OK, I generally try to not stray too deep into the miasma that is
politics these days, but there is something that is worrying me. I’m
seeing people, bright, intelligent people whom I respect, still
buying into the “voter fraud” argument. If you’re one of those
people: I hate to say this, but I truly do love you, and love
sometimes has to speak the truth:
Y’all have been
gaslighted. I don’t say that lightly, and I’m trying not to be
mean about it, but that’s the only thing I can find to explain the
phenomena.
I have two different
explanations for why the 2020 Election couldn’t have been stolen:
One Logistic and one Statistical. We’ll take the Logistic first.
The Logistics
problem begins with this simple fact: Every voting precinct has a
different slate of candidates, offices, and issues. Not every state,
or every county, every voting precinct. For example, in my precinct,
I vote for a different school board than the one for the city I live
in, because I’m part of that school district. The school district
doesn’t follow city boundaries.
Each voting precinct
has a different ballot, which means that the encoded data will be
different. Each precinct’s mail in ballots will be different as
well. Wikipedia reports that in 2020, there were 176,933 precincts in
the United States. That doesn’t have to be an exact number,
though. Managing to fraudulently manipulate the results from anything
over a few thousand different voting precincts rapidly becomes a
logistical nightmare. Anything over 100,000 precincts in a 24 hour
period? Logistically impossible. What about with a computer? Well,
you would have to find a way to program a computer to invisibly
manipulate different ballots, captured by different means, all within
24 hours.
What about AI? Well; (1) AI was not that advanced in 2020, and (2) AI requires a huge sample of text and images (multiple millions of samples) to be able to even recognize a ballot reliably, let alone decipher hundreds of thousands of different forms and formats, and successfully manipulate them. I'm pretty sure that someone would have spotted all those samples being accumulated.
Now, on to Statistics: I’m deep down a “numbers and logic” guy, so let’s
take a logical look at some numbers. I’m using two sources of
information: A 20 year MIT database of observed voter fraud as of
2020, and a table of 2020 state-by-state vote counts from Dave
Lep’s Atlas of US Presidential Elections.
First, the MIT
database shows, over the past 20 years, just over 1,200 cases of
voter fraud, 204 of which involved mail-in ballots. That is a rate of
voter fraud of 0.00006%.
Now let’s look at
Dave Let’s Atlas. I didn’t pick this site because of any
particular political bent, it just happened to be the first one I
found that had a handy table. First, let’s look at the popular
vote. The margin of popular vote victory for the Biden/Harris ticket
is 3,078,287 votes. In order to make it a “dead heat”, half of
those (1,539,543) would have to be fraudulent. There were 158,590,015
total votes cast across all 50 states, so a “dead heat”
popular-vote election would require that there was a fraud rate of
just under 1%
That is 16,000 times
the rate of voter fraud observed at MIT, just to get to a dead heat.
A victory for Trump/Pence by the same margin would require a fraud
rate of 1.94% of all votes cast, about 32,000 times what MIT
observes.
Ah, but a few key
states for the Electoral College were close! What about those?
Basically, we’re talking here about Arizona (11), North Carolina
(15) and Georgia (16). For the sake of discussion, let’s assume
that all 3 actually should have gone to Trump/Pence. The next closest
state, by a “% of fraudulent votes to make it a dead heat”
measure is Wisconsin, with 0.31%. That is still 5,000 times the MIT
observed rate. Let’s assume that Wisconsin should have gone to
Trump/Pence by the same margin (10,000 times MIT’s rate of vote
fraud). Now you’re at a dead heat in the Electoral College at 269
each.
That’s what you
have to assume to imagine that voter fraud made it a dead heat.
10,000 times the observed rate of voter fraud.
Not a clear victory
for Trump/Pence, just a dead heat in the Electoral College.
You have to assume that every one of the 4 closest states to a dead
heat should have gone to Trump/Pence.
For a clear victory
(by the same vote margin) you would have to throw in Pennsylvania
(the next closest state after Wisconsin) with an assumed a rate of
fraud in of 12,000 times the MIT observation.
To be clear: To buy
the argument that voter fraud manipulated a loss for Trump/Pence, you
have to assume that either; (1) a campaign to affect the vote through
fraud at 12,000 times the observed rate of fraud has so far gone
totally undetected by the people responsible in both parties, or
(2) MIT’s data only reflects unsuccessful fraud, and the
successful fraud isn’t caught. (That’s called “ascertainment
bias”, where you don’t know reality because your sample size
misses too much.)
Dealing with the
first point, some may argue that it is all a product of a massive
conspiracy to cover up the fraud. In response, I would point to Chuck
Colson’s comment about his belief in the Resurrection:
“I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me.
How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the
dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once
denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison.
They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate
embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't
keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep
a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.”
Regardless of how
you may feel about the Resurrection, Mr. Colson’s point about
conspiracy is valid: The Watergate conspirators couldn’t
collectively keep a secret for 3 weeks. The more collaborators there
are in a conspiracy, the more possibility that someone would break,
especially when their careers and even their lives are being
threatened. A cover-up on this scale would have to involve thousands
of people, at many levels, any of whom would be able to bring forward
evidence to prove the conspiracy, any time in the past almost 4
years. Nobody has come forward, nobody has confessed, despite the
threats, and despite the opportunity to be a hero by saving some
court cases.
Didn’t happen. That dog don’t hunt.
Now, let’s think
through that second possibility for a moment, because “Survivorship
bias” and Ascertainment bias both happen. MIT’s data when I
referenced it covered 20 years of observations (1999 – 2019)*.
The assumption that the data is that massively flawed,
and that the real rate of fraud is underreported by a factor of
12,000, calls into question every election in the past 20 years,
regardless of who won.
So, if you want to
believe that Trump’s loss in 2020 was a result of undiscovered
voter fraud, you would have to accept that his victory in 2016 was
a fraud as well.
Either; (a) there
has been massive fraud for the past 20 years, that the MIT survey
doesn’t pick up on, or (b) the 2020 election had a rate of voter
fraud that exceeded the historical precedent by a factor of 12,000,
and that with all the tens of thousands of people responsible (see my
logistical argument) either missed it, or lied, and nobody has
‘fessed up.
That’s why I’m saying that, if you, bright person whom I respect,
buy the “voter fraud” argument about the 2020 Election, you have
been successfully gaslighted.
The numbers just don’t work. The logic is faulty. I’m sorry to
say it, but your perception of reality has been distorted.
* I originally wrote this in late 2020, and have only minimally
updated it since.