From Esteban:
In my previous award-winning post here at CT I wrote “I believe President Trump deservedly won a massive reelection victory, but the Democrats cleverly took advantage of every opportunity presented by the Kung Flu, Democrat judges and election workers who were willing to do anything to get rid of him.” A number of commenters wondered if I could really believe such thing. Well, allow me to appropriate Steven Crowder’s approach and ask you to change my mind.
Unlike the way that a lot of Conservatives approach this question I am going to focus on the strongest examples. If this goes on long enough I may delve into some of the murkier areas, but I believe the issue can be settled without resorting to statistical anomalies (no matter how extreme) or theories about Dominion voting machines (although in 2017 CNN thought this worrisome enough to warrant a special episode).
On election night – November 3, 2020 – an interesting thing happened in Atlanta, which happens to be a big Democrat-run city in a swing state. Around 10:30 PM the election workers told everyone to go home, it was getting late and they’d start counting votes again in the morning. Shortly after everyone else went home they locked the door and pulled suitcases out from under a table where they were hidden by a tablecloth. They then proceeded to remove ballots from the suitcases and run them through the vote counting machines repeatedly. How do we know this, you ask? Well, it’s not based on rumors or even affidavits, there is video of it. As it happens there were security cameras covering the room where this was going on, presumably unknown to the civil servants.
I believe this is the most blatant example, but there are others that are also backed up by video. So, those of you who wonder where some of us get this idea that the election was less than honest, change my mind. How do you explain this as anything other than vote fraud?
Could you post some links to these videos, please?
Yup, that would seem like a good first step.
Took me a minute to find this:
https://wtam.iheart.com/featured/mike-trivisonno/content/2020-12-04-watch-video-ballot-count-irregularities-in-atlanta/
And the counter – https://eu.onlineathens.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/12/05/fact-check-video-doesnt-show-suitcases-illegal-ballots-georgia/3838383001/
Here’s the substance of the “counter”, cut and pasted from your link (the link, by the way, winds up at left-wing propaganda outlet factcheck.org):
“Fulton County’s election director has disputed that claim”. So, the people perpetrating the fraud have said there was no fraud, so that settles that.
Have you watched the video at the top of this – https://www.wsbtv.com/news/politics/georgia-election-officials-show-frame-by-frame-what-really-happened-fulton-surveillance-video/T5M3PYIBYFHFFOD3CIB2ULDVDE/
Why else would they want to impeach Trump unless they had well-motivated fears that the election would be proven fraudulent and Trump would return?
Michael, it won’t be proven fraudulent but your question is pertinent; some legislators’ overt goal is to disqualify Trump for 2024. The fools are prolonging Trump’s relevance and squandering Biden’s “honeymoon” – even after the 55-45 vote that the Senate considers it Constitutional to impeach a private citizen but also disclosed that there is no 2/3 majority to convict. Bring it on! Is it good for the nation? “Compared to what?”
I love the tacit acknowledgment from both sides that the actual facts of the case will have no bearing on the verdict.
We have no federal elections. Even Presidential Electors are state officials, and they are chosen subject to 51 different legal systems. Election integrity is the business of the states. Republican officials in Georgia conceded to Democrat lawsuits and ignored certain state laws. The election was stolen when con artists portrayed Covid as The Plague and demanded that we reinvent everything including elections to minimize human contact. Maximize ease of voting rather than confidence in the result, ability to say who the electorate is, ability to return a result the same evening. The bill HR-1 seeks to order the states to… Read more »
PS – I agree with columnist Victor Davis Hanson who said this week that the most important question is this: If everyone had been telling you for four years that the current U.S. President was essentially Adolf Hitler, would you not feel a moral duty to cheat to defeat him in the 2020 election?
You are right, there were almost certainly some people who were tempted and thought they had a moral duty to ensure that Trump didn’t win. But that isn’t the most important question. The most important question is whether they had the means and motive to act on that temptation, and if they did act whether it could have been done in such a way to sufficiently avoid detection and have a meaningful impact on the result. There is also the issue that if everyone has been telling you that the next US president was essentially Joe Stalin and that he… Read more »
Able to sufficiently avoid detection? When the voice of “science” is Anthony Fauci, when “journalism” is Jim Acosta, when “Congressional oversight” is Eric Swalwell, and when “free speech” is managed by @Jack – Yeah, probably.
No one was saying Biden is Stalin, and it is telling that you conclude with this straw man. A lot of people were saying Biden was feeble, demented, doesn’t know what anything is for, and will break anything he touches. Guess what.
PS – Correction to my earlier PS post: The columnist was Dennis Prager.
To return to the point: However the other side feels about Biden, they do not steal elections, because they believe in the rule of law. Likewise, they don’t commandeer blocks of central cities either, because they have day jobs.
https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2021/01/26/the-most-important-question-about-the-2020-election-n2583706
The simple fact that votes were found after the count proper had begun, in various locations demonstrates that the ballots had not been verified prior to the count.
A massive opening for fraud!
If course that does not prove fraud happened, not beyond reasonable doubt. But it does prove stunning incompetence.
And to turn the burden of proof to the way the public see things, rather than the way the courts see things, it is impossible to prove, even on balance of probibility, that those parts of the election were on the level.
Everyone thinks government is shit at doing stuff so why would election counting be any different? There is a difference between incompetence and malicious intent.
True, but the suitcase episode wasn’t incompetence, it actually was very well executed. As noted above, still waiting for any explanation of this episode other than voter fraud.
What do you think of https://www.wsbtv.com/news/politics/georgia-election-officials-show-frame-by-frame-what-really-happened-fulton-surveillance-video/T5M3PYIBYFHFFOD3CIB2ULDVDE/
What do I think of it? Having been a party scrutineer at a UK general election count, I think it’s a fucking mess. The counting tables should be plain tables. A top & four legs so the scrutineers can see what’s going on. Counters should count. They shouldn’t to be going to collect boxes of votes, standing around tables, walking about. In a two candidate election ballot papers should be in one of four stacks in front of each counter. Votes to be counted. Votes for candidate A. Votes for candidate B. Ballot papers where the vote is unclear. How… Read more »
So, government is shit at stuff. USA has poor election processes. Not a great place to be but also not definitive evidence of fraud as the article writer believes.
Further point. Voting machines. No voter can check that they record the vote intended, few would be competent to do so even if given the opportunity. Which in 2016 gave rise to the suspicion that Putin hacked them and last year to the suspicion that someone else did. Get rid of the suspicion by using well understood voting machines – pencils. Also I note that the courts refused to consider any evidence of voter fraud, citing lack of standing. Unless one is of the opinion that elections don’t have consequences, and hence that government can be ignored, then this is… Read more »
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/14/fact-check-georgia-suitcase-video-missing-context/3892640001/
USA Today says “nothing to see here”. I note they state re: poll watchers and observers “The fact that some left after a late point” – they left because they were told to do so, we’re done counting for the night. If they spin that point I’m going to have trouble buying the rest.
And yet its plausible. Which means it isn’t “slam dunk” evidence of electoral fraud. And this was the example given in the article which presumably means it’s one of the strongest cases that can be made for fraud.
Plausible doesn’t mean possible doesn’t mean probable doesn’t mean it is fact. You sound like a demented Evangaloony talking Jesus.
The USA Today article is quite wide of the mark. It talks about the election workers packing up ballots in cases, says this is normal – since that’s got nothing to do with the alleged fraud, I can only conclude that they’re blowing smoke. They never explain why election workers hid cases of ballots under a tablecloth, only pulled them out after all witnesses had left and ran them through the counting machines multiple times.
Remember, Biden only won Georgia by a little less than 12,000 votes out of more than four million. Doesn’t take much fraud to come out a winner.
The real argument against absentee votes (whether by mail or some Internet magic) – which is what decided the US 2020 election result – is that there’s a reason secret ballots were introduced. With secret ballots, nobody can coerce or buy votes, because they have no way of knowing how a specific individual voted. But with a postal ballot that protection is gone. This is becoming a growing problem in the UK, particularly in its more ‘diverse’ areas, such as Tower Hamlets. Postal (and any other ‘remote’ form of) voting should be restricted to those genuinely unable to attend a… Read more »
I did notice a flood of options for absentee voting in the last Queensland election. Indeed I didn’t need to wait in line when I went to the polling station.
Of course the Labor government was re-elected, though I’d attribute this to inertia rather fraud. Apart from the gerrymander that replaced the old one when it began putting the Nationals rather than them in power.
Hidden or Stored, that is the question. If you merely wanted to store some ballots where would you put them? Under tables is the obvious place.
It may be that Trump supporters have succumbed to the same faulty thinking as democrats and remoaners, there has to be some nefarious reason for why “we” lost. Having said that, Trump supporters have the moral high ground, because it is known that their opponents have no problem with cheating, since anything goes when you are on the same side as the angels.
Their opponents also advocate coercive solutions to social and economic problems (much more so than the Trump supporters). When you’re okay with force, fraud is even better as it’s less likely to devolve into violence. This is why “democratic socialism” (socialism constrained by an accurate measurement of the popular will – or more generally, socialism constrained by anything) is transient.