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Home » So, what about the whole election cheating thing?

So, what about the whole election cheating thing?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “MBunge” writes:

The all-around execrable Erick Erickson has a tweet out saying “See, all you stupid Trumpers! Elections aren’t rigged so shut up about 2020!”

Youngkin won while all the questioning of 2020 is going on. It didn’t hurt him. It didn’t cost him the election. Who knows? Trump continuing to make a stink about 2020 may have scared the Democrats off trying to steal Virginia.

My take on it is – as I’ve said many many times – that the basic issue is the changing of the election rules that had several effects. The first was the pre-election undermining of trust in the integrity of elections, and the second was the strong possibility of resultant cheating that by its very nature almost certainly could never be proven even if true. That’s a recipe for disaster.

The Virginia election can tell us nothing about what happened regarding cheating in the 2020 election. Heck, it can’t even tell us all that much about cheating in yesterday’s election, except that if cheating did occur on the part of Democrats it wasn’t enough to change the winner.

Election rules and their enforcement are the keys, and each state is different in that regard (HR1, if passed, would have changed that, but thankfully we’ve dodged that bullet for now). Some states are very lax and some are still pretty strict. In order for cheating to be effective in a statewide or national election (except in the closest of races), a couple of things would ordinarily have to be present: somewhat of a swing state with lax voting rules and rural red areas but deep blue cities in which the voting apparatus can be rather easily controlled by the Democrat machine.

I’m not at all sure that Virginia ever met those characteristics – at least, during the 2020 election I don’t recall the state being on the list of those with alleged cheating by Democrats. I’d have to do an in-depth study of Virginia’s voting laws and how they are administered to know whether there was much of a possibility of cheating there, and I certainly haven’t researched that. If anyone has any light to shed, feel free. But again, what happened in one state tells us little about what happened in another state at another time.

I’ve also said (but it bears repeating) that I don’t think we’ll ever know whether cheating made a difference in 2020. I don’t think it’s possible to know, and that’s part of the problem because it’s certainly plausible. We do know, however, about many of the influential and far-reaching lies that were told by the left about the right, with the aid of the MSM, and how social media cooperated in the blocking of the voices of the right. That undoubtedly had a huge influence, and it is almost certain it will continue.

Comments

So, what about the whole election cheating thing? — 41 Comments

  1. When it comes to fraud in a Presidential election, due to the nature of our system, it doesn’t have to occur everywhere to change the final result. In fact it’s better if it doesn’t to avoid arousing suspicion. In a close presidential election (which has been most of them since 2000) a little fraud just has to occur in a few very specific areas, a few key districts in swing states. The would-be Democrat fraudsters can’t guarantee the outcome in every case… yet. They can only change things when the outcomes are somewhat close and they have almost complete control of the election apparatuses in these key areas.

    Unfortunately for Conservatives it means we have to be sure that things aren’t close. We have to cover the margin of fraud. Of course we should always work to make it more difficult for the fraudsters, but that’s an ongoing battle and one that I don’t have a great deal of confidence in personally given the nature of our system.

  2. Given how miserably laughable McAuliffe and his campaign minions have come off in the last week or so, who’s to say the margin of victory in terms of legitimate votes wasn’t much higher?

  3. Not so fast…..
    Paul A. Szypula
    @Bubblebathgirl
    Bergen County, NJ

    100% Reporting

    Midnight: 219,894 votes
    Ciattarelli up 5%

    7:30 AM: 261,528 votes
    Murphy up 4%

    Democrats “found” 41,634 votes.

    Audit New Jersey?

  4. My opinion, after a lifetime of viewing the Democrats, is that their only platform planks are to win and then vote the Party line. By hook, by crook, by lies, by any means necessary. Anything that can gain them even 1/10th of a % advantage will be done.

    They evaluate candidates to run by whether they can win not whether they are capable of preforming the job of the office. Their only job is to win and then vote as the Party demands.

    Not that Republican’s don’t do some of this too, but they do seem better at filtering out the worst sociopathic liars at a low level whereas that quality is a resume enhancement for the Party of [D]. As I say my opinion. YMMV.

  5. I am a fan of Mollie Hemingway. A talented, bright, fearless reporter. I haven’t read it, but my guess is her book on the subject, “Rigged: How the Media Big Tech and the Democrats Seized Our Elections” would be an informative, comprehensive and damning volume on fraud in the 2020 election.

    As neo wrote, there were many state rules violated in many states, but let’s just take one thing; the media’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Polls show if that had not been suppressed Trump would have likely won, even with state voting irregularities. Many 3rd world countries have less corrupt elections than ours. What an embarrassment.

  6. As previous comment here puts it New Jersey might be the repeat of 2020.

    Just into first few chapters of Rigged myself.

  7. I never understood why all of the emphasis was on the possibility of fraud, since its existence is hard to prove, as Neo has frequently noted, and even harder to prove that it changed the outcome. Not that I doubt that extensive fraud occurred.

    The incontestable core issue to me was the extra-legal distortion of voting laws in key states, which should have nullified the election. Given that this occurred in a national election, I also questioned what could be of greater concern for SCOTUS. They failed miserably in my opinion.

  8. My take on the 2020 elections in the US is that there was likely some fraud in a few states — notably GA, PA, MI and one other that escapes me right now. That fraud was very possibly enough to swing the results from Trump to Biden in those states, and those states had enough electoral votes to give Biden the win. I would guess we’re talking about fewer than 150,000 total fraudulent votes in those states.

    Far more important than fiddling with voting machines or importing stacks of ballots was changing election procedures in those and a few other states in a way that was unconstitutional. In my own state of NV, for example, the governor acted in the last few weeks of the electoral season to send mail in ballots to everyone who appeared on voter rolls despite the fact this rolls had not been reviewed in many years. How many of those ballots were ultimately “harvested” by party operatives and turned in will never be known. Here in NV, the results might not have been changed, since there are so many more voters in Clark County (Las Vegas) than the rest of NV that Clark dominates state elections. In PA, where similar voting changes were made very late in the campaign, and in a manner not permitted under the PA constitution, I think the results were likely affected to the extent that all PA’s electoral votes went to Biden.

    Equally as important, the bias of the American news media had an enormous impact on the final result. I don’t even need to list the ways, as they are well known by readers of New Neocon. The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story alone was significant, and there were other examples.

    Between unconstitutional changing of voting procedures (under the guise of protecting voters from Covid) and a very biased media, it really isn’t necessary to change many votes at the counting stage.

    In that sense, there was not a lot of fraud.

  9. More than one writer at NRO is pointing to the Virginia election and saying “see, there’s no material fraud, you can vote your way out”. And it’s very convenient for them that we believe this.

    There’s other commenters who equivocate between fraudulent votes and wrongly counted votes. You can tabulate fraudulent votes a million times and get the same count and same election result, that doesn’t mean votes were cast which should not have been and would have changed the outcome.

    The real problem, as some folks here have noted, is that once accepted into the ballots, a ballot voted by someone not eligible to do so (i. e. not a citizen, already voted somewhere else, dead, don’t exist, someone else voted their ballot) cannot be told from one voted by someone who was. This makes fraud very difficult to prove, and in addition many states have been loosening the safeguards to prevent wrongly-cast votes from happening which makes fraud easier and harder to prove.

  11. In terms of shifting the Electoral College, Biden’s winning margin in 2020 was less than Trump’s in 2016.
    ____________________________________

    The tight races in the trio of states had a big electoral impact. As NPR’s Domenico Montanaro has put it, “just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.”

    Of course, Trump is no stranger to narrow victories. He won the 2016 election thanks to just under 80,000 combined votes in three of those six key states.

    https://www.npr.org/2020/12/02/940689086/narrow-wins-in-these-key-states-powered-biden-to-the-presidency
    ____________________________________

    I forgot to mention eliminating the Electoral College was another measure Dems hoped to ram through under Biden. That would be huge for Democrat domination.

  12. I was going to mention the several states (four? five?) where Trump was ahead by significant margins in the early hours of the morning after the election and where vote counting simply STOPPED for a few hours; and when counting resumed enough votes were found for Biden that he WON IN EACH AND EVERY STATE where this happened (and by only a small number of percentage points, no less, in each case)…but since this sort of thing happens ALL THE TIME in American presidential elections, I figure it’s not worth mentioning…

    Yep, in EACH AND EVERY STATE an extremely narrow come-from-behind victory from the man who won more votes than any other candidate in American history. (Moreover, after vote counting was stopped, Republican vote counters and/or observers were told to go home OR PREVENTED from observing what was being done…and then after several hours, vote counting was resumed.)

    Nope, move along, nothing to see here….

    BTW, does Hemingway at all discuss this particular, um, shall we call it “phenomenon”? Or is it such a common occurrence that it bears no mention?…)

  14. Barry Meislin:

    I remember that night. Trump was winning. I was following the election online when I noticed a tweet from Jon Gabriel that the returns from Arizona had a paused for over an hour.

    I had a bad feeling, but tried not to worry. I went to bed and Joe Biden was President the next morning.

    (Jon Gabriel was the guy who came up with: “My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing.”)

  15. “ ..and rural red areas but deep blue cities in which the voting apparatus can be rather easily controlled by the Democrat machine.” At least that part of Neo’s blog describes Virginia (where I’ve lived for the past 40 years). This time the parents in the big city areas (Northern VA – DC suburbs) realized how much the far-left agenda is negatively affecting our once highly regarded school systems in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties and it seems that sanity finally prevailed.

  16. Oldflyer…”I never understood why all of the emphasis was on the possibility of fraud, since its existence is hard to prove, as Neo has frequently noted, and even harder to prove that it changed the outcome. Not that I doubt that extensive fraud occurred. The incontestable core issue to me was the extra-legal distortion of voting laws in key states, which should have nullified the election.”

    I think the validity of the election results should be analyzed at three levels:

    (1) the accuracy of the ballot counting per se
    (2) the legality of the voter eligibility requirements, including whether changes were made with proper legal authority
    (3) the freedom, or lack thereof, of information distribution about the candidates

    Concerning item (3), there was clearly active suppression of Biden-adverse information by most traditional AND online media…so that even if the election were Legal, it cannot properly be called ‘fair.’ (And the preferential treatment of Biden by the media may actually have implications for legality as well, given that biased media activities could be considered as unreported contributions in-kind to the Biden campaign)

    Concerning items (1) and (2), here’s an analogy…if you are CEO or CFO of a publicly-traded company, you are now required to *personally* certify the accuracy of the company’s financial statements. If you were in such a position, and the financials had been assembled with analogous issues to the way this election was conducted…last-minute changes in procedure, questions about the integrity of some of the people counting the inventory and certifying the cash balances…would you sign the statement and possibly put both yourself and the company at risk, or delay and demand another and more detailed audit, with consequences for embarrassment and likely for the stock price?

  17. Frederick, at 3:47 p.m., states it very clearly. Lax rules on mail-in and absentee ballots make fraudulent votes possible. Once the ballots are separated from their authorizing documents, it is impossible to tell which ballots ought to be counted, and which not. Another problem, related to early in-person voting, is “same day registration.” There often is not enough time to verify the identities and eligibility of those voters, many of whom turn out to live in their dozens at invalid addresses.

    Those who claim “no fraud” mean the ballots which were counted, were counted reasonably accurately.

  18. “…sanity finally prevailed…”

    Youngkin’s win is in fact a VICTORY FOR SANITY.

    A victory for decency—since it runs across all racial, ethnic and social categories.

    A victory for hope in the future and a pushback against the forces of evil.

    To demonstrate that this is true, all one has to do is read, watch and/or listen to the totally unhinged, deranged responses to the election results from ALL the usual suspects.

    So in this sense it is NOT Youngkin’s victory alone.

    One might dare hope that this IS only the beginning of the pushback of the decent and the concerned—the empowerment of all that is good in the country—against the forces whose aim is to destroy it.

  20. BTW, ought one mention (or even describe—in glowing detail!) how eager were the Democrats to conduct audits to demonstrate electoral transparency so as to attempt to resolve all the bizarre discrepancies and assuage the doubts of all those who had serious questions about the results?

    (OTOH, why SHOULD the Democrats have conducted audits to demonstrate electoral transparency so as to attempt to resolve all the bizarre discrepancies and assuage the doubts of all those who had serious questions about the results?…)

    …So I guess the answer to that is, “No, no need to mention it at all”….

    (In fact you’re a deplorable enemy of the people and democracy if you even RAISE the issue of doubt, of skepticism, of disbelief….)

  22. I just finished Rigged. I think the book does a good job of summarizing the problems with the 2020 election and how it was stolen but there is not a lot in the book that will be news to anyone who has been paying attention.

    One thing that I didn’t know that much about was how Mark Zuckerberg through the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Election Innovation and Research was able to take control of the election process in key counties in swing states. It really is hard to believe that this was allowed to happen but Hemmingway does a good job of documenting this.

    One relatively minor quibble, when she writes about the George Floyd case she says that he was killed by Derek Chauvin. She does point out that more attention should have been paid to the drugs in Floyd’s system but she stops short of saying that Floyd almost certainly died of an overdose. I understand that since her book was focused on the election, she probably didn’t want to get too deep in the weeds on the Floyd case. She might have figured that disputing the Floyd death might have turned off readers who accept the murder charge as a given. Still, her treatment of that case bothered me.

  23. Election procedures in many states were violated and Republicans were either asleep at the switch or in on the fraud. As Neo says, we’ll never be able to prove it. And while I don’t like what Time Magazine gloated about in its confession article on how the world was saved from Trump II or how that nimrod Zuckerberg spent almost half a billion dollars influencing the outcome, people have free will. A continuing problem is the Democratic Party screeching “voter suppression” every time someone says we need to show ID, etc. to vote. I’m bothered by Democratic lust for mail-in ballots, same day voting. If you as a citizen are too tired to drag your sorry *** to the polls, then maybe you shouldn’t be voting in the first place. Democrats won’t be happy until they have completely destroyed our belief in free and fair elections, all under the guise of making our elections more free and fair!

  24. There was verifiable cheating in Georgia in 2020. The state Senate held a hearing in December showing surveillance video from the MacDonald’s Convention Center in Atlanta. In the early morning before the Republican monitors showed up, there is video of a man rolling in boxes of ballots and hiding them under a table. In the evening after the “water main break” and the Reps left, he is seen to roll the ballots out and distribute them to Dem vote counters who never left. The women then proceed to count and recount each batch of ballots three and four times before moving on to a new batch from the boxes. I saw four different women in the videos, including a mother daughter pair. The daughter was identified as a Dem party official.

    The ballots were not mail-in ballots, which would not needed to be hidden. They had to be pre-printed ballots.

    The estimate at the hearing of the number of fake votes was 18,000 in the three hours they had and the number of counting machines in operation.

    The entire operation was straight up fraud, the ballots themselves and the counting of them.

  25. If the 2020 election wasn’t rigged, I would suggest Erick Erickson take another look at who is sitting in the oval office before he calls Trumpers stupid.

  28. The most significant thing Youngkin proved is that Republicans don’t have to run candidates who alienate large swaths of the white collar suburbs in order to turn out Trump’s rural blue collar base.

    Youngkin outperformed Trump’s numbers from last year in the suburbs, but also in the red rural areas. And the turnout was the highest ever for a Virginia gubernatorial election.

    The most effective way to beat fraud is to win by more than the margin of fraud.

  29. Perhaps what Youngkin proved is that he can win when the opposition insults, then spits on the voters and follows up by crapping on them. What that tells us about Trump is zilch. Trump won in 2016. He overcame covid and a massive and unprecedented campaign of lies, slanders, crimes, unconsititutional voting changes and dirty tricks to produce a winning margin of votes in 2020. His rallies were the most attended of any candidate in our history. He turned out record numbers of blacks, hispanics and working class people for the GOP. He had long coat tails. Granted, Trump’s critics in the GOP don’t give a damn about blacks, hispanics and workers, but their votes count. And they appreciate that Trump was the only candidate in any party to genuinely care about them. As a result, he is, by far, the most loved politician in America.

    I know the panty bunchers love to condemn Trump for failing to live up to a standard of purity that has never been achieved by any other human. But the Democrats’ investigations, legal and illegal, proved CONCLUSIVELY that he was the most honest, least corrupt person to ever run for or serve as president. Condemn that.

  30. The most significant thing Youngkin proved is that Republicans don’t have to run candidates who alienate large swaths of the white collar suburbs in order to turn out Trump’s rural blue collar base.

    Bauxite:

    I don’t think anyone here argues that Trump had to alienate large swaths of people. He was just the guy who broke through to show the path. That he didn’t do so perfectly is what it is.

  31. Saw on youtube a CNN video on election night where Wolf Blitzer and Chris Cuomo were going over a live view of incoming votes in a particular state ( I forget which state). Trump was ahead by many thousands of votes and within a split second, the vote count had Biden ahead by many thousands of votes; that is, the votes Bidet received in a split second were an exact number of votes DEDUCTED
    from the Trump vote count.
    Blitzer and Cuomo were momentarily speechless; when they observed this; as they should have been. They actually appeared very puzzled.

    Just another “hard to prove” example of Trump obtaining “negative” votes; that is, giving up thousands of votes that , miracle of miracle, becomes “positive” votes into Bidet’s vote count.
    No need to speak of election districts receiving more mail in ballots than were mailed out; nothing to see here folks.
    No need to to see Trump ahead pretty much everywhere at midnight by wide margins, and by 4 AM , Trump is down where? Oh, that’s right, in key states only.
    Geez what a coincidence.

    So, how many bizarre / strange voting patterns/events must one observe before you question what on earth is going on?

    The ONLY reason it is hard to prove that the elections was a total fraud is because no agency, no state, nobody , made a thorough effort to investigate the very numerous inexplicable and highly unlikely voting events.

    Recall after the Bush / Gore election mess, where Bush finally prevailed, how all the democrats came out complaining about how voting machines were tampered with, how computer experts could hack into voting machines and change the votes, how the machines registered the wrong vote, how unreliable the machines were, etc etc.

    and, oh yea, did you know Trump was a Russian spy?

  33. Why are there are no discussions of what an ideal election system should look like?

    As a computer professional who has written tens of thousands of lines of code and designed several successful complex systems, I believe that all the software in voting systems should be open source in C running under Linux.

    Paper ballots should be used so a permanent record is created. Voters should be able to see their ballot scanned and review the result of the scan immediately.

    Scans of mailed ballots could be provided by using public/private key encrypted access over the internet.

    The cost of scanners has plummeted and quality has soared. Voting machines could incorporate scanners in each booth which would be fed the paper ballot, display the result, print a confirmation ticket, and save the ballot in a secure container once the voter approved the scan.

    Voting system suppliers should compete on things like reliability, cost, support and training provided, level of repair parts and devices and ability to provide quick maintenance service. Their systems should all use the same open source code.

    Processors running the systems shouldn’t have the hardware to support any type of communication except direct physical connection, no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or other similar hardware should be allowed. Open source memory image tests also should be provided to poll watchers who could run the test on machines at will. Audit trails of the types long used in banking systems could easily provide almost unbreakable security of results.

    Go into a booth or sit at your kitchen table and mark a paper ballot. Watch it being scanned and check the results or go online and use the private key provided with your ballot to see how it was recorded, with the software providing online access also open source.

    This article provides good information on the weaknesses of the current systems. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/11/02/computer-experts-sound-warnings-safety-americas-voting-machines/6087174002/

    Direct Recording Electronic voting systems, or DREs, should be replaced by scanners at all polling places, which would scan ballots immediately and let the voter see the results.

    Total transparency is the only solution to the sort of behavior we saw in the 2020 election. Voters should be able to see their ballot processed, see the votes counted, and know that armies of geeks are looking at everything in the systems being used.

  34. Thanks, Dick, for explaining to us—in explicit detail and with great patience—just why the Democrats will never vote for such an excellent system.

    Hint:
    – It’s racist!
    – It disenfranchises [fake] voters!
    – It smacks of whiteness and white privilege!

    In short, it can’t be easily manipulated.

    (But would it ever be great if it could be implemented…)

    Thanks!

  35. Leading us all down the Garden State path…
    “New Jersey poll workers let illegal alien vote and admitted they was letting illegal aliens vote during the presidential election.”
    https://twitter.com/AKA_RealDirty/status/1456107653139243013
    H/T Lee Smith twitter roll.

    + An “oldie but goodie”:
    ‘Dems find more ballots over the next 24 hours and call a win for Murphy, even though Ciatterrelli was ahead. They get their lapdog media outlets to prematurely call a win for Murphy. Make Ciatterrelli challenge it in court and hope he runs out of time. Sound familiar?’
    https://twitter.com/christina_bobb/status/1456047902736850944

  36. See”cheating” — that word regarding the hopefully sacrosanct act of of popular voting appears in this page 14 times.

    THAT is how far American civilization has descended towards the Hell of illegitimacy and tyranny.

  37. wendybar’s comment needs to be repeated, Murphy ‘won’ through fraud. https://www.rightjournalism.com/new-jersey-voter-fraud-allegations-video-shows-republican-winning-largest-county-with-100-of-votes-counted-then-vote-flips-and-democrat-wins-county/

    “The most significant thing Youngkin proved is that Republicans don’t have to run candidates who alienate large swaths of the white collar suburbs in order to turn out Trump’s rural blue collar base.” Bauxite

    Mistaken and not even close to the “most significant thing”.

    What Trump demonstrated and Youngkin reinforced is that strait talk about the results of the democrat’s actions is the way to win. People don’t need to know why the left’s thinking is, at best flawed, to see that placing them in control is disastrous.

    What Trump demonstrated to the GOP is that following through on promises creates approval from the base and loyalty to those whose actions match their words. But the GOP already knew that, they simply aren’t serving their voters but rather their big donors.

    Dick Illyes,

    Thank you for that insightful proposal.

    Barry Meislin,

    True, the democrats will never vote for such a system. If the GOP ever regains majority control, that is when such a system could be implemented. If they do not then do so, absolute proof will have been demonstrated that there is only a Uni-Party and a very small minority of dissenters.

  38. My response?

    =====================================================

    }}} “See, all you stupid Trumpers! Elections aren’t rigged so shut up about 2020!”

    HEY, ASSHOLE: you jackwads went on and on and on for THREE FREAKING YEARS over a GLARINGLY FAKED “Russia” connection to Trump, which ALWAYS had LESS justification than the ELECTION RIGGING questions do.

    So *G*F*Y*. With a sharp pointy stick… *Not* letting go of this, DIPSHIT.

    You ALSO attempted to pillory a SCotUS candidate over blatantly, unquestionably doubtful rape allegations.

    I repeat: *G*F*Y*. With a sharp pointy stick, coated with Tabasco sauce and ghost pepper puree… *Not* letting go of this, you moronic DIPSHIT.

  39. “My take on the 2020 elections in the US is that there was likely some fraud in a few states — notably GA, PA, MI and one other that escapes me right now. That fraud was very possibly enough to swing the results from Trump to Biden in those states, and those states had enough electoral votes to give Biden the win. I would guess we’re talking about fewer than 150,000 total fraudulent votes in those states.”

    Likely several times that in just one state – here in AZ. Biden won by 10k and Jelly by 20k, and hundreds of thousands of questionable ballots.

  41. “I don’t think we’ll ever know whether cheating made a difference in 2020. I don’t think it’s possible to know, and that’s part of the problem because it’s certainly plausible.”

    If one uses the same statistical standards used by science to determine “scientific facts”, we can conclude that the election was stolen. Because the statistics showing rampant fraud are much stronger and show a far greater certainty than the science behind, for example, catastrophic climate change.

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