For last month’s newsletter, I submitted the first of a two part series. The first part featured two trending concerns: the death of personal liberty and the death of money. This second part of the series focuses on the third trending concern, the death of democracy. To be blunt, the topic could just be called election fraud, because that’s what this article is about. Without honest and reliable voting, democracy does not exist.
Election fraud has been a concern of all political parties for quite some time. Democrats complained bitterly about the results of the 2000 election. Legislation called the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, was passed in 2002 in response to their complaints, most of which fell under the rubric of voter suppression. This legislation offered Federal aid and guidelines to states to encourage them to upgrade to electronic voting systems. A key provision was that a permanent paper record of all elections would be produced by the machines to ensure the votes could be audited.
Democrats were back complaining after the 2004 elections. In the 2005 joint session of Congress to certify the electors, Senator Barbara Boxer and Representative Stephanie Tubbs, D-Ohio, objected to Bush’s Ohio votes. That caused the chambers to leave their joint session and debate separately for two hours. Neither chamber voted against certification [1], but House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) praised Boxer and Tubbs for bringing up the objection. She said, “Today we are witnessing Democracy at work.” John Conyers, the Democrat Congressman from Detroit, was one of 31 members of the House who voted not to count the 20 Electoral College votes from Ohio. Conyers wrote a book citing his Party’s claims of election fraud called ”What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election.” I read the book in 2005. I believe a copy is still somewhere in my house.
The conversion of America’s voting system from paper to electronic did not go well, like most federal programs. Critics complained that the funds were misappropriated, giving contractors too much money for building handicap accessibility and leaving too little for upgrades to electronic systems. The electronic systems purchased were foreign produced or cobbled together from off the shelf software. Many counties did not meet the deadlines for conversion specified in HAVA. As states scrambled to comply, security was not the highest priority.
During the Obama years, Democrats were sufficiently satisfied with election results. The Federal government did not make voting systems a priority as states quietly went about changing over their systems and refining their procedures to comply with HAVA mandates and guidelines. The U.S. Constitution, after all, gave state legislators the right to determine the time, manner and place for federal elections. Republicans seemed to be satisfied working at the state level. However, after Trump was elected in 2016, the Democrat criticisms began again. The Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, asked for recounts in several states. Republicans complained that Stein was secretly acting on behalf of the Democrat candidate, Hillary Clinton. In early 2017, at least six House Democrats objected to the Electoral College: McGovern, Raskin, Jayapal, Barbara Lee, Jackson Lee and Maxine Waters.[2]
During the Trump administration, enough time had passed since HAVA for the technology of some of the voting systems to become outdated, and for enough data to be collected to take a serious look at the systems on a national basis. There was growing concern. It became apparent to many observers that machines had been purchased by various county boards of election whose officials for the most part lacked the expertise needed for the analysis and selection of modern data collection systems. Numerous articles and studies were published indicating that the machines were insecure and could be hacked physically or remotely.
In 2020, both Democrats and Republicans were concerned about the integrity of the upcoming election. It is well known that Donald Trump sounded the alarm on numerous occasions, primarily about the ad hoc procedures being developed for mail in ballots due to the coronavirus “crisis”. In August of 2020, Hillary Clinton stated, “it is imperative that Biden does not concede the election no matter what the vote tallies are” [3]. The election did not go well. This was not a surprise.
The Republican objections to the 2020 election encompass six issues:
- insecure voting machines
- restrictions on the ability of poll watchers to do their job.
- alleged illegal acts by election officials and poll workers who closed the polls in the early morning hours of November 4th around 3:00am on false pretexts, sending the poll observers home. When official counting resumed during normal business hours on November 4th, large leads for Trump had become leads had suddenly become leads for Biden.
- Data analysis showing statistical impossibility for the vote tallies to occur as they did when they did.
- Error and fraud inherent in the new procedures for mail in ballots that were created because of the Coronavirus epidemic.
- Violations of law in creating these new procedures, specifically Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
On November 4th, I was called by a friend of mine, a graduate from the University of Chicago with a degree in economics and a successful hedge fund manager. Highly agitated, he gave me a convincing case for the 4th objection listed above. Sophisticated statistical analysis convinced him that the vote count in Philadelphia was fraudulent. I had already been reading about other mathematicians who were making the same case, so it didn’t take much for me to believe him. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had already issued Philadelphia an order to segregate ballots which had been handled in violation of the law. This order was ignored.
Eager for answers, I started looking for any information available. I knew there was a group in Ohio whose members were strong supporters of Trump, so I went to their website, and I’ve been following it since early November. I am not going to attempt to explain the six issues of doubt I listed above, but I am going to provide the two sources where you can read the explanations for yourself. The Trump supporter’s website is www.wethepeopleconvention.org. Day after day, week after week, they have been laying out a case that the election had been stolen. There is a massive archive of videos and articles archives on this website just about the 2020 election. The evolution of thought from late fall to now of these people is also interesting.
The best summary of the events before, during and after the election from someone who was on the inside of Trump’s team is at www.deepcapture.com. This blog, written by self styled libertarian Patrick Byrne, lists the posts necessary to read on the opening page. It is important you read all of them, and soon, because it may be soon taken down. One of the posts incorporates a New York Times video and editorial which illustrates the non-partisan concern over voting machines just after 2017. Patrick Byrne makes it a point to tell his readers to watch the video in its entirety.
I know it is hard to swallow the idea that some massive conspiracy could pull something like this off. Articles have been written about how ridiculously hard this would be. These articles are false. In one of his blogs, Patrick Byrne says something like, “go to any college and ask a political science professor how you can steal an election and he will tell you, ‘all you have to do is capture the votes of six metropolitan counties in six key swing states’”. According to the Trump team narrative, this is in fact what happened.
One of the strongest influences towards me believing that this fraud occurred is the massive gaslighting by the conventional media outlets and the Democrat Party. Many times they mention “false claims”, “without evidence”, etc. This can’t be true by any stretch of the English language. In the first place, there are dozens of affidavits sworn by people under penalty of perjury who allege to have seen election fraud. There are computer experts who have offered to show how to unequivocally prove or disprove whether ballots were fraudulent. There are many data experts and mathematics PHDs who can show certain patterns of vote totals in this election which are impossible. The media could use terms like “alleged fraud” or “without credible evidence”, which would be somewhat more truthful, but they don’t. They just claim the evidence was never provided, which is on its face a lie. They could say it is bad evidence, but not that there is no evidence. They simply don’t want the people to hear the case for a fraudulent election. The Democrats call the Republicans traitors and insurrectionists for using the same Constitutional procedures to certify the electors in a joint session of Congress that they themselves utilized many times before. As usual, the hypocrisy of both political parties is appalling and almost laughable.
Let me repeat what I said in my article last month. This is not about Trump. Trump did one thing right in his last year in office. He let the laboratory of states devise their own plans to combat the Coronavirus pandemic instead of trying to impose a federal dictatorship as Biden is prepared to do. Other than that, many of Trump’s decisions in 2020 were abysmal. He was disorganized and unprepared for another term. I believe he would been a lesser evil than Biden, but there is no way to know for sure.
This is about the one essential thing needed to preserving self-government, which is arguably the finest achievement of humans, and that is the right to vote in a representative form of government. We need to learn everything we can about the current process and make our voices heard. Right now, the Democrats are ready to push another bill through Congress that will fundamentally change the character of our Republic. It is a disastrous bill, but it is so important to Joe Biden it is House Bill 1. It is not an easy thing to do, but Libertarians have got to be serious and active in preserving the integrity of the vote. We know that Republicans and Democrats can’t be entrusted with any thing of value.
[1] http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll007.xml.
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/politics/electoral-college-vote-count-objections/index.html
[3] https://www.newsmax.com/politics/concede-election-democrat-hypocrisy/2020/11/08/id/996002/.
John Stewart, Member At-Large, Franklin County Libertarian Party