It’s silly, but Star Wars is the one analogy I keep going back to in recent days to describe the Donald Trump era in American politics.
First, it was a New Hope. He won, against all odds, and seemingly defeated the Uniparty–in the form of Jeb Bush and Hillary–in 2016. But then the Empire rebuilt the Death Star and roared back with a vengeance, brazenly stealing multiple key swing states in the 2020 election and declaring Joe Biden the President-elect.
We are in the Empire Strikes Back phase of the Trump Saga. I don’t know what will happen next. I can’t promise there will be a Return of the Jedi in 2024, or if Trump will somehow prevail in the next couple months. I really have no idea what’s going to happen (although I’m not getting my hopes up that justice prevails).
But here’s some of the latest information that I found particularly interesting.
First is this revelation from James O’Keefe, one of America’s few remaining real journalists, about a USPS whistleblower from Erie, PA named Richard Hopkins, who came forward with claims that postal workers were ordered to back-date a ballot that arrived on November 4 so that it would appear it was received on November 3, election day.
Now, one ballot alone would not seem like that big of a deal. But you have to assume that it didn’t happen once: after all, why risk getting caught for election fraud if it’s not on a level anywhere near enough to make a difference?
(By the way, this is the main reason I think the media’s claim that “voter fraud does happen but it’s rare and never significant enough to tip an election” is BS. Nobody would risk committing a federal crime and risk getting caught over one ballot, or even a hundred ballots. If you’re going to commit election fraud, it’s going to be on a scale that could tip an election. Nobody would risk prison time over one ballot.)
And Hopkins’ claims were explosive enough to compel a federal agent from the USPS’s Inspector General office named Russell Strasser to get in contact with Hopkins and try to coerce him into recanting his story. Project Veritas has it all on audio:
RECORDING: Federal agents “coerce” USPS whistleblower Hopkins to water down story. Hopkins doubles down…
Agent Strasser: “I am trying to twist you a little bit”
“I am scaring you here”…” we have Senators involved…DOJ involved…reason they called me is to try to harness.”
Richard Hopkins, a Combat Veteran and a marine with a daughter never asked to go public or for any of this. In the full interview released tomorrow, he said this harder than what he endured in Afghanistan.
The post office has placed him on non-pay status.
You can support him here.
Originally tweeted by James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) on November 10, 2020.
I would’ve included the link to Hopkins’ GoFundMe page, but it has been taken down. Imagine that.
O’Keefe released that video just a couple of hours ago.
If Hopkins’ story is much-ado about nothing, as the media is claiming, then it appears the federal government does not concur with that assessment. Why else would they try to shut him up?
I’ll also point out again that this was in Erie, PA. Not Philly. Do not assume the voter fraud was limited to just a few big blue cities in the major swing states.
***
Next we have this from GOP national spokeswoman Liz Harrington, who cites a sworn affidavit by a GOP poll watcher in Detroit detailing likely vote fraud on election night:
“I specifically noticed that every ballot I observed was cast for Joe Biden.”
That Joe Biden is one popular guy!
***
Then we have this from the Epoch Times. I’m going to quote the article at length because it explains the situation well:
More than 20,000 absentee ballots in Pennsylvania have impossible return dates and another more than 80,000 have return dates that raise questions, according to a researcher’s analysis of the state’s voter database.
Over 51,000 ballots were marked as returned just a day after they were sent out—an extraordinary speed, given U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivery times, while nearly 35,000 were returned on the same day they were mailed out. Another more than 23,000 have a return date earlier than the sent date. More than 9,000 have no sent date.
The state’s voter records are being scrutinized as President Donald Trump is challenging the results of the presidential election in Pennsylvania and other states where his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, holds a tight lead. The Trump campaign is alleging that invalid ballots have been counted for Democrats and valid ballots for Republicans were thrown away.
The analysis of the publicly available data was conducted by a data researcher who submitted it first to the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times. The researcher, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he consulted about the matter with several USPS field engineers, who said the return dates shown in the database are “impossible.”
The dataset made public by Pennsylvania’s secretary of state was last updated on Nov. 10, and “describes a current state of mail ballot requests for the 2020 General Election.” The data includes the mailed-out and return dates.
In Pennsylvania, voters must request a ballot, which is sent to them via USPS. The voter then fills out the document and sends it back via mail or returns it in person. The process usually takes several days or even weeks, depending on the speed of delivery and response by the voter.
This year, Pennsylvania also allowed voters to “request, receive, mark and cast your mail-in or absentee ballot all in one visit to your county election office or other designated location.” That may explain the ballots with no sent date—they may have been received and cast in person.
While it could also explain the ballots with the same sent and returned date, that appears to clash with the description of the database, which says the sent date is “the date the county confirmed the application to queue a ballot label to mail the ballot materials to the voter.”
If the ballot was received by the voter in person, there would have been no need for a mailing label.
More:
“Since October 1, the average time of delivery for First-Class Mail, including ballots, was 2.5 days,” USPS said in an Oct. 29 release. Impossible and improbable return dates indicate there’s something wrong with either the database or the ballots.
I’m sure they’ll say the database is wrong. Easy fix!
I don’t know exactly what this story proves, but I imagine it would be a good starting point in hunting down fraudulent ballots.
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Finally we have Steve Cortes who goes over several statistically improbable things that happened during the 2020 election.
His first point is the ridiculously high voter turnout in Milwaukee:
Even more importantly, looking within the Wisconsin vote, the decisive locale for Biden was, unsurprisingly, Milwaukee. Wisconsin’s largest city reported an 84% turnout to secure a 145,916 vote lead there for Biden.
Consider a comparison to another very similar Midwestern city, Cleveland, OH. Milwaukee has a population of 590,000, 67% of them minorities. Cleveland has 381,000 people with 60% of them minorities.
But Milwaukee’s 84% turnout dwarfs Cleveland’s more believable 51% turnout rate. Like many of the suspect statistical trends evident from last Tuesday, the abnormal factors favoring Biden seem only present in the key swing states that Biden allegedly won.
It’s certainly possible that Milwaukee had 84% voter turnout while Cleveland only had 51%. It’s possible.
But it seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Are the people of Milwaukee just really, really politically engaged, while the people of Cleveland are not?
Mass mail-in voting could explain the higher turnout in Milwaukee, but then why wouldn’t Cleveland’s voter turnout also be really high?
It’s possible that Wisconsin was way more lenient with mail-in ballots than Ohio was. After all, each state had different rules on absentee voting this year. But according to the Washington Post, both Ohio and Wisconsin automatically sent ballots to eligible voters:
You can see that Ohio and Wisconsin both had the same rules: mail-in ballots were automatically sent to all voters in both states.
And yet Milwaukee had 84% voter turnout, while Cleveland only had 51%.
Bronze Age Pervert makes a good point regarding improbable vote counts in urban areas:
It’s a very un-PC thing to say, but it’s true.
Next point from Cortes: the Biden-only ballots in key states:
Trump campaign legal counsel Sidney Powell reports that, nationwide, over 450,000 Biden-only ballots were cast, meaning the voter allegedly selected Biden but then neglected down-ballot candidates, including closely-contested Senate and House races.
Again, this phenomenon appears far more prominently in battleground states, raising the alarm for manipulation. Why would so many people vote Biden–only in battleground Georgia, but not in deeply-red Wyoming, for instance?
In the Peach State, President Trump’s vote total almost exactly tracked the vote totals for the Republican senate candidates, separated by merely 818 votes out of 2.43 million votes Trump earned there. But, Joe Biden saw an astounding surplus of 95,801 votes over the Democratic Senate candidates.
By comparison, in Wyoming Biden only registered a surplus “Biden-only” take of just 725 votes over the Democratic Senate candidate there, or about 1/4th his take in in Georgia, on a percentage basis.
The Biden-only ballots do not conclusively prove fraud, but they sure reek of something very amiss.
There are actually two Senate elections in Georgia right now, but one of them is a four-way race so we’ll look at the race between David Perdue (R) and Jon Ossoff (D). Cortes’ numbers are now inaccurate after more votes came in, so here are the updated totals:
Biden’s vote total in Georgia right now is 2,471,882. Ossoff got 2,371,970.
This means Biden got 99,912 votes more than Ossoff.
Trump is at 2,457,734 in Georgia. David Perdue is at 2,458,525.
Perdue actually outperformed Trump by 791 votes.
This seems strange. I guess it’s possible that nearly 100k voters in Georgia voted for Biden but left Ossoff hanging. It could be that people only care about the Presidential race and don’t care about down-ballot races. But then why would we not see a similar phenomenon on the Republican side?
The more sinister explanation is that the Biden-only ballots were fraudulent and hastily filled out, and the fraudsters didn’t have time to fill out fake votes for the down-ballot races. After all, there were 100k Biden-only ballots. It takes a long time to fill all of those out.
Final point from Cortes:
Democratic governors clamored for massive amounts of mail-in voting, knowing full well that most states would become overwhelmed and wholly unable to establish the validity and legality of almost all the votes that poured in via mail.
In the case of Pennsylvania, Governor Wolf made such changes unilaterally, in stark violation of Pennsylvania law and in contradiction of the clear US Constitutional assignment of voting regulatory authority to state legislatures, not governors. Governor Wolf’s election boards clearly just accepted the ballots… en masse, without appropriate vetting.
By their own admission, the scant 0.03% of rejected ballots represents a refusal rate that is just 1/30th the level of 2016 in Pennsylvania.
First-time mail-in voters typically see a rejection rate of about 3% historically, or 100 times the rejection rate of Pennsylvania in 2020. When neighboring New York state moved to widespread mail-in voting this summer, their election officials rejected 21% of mailed ballots in June, representing a rate 700 times higher than Pennsylvania’s.
This total lack of filtering or controls raises enormous suspicion regarding a seriously-tainted ballot pool in the Keystone State.
In a year with an unprecedented level of mail-in votes being cast, you would expect the rejection rate to be higher, like it was in New York. But in Pennsylvania, it was many times lower than the 3% historical norm.
That’s fishy.
***
The last thing I want to note is that more votes were counted in Arizona just an hour ago and Biden now leads by 12,813
I’m seeing that there are around 63k votes left to count. If that’s an accurate figure, Trump would need to get about 38k of those to Biden’s 25k in order to pull ahead. That comes out to 60% of the outstanding ballots Trump would need.
So that’s what I’ve got for today.