So what, precisely, are we calling electoral fraud?

 

I'm obliged to the American Spectator for breaking down the allegations of electoral fraud that the Trump campaign's lawyers are making, and what they encompass.  The big picture is eye-opening, but when it's broken down into sub-sections, it's astonishing in the breadth of the conspiracy they're alleging.

A major part of the problem is the sheer size, scope and scale of the fraud, if their allegations are correct.  Will it be possible to get this through State and lower-level Federal courts, and into the hands of the Supreme Court, in time to affect the results of the election?  I hope and pray so, but it's going to be a nail-biter.  There's a very limited window in which to make the case, and every day of that window is going to be filled with more and more vitriolic abuse and rejection from the progressive left, who are desperate to prevent these issues from being aired in public - let alone proved in court.

Here's what the state of play looks like right now.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

Essentially, then, you have two lines of attack here.

Powell seems to be the lead player on the electronic fraud field. She traced the ownership and participation of companies like Dominion Voting Systems, a Canadian firm doing business all over the world which is a major supplier of voting machines to states and counties all over America, and Smartmatic, a firm founded in Venezuela by allies of then-dictator Hugo Chavez, which got its start rigging Venezuelan elections and has since spread around the world; Smartmatic’s board chairman is, or at least was until a few days ago, a George Soros associate named Lord Mark Malloch-Brown. According to Powell, and corroborated by reporting elsewhere (though not in the legacy corporate media), Smartmatic vote tabulation is done not in America but in Spain and Germany and then fed back into the election management software systems in America, which report the vote to media organizations like CNN, the Associated Press, and the New York Times.

From Powell’s statements and other critics of the 2020 election, there seem to be four main problems with the electronic handling of elections, any of which would be fatal to the public trust in the counting of votes in our elections.

First is the presence of algorithms in vote tabulation software. Data from logs scraped off the New York Times‘ election reporting portal indicates vote totals expressed with numbers to the right of a decimal point. You can’t cast a fraction of a vote, but for several years there has been electronic tabulation software that allows for weighted voting going all the way back to when Diebold voting machines garnered such a bad reputation following the 2004 election. There is zero place for algorithms in vote tabulation software — this is addition, not algebra. More on this a bit below.

Second, what appear to be instances where Trump vote totals actually decreased in some of the vote total updates in the data logs scraped from the tabulations. It isn’t possible for a candidate to lose votes; that can only happen if votes are being shifted from one candidate to another, which is an allegation Powell is making. She says that shifting votes from, in this case, Trump to Biden is an actual feature of the software, and it can be done as a drag-and-drop. And she says this isn’t just an allegation, but rather a fact discernible from the software manual found on Smartmatic’s website. What happened in Antrim County, Michigan, where some 6,000 votes were flipped from Trump to Biden in a very conspicuous example, would fit this category of irregularity, though that has been chalked up to “human error” in the legacy media.

Third are the conspicuous large dumps of votes nearly or completely exclusively for Biden present in the vote total updates, something which is statistically improbable if not impossible. These happened in Wisconsin and Michigan almost at the identical time early in the morning on Nov. 4 and generated no small amount of notice by those curious about the election returns.

And fourth, and perhaps more damning than anything, are the very interesting line items in these vote total update logs whereby long successions of updates saw Trump and Biden get identical proportions of each batch of votes counted. That is statistically impossible and cannot happen without manipulation. In Michigan, it looks as though there was the application of an algorithm that discounted Trump votes and generated a sizable statistical anomaly wherein he underperformed progressively worse the more Republican the precinct.

. . .

Giuliani’s presentation covered the other line of attack, which is old-fashioned vote fraud. Focusing most particularly on Pennsylvania and Michigan, but also in Wisconsin, he discussed the multitude of affidavits alleging wide-scale irregularities in the counting of those mail-in ballots. Signatures not matched to those on file. The refusal to allow Republican poll watchers to be present to examine the ballots at the counting. Batches of ballots being run through voting machines over and over again to run up Biden vote totals. Truckloads of Biden-only ballots arriving in the early hours of Nov. 4 through the back doors of counting-houses. Dead people voting. Absentee votes counted despite “ballots” coming in from people who aren’t on record as requesting a ballot. Voters in Democrat counties being contacted and given the opportunity to correct flawed ballots while voters in other counties not contacted with the same opportunity. Trump voters in Pittsburgh arriving to the polls on Nov. 3 only to find that somehow they’re listed as voting already. And so on.

Giuliani says this creates a clear violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause. You can’t run one election in Democrat counties and another election in Republican ones. If the facts are as alleged, that claim is unassailably valid.

Related to this is the drama unfolding in Wayne County, Michigan, in which Detroit sits. The two Republicans on that county’s canvassing board refused to certify the election results there, citing massive evidence of irregularity in the counting. Both were called racists and a local Democrat politician named Abraham Aiyash even revealed one of their home addresses and, worse, where her children go to school. That led to a temporary caving, in which the Republican canvassers agreed to certify the election pending a full investigation by the state. When Jocelyn Benson, the Democrat Secretary of State on whose watch this circus has proceeded, refused to honor that request, the two Republicans stiffened on their refusal to certify the election. Now the Legislature is calling for a full audit, and Benson has no choice but to perform one.

What has happened in Wayne County is a prelude to the real strategy here. Team Trump isn’t necessarily out to prove that the president beat Biden by x number of votes in Georgia and y number of votes in Pennsylvania and z number of votes in Michigan, etc. Instead, what his lawyers are going to try to do is point out that because of the irregularities and manifest illegality in the vote-counting in these disputed states the results cannot be certified. There is no way to prove, because of the electronic and paper fraud in the counting, who won those states.

And while they’ll be in court presenting this evidence to judges, it won’t be in an attempt to have Trump declared the winner of the election, though they’d take that if it was available.

It will be in an attempt to enjoin the certification of the results in those states.

. . .

And if the judges stop the certification of the results, because the true results can’t be known due to computer data being corrupted and fraudulent mail ballots mixed in with legitimate ones, all in violation of state law set down by the state legislatures as the Constitution provides, then it falls to those state legislatures to decide which slate of electors to appoint.

. . .

Let’s understand that should it fall this way it’s almost literally the worst way to win an election from a public relations standpoint. The Left will howl that Trump stole the election, and there will be documentaries and news reports about his “theft” and “coup d’état” and “assault on democracy” for decades. Almost certainly rioting that dwarfs what happened this summer will break out everywhere the Antifa/BLM crowd doesn’t believe local law enforcement will intervene. There could be assassination attempts. Physical assaults on people in random places for wearing Trump shirts or hats. “Resistance” on a scale that greatly exceeds what happened after Trump won in 2016. A campaign to generate faithless electors that dwarfs the obnoxious 2016 efforts at pressuring or intimidating Trump electors. Those electors would likely need round-the-clock protection from law enforcement or other security personnel.

And the Democrats will do everything they can to make America ungovernable, leading up to, and perhaps into, civil war.

Of course, based on the evidence Giuliani, Powell, and the team have presented, a Biden inauguration could potentially have the same effect with roles reversed.

Run a failed Latin American election, and you’ll get a failed Latin American country.

There's a lot more at the link.  It's well worth reading in full.  If it's true . . . then this country may be perilously close to becoming a failed state.

The good news is, there seem to be two separate but complementary lines of attack for President Trump.  One is problems with the election software;  the other is problems with the voting.  Either one, in itself, might be enough to overturn the election results in any state where they were a factor.  If both can be proved, that becomes a virtual certainty instead of a possibility.  On the other hand, if both can't be proved, or - and this may be the biggest single problem - if there isn't enough time to prove them before the election results must be finalized, then we can look forward to President Biden . . . whose election many Americans, including myself, will never accept as genuine.  For us, civil disobedience will become the order of the day.  The "Resistance" in America will now be right-wing, rather than left-wing.

As Ernest Hemingway put it in dialog form, in his 1926 novel "The Sun Also Rises":

“How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

That sounds suspiciously like our political environment right now.  How did it get to this ridiculous state?  Gradually, because we, the electorate, kept on electing scumbag politicians;  and then suddenly, when the accumulated weight of scumbags became too much for the system to bear.  I suspect we're at the "suddenly" stage right now.

May God have mercy on us all as we work our way through this.  As I said a couple of weeks ago, civil war is not an unimaginable result of this crisis.

Peter