“With a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends,” Daley had assured Kennedy before the AP had pushed out the count, “you’re going to carry Illinois.”
Uh, e.g. Sam Giancana, Steve. The mob was "assisting" with the counting of IL ballots in 60.
"By the way, the above logic is why I quickly lost interest in the Republicans’ second theory of how Biden stole the 2020 election."
Ok, what's the first theory of how the 20 election was stolen? Would it have to do with the over abundance of the mail-in ballots? Example: with a straight face, one is expected to believe that Biden had ca.5-10 million additional total votes than did Barack Obama in either 08 or 12? Or Hillary in 16?
One can notice, that the mail in ballots (obviously due to a lack of COVID in 24, as 20 was a unique experience on how the virus directly affected many things regarding life in the US, including the election), were a bit over done.
Perhaps: Harris carried around the same amount of votes in 24, that Biden WOULD have carried in 20, had there been no COVID, and thus a smaller percentage of the total votes due to mail in ballots?
Rather than blame the voting machines, perhaps it's time to place the responsibility on overabundance of mail in ballots, which, surprise, surprise, wasn't a major factor in 24. Can't imagine why they weren't this time around.
And...mail in ballots can be counted in various ways, by all sorts of various people.
Perhaps a Federal law on election process would help reduce the charges of fraud, etc. : An individual state's total mail in ballots shall not exceed 1% of the individual state's population in any given election year.
But 20 was a unique election, due in no small part to COVID. If no COVID, perhaps no elected Biden, which he won in no small part due to the overabundance of mail in ballots.
15 million extra voters magically appeared in 2020 that didn't appear in 2012 or 2016 and magically disappeared in 2024. And all their votes came in at 3am EST!
Man, what are the odds?! Sure was lucky for Dementia Joe!
See Halperin's 2WAY for actual voter testimonials showing exactly this trend and the (largely rational) thinking behind such unexpected voting behavior.
One data point: to believe Biden won fair and square, we have to believe he got *more* black votes and a higher percentage of the black vote than Obama did in either 2008 or 2012.
From the Edison Research exit polls for 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. (Edison Research is the firm used by most major media in their quoted exit polls):
***
[2000]
2000: Blacks at 10.5% of voters; 90% for Gore, 8% for G. W. Bush Jr. [NYT]. With 105.4 million votes counted in 2000, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2000:
- 11.1 million total Black votes in 2000
- - 10.0 million total Black votes for Gore
- - 0.9 million total Black votes for Bush
- - 0.1 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2000, absolute: 9.1 million votes)
***
[2004]
2004: Blacks at 11% of voters; 88% for Kerry, 11% for G. W. Bush Jr. With million votes counted in 2004, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2004:
- 13.5 million total Black votes in 2004
- - 11.9 million total Black votes for Kerry
- - 1.5 million total Black votes for Bush
- - 0.1 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2004, absolute: 10.4 million votes)
***
[2008]
2008: Blacks at 13% of voters; 95% for Obama, 4% for McCain (Mr. Invade-Invite). With 131.3 million votes counted in 2008, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2008:
- 17.1 million total Black votes in 2008
- - 16.2 million total Black votes for Obama
- - 0.7 million total Black votes for Mr. Invade-Invite
- - <0.2 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2008, absolute: 15.5 million votes)
***
[2012]
2012: Blacks at 13% of voters; 93% for Obama, 6% for Romney. With 129.1 million votes counted in 2020, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2012:
- 16.8 million total Black votes in 2012
- - 15.6 million total Black votes for Obama
- - 1.0 million total Black votes for Romney
- - <0.2 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2012, absolute: 14.6 million votes)
***
[2016]
2016: Blacks at 12% of voters; 89% for Hillary, 8% for Trump. With 136.7 million votes counted in 20216, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2016:
- 16.4 million total Black votes in 2016
- - 14.6 million total Black votes for Hillary
- - 1.3 million total Black votes for Trump
- - 0.5 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2016, absolute: 13.3 million votes)
***
[2020]
2020: Blacks at 13% of voters, 87% for Biden, 12% for Trump. With 158.4 million votes counted in 2020, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2020:
- 20.6 million total Black votes in 2020
- - 17.9 million total Black votes for Biden
- - 2.5 million total Black votes for Trump
- - 0.2 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2020, absolute: 15.4 million votes)
(The Black absolute margins in 2020 and 2008 are equal.)
***
[2024]
2024: Blacks at 11% of voters; 85% for Kamala the Kackler, 13% for Trump. With million votes counted in 20216, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2024, extrapolating to final from 98%-reporting results:
- ca. 17.2 million total Black votes in 2024
- -14.6 million total Black votes for Kamala
- - 2.2 million total Black votes for Trump
- - 0.3 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2024, absolute: 12.4 million votes)
***
2000 to 2016: When a Black presidential candidate is on the ballot (n=2), Blacks give a +15-million vote margin for him. When it's a non-Black D is the candidate (n=4), it's circa +11 million (+/- 2 million).
The number of voting-eligible Blacks in 2020 was not much different than 2008. But in 2020, it'd be bit higher. Adjusting slightly upward to compensate, Biden-2020 did BETTER than Obama-2008 in terms of ratio+turnout: that is, in a calculation of the absolute number of Blacks said to have actually cast a vote for Obama vs. Biden, Biden wins.
(That's taking these numbers as correct for sake of argument (in reality, they are subject to modest error-bars as they are based on exit polls.)
Is it possible that the same absolute-number of Blacks sought to vote for Biden-2020 as Obama-2008? And that a few million more Blacks voted Biden-2020 as Hillary-2016 and Kamala-2024? Was Biden so appealing to Blacks? How? Why?
There are many alternative explanations to the implausible "Biden was as appealing as Obama to Blacks." These explanations are not limited to Blacks but likely apply to them more than any other large group.
The alt-explanations for these numbers involve grey areas of cheating or unethical behavior, including the practice known as "ballot harvesting." And of course the "mail-in voting" changes that were dumped on the USA in 2020.
If anyone reading this is naive enough to assume that no Black person would cut a few corners on "ballot harvesting" and similar activities, to goose up the numbers a bit for their side, I say: you just don't know Blacks, you have likely never lived among them to any meaningful degree, you have never observed their baseline attitudes towards such rules and norms.
"Is it possible that the same absolute-number of Blacks sought to vote for Biden-2020 as Obama-2008? And that a few million more Blacks voted Biden-2020 as Hillary-2016 and Kamala-2024? Was Biden so appealing to Blacks? How? Why?"
1. Biden was Obama's vice president and quite liked by blacks, their votes allowed him to win the primary in the first place
2. 2020 was an election with record turnout. People were forced to stay at home and politics became their 'entertainment' and life. Voting also became easier than ever due to many states sending out universal mail-in ballots, but only Democrats promoted using them.
3. 2020 was the year when George Floyd died and was promoted by the mainstream media as a martyr, and BLM (which has the support of the large majority of Black people) peaked
The "Obama vs. Biden" Black-voting question is hypothetical, based on all-population voting preferences. Of a random selection of a hundred Blacks, measuring preference plus (what is called) "enthusiasm" (turnout), Obama > Biden seems obvious. If Biden > Obama is an observed result, something strange has happened in the mechanics of the system at least.
Your explanation (1.) cannot stand alone as it suggests Biden was more popular with Blacks than was Obama, which is not realistic. The explanation must depend on your (2.) and (3.)
Your (2.) is actually three separate points being conflated, I think: (2a.) "politics as entertainment"; (2b.) the media-enforced social atmosphere of moral-panic related to a flu-virus (and lockdowns), and to your (3.), the long-promoted conspiracy theory of White Racism; (2c.) mass rule changes with voting, including unprecedented mass mail-in balloting.
Now, (2b.) and (3.) must have influenced (2c.) into directions not previously seen. Most often in a grey area with what people would call cheating. A lot of this discussion seems implicitly about the definition of "cheating"; but the simple, straight-on question of whether more Blacks would, "all else equal," vote for Biden over Obama does seem valid: It's not realistic and something else is going.
Those numbers from ZeroHedge are going to be off by nearly an order of magnitude. They produced that bogus graph when California, Oregon, and Washington still hadn't counted the vast majority of their ballots, which is exactly the problem that Mr Sailer is pointing out in this piece. Since they are safely blue states, however, it didn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out the Democrat was going to win their EVs regardless of how few of their votes were counted on Election Day.
As of Sunday night, Trump has roughly 76.4 million votes. Harris has about 73.7. California has about 7% of its votes to count, and a smattering of other states (NY, NJ, CO, UT) are between 95% and 98%. Trump should wind up with about 77.5 million and Harris 74.5 million when everybody gets done counting. That'll be a total of 152 million, or only 3 million less than the roughly 155 million votes Biden (81 million) and Trump (74 million) got in 2020.
INsults is also a sign of weakness. It means that one knows that the facts or arguments are not strong such as still arguing that there are 15 million fewer votes.
Half a million fewer people voted in New York state in 2024 versus 2020. Yet, no one ever claim that the Democrats stole votes in New York in 2020.
Trump is current at 50.1% of the vote with around 2% still to count. Harris currently has 73.7 million votes compared to a final number of 81.2. Trump went from 74.2 in 2020 to 76.5. So there are not 15 million missing votes and turnout is not the same every year.
I'm not sure who the official propounder of the Republicans' "initial theory" and "second theory" of "how Joe Biden stole the 2020 election" is, and I'm not sure I've ever heard theories of 2020 vote fraud enumerated in any official order. What I have heard is a lot data-free shrieking about "conspiracy theories", "election denial", and "deboooonked!". That said, Steve's conspiracy theory of election fraud denial refreshingly does use data, and for this we are grateful.
Steve acknowledges that vote fraud does happen and mentions two instances: the 1960 Presidential election and the 1982 Illinois gubernatorial election. It's worth noting that we only know about these two instances because of flukes: the former because Ted White imprudently included it (later excised) in his book, and the latter because the naive but willful candidate insisted on a recount, inadvertently exposing some of his own party's fraud to prosecution by the Federal executive branch headed by the other party. (The latter scenario nearly played out again in Michigan following the 2016 presidential upset, but Dems managed to shut it down before it became too embarrassing.) Said another way, on the rare occasions that a stone is overturned and we get to see what is underneath, it’s crawling with fraud.
Ted White concedes, as Steve quoted, that back in the more genteel late 20th century, with fewer mail-in ballots, one can steal “one or two percent of the vote”. Today we can watch in real time as 4.2% of the vote is stolen in California’s US Rep District 45. In 2020 there were unprecedented, untraceable, and unauditable mail-in ballots, unprecedented election “fortification”, unprecedented interruptions in vote counting, unprecedented evictions of one side’s poll watchers from the polls, and several days of counting and recounting in which to make mischief. Under those circumstances, what percent of the vote do you think could be ... redistributed?
Well, it doesn’t matter whether you choose 1%, 2%, 4%, or some higher number for 2020, because Biden's Electoral College majority depended on 0.3%, 0.6%, and 0.2% (a total of 42,918 votes) in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia respectively. How difficult do you think it was for the hardworking party professionals to fraud those tiny margins? If you’ve already conceded Ted White’s lowball 1% fraud, you’ve already conceded away the legitimacy of Biden’s Electoral College majority.
The surprise in 2020 wasn’t that there might have been 42,918 fraud votes; it was that it took so many days to generate them. Probably they didn’t expect so many legitimate votes for Trump. So that was a lot to overcome for the hardworking election party professionals.
You write that some kind of limited election-fraud investigation "played out in Michigan following the 2016 presidential upset, but Dems managed to shut it down before it became too embarrassing" for them because, you suggest, some of their own operatives would've landed in legal trouble alal Sailer's 1982 anecdote.
I hadn't ever heard this on Michigan-2016 (or, if I did, I forgot it promptly). What's a good source?
"The problems were the worst in Detroit , where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes."
In other words, most of Detroit's (the bluest and most corrupt part of Michigan) ballot boxes had been tampered with and could not legitimately be recounted. Of the boxes with intact seals, most of those had more votes in them than their precincts had voters (i.e., the ballot boxes had been stuffed beyond 100%). Take that Saddam Hussein! 99.9%? Piker! Detroit blows you out of the electoral water! Maybe the Arabs whose invasion of Michigan is ongoing can export Democracy to Detroit as part of their mission... .
So, tampered records, overstuffed ballot boxes, 107% 'turnouts' ... the State, the Feds, and the national media all investigated this obvious and flagrant case of mass vote fraud, right?
Hahahahahahahaha
No way. They all declared that if you question elections, you are conspiracy theorist and probably a domestic extremist.
As a completely unrelated matter, for some reason government and media credibility polls keep plummeting, but nobody knows why.
Trump's nominating House members as Cabinet officials is rather stupid. Gaetz has already resigned so his seat will be vacant for a few months. Waltz and Stefanik will be surrendering their seats which will become vacant. The Republicans might not have a majority to name a Speaker in January. What a blockhead.
I believe Waltz and Gaetz are both Safe-R seats.. They'll keep these seats unless the R-team brain-trust runs someone as bad as Kamala. (Like that Black candidate for North Carolina governor in 2024.)
By Florida law vacant seats have to be filled within about 60 days which is likely why Gaetz resigned immediately. While there is some discussion about how other deadlines, such as the processing of new absentee ballot requests and military ballots, will impact the process, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think the seats will be filled by March.
Considering where Stefanik is going, she can stay in the House until she's replaced and it'll be no great loss.
Gaetz must have resigned his U.S. House seat specifically in consultation with Peaker Mike Johnson and his inner circle of R-teamers nervous about keeping their majority (filling the seat in 60 days).
Gaetz resignation on Nov. 13 means the seat fill be re-filled by a loyal R-teamer from somewhere down there by Jan. 13, 2025, and nothing can be done by D-teamers or anyone else to prevent it. Meanwhile, the new House is sworn in Jan. 1, 2025. If it turns out that dumps of 3am mystery-ballots make the total House down low enough that one seat can matter, and if for some reason that Gaetz seat is empty until the end of that 60-day window, it'd only be a brief delay for the R-team to elect their Speaker.
The alternative theory that he resigned SOLELY to avoid an ethics report release, like a criminal dodging some penalty on a technicality and fleeing shouting saying "the real with Speaker Johnson and the security of the R-team's majority" -- is not realistic. A cartoon-version of reality.
I don't see how Biden got to 81 million votes in 2020 without mail-in games. I would guess about two million mail-ins were corrupt. But still Biden won in 2020 and Trump was fired. Another truth is that millions of moderates, mostly women, voted for Biden in 2020 who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Mrs. Clinton turns off a lot of women who aren't into feminist doctrine.
As a piece of evidence, Maryland is not a state that Democrats had to cheat in to win. Talbot County of Maryland's Eastern Shore has been a very Republican County for decades. For the first time since Johnson's 1964 landslide, Talbot County narrowly went for Biden in 2020. Talbot County has a lot of wealth and lots of old, monied grannies living in places like Oxford, Easton, Trappe and St. Michaels. They fired the Orange Man in 2020.
I would like to ask our host how to explain that Trump won 19 of the 20 bellweather counties yet still lost. Yet I do think Biden won at least four million more votes than Trump in 2020.
I wrote an article in October 2000 about how Delaware was a near perfect bellwether state. I even got the great historian David Hackett Fischer ("Albion's Seed") to give me quotes explaining the Deep Roots of Delaware being the best bellwhether state. I was really proud of the article.
But since then Delaware has gone solid blue and been wrong 4 times in 7 elections.
Things change.
Trump, for example, is not a conventional GOP candidate so old rules of thumb apply less to him.
After the anti-war, anti-corporate left got purged from the D's after Obama's election, and DC's spread metastasized past the district's borders and into the neighboring states, Delaware voting more D was inevitable. Wilmington is the headquarters of a lot of corporate America that made money off the endless wars, Biden was VP, and Delaware voted more urban as it got a new city (DC) spreading into it.
I remember in about 2011 or 2012 visiting a law office that was in MD just across the border from DC, and was on the subway line. The entire place was jumping with new office buildings. The lawyer who ran the office said when he first rented the space his building in 2000-2001 was the only one around and he was basically in the woods alone. Now he tons of options for buildings to move into.
Delaware isn't on the DC subway like Maryland or Virginia is, but its within commuting distance from Delaware, as Biden made famous as a younger man by riding Amtrak in to DC during the week. Urban sprawl and DC swamp cash makes people vote blue.
The school busing fall-out in New Castle County(Wilmington) slowly changed the demographics of Delaware. Funny, Delaware is generally culturally conservative in its two southern counties, little different from Maryland's Eastern Shore. But New Castle has moved left and overwhelms Kent and Sussex Counties.
By the way, I believe you are writing about the large office complexes near the New Carrollton subway stop. That part of Prince George's County used to be middle-class and white in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Not any more.
In 2016, Pennsylvania was called for Trump early in the night. At that point I was fairly sure he was going to win the presidency.
In 2020, Fox called Arizona for Biden approximately 1.5 seconds after the polls closed there. They only managed to call Arizona days after the election this year.
Also in 2020, Philadelphia, for the first time in history, closed down their vote count in the middle of the night following the election. It was at that point that I figured the fix was in.
I’m very glad that you’ve chosen to address your reasons for confidence in the 2020 result, but I’m a long way from convinced, myself.
I’m a little surprised that names are already being floated for the democrats in ‘28. I was assured that Trump would be implementing a fascist regime and that we needn’t concern ourselves with elections going forward. Strange.
-- Remembering the Arizona "forensic vote audit" of 2021 --
Some will remember that an intense "forensic" vote-audit was conducted for Maricopa County, Arizona, in 2021, regarding its 2020 presidential votes. The audit had some interesting results, not proving "fraud" but definitely proving laxness of standards which plausibly could have tipped the state or Arizona.
The Arizona Audit story: after the unpleasantness of 2020, lots of people had no confidence Arizona's electoral votes in 2020 were awarded legally or based on legal votes. An independent firm was brought in to conduct a "forensic audit," which they did over several months in 2021 after being granted access to the ballots and all related material. The results could not change anything but, the idea was, it would help election security (and confidence).
The Arizona Audit team subject each and every ballot to scrutiny, as if each were a mini legal case to be settled based on evidence. This was done at the request of the Arizona state legislature (I believe). Most U.S. media didn't cover it, except the likes of One America News Network.
I wrote about the Arizona Audit on Peak Stupidity when they released the results, in September 2021:
There were 57,000+ problematic votes cast and counted in Maricopa County in 2020. This was 2.75% of votes cast an dcounted. As I wrote at the time: "These flagged votes are all at least clearly in a grey area of legality and some even into a black area of 'should have been rejected'." But as we know, standards were relaxed in 2020 across the board.
The Biden margin-of-victory in the county was 2.2%. The questionable/suspect/arguable votes totalled 2.75%. Therefore, if 4 in 5 of the problematic ballots were for Biden, the county would have tipped to Trump. With Maricopa tipping the Trump, the entire state would likely easily tip to Trump.
The Maricopa County illegal-plus-questionable-ballot total was found to be 57,000. The certified statewide margin was: 10,5000 votes. So, holding all else equal, if the Maricopa illegal-and-questionable ballots had broken only 60:40 for Biden, or so, and all had been rejected and not counted in 2020, Trump would've won the state
No definite conclusions can be drawn, as the forensic audit team stressed, because (1.) no forensic audit was performed on the other counties; and (2.) it is up to elections authorities to decide what standards to apply, as the states are quasi-sovereign entities when it comes to this complicated "electoral vote" determination process.)
-------
With the story of Arizona-2020 in mind, and the forensic audit conducted by an independent firm in mid-2021 in mind, I submit this
Mr. Sailer mentions several cases of suspected or proven cheating in Chicago. But I can think of more-recent character out of Chicago than the 1960s or 1980s, in which a character cruised into victory using electoral-system manipulation tactics to secure his seat.
In the late 1990s, there was a slick candidate who had teams of lawyers and malcontents scrutinize and legally every signature of his opponents. He got all of them disqualified on technicalities. He ran alone, won the seat, and went on to a big political future. That man's name was Barack H. Obama Jr.
If the same "Obama" standards (on which the Obama people cruised him into his first political office) had been applied to Arizona in 2020, the state "may" have tipped to Trump. But it's hard to say.
The real lesson of the Arizona-2020 forensic audit was what all good "data people" always know: All complex data-sets tend to exist in ranges of uncertainty. Officially, Biden won Arizona 50-49. But if a Florida-style severely strict election system were in place, it's perfectly plausible to imagine Trump winning, without a single legitimate voter changing his or her mind.
Was there any indication of what portion of the 57,000 dubious ballots were for Biden or Trump?
I also wonder what makes a ballot "problematic"? No matter how the ballot arrived, once it is dumped into the ballot boxes, it is usually indistinguishable from any other ballot. Part of a Secret Ballot is that there is no way to trace an individual ballot back to its caster, so once ballots reach the ballot box it is too late to catch any vote fraud but the most incompetent. For an anonymous ballot among other anonymous ballots to be "problematic", it must have been extremely shoddy. Which means that all of the better-than-extremely-shoddy false ballots were successfully integrated and counted.
A mail-in ballot is supposed to have a signature, and someone is supposed to match it with what the Board of Elections has on file for the voter, so they're not secret. This helps enforcement of bloc voting in shady neighborhoods like California and Oregon.
Sorry, that was a bit glib. I'm editing to a fuller reply now.
The industrial-scale cheating that political machines do is a multi-phase process. The first, and perhaps most resource-intensive, phase is to build a book of idle vote registrations. These can be former voters who died, moved, or lost interest or it can be new voters who may or may not show up, or it may be entirely fictional voters that they slip through the cracks of state's registration process. Whatever the source, the objective is to build up as many of these as possible and to keep track of them, because they are the raw material for later the steal.
The election-phase is to get as many ballots as possible to attribute to these notional "voters" as possible. The more they have of each, the more they can create the "vote" they want.
Sometimes they get overzealous and somehow end up logging more votes than there are voters anyway. This is embarrassing, but media don't usually fuss about it, nor do I recall any prosecutions for it in the last few decades. The point is that there are lots of ways of frauding votes, some which depend on matching registrations, some of which do not.
The original reports stated that other counties had raised similar alarms. This has faded from the news in light of Trump’s win, but we have election officials openly admitting to defying the State Supreme Court in the matter of approving dubious ballots for the US Senate recount.
The number of 'zombie' voters can be staggering. After DeSantis took over Florida and cleaned up the voter registration rolls, about 10% of the Democrat electorate mysteriously disappeared. I don't think they so much disappeared as simply didn't actually exist in the first place, except in the notebooks of the vote-riggers. And then consider that DeSantis probably didn't get rid of all of them, which means a huge swathe of the Florida electorate was fake. Fake but sometimes decisive.
Florida is probably not exceptional. I often wonder if the supposed Democrat popular vote advantage is just a psyop. If someone waved a magic wand and made all the empty registrations in every US state disappear, the vaunted Democrat electorate would probably shrink to an ineffectual minority overnight.
~$100 million dollar company idea:
There are probably >10 million phantom registered voters in the US. Develop a data analytics company that uses modern data science and old school political savvy to detect, verify, and package for removal expired and invalid voter registrations. Price the product between $10 and $25 per removed registration. That's 1/10 - 1/4 $billion on the first wave. Get paid either by municipalities complying with registration hygiene laws or by political parties seeking electoral advantage over rivals. After the first wave, ongoing registration decay ensures a permanent revenue stream. Then international markets beckon, especially Anglophone, common law, and other W.E.I.R.D. countries. Get rich and restore democracy as a byproduct.
There were a number of categories of problem they were checking for. One example of the "problematic" ballots counted in the certified-total for Arizona 2020:
"The county only rejected 0.03% of votes for signature not matching ("Bad Signatures"). The Audit found this number should have been 0.22%+, by even a relatively relaxed threshold under industry-standard signature verification software. Also analyzed manually with pairs of eyes. A total of 0.19%+ of the certified vote should have been tossed for signature problems but instead were tossed in."
The Bad Signatures category was a clear case of "invalid votes" per the nominal elections as established by the state legislature, and hence "illegal votes." Ballots with invalid/absent/nonmatching signatures which were counted (included in the certified-2020 total for Arizona) across the state would easily be enough, alone, to cover the vote margin by which Biden carried the state.
I'm not seeing (and I looked at your link) where you told us what the bottom line results of the "forensic audit" were. How many votes were decided should have been declared invalid and what was their partisan breakdown?
And what governed the selection of a ballot as "problematic"? If you want to squelch the detection of fake ballots by this method all you have to do is make sure that what is sampled is actually-unproblematic votes.
Btw, in the 2022 Gubernatorial election Kari Lake demonstrated to my satisfaction (if I believe Robert Barnes) that the signature checks were utterly fake, being processed too fast to involve actual scrutiny.
Trump's challenge to the 2020 election result was such a pathetic shitshow that it was obvious that nothing would result and I didn't pay much attention to the question of whether the election as a whole was stolen. But the vans of absentee ballots filmed arriving at Cobo Hall at 3am or so caught my attention and it sure looks to me, after looking further into what went on there, like MICHIGAN was stolen. That wouldn't be enough to change the election result, but the "most secure election ever" claptrap got the horselaugh from me thereafter.
And now we have the 20 million drop in Dem votes from 2020 to 2024 add to the evidence that something squirrely was going on while the GOP was asleep at the switch.
(1.) The "partisan breakdown" was never given, as far as I know. The forensic-audit team from the start was never tasked with declaring the 2020-certified results valid or invalid, but only looking for voter irregularities; including definitely-illegal votes and various categories of arguably-invalid votes.
(2.) The question of which votes to count, the large "arguably invalid" categories, is not up to a team of intensely-detail-oriented "forensic vote auditors." It is a political question, in theory to be decided by the state legislature and enforced by local and state officials.
(3.) Therefore, all the Arizona Audit people did, could do, was present several sets of numbers to the legislature, which commissioned them, on which votes fell into which category. The task having been determining the scope of possible voting irregularities, the goal was to tighten-up election procedures for future elections after what was seen as a debacle in 2020.
(4.) The "bottom line results," as I understood them at the time, was: 97.25% ballots implicitly deemed "clean" (legal and unproblematic, at least on the measures they were looking at; and 2.75% of total ballots counted-and-certified in late 2020 were flagged for problems or invalidity on one measure or another (57,000 in absolute terms).
(5.) Under a much-stricter, Florida-style voting regime, all or almost all of those 57,000 ballots would've been rejected, and possibly others (the world of "hold everything else equal" is always only theoretical). But the independent auditors never announced which way the various categories of problematic or dubious ballot went.
(6.) I assume the auditor agency's contract with the Arizona legislature said not to announced vote-totals of the problematic, dubious, and illegal votes. The way the audit was agreed to in the first place having been to the effect of: "this is only for purposes of helping elections become more secure," not to "re-litigate 2020."
(7.) If the Kari Lake election-disputes hold water, as you say, it's possible the lessons of the 2021 audit were not enforced. This comes down, I presume, to the state government having lots of Democrats. State officials would've needed to oversee a DeSantis-style tightening of the election-machinery "belt" that could knock a few points off the D side's default totals.
(8.) Note that the single official who'd have been most responsible for a DeSantis-style major election-machiney "belt tightening" was Democrat, Katie Hobbs (White, b.1969, ran on tearing down any Trump border wall). She was the secretary of state of Arizona, 2019-23. She is now the governor.
"(2.) The question of which votes to count, the large "arguably invalid" categories, is not up to a team of intensely-detail-oriented "forensic vote auditors." It is a political question, in theory to be decided by the state legislature and enforced by local and state officials."
Do I understand correctly from your first post that not all ballots were subjected to audit?
I believe he's talking about which votes to "count as legitimate" as in, what the standards should be to accept a ballot as legit or discard it. The study counted all of the Maricopa County ballots and found that 57,000 were questionable.
Without endorsing the highly partisan take adopted here, it seems that the "questionable" finding is in no way related to "[decisions made by] the state legislature and enforced by local and state officials."
edit: I ran across a mention by Barnes of signature checks being processed faster than the mind could possibly process the information, but the instance I recall where he went into that in more detail is not the one I found. Kari Lake's brief would presumably be helpful.
It is difficult to get the official report of the Maricopa County audit, which was issued in 3 volumes. However, I found useful links to go along with E. H. Hail's excellent comment.
I also found several Democratic articles written by people who knew what they were instructed to write and who therefore did not find it necessary to read any of the report. This includes an article with links to the first two volumes, which contradicted the article's idiotic theme that the report proved there was no major problem with election administration in Maricopa County.
My earlier comment on slow vote-counting and its function within the U.S. system, incl. why it tends to be seen only in Big-Blue states/areas, how it evolved, why the D-team favors it (Steve Sailer makes the same points better here), and how it works in practice:
The slowest states are states where most vote by mail, they are postmark states instead of in-hand states, and state employees count the ballots instead of having a ton of low paid volunteers who do all of the work before or during election day.
If the U.S. every goes to national popular vote, then all of the states are going to have to use the same voting systems.
I work elections in Louisville. Granted we are a large county but there is little to no hand-counting of ballots. The machines we use tabulate the votes from marked paper ballots at the precinct level. The results are transferred up to the county for summary and verification, and presumably absentee and other ballots are then counted and added in. Nobody is touching the ballots again after election day unless there is a recount, as far as I know.
I think most of the problem is jurisdictions like California that want to make it far too easy to vote, which almost invariably makes it easy to introduce illegitimate ballots and makes it hard to count ballots from too many sources.
Here in Vallejo, CA we fill in bubbles on the ballots and they go immediately into optical readers which presumably give immediate totals. Then there are provisional ballots. And postal ones. How they handle missing or illegible postmarks I don't know.
What bothers me is that I got a numbered receipt for my ballot, but I can't check on what the votes on it purportedly were. So who knows what was recorded as being on them?
This is particularly good, but I’ve only read it once with one cup of coffee. I’m still hazy how 13 million votes evaporated. Weren’t there untold numbers of ballots with just President filled in? Shady.
I remember when Trump breezed through with Florida and Ohio and another big state in 2020 and Biden operatives assuring their people on camera “don’t worry, we have a path”.
The total votes cast in 2024 will turn out to be, when California finally is finished counting, very similar to the total votes cast in the massive turnout 2020 election.
Eight million voters who showed up for Biden in 2020 (already exhibiting Stage 4 dementia and campaigning from his basement) didn't show up for Harris. Trump gained a few hundred thousand votes.
Steve is in as much denial about the missing votes as he was about Biden's clear dementia in 2020. For some reason these are two of his big blind spots; or maybe he's trolling.
Biden famously won "educated" voters in 2020. Why hasn't there been a poll of them to see how many saw he was mentally impaired yet voted for him anyway (and why)? Why isn't anyone in the MSM talking about four years of his further decline (and all the drugs he took)? Don't they see it's self-discrediting to ignore their complicity?
Since California has a history of long delays in vote counting and early leads evaporating as new boxes of ballots are counted, how often does the winner turn out to be the Republican? Is it roughly 50 - 50 or more like one out of ten?
Since the Republicans are not competitive in most elections in California, there is no way to make a good comparison unless one limits the analysis to elections decided by 1% or less.
Young Kim, who sounds like the name of a rapper, but is actually a Christian Korean Republican lady politician in Orange County, CA, usually endures lengthy vote-counting ordeals in her runs for the House. She was declared the loser on November 18, 2018 then winner on November 13, 2020, winner on November 11, 2022, and this time winner the day after.
The essence of the "Too Big To Rig" slogan that has found so much 'rhetorical' success in 2024, depends on, IMO: (1.) comfortable R victory-margins, (2.) a baseline of slow vote-counting, or other strange counting-practices, and (3.) a threshold-level perception of Third Worldization-associated corruption.
.
Young Kim results [CA-39 & CA-40, Orange Co., Calif.]
- 2024: 55-45 win (announced: +1 day after election)
- 2022: 57-43 win (announced: +3 days after election)
- 2020: 51-49 win (announced: +10 days after election)
- 2018: 48-52 loss (announced: +12 days after election)
.
Same district [39th, Orange Co., Calif.] before Young Kim ran:
- 2016: 57-43 [Ed Royce, R] win (announced: +2? days after election)
- 2014: 69-31 [Ed Royce, R] win (announced: day after)
- 2012: 66-30 [Ed Royce, R] win (announced: day after)
.
When the margin is <5 points, for some reason at least ten days are needed. (None of these elections were 50.1-49.9 or the like.) This the "Too Big to Rig" principle in action. across all three of the above-identified planks: A former-White Safe-R seat that became something of a "swing district" in the Trump era, with Whites now a minority of voters, and in a Big-Blue state, where results in <5-point districts take 10+ days.
Young Kim's predecessor in the seat, Ed Royce (b.1951, Los Angeles), looks to be an interesting holdover from the days of White-California. In fact, a holdover from the 1970s-80s. Despite the broad Third Worldization of the state -- now long-ruled along sacred High-Low Coalition lines -- this old-style White Republican, Royce, "held on" in Orange County even deep in to the 2010s.
In the meantime, Orange County had tipped to losing its White-centric nature. In the 1990s, 65% White, 10% Asian, 2% Black, 23% Hispanic, but with noncitizens ineligible to vote the 1990s elections were completely dominated by "the White Vote." By 2020 it's down to 38% White [-27%-pts], 22% Asian [+12%-pts], 2% Black, 34% Hispanic. (Wiki has this for CA-40, Young Kim's district: "48.5% White; 25% Hispanic; 19% Asian; 2% Black; and 5% 'Two or more races'," making it modestly White than Orange County as a whole.)
With conditions untenable for White Republicans in 2018, key players behind the scenes talked Ed Royce into retiring. A familiar process, as had plodded through much of the state over the previous thirty years or so, finally came for Orange County. The seat was likely to flip "D" in that wave election, and did. A Nonwhite candidate was needed if there was to be any hope.
Into the seat, after a two-year gap after the 2018 loss, comes someone without any meaningful roots in the USA before the 1980s.
Young-oak Kim, b.1962; emig. from South Korea, 1975; one or two years in Guam; and at least three or four years in Hawaii; and takes a degree at University of Southern California in 1985. she marries fellow-Korean in 1986. Between about the mid-1990s and the late 2010s, Young Kim had worked as "community liaison director of Asian affairs" for Ed Royce.
The whole thing feels symbolic of ethnopolitical 'arc' in California, ca. 1970s to present -- with the entire USA not far behind.
People in Big-Blue areas have long gotten cynically "used to" this process, seeing it as (somehow) natural. (Needless to say, nothing like it is evident in South Korea even now in its rich-developed state.) Why should it be natural? Much of the Trump base says: "No"; but other parts of the Trump base say: "Yes!"
Young Kim: "We are all FOR legal immigration. Someone like me, who immigrated LEGALLY, is what we should be advocating... We [Republicans] should NOT block legal immigrants or be perceived as an anti-immigration party." -- Young Kim, January 2022, when asked about the Biden "border" illegal-immigration problem, in a longform KQED public-radio interview. She added that she was proud to have introduced legislation to help "Dreamers."
Among the White-European-origin 80% of Trump's voters, I think you'll see very few saying "We love immigrants! We want more immigrants!" For every one who does pop up there are many more willing to hold up "Mass Deportations Now" signs.
It's people who attach themselves to the emergent Trump-machine, and use the ancient art of flattery, who you'll see doing this. Ultimately the people doing this do use the levers of power (agenda-setting / narrative-control, propaganda, shaming, ridicule, and other things from bag-of-tricks of various sorts of ancient enemies of Western openness and fair-play). And Trump's "big beautiful door in the big beautiful wall"-type lines reflect that. He really, really wants people to kind of kowtow to him and, if they do, he will tend to be flexible IMO.
One answer to your good question (on an example of "any part of the Trump base saying 'Yes' to more immigration"): Is House member Young Kim a part of the "Trump base" or not? (see her quotes at the bottom of the earlier comment).
If Young Kim is part of the Trump base, then I say to those celebrating a supposed glorious multi-racial Trump-"caudillo" coalition: take warning; be careful what you wish for.
I would say Kim is too much of a special case to be a part of Trump's "base", as I understand the term. The elements of the BASE are CATEGORIES which point to members being likely Trump voters. What's her caregory?
Great piece! But how does the fact that Trump ran better in Philadelphia in 2020 than 2016 mean it was on the up and up? If you are going to steal an election you only need enough votes for a majority in the present, whether this is more or fewer than previously.
People need to be able to think in terms of percentage and turnout. Trump gets a couple of percent more in 2020 but the turnout is much higher, the net result is Trump was further behind in Philadelphia.
It can be easy to confuse in memory logical forecasts of what would make sense if it happens -- Joe from Delaware knows a guy who knows a guy in Philadelphia who can make up votes -- with what actually did happen: Philadelphia in 2020 turned out to be a disappointing year for Democrats.
In general, what happened is that Biden did really well relative to history and other objective factors in traditionally honest suburbs in non-competitive Red and Blue states and less well in Usual Suspect urban machine counties.
Or the idea was----Trump's team will be keeping an eye on Philly's votes, so let's bluff there and put the rigged votes somewhere else and then claim Trump is "fighting against democracy" when he realizes he needs to audit somewhere else a week later.
The vote by mail thing favors Democrats -- a lot. What they do is register everyone whether they asked to be registered or not, then they mass-print ballots and send them everywhere.
I live in Washington state - a democrat-controlled state with mail-in voting - and each year I receive ballots in my mailbox for people who don't live at my place.
If I filled them out then forged some random signature I bet nine times out of ten (probably more) the votes would be counted.
I also saw a guy who was getting a driver's license with a Mexican birth certificate asked whether he wanted to register to vote. I don't think he understood the question, so he probably got registered.
They are so enthusiastic here about registering non-citizens that immigration lawyers are begging them to stop, because it puts their clients in legal jeopardy:
I'm not saying that there's straight-up organized voter fraud (although there may be), but that when you inundate people with ballots and then put Democrats in charge of counting them it's kind of a "nature taking it's course" situation.
What difference does this make in Washington? Well, compared to a traditional election day vote in person election, I'd say around 3-5%, which is very significant.
"In general, what happened is that Biden did really well relative to history and other objective factors in traditionally honest suburbs in non-competitive Red and Blue states and less well in Usual Suspect urban machine counties."
So where is the analysis behind this claim?
Also, talk to me about Detroit rather than Philadelphia.
Steve's logic was cited to a 2020 comment at Unz.com by the usually reliable commenter "ic1000". ic1000's contention was that since Trump votes increased more in Philadelphia than in any rural county, that meant that the Pennsylvania vote must have been clean, since the Dems would have cheated in Philly rather than rural, heavy R, counties.
Unfortunately, there are at least two problems with this.
1) [Most embarrassingly] The "per capita" problem. Just because more absolute votes swung toward Trump in densely populated Philly than in any sparsely populated rural county, does not mean that Philly's tally was at least as legitimate as any rural county. You would have to compare percentages to make that claim. For whatever reason, ic1000 didn't.
2) There's no reason, especially with mail-in ballots, that the fraud has to be confined to Philly. Fraudsters may have simply decided to deploy some of their 'spare' ballots from the city center, where they've had embarrassingly overstuffed ballot boxes in the past, to inner-ring suburbs, where the population is still large enough to camouflage fraud but the registration margins aren't already maxed out.
Professional vote riggers can think too, so they don't always do the most obvious or convenient thing. Part of their project is to keep things looking plausible. Steve pre-emptively derides this as a "notion that the Democrats concoct brilliant plans to fool Steve Sailer", but riggers aren't trying to fool Steve Sailer, whom they've never heard of, they're trying to fool everyone else, and they generally succeed. Mass mail-in ballots made it even easier by presenting unprecedented precinct-hopping opportunities.
Note that in 2024, Trump's share of the vote in major cities increased very sharply, say 10 - 12 percentage points, or about half the gap. This was scoring big gains off a low starting point. So he had no doubt bigger percentage gains in the cities than outside them. Democrat overall vote totals in the election dropped sharply from 2020, which could either be less cheating or loss of enthusiasm, likely some of each.
And then the Democrats did the same thing in California and Utah and Massachusetts just for grins?
What happened is that Trump did pretty well in the swing states of 2020, almost getting 3 states he would have needed for a 269-269 tie, while doing pretty bad in the noncompetitive states. And even in the swing states, Biden tended to do better relativistically in the traditionally more honest white suburbs than in the historically dubious urban machine counties.
That all seems pretty inefficient of the Democratic string-pullers in 2020.
A simpler explanation would be that 2020, a pretty weird year as you may recall, saw a fairly large nationwide movement of voters in favor of Democrats. Trump almost got lucky enough to push the election into the House of Representatives, but not quite.
In the notorious Machine city where I used to live, the precinct captains and so on would cheat even when they didn't need to just to stay in practice, or more likely to impress their superiors so they could move up in the patronage network. They're not concerned with national efficiency, they're concerned with repping themselves in the state or city machine. Maybe the same thing happens in California and Utah and Massachusetts. I don't know much about Utah, but Massachusetts is certainly no stranger to ethnic Machine politics, and the benefit of a solid Machine game is playing out in California's 45th District as we speak.
In 2020, the "string-pullers" had unprecedented means, motive, and opportunity to sway elections at all levels and in all jurisdictions. Why wouldn't they take it? It's what they do.
Trump always runs a bit of a skinflint campaign (as you once amusingly characterized it IIRC), focusing on the gettable swing states, while abandoning the deep blues and deep reds to fate. That can result in an apparent shift in historically honest suburbs and deep color states (Cali, Utah, Mass) under the pressure of nationwide media assault (a virtual leftwing monopoly). Both things can be true at the same time: large 'secular' trends, but also cheating to change elections. The existence of one doesn't invalidate the other. The reason for 2020's aberrantly high vote count could be both heightened political fanaticism and mass ballot fabrication. Certainly none of the events from the early morning vote counting interruptions onward inspired any confidence that the result would reflect the voters' will purely.
"In 2020, the "string-pullers" had unprecedented means, motive, and opportunity to sway elections"
That is definitely true. I've pointed out that if the baseline is, say, 0.5% invalid votes that get counted, and in 2020 this rose to 1.5%, that's actually a huge difference which, if it all or almost all "went one way," swayed the election.
Even absent any sort of 'overt' cheating at all, mass rule-changes ahead of one election are a bad thing. When strange and anomalous results follow mass rule-changes and a hyped-up atmosphere of intense propaganda and martial-law-like conditions (the lockdowns), it's a "red flag" as some like to say. (All those bellwether counties, with a century of right-call, all have the asterisk of getting it wrong only once: 2020!)
The D's have for a while now been pushing this "we win the popular vote" idea to (1) try to get people to get rid of the electoral college; and (2) try to undermine the R president. Trump taking it this time was a big blow to them on that talking point.
Removing the Electoral College massively increases the rewards for cheating (a Dem forte). In the EC system, no matter how many fake votes you generate in one state, you can't win more than that one state. But with a national popular vote, the infinite supply of fake votes producible in blue machine cities can tip every election your way forever. Dems want that.
Thank you. This is part of my point to counter Steve on this issue. The D's in the deep blue states throw in a bunch of extra ballots to push their guy ahead in the popular vote and no one checks because its an uncontested/safe seat. Given that D's are the Urban Party, they can make up a lot more votes in a city that don't look *too* crazy than they could if they were the R Rural Party.
And then the professional vote riggers made up Biden votes in a whole bunch of states where their strenuous and legally risky efforts couldn't possibly affect the Electoral College results just to further fool statistically inclined analysts like myself.
Seriously, there is very little evidence that the Democrats stole more votes in 2020 in places where it would benefit them more than anywhere else. You wind up having to argue that those diabolically clever and diligent Democrats fooled analysts like me by stealing votes at random all across the country so that the results wouldn't look any different than if there was a broadly pro-Democratic swing in 2020, just as there were nation-wide pro-Republican swings in 2016 and 2024.
This country has lots of demonstrably statistically numerate people. Consider baseball analysts. How many of them were persuaded that there is any sort of pattern in the results indicative of a steal? For example, baseball analytical pioneer Bill James is obviously a lifelong Republican. Did he holler that the data showed the Democrats were clearly stealing the election? Nate Silver is a political centrist and a former professional baseball analyst. He knows a lot about voting.
My impression is that the evidence of a stolen 2020 was more convincing to the hot video babes with no track record of statistical prowess than it was to the homely nerds whose baseball analyses have been worth paying for.
This is right up there with your long-term defense as Biden actually being in charge and not having dementia --right up until his first debate, when you haven't mentioned it since. This is a similar blind spot.
The D's have for a while now very much tried to claim popular vote victories to delegitimize R presidents who win but get fewer votes. They want to make it seem like they are inevitable and that the yucky electoral college should be removed and then the "real American vote" will be heard. And the more votes they can come up with for a D candidate the bigger his "mandate" is in his district. And, as someone else has pointed out, the average guy on the ground rigging it just wants to make sure he does it right so will overcompensate to make sure his bosses don't get angry if he gets the number too low.
This isn't hard. They run up the score for various reasons. 2020 was an extreme example when they weren't just seeking the above reasons but because they feared Trump so much they needed to invent millions of extra votes just to pull Dementia Joe across the finish line and make it seem like the people hated Trump.
So the Democrats decided in 2016: let's cheat, but not so much that we actually win, but just enough to score a moral victory by winning the [rigged] popular vote.
Everyone in the Deep State was floored Trump won; they relied on bad polls and ignored the people, and their desperate Russia hoax/impeachment hoaxe/send in the Antifa rioters stuff shows their shocked panic. Maxine Waters was on Morning Joe talking about impeaching Trump in January 2016, ffs.
But those D's in the safe states were going to run up the score no matter what. Why is it hard to believe some D's in CA and other D states would want to make sure their totals for the First Woman President to be high? Simply because the swing state D's blew their job doesn't mean the safe state ones did, and the latter had the luxury of a safe win they could pad without too much scrutiny.
> "Seriously, there is very little evidence that the Democrats stole more votes in 2020 in places where it would benefit them more than anywhere else."
If you say so, but even if that is true, recall that Dems had to steal very few votes by historical ("one or two percent") standards to change the 2020 election: key swing state margins were sub-1%. So the steal doesn't have to be huge to be true.*
That doesn't mean that there wasn't also other cheating elsewhere. 2020 wasn't just the Presidential election. There were elections in every jurisdiction, often with a lot at stake. Some amount of cheating undoubtedly occurred in those cases too. How much, I don't know. I do know the Democratic Party commands an impressive roster of "undead" votes. Believing that they wouldn't have employed these in 2020, when there was an exceptional opportunity to do so, strikes me as a little naive.
> "those diabolically clever and diligent Democrats fooled analysts like me by stealing votes at random all across the country"
A lot of cheating by a lot of people in a lot of places for a lot of purposes often does at a distance indeed look like randomness. I don't claim to know what is happening in every district. But as I've said, the Dems enjoy the benefit of a significant tranche of ghost votes. They get used even when they are not strictly needed, both to maintain their viability and for local operatives to demonstrate on.
Maybe there was also a broadly pro-Democratic swing in 2020, but if so, it was a swing that swung just enough to change the Presidential election on a few thousand votes counted in obscure circumstances. That can happen legitimately, but given the corrupt sloppiness of so many American elections, we can't really know. And, as I keep saying, a genuine Democrat swing is not mutually exclusive with Democrat cheating.
> "Consider baseball analysts. How many of them were persuaded that there is any sort of pattern in the results indicative of a steal?"
I dunno. Other than you, I've taken no interest in them.
> "Nate Silver is a political centrist and a former professional baseball analyst. He knows a lot about voting."
Isn't he that guy who keeps making wrong predictions?
> "the evidence of a stolen 2020 was more convincing to the hot video babes with no track record of statistical prowess than it was to the homely nerds whose baseball analyses have been worth paying for."
I don't have a TV, so I don't know what the hot video babes are saying. But I also don't pay for any baseball analysis, so I don't know what the homely nerds are saying either. Do the nerds find notoriously lazy urban precincts with >100% election turnout to be "a pattern"? Seems like they could.
---------
* The 2020 Presidential stealing appears to have taken place heavily in the hours and days just after the election, i.e., after they knew how many GOP votes they had to overcome, so the vote riggers' purpose changes from "demonstrate my power" to "just enough to win", in the same way that other 'contested' elections have a habit of going from a convincing GOP win to the Democrat squeaking in by a few votes. (See California 45 right now, or Al Franken in 2008, or Washington's Governorship in 2004, or anything involving Marc Elias.)
> ic1000's contention was that since Trump votes increased more in Philadelphia than in any rural county, that meant that the Pennsylvania vote must have been clean, since the Dems would have cheated in Philly rather than rural, heavy R, counties.
Those observations and that analysis were by Steve McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining engineer who is sometimes active on Twitter (and well worth following). That thread:
McIntyre's signal contribution to public discourse is his blog Climate Audit, which in the 2000s and early 2010s was the focal point for discussion of recent advances in paleoclimatology. More exactly, the focus of skepticism and non-Consensus analysis of the Climate Alarmists' scientific work on the climate of past centuries. Which is interesting for a few reasons.
1. The Alarmists (>95% of scientists in the field; their self-description) think the post-Ice-Age temperature record is important because their methods show a generally cool and stable climate, in contrast to post-1950 Anthropogenic Global Warming.
2. McIntyre is numerate, adept with statistics, and detail-oriented. He has claimed (convincingly IMO) that most of the foundational peer-reviewed articles of paleoclimatology are not worth the paper they were printed on. They are full of errors, ranging from bad arithmetic to statistical malpractice. And, surprisingly, all these errors work in favor of the Alarmist perspective.
3. The climate community put aside their egos to welcome this outsider's technically-astute and informed critiques. The flawed papers were corrected in some cases and retracted in others. What started as a debacle for paleoclimatology ended up strengthening the rigor and accuracy of this corner of the scientific world.
3a. If you took my point (3) immediately prior at face value, you didn't notice the [sarc] and [/sarc] tags, or are unfamiliar with how the politicized-science sausage is made. Perhaps both.
4. In the present case, McIntyre dug for data on Trump's and Biden's performances in Pennsylvania's relatively honest suburban/rural areas, and in its corruption-prone Machine cities. Perhaps his analysis didn't match his initial expectations, but he tweeted it out anyway.
5. To restate the obvious, the existence of one factor doesn't preclude the existence of others. I think it does suggest that the level of fraud in 2020 Philadelphia (and Pittsburgh) was more modest than most Stolen Election partisans seem to believe.
McIntyre pulled data from Pennsylvania and presented his analysis of it. Detroit is in Michigan.
> If it was done with fake absentee ballots they could ostensibly be from anywhere.
Each fake absentee ballot would seemingly have been filled out by a seemingly-legit voter, who actually wasn't (e.g. dead, moved away, non-citizen, ghosting a registrant who never votes). The phony absentee ballot comes with an address (real or imagined) within the precinct where the vote is tallied. So you'd have to explain what you mean by "anywhere."
Now do Detroit. Sailer makes expansive claims that cannot rest only on the work McIntyre did in Pennsylvania.
In DETROIT (which I paid a bit of attention to, unlike other places, because the video of vans arriving in the wee hours after the observers were sent home caught my eye) the ballots came to the counting site from the office of the (State?) election official allegedly "pre-verified" (without any observers present) and so, AFAIK did not have with them any enclosing envelopes with identifying information. So the ballots counted (who knows how many times each) could AFAIK have been attributed to any location in Michigan. No examination of what had happened took place afterwards because the relevant court dismissed the suits that were filed without any actions taken so it is not in evidence that any enclosing envelopes ever existed. Does that clarify "anywhere" for you?
When the observers were sent home based on the claim that the counting was over Trump was substantially ahead. Next morning Biden had won Michigan. Hmmm....
His time series of swing-state vote counts are particularly notable (= suspicious). (FWIW, I find his work impressive but not totally persuasive; there are flaws.).
For 2020, Jeff worked with data that Edison supplied to the NYT. He says that, so far, analogous data for 2024 are "unavailable."
The Democrats are living in a Smiths song:
How can they look into my eyes
And still they don't believe me?
How can they hear me say those words
Still they don't believe me?
And if they don't believe me now
Will they ever believe me?
And if they don't believe me now
Will they ever, they ever believe me?
Oh, oh, oh, oh
“With a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends,” Daley had assured Kennedy before the AP had pushed out the count, “you’re going to carry Illinois.”
Uh, e.g. Sam Giancana, Steve. The mob was "assisting" with the counting of IL ballots in 60.
"By the way, the above logic is why I quickly lost interest in the Republicans’ second theory of how Biden stole the 2020 election."
Ok, what's the first theory of how the 20 election was stolen? Would it have to do with the over abundance of the mail-in ballots? Example: with a straight face, one is expected to believe that Biden had ca.5-10 million additional total votes than did Barack Obama in either 08 or 12? Or Hillary in 16?
One can notice, that the mail in ballots (obviously due to a lack of COVID in 24, as 20 was a unique experience on how the virus directly affected many things regarding life in the US, including the election), were a bit over done.
Perhaps: Harris carried around the same amount of votes in 24, that Biden WOULD have carried in 20, had there been no COVID, and thus a smaller percentage of the total votes due to mail in ballots?
Rather than blame the voting machines, perhaps it's time to place the responsibility on overabundance of mail in ballots, which, surprise, surprise, wasn't a major factor in 24. Can't imagine why they weren't this time around.
And...mail in ballots can be counted in various ways, by all sorts of various people.
Perhaps a Federal law on election process would help reduce the charges of fraud, etc. : An individual state's total mail in ballots shall not exceed 1% of the individual state's population in any given election year.
But 20 was a unique election, due in no small part to COVID. If no COVID, perhaps no elected Biden, which he won in no small part due to the overabundance of mail in ballots.
Yeah that theory.
True, the difference from 1960 is the mail-in ballots. A fraudster can use any address on the ballot, even a traditionally honest upscale suburb.
Don't forget Joe Kennedy & the Daley & Mob connections.
15 million extra voters magically appeared in 2020 that didn't appear in 2012 or 2016 and magically disappeared in 2024. And all their votes came in at 3am EST!
Man, what are the odds?! Sure was lucky for Dementia Joe!
It's almost as if some people change their minds from 2016 to 2020 to 2024.
See Halperin's 2WAY for actual voter testimonials showing exactly this trend and the (largely rational) thinking behind such unexpected voting behavior.
One data point: to believe Biden won fair and square, we have to believe he got *more* black votes and a higher percentage of the black vote than Obama did in either 2008 or 2012.
That doesn't even pass the smell test.
-- Black vote, absolute and relative, by year --
From the Edison Research exit polls for 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. (Edison Research is the firm used by most major media in their quoted exit polls):
***
[2000]
2000: Blacks at 10.5% of voters; 90% for Gore, 8% for G. W. Bush Jr. [NYT]. With 105.4 million votes counted in 2000, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2000:
- 11.1 million total Black votes in 2000
- - 10.0 million total Black votes for Gore
- - 0.9 million total Black votes for Bush
- - 0.1 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2000, absolute: 9.1 million votes)
***
[2004]
2004: Blacks at 11% of voters; 88% for Kerry, 11% for G. W. Bush Jr. With million votes counted in 2004, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2004:
- 13.5 million total Black votes in 2004
- - 11.9 million total Black votes for Kerry
- - 1.5 million total Black votes for Bush
- - 0.1 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2004, absolute: 10.4 million votes)
***
[2008]
2008: Blacks at 13% of voters; 95% for Obama, 4% for McCain (Mr. Invade-Invite). With 131.3 million votes counted in 2008, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2008:
- 17.1 million total Black votes in 2008
- - 16.2 million total Black votes for Obama
- - 0.7 million total Black votes for Mr. Invade-Invite
- - <0.2 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2008, absolute: 15.5 million votes)
***
[2012]
2012: Blacks at 13% of voters; 93% for Obama, 6% for Romney. With 129.1 million votes counted in 2020, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2012:
- 16.8 million total Black votes in 2012
- - 15.6 million total Black votes for Obama
- - 1.0 million total Black votes for Romney
- - <0.2 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2012, absolute: 14.6 million votes)
***
[2016]
2016: Blacks at 12% of voters; 89% for Hillary, 8% for Trump. With 136.7 million votes counted in 20216, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2016:
- 16.4 million total Black votes in 2016
- - 14.6 million total Black votes for Hillary
- - 1.3 million total Black votes for Trump
- - 0.5 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2016, absolute: 13.3 million votes)
***
[2020]
2020: Blacks at 13% of voters, 87% for Biden, 12% for Trump. With 158.4 million votes counted in 2020, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2020:
- 20.6 million total Black votes in 2020
- - 17.9 million total Black votes for Biden
- - 2.5 million total Black votes for Trump
- - 0.2 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2020, absolute: 15.4 million votes)
(The Black absolute margins in 2020 and 2008 are equal.)
***
[2024]
2024: Blacks at 11% of voters; 85% for Kamala the Kackler, 13% for Trump. With million votes counted in 20216, a straight-line conversion yields:
Absolute vote-totals, 2024, extrapolating to final from 98%-reporting results:
- ca. 17.2 million total Black votes in 2024
- -14.6 million total Black votes for Kamala
- - 2.2 million total Black votes for Trump
- - 0.3 million total Black votes for others
(Black D vote-margin, 2024, absolute: 12.4 million votes)
***
2000 to 2016: When a Black presidential candidate is on the ballot (n=2), Blacks give a +15-million vote margin for him. When it's a non-Black D is the candidate (n=4), it's circa +11 million (+/- 2 million).
The number of voting-eligible Blacks in 2020 was not much different than 2008. But in 2020, it'd be bit higher. Adjusting slightly upward to compensate, Biden-2020 did BETTER than Obama-2008 in terms of ratio+turnout: that is, in a calculation of the absolute number of Blacks said to have actually cast a vote for Obama vs. Biden, Biden wins.
(That's taking these numbers as correct for sake of argument (in reality, they are subject to modest error-bars as they are based on exit polls.)
Is it possible that the same absolute-number of Blacks sought to vote for Biden-2020 as Obama-2008? And that a few million more Blacks voted Biden-2020 as Hillary-2016 and Kamala-2024? Was Biden so appealing to Blacks? How? Why?
There are many alternative explanations to the implausible "Biden was as appealing as Obama to Blacks." These explanations are not limited to Blacks but likely apply to them more than any other large group.
The alt-explanations for these numbers involve grey areas of cheating or unethical behavior, including the practice known as "ballot harvesting." And of course the "mail-in voting" changes that were dumped on the USA in 2020.
If anyone reading this is naive enough to assume that no Black person would cut a few corners on "ballot harvesting" and similar activities, to goose up the numbers a bit for their side, I say: you just don't know Blacks, you have likely never lived among them to any meaningful degree, you have never observed their baseline attitudes towards such rules and norms.
"Is it possible that the same absolute-number of Blacks sought to vote for Biden-2020 as Obama-2008? And that a few million more Blacks voted Biden-2020 as Hillary-2016 and Kamala-2024? Was Biden so appealing to Blacks? How? Why?"
1. Biden was Obama's vice president and quite liked by blacks, their votes allowed him to win the primary in the first place
2. 2020 was an election with record turnout. People were forced to stay at home and politics became their 'entertainment' and life. Voting also became easier than ever due to many states sending out universal mail-in ballots, but only Democrats promoted using them.
3. 2020 was the year when George Floyd died and was promoted by the mainstream media as a martyr, and BLM (which has the support of the large majority of Black people) peaked
The "Obama vs. Biden" Black-voting question is hypothetical, based on all-population voting preferences. Of a random selection of a hundred Blacks, measuring preference plus (what is called) "enthusiasm" (turnout), Obama > Biden seems obvious. If Biden > Obama is an observed result, something strange has happened in the mechanics of the system at least.
Your explanation (1.) cannot stand alone as it suggests Biden was more popular with Blacks than was Obama, which is not realistic. The explanation must depend on your (2.) and (3.)
Your (2.) is actually three separate points being conflated, I think: (2a.) "politics as entertainment"; (2b.) the media-enforced social atmosphere of moral-panic related to a flu-virus (and lockdowns), and to your (3.), the long-promoted conspiracy theory of White Racism; (2c.) mass rule changes with voting, including unprecedented mass mail-in balloting.
Now, (2b.) and (3.) must have influenced (2c.) into directions not previously seen. Most often in a grey area with what people would call cheating. A lot of this discussion seems implicitly about the definition of "cheating"; but the simple, straight-on question of whether more Blacks would, "all else equal," vote for Biden over Obama does seem valid: It's not realistic and something else is going.
Those numbers from ZeroHedge are going to be off by nearly an order of magnitude. They produced that bogus graph when California, Oregon, and Washington still hadn't counted the vast majority of their ballots, which is exactly the problem that Mr Sailer is pointing out in this piece. Since they are safely blue states, however, it didn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out the Democrat was going to win their EVs regardless of how few of their votes were counted on Election Day.
Take a look at the current results from AP
https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/?office=P
As of Sunday night, Trump has roughly 76.4 million votes. Harris has about 73.7. California has about 7% of its votes to count, and a smattering of other states (NY, NJ, CO, UT) are between 95% and 98%. Trump should wind up with about 77.5 million and Harris 74.5 million when everybody gets done counting. That'll be a total of 152 million, or only 3 million less than the roughly 155 million votes Biden (81 million) and Trump (74 million) got in 2020.
The AP?
Nitpicking cites is a sign of weakness.
lol. "How dare you question Pravda's statistics, no matter how many times they've lied in the past!"
And you lose, Soros-boy.
INsults is also a sign of weakness. It means that one knows that the facts or arguments are not strong such as still arguing that there are 15 million fewer votes.
Half a million fewer people voted in New York state in 2024 versus 2020. Yet, no one ever claim that the Democrats stole votes in New York in 2020.
lol. "Pravda is never wrong, comrades. Even when it is!"
Trump is current at 50.1% of the vote with around 2% still to count. Harris currently has 73.7 million votes compared to a final number of 81.2. Trump went from 74.2 in 2020 to 76.5. So there are not 15 million missing votes and turnout is not the same every year.
lmao. "Trust me, comrade, Mr. Soros's paid-for numbers say nothing happened!"
You have no credibility, little one. And therefore neither do your numbers.
Learn to google the numbers. Insults and stupid memes are signs of weakness.
rofl. No credibility Soros-repeater says what?
I'm not sure who the official propounder of the Republicans' "initial theory" and "second theory" of "how Joe Biden stole the 2020 election" is, and I'm not sure I've ever heard theories of 2020 vote fraud enumerated in any official order. What I have heard is a lot data-free shrieking about "conspiracy theories", "election denial", and "deboooonked!". That said, Steve's conspiracy theory of election fraud denial refreshingly does use data, and for this we are grateful.
Steve acknowledges that vote fraud does happen and mentions two instances: the 1960 Presidential election and the 1982 Illinois gubernatorial election. It's worth noting that we only know about these two instances because of flukes: the former because Ted White imprudently included it (later excised) in his book, and the latter because the naive but willful candidate insisted on a recount, inadvertently exposing some of his own party's fraud to prosecution by the Federal executive branch headed by the other party. (The latter scenario nearly played out again in Michigan following the 2016 presidential upset, but Dems managed to shut it down before it became too embarrassing.) Said another way, on the rare occasions that a stone is overturned and we get to see what is underneath, it’s crawling with fraud.
In reality, of course, a certain amount of fraud is happening everywhere all the time. Don’t take my word for it, ask a pro: https://nypost.com/2020/08/29/political-insider-explains-voter-fraud-with-mail-in-ballots/
Ted White concedes, as Steve quoted, that back in the more genteel late 20th century, with fewer mail-in ballots, one can steal “one or two percent of the vote”. Today we can watch in real time as 4.2% of the vote is stolen in California’s US Rep District 45. In 2020 there were unprecedented, untraceable, and unauditable mail-in ballots, unprecedented election “fortification”, unprecedented interruptions in vote counting, unprecedented evictions of one side’s poll watchers from the polls, and several days of counting and recounting in which to make mischief. Under those circumstances, what percent of the vote do you think could be ... redistributed?
Well, it doesn’t matter whether you choose 1%, 2%, 4%, or some higher number for 2020, because Biden's Electoral College majority depended on 0.3%, 0.6%, and 0.2% (a total of 42,918 votes) in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia respectively. How difficult do you think it was for the hardworking party professionals to fraud those tiny margins? If you’ve already conceded Ted White’s lowball 1% fraud, you’ve already conceded away the legitimacy of Biden’s Electoral College majority.
The surprise in 2020 wasn’t that there might have been 42,918 fraud votes; it was that it took so many days to generate them. Probably they didn’t expect so many legitimate votes for Trump. So that was a lot to overcome for the hardworking election party professionals.
You write that some kind of limited election-fraud investigation "played out in Michigan following the 2016 presidential upset, but Dems managed to shut it down before it became too embarrassing" for them because, you suggest, some of their own operatives would've landed in legal trouble alal Sailer's 1982 anecdote.
I hadn't ever heard this on Michigan-2016 (or, if I did, I forgot it promptly). What's a good source?
Here's an article from the Detroit News, where they tried to learn something about what the recount would have found had it continued:
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2016/12/12/records-many-votes-detroits-precincts/95363314/
Money quote:
"The problems were the worst in Detroit , where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes."
In other words, most of Detroit's (the bluest and most corrupt part of Michigan) ballot boxes had been tampered with and could not legitimately be recounted. Of the boxes with intact seals, most of those had more votes in them than their precincts had voters (i.e., the ballot boxes had been stuffed beyond 100%). Take that Saddam Hussein! 99.9%? Piker! Detroit blows you out of the electoral water! Maybe the Arabs whose invasion of Michigan is ongoing can export Democracy to Detroit as part of their mission... .
So, tampered records, overstuffed ballot boxes, 107% 'turnouts' ... the State, the Feds, and the national media all investigated this obvious and flagrant case of mass vote fraud, right?
Hahahahahahahaha
No way. They all declared that if you question elections, you are conspiracy theorist and probably a domestic extremist.
As a completely unrelated matter, for some reason government and media credibility polls keep plummeting, but nobody knows why.
Ball's in your court Steve.
Speaking of Michigan, in January I had calculated some figures for urban/suburban Oakland County (next to Detroit/Wayne County).
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-13th-day-of-christmas/#comment-6350746
For the 2020 election, between 102% and 106% of eligible county residents had registered to vote (75% of registered names cast a vote for President).
For November 2024, a slightly higher fraction of eligible residents were registered (103%-107%?). I'll post the numbers and sources once I run them.
So despite the catcalls about President Biden's debilities, public-spirited civic pride grew during his Administration. At least in this county.
Trump's nominating House members as Cabinet officials is rather stupid. Gaetz has already resigned so his seat will be vacant for a few months. Waltz and Stefanik will be surrendering their seats which will become vacant. The Republicans might not have a majority to name a Speaker in January. What a blockhead.
I believe Waltz and Gaetz are both Safe-R seats.. They'll keep these seats unless the R-team brain-trust runs someone as bad as Kamala. (Like that Black candidate for North Carolina governor in 2024.)
We'll keep all the seats for sure but the seats will be empty until the early Spring.
By Florida law vacant seats have to be filled within about 60 days which is likely why Gaetz resigned immediately. While there is some discussion about how other deadlines, such as the processing of new absentee ballot requests and military ballots, will impact the process, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think the seats will be filled by March.
Considering where Stefanik is going, she can stay in the House until she's replaced and it'll be no great loss.
Gaetz must have resigned his U.S. House seat specifically in consultation with Peaker Mike Johnson and his inner circle of R-teamers nervous about keeping their majority (filling the seat in 60 days).
Gaetz resignation on Nov. 13 means the seat fill be re-filled by a loyal R-teamer from somewhere down there by Jan. 13, 2025, and nothing can be done by D-teamers or anyone else to prevent it. Meanwhile, the new House is sworn in Jan. 1, 2025. If it turns out that dumps of 3am mystery-ballots make the total House down low enough that one seat can matter, and if for some reason that Gaetz seat is empty until the end of that 60-day window, it'd only be a brief delay for the R-team to elect their Speaker.
The alternative theory that he resigned SOLELY to avoid an ethics report release, like a criminal dodging some penalty on a technicality and fleeing shouting saying "the real with Speaker Johnson and the security of the R-team's majority" -- is not realistic. A cartoon-version of reality.
I don't see how Biden got to 81 million votes in 2020 without mail-in games. I would guess about two million mail-ins were corrupt. But still Biden won in 2020 and Trump was fired. Another truth is that millions of moderates, mostly women, voted for Biden in 2020 who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Mrs. Clinton turns off a lot of women who aren't into feminist doctrine.
As a piece of evidence, Maryland is not a state that Democrats had to cheat in to win. Talbot County of Maryland's Eastern Shore has been a very Republican County for decades. For the first time since Johnson's 1964 landslide, Talbot County narrowly went for Biden in 2020. Talbot County has a lot of wealth and lots of old, monied grannies living in places like Oxford, Easton, Trappe and St. Michaels. They fired the Orange Man in 2020.
I would like to ask our host how to explain that Trump won 19 of the 20 bellweather counties yet still lost. Yet I do think Biden won at least four million more votes than Trump in 2020.
I'd like to ask Derek Leaberry how Trump won in 2016 without the famous bellwether of Maine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Maine_goes,_so_goes_the_nation
I wrote an article in October 2000 about how Delaware was a near perfect bellwether state. I even got the great historian David Hackett Fischer ("Albion's Seed") to give me quotes explaining the Deep Roots of Delaware being the best bellwhether state. I was really proud of the article.
But since then Delaware has gone solid blue and been wrong 4 times in 7 elections.
Things change.
Trump, for example, is not a conventional GOP candidate so old rules of thumb apply less to him.
After the anti-war, anti-corporate left got purged from the D's after Obama's election, and DC's spread metastasized past the district's borders and into the neighboring states, Delaware voting more D was inevitable. Wilmington is the headquarters of a lot of corporate America that made money off the endless wars, Biden was VP, and Delaware voted more urban as it got a new city (DC) spreading into it.
I remember in about 2011 or 2012 visiting a law office that was in MD just across the border from DC, and was on the subway line. The entire place was jumping with new office buildings. The lawyer who ran the office said when he first rented the space his building in 2000-2001 was the only one around and he was basically in the woods alone. Now he tons of options for buildings to move into.
Delaware isn't on the DC subway like Maryland or Virginia is, but its within commuting distance from Delaware, as Biden made famous as a younger man by riding Amtrak in to DC during the week. Urban sprawl and DC swamp cash makes people vote blue.
The school busing fall-out in New Castle County(Wilmington) slowly changed the demographics of Delaware. Funny, Delaware is generally culturally conservative in its two southern counties, little different from Maryland's Eastern Shore. But New Castle has moved left and overwhelms Kent and Sussex Counties.
By the way, I believe you are writing about the large office complexes near the New Carrollton subway stop. That part of Prince George's County used to be middle-class and white in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Not any more.
Franklin Roosevelt thought the same in 1936. So did Alf Landon.
In 2016, Pennsylvania was called for Trump early in the night. At that point I was fairly sure he was going to win the presidency.
In 2020, Fox called Arizona for Biden approximately 1.5 seconds after the polls closed there. They only managed to call Arizona days after the election this year.
Also in 2020, Philadelphia, for the first time in history, closed down their vote count in the middle of the night following the election. It was at that point that I figured the fix was in.
I’m very glad that you’ve chosen to address your reasons for confidence in the 2020 result, but I’m a long way from convinced, myself.
I’m a little surprised that names are already being floated for the democrats in ‘28. I was assured that Trump would be implementing a fascist regime and that we needn’t concern ourselves with elections going forward. Strange.
-- Remembering the Arizona "forensic vote audit" of 2021 --
Some will remember that an intense "forensic" vote-audit was conducted for Maricopa County, Arizona, in 2021, regarding its 2020 presidential votes. The audit had some interesting results, not proving "fraud" but definitely proving laxness of standards which plausibly could have tipped the state or Arizona.
The Arizona Audit story: after the unpleasantness of 2020, lots of people had no confidence Arizona's electoral votes in 2020 were awarded legally or based on legal votes. An independent firm was brought in to conduct a "forensic audit," which they did over several months in 2021 after being granted access to the ballots and all related material. The results could not change anything but, the idea was, it would help election security (and confidence).
The Arizona Audit team subject each and every ballot to scrutiny, as if each were a mini legal case to be settled based on evidence. This was done at the request of the Arizona state legislature (I believe). Most U.S. media didn't cover it, except the likes of One America News Network.
I wrote about the Arizona Audit on Peak Stupidity when they released the results, in September 2021:
https://peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=2054
Ultra-thin summary of the findings:
There were 57,000+ problematic votes cast and counted in Maricopa County in 2020. This was 2.75% of votes cast an dcounted. As I wrote at the time: "These flagged votes are all at least clearly in a grey area of legality and some even into a black area of 'should have been rejected'." But as we know, standards were relaxed in 2020 across the board.
The Biden margin-of-victory in the county was 2.2%. The questionable/suspect/arguable votes totalled 2.75%. Therefore, if 4 in 5 of the problematic ballots were for Biden, the county would have tipped to Trump. With Maricopa tipping the Trump, the entire state would likely easily tip to Trump.
The Maricopa County illegal-plus-questionable-ballot total was found to be 57,000. The certified statewide margin was: 10,5000 votes. So, holding all else equal, if the Maricopa illegal-and-questionable ballots had broken only 60:40 for Biden, or so, and all had been rejected and not counted in 2020, Trump would've won the state
No definite conclusions can be drawn, as the forensic audit team stressed, because (1.) no forensic audit was performed on the other counties; and (2.) it is up to elections authorities to decide what standards to apply, as the states are quasi-sovereign entities when it comes to this complicated "electoral vote" determination process.)
-------
With the story of Arizona-2020 in mind, and the forensic audit conducted by an independent firm in mid-2021 in mind, I submit this
Mr. Sailer mentions several cases of suspected or proven cheating in Chicago. But I can think of more-recent character out of Chicago than the 1960s or 1980s, in which a character cruised into victory using electoral-system manipulation tactics to secure his seat.
In the late 1990s, there was a slick candidate who had teams of lawyers and malcontents scrutinize and legally every signature of his opponents. He got all of them disqualified on technicalities. He ran alone, won the seat, and went on to a big political future. That man's name was Barack H. Obama Jr.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2007/04/04/from-2007-showing-his-bare-knuckles/
If the same "Obama" standards (on which the Obama people cruised him into his first political office) had been applied to Arizona in 2020, the state "may" have tipped to Trump. But it's hard to say.
The real lesson of the Arizona-2020 forensic audit was what all good "data people" always know: All complex data-sets tend to exist in ranges of uncertainty. Officially, Biden won Arizona 50-49. But if a Florida-style severely strict election system were in place, it's perfectly plausible to imagine Trump winning, without a single legitimate voter changing his or her mind.
Was there any indication of what portion of the 57,000 dubious ballots were for Biden or Trump?
I also wonder what makes a ballot "problematic"? No matter how the ballot arrived, once it is dumped into the ballot boxes, it is usually indistinguishable from any other ballot. Part of a Secret Ballot is that there is no way to trace an individual ballot back to its caster, so once ballots reach the ballot box it is too late to catch any vote fraud but the most incompetent. For an anonymous ballot among other anonymous ballots to be "problematic", it must have been extremely shoddy. Which means that all of the better-than-extremely-shoddy false ballots were successfully integrated and counted.
A mail-in ballot is supposed to have a signature, and someone is supposed to match it with what the Board of Elections has on file for the voter, so they're not secret. This helps enforcement of bloc voting in shady neighborhoods like California and Oregon.
"supposed to"
Sorry, that was a bit glib. I'm editing to a fuller reply now.
The industrial-scale cheating that political machines do is a multi-phase process. The first, and perhaps most resource-intensive, phase is to build a book of idle vote registrations. These can be former voters who died, moved, or lost interest or it can be new voters who may or may not show up, or it may be entirely fictional voters that they slip through the cracks of state's registration process. Whatever the source, the objective is to build up as many of these as possible and to keep track of them, because they are the raw material for later the steal.
The election-phase is to get as many ballots as possible to attribute to these notional "voters" as possible. The more they have of each, the more they can create the "vote" they want.
Sometimes they get overzealous and somehow end up logging more votes than there are voters anyway. This is embarrassing, but media don't usually fuss about it, nor do I recall any prosecutions for it in the last few decades. The point is that there are lots of ways of frauding votes, some which depend on matching registrations, some of which do not.
Lancaster County, PA raised an alarm over suspicious voter registrations just before this last election.
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/25/nx-s1-5165382/lancaster-county-voter-registration-fraud
The original reports stated that other counties had raised similar alarms. This has faded from the news in light of Trump’s win, but we have election officials openly admitting to defying the State Supreme Court in the matter of approving dubious ballots for the US Senate recount.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pennsylvania-democrats-openly-admit-to-counting-illegal-ballots-in-mccormick-casey-race/ar-AA1uckSy
The number of 'zombie' voters can be staggering. After DeSantis took over Florida and cleaned up the voter registration rolls, about 10% of the Democrat electorate mysteriously disappeared. I don't think they so much disappeared as simply didn't actually exist in the first place, except in the notebooks of the vote-riggers. And then consider that DeSantis probably didn't get rid of all of them, which means a huge swathe of the Florida electorate was fake. Fake but sometimes decisive.
Florida is probably not exceptional. I often wonder if the supposed Democrat popular vote advantage is just a psyop. If someone waved a magic wand and made all the empty registrations in every US state disappear, the vaunted Democrat electorate would probably shrink to an ineffectual minority overnight.
~$100 million dollar company idea:
There are probably >10 million phantom registered voters in the US. Develop a data analytics company that uses modern data science and old school political savvy to detect, verify, and package for removal expired and invalid voter registrations. Price the product between $10 and $25 per removed registration. That's 1/10 - 1/4 $billion on the first wave. Get paid either by municipalities complying with registration hygiene laws or by political parties seeking electoral advantage over rivals. After the first wave, ongoing registration decay ensures a permanent revenue stream. Then international markets beckon, especially Anglophone, common law, and other W.E.I.R.D. countries. Get rich and restore democracy as a byproduct.
Michigan has over 500k registered voters than citizens of voting age. They’ve promised to clean up by’27. Conveniently after the mid-terms.
https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/michigan-voter-rolls-inflated-500k-state-says-its-no-issue-gop-disagrees
There’s way too much latitude for cheating.
There were a number of categories of problem they were checking for. One example of the "problematic" ballots counted in the certified-total for Arizona 2020:
"The county only rejected 0.03% of votes for signature not matching ("Bad Signatures"). The Audit found this number should have been 0.22%+, by even a relatively relaxed threshold under industry-standard signature verification software. Also analyzed manually with pairs of eyes. A total of 0.19%+ of the certified vote should have been tossed for signature problems but instead were tossed in."
The Bad Signatures category was a clear case of "invalid votes" per the nominal elections as established by the state legislature, and hence "illegal votes." Ballots with invalid/absent/nonmatching signatures which were counted (included in the certified-2020 total for Arizona) across the state would easily be enough, alone, to cover the vote margin by which Biden carried the state.
See also my reply to Andrew Phillips:
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/democrat-politicians-assume-democrat/comment/77686033
I'm not seeing (and I looked at your link) where you told us what the bottom line results of the "forensic audit" were. How many votes were decided should have been declared invalid and what was their partisan breakdown?
And what governed the selection of a ballot as "problematic"? If you want to squelch the detection of fake ballots by this method all you have to do is make sure that what is sampled is actually-unproblematic votes.
Btw, in the 2022 Gubernatorial election Kari Lake demonstrated to my satisfaction (if I believe Robert Barnes) that the signature checks were utterly fake, being processed too fast to involve actual scrutiny.
Trump's challenge to the 2020 election result was such a pathetic shitshow that it was obvious that nothing would result and I didn't pay much attention to the question of whether the election as a whole was stolen. But the vans of absentee ballots filmed arriving at Cobo Hall at 3am or so caught my attention and it sure looks to me, after looking further into what went on there, like MICHIGAN was stolen. That wouldn't be enough to change the election result, but the "most secure election ever" claptrap got the horselaugh from me thereafter.
And now we have the 20 million drop in Dem votes from 2020 to 2024 add to the evidence that something squirrely was going on while the GOP was asleep at the switch.
(1.) The "partisan breakdown" was never given, as far as I know. The forensic-audit team from the start was never tasked with declaring the 2020-certified results valid or invalid, but only looking for voter irregularities; including definitely-illegal votes and various categories of arguably-invalid votes.
(2.) The question of which votes to count, the large "arguably invalid" categories, is not up to a team of intensely-detail-oriented "forensic vote auditors." It is a political question, in theory to be decided by the state legislature and enforced by local and state officials.
(3.) Therefore, all the Arizona Audit people did, could do, was present several sets of numbers to the legislature, which commissioned them, on which votes fell into which category. The task having been determining the scope of possible voting irregularities, the goal was to tighten-up election procedures for future elections after what was seen as a debacle in 2020.
(4.) The "bottom line results," as I understood them at the time, was: 97.25% ballots implicitly deemed "clean" (legal and unproblematic, at least on the measures they were looking at; and 2.75% of total ballots counted-and-certified in late 2020 were flagged for problems or invalidity on one measure or another (57,000 in absolute terms).
(5.) Under a much-stricter, Florida-style voting regime, all or almost all of those 57,000 ballots would've been rejected, and possibly others (the world of "hold everything else equal" is always only theoretical). But the independent auditors never announced which way the various categories of problematic or dubious ballot went.
(6.) I assume the auditor agency's contract with the Arizona legislature said not to announced vote-totals of the problematic, dubious, and illegal votes. The way the audit was agreed to in the first place having been to the effect of: "this is only for purposes of helping elections become more secure," not to "re-litigate 2020."
(7.) If the Kari Lake election-disputes hold water, as you say, it's possible the lessons of the 2021 audit were not enforced. This comes down, I presume, to the state government having lots of Democrats. State officials would've needed to oversee a DeSantis-style tightening of the election-machinery "belt" that could knock a few points off the D side's default totals.
(8.) Note that the single official who'd have been most responsible for a DeSantis-style major election-machiney "belt tightening" was Democrat, Katie Hobbs (White, b.1969, ran on tearing down any Trump border wall). She was the secretary of state of Arizona, 2019-23. She is now the governor.
"(2.) The question of which votes to count, the large "arguably invalid" categories, is not up to a team of intensely-detail-oriented "forensic vote auditors." It is a political question, in theory to be decided by the state legislature and enforced by local and state officials."
Do I understand correctly from your first post that not all ballots were subjected to audit?
I believe he's talking about which votes to "count as legitimate" as in, what the standards should be to accept a ballot as legit or discard it. The study counted all of the Maricopa County ballots and found that 57,000 were questionable.
Without endorsing the highly partisan take adopted here, it seems that the "questionable" finding is in no way related to "[decisions made by] the state legislature and enforced by local and state officials."
https://www.12news.com/article/news/verify/arizona-audit-57000-ballots-senate-gop/75-a0a98638-f74f-4861-b6e0-e1d53c3eec06
I'm looking for Barnes talking about the time spent verifying sigs on each ballot. This isn't it, but I'll post it here for convenience:
https://rumble.com/v2fo90a-viva-and-barnes-kari-lake-arizona-supreme-court-decision-the-washington-pun.html
edit: I ran across a mention by Barnes of signature checks being processed faster than the mind could possibly process the information, but the instance I recall where he went into that in more detail is not the one I found. Kari Lake's brief would presumably be helpful.
When all the lucky breaks go one way, the fix is in.
It is difficult to get the official report of the Maricopa County audit, which was issued in 3 volumes. However, I found useful links to go along with E. H. Hail's excellent comment.
Volume 1 (Summary) is here: https://c692f527-da75-4c86-b5d1-8b3d5d4d5b43.filesusr.com/ugd/2f3470_a91b5cd3655445b498f9acc63db35afd.pdf.
Volume 2 (Methods) is here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21069026/cyber-ninjas-marico-audit-report-final-vol-2.pdf
Volume 3 (Details) is here: https://cdn.nucleusfiles.com/fe/fe2178f7-654f-4b89-993e-6556f65e70d8/cyber-ninjas-report-vol.-iii.pdf
I also found several Democratic articles written by people who knew what they were instructed to write and who therefore did not find it necessary to read any of the report. This includes an article with links to the first two volumes, which contradicted the article's idiotic theme that the report proved there was no major problem with election administration in Maricopa County.
My earlier comment on slow vote-counting and its function within the U.S. system, incl. why it tends to be seen only in Big-Blue states/areas, how it evolved, why the D-team favors it (Steve Sailer makes the same points better here), and how it works in practice:
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/why-cant-california-count-its-votes/comment/75575456
The slowest states are states where most vote by mail, they are postmark states instead of in-hand states, and state employees count the ballots instead of having a ton of low paid volunteers who do all of the work before or during election day.
If the U.S. every goes to national popular vote, then all of the states are going to have to use the same voting systems.
I once served as a “Poll-watcher” and at the conclusion of the day the results had been triple-checked and submitted.
How many days have these California ballots been unattended?
I work elections in Louisville. Granted we are a large county but there is little to no hand-counting of ballots. The machines we use tabulate the votes from marked paper ballots at the precinct level. The results are transferred up to the county for summary and verification, and presumably absentee and other ballots are then counted and added in. Nobody is touching the ballots again after election day unless there is a recount, as far as I know.
I think most of the problem is jurisdictions like California that want to make it far too easy to vote, which almost invariably makes it easy to introduce illegitimate ballots and makes it hard to count ballots from too many sources.
Here in Vallejo, CA we fill in bubbles on the ballots and they go immediately into optical readers which presumably give immediate totals. Then there are provisional ballots. And postal ones. How they handle missing or illegible postmarks I don't know.
What bothers me is that I got a numbered receipt for my ballot, but I can't check on what the votes on it purportedly were. So who knows what was recorded as being on them?
This is particularly good, but I’ve only read it once with one cup of coffee. I’m still hazy how 13 million votes evaporated. Weren’t there untold numbers of ballots with just President filled in? Shady.
I remember when Trump breezed through with Florida and Ohio and another big state in 2020 and Biden operatives assuring their people on camera “don’t worry, we have a path”.
This is just one cup of coffee pontificating.
The total votes cast in 2024 will turn out to be, when California finally is finished counting, very similar to the total votes cast in the massive turnout 2020 election.
https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-voter-turnout-republicans-trump-harris-7ef18c115c8e1e76210820e0146bc3a5
Eight million voters who showed up for Biden in 2020 (already exhibiting Stage 4 dementia and campaigning from his basement) didn't show up for Harris. Trump gained a few hundred thousand votes.
Steve is in as much denial about the missing votes as he was about Biden's clear dementia in 2020. For some reason these are two of his big blind spots; or maybe he's trolling.
Sailer has made an argument about the (Biden?) overvote showing up elsewhere than in crooked blue districts. What is your reply?
Biden famously won "educated" voters in 2020. Why hasn't there been a poll of them to see how many saw he was mentally impaired yet voted for him anyway (and why)? Why isn't anyone in the MSM talking about four years of his further decline (and all the drugs he took)? Don't they see it's self-discrediting to ignore their complicity?
Democrats win huge majorities with the idiot vote.
Trump ran a campaign with things like prayer breakfasts, Hulk Hogan, etc. That's a turnoff to many people.
Trump got 63 million votes in 2016, 74 million in 2020 (+11), and is on track for at least 77 million in 2024 (+14 from 2016).
Obama got 69 million votes in 2008 and 66 million votes in 2012 (-3).
Biden got 81 million votes in 2020. Harris is on track for about 75 million in 2024 (-6)
I'm pretty sure the Democrats wish they were turning off as many people as Trump is.
"That's a turnoff to many people."
Both candidates do things that turn off many people.
Your point isn't as obvious as you seem to imagine it is.
Since California has a history of long delays in vote counting and early leads evaporating as new boxes of ballots are counted, how often does the winner turn out to be the Republican? Is it roughly 50 - 50 or more like one out of ten?
Since the Republicans are not competitive in most elections in California, there is no way to make a good comparison unless one limits the analysis to elections decided by 1% or less.
Young Kim, who sounds like the name of a rapper, but is actually a Christian Korean Republican lady politician in Orange County, CA, usually endures lengthy vote-counting ordeals in her runs for the House. She was declared the loser on November 18, 2018 then winner on November 13, 2020, winner on November 11, 2022, and this time winner the day after.
The essence of the "Too Big To Rig" slogan that has found so much 'rhetorical' success in 2024, depends on, IMO: (1.) comfortable R victory-margins, (2.) a baseline of slow vote-counting, or other strange counting-practices, and (3.) a threshold-level perception of Third Worldization-associated corruption.
.
Young Kim results [CA-39 & CA-40, Orange Co., Calif.]
- 2024: 55-45 win (announced: +1 day after election)
- 2022: 57-43 win (announced: +3 days after election)
- 2020: 51-49 win (announced: +10 days after election)
- 2018: 48-52 loss (announced: +12 days after election)
.
Same district [39th, Orange Co., Calif.] before Young Kim ran:
- 2016: 57-43 [Ed Royce, R] win (announced: +2? days after election)
- 2014: 69-31 [Ed Royce, R] win (announced: day after)
- 2012: 66-30 [Ed Royce, R] win (announced: day after)
.
When the margin is <5 points, for some reason at least ten days are needed. (None of these elections were 50.1-49.9 or the like.) This the "Too Big to Rig" principle in action. across all three of the above-identified planks: A former-White Safe-R seat that became something of a "swing district" in the Trump era, with Whites now a minority of voters, and in a Big-Blue state, where results in <5-point districts take 10+ days.
Young Kim's predecessor in the seat, Ed Royce (b.1951, Los Angeles), looks to be an interesting holdover from the days of White-California. In fact, a holdover from the 1970s-80s. Despite the broad Third Worldization of the state -- now long-ruled along sacred High-Low Coalition lines -- this old-style White Republican, Royce, "held on" in Orange County even deep in to the 2010s.
In the meantime, Orange County had tipped to losing its White-centric nature. In the 1990s, 65% White, 10% Asian, 2% Black, 23% Hispanic, but with noncitizens ineligible to vote the 1990s elections were completely dominated by "the White Vote." By 2020 it's down to 38% White [-27%-pts], 22% Asian [+12%-pts], 2% Black, 34% Hispanic. (Wiki has this for CA-40, Young Kim's district: "48.5% White; 25% Hispanic; 19% Asian; 2% Black; and 5% 'Two or more races'," making it modestly White than Orange County as a whole.)
With conditions untenable for White Republicans in 2018, key players behind the scenes talked Ed Royce into retiring. A familiar process, as had plodded through much of the state over the previous thirty years or so, finally came for Orange County. The seat was likely to flip "D" in that wave election, and did. A Nonwhite candidate was needed if there was to be any hope.
Into the seat, after a two-year gap after the 2018 loss, comes someone without any meaningful roots in the USA before the 1980s.
Young-oak Kim, b.1962; emig. from South Korea, 1975; one or two years in Guam; and at least three or four years in Hawaii; and takes a degree at University of Southern California in 1985. she marries fellow-Korean in 1986. Between about the mid-1990s and the late 2010s, Young Kim had worked as "community liaison director of Asian affairs" for Ed Royce.
The whole thing feels symbolic of ethnopolitical 'arc' in California, ca. 1970s to present -- with the entire USA not far behind.
People in Big-Blue areas have long gotten cynically "used to" this process, seeing it as (somehow) natural. (Needless to say, nothing like it is evident in South Korea even now in its rich-developed state.) Why should it be natural? Much of the Trump base says: "No"; but other parts of the Trump base say: "Yes!"
Young Kim: "We are all FOR legal immigration. Someone like me, who immigrated LEGALLY, is what we should be advocating... We [Republicans] should NOT block legal immigrants or be perceived as an anti-immigration party." -- Young Kim, January 2022, when asked about the Biden "border" illegal-immigration problem, in a longform KQED public-radio interview. She added that she was proud to have introduced legislation to help "Dreamers."
Trump also waxed bathetic about "Dreamers" (who are illegals).
"Why should it be natural? Much of the Trump base says: "No"; but other parts of the Trump base say: "Yes!""
Can you give an example of any part of the Trump BASE saying "Yes!"?
Right, it's not the base that says "Yes," that's for sure.
I recently created a hypothetical 100-person Trump voter profile based on the national exit polls and share-of-electorate. Of 100 people casting votes for Trump, 80 are Whites of European-Christian origin; a further 11 are Hispanics, probably many of them full- or nearly-full White (see: https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2024/11/12/revisiting-the-sailer-strategy-after-the-trump-2024-victory-whites-cast-80-of-trumps-votes-but-some-call-the-sailer-strategy-obsolete-why/).
Among the White-European-origin 80% of Trump's voters, I think you'll see very few saying "We love immigrants! We want more immigrants!" For every one who does pop up there are many more willing to hold up "Mass Deportations Now" signs.
It's people who attach themselves to the emergent Trump-machine, and use the ancient art of flattery, who you'll see doing this. Ultimately the people doing this do use the levers of power (agenda-setting / narrative-control, propaganda, shaming, ridicule, and other things from bag-of-tricks of various sorts of ancient enemies of Western openness and fair-play). And Trump's "big beautiful door in the big beautiful wall"-type lines reflect that. He really, really wants people to kind of kowtow to him and, if they do, he will tend to be flexible IMO.
One answer to your good question (on an example of "any part of the Trump base saying 'Yes' to more immigration"): Is House member Young Kim a part of the "Trump base" or not? (see her quotes at the bottom of the earlier comment).
If Young Kim is part of the Trump base, then I say to those celebrating a supposed glorious multi-racial Trump-"caudillo" coalition: take warning; be careful what you wish for.
I would say Kim is too much of a special case to be a part of Trump's "base", as I understand the term. The elements of the BASE are CATEGORIES which point to members being likely Trump voters. What's her caregory?
Great piece! But how does the fact that Trump ran better in Philadelphia in 2020 than 2016 mean it was on the up and up? If you are going to steal an election you only need enough votes for a majority in the present, whether this is more or fewer than previously.
People need to be able to think in terms of percentage and turnout. Trump gets a couple of percent more in 2020 but the turnout is much higher, the net result is Trump was further behind in Philadelphia.
The problem is whether the higher turnout represents real or fake votes, right?
But that didn't much happen.
It can be easy to confuse in memory logical forecasts of what would make sense if it happens -- Joe from Delaware knows a guy who knows a guy in Philadelphia who can make up votes -- with what actually did happen: Philadelphia in 2020 turned out to be a disappointing year for Democrats.
In general, what happened is that Biden did really well relative to history and other objective factors in traditionally honest suburbs in non-competitive Red and Blue states and less well in Usual Suspect urban machine counties.
Or the idea was----Trump's team will be keeping an eye on Philly's votes, so let's bluff there and put the rigged votes somewhere else and then claim Trump is "fighting against democracy" when he realizes he needs to audit somewhere else a week later.
The vote by mail thing favors Democrats -- a lot. What they do is register everyone whether they asked to be registered or not, then they mass-print ballots and send them everywhere.
I live in Washington state - a democrat-controlled state with mail-in voting - and each year I receive ballots in my mailbox for people who don't live at my place.
If I filled them out then forged some random signature I bet nine times out of ten (probably more) the votes would be counted.
I also saw a guy who was getting a driver's license with a Mexican birth certificate asked whether he wanted to register to vote. I don't think he understood the question, so he probably got registered.
They are so enthusiastic here about registering non-citizens that immigration lawyers are begging them to stop, because it puts their clients in legal jeopardy:
https://kpq.com/has-washington-state-registered-foreign-nationals-to-vote/
I'm not saying that there's straight-up organized voter fraud (although there may be), but that when you inundate people with ballots and then put Democrats in charge of counting them it's kind of a "nature taking it's course" situation.
What difference does this make in Washington? Well, compared to a traditional election day vote in person election, I'd say around 3-5%, which is very significant.
"In general, what happened is that Biden did really well relative to history and other objective factors in traditionally honest suburbs in non-competitive Red and Blue states and less well in Usual Suspect urban machine counties."
So where is the analysis behind this claim?
Also, talk to me about Detroit rather than Philadelphia.
Steve's logic was cited to a 2020 comment at Unz.com by the usually reliable commenter "ic1000". ic1000's contention was that since Trump votes increased more in Philadelphia than in any rural county, that meant that the Pennsylvania vote must have been clean, since the Dems would have cheated in Philly rather than rural, heavy R, counties.
Unfortunately, there are at least two problems with this.
1) [Most embarrassingly] The "per capita" problem. Just because more absolute votes swung toward Trump in densely populated Philly than in any sparsely populated rural county, does not mean that Philly's tally was at least as legitimate as any rural county. You would have to compare percentages to make that claim. For whatever reason, ic1000 didn't.
2) There's no reason, especially with mail-in ballots, that the fraud has to be confined to Philly. Fraudsters may have simply decided to deploy some of their 'spare' ballots from the city center, where they've had embarrassingly overstuffed ballot boxes in the past, to inner-ring suburbs, where the population is still large enough to camouflage fraud but the registration margins aren't already maxed out.
Professional vote riggers can think too, so they don't always do the most obvious or convenient thing. Part of their project is to keep things looking plausible. Steve pre-emptively derides this as a "notion that the Democrats concoct brilliant plans to fool Steve Sailer", but riggers aren't trying to fool Steve Sailer, whom they've never heard of, they're trying to fool everyone else, and they generally succeed. Mass mail-in ballots made it even easier by presenting unprecedented precinct-hopping opportunities.
Note that in 2024, Trump's share of the vote in major cities increased very sharply, say 10 - 12 percentage points, or about half the gap. This was scoring big gains off a low starting point. So he had no doubt bigger percentage gains in the cities than outside them. Democrat overall vote totals in the election dropped sharply from 2020, which could either be less cheating or loss of enthusiasm, likely some of each.
And then the Democrats did the same thing in California and Utah and Massachusetts just for grins?
What happened is that Trump did pretty well in the swing states of 2020, almost getting 3 states he would have needed for a 269-269 tie, while doing pretty bad in the noncompetitive states. And even in the swing states, Biden tended to do better relativistically in the traditionally more honest white suburbs than in the historically dubious urban machine counties.
That all seems pretty inefficient of the Democratic string-pullers in 2020.
A simpler explanation would be that 2020, a pretty weird year as you may recall, saw a fairly large nationwide movement of voters in favor of Democrats. Trump almost got lucky enough to push the election into the House of Representatives, but not quite.
In the notorious Machine city where I used to live, the precinct captains and so on would cheat even when they didn't need to just to stay in practice, or more likely to impress their superiors so they could move up in the patronage network. They're not concerned with national efficiency, they're concerned with repping themselves in the state or city machine. Maybe the same thing happens in California and Utah and Massachusetts. I don't know much about Utah, but Massachusetts is certainly no stranger to ethnic Machine politics, and the benefit of a solid Machine game is playing out in California's 45th District as we speak.
In 2020, the "string-pullers" had unprecedented means, motive, and opportunity to sway elections at all levels and in all jurisdictions. Why wouldn't they take it? It's what they do.
Trump always runs a bit of a skinflint campaign (as you once amusingly characterized it IIRC), focusing on the gettable swing states, while abandoning the deep blues and deep reds to fate. That can result in an apparent shift in historically honest suburbs and deep color states (Cali, Utah, Mass) under the pressure of nationwide media assault (a virtual leftwing monopoly). Both things can be true at the same time: large 'secular' trends, but also cheating to change elections. The existence of one doesn't invalidate the other. The reason for 2020's aberrantly high vote count could be both heightened political fanaticism and mass ballot fabrication. Certainly none of the events from the early morning vote counting interruptions onward inspired any confidence that the result would reflect the voters' will purely.
I'm really appreciating your well-informed insights.
"In 2020, the "string-pullers" had unprecedented means, motive, and opportunity to sway elections"
That is definitely true. I've pointed out that if the baseline is, say, 0.5% invalid votes that get counted, and in 2020 this rose to 1.5%, that's actually a huge difference which, if it all or almost all "went one way," swayed the election.
Even absent any sort of 'overt' cheating at all, mass rule-changes ahead of one election are a bad thing. When strange and anomalous results follow mass rule-changes and a hyped-up atmosphere of intense propaganda and martial-law-like conditions (the lockdowns), it's a "red flag" as some like to say. (All those bellwether counties, with a century of right-call, all have the asterisk of getting it wrong only once: 2020!)
When all the 2024 votes are finally counted, 2020's record will turn out to be more the New Normal than "aberrantly high."
Love him or hate him, Donald Trump gets people interested in politics.
Wasn't Donald on the ballot in 2016 ?
"When all the 2024 votes are finally counted, 2020's record will turn out to be more the New Normal than "aberrantly high.""
Be sure to say "I told you so" when this happens.
Or otherwise if not.
The D's have for a while now been pushing this "we win the popular vote" idea to (1) try to get people to get rid of the electoral college; and (2) try to undermine the R president. Trump taking it this time was a big blow to them on that talking point.
Removing the Electoral College massively increases the rewards for cheating (a Dem forte). In the EC system, no matter how many fake votes you generate in one state, you can't win more than that one state. But with a national popular vote, the infinite supply of fake votes producible in blue machine cities can tip every election your way forever. Dems want that.
Thank you. This is part of my point to counter Steve on this issue. The D's in the deep blue states throw in a bunch of extra ballots to push their guy ahead in the popular vote and no one checks because its an uncontested/safe seat. Given that D's are the Urban Party, they can make up a lot more votes in a city that don't look *too* crazy than they could if they were the R Rural Party.
Being the Urban Party has its advantages. And they know it.
And then the professional vote riggers made up Biden votes in a whole bunch of states where their strenuous and legally risky efforts couldn't possibly affect the Electoral College results just to further fool statistically inclined analysts like myself.
Seriously, there is very little evidence that the Democrats stole more votes in 2020 in places where it would benefit them more than anywhere else. You wind up having to argue that those diabolically clever and diligent Democrats fooled analysts like me by stealing votes at random all across the country so that the results wouldn't look any different than if there was a broadly pro-Democratic swing in 2020, just as there were nation-wide pro-Republican swings in 2016 and 2024.
This country has lots of demonstrably statistically numerate people. Consider baseball analysts. How many of them were persuaded that there is any sort of pattern in the results indicative of a steal? For example, baseball analytical pioneer Bill James is obviously a lifelong Republican. Did he holler that the data showed the Democrats were clearly stealing the election? Nate Silver is a political centrist and a former professional baseball analyst. He knows a lot about voting.
My impression is that the evidence of a stolen 2020 was more convincing to the hot video babes with no track record of statistical prowess than it was to the homely nerds whose baseball analyses have been worth paying for.
This is right up there with your long-term defense as Biden actually being in charge and not having dementia --right up until his first debate, when you haven't mentioned it since. This is a similar blind spot.
The D's have for a while now very much tried to claim popular vote victories to delegitimize R presidents who win but get fewer votes. They want to make it seem like they are inevitable and that the yucky electoral college should be removed and then the "real American vote" will be heard. And the more votes they can come up with for a D candidate the bigger his "mandate" is in his district. And, as someone else has pointed out, the average guy on the ground rigging it just wants to make sure he does it right so will overcompensate to make sure his bosses don't get angry if he gets the number too low.
This isn't hard. They run up the score for various reasons. 2020 was an extreme example when they weren't just seeking the above reasons but because they feared Trump so much they needed to invent millions of extra votes just to pull Dementia Joe across the finish line and make it seem like the people hated Trump.
So the Democrats decided in 2016: let's cheat, but not so much that we actually win, but just enough to score a moral victory by winning the [rigged] popular vote.
Really?
Everyone in the Deep State was floored Trump won; they relied on bad polls and ignored the people, and their desperate Russia hoax/impeachment hoaxe/send in the Antifa rioters stuff shows their shocked panic. Maxine Waters was on Morning Joe talking about impeaching Trump in January 2016, ffs.
But those D's in the safe states were going to run up the score no matter what. Why is it hard to believe some D's in CA and other D states would want to make sure their totals for the First Woman President to be high? Simply because the swing state D's blew their job doesn't mean the safe state ones did, and the latter had the luxury of a safe win they could pad without too much scrutiny.
> "Seriously, there is very little evidence that the Democrats stole more votes in 2020 in places where it would benefit them more than anywhere else."
If you say so, but even if that is true, recall that Dems had to steal very few votes by historical ("one or two percent") standards to change the 2020 election: key swing state margins were sub-1%. So the steal doesn't have to be huge to be true.*
That doesn't mean that there wasn't also other cheating elsewhere. 2020 wasn't just the Presidential election. There were elections in every jurisdiction, often with a lot at stake. Some amount of cheating undoubtedly occurred in those cases too. How much, I don't know. I do know the Democratic Party commands an impressive roster of "undead" votes. Believing that they wouldn't have employed these in 2020, when there was an exceptional opportunity to do so, strikes me as a little naive.
> "those diabolically clever and diligent Democrats fooled analysts like me by stealing votes at random all across the country"
A lot of cheating by a lot of people in a lot of places for a lot of purposes often does at a distance indeed look like randomness. I don't claim to know what is happening in every district. But as I've said, the Dems enjoy the benefit of a significant tranche of ghost votes. They get used even when they are not strictly needed, both to maintain their viability and for local operatives to demonstrate on.
Maybe there was also a broadly pro-Democratic swing in 2020, but if so, it was a swing that swung just enough to change the Presidential election on a few thousand votes counted in obscure circumstances. That can happen legitimately, but given the corrupt sloppiness of so many American elections, we can't really know. And, as I keep saying, a genuine Democrat swing is not mutually exclusive with Democrat cheating.
> "Consider baseball analysts. How many of them were persuaded that there is any sort of pattern in the results indicative of a steal?"
I dunno. Other than you, I've taken no interest in them.
> "Nate Silver is a political centrist and a former professional baseball analyst. He knows a lot about voting."
Isn't he that guy who keeps making wrong predictions?
> "the evidence of a stolen 2020 was more convincing to the hot video babes with no track record of statistical prowess than it was to the homely nerds whose baseball analyses have been worth paying for."
I don't have a TV, so I don't know what the hot video babes are saying. But I also don't pay for any baseball analysis, so I don't know what the homely nerds are saying either. Do the nerds find notoriously lazy urban precincts with >100% election turnout to be "a pattern"? Seems like they could.
---------
* The 2020 Presidential stealing appears to have taken place heavily in the hours and days just after the election, i.e., after they knew how many GOP votes they had to overcome, so the vote riggers' purpose changes from "demonstrate my power" to "just enough to win", in the same way that other 'contested' elections have a habit of going from a convincing GOP win to the Democrat squeaking in by a few votes. (See California 45 right now, or Al Franken in 2008, or Washington's Governorship in 2004, or anything involving Marc Elias.)
> ic1000's contention was that since Trump votes increased more in Philadelphia than in any rural county, that meant that the Pennsylvania vote must have been clean, since the Dems would have cheated in Philly rather than rural, heavy R, counties.
Those observations and that analysis were by Steve McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining engineer who is sometimes active on Twitter (and well worth following). That thread:
https://x.com/ClimateAudit/status/1324904817001717762
McIntyre's signal contribution to public discourse is his blog Climate Audit, which in the 2000s and early 2010s was the focal point for discussion of recent advances in paleoclimatology. More exactly, the focus of skepticism and non-Consensus analysis of the Climate Alarmists' scientific work on the climate of past centuries. Which is interesting for a few reasons.
1. The Alarmists (>95% of scientists in the field; their self-description) think the post-Ice-Age temperature record is important because their methods show a generally cool and stable climate, in contrast to post-1950 Anthropogenic Global Warming.
2. McIntyre is numerate, adept with statistics, and detail-oriented. He has claimed (convincingly IMO) that most of the foundational peer-reviewed articles of paleoclimatology are not worth the paper they were printed on. They are full of errors, ranging from bad arithmetic to statistical malpractice. And, surprisingly, all these errors work in favor of the Alarmist perspective.
3. The climate community put aside their egos to welcome this outsider's technically-astute and informed critiques. The flawed papers were corrected in some cases and retracted in others. What started as a debacle for paleoclimatology ended up strengthening the rigor and accuracy of this corner of the scientific world.
3a. If you took my point (3) immediately prior at face value, you didn't notice the [sarc] and [/sarc] tags, or are unfamiliar with how the politicized-science sausage is made. Perhaps both.
4. In the present case, McIntyre dug for data on Trump's and Biden's performances in Pennsylvania's relatively honest suburban/rural areas, and in its corruption-prone Machine cities. Perhaps his analysis didn't match his initial expectations, but he tweeted it out anyway.
5. To restate the obvious, the existence of one factor doesn't preclude the existence of others. I think it does suggest that the level of fraud in 2020 Philadelphia (and Pittsburgh) was more modest than most Stolen Election partisans seem to believe.
Sample size of 1 not convincing. Now do Detroit.
If it was done with fake absentee ballots they could ostensibly be from anywhere.
> Now do Detroit.
McIntyre pulled data from Pennsylvania and presented his analysis of it. Detroit is in Michigan.
> If it was done with fake absentee ballots they could ostensibly be from anywhere.
Each fake absentee ballot would seemingly have been filled out by a seemingly-legit voter, who actually wasn't (e.g. dead, moved away, non-citizen, ghosting a registrant who never votes). The phony absentee ballot comes with an address (real or imagined) within the precinct where the vote is tallied. So you'd have to explain what you mean by "anywhere."
Now do Detroit. Sailer makes expansive claims that cannot rest only on the work McIntyre did in Pennsylvania.
In DETROIT (which I paid a bit of attention to, unlike other places, because the video of vans arriving in the wee hours after the observers were sent home caught my eye) the ballots came to the counting site from the office of the (State?) election official allegedly "pre-verified" (without any observers present) and so, AFAIK did not have with them any enclosing envelopes with identifying information. So the ballots counted (who knows how many times each) could AFAIK have been attributed to any location in Michigan. No examination of what had happened took place afterwards because the relevant court dismissed the suits that were filed without any actions taken so it is not in evidence that any enclosing envelopes ever existed. Does that clarify "anywhere" for you?
When the observers were sent home based on the claim that the counting was over Trump was substantially ahead. Next morning Biden had won Michigan. Hmmm....
> Does that clarify "anywhere" for you?
Yes. Thanks. (Though I hadn't read that the bolus of Wayne County (Detroit) votes could have been from anywhere in the state -- do you have a link?)
Worth reading the analyses by "Jeff Id" of "The Air Vent" blog.
https://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2024/11/10/2020-vote-fraud-summary/
His time series of swing-state vote counts are particularly notable (= suspicious). (FWIW, I find his work impressive but not totally persuasive; there are flaws.).
For 2020, Jeff worked with data that Edison supplied to the NYT. He says that, so far, analogous data for 2024 are "unavailable."
https://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2024/11/06/fifteen-million-missing-americans-or/#comment-313166