the 2020 election sagas of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Obviously, at present Georgia is of particular interest.
Georgia’s 2020 election was a shambles.
The VoterGa.org website has a long list of faults in its WHO SAYS THERE WAS NO GEORGIA ELECTION FRAUD? section and a 7-page written statement WHO SAYS THERE WAS NO 2020 ELECTION FRAUD? This has the salient conclusion:
In reality, the entire 2020 Presidential election outcome was decided by secret counts in five counties of five battleground states, each riddled with the corruption described. Specifically, on fraud and illegalities committed in Philadelphia Co. Pennsylvania, Wayne Co. Michigan, Milwaukee Co. Wisconsin, Fulton Co. Georgia and Maricopa Co. Arizona determined the 2020 Presidential election.
Fried summarizes a few choice items, including
- The number of “funny” ballots and “impossible” ballots is about forty-five times larger than the Biden margin of victory for Georgia, which was around 11,700.
- Although it takes at least one second to scan a ballot, there are over 4,000 ballots with precisely the same timestamp — to the second. Not possible.
Needless to say, neither the Fulton County DA, Fani Willis, nor the Feds have shown any interest in investigating these complaints.
Fried strongly recommends listening to the VoterGA Press Conference March 7th, starting at 27:00.
The quite extraordinary aspect of the Georgia election scandal: The State GOP leadership is furiously opposed to any investigation or subsequent reform. See VoterGA’s Kemp, Duncan Block Key Election Integrity Bill to Unseal Ballots. This was in April 2022.
The GA GOP leadership are vociferous Never Trumpers, as VDARE.com’s Washington Watcher II detailed in GA Gov. Brian Kemp, Fake Immigration Patriot, Hopes Communist Prosecutors Take Out Trump. But He’ll Be Next. Of course, leaving the Georgia’s election procedures as they are jeopardizes all Republicans: both Republican Senators were “defeated” in the reruns in early 2021. The GA GOP leadership are behaving like Democrats.
My view: Probably that is because they are Democrats.
I speak as a resident of the South during the crucial transition years in the late 20th century. Normal, spoils-seeking White Democrat pols have migrated from their party because the unusually large populations of race-crazed blacks and Trump-deranged Leftist whites in Atlanta a.k.a. Fulton County have evicted them. So they have migrated to and have infested the Republican Party. The famous close 2018 Kemp victory over Stacey Abrams was probably a Georgia Uniparty fix (she may be too stupid to realize this).
Leading culprit in this atrocity: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Fried devotes several pages to this scoundrel. Raffensperger has fought doggedly to prevent any investigation of the election, sometimes quite unscrupulously.
In the famous phone call [Here’s the full transcript and audio of the call between Trump and Raffensperger, Washington Post, January 5, 2021] that produced the Trump quote
Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already.
Fried notes that Raffensperger team
… disputed every assertion made by the Trump team but never supported their assertions with data… Instead, they claimed that their information was correct, and it would be presented in court (and not before) … So far, no court has issued a ruling on the merits of these claims, or even considered the claims.
Raffensperger never asked for one to do so.
The decisive condemnation of Raffensperger’s integrity: the revelation that he had in his possession at the time a 29-page report detailing horrific conditions at the Fulton County counting facility. This was revealed (in a Pulitzer Prize-deserving scoop, LOL) by John Solomon and Daniel Payne: Georgia investigator’s notes reveal ’massive’ election integrity problems in Atlanta [Just the News, June 19, 2021]:
…in January, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger: “We had safe, secure, honest elections,” he declared to “60 Minutes.”
That rosy assessment, however, masked an ugly truth inside his agency’s own files: A contractor handpicked to monitor election counting in Fulton County wrote a 29-page memo back in November outlining the “massive” election integrity failures and mismanagement that he witnessed in the Atlanta-area’s election centers.
The bombshell report, constructed like a minute-by-minute diary, cited a litany of high-risk problems such as the double-counting of votes, insecure storage of ballots, possible violations of voter privacy, the mysterious removal of election materials at a vote collection warehouse, and the suspicious movement of “too many” ballots on Election Day.
The State Farm Arena, where the Fulton County Votes were counted, was of course the scene of the infamous sending-home of the GOP observers while counting was ongoing, and the boarding-up of windows.
Fried reports:
…the Trump team obtained video coverage … On the video, workers could be seen pulling boxes … from under a large skirted table. The workers then proceeded to scan the ballots…
All this is disputed, of course. What cannot be disputed is, in Fried’s words:
…there was a large vote spike of 23,487 votes during the processing. Of that amount Joe Biden was awarded 98% … In an election decided by about 12,000 votes the spike … easily gave the victory to Biden.
Raffensperger blocked any investigation of the 2020 election. And Governor Kemp had the insolence to Tweet last week, quoted in Washinton Watcher II’s Kemp critique above:
Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair…
On the infamous Trump/Raffensperger call, in which Trump showed an impressive mastery of the details, Fried says:
…the implication that he wanted the fabrication of votes is clearly false. He seemed to genuinely believe that he had those votes already — easily.
If reasonable people form this judgment, the Georgia case fails.
But there will be no such specimens on the Sovietized Fulton County jury.
Fried has much more to say about the Georgia election, all of it infuriating, and much to say about the elections he surveys in the other states.
Broadly speaking, it is all the same story. In the interests of space, I will simply pick out some distinguishing elements:
On its face, the certification was illegal because the Secretary had not investigated a very large excess of ballots cast over the number of participating voters [i.e., voters who had applied for ballots] … there were 202,377 more ballots cast than the number of people who actually voted [i.e., applied for ballots]. (p. 197)
Biden’s margin of victory was 81,660 votes.
Of course, Pennsylvania Democrats pushed through the usual promiscuous mail-in ballot program, spawning the usual plausible stories of fraud.
But they received special help from the extremely partisan State Supreme Court. The Green Party was prevented from running; objections to mail-in ballot procedures were swept aside; large scale distribution, mainly in Democrat areas, of unmonitored drop boxes (financed by Marc Zuckerberg) was allowed; Republican poll observers were seriously hindered; and, incredibly all mail in ballots were ordered to be counted even if the signatures on them did not match the registration signatures. (p. 194)
Generally speaking, weak or nonexistent signature controls were a consistent feature of the 2020 mail-in ballot campaigns.
As noted above, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson lawlessly mailed out ballots to the entire seriously out-of-date voter list and the repulsive Michigan Attorney General, Dana Nessel, litigated aggressively to stop any citizen investigation of the election. In the Detroit area election-training sessions were apparently geared to defeating Republican observers [MI: Radical Dem AG Threatens Reporter With Criminal Prosecution For Publishing Damning Undercover Audio Exposing Crooked Detroit Election Official, by Patty McMurray, 100PERCENTFEDUP.com, November 10, 2020]. And, particularly in Wayne County [Detroit], GOP Poll observers were threatened and sometimes evicted from the counting process.
Of course, Detroit couldn’t let Atlanta down. Fried reports that two large and unsupervised loads of ballots were delivered.
- At 3:50 AM (EST) there was an update in Michigan that gave 54,497 votes to Biden and 4,718 to Trump
- At 6:31 AM (EST) there was an update in Michigan that gave Joe Biden 141,258 votes while giving only 5,968 votes to Trump (pp. 155-156)
That is 195,755 fresh Biden votes. His margin of “victory” was 154,188 votes.
Fried thoughtfully notes (P155):
By law, all Michigan ballots must be in the hands of county or township clerks by 8:00 PM on Election Day. So, why did it take 7.5 hours… for Detroit ballots to reach the Detroit TCF Center? Is the city that big?
Fried says:
In the summer of 2021, Wisconsin performed an audit of the 2020 presidential election. However, the City of Madison and Milwaukee County, refused to give the auditors physical access to the ballot certificates and many other election records, after citing guidance from the Biden administration. The withheld ballots comprised about 19% of all state ballots (620,000 of 3.3 million).
The auditors disregarded the omitted ballots and they only examined the ballots they were allowed to see. Based on this review, the auditors concluded that Wisconsin did a very good job of managing the election, and that Joe Biden won it. Wisconsin legislators and the mainstream media celebrated the findings. (p. 3)
Obviously, this huge omission renders the audit worthless. Madison, of course, is the home of the University of Wisconsin and Milwaukee is 37.8% black. They must be the epicenters of anti-Trump partisanship.
Another vignette: on P210 Fried supplies a table showing that an investigation of 91 nursing homes in 5 WI counties showed 100% turnout at 66 and turnouts above 95% in all the rest.
Nursing homes are notorious sources of voter fraud, as noted in Confessions of a voter fraud: I was a master at fixing mail-in ballots cited above.
Despite MSM and Big Tech deplatforming, the truth about the 2020 election will continue to spread. The damage to the American polity is going to be terrible.
All of this could have been avoided if America had followed the example of almost every serious democracy, banning or very seriously constraining mail in voting and implementing Voter ID requirements.
As Fried points out on p. 138 of his book:
Of the 47 countries in Europe today, 46 of them currently require government issued IDs to vote … When it comes to absentee voting, we Americans … are often shocked to learn that 35 out of 47 European countries …don’t allow absentee voting for citizens living in country.
[Is Ensuring Election Integrity Anti-Democratic?, John R. Lott, Jr., Imprimis, October 2021]
VDARE.com’s Allan Wall asked 20 years ago (!) Why Is Mexico’s Voter Registration System Better Than Ours?
Every registered Mexican voter has a Voter ID card, complete with photograph, fingerprint, and a holographic image to prevent counterfeiting.
I believe the answer is that the Democrats have been preparing to perpetrate massive voter fraud since at least the Obama Administration. VDARE.com has 113 articles under the tag Voter Fraud going back to 2003.
Until recently, the battle ground has been Voter ID, which the Democrats, greatly aided by their Kritarch allies, have managed to block.
This has led to the ludicrous situation in which Americans going about their daily business have to produce photo ID to register at hotels, board planes and enter many public and private buildings — but not to vote or to apply for absentee ballots.
More recently, Democrat apparatchiks have cooked up a number of ballot-tampering stratagems, known politely as “ballot harvesting” and “curing.” I found the book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway a good introduction to this arcane subject.
VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow is right: Trump’s Indictment — Like I Said, This Is A Communist Coup.
Clear proof of this: the way the MSM and Big Tech are suppressing all discussion of the 2020 election facts. (We notice shadow banning of VDARE and our friends has greatly intensified since the Trump indictments.)
Subjectively, the Stalinesque uniformity with which the MSM has chanted that Trump is lying about 2020 fraud is a frightening indicator. How could they possibly know? Especially given the enormous increase in mail-in voting. As I said at the beginning of this article, to anyone except a rabid Democrat, the election has looked suspicious since the evening of November 3rd.
Far more than Donald Trump is at stake in this struggle.
The GOP, and the American people, need to wake up.
Email Patrick Cleburne.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.