7: The Big Censored Election

I can think of no more foolish endeavor a this point in my reflections than to attempt to lay out any case concerning any fraud in the 2020 election, in any direction, in any state. Everyone is set in whatever opinion one has, and I will leave it to people far more consequential than me to run through that meat grinder. No, I will not focus on the substance of any argument, for or against. I've been around too long for that. Not that I don't do stupid things, we'll get to that later.

I would, however, wish to be indulged for a few paragraphs.

2020, to say the least, was unusual. Several states made significant changes to their voting rules. As we are now finding, some states (Wisconsin) illegally changed their manner of voting. Instead of the legislatures passing legislation on changes to voting, procedures where changed by election commissions or other executive branch individuals, presumably because of Covid. Some states extended the dates by which ballots could be received and still be counted, out to over a week in at least one state.

On the evening of November 3rd, President Trump was up significantly in battleground states. The prediction markets calculated a 79% chance of a Trump win. The margins were extreme - 57% to 41% in Pennsylvania, for example. Biden would need to win 80%+ of the remaining ballots in some cases to win, a near impossibility, statistically speaking.

And yet, given enough time in enough states, Trump's lead dwindled just enough for Biden to squeak out victory after victory, going out 10 days.

I have mentioned that I have been a practicing statistician for much of my career. The great thing about running an analytic marketing agency is that we have many different clients, so we do interesting analytic work across industries, and among many firms. There are patterns that show themselves time and again. When we would have a client with a situation that does not fit the pattern, I would ensure that the team review every step of their processing and analysis. Invariably, with extremely few exceptions, an error would be found, the problem fixed, and the pattern would emerge.

While I didn't focus on election statistics as a career, the simple table below made may radar go up. There are approximately 3242 counties (including "county equivalents") in the United States. Trump won 2,749 of them, about 85%. Obama won by capturing 873 mostly urban counties, and 69 million votes. Biden won, capturing more votes than Obama, but having them more concentrated (less than 15% of counties). Biden campaigned from his basement, while Obama campaigned aggressively in 2008 and had a massive following.

If this was a client, I would require the team to go back to their data and review each step, because the story itself does not make sense.

Except we have one big problem: Our elections are not structured to be audited.

We have another problem: Audits would be conducted by those who benefit from the elections. This would be an "incentives" problem.

Scott Adams, Dilbert comic creator, would add a third: Any system where fraud could occur will have fraud.

From my perspective, there were plenty of reasons that some states need to be audited. Please note I am not mentioning things like Republican poll watchers being excluded from the TCF Center in Detroit, where the windows were covered up in a hurry at night. It was a question of the state legislatures taking their role seriously and holding their election commissions accountable to the rule of law in their states.

It has been a consistent right of passage for Democrats to contest the legitimacy of Republican presidential victories. In fact, our entire corporate media spent three years telling Americans that Trump must be illegitimate because of non-existent Russian collusion. Hillary, I think, is still quacking about it.

The media and big tech immediately censored any discussion about concerns with the election. In fact, we were (ludicrously) being told it was the "most secure in history." Conservative commentators, and anyone who had the noble concerns of election integrity, were censured across social media. The ones that did make headway were either ignored or crucified by the media.

Having endured 8 years of Obama telling us how terrible we are as people (and convincing liberals) while targeting our businesses, followed by the media smears for four more years, full of lies, the road ahead seemed pretty grim. I used to be able to have conversations with family members from the "other" side. No more. I was harassed, condescended to, and literally called names because I maintained that the election results need to be audited.

This was more proof that the media was gaslighting our hurting republic. Not one person should want an illegitimate officeholder anywhere. In this case, it would be up to the states, campaigns, and courts to figure out this mess.