Jan 10, 2022 • 15M
January 6, 2021 and the Power of Belief, audio edition
What were these people thinking when they stormed the Capitol Building?
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Michael Shermer
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January 6, 2021 and the Power of Belief, audio edition
The Commission on Federal Election Reform determined in 2005 that voting by mail “remain[s] the largest source of potential voter fraud.” In October 2012, The New York Times reported that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth.” The same month, The Washington Post reported that “it may still be possible to steal an American election, if you know the right way to go about it.”
Many mail-in ballots are likely to be sent out based on inaccurate and outdated voter registration rolls. In 2012, Pew determined that almost 24 million voter registrations were “no longer valid or significantly inaccurate.”
In the 2012 and 2018 elections, the state of Oregon could not account for 871,000 ballots sent out, which amounts to one out of every eight ballots that the state mailed out. Nationally, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission determined that 28.3 million mailed ballots disappeared in the four federal elections held between 2012 and 2018.
Matt Braynard of the Voter Integrity Project (VIP) analyzed publicly available data on the 2020 election. Among the most significant VIP findings involved people who changed their state of residence, yet voted absentee using their prior address. In Arizona, which Biden “won” by 10,457 votes, there were 19,997 questionable votes. In Georgia, which Biden “won” by 12,670 votes, VIP found 138,221 such votes. In Wisconsin, which Biden “won” by 20,608 votes, there were 26,673 such votes.
Liberal groups are trying to get states to stop participating in the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a voluntary program run by the states in which they compare their statewide voter registration lists to find voters who are registered in more than one state. Liberals have also taken to the courts to oppose all efforts by states to increase the accuracy of their voter rolls and to remove ineligible voters. There is no question that voter registration lists across the country are filled with errors and inaccurate data and that Democrats consistently oppose any measure that might correct such errors.
Interestingly, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber verified 1.6 million of the signatures gathered to recall fellow Democrat Gavin Newsome, rejecting nearly 20 percent. “I thought signature verification was vote suppression?” senator Ted Cruz tweeted. “That’s what Dems told us.” The Democrats examine elections when it conveniences them and scream “voter disenfranchisement” when it doesn’t.
The Democrats quickly declared victory in November 2020 and demanded that Trump immediately concede the contest, even though they applaud Stacey Abrams for still refusing to admit that she lost her 2018 bid to become Governor of Georgia. No “widespread fraud” to see here. But then many Democrats and their media supporters openly urged people to go to Georgia and commit fraud by voting in the Senate runoffs held there in early January 2021.
A Clinton, Bush, and Obama-era Ambassador rejected the results of 2004’s Ukrainian Presidential election over the same plethora of fraud witnessed in the U.S. elections of 2020. The observations that indicated election-day fraud included illegal use of absentee ballots, ejection of observers, implausible voter turnout rates, mobile ballot box fraud, computer data allegedly altered to favor one candidate, and eye-witness reports of fraud.
Allied Security Operations Group audited the system used to tabulate votes in Michigan in 2020. “We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results,” the audit report charged. “The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud.” The same Dominion software was rejected by the Texas Secretary of State for use in elections in 2013 and 2019 over a plethora of issues which led it to fail basic tests for reliability and accuracy.
To accept Joe Biden as our legitimate Chief Executive, we must believe the voters punished the Democrats in congressional, state, and local elections, yet decided to elect the “leader” of their party president. We must believe that he dramatically underperformed among minority voters, yet received 10 million more votes than Barack Obama. We must believe that virtually all of the reliable election bellwethers were wrong. We must believe that all of the elections in the swing states were conducted honestly, despite efforts by Democrats to block observation and verification. And we must believe that Venezuelan software which was designed to rig elections was used to tabulate the votes in a manner that was completely secure and fair.
For the millions of people who voted for Trump, the most persuasive evidence of massive fraud in the election is likely to be the parade of such categorical assurances that there is no evidence of it. Instead of arguing the evidence of fraud, Shermer, the media, and the Democrats routinely dismiss it as a “conspiracy theory.” However many conspiracy theories may be shown to be untrue, that doesn’t make any new allegation of conspiracy untrue. In reality, voter fraud has a long history in American elections. Since the nation’s independence, there have been over 1,300 proven cases resulting in over 1,125 criminal convictions.
Instead of such bad-faith efforts to refute the allegations of fraud, why didn’t the Democrats themselves take the lead in seeking to dispel the widespread suspicion on the part of the public that the system is rigged by supporting a thorough investigation of the allegations and suspending the certification of the result until it was complete? Isn’t that the only way for trust in the integrity of the electoral system to be preserved? And isn’t such trust vital for democracy to succeed?
I’m afraid we must conclude that neither democracy nor the public’s trust in it is a high priority for the Democrats, who appear to have decided that such things are less important than their primary goal of getting rid of Trump and disenfranchising Republicans by any means necessary.