Back in 2016, then candidate Hillary Clinton got almost 3 million more popular votes than the Electoral College winner, Donald Trump.
In 2020, Trump gained more popular votes as a sitting president than any of his predecessors. Trump also received the highest percentage of non-white votes than any GOP candidate since Richard Nixon in 1960.
Despite those statistics, Trump (allegedly) still lost to Biden by a little over 7 million votes.
Or did he?
As the graphic at the top reveals, Biden's nearly 4.2 million vote improvement in Margin of Victory (MOV) appears to be remarkably similar to the decrease (4.3 million) in WIMP over the same period.
Is this just another one of many numerical coincidences that keep popping up in the 2020 election results that points to tabulation (adjudication) problems in the election system -- or did Libertarians, Greens, and others just decide to vote for Biden?
Evidence points to the former
Despite an increase in nationwide voter turnout of over 30 million in 2020, there were three times fewer write-in votes than in 2016. The numbers don't make sense, especially when you consider that Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin relegated the Green Party to write-in status in the Presidential contest. To be clear, we should have seen an increase in write-in votes.
But across the United States, write-in votes fell from 698,990 in 2016 to just 217,465 in 2020 -- and an impossibly low 13,803 of those votes reportedly came by absentee ballot (source Edison Research data).
According to fivethirtyeight.com, nearly 48 million absentee ballots were cast in 2020. Doing the math, only about 3 in 10,000 (.00029%) absentee voters wrote-in a candidate for President. That seems highly unlikely. In 2016, scattered write-ins accounted for .05% of the total vote.
Key Battleground States
Recall from the Pennsylvania analysis that Green Party down ballot candidates received between 31K and 38K absentee ballots -- but the Presidential candidate, Howie Hawkins, who was a write-in candidate, received less than 453 absentee votes. In other words, about 30,000 write-in absentee votes seemingly went missing.
But it gets worse when you consider in-person votes.
A review of county level election reports in Pennsylvania (PA) determined Hawkins received just 611 votes overall (absentee + in-person), compared to other Green party statewide candidates who each received over 70,000 votes. This is rather compelling evidence that the election system in Pennsylvania was not properly adjudicating in-person and absentee write-in votes.
Biden's MOV in Pennsylvania was 80,555 -- remarkably close to the potential number of "missing" Green Party (write-in) presidential votes.
In Georgia the decline in the write-in votes (~20K) was also greater than the MOV (~12.6K) in 2020.
In addition, the vote dump that occurred in Georgia at 1:32AM EST -- about 3.5 hours after the initiation of the infamous State Farm Arena secret ballot count -- counted approximately 162K votes for Biden, 42K votes for Trump with approximately 3,000 WIMP votes adjudicated to Biden (according to Edison data).
That pattern repeated in the other battlegrounds.
In Arizona, Trump's margin in 2016 was 91,234 votes but in 2020 the margin is practically erased by the decline in Minor Party votes (89,207). The 2020 Biden MOV is less than the decline in Write-In votes from 2016.
The decline in Write-In votes accounts for Biden's MOV in Badger State.
The vote dump that pushed Biden ahead in Wisconsin occurred at 3:42 AM EST on November 4th. That dump was an upload of absentee votes from Milwaukee in which Biden gained about 143K votes to Trump's 25K and forged ahead in the race by 10,000 votes. There were no WIMP votes in the dump based on Edison time series data.
Write-in votes are the easiest votes to steal because they are automatically sent to adjudication where election workers are supposed to determine the will of the voter. However, the massive decline in write-in votes from 2016 likely points to a nationwide, systemic issue that was automatically shifting votes.
A recent evidence exhibit from the forensic audit of the Antrim County, Michigan voting systems found that Dominion and ES&S systems had an internal wireless card that allowed voting machines to communicate with a central server. The audit report stated that it was possible for an unauthorized user to gain access to the system. Given the prevalence of Dominion and ES&S voting systems across the United States, it is certainly possible that 2020 election was "hacked" by bad actors.
Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, is that vote shifting (stealing) malware could have been unwittingly uploaded by election officials just prior to the election when they uploaded the new ballot definition files or made software changes.
In any case, audits of paper ballots and the ballot images are needed to determine what happened in the 2020 election.
Ray Blehar, April 12, 2021, 6:07PM EDT; Updated April 13, 2021 at 9:24AM EDT
This is an interesting perspective.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading the blog and for commenting.
DeleteThe Pennsylvania numbers for Green Party candidates are not credible. Stein knew that in 2016, but Judges thought that machine manipulation of votes was impossible because voting machines (allegedly) aren't connected to the internet.
Most lawyers and judges are technology idiots.
Cheers!
Ray