We Need To Fix Our Voting System

As the votes continue being “counted” and Biden keeps getting the vast majority of them, it’s clear that this thing is headed for a recount and probably a final decision by the Supreme Court.

If you’re reading this site I’m sure you probably suspect there is some funny business going on in Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Las Vegas. I’ve discussed this at length in prior posts, but in the past couple of days or so it has come out that lots of dead people voted in the major swing states.

Austin Fletcher, a pro-Trump YouTuber who goes by the name Fleccas, found numerous instances of dead people voting in Michigan:

William Bradley was born in 1902 and died in 1984. And yet he is registered to vote in Wayne County Michigan, applied for an absentee ballot in September 2020, and his vote was received on October 2, 2020. If you want to see the images and try it yourself, go to the link above the image and visit Fleccas’ Twitter page.

Fleccas put out a whole video going into the dead voters he was able to find:

Who knows how many dead people voted in the 2020 election?

The Public Interest Legal Foundation conducted a study this year and found that there are 349,773 dead people still on voter rolls nationwide. It’s unclear at this point how many have had ballots cast in their name in this election, but that number is large enough to swing this election.

How is this even possible in an advanced country in the information age? It has to be deliberate.

But dead voters are not the only thing that has been questionable about this election. There are a lot of results (thus far) that don’t make sense:

• Early this morning, Biden pulled ahead in Georgia. He might also pull ahead in North Carolina, but we won’t know until the 12th because for some reason the state wants to wait until then to resume counting. I’m sure Biden will take the state somehow. However, Georgia and North Carolina going blue while Florida goes red just defies belief. There is no way Florida is redder than Georgia and North Carolina.
• In 2012, Romney won Georgia and North Carolina while Obama won Florida. In 2008, Obama won Florida and North Carolina but lost Georgia to McCain. Bush carried all three states in both his elections, although Florida in 2000 was heavily disputed. And that just goes to my point: Georgia and NC were solidly for Bush, but Florida was decided by a razor-thin margin. In no election since 1992 has Florida ever been redder than either Georgia or North Carolina. 2020 is the first time that’s happened since 1992. I’m not saying it’s impossible for it to happen, but it’s odd and should raise some concerns.
• In a similar vein, the Rust Belt states tend to vote together, too. It’s strange that Ohio, Indiana and Iowa would be solidly for Trump but Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania wouldn’t be. In 2016, PA/OH/MI/WI/IN/IA all voted Trump. In 2012, Obama won all of them but Indiana. In 2008, Obama won all six states. In 2004, Bush won Iowa, Ohio and Indiana but lost PA/MI/WI. In 2000 it was almost the same result except Iowa went for Gore. In 1996 and 1992, Clinton won all but Indiana. In 1988, Bush won all but Iowa and Wisconsin. Reagan swept all six states in both 1984 and 1980. So these states don’t always vote together in lockstep (Indiana is generally redder than the rest), but they are usually pretty close to one another in terms of voting trend.
• Ohio and Pennsylvania have voted the same in the past three elections. Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have voted the same in the past seven elections.
• I could see the upper Midwest states flipping if Trump wasn’t on the ballot, but for them to change this radically between Trump’s first and second election is strange. Generally when a candidate wins the Presidency for the first time, he tends to hold on to most of the states he won. Trump is now projected to lose 6 states that he carried in 2016: PA, WI, MI, GA, NC, AZ. That’s irregular. Obama only lost two states between 2008 and 2012: Indiana and North Carolina. Bush lost one (NH) and gained 2 (IA, NM) between 2000 and 2004. Clinton lost CO, MT and GA from 1992 to 1996, while gaining FL and AZ. 6 state flips in a reelection fight is odd.
• It’s not unprecedented, however. Bush Sr. lost lots of states between 1988 and 1992, although much of that had to do with Ross Perot being in the race. That’s why 1992 and 1996 are hard to use as comparisons. The point is, usually when a candidate wins, his coalition remains largely intact when it comes time for reelection. The number of flips we’re seeing in 2020 is not normal.
• This is the first election since 1960 where the winner lost both Florida and Ohio. Florida and Ohio are bellwether states, meaning they almost always vote with the winner of the election overall. This is because they’re diverse states that reflect the overall makeup of the nation pretty well. Those two states, more than any others, are like microcosms of the whole nation. To put it another way, if you looked at the results of every election dating to 1960 and only knew the results of Florida and Ohio, you’d be able to reliably guess the winner for nearly every election. But this year is an exception.
• The last time a candidate won the White House and lost Florida was Clinton in 1992, but Bush only won it by less than 2%. Plus Perot won nearly 20% of the vote there so that skewed things. Otherwise, you’d have to go all the way back to 1960 to find an election in which the winning candidate failed to carry both Florida and Ohio (and as we went over the other day, the 1960 was likely swung to Kennedy by way of fraud.) I’m not saying it’s impossible for a candidate to win without either Florida or Ohio, but it is very unusual.

Then we have the bellwether counties. Wikipedia has a list of them. Let’s take a look at how they shook out in 2020:

• Biden will become the first president since 1952 to win despite losing Vigo County, Indiana, which is considered one of the most reliable bellwether counties in the nation. It had voted with the winner of the election all but twice since 1888, and in 15 straight elections. The only two times it missed were 1908 and 1952. And now 2020.
• Valencia County, New Mexico. Perfect record of voting with the winner since 1952, Trump won it 54-44 this year. The perfect streak ends.
• Westmoreland County, Virginia. Perfect since 1964, Trump won it this year 54-45. It has only missed twice since 1928: 1948 and 1960. And now 2020.
• Ottowa County, Ohio. Hadn’t missed since 1960. Trump won 61-37 this year.
• Wood County, Ohio. Only one miss since 1964 (1976). Voted Trump 53-45 this year.
• Kent County, Delaware. Only two misses since 1928 (1948 & 1992). Biden won it this year 51-47, although given that Biden is from Delaware it might not be fair to include Kent as a bellwether county for this year.
• Essex County, Vermont. Only miss since 1964 was 1976. This year it was the only county in Vermont Trump won, and it was by a margin of 54-43.
• Juneau County, Wisconsin. Trump won it 64-34 this year. It has only had one miss since 1952 (1960). And now 2020.

I could keep going with the swing counties, but you get the point. Is it really believable that so many of these bellwether counties missed in the same election? It’s possible, but it’s fishy.

These unusual results only lend further credence to the idea that this election has been marred by vote fraud. Obviously none of those results I went over above are impossible, but they do raise questions.

We all now know the polls were wildly wrong, even if the current vote tallies are 100% accurate. The polls were literally the only thing indicating Biden would win, and so now that they’ve been discredited, that removes basically the only thing that suggested Biden was going to win this election. Trump had voter enthusiasm on his side. His rallies were way, way bigger than Biden’s. And he won the two bellwether states along with virtually all of the bellwether counties.

Trump should have won this election. It just doesn’t add up that he is now losing. In my view, the most plausible explanation for why he’s currently losing is vote fraud. We need manual recounts and vote audits in all of the disputed states.

However, while a recount/audit can and should uncover and discard all the votes from dead people, there are other categories of voter fraud that may not be so easy–or even possible at all–to root out. For instance, There is no way to tell if a person was bribed for their vote. With all the mail-in ballots, it’s entirely possible that party operatives and campaign workers went to people’s homes and either bribed or coerced them to vote a certain way. The ballot would then have been mailed in and there’s no way to know if it was the result of a bribe.

Additionally, how do you account for Trump ballots that were thrown out or destroyed? The recount cannot account for this at all. You can’t recount ballots that were never counted the first time around.

In 2012, long before mail-in voting became Good and Perfect and Unassailable and Essential To Our Democracy™, the New York Times raised significant concerns over “error and fraud as absentee voting rises,” saying:

Votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.

There were over 92 million mail ballots requested for the 2020 election and over 65 million returned. 2% of 65 million is 1.3 million. That means 1.3 million mail-in ballots in the 2020 election might be invalid.

This is not a small number considering how many crucial swing states currently have margins in the thousands, and in Georgia right now Biden is only up like 650 votes.

But the failure rate of mail-in ballots is probably way higher than 2%:

In the [2008] presidential election, 35.5 million voters requested absentee ballots, but only 27.9 million absentee votes were counted, according to a study by Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He calculated that 3.9 million ballots requested by voters never reached them; that another 2.9 million ballots received by voters did not make it back to election officials; and that election officials rejected 800,000 ballots. That suggests an overall failure rate of as much as 21 percent.

Some voters presumably decided not to vote after receiving ballots, but Mr. Stewart said many others most likely tried to vote and were thwarted. “If 20 percent, or even 10 percent, of voters who stood in line on Election Day were turned away,” he wrote in the study, published in The Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, “there would be national outrage.”

How were they thwarted? Maybe mishaps and/or funny business by the Postal Service, stolen mail, or the mail in ballots were simply tossed or destroyed by poll workers.

The Times discussed the increased potential for fraud with mail-in voting:

The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say.

In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time. Before this year’s primary, for example, a woman in Hialeah was charged with forging an elderly voter’s signature, a felony, and possessing 31 completed absentee ballots, 29 more than allowed under a local law.

This is the kind of thing I was talking about above in regards to the recount: stuff like this is impossible to root out unless you catch the person with the ballots before they submit them. If that woman in Hialeah had submitted all those ballots, they would have appeared legit. There would have been no way to know they were fraudulent.

Furthermore:

Election administrators have a shorthand name for a central weakness of voting by mail. They call it granny farming.

“The problem,” said Murray A. Greenberg, a former county attorney in Miami, “is really with the collection of absentee ballots at the senior citizen centers.” In Florida, people affiliated with political campaigns “help people vote absentee,” he said. “And help is in quotation marks.”

Voters in nursing homes can be subjected to subtle pressure, outright intimidation or fraud. The secrecy of their voting is easily compromised. And their ballots can be intercepted both coming and going.

The problem is not limited to the elderly, of course. Absentee ballots also make it much easier to buy and sell votes. In recent years, courts have invalidated mayoral elections in Illinois and Indiana because of fraudulent absentee ballots.

It’s just common sense that mail-in voting is rife with potential for fraud and skullduggery. Anyone with a functioning brain should be able to intuitively understand why.

And yet this year you have Twitter affixing this little disclaimer to every tweet that expresses any sort of doubt about mail-in voting:

This is pure gaslighting.

Mail-in voting is by far the easiest way to steal an election fraudulently, and it is not a coincidence that this year the Democrats went all-in on voting by mail.

France banned mail-in voting all the way back in 1975 due to massive fraud that occurred in Corsica (I didn’t even know until today that Corsica is ruled by France).

John R. Lott took a look at voting rules around the world specifically pertaining to mail-in voting, and this is what he found:

Liberals and progressives often try to model the U.S. on Western European countries, but you never hear them arguing that we should adopt their voting rules. There is a reason for that. Banning mail-in voting or requiring people to use photo IDs to obtain a mail-in ballot is quite common in developed countries, especially in Europe.

To study this, the Crime Prevention Research Center, of which I am the president, created a database on voting rules around the world

Here is what we found. Besides the United States, there are 36 member states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Forty-seven percent ban mail-in voting unless the citizen is living abroad, and 30 percent require a photo ID to obtain a mail-in ballot. Fourteen percent of the countries ban mail-in voting even for those living abroad.

Among the 27 countries in the European Union, 63 percent ban mail-in voting unless living abroad and another 22 percent require a photo ID to obtain a mail-in ballot. Twenty-two percent ban the practice even for those who live abroad.

Meanwhile in the US, mail in voting is more prevalent than ever before.

Look, I get that there’s a pandemic going on. But there are ways to account for that without resorting to mail-in ballots. The vast majority of this country is not at any risk at all of dying of this virus. There is no reason everyone should have been told to vote by mail. Maybe the elderly and people in nursing homes I understand. But for everyone else in the lower-risk age tiers, there is no reason they can’t vote in person. In-person early voting for multiple weeks leading up to the election would have been more than enough. If you have an early-voting period of 2-3 weeks then it gives people plenty of time and ensures the lines aren’t out of control.

We need to clamp down massively on voting by mail. The pandemic was not a valid excuse.

Plus, literally on Election Day, the CDC came out and said that even people who currently have Covid can break quarantine and go vote:

Covid can’t spread on election day. It’s #Science, people.

We have to massively cut down on voting by mail.

Yet even if we assume there was no mail-in voting fraud whatsoever, our election system is still horribly dysfunctional. It’s obviously a major assumption to say there was no fraud, and in my view one that defies common sense. But bear with me here: even if there was no voter fraud, it is unacceptable that the election has taken this long to be decided.

It should not take this long to know the results, especially when so many of the votes were cast prior to election day (early vote estimates were at least 100 million of the ~141 million total votes cast this year).

We should have a system where we know the results on election night. We need to ensure our voter rolls are accurate and up to date. We need nationwide voter ID.

Could blockchain voting work? I like the idea but it’s unlikely to ever be implemented for the same reason we still don’t have nationwide voter ID: because lots of powerful people want our election system vulnerable to fraud.

While we know what’s wrong with the election system, fixing it is a whole ‘nother thing. Democrats will obviously fight all the necessary reforms tooth and nail because vote fraud is their bread and butter.

But if our voting system doesn’t work, then we are no longer a democracy.