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Democrats Prepare To Dump Joe Biden Now That He’s Served His Purpose

Reported BY: BOB ANDERSON | DECEMBER 20, 2021

Joe Biden getting a vaccine — **Just a year after a record 81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden, they’re now being told it didn’t work out. BOB ANDERSON / MORE ARTICLES**

When The New York Times begins publishing op-eds saying Joe Biden should not run again, and that he should announce it soon, then the gig is officially up. Biden is a lame duck. Perhaps someone should tell him.

Columnist Bret Stephens is right to note that the president would be 86 years old at the time of the next election cycle, and that he now “seems … uneven. Often cogent, but sometimes alarmingly incoherent.” More simply, Joe is old and tottering—and he’s unpopular to a startling degree. As Stephens notes, even passage of a multi-trillion-dollar “infrastructure” spending bill didn’t boost his numbers much. He suggests the president liberate his party by freeing new (and younger) candidates to begin exploring a path to the presidency.

Sure, the question of Joe’s future “need(s) to be discussed candidly, not just whispered constantly.” At the same time, can we also ask the other obvious question candidly? Why did the media cover for an elderly septuagenarian with clear age-related issues, thrusting him into a job he was never truly capable of holding—and subjecting the nation to a dangerous period without a strong leader? It’s fine to have a mea culpa moment, and truth delivered late is better than truth denied forever, but as the nation stumbles along with a puppet president there should be some accountability.

Just a year after a record 81 million Americans voted for Biden, they’re now being told it didn’t work out. Sorry. It’s coming within the timeframe of the traditional presidential “honeymoon,” that brief period presidents are normally at their zenith of political power and brimming to pass a bold agenda. Perhaps we should give the public some adjustment time to avoid whiplash from this quick pivot. After all, it wasn’t long ago that the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin was telling them Biden was completely fit for duty, someone who “with his aviator sunglasses (plus his promotion of exercise during the Obama administration), projects vitality and energy.”

Just more than a month before the election last year, a Forbes article claimed Trump and Biden might be “super agers” who would be expected to significantly outlive other men their age. Trump’s activity on the campaign trail perhaps warranted that description, but Biden not so much. He spent more days underground than Punxsutawney Phil and showed frequent difficulty with coherency on the campaign trail, from trying to describe COVID losses “for the past hundred years” to quoting “you know, the thing.”

Days after Biden’s election victory last year, Matt Viser of the Washington Post tweeted that “Joe Biden would often jog onto stage, showing how physically vigorous he is and attempting to dispel questions about his age. Now that he’s the oldest president-elect in American history, that doesn’t change.”

Has it changed now, Matt?

The truth is that establishment Democrats wanted Joe, and they selected him, despite his age and numerous warning signs regarding his mental acuity. He was the blank canvas on which anything could be written, and he could be sold as a “moderate.”

As Bernie Sanders surged in the polls in early 2020 with 45 delegates after the first three primaries and Joe languished in a distant third place with 15, the party took control. Rep. Jim Clyburn stepped in and delivered an influential endorsement in South Carolina that pushed African-American support to Biden’s campaign, propelling him to victory. Stories immediately appeared claiming Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg had “no realistic path to the nomination.”

Despite trailing early in fundraising behind the well-organized Sanders fundraising machine, the Democrat establishment pivoted to push donations to Biden. As the NYT admitted in an article at the time, “The elite world of billionaires and multimillionaires has remained a critical cog in the Biden money machine.” Bernie’s small-dollar donors were no match for the large bundles of corporate and PAC cash. With a lot of help from a sycophantic media, Biden was elected president of the United States, without serious inquiry regarding his physical and mental abilities. Now, suddenly, it’s time to plan Joe’s exit before the new Oval Office carpet has fully settled in place?

We should note that it wasn’t Joe stumbling up the stairs of Air Force One that troubled Democrats into questioning Joe’s fitness. They didn’t question his stability when he at times spoke gibberish. They didn’t seem worried when his physical exam failed to report on his cognitive ability. No, his collapse in the polls is why Joe is suddenly being challenged on the question of running again, and despite Chuck Todd’s protestations, it can’t be blamed on Trump.

It turns out that the public is a bit smarter than Democrats guessed. Reading prepared speeches from a teleprompter is not a substitute for leadership. Neither is putting one’s head down on the presidential podium like a child in the face of tough questions about a military failure in Afghanistan. The blame game can only get a president so far. After voters finish expressing ire at the press for being misled about Biden’s abilities, perhaps they will turn and express sympathy for the old man who so desperately wanted the job. Having run twice before, the party eventually picked him, but not before the gas had run out of his tank.

Joe may have always been a politician, but the man behind the podium now is not the same as the one who ran in 2008, and certainly not the man who ran in 1988. Stripped of his dignity, he has become a caricature of a president, adorned with all of the symbols of the office, but lacking the substance necessary to perform.

Every Trump voter can still name his key issues: closing the border, beating China, restoring American jobs, making America energy independent, and above all, to “Make America Great Again.” Less than a year into his presidency, it’s hard to recall Biden standing strongly for anything in particular, having served more as an official signer of policy goals for leftist special interest groups than for his own agenda.

The truth is that even as his campaign wobbled toward the finish line last year, they were still struggling to coin a definitive slogan. That few can remember the eventual decision speaks to the vacuousness of this man and this presidency.

Joe is in the process of sinking not only himself but also his party in the upcoming midterms and possibly the 2024 election, so the door to retirement is being planned. Perhaps Democrats will at least give him the courtesy of a final national address, a chance to read from the presidential teleprompter one final time. At the end, he can sign off blissfully with, “Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America … end of message.”

Bob Anderson is a partner and CFO of a hotel development company and a former aerospace engineer who worked on the International Space Station and interned in Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) at the Pentagon. He is also a licensed commercial pilot.

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Joshua Lawson of the Federalist Op-ed: Giving 2021 A Fighting Chance Requires We All Choose To Do What Is Hard

Even before the horrible year that was 2020, New Year’s Eve celebrations have long been filled with the near-certain expectation that things will definitely get better. Generally speaking, it’s a fine sentiment. Optimism is good; hope is good; and striving to improve the future from where we are today led us from the cave to the fields, across vast oceans, and into the limitless of outer space.

But nothing magical happens when the calendar year flips over. There’s no unexplained scientific phenomenon that shifts the incalculable number of atoms in our known universe into undaunted forces for good simply because we’ve reached the conclusion of this year’s cycle through the Gregorian calendar. Instead, history tells us things can always get worse.

After the stock market crashed in 1929, the Great Depression didn’t reach its darkest days until 1933. The 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria was followed by the invasion of Poland in 1939, then the steamrolling of France and near-defeat of Britain in 1940.

Yet while there’s no iron-clad guarantee that 2021 will be great, every one of us can contribute to the effort to make a redemptive year a reality.

No government action will make 2021 better than what we just went through in 2020. As with most positive change, any meaningful, lasting shifts in the trajectory of our towns and our nation will stem from individuals choosing to do good.

World events of a grand nature will remain outside our ability to master. Pandemics, wildfires, and — unless you live in one of a handful of swing states — presidential elections involving more than 158 million votes are things almost entirely beyond our control. Yet, even in the worst of times, we can control how we interact with our fellow Americans, and a shift in the right direction in this regard is one of the simplest — albeit difficult — steps we can take.

It’s within the grasp of each of us, as individuals, to decide if what we both consume and contribute is life-affirming or malevolent, restorative or toxic. In our workplaces, online using social media, with our families, and interacting with total strangers, we are responsible for how we live amongst one another.

In our current rancorous political environment, we’ll have a chance at a better year if we realize most genuine conversations or debates aren’t best served in a tit-for-tat on Facebook or Twitter but in person over coffee, lunch, or a drink after work. This doesn’t mean surrendering our principles or allowing ourselves to be walked over. It does, however, require we prudently recognize whose minds are open to change, and those who refuse to be unconvinced of what they believe; which arguments may bear fruitful discussion, and those that will only lead to more frustration and anger this country can do without.

Regardless of one’s faith, there is wisdom in the instructions given in the Bible’s 2 Timothy:

Again I say, don’t get involved in foolish, ignorant arguments that only start fights. A servant of the Lord must not quarrel but must be kind to everyone, be able to teach, and be patient with difficult people. (2 Timothy 2:23)

As the author of the epistle to Timothy later notes, being honest doesn’t mean being needlessly hurtful or tactless, and he reminds us to “Gently instruct those who oppose the truth.” There’s an Aristotelian golden mean between failing to state a necessary truth and being an overly blunt jerk about it.

Similar valuable cautions are given in Titus 3:2 not to slander, to “avoid quarreling,” and to “show true humility to everyone.” Later in the chapter, we’re also reminded it may be best to walk away from those who continue to engage in foolish controversies:

If people are causing divisions among you, give a first and second warning. After that, have nothing more to do with them. (Titus 3:10)

Admittedly, it’s hard to do, especially in a climate that often mistakenly views the last person who responded in a Facebook fight as “the winner” or politeness as a sign of “weakness.” Even so, it’s one of the few ways to lower the temperature to the point where authentic, amiable exchanges and healthy debates are possible. We’ll be a better nation in 2021 if Americans take time to ask and reflect, “Will this truly make things better?” before acting.

Furthermore, giving 2021 a fighting chance will involve constantly “checking one’s priors” at the door. Or, as Jordan Peterson has phrased it, we’d do well to “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something that you don’t.”

As more Americans limit their media consumption to voices and opinions they already agree with, ideological and philosophical blind spots pose an increasingly higher risk. Yet rarely are things as simple as either the “left” or “right” (antiquated terms to begin with) being absolutely correct or absolutely wrong.

Taking in the views of only a small territory of the political spectrum is one of the contributing factors that led us to a place, never more evident than in 2020, where one half of the country can’t even stand being in line next to the other half — six feet apart, no less. We don’t have to agree, but we have to be able to at least relate to where those we disagree with are coming from. This begins with the humility to acknowledge we may be wrong about something, or, at least, not as correct as we think we are.

“Genuine conversation is exploration, articulation, and strategizing,” Peterson writes, “When you’re involved in a genuine conversation, you’re listening.” This may also require mingling outside a safe, “bubbled,” friend group, especially if that group is comprised of similarly like-minded folks.

It means not assuming to know the totality of someone’s beliefs and values based on their stance on a single issue. It means being OK with someone thinking, even acting, in a way we personally disagree with (as long as it doesn’t directly infringe on anyone’s rights to life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness). A tolerance of true intellectual diversity will be a key factor in helping 2021 rebound after the past year.

In what could be the most important New Year’s resolution we make, by exercising humility, patience, and grace, we can each take responsibility in helping make 2021 the year we all need it to be, one individual choice at a time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joshua Lawson is managing editor of The Federalist. He is a graduate of Queen’s University as well as Hillsdale College where he received a master’s degree in American politics and political philosophy. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaMLawson.

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Mollie Hemingway: When People Claim The Election Was Rigged, They Include Big Tech And Big Media

DECEMBER 11, 2020 By Tristan Justice

Mollie Hemingway: When People Claim The Election Was Rigged, They Include Big Tech And Big Media

Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway said on Fox News Thursday that allegations of a rigged election include big tech and big media conspiring to elect Joe Biden in addition to charges of voter fraud.

“We hear about the rigging of the election,” Hemingway said, “but partly what they mean is the meddling on the part of big media and big tech to affect the outcome of the election.”

Hemingway continued, pointing out that when major revelations about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, began to surface implicating the former vice president in corrupt and potentially criminal overseas business activity, the stories were suppressed online by Silicon Valley tech giants and delegitimized by legacy media.

“When the New York Post broke the story about these emails,” Hemingway said, referencing the paper’s reporting from an abandoned Delaware laptop expanding the web of Biden’s scandals, “even though they were verified and people who were recipients of these emails verified they were real, the media suppressed that story.”

In October, the New York Post published a series of exposes revealing that Joe Biden stood to rake in millions from Chinese communist leaders, lied repeatedly when denying conversations about his son’s business, and leveraged his high-powered position to benefit the family. A Biden family business partner-turned whistleblower even came forward to corroborate details of the New York Post’s reporting.

The Post’s journalism that made Democrats look bad got the nation’s oldest paper locked out of its Twitter account for two weeks after the platform blocked users from sharing its blockbuster reporting.

Hemingway also pointed out that this week’s news that Hunter Biden is under a federal investigation had already been reported, revealed days before the election.

“We actually also knew that there was an FBI investigation into Hunter Biden before the election except that the media suppressed it,” Hemingway said, depriving the American people of being fully informed when casting their ballots to hand over the country to Joe Biden.

“This meddling on the part of big media and big tech, which banned people from even talking about this on Facebook and Twitter, is a very serious problem and a huge threat to the republic,” Hemingway said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

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No, The Georgia Vote-Counting Video Was Not ‘Debunked.’ Not Even Close

Reported by Mollie Hemingway | DECEMBER 7, 2020

A Big Tech-backed “fact” “checking” outfit claimed to debunk explosive evidence in support of Republicans’ claims of significant election problems at a Thursday Georgia Senate hearing. It didn’t. Not even close.

Newly discovered security footage from Georgia’s State Farm Arena showed dozens of ballot counters, media, and Republican observers leaving en masse at the same time from the ballot-counting area for Fulton County. After they left, a small remnant of about four workers began pulling trunks containing thousands of ballots from underneath a table with a long tablecloth and running them through machines.

The footage supported claims from Republicans that they were told counting had stopped for the night, only to find out hours later that it had kept going on. You can and should watch the 12-minute portion of the testimony from Jacki Pick here.

On Friday morning, a group called Lead Stories published a “hoax alert” falsely claiming to have debunked the security video. The Washington Post, Newsweek, and other outlets followed along, criticizing non-leftist journalists for giving the video traction. In fact, none of the claims made by the Republicans were debunked.

Lead Stories’ “fact” “check” says government officials told them everything was fine with the counting, that the ballots were in “containers — not suitcases,” and that “party observers were never told to leave because counting was over for the night.”

Leaving aside whether relying solely and uncritically on government officials’ claims constitutes anything close to a “fact” “check,” let’s look at the claim that party observers were never told that counting was over for the night. In Lead Stories’ regurgitation of the government officials’ claims, only the people who cut open the absentee ballot envelopes were sent home, while ballot counters and scanners were retained and kept working — and no one told the press or other observers they were done counting.

Were Republican Poll Watchers and the Media Told Counting Had Stopped For The Night?

Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer has consistently said that’s what happened at State Farm Arena, beginning hours after the election:

That claim, which he has repeated consistently, is backed by sworn affidavits from two Republican observers, who further allege they were kept an unreasonable distance from the ballots even while they were at State Farm Arena, making it completely impossible to meaningfully do their jobs. (The video, which shows the room from four different angles, fully supports the claim that poll watchers were kept away from meaningful observation of ballot handling.)

The observers say that they arrived for their observation jobs around 8 p.m. They say in the first half of the 10 o’clock hour, a woman with blonde braids who appeared to be a supervisor “yelled out” to those present in the room that they would stop working for the night and would resume in the morning. The Republican poll watchers said they asked Fulton County Elections Spokesperson Regina Waller questions about the status of the ballot count multiples times but that she refused to answer.

Lead Stories, however, says, “There was never an announcement made to the media and other observers about the counting being over for the night and them needing to leave, according to [Frances Watson, chief investigator for the Georgia Secretary of State], who was provided information by the media liaison, who was present.” While Lead Stories doesn’t name the media liaison, the media liaison who was present that night, according to the affidavits, was Regina Waller, the Fulton County public affairs manager for elections.

OK, so on the one hand you have sworn affidavits from observers saying that supervisors told ballot counters to go home for the evening shortly after 10 p.m. and a video showing everyone leaving en masse at that time. And on the other hand, you have two government officials promising that no one was told that counting was over. Is there any other evidence to consider?

Well, on election night, ABC News reported that ballot counters were sent home at the time that the Republican observers said everyone was told counting had stopped. Their source? Regina Waller:

The Republican poll watchers’ story matches this election night reporting perfectly. And it wasn’t just ABC that reported counting was being delayed. Many media outlets reported on counting delays. See, for example, “Fulton County stopped counting absentee ballots for the night.”

Local NBC journalists on site that night independently confirmed “they were told counting was done for the night” and given no indication it would continue before the next morning. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution even reported of a “plan” to stop scanning ballots at the same time the poll watchers said things were shut down:

They planned to stop scanning absentee ballots at 10:30 p.m. and pick it up back in the morning. No official could explain before press time why Fulton was stopping its count of absentee ballots at that time, only saying that was the procedure.

‘As planned, Fulton County will continue to tabulate the remainder of absentee ballots over the next two days. Absentee ballot processing requires that each ballot is opened, signatures verified, and ballots scanned. This is a labor-intensive process that takes longer to tabulate than other forms of voting. Fulton County did not anticipate having all absentee ballots processed on Election Day,’ the county spokeswoman wrote in a statement.

Some debunking there, guys. The video supports the claim from the affiants.

Incidentally, most of the linked stories include mention of a major election day story of a burst pipe delaying vote counting. Some even said it was reportedly a water main.

In a new affidavit, the aforementioned Watson swore, “Our investigation revealed that the incident initially reported as a water leak late in the evening on November 3rd was actually a urinal that had overflowed early in the morning of November 3rd.”

She also said that her investigation shows that the press and observers “simply left on their own,” although she later said workers put ballots underneath the table because they thought that counting was stopping for the evening. “This was done because employees thought that they were done for the night and were closing up and ready to leave,” she claimed.

Was a State Election Board Monitor Present While Partisan Observers Were Gone?

A Newsweek story quoted someone saying that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office claimed that a designated election observer was “at that spot all night, the entire time.” Lead Stories emphasizes that while partisan observers may not have been present, an “unnamed state election board monitor” was present:

A state election board monitor, who asked for his name not to be used due to safety concerns, told Lead Stories on the phone on December 3, 2020, that he was present at the vote counting location beginning at 11:52 p.m., after leaving briefly at earlier in the evening. He then stayed until about 12:45 a.m., when the work that night was completed.

The deputy chief investigator for the secretary of state’s office was present beginning at 12:15 a.m. November 4, he said.

The monitor only claims to have been present in the processing room from 11:52 p.m. on election night to 12:45 a.m., the following morning, or less than an hour. That means there were neither partisan monitors nor the state election board monitor for more than an hour after ballots began being scanned at 10:35 p.m.

What the “fact” “check” shows, then, is the monitor admitting he wasn’t present for much of the time in question, contrary to claims made by the Secretary of State’s office. For whatever it’s worth, the same monitor is the subject of an affidavit from another witness, devoted exclusively to concerns about the monitor’s conduct prior to the late hours on election day, according to a member of the Trump team. The claims include that he was sleeping on the job and staring at his phone.

Incidentally, Fulton County had such massive problems managing elections earlier this year that they were fined and forced into a settlement agreement that included a requirement that they be independently monitored, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

To avoid the fine, Fulton must maintain verifiable levels of operational competence by properly processing absentee ballots; keeping a force of 2,200 properly trained poll workers; providing at least 24 early voting sites; striving to process 100 voters per hour at any site; having a technical support staff member at every site; and creating a post-election audit.

The consent order also requires Fulton to regularly update the Board on its pool of poll workers.

The issue in the consent order requiring the most negotiation was over an independent elections monitor.

They agreed on Carter Jones, who spent time in Africa helping countries improve their elections…

The U.S. Department of Justice also sent an election monitor to Fulton County.

Contrary to the media impression that a state monitor is sufficient oversight, the press and partisan observers are just as if not more important. The false public claims about a pause in counting led to the departure of the press and Republican observers.

As for the deputy chief investigator who arrived at 12:15 on Nov. 4, when the ballot-scanning activities were nearly completed, the video shows the person entering the large room, glancing around, and talking on his phone. At no point have the “fact” “checkers” or other media figures asked what prompted an investigator to be dispatched to the State Farm Arena at that time.

The Trump legal team, for its part, said the Fulton County situation violated Georgia laws that require election tabulation to be open to public view. The witness affidavits say the denial of meaningful access to the counting process kept Republican observers from being able to actually observe what happened. The Republican observers, the press, and the public were kept to a roped-off area too far from the ballot activity to matter, which doesn’t comply with Georgia law, they say.

There Are Much Bigger Georgia Claims

While conspiracy theories about election fraud abound — ranging from The New York Times’ claim that there was no election fraud anywhere in the entire country to dramatic claims of a global conspiracy involving voting machines, the Trump campaign’s official claims are sober and serious. State Republican Chairman David Shafer and President Donald Trump filed a criminal complaint in state court on Friday regarding tens of thousands of votes that they say were fraudulent.

Trump and Shafer allege, for example, that votes came from:

2,560 felons,
66,247 underage registrants,
2,423 people who were not on the state’s voter rolls,
4,926 voters who had registered in another state after they registered in Georgia, making them ineligible,
395 people who cast votes in another state for the same election,
15,700 voters who had filed national change of address forms without re-registering,
40,279 people who had moved counties without re-registering,
1,043 people who claimed the physical impossibility of a P.O. Box as their address,
98 people who registered after the deadline, and, among others,
10,315 people who were deceased on election day (8,718 of whom had been registered as dead before their votes were accepted).

The lawsuit further alleges that mail-in ballots received nearly no scrutiny as standards for contesting questionable ballots were made unreasonably difficult.

A Note On Lead Stories

The “fact” “check” was originally written by Alan Duke and Hallie Golden, although Golden’s name was removed from later versions of the story. Golden is a freelance writer whose work regularly appears in The Guardian, a left-wing publication. Duke, a CNN entertainment reporter, retired from the left-wing outlet after 26 years.

Earlier versions of the story included a mathematical error about whether the votes that were counted after observers left State Farm Arena could have affected the outcome of the election. The authors falsely wrote that they couldn’t have, when they could have.

A later purported “fact” “check” said it wasn’t true that Republican poll watchers swore affidavits that they were told to leave the center, Lead Stories falsely stated that these claims were the “cornerstone” of Trump’s challenge of Georgia. In fact, the legal claim filed by the Trump team only mentions Fulton County telling the press and other election observers that they were going to stop counting ballots and resume counting in the morning once, on one page of the 64-page complaint. Again, those claims have been corroborated, not debunked, by multiple press accounts from election night. As for the affidavits, they make the same claim — that Fulton County election officials falsely said they were stopping the count when in reality they were continuing to count through the night after observers left. The affidavits further state that they were unable to get answers to basic questions from officials.

Lead Stories claims it is funded by Facebook, Google, and ByteDance. The latter is the Beijing-based and China Communist Party-linked company known for TikTok. Facebook and Google have suppressed journalism deemed harmful to Trump’s 2020 election opponent Joe Biden. The Trump administration has said TikTok’s ties to the Chinese Communist government makes it a national security threat.

NOTE: In a Kafka-esque twist, Facebook is now using Lead Stories to censor this story critical of Lead Stories.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. Follow her on Twitter at @mzhemingway

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5 More Ways Joe Biden Magically Outperformed Election Norms

In all the excitement among objective journalists for Joe Biden’s declared victory, reporters are missing how extraordinary the Democrat’s performance was in the 2020 election. It’s not just that the former vice president is on track to become the oldest president in American history, it’s what he managed to accomplish at the polls this year.

Candidate Joe Biden was so effective at animating voters in 2020 that he received a record number of votes, more than 15 million more than Barack Obama received in his re-election of 2012. Amazingly, he managed to secure victory while also losing in almost every bellwether county across the country. No presidential candidate has been capable of such electoral jujitsu until now.

While Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals in every urban county in the United States, he outperformed her in the metropolitan areas of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Even more surprising, the former VP put up a record haul of votes, despite Democrats’ general failures in local House and state legislative seats across the nation.

He accomplished all this after receiving a record low share of the primary vote compared to his Republican opponent heading into the general election. Clearly, these are tremendous and unexpected achievements that would normally receive sophisticated analysis from the journalist class but have somehow gone mostly unmentioned during the celebrations at news studios in New York City and Washington, D.C.

The massive national political realignment now taking place may be one source of these surprising upsets. Yet still, to have pulled so many rabbits out of his hat like this, nobody can deny that Biden is a first-rate campaigner and politician, the likes of which America has never before seen. Let’s break down just how unique his political voodoo has been in 2020.

1. 80 Million Votes

Holy moly! A lot of Americans turned out for a Washington politician who’s been in office for nearly 50 years. Consider this: no incumbent president in nearly a century and a half has gained votes in a re-election campaign and still lost.

President Trump gained more than ten million votes since his 2016 victory, but Biden’s appeal was so substantial that it overcame President Trump’s record support among minority voters. Biden also shattered Barack Obama’s own popular vote totals, really calling into question whether it was not perhaps Biden who pulled Obama across the finish lines in 2008 and 2012.

Proving how sharp his political instincts are, the former VP managed to gather a record number of votes while consistently trailing President Trump in measures of voter enthusiasm. Biden was so savvy that he motivated voters unenthusiastic about his campaign to vote for him in record numbers.

2. Winning Despite Losing Most Bellwether Counties

Biden is set to become the first president in 60 years to lose the states of Ohio and Florida on his way to election. For a century, these states have consistently predicted the national outcome, and they have been considered roughly representative of the American melting pot as a whole. Despite national polling giving Biden a lead in both states, he lost Ohio by eight points and Florida by more than three.

For Biden to lose these key bellwethers by notable margins and still win the national election is newsworthy. Not since the Mafia allegedly aided John F. Kennedy in winning Illinois over Richard Nixon in 1960 has an American president pulled off this neat trick.

Even more unbelievably, Biden is on his way to winning the White House after having lost almost every historic bellwether county across the country. The Wall Street Journal and The Epoch Times independently analyzed the results of 19 counties around the United States that have nearly perfect presidential voting records over the last 40 years. President Trump won every single bellwether county, except Clallam County in Washington.

Whereas the former VP picked up Clallam by about three points, President Trump’s margin of victory in the other 18 counties averaged over 16 points. In a larger list of 58 bellwether counties that have correctly picked the president since 2000, Trump won 51 of them by an average of 15 points, while the other seven went to Biden by around four points. Bellwether counties overwhelmingly chose President Trump, but Biden found a path to victory anyway.

3. Biden Trailed Clinton Except in a Select Few Cities

Patrick Basham, a pollster with an accurate track record and the director of the Democracy Institute in D.C., highlighted two observations made by fellow colleagues, polling guru Richard Baris of Big Data Poll and Washington Post election analyst Robert Barnes. Baris noted a statistical oddity from 2020’s election returns: “Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.”

Barnes added that in those “big cities in swing states run by Democrats…the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters.” In the states that mattered most, so many mail-in ballots poured in for Biden from the cities that he put up record-breaking numbers and overturned state totals that looked like comfortable leads for President Trump.

If Democrats succeed in eliminating the Electoral College, Biden’s magic formula for churning out overwhelming vote totals in a handful of cities should make the Democrats unbeatable.

4. Biden Won Despite Democrat Losses Everywhere Else

Randy DeSoto noted in The Western Journal that “Donald Trump was pretty much the only incumbent president in U.S. history to lose his re-election while his own party gained seats in the House of Representatives.” Now that’s a Biden miracle!

In 2020, The Cook Political Report and The New York Times rated 27 House seats as toss-ups going into Election Day. Right now, Republicans appear to have won all 27. Democrats failed to flip a single state house chamber, while Republicans flipped both the House and Senate in New Hampshire and expanded their dominance of state legislatures across the country.

Christina Polizzi, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, went so far as to state: “It’s clear that Trump isn’t an anchor for the Republican legislative candidates. He’s a buoy.” Amazingly, Biden beat the guy who lifted all other Republicans to victory. Now that’s historic!

5. Biden Overcame Trump’s Commanding Primary Vote

In the past, primary vote totals have been remarkably accurate in predicting general election winners. Political analyst David Chapman highlighted three historical facts before the election.

First, no incumbent who has received 75 percent of the total primary vote has lost re-election. Second, President Trump received 94 percent of the primary vote, which is the fourth highest of all time (higher than Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon, Clinton, or Obama). In fact, Trump is only one of five incumbents since 1912 to receive more than 90 percent of the primary vote.

Third, Trump set a record for most primary votes received by an incumbent when more than 18 million people turned out for him in 2020 (the previous record, held by Bill Clinton, was half that number). For Biden to prevail in the general election, despite Trump’s historic support in the primaries, turns a century’s worth of prior election data on its head.

Joe Biden achieved the impossible. It’s interesting that many more journalists aren’t pointing that out.

J.B. Shurk is a proud American from Daniel Boone country.

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Without President Trump, On Whom Will The Left Blame Their Failures?

There is honor among thieves. There has to be, if they are to be successful. Even lawbreakers require some sort of law, both in reality, where organized crime requires organization, and in fiction, where it is a standard trope that the Guild of Assassins (or whatever) has rules. The wicked still need some virtue to be effective, although it must be severed from the whole of virtue.

This explains a lot about politics. The rules and organization necessary for societal or group survival and success are not the same as justice; indeed, they may be nothing more than a predatory morality that enables cooperation in oppression.

Governments often begin as the biggest band of brigands around, and many never rise much beyond that. As Augustine put it in “The City of God,” “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?” He illustrated this point with the tale of a captured pirate who told Alexander the Great that the difference between piracy and Alexander’s empire was only of scale.

Adherence to the norms and manners of the ruling class does not assure personal virtue or political justice. This is obvious to those on the outside, but members (and aspiring members and hangers-on) of the ruling class have an interest in not seeing it. This willful blindness also explains a lot about the recent election.

The Biden campaign told us that the election was about the soul of the nation. A multitude of Democrats, media figures, and Never-Trump leftovers told us that it was about restoring decency to the White House. Even now, in apparent victory, they remain appalled that anyone voted for President Trump, let alone more than 70 million Americans—don’t we know how indecent he is? But it is not that we think Trump is decent, it is that we doubt that his opponents are.

We suspect that by decency they mean nothing more than the professional civility of the educated class, and we know that true decency is more than civility. It is certainly more than not being Donald Trump.

This is not to say that civility does not matter. Conservatives know that manners matter. Manners can force us to be restrained, to at least make a show of treating political opponents with respect, and by inculcating these habits, they can make us better.

But manners can also be weaponized. They can become tools of exclusion that keep those with different beliefs and backgrounds out. They can conceal great wickedness behind a pleasing mask.

There is a persistent temptation to focus on the superficial form of decency (as manifest in politeness) over the substance of virtue. So we are treated to lectures on decency from men who have cheated on a succession of wives or traded in the wife of their youth for a young research assistant—and from a presumptive vice president who slept her way into politics.

Nor is such wickedness confined to personal sins; it extends throughout political positions. Consider the Democratic Party’s fanatical support for abortion. There is nothing decent about tearing a baby limb from limb and displaying her still-beating heart on a tray—if decency encompasses support for unrestricted, taxpayer-funded late-term abortion, then to hell with decency and the decent.

Likewise, the bipartisan establishment embrace of China is indecent, unless decency merely means civility in the service of ruling-class interests. There is nothing decent about closer bonds with the Chinese Communist Party and the genocidal totalitarian slave state that it runs. All the civility and cheap consumer goods in the world cannot wash away that guilt.

The pretense of decency also asks us to ignore that our ruling class is neither civil nor trustworthy. The same people who spent years suggesting that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election are now outraged that he has not conceded this one. And remember when Senate Democrats accused Brett Kavanaugh of being a high-school gang-rape mastermind?

Remember when the media tried to destroy a high school student for smiling awkwardly while wearing a Trump hat? Remember when they told you the most expensive riots in American history were mostly peaceful? Remember all the times they’ve called you and your friends and family ignorant, racist bigots—as epitomized by Hillary Clinton’s consigning you to an irredeemable basket of deplorables?

The response to this litany of leftist indecency is predictable—what about this and that and the other thing Trump did and said? Well, what about them? People who have concluded that our leaders are corrupt and indecent will not support them just because Trump is also indecent.

Furthermore, Trump will soon be out of office, while our elites will remain in their positions in media, academia, entertainment, business and government. Without President Trump, what excuse will they then have for their failures of virtue and justice?

Trump leaving office will not make America more decent if it just returns power to those whose garb of civility covers corrupt hearts. What is needed is not further recriminations over Trump, but a commitment to seek justice and the common good. This renewal must be led by those who have the power to shape institutions and culture.

I don’t say this to deny the need for all of us to repent of our sins. I merely state the obvious, which is that those with the power to shape the culture bear the most responsibility for it. If we are as indecent a nation as they say, then perhaps the likes of New York Times writers, Ivy League professors and pop stars should spend less time lecturing Trump voters and more time in sackcloth and ashes.

Nathanael Blake is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist. He has a PhD in political theory. He lives in Missouri.

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In Nevada, A Corrupt Cash-For-Votes Scheme Is Hiding In Plain Sight

Reported by John Daniel Davidson | NOVEMBER 18, 2020

It should surprise no one that Nevada has problems with election security and voter fraud, especially after the state mailed an absentee ballot to every registered voter this year whether he requested one or not, then received back more than eight times as many mail-in ballots as they did in 2016. That’s part of the reason Republicans in Nevada filed another lawsuit on Tuesday alleging widespread voter fraud and irregularities.

The mass mailing of unsolicited ballots is of course a recipe for fraud, even more so in a state where the voter rolls contain tens of thousands of people who haven’t voted or updated their records in more than a decade. This is how you get dead people voting, as we reported here at The Federalist and as Tucker Carlson noted last week.

But there’s another, less sensational but perhaps more consequential election scandal in Nevada that hasn’t yet made headlines, even though it’s been hiding in plain sight for weeks now. Under the guise of supposedly nonprofit, nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns, Native American voter advocacy groups in Nevada handed out gift cards, electronics, clothing, and other items to voters in tribal areas, in many cases documenting the exchange of ballots for “prizes” on their own Facebook pages, sometimes even while wearing official Joe Biden campaign gear.

Simply put, this is illegal. Offering voters anything of value in exchange for their vote is a violation of federal election law, and in some cases punishable by up to two years in prison and as much as $10,000 in fines. That includes raffles, free food, free T-shirts, and so on.

The GOTV Effort In Nevada Was Blatantly Criminal

Yet the Nevada Native Vote Project’s Facebook page contains post after post of voters receiving something of value in exchange for proof they cast a vote or handed over an absentee ballot. In one post, two men display $25 Visa gift cards they received after dropping off absentee ballots, presumably to someone who works for the Nevada Native Vote Project.

Sam appears in another video wearing a Biden-Harris campaign mask with the Biden campaign bus behind her, talking about how important Native votes are to “swing” Washoe County (Biden won the county, which includes Reno, by less than 12,000 votes). In another video, she tells viewers about “Biden swag” available at a GOTV event, along with free Biden cookies. All these videos appear on the official Facebook page of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. (I called Sam to ask about this, and about the illegal raffles, but she never called me back.)

Raffling off gift cards—the equivalent of a cash giveaway—appears to have been widespread among Native American communities in Nevada. The Nevada Native Vote Project’s Facebook page lists dozens of gift card winners by name, all of them rewarded simply for their vote, as well as advertisements for the raffles and information on how to enter.

Others, like the Las Vegas Tribal Community, simply gave away “free stuff” to voters.

Following The (Taxpayer) Money

All of this raises some fairly obvious questions. Where did all these gift cards and prizes come from? Who paid for them? How much “free stuff” was given away? Who’s really behind this so-called GOTV effort?

The Nevada Native Vote Project is a nonprofit group, and its voter advocacy is supposed to be nonpartisan and politically unbiased. Yet the group’s Facebook page includes a post from a group called Native Organizers Alliance about the importance of voting, “because we live in places of political upheaval where the rightwing operates quite openly.” The post includes a political map of Nevada and Wisconsin, with arrows pointing to blue, Democrat-voting areas that say, “Natives live here.”

Funding for the Nevada Native Vote Projects appears to come from an umbrella group called Native Vote that’s an initiative of the National Congress of American Indians, or NCAI. The connections between such groups are not always obvious, but the logos on the T-shirts the Nevada Native Vote Project was handing out at polling places is the same logo on the Native Vote website (see screenshots below).

So where does NCAI get its funding? From a lot of places, including Native tribal groups, charitable foundations, and major corporations. It also gets millions in funding from the federal government. More than a half-dozen government “partners” are listed on NCAI’s supporters page, including the Department of the Interior, Department of Agriculture, the Small Business Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others. In 2018, these federal agencies provided a total of more than $3 million to NCAI, according to the group’s own disclosures.

It’s unclear whether taxpayer dollars went directly into Native Vote’s GOTV efforts or to purchase gift cards and other “prizes” for Native American voters, but the NCAI logo does appear on Facebook posts advertising illegal Election Day cash raffles in Nevada.

What’s clear, however, is that the GOTV efforts of Native Vote aren’t nonpartisan. Native Vote and NCAI have partnered in the past with a Native advocacy group called Four Directions, jointly producing a voter guide in 2012 and last year partnering with Four Directions to co-host a presidential forum focused on Native American issues.

This year, back in January, Four Directions co-hosted a presidential forum in Las Vegas with Nevada Tribal Nations. The “donate” page for that forum, and indeed for Four Directions’ own website, goes through ActBlue, an online giving platform that funneled nearly $1.6 billion to Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterms and has since become a powerful fundraising tool for Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations like Black Lives Matter.

This Is Widespread, And Corporate Media Won’t Report It

There are about 60,000 eligible Native American voters in Nevada who make up about 3 percent of the state’s total voting population. That’s almost twice the current margin of Biden’s current lead over President Trump in Nevada. So the Native American vote really does matter, it could even be decisive. It therefore matters how many Native American votes were influenced by an illegal cash-for-votes scheme, especially if funding for it came from American taxpayers via the NCAI.

It also matters because this didn’t just happen in Nevada. Organizers there might have been more obvious about what they were doing, but there’s evidence that similar efforts, including gift card and electronics giveaways, were undertaken in Native communities in South Dakota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Washington, Michigan, Idaho, Minnesota, and Texas.

All of this coordinated illegal activity, clearly designed to churn out votes for Biden and Democrats in tribal areas all across the country, is completely out in the open. You don’t need special access or some secret source to find out about it. You just have be curious, look around, and report it.

Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets are not curious and refuse to report on any of this stuff. What’s described above is an egregious and totally transparent vote-buying scheme in Nevada that was likely undertaken on a similar scale across nearly a dozen other states, but you won’t read about it in The New York Times, or hear about it on CNN.

That’s not because the story is unimportant, but because, for the media establishment, it’s inconvenient. No wonder these groups didn’t try to hide what they were doing.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

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Republicans Have Good Reason Not To Trust The Election Results

To read reports in the mainstream press about the throngs of President Trump’s supporters who rallied in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, you’d think the crowd was made up of a bunch of conspiracy theory-addled rubes and delusional far-right extremists all of them hoodwinked into thinking the election was stolen. To read David Frum’s Twitter take, you’d think they were all Nazis.

The march came on the heels of a poll last week that found a staggering 70 percent of Republicans now say they don’t believe the presidential election was free and fair. That news, like news of the self-described Million MAGA March, was met with a mix of contempt, hysteria, and condescension from Democrats and the media.

Their rough consensus is that GOP voters who still support the president are either treasonous or stupid, reinforced constantly by a brittle insistence that there was “no fraud” in the presidential election. A totemic front-page declaration by the New York Times, “ELECTION OFFICIALS NATIONWIDE FIND NO FRAUD,” has been repeated everywhere, mantra-like. Any claims of voter fraud or ballot-counting irregularities, whether from President Trump or the tens of thousands who marched over the weekend, are “baseless,” “unfounded,” and have “no evidence” behind them.

There’s a palpable nervousness about the media’s insistence that the election was as pure as the driven snow. Maybe they seem so nervous because they know what everyone in America knows: there was nothing pure or secure or even ordinary about the election.

How could there be? Under the pretext of ensuring “voter access” during the pandemic, Democrats, leftist nonprofits, and activist judges across the country unleashed a flood of changes to election rules in the months leading up to the vote, including an unprecedented expansion of mail-in voting, an inherently fraught method of casting ballots that removes almost all oversight from the process.

No matter. States pushed ahead, mailing ballots to outdated voter rolls en masse and recklessly loosening oversight for how those ballots could be collected and counted. Chain-of-custody for absentee ballots went out the window, along with whatever meager safeguards usually apply to absentee voting. Ballot harvesting, long a tradition of corrupt Democratic political machines in places like Detroit and Philadelphia, was introduced in some places for the first time. Taken together, all these pandemic-inspired reforms presented an ideal opportunity for Democrats to flood absentee ballot-counting centers in major cities and run up the vote-count long after the polls closed on Election Day.

No wonder scores of Republican poll challengers in Michigan filed sworn affidavits claiming tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots were counted for Biden in Detroit. No wonder that in Philadelphia, poll watchers reported how they were forcibly kept from observing the counting of absentee ballots, as required under state law.

Not all the reports of ballot-counting skullduggery amount to old-fashioned voter fraud, but as my colleague Margot Cleveland has noted, they’re just as important because they undermine the integrity of an election just as much as, say, thousands of dead people voting.

Even more egregious than voter fraud (and harder to redress) are cases where election bureaucrats or activist judges simply ignored restrictions that GOP legislatures had passed into law. In Pennsylvania, the state supreme court brushed off rules set by lawmakers and extended a deadline for when absentee ballots could be received. Extending deadlines for absentee ballots is of course an invitation to break election laws—especially in Philadelphia, a city with a long history of ballot-stuffing and bribing election judges.

In other states, the corruption of election integrity was voluntary. In Georgia, the state government settled a lawsuit in March with a cadre of Democratic Party groups that changed the rules for accepting mail-in ballots. Instead of the signature on the ballot having to match the signature on the voter rolls, it only had to match the signature on the mail-in ballot application. You don’t need to be a sophisticated election thief to figure out how to get a fraudulent ballot counted under such rules.

On and on it goes. A dozen states temporarily expanded mail-in voting just for the 2020 election. Others mailed ballots to everyone on the voter rolls. Many others extended the mail-in ballot deadline, set up ballot drop boxes, and allowed mail-in ballot harvesting on a mass scale.

Any reasonable person can look at these changes and conclude they create conditions ripe for fraud and abuse. Only the most naïve, pollyannaish observer would survey all of the above and conclude, as our mainstream media has, that there was “no fraud” in the election. Of course there was, and everyone knows it.

Whether it was enough to change the outcome of the election, we’ll probably never know, partly because the kind of abuses and criminal activity engendered by mass mail-in voting are hard to detect and even harder to prove in court. But pointing all of this out, and having a problem with it, even to the point of saying you don’t have much confidence that the election was free and fair, doesn’t make you a rube or a conspiracy theorist.

By contrast, pretending that none of this had any effect on the election, and demonizing anyone who says it did, as the media is doing now, is a reaction born of self-doubt and desperation—like labeling anyone who disagrees with you a traitor or a Nazi. There’s an exhausted nervousness about it, a contempt rooted in insecurity. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’ve written off your countrymen, and given up on the idea of a republic.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

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Partisans Cheating By Ignoring Election Law Is A Problem As Big As Vote Fraud

Fraud represents only one aspect of concern over the results from last week’s election. Of equal import when judging the legitimacy of the next president of the United States is whether states complied with the election rules established by their legislatures. These are not questions of mere “technical errors,” but raise significant constitutional concerns.

On Wednesday, Jim Geraghty of National Review tweeted his “Morning Jolt” summary of post-election lawsuits. “The Trump campaign,” Geraghty stressed, “conceded in oral arguments they were not contending fraud or improper influence, merely technical errors,” he wrote of a recent election case. Geraghty’s article, linked in his tweet, continued: “It is one thing to fume on Twitter that there is a sinister effort to steal an election; it is another thing to assert that sweeping claim in a court of law, before a judge, under penalty of perjury and/or disbarment.”

Not to pick on Geraghty, whom I respect immensely, but he is conflating two separate issues: fraud and violations of the election code. Those are two distinct problems, yet there has been little analysis of the latter, which over the next several weeks might prove more significant.

There are multiple allegations of fraud, such as the middle-of-the-night arrival of unsecured ballots in Detroit or the dead man voting in Nevada. Then there’s the even more devastating suggestion that votes for Donald Trump were swapped to Joe Biden via vulnerable computer systems. Frankly, this idea strikes me as unbelievable, but then again, so did the idea that the FBI would obtain illegal secret court warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, and we know how that turned out.

Election Code Violations Might as Well Be ‘Fraud’

Violations of the election code, however, are a different matter, and unfortunately, sometimes the public views election officials’ bending of the rules as a harmless ignoring of technicalities. As the attorney in the Montgomery County Board of Elections case noted after “conceding” he was not alleging fraud: “The election code is technical.”

That makes technical violations constitutionally significant because Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 grants state legislatures the ultimate authority to appoint the electors who choose the president: “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”

In Bush v. Gore, former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist stressed the significance of this constitutional provision in a concurrence joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and former Justice Antonin Scalia. As Rehnquist wrote, that clause “convey[s] the broadest power of determination” and “leaves it to the legislature exclusively to define the method” of appointment of electors. Furthermore, “a significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.”

The three concurring justices in Bush v. Gore concluded that the Florida Supreme Court’s order directing election officials to count improperly marked ballots was a “significant departure from the legislative scheme,” and “in a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail.” Accordingly, those justices would have declared the Florida recount unconstitutional under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2.

While the concurrence in Bush v. Gore failed to garner support by a majority of the justices, the Supreme Court’s composition has changed dramatically since then, and the reasoning of this concurrence provides a strong basis to view deviations from the technicalities of the election code as unconstitutional. As Rehnquist stressed, “[I]n a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail.”

So, if the legislative branch mandates voter signatures, or verification of signatures, or internal secrecy sleeves, or counting only in the presences of poll-watchers from each party, it is no answer to say it is a technicality and not fraud at issue. The state legislatures, through the election code, define the validity of votes, and allowing state officials or courts to read those provisions out of the law raises serious questions under Article 2 of the Constitution.

Ignoring the Election Code Denies Equal Protection

Allowing state officials to fudge on the mandates of the election code raises a second significant constitutional issue, this one under the Equal Protection Clause, which served as the basis for the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore. The majority in Bush v. Gore held that the varying standards violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, reasoning: “The right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise. Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.”

When state officials ignore the technicalities of the election code, however, it virtually guarantees voters will be denied equal treatment. The proof is in Pennsylvania. There, for instance, even though the election code prohibited inspecting ballots before Election Day, some county officials — those in larger counties with access to mail-sorting machines that could weigh ballots — weighed the ballots to determine if the voter failed to include the required inner secrecy sleeve.

Then those officials, again contrary to the election code, provided information to representatives of the Democratic Party so they could identify the voters whose ballots would be canceled. Voters whose election officials abided by the technicalities of the election code, however, did not receive that notice nor the opportunity to “cure” their ballot.

Now thanks to the unprecedented push toward mail-in voting over the last year, we are seeing this same pattern repeat itself throughout the country. Some election officials bent (or broke) the rules the legislative branch had set, while others followed the letter of the law. As a result, voters in different counties in the same state were treated disparately and on an arbitrary basis. Unlike the situation in Bush v. Gore, however, it is not the state courts altering the plain language of the election code, but secretaries of state or local election officials.

The majority in Bush v. Gore recognized the rightful place of election officials to interpret and apply the rules established by the legislative branch. This difference provides some leeway to states, which through interpretative guidance tweak the technicalities of the election code. But as in other areas of the law, such interpretations must be reasonable and must not violate the clearly expressed intent of the legislature.

The Supreme Court will likely decide where that line will be drawn in the coming days.

Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Why President Trump Has A Strong Supreme Court Case To Contest Pennsylvania

As arguments about voter fraud have escalated across the country, it’s time to recognize that despite what an unmitigated disaster widespread expansion of absentee balloting has been, concerns about its abuse aren’t the most important argument in the ongoing fight over the legitimacy of this election. Sure, the media and Big Tech’s widespread white-washing and censoring of very real voter fraud concerns are damaging to the social fabric in existential ways, just as ignoring norms (and in some cases laws) requiring transparency destroys public trust and confidence in the outcome.

The Pennsylvania lawsuit isn’t yet proof that election-altering fraud occurred, although it does present compelling evidence that if proved shatters the media narrative on election security. A closer look at the allegations of direct fraud weighed against the likelihood of proving that enough occurred to alter the outcome — on a shortened timeline — reveals a daunting task for the president’s legal team.

President Trump’s lawyers, however, aren’t making the same argument as your uncle on Facebook; they’re playing for keeps. Some Republicans have been content to publicly call for the “process to play out” while privately predicting losses or maybe a few favorable rulings on some esoteric technicalities. But the president is not tired of winning yet.

Shortly after the filing, Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, put it succinctly: “Pennsylvania is irredeemably compromised.”

The thrust of their legal argument doesn’t hinge on the numbers of fraudulent ballots cast, but on the inconsistent and illegal application of Pennsylvania election law, which dilutes legally cast votes — so-called disparate treatment, from which the U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect us.

The other key legal argument is that those changes in the election law, which were implemented by an unelected appointee of Pennsylvania’s executive branch, namely Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, were an impermissible usurpation of the legislature’s prerogative even if Pennsylvania’s judicial branch approved them.

Bush v. Gore Already Wrestled with These Concerns

Underlying the president’s legal argument is the recognition that the Pennsylvania legislature implemented an imperfect regime that rationally valued security of the election as more important than avoiding disenfranchising any voters. Even amid a pandemic, the Pennsylvania legislature understood that their expansion of ballot-by-mail increased risks to election security, and thus sought to mitigate that as best they could. It was partisan state courts that unilaterally overrode those determinations in the middle of a presidential campaign in an unconstitutional way.

The discussion about what types of fraud, and how much, is important because it goes to the very heart of election integrity, and our system cannot stand without trust in the outcome. That argument, however, won’t decide the Pennsylvania case from a legal standpoint. It will come down to whether a ministerial appointee of Pennsylvania’s executive branch can work with Pennsylvania’s judicial branch to subvert the expressed will of the legislature, and hastily put in place an election process wherein citizens who chose to vote differently had their votes disparately treated.

Recall that in 2000, the legal argument that eventually carried the day was equal-protection grounds; by implementing different methods for recounts and different scrutiny for different counties, voters were receiving unequal treatment. The Supreme Court held 7-2 that “Upon due consideration of the difficulties identified to this point, it is obvious that the recount cannot be conducted in compliance with the requirements of equal protection and due process without substantial additional work.”

In most cases, comity and respect for federalism compel us to defer to the decisions of state courts on issues of state law. That practice reflects our understanding that the decisions of state courts are definitive pronouncements of the will of the States as sovereigns. Of course, in ordinary cases, the distribution of powers among the branches of a State’s government raises no questions of federal constitutional law, subject to the requirement that the government be republican in character. But there are a few exceptional cases in which the Constitution imposes a duty or confers a power on a particular branch of a State’s government. This is one of them. … Thus, the text of the election law itself, and not just its interpretation by the courts of the States, takes on independent significance.

A significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.

If we are to respect the legislature’s Article II powers, therefore, we must ensure that postelection state-court actions do not frustrate the legislative desire to attain the ‘safe harbor’ provided by §5. (Rehnquist concurring, but writing separately; Citations and dicta omitted)

Admittedly, this “Article II view” was a more expansive view on why the ongoing Florida recount was suspect than the Supreme Court ultimately held, but clearly, at least three justices believed that the courts — even state courts, which usually receive great deference to interpreting state law — don’t have a right to tweak the express will of the state legislature about presidential electors.

To be sure, the equal-protection claims also present differently, so they aren’t a slam-dunk here, and the Rehnquist concurrence isn’t controlling precedent (two of the three justices who signed on to the opinion are no longer on the court), so it might not carry the day.

Three of the young lawyers on the Bush team advocating this view of the law in 2000 have received pretty notable promotions since that time, however, and three other guys likely to have a say have signaled their belief in exactly this interpretation, stating recently, “The provisions of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election.”

It’s anyone’s guess how the Supreme Court would rule if it gets to that point, but when three current justices (Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch) have signaled they’re sympathetic to the basic legal argument, and three other justices (John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) were part of the team that advanced very similar legal arguments in Bush v. Gore, the president and his team must like their chances.

The Changes Disproportionately Helped Biden

Pundits and some Trump supporters have engaged in navel-gazing and resigned themselves to the line of reasoning that “maybe Trump shouldn’t have down-talked absentee voting.” We know in addition to increased risk of fraud, however, voters who cast absentee ballots have historically had a significantly greater likelihood of being disenfranchised than in-person voters.

For Trump to push his supporters to vote in ways that were more likely to count isn’t irrational. It instead raises the question of why former Vice President Joe Biden wasn’t concerned with his voters being disenfranchised if they voted absentee, given the historical risks.

Both the potential for fraud and increased probability of disenfranchising voters sound intuitively like things we should fix, but the Pennsylvania legislature didn’t. They saw fit to keep the bar high to offset the risk of fraud and associated effects to public confidence in the election that unrestricted mail balloting would cause.

There’s a rational basis for that, and the entire saga has played out nationally. With the non-legislative changes, absentee voters were significantly less likely to be disenfranchised than before — indeed, Boockvar’s unilateral changes in Pennsylvania removed nearly every barrier the duly elected state legislature had put in place.

This created an environment where the constitutional guarantee of one person, one vote was tilted significantly in the direction of a voting modality (mail balloting versus in-person balloting). Not only was this ripe for greater abuse, but that tilting of the playing field disproportionately benefited the voters of one presidential candidate. Making this even more obvious are new revelations that show how the larger Democratic strongholds were equipped to quickly pre-sort potentially invalid ballots, and Democratic operatives were gearing up to capitalize on the eventual changes to the statutory pre-canvass period before Boockvar’s office even announced them.

What if the Supreme Court Invalidates a State’s Election

For conservatives, an intellectual challenge now presents itself: If you were OK with the Supreme Court stopping the Florida recount in 2000, you need to prepare yourself to be comfortable with the same court invalidating the Pennsylvania electors. Indeed, you should want them to, whether or not there was underlying direct fraud sufficient enough to affect the outcome. Alternatively, you should start working on your tortuous rationale for why, on constitutional grounds, what was legitimate in 2000 is not legitimate in 2020.

Whether you’re persuaded by the equal protection reasoning in the Bush v. Gore holding or in the minority’s separate concurrence emphasizing the plenary powers of the Pennsylvania legislature under Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, if the case makes it to the Supreme Court it won’t hinge on some threshold level of fraud that tipped the scales against Trump, nor will it be about the raw power of a conservative court to hand the election to Trump (which will certainly be the media narrative if it gets to that point). It will be, and always has been, about the rule of law.

Where the actual fraud becomes important — an actual measure of it, and whether it delivered an illegitimate win to Biden — is in how the Pennsylvania legislature, and potentially Congress, should react to the Court prohibiting the certification of the November election with respect to presidential electors. There is nothing wrong or abhorrent to our constitutional system if the elected representatives of the citizens of Pennsylvania are required to weigh in and clean this up on behalf of their voters. They need to be prepared to make their case to their voters if the predominant media narrative remains that the fraud wasn’t significant enough to affect the election outcome in Pennsylvania.

Regardless of how the Pennsylvania case gets resolved, it won’t change the overall outcome on its own. The 20 electoral votes wouldn’t be enough to swing the election to Trump if existing media projections for Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan stay in Biden’s column. If any of those changes, whether through ongoing canvassing efforts or other simultaneous legal challenges — such as the president’s filing Wednesday in Michigan making similar constitutional claims — well, Katy, bar the door.

Our way of government is strong enough to endure this. The only way through is through.

For nearly twenty years, Matt Beebe served as a countermeasures engineer in the Air Force and a contractor in the intelligence community before launching an IT and computer security firm in San Antonio, Texas. He is active in Texas politics and can be found on Twitter @theMattBeebe.

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Lawsuit Claims 40,000-Plus Fraudulent Ballots Pumped Through Detroit For Joe Biden

A lawsuit filed Nov. 8 in Michigan alleges that Detroit, Mich. elections officials oversaw and openly encouraged election fraud totaling many “tens of thousands” of fraudulent ballots, plus other illegal election-tampering.

The complaint filed by an in-state conservative nonprofit legal group alleges numerous instances of illegal and suspicious activity in the Democrat stronghold encompassing Detroit, Wayne County. President Trump’s legal team has filed a separate lawsuit alleging additional voting crimes and irregularities in the county.

The current results of the presidential race in Michigan suggest an approximately 146,000-vote gap between President Trump and Joe Biden, and an 84,000-vote gap between U.S. Senate candidates Gary Peters (D) and John James (R). The Associated Press and the state’s Democrat officials say Biden has won the state’s electoral votes and that Trump’s claims of fraud are insulting and inaccurate.

Wayne County is estimated to have been the site of some 850,000 votes this year. If this lawsuit is accurate, however, a massive portion of these votes is fraudulent.

The Great Lakes Justice Center complaint provides “eyewitness accounts and direct evidence” that “approximately 40,000” unsecured, irregular ballots arrived in vehicles with out-of-state license plates at Detroit’s only vote-counting location, TCF Center, in the wee hours of the Nov. 4 morning during a shift change in election workers. Eyewitnesses signed affidavits saying that every one of this group of 40,000 ballots they saw “was counted orally and attributed only to Democratic candidates,” specifically Joe Biden.

Other eyewitnesses signed affidavits under penalty of perjury stating they saw multiple other piles of ballots, together additionally numbering in the tens of thousands, that were counted despite violating election law, sometimes at the direction of local election officials. This allegedly happened both before the election, during early voting, and during the election and subsequent vote count.

“After poll challengers started discovering the fraud taking place at the TCF Center, Defendant election officials and workers locked credentialed challengers out of the counting room so they could not observe the process, during which time tens of thousands of ballots were processed,” the complaint says. It also alleges:

“Defendant election officials and workers allowed ballots to be duplicated by hand without allowing poll challengers to check if the duplication was accurate. In fact, election officials and workers repeatedly obstructed poll challengers from observing. Defendants permitted thousands of ballots to be filled out by hand and duplicated on site without oversight from poll challengers.”
Poll challenger Daniel Gustafson signed an affidavit stating he “witnessed tens of thousands of ballots being delivered to the TCF Center that were not in any approved, sealed, or tamper-proof container…Large quantities of ballots were delivered to the TCF Center in what appeared to be mail bins with open tops. Contrary to law, these ballot bins and containers did not have lids, were not sealed, and did not have the capability of having a metal seal.”

The Federalist reported earlier this week on one affidavit filed in this complaint, from former Michigan Assistant Attorney General Zachary Larsen, but there are many, many more, and the details are scandalous.

The First Big Batch of 40,000 Suspicious Votes

An affidavit signed by poll challenger Andrew Sitto tells more about the 40,000 ballots he says he saw brought in: “At approximately 4:00 a.m. on November 4, 2020, tens of thousands of ballots were suddenly brought into the counting room through the back door…by vehicles with out-of-state license plates (Exhibit C). It was observed that all of these new ballots were cast for Joe Biden,” summarizes the complaint.

Sitto’s affidavit expands on what he saw while observing the vote-counting process from election night, Nov. 3, overnight into the early morning of Nov. 4. He says by 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, right before a 5 a.m. shift change between poll watchers, one of two men in charge of the vote counting “got on the microphone and stated that another shipment of absentee ballots would be arriving and would have to be counted.”

“At approximately 4:30 a.m., tens of thousands of ballots were brought in and placed on eight long tables. Unlike the other ballots, these boxes were brought in from the rear of the room. The same procedure was performed on the ballots that arrived at approximately 4:30 a.m., but I specifically noticed that every ballot I observed was cast for Joe Biden,” his affidavit states. “While counting these new ballots, I heard counters say at least five or six times that all five or six ballots were for Joe Biden. All ballots sampled that I heard and observed were for Joe Biden.”

There Was a Second Big Dump of Suspicious Ballots

The lawsuit alleges the 40,000 vote dump is not the only suspicious one observed on Nov. 4 in Detroit. Poll challenger Robert Cushman attested that on Nov. 4, 2020 at approximately 9 p.m., he “was surprised to see numerous new boxes of ballots arrive at the TCF Center in the evening… I estimate these boxes contained several thousand new ballots when they appeared.” He noticed that none of the names on these new ballots were of registered voters, which poll workers were supposed to verify.

“I saw the computer operators at several counting boards manually adding the names and addresses of these thousands of ballots to the QVF system,” his affidavit states. “When I asked what the possible justification was to counting ballots from unknown, unverified ‘persons,’ I was told by election supervisors that the Wayne County Clerk’s Office had ‘checked them out.’” Subsequently, Cushman challenged the entire process encompassing these “thousands of ballots.”

Election workers are supposed to match the name on each ballot with a registered voter on the state’s official lists. Instead, Cushman says, the Wayne County Clerk’s officers told poll workers to add all the names on the ballots from these boxes to the state’s list, giving them all a false birth date of January 1, 1900.

Election rules also say absentee voters are supposed to be added to the state’s registered voter lists before 9 p.m. on Nov. 3, election day. All of the voters for these ballots were added after this deadline, at the direction of local election officials, Cushman says.

“None of the names of these new ballots corresponded with any registered voter,” the complaint says.

Whistleblower: Election Officials Broke the Law Big-Time

One of the affidavits is signed by a Detroit Elections Department worker whose identity is concealed in the court documents under whistleblower protections. A Great Lakes Justice Center attorney told The Federalist she snuck out yellow sticky notes during ballot processing to be able to stay and observe some of the illegal activities alleged in her affidavit. The affidavit alleges numerous illegal activities conducted by Wayne County election officials, affecting thousands if not tens of thousands of votes atop all those outlined above.

The whistleblower says that during her work processing early votes, “I was instructed by my supervisor to adjust the mailing date of these absentee ballot packages to be dated earlier than they were actually sent. The supervisor was making announcements for all workers to engage in this practice.” If true, this is fraud and election tampering.

The same sort of fraud, she alleges, happened on Nov. 4. That day, she says, “I was instructed to improperly pre-date the absentee ballots receive date that were not in the QVF [the state’s registered voter list] as if they had been received on or before November 3, 2020. I was told to alter teh [sic] information in the QVF to falsely show that the absentee ballots had been received in time to be valid. I estimate that this was done to thousands of ballots.”

Throughout her daily elections work in September through November 2020, the whistleblower says, “I directly observed, on a daily basis, City of Detroit election workers and employees coaching and trying to coach voters to vote for Joe Biden and the Democrat party.” This is also illegal. “I witnessed these workers and employees encouraging voters to do a straight Democrat ballot. I witnessed these election workers and employees going over to the voting booths with voters in order to watch them vote and coach them for whom to vote.”

The whistleblower also says Detroit election officials actively avoided verifying voters’ identities: “During the last two weeks while working at this satellite location, I was specifically instructed by my supervisor not to ask for a driver’s license or any photo I.D. when a person was trying to vote.”

The whistleblower also alleges encouraged voter fraud through the possibility of double voting: “I observed a large number of people who came to the satellite location to vote in-person, but they had already applied for an absentee ballot. These people were allowed to vote in-person and were not required to return the mailed absentee ballot or sign an affidavit that the voter lost the mailed absentee ballot.”

The suit names the City of Detroit, the Detroit Election Commission, Detroit Clerk Janice Winfrey, Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett, and the Wayne County Board of Canvassers as defendants. The Democratic Party has made a motion to join the lawsuit as defendants, meaning it is volunteering to be also sued for these alleged crimes.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her newest ebooks are“Classic Books for Young Children” and “32 Classic Games You Can Play Anywhere.” @JoyPullmann is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

Photo Photo By: Spc. Brian Pearson

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Christians Aren’t In Existential Despair If Biden Won, Because Government Isn’t Our God

On Election Night, I was crowded around the television with a dozen college friends in a tiny apartment above our government professor’s house. The Virginia night air seeping through the window was rescuing the feeble air conditioning unit and someone had propped up the three-legged TV with a handful of textbooks. Everyone watched the colorful maps on TV flip colors and we good-naturedly heckled CNN hosts who had been talking nonstop for the better part of two hours.

When Trump started gaining votes in Pennsylvania, everyone glanced at the three Pennsylvanians in the room. “All the Republicans just got off work,” said one, a pastor’s son from Pittsburgh. We all laughed.

But his joke stuck with me. I imagined that amorphous group of Pennsylvania Republicans going about their days, serving customers, trading smiles, clattering dinner plates in the kitchen. They would vote proudly and then they would move on with their daily responsibilities to the people around them.

I can’t say for sure if those Norman Rockwell-esque voters in rural Pennsylvania exist the way I imagined, but I have been inspired and convicted by their imaginary example following the election. They cheerfully did their civic duty, and they went about their day. They didn’t drop the responsibilities and joys around them to hang all hope of salvation on a presidential candidate.

As Christians, that’s how we should approach the electoral process — both before and after the results are announced. We should be educated and enthusiastically involved in our governing authority. We should surely fight to protect our families, our right to worship, and the rights of those who cannot defend themselves. But at the end of the day, we do all we can and then leave the results in eternal hands.

We preach that Christ alone is the hope of our salvation. But how graciously we handle the results of this election will show those around us whether we mean it.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be rightly concerned about protecting the electoral process where there is evidence of voter fraud. It also doesn’t mean we should give up being politically involved or holding our elected officials accountable for their words and actions. Advocating for liberty and justice in the civic process is a legitimate and necessary calling.

But it does mean we have an excellent opportunity to live out our faith by remembering that we trust in something greater than elections. “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation,” the psalmist says. “Blessed is he whose hope in is the Lord his God.”

Because our hope is not in this world, we have no reason to be fearful. We may be disappointed and should be aware of policies that threaten our ability to live as we have been called. Yet we have no need to feel afraid, distraught, or betrayed. Any earthly idol would betray our trust.

It is because we hope in an eternal savior that we joyfully continue our daily lives. We don’t need a week off of classes or work to mourn an election. Our daily joys have suffered no loss of meaning. We continue to enjoy fellowship with other members of the body of Christ. We keep going to work and serving those around us. We go on cooking dinner and enjoying it around the family dinner table. And we remain completely fulfilled by the daily grace of God. Because of our faith, we know that politics isn’t everything (and thank God it isn’t). Our lives shouldn’t revolve around who sits in the Oval Office.

After all, the whole concept of government is merely a means to enable people to live well in community with each other. We cannot let the means become the end. Instead, we should continue to live full and fruitful lives with the people placed around us. Furthermore, watching other reactions to election results reminds us how dangerous and disappointing it is to place our trust in fallen human beings.

A video of a woman screaming uncontrollably at Trump’s inauguration in 2016 became a meme because it captured the disconsolate reaction to Trump’s victory by some of his opponents. “I’m so sorry to my world,” the woman sobbed. “There’s so much potential for beauty and for devastation in this one moment, it’s just almost incomprehensible that they can exist right now.”

Other Clinton supporters reminisced a full year after Trump’s election about how devastated they were by his victory. “It kind of just hit you,” said Trent Vanegas, explaining how he broke down in tears when the 2016 election results were announced. “One moment, there’s hope and the next moment it’s complete despair.” Another Clinton voter expressed fear that he and his wife would have to raise their newborn child under a Trump presidency.

Even the positive reactions to Biden’s apparent victory show an obsessive and unhealthy faith in political power. Members of the media literally wept on television when they called the race for Biden. “I don’t know why I’m crying so much,” MSNBC contributor and former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill said. “I keep crying, I’m going to cry now.”

“I’m very emotional,” CNN’s Don Lemon said. “So when you ask me how I’m feeling right now, I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you.” CNN’s Van Jones repeatedly wiped his eyes with a tissue on camera.

And then there was Stephen Colbert on Thursday night, in what was supposed to be a comedy routine. Because of Trump, “I’m not sitting down yet, I just don’t feel like it yet,” Colbert said. “I’m also dressed for a funeral, because Donald Trump tried really hard to kill something tonight.”

Two minutes into the show and without having told a single joke, Colbert hung his head and just stood awkwardly in silence. “What I didn’t know is that it would hurt so much,” he finally added. “I didn’t expect this to break my heart, for him to cast a dark shadow on our most sacred right.”

Comedian Marc Maron led off his podcast on Monday — after about 30 seconds straight of profanity — by proclaiming “the weight has been lifted…I don’t know that people really fully understand the power, the symbolic power of the head of state that determines on some level how grounded people feel in the country.”

“We just barely f—ing avoided real fascism, people,” he added, before calling Trump supporters “brainf—ed, brainwashed people or just people who believe that fascism is the way to go.”

Watching these reactions, we should not make a mockery of their joy or sorrow. We should, however, be inspired to share the promise that we have. After all, we are blessed with the confidence that politics is not our final hope. And we are called to live accordingly.

Elle Reynolds is an intern at the Federalist, and a senior at Patrick Henry College studying government and journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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Totalitarian Left Promises Purges And Punishment For All Trump Voters

If 2020 didn’t already feel enough of a Kafkaesque nightmare, the latest bit of depravity from the “hate has no home here” totalitarian left is a ghoulish scheme announced by three former Barack Obama and Pete Buttigieg staffers on Twitter last week called “The Trump Accountability Project.” Aspiring apparatchiks Emily Abrams, Michael Simon, and Hari Sevugan lauded the website whose stated mission is to “never forget those who furthered the Trump agenda.”

According to the now privatized site, whose internet archives were captured, anyone associated with the Trump administration, including those who elected him, staffed his government, funded him, endorsed him, worked in law firms for him, and who supported him in general, should be “held accountable.”

The site includes a comprehensive list of “known collaborators,” including U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, White House Chief of Staff Mike Meadows, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, campaign advisors Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, and the 56 federal judges, including U.S. Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by President Trump. No one is spared: assistants, receptionists, stenographers, calligraphers—our diligent Comrades know how to name names.

The idea of punishing people who have supported Trump also surfaced among media types including Jake Tapper of CNN and Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post. All of them have called for at least social recriminations such as keeping the “guilty” from being able to support themselves and their families through paid employment.

So what exactly are these Trump deplorables going to be “held accountable” for? The reasons cited are the administration’s purported assault on democracy, separation of children from their families, encouragement of racism, and “the country’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Is this reasonable? Has the Trump administration, aided and abetted by its staff, supporters, donors, endorsers, and even independent judges, produced so horrific an environment that, even as we enter our glorious post-Trump One Party era, we should implement a program of purges and punishment?

The allegations regarding democracy are preposterous. The Democratic Party’s various policies and tactics since 2016 overwhelmingly surpass the most exaggerated allegations of Trump “authoritarianism,” and the left knows it.

Also questionable are factually selective cries about children being separated from their parents. A border policy of removing children from their rightful parents is wrong and should never have been implemented. But the complicated and grim reality is that some parents are the ones doing the separating, paying human smugglers to traffic their children over the border. Some don’t want their children brought back to their countries of origin.

Furthermore, the moral outrage over this issue is particularly disingenuous considering the left’s support for obscene abortion laws that butcher close to 1 million babies, give or take, each year. And these policies are racially targeted. Almost 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of black neighborhoods. Roughly a third of all babies aborted each year are black, even though black women represent approximately 7 percent of the U.S. population.

The claim of “antisemitism” is similarly ludicrous. Under Trump, the U.S. embassy was moved to Jerusalem, a promise made under previous presidencies but never delivered. A historic diplomatic accord was recently signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and subsequently Bahrain. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the agreement heralded a “new dawn of peace.” It’s no wonder that President Trump is the overwhelmingly preferred presidential candidate for the Israeli Jewish public.

As for the administration’s COVID response, the pandemic took everyone by surprise. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi were still accusing Trump of fear-mongering and xenophobia weeks after he closed the borders to China. Since then, and despite rapid mobilization efforts under Operation Warp Speed, Democrats and their media allies have consistently slammed Trump for not being able to magically control a new virus.

Yet Biden has not yet been able to articulate what exactly he would do differently, other than imposing a national lockdown. Considering that the most devastating economic impact has been felt in blue states where governors have stubbornly kept their economies shut down, this sort of strategy would be a calamity.

But none of this can get in the way of some good old-fashioned witch hunting. How will these Trump deplorables be held accountable? A consideration of Soviet communist tactics offers some interesting possibilities. Farcical show trials were held to liquidate perceived national traitors and thereby eliminate political opposition.

In Czechoslovakia, the children of shopkeepers, professionals, and intellectuals were barred from higher education. As for the judiciary, Communists resolved the problem of ideologically suspect pre-war appointed judges by issuing decrees that subordinated the judiciary to state ministries of “justice.”

Proponents of Trump purges have proposed their own ideas. Comrade Sevugan tweeted on Friday that CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “reported WH staff are starting to look for jobs” and warned that “employers considering them should know there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values.” So-called “pro-democracy” commentator Rubin tweeted that those questioning the election results and making claims of voter fraud should “never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite society.’”

As if that perversity wasn’t enough, she appeared on MSNBC’s AM Joy over the weekend and argued that “it’s not only that Trump has to lose, but that all his enablers have to lose.” She added, shockingly, that “we have to collectively in essence burn down the Republican Party” because “if there are survivors… they will do it again.”

Evan McMullin, a budding Stalinist dressed up as a defender of the republic, proposed that “we should keep and publish a list of everyone who assists Trump’s frivolous and dangerous attacks on the election.” For the good of the country, we should “name and shame forever,” he said.

Not surprisingly, socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is totally on board with implementing this “accountability” agenda. She tweeted concern that “Trump sycophants” might “downplay or deny their complicity” by deleting tweets, writings, and photos. Fortunately for her, the lists are already being tabulated.

Had we not just spent the better part of a year battling a host of assaults on individual, religious, and political freedoms, we would not have believed such an outrage possible. Indeed, once upon a time in 2019, sane people on both sides of the political spectrum would have regarded this sort of garbage as a blatant rights and basic decency violation. Now, once presumably normal people are salivating over the prospect of purges and punishment, a tactic that is rooted in communist propaganda: the enemy narrative. According to this pernicious lie, our very existence is under such threat by an evil adversary, that the erosion of human rights and undemocratic seizure of power are justified.

For the Soviets, the villain was capitalism and the parasitical Western imperialists; for today’s Totalitarian Left, the enemy is the Orange Man in the White House and his racist supporters. Comrades Sevugan, Rubin, and McMullin are spewing the same bile that communists have used to poison millions: the evil must be stamped out and its enablers humiliated and exiled to protect our very existence.

We must pray that this roadkill of an election is cleaned up and truth and freedom preserved so the circling vultures find some other carrion to gnaw. Resorting to Soviet-style tactics to intimidate their 70 million fellow Americans who support President Trump is despicable. And it only reinforces the widespread belief that the totalitarian left has officially abandoned any pretense of a commitment to democratic freedoms and rule of law.

Carina Benton is a native Australian living in Washington state. She is a practicing Catholic and has taught for many years in Catholic and Christian schools. She is a mother of two young children.

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I Was In Philadelphia Watching Fraud Happen. Here’s How It Went Down

Legacy media are lying when they claim that all of President Trump’s allegations of voter fraud are baseless. I know, because I argued a case on the president’s behalf in federal court in Philadelphia.

At issue was President Trump’s request for an order changing the way Pennsylvania absentee and mail-in ballots are being reviewed at the Philadelphia Convention Center. CNN and others claim he “lost.” That’s false: he won. As I made that argument on behalf of the president’s campaign, I can tell you what really happened.

President Trump went to court about two problems: First, only a handful of Republican observers—substantially fewer than the Democrats had there—were being admitted to the room at the Philadelphia Convention Center where inspections were being conducted. Second, the few who could get in weren’t permitted to get close enough to see what was actually happening. The most important questions all have to ask are: Why all the hiding? What’s being hidden?

At the Convention Center counting location, I personally observed dozens of Trump campaign volunteers being barred from the counting room even though they’d been properly registered as observers. That’s why I urged Pam Bondi and Corey Lewandowski, who were on the scene, to authorize the filing of a request that a federal court order the Board of Elections to stop this nonsense.

More hiding: despite a binding order of the state’s Commonwealth Court, the handful of Republican observers who could get into the room weren’t being allowed up to the barrier set at six feet from the closest tables where work was being done. So even though they were in the room where it was happening, they had no way to tell what was happening. If there’s no fraud, why is the Democrat-controlled Board of Elections unwilling to let people get close enough to actually see what its people are doing?

So on a borrowed laptop at around 2 p.m. on election day, I typed up a very short document to start a federal lawsuit and to request that the federal court intervene to prohibit these unfair practices. At about 4:30 p.m., its filing was authorized by the campaign.

The federal judge ordered a hearing that began at 5:30 p.m. and went for two hours. In open court, the judge compelled the Board of Elections to agree that the Republicans could have up to 60 representatives in the room. That was a huge victory, not only for Republicans but for anyone who actually wants to have a vote tabulation worthy of belief.

He also compelled the board to agree that all observers, Democrat or Republican, could get up to the six-foot barrier. While the Democrats claimed that of course, of course, they had always been letting people in and letting them up to the barrier, I had a long list of witnesses who were prepared to testify that this was false. The judge told the defendants pointedly that if they didn’t do what they’d promised in his courtroom they would, he had plenty of authority to make them keep their word.

Having secured this agreement from the Board of Elections, the court dismissed the president’s motion for court-ordered relief as moot. Courts often do that when they secure an agreement between the parties. It means the court doesn’t have to issue an order, which would be appealable, granting or denying the motion, and it means the court doesn’t have to write an opinion. What it doesn’t mean is that the request made on behalf of President Trump to stop the election fraud was moot, despite the false spin CNN and other mainstream media put on it. All of this was a victory for President Trump and anyone else who believes in open government.

I’m no longer surprised by anti-Trump non-news coming from the likes of CNN. But I cannot imagine why Pennsylvania Republican leaders have suggested there’s no reason to think that anything wrong or fraudulent is going on in the counting of Pennsylvania’s votes.

If that were true, why in the world would the Democratic-controlled city government be working so hard to keep Republicans out of the room where those votes are being counted? In a world where every car that drives down the street is on video, why isn’t all of this counting being conducted in broad daylight, under watchful eyes? What do they have to hide?

Other people have gathered substantial evidence that there are indeed things to hide, including this video showing, among other things, footage of government officials wearing Joe Biden facemasks filling in blanks in already-submitted mail-in votes. The hearing I attended wasn’t about that, but it was about the conditions that make that possible.

No one who wants a legitimate vote count should be working to keep observers out of the room where the votes are counted. Yet for some reason the City of Philadelphia sent three lawyers, including the city solicitor himself, to a hearing to try to persuade a federal judge that he shouldn’t even bother addressing President Trump’s request.

Fortunately, the federal judge didn’t take that advice, and he forced the Board of Elections to do the right thing. I call that a solid victory for everyone—except for those with something to hide. For some reason, all of this hiding was being done by Democrats, for Biden.

Jerome M. Marcus is an attorney in private practice in Philadelphia.

Photo Carol Highsmith / Wikimedia

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From Hanging Chads To Ballot Creep, Democrats Are Perfecting Post-Election Heists

If we thought “hanging chads” were damaging to electoral confidence back in 2000, then buckle your seat belt. The year 2020 that’s already brought us a pandemic and riots has suddenly lurched toward a dangerous curve that poses an unprecedented risk to the American electoral process and our faith in it.

Twenty years ago we were glued to our televisions as vote-counting unfolded in the crucial state of Florida. A huge magnifying glass held by one vote counter became an iconic symbol of the effort to rightly interpret votes. As agonizingly difficult as it was to watch, it paled in comparison to what we’re seeing in the 2020 election.

Transparency has been replaced with boards over windows. Election observers have been barred in key Democratic strongholds where vote counting continues, days after other states wrapped up. When they are allowed in they’re forced to remain behind barricades far away. In Detroit, it was reported that vote counters cheered as GOP observers were kicked out.

For all of the tough elections in years past, despite all of the bitter division along partisan lines, at the end of the day we’ve always benefited from an election system that, while not perfect, has been widely viewed as free and fair by the majority of Americans. Such things matter. Constitutional governance is the hallmark of a healthy democracy. It is what most others around the globe crave but will never experience.

But now, in the span of just a few days, we’ve seen the traditional presidential election process devolve into a chaotic scene suggesting those of banana republics. When blue-state political machines call an end to vote counting on election night just as the scale is about to tip to a Republican victory, something has gone terribly amiss.

Confidence in the system eroded further as massive numbers of mail-in ballots for one candidate suddenly appeared in the middle of the night. While it was explained as a “clerical error” in one state, and defended as such by Democrats’ willing social media agents, Twitter and Facebook, no explanation is given for how it happened in multiple states, a statistically improbable occurrence.

Each day we have watched the vote tallies in a half-dozen key states drift inexorably toward blue, many of which were heading solidly red on election night. Is it possible to elect the leader of the free world in this way, in a closed-door system that reeks of possible corruption?

The legality of ballots must be determined first. The count comes second. As significant as the “hanging chads” were in 2000, ballot creep has emerged as the determining issue in 2020. It’s a skill that Democrats perfected in past elections.

Back in 2008, incumbent Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman seemed on his way to re-election against comedian Al Franken. After the ballots were counted, Coleman had a 725-vote lead. But then the post-Election Day vote-gathering kicked into high gear. By the time it was over, an exhausting eight months later, Coleman was cleaning out his Capitol Hill office and Franken was moving in. His margin of victory: 312 votes.

The process by which it all happened is instructive as to how Democrats operate. The initial canvass in Minnesota had resulted in a 206-vote lead for Coleman. Democrats were just getting started, though, as a phalanx of attorneys descended on the blue state. Caches of ballots began to appear, starting with 200 that had not been counted on election night.

An envelope with ten absentee ballots was found in a Democratic stronghold. And 953 previously rejected absentee ballots were included in the second recount, yielding a net pickup of 176 votes for Franken. Nineteen precincts in Democrat-friendly Minneapolis ended up reporting more votes than voters. By January, the State Canvassing Board certified Franken as the winner.

Just a few years prior in Washington state, Republican Dino Rossi lost by 129 votes in the closest gubernatorial election in the history of the United States. He had led Democrat Christine Gregoire in both the initial count (261 votes) and the machine recount (42 votes). Consideration of 573 previously rejected ballots had only added to his lead, then up to 74 votes.

But then a tray of 162 “misplaced” absentee votes was suddenly discovered in a warehouse in Democrat-heavy King County, and by the end of December Gregoire was ahead by 130 votes. Litigation followed but was never successful in unseating her.

Before, there was Lyndon Johnson’s election to the Senate in 1948 via a batch of 202 ballots found six days after polls closed in a small town in south Texas, and John Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960 via fake voter registrations (names found on cemetery tombstones and an empty house with 56 votes tied to it).

The lesson is clear: Democrats believe in finding votes, until they’re ahead. Then it’s game over. It’s a sport Democrats know well, but Republicans seem to instinctively fail to understand. As Coleman commented, “I’ve watched this drama before. The other side is very good at this. … if you have an accounting process that simply allows unlimited ballots to kind of come in without being checked, without being verified, without having timestamps, who knows what you get in the end?”

Democrats will argue that Al Gore was cheated out of victory in 2000, but the simple truth is that, for once, they were stopped from perpetual recounting in accordance with the law. There had already been an initial count (1,784 Bush margin), and then a state-mandated machine recount which again yielded a Bush win (327 votes).

It should’ve ended there, but Gore’s team then sought a manual recount in four selected counties, and eventually the Florida Supreme Court ordered a state-wide manual recount that threatened to go on forever. Four days later, on December 12, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped it on the grounds that different counting methods were being used, a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, and the fact that the state’s electoral deadline was at hand.

The decision ended Democrats’ attempts to continue counting “hanging chads” ad infinitum. Writing in support of the ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia warned of “irreparable harm” by “the counting of votes that are of questionable legality.” With words that could be called upon today, he noted that, “Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires.”

The Supreme Court must soon hear these arguments in another presidential race. More important than whether the person who takes the oath of office in January is Republican or Democrat is the confidence of the American people in the validity and fairness of the process. We may be witnessing the end of election integrity—and nations do not long stand when the foundation of democracy is shattered.

Bob Anderson is a partner and CFO of a hotel development company and a former aerospace engineer who worked on the International Space Station and interned in Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) at the Pentagon. He is also a licensed commercial pilot.

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How Pennsylvania Democrats Deliberately Stoked 2020 Election Chaos

I can’t tell you how many texts I’ve received this week from friends and acquaintances across the country asking—usually in all-caps and peppered with profanity—what is going on in Pennsylvania? As a native Philadelphian, and from my current vantage in politically coveted Bucks County, I can see why Americans are demanding answers.

Ballots can be counted up to three days after Election Day? Mailed ballots with no postmark still qualify? Unsupervised drop boxes scattered across cities are entrusted to secure tens of thousands of votes?

Sadly, it’s all true. None of these practices inspires confidence that the standard of “one person, one vote” is being upheld. Nor were these practices valid in any prior general election in Pennsylvania.

Scratching your head as to why we chose the most consequential election in our lifetimes to run an experiment? Here’s what I’ve told my friends: the experiment was a wild success—once you understand that the chaos we’re witnessing was the plan all along, carefully orchestrated by Pennsylvania Democrats, including the governor, party activists, and the state Supreme Court. Here’s how it happened.

In Pennsylvania, Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf used the COVID-19 pandemic as cover for hurrying through new voting rules that bypassed reasonable deadlines or restrictions. The result? Many voters now have deep suspicion about wide-scale voter fraud in Philadelphia.

Republicans and Democrats have long understood the problems with mass mail-in ballots. The usual stages of ballot security are lost: unlike absentee ballots, some people are claiming they received unsolicited mail-in ballots, a practice Pennsylvania does not allow. Could it be ballots are being illegally sent or is it simply that voters forgot they signed up to get them?

Worse, it’s impossible to ensure the ballot is filled out by the voter or with her approval. And when the ballot is submitted, the chain of custody observing that ballot is broken. It’s a recipe for contested election results.

The seeds of public distrust were sowed in June, when Wolf decreed by executive order that mail-in ballots in the primary election could trickle in from certain counties for an extra week. The state Democratic Party followed up in July by suing to similarly extend the general election deadline for mail-in ballots. Their suit also sought to allow unprecedented “drop boxes” to collect mail-ins and to limit the number of election observers.

Wolf’s administration then asked the state’s elected Supreme Court, which is 5-2 Democratic-majority and has become notorious for partisan rulings, to grant all the Democrats’ requests—and they did on Sep. 17. The court went further than expected, granting the Democrats’ deadline extension, approving drop boxes and satellite “election offices” for ballot collection, and even ruling that postmarks could not be used to verify when ballots had been mailed.

In addition, the court removed the Green Party presidential candidate’s name from the state ballot over a technicality, a move that may have shifted Green Party votes to Joe Biden’s camp. In their decision, the justices acknowledged that the new deadline violated state law but claimed that “in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic” such laws could be dismissed.

It got worse. Sensing an opportunity, the Wolf administration pronounced that county officials “are prohibited from rejecting absentee or mail-in ballots based on signature comparison.” On Oct. 23, not long before Election Day, the court approved this last nail in the coffin of election integrity.

On Thursday, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey expressed concern about these unprecedented rule changes that fueled this week’s chaos, making clear that free and fair elections aren’t a partisan issue. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court will have to rule.

But on Oct. 28, the Supreme Court postponed any decision with a 4-4 ruling—excluding newly appointed justice Amy Coney Barrett—that returned the case to its court of origin. At the time, Justice Samuel Alito noted that it is likely “that the state Supreme Court decision violates the Federal Constitution,” opening a possibility that the justices will review the case post-election, with the potential outcome of eliminating thousands of illegal ballots.

On Friday, GOP state House Speaker Bryan Cutler, who noted that the election “confusion is a direct result of the court decisions,” called for a full audit before any certification of the results. Cutler also cited Pennsylvania’s 100,000 provisional ballots—cast when a voter’s eligibility is in question—that further indicated problems with the mail-in system.

Elections decided by the courts is a nightmare scenario for either political party. But Wolf refused to reform the state’s election procedures in concert with the legislature. In October, GOP lawmakers proposed compromise legislation, House Bill 2626, that included several, but not all, of the governor’s proposed changes to Pennsylvania voting laws. Wolf threatened to veto their bill in an all-or-nothing negotiation standoff.

To prevent a future election debacle in Pennsylvania, we need election integrity reform through the normal legislative process. Only legal votes should be counted, and controls should be put in place—like polling place verification and absentee ballot chain-of-custody at every stage.

But Democrats have resisted these reforms for years, creating the present chaos. The U.S. Supreme Court must respond accordingly and assure Pennsylvanians that their election was fair—regardless of the presidential outcome.

Jennifer Stefano is chief innovation officer and vice president at the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free market think tank.

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Reports Of Election Fraud Keep Piling Up In Michigan. What’s Going On?

It appears that Democrats in Detroit, a city with a long history of election fraud, are tampering with absentee ballots and breaking state law. As absentee ballot counting continues in a handful of key states across the country, reports of voter fraud, ballot tampering, and the illegal removal of Republican election observers are cropping up in Michigan, especially in Detroit, a Democratic stronghold which has a long history of voter fraud.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced it was filing a lawsuit in Michigan over what it claims are systematic efforts to prevent Republican election observers from monitoring the ballot counting process as allowed under state law. The lawsuit comes as video clips continue to surface on social media showing election officials denying access to authorized GOP poll watchers.

Aric Nesbitt, a Michigan state senator, posted a video on Twitter Wednesday afternoon of election workers at the convention center in Detroit, where absentee ballots are being counted. The video shows workers cheering every time an official election observer with the Michigan GOP is ejected from the counting room. Apparently this has been happening frequently, in violation of state law. Democratic observers, says Nesbitt, now outnumber Republicans observers at the convention center 3 to 1.

Here’s why that’s a problem. When an absentee ballot is unreadable for whatever reason, a ballot counter takes out a blank ballot, lays it on the table next to the unreadable ballot, and transposes the vote so it can be filed and tallied. Republican and Democratic “poll challengers,” as they’re called, are supposed to observe this process as it happens and make sure that the vote is transposed accurately. In addition, Michigan state law requires that a Republican and a Democratic official sign off on every voting precinct where absentee ballots are cast in this manner.

Phill Kline is a former Kansas attorney general and now an attorney for the nonprofit Amistad Project, which filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that tens of thousands of ballots in Detroit have been illegally filled out by election officials and Democratic election observers. “We have confirmed evidence that Democratic election officials have violated state law,” he told The Federalist, “and have opened the door for fraud involving tens of thousands of ballots.”

Kline confirmed Republican officials have been barred from observing the counting of absentee ballots, and that transposed absentee ballots are being certified without a GOP official signing off on them. The law, Kline says, states that an official from both parties must sign off “if possible,” and that Democratic election officials are claiming they can’t find a Republican to sign off—even though they are also kicking Republican officials out of the counting rooms.

I also spoke by phone to one GOP poll challenger who asked to remain anonymous and told me the election officials at the convention center are not letting Republican poll challengers remain in the room where absentee ballots are being counted, saying there’s “too many” of them. Asked how many people were in these rooms, the officials in charge could not say, according to this person, who added that the rooms in question are enormous, the size of a football field (remember this is at the convention center, where the Detroit auto show is held).

After kicking out Republican poll challengers, election officials began covering up the windows of the counting rooms with cardboard to block the view of Republican observers. “It was pretty chaotic,” the poll challenger said.

News reports are starting to reflect the chaos at the convention center. The Detroit Free Press reported Thursday morning that a lawyer, Jessica Connarn, who was working as a Republic poll challenger, filed an affidavit saying she was told by someone counting absentee ballots that workers in Detroit were “changing the dates the ballots were received” so they would be considered valid.

“When I approached the poll worker, she stated to me that she was being told to change the date on ballots to reflect that the ballots were received on an earlier date,” Connarn says in the affidavit. The Free Press goes on to report:

Connarn states when she tried to get additional information later from this poll worker, she was “yelled at by the other poll workers working at her table, who told me that I needed to go away and that I was not allowed to talk to the poll worker.”

In that interaction, the poll worker slipped Connarn a note, she states.

The note says “entered received date as 11/2/20 on 11/4/20.”

In Michigan, only ballots received by 8 p.m. on Election Day, this year Nov. 3, are valid.

No One Should Trust The Election Process In Detroit

None of this is new for Detroit, which has been plagued by corrupt election officials for years. In 2005, federal officials launched an investigation after the November election and state officials took over the handling of absentee ballots in Detroit after the Detroit News reported that “legally incapacitated nursing home residents were being coaxed to vote and Detroit’s voting rolls were inflated with more than 300,000 names of people who had died or moved out of the city.” A post-election audit found that nearly 30 percent of precincts showed discrepancies in vote totals.

Despite reform efforts over the years, these problems have persisted. Back in December, a public interest group sued the city in federal court, claiming its voter rolls are “replete with typos, dead people, duplicate registrations and mistakes about gender and birth: One Detroit voter is listed as being born in 1823—14 years before Michigan was annexed into the Union,” according to the Detroit Free Press.

In the 2016 presidential election, voting machines in more than a third of all voting precincts in Detroit registered more votes than the number of voters tallied by poll workers. The irregularities meant that more than half the city would be ineligible for a statewide presidential recount that was eventually called off by the Michigan Supreme Court. Here’s what Detroit News reported at the time:

Overall, state records show 10.6 percent of the precincts in the 22 counties that began the re-tabulation process couldn’t be recounted because of state law that bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals.

The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.

But these problems persisted. In the August primary, ballot counts in 72 percent of Detroit’s absentee voting precincts didn’t match the number of ballots cast, and in 46 percent of the city’s precincts the combined vote counts for Election Day and absentee voting were out of balance. Even Democratic election officials admitted that something had gone wrong in tracking ballots by precinct.

According to Michigan state law, precincts whose poll books don’t match up with the number of ballots cast can’t be recounted. That might present problems for any eventual presidential recount in the state, as it did in 2016.

For now, it seems clear that credible evidence of election fraud has surfaced in Detroit, which is not surprising given Detroit’s troubled history of election fraud. But it’s also deeply disturbing. The Trump campaign’s lawsuit to halt what appears to be a corrupt process is, in this case, entirely appropriate. We need to get to the bottom of what’s going on in Detroit.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

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Yes, Democrats Are Trying To Steal The Election In Michigan, Wisconsin, And Pennsylvania

Reported By John Daniel Davidson | NOVEMBER 4, 2020

In the three Midwest battleground states, vote counting irregularities persist in an election that will be decided on razor-thin margins. As of this writing, it appears that Democratic Party machines in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are trying to steal the election.

As reporters and commentators went to bed early Tuesday morning, all three states were too close to call, but President Trump led former Vice President Joe Biden by comfortable margins—far beyond what had been predicted in the polls. None of the networks called these states because enough mail-in ballots remained uncounted that it could swing either way, but Trump’s position looked good.

Then, something strange happened in the dead of the night. In both Michigan and Wisconsin, vote dumps early Wednesday morning showed 100 percent of the votes going for Biden and zero percent—that’s zero, so not even one vote—for Trump.

In Michigan, Biden somehow got 138,339 votes and Trump got none, zero, in an overnight vote-dump.

When my Federalist colleague Sean Davis noted this, Twitter was quick to censor his tweet, even though all he had done was compare two sets of vote totals on the New York Times website. And he wasn’t the only one who noticed—although on Wednesday it appeared that anyone who noted the Biden vote dump in Michigan was getting censored by Twitter.

Others were quick to note the partisan censorship from Twitter and raise concerns over how 100 percent of a vote dump could possibly go to Biden. But the social media giant has maintained its crackdown on sharing this information. Twitter users could not like or share a tweet from the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh noting the 138,339-vote dump.

Buzzfeed later reported that according to a spokesperson at Decision Desk HQ, the votes for Biden were the result of a “data error” from a “file created by the state that we ingested.” When the state noticed the “error” it updated its count, which somehow gave 138,339 votes to Biden and zero to Trump.

It turns out, the vote dump was the result of an alleged typo, an extra zero that had been tacked onto Biden’s vote total in Shiawassee County, Michigan. It seems the error was discovered only because Davis and other Twitter users noted how insane and suspicious the vote totals looked, and demanded an investigation that uncovered what was either a typo or an incredibly clumsy attempt to boost Biden’s vote count.

There was also something suspicious about the vote reporting in Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016. Initial vote totals there showed Biden ahead of Trump by 29 points, a result that can’t possibly be accurate, as plenty of journalists noted.

After the strange results caught national attention, election officials in Antrim County said they were investigating what they called “skewed” results, working with the company that provides their election software to see what went wrong. The county clerk said they plan to have an answer by Wednesday afternoon.

Then another mysterious all-Biden vote dump happened in Wisconsin. Biden miraculously overcame a 4.1-point Trump lead in the middle of the night thanks to vote dumps in which he got—you guessed it—100 percent of the votes and Trump got zero.

Note the vertical lines in both graphs below:

On Wednesday, the Trump campaign demanded a full recount in Wisconsin, citing “reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results.”

In Pennsylvania, the Democratic scheme to steal the election is a bit different. Rather than vote dumps that impossibly go 100 percent to Biden, Pennsylvania is relying on the Democratic Secretary of State’s plan to count indisputably late mail-in ballots as though they were received on Election Day—even if they have no postmark.

This plan was of course rubber-stamped by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which cited the need for “equitable relief” to address mail delays amid the pandemic.

Note that this isn’t just about ballots that come in after Election Day, but about ballots that come in after Election Day that don’t even have a postmark—that is, there is no way to tell when the ballots were mailed, or from where.

Although it’s true that the long delays we’ve seen for absentee ballot counts are due in part to state laws in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that prohibit the counting of absentee ballots before Election Day, which is not the case in most other states. But the cumulative circumstances under which these absentees ballots are now being tallied is highly suspicious.

Unless election officials in Michigan and Wisconsin can explain the overnight vote-dumps and, in Michigan, the “typo” that appeared to benefit Biden, and Pennsylvania officials can explain their rationale for counting ballots with no postmark, the only possible conclusion one can come to right now is that Democrats are trying to steal the election in the Midwest.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

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Biden Falsely Claims Intel Community Has Cleared His Family Of Wrongdoing

OCTOBER 21, 2020 By Jordan Davidson

Without any evidence, Democratic Nominee Joe Biden claimed that the “vast majority” of the intelligence community agrees there is “no basis at all” for the allegations of corruption against him and his son Hunter Biden.

“And, you know, and all and the vast majority of the intelligence people have come out and said, there’s no basis at all,” Biden claimed.

Despite his baseless claims, the intelligence community has weighed in on the potentially incriminating evidence presented by the New York Post and others who obtained information from a laptop hard drive reportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.

On Tuesday, the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) agreed with Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe Tuesday that the information released about Biden and his son Hunter is not a Russian disinformation campaign.

“Let me be clear,” Ratcliffe said on Fox Business, debunking Rep. Adam Schiff’s baseless claims of foreign election interference. “The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that.”

The FBI is also in possession of the laptop.

Despite these claims, Biden continued to criticize the spread of this damning evidence, calling it a “last-ditch effort in this desperate campaign to smear me and my family.”

“This is the same garbage [as] Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s henchmen,” Biden said.

Biden’s comments come after Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released a statement “on Homeland Security letterhead” claiming that Hunter and the Biden family were profiting from “the Biden name.”

A Senate report released in late September outlined “a long list of the Biden family’s conflicts of interest conducting shady overseas business activity with foreign adversaries while serving at the upper echelons of government, raising significant national security concerns with potentially criminal conduct and threats of extortion.”

Johnson reiterated his position on the issue to Sean Hannity on Fox News Monday night, expressing his concern that the mainstream media was not covering the scandal properly.

“Hunter Biden, together with other Biden family members, profited off the Biden name. That’s what’s happening here,” he said. “What we revealed in our 87-page report is a vast web of connections with Chinese nationals, with people all over the world. Again, trading on the Biden name.”

“But it’s these business dealings – you know, our report raises far more questions than it actually answered – but it raises so my troubling issues that the mainstream media is simply not looking at,” Johnson added. “They are suppressing the information, which is a scandal in and of itself.”

In response, Biden said that “Ron should be ashamed of himself” and referred to GOP outsider Sen. Mitt Romney’s denial of these claims. Romney has historically opposed his Republican colleagues on multiple contentious issues including endorsing the Democrats’ campaign to attempt to impeach Trump.

“Even the man who served with him on that committee, a former nominee for the Republican Party, said there’s no basis to this,” Biden said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘20/20’

Reported BY: BOB ANDERSON | DECEMBER 20, 2021

Bob Anderson is a partner and CFO of a hotel development company and a former aerospace engineer who worked on the International Space Station and interned in Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) at the Pentagon. He is also a licensed commercial pilot.

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“We hear about the rigging of the election,” Hemingway said, “but partly what they mean is the meddling on the part of big media and big tech to affect the outcome of the election.”

“We actually also knew that there was an FBI investigation into Hunter Biden before the election except that the media suppressed it,” Hemingway said, depriving the American people of being fully informed when casting their ballots to hand over the country to Joe Biden.

“This meddling on the part of big media and big tech, which banned people from even talking about this on Facebook and Twitter, is a very serious problem and a huge threat to the republic,” Hemingway said.

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Reported by Mollie Hemingway | DECEMBER 7, 2020

Were Republican Poll Watchers and the Media Told Counting Had Stopped For The Night?

They planned to stop scanning absentee ballots at 10:30 p.m. and pick it up back in the morning. No official could explain before press time why Fulton was stopping its count of absentee ballots at that time, only saying that was the procedure.

Was a State Election Board Monitor Present While Partisan Observers Were Gone?

There Are Much Bigger Georgia Claims

A Note On Lead Stories

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1. 80 Million Votes

2. Winning Despite Losing Most Bellwether Counties

3. Biden Trailed Clinton Except in a Select Few Cities

4. Biden Won Despite Democrat Losses Everywhere Else

5. Biden Overcame Trump’s Commanding Primary Vote

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Reported by John Daniel Davidson | NOVEMBER 18, 2020

The GOTV Effort In Nevada Was Blatantly Criminal

Following The (Taxpayer) Money

This Is Widespread, And Corporate Media Won’t Report It

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Election Code Violations Might as Well Be ‘Fraud’

Ignoring the Election Code Denies Equal Protection

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Bush v. Gore Already Wrestled with These Concerns

A significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.

If we are to respect the legislature’s Article II powers, therefore, we must ensure that postelection state-court actions do not frustrate the legislative desire to attain the ‘safe harbor’ provided by §5. (Rehnquist concurring, but writing separately; Citations and dicta omitted)

The Changes Disproportionately Helped Biden

What if the Supreme Court Invalidates a State’s Election

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Reported by Joy Pullmann | NOVEMBER 12, 2020

The First Big Batch of 40,000 Suspicious Votes

There Was a Second Big Dump of Suspicious Ballots

Whistleblower: Election Officials Broke the Law Big-Time

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Legacy media are lying when they claim that all of President Trump’s allegations of voter fraud are baseless. I know, because I argued a case on the president’s behalf in federal court in Philadelphia.

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But then a tray of 162 “misplaced” absentee votes was suddenly discovered in a warehouse in Democrat-heavy King County, and by the end of December Gregoire was ahead by 130 votes. Litigation followed but was never successful in unseating her.

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No One Should Trust The Election Process In Detroit

Overall, state records show 10.6 percent of the precincts in the 22 counties that began the re-tabulation process couldn’t be recounted because of state law that bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals.

The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.

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Then, something strange happened in the dead of the night. In both Michigan and Wisconsin, vote dumps early Wednesday morning showed 100 percent of the votes going for Biden and zero percent—that’s zero, so not even one vote—for Trump.

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OCTOBER 21, 2020 By Jordan Davidson

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In His Service

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