Auditing Biden's 'victory' A veteran CPA lays it all out
In some cases, an election result cries out for an audit. One test is statistical likelihood. The 2020 election, as it turns out, failed this test spectacularly. A few examples: for almost sixty years, the winner of the electoral votes from Ohio and Florida has also won the nationwide election – but in 2020, no. Since 1898, any candidate winning those two states plus North Carolina has taken the presidency – but, again, not in 2020. For forty years, nineteen bellwether counties around the country have correctly predicted the ultimate winner of the presidential sweepstakes – and who won eighteen of them in 2020? Trump.

There’s more. Not in 150 years has a candidate whose vote total jumped as much as Trump’s did from one election to the next ended up losing the election. Never has any incumbent who received over 75 percent of the votes in his party’s primaries (Trump won 94 percent) lost the general election. Rarely has a president lost a re-election bid even as his party picked up seats in the House. Then there’s the blatantly obvious difference in voter enthusiasm between Trump – with his epic campaign rallies – and Biden, whose events sometimes seemed to draw more journalists than voters. Then there’s what is apparently a suspicious variation in turnout rates between otherwise very similar cities: for example, 84 percent in Milwaukee, but only 51 percent in Cincinnati.

None of this, Fried underscores, proves anything. But all of it points to the urgent need for a legitimate audit. So do a number of other problems in several widely distributed jurisdictions. For instance, several Democrat-run states, purportedly seeking to make the voting process safer (because of COVID) and easier (especially for minorities, who, it was claimed, somehow had special difficulties in navigating the process), dramatically broadened the use of absentee ballots and relaxed (or entirely removed) ballot signature requirements. Some states even sent out unsolicited ballots to every registered voter. All of these actions were blatant invitations to massive fraud. Republicans who protested were condemned as racist reactionaries – even though most countries in “progressive” Western Europe ban absentee ballots entirely for resident citizens, and those that do allow them are much stricter in distributing them.

Some states hired election workers who weren’t able to operate the computers involved. In many locations, there was large-scale “vote harvesting” – the practice, by political operatives, of going door-to-door to collect voters’ completed absentee ballots and then delivering them (perhaps intact, perhaps not) to the appropriate polling place. And a number of state governments – often at the last minute – made illegal changes in election procedures.

For a responsible auditor, there are other questions to be asked. Were voter logs updated? Were ballot requests logged? Who emptied the drop boxes in which absentee voters deposit their ballots? Who, after the ballots were received, maintained chain of custody? Who had access to the computers used in ballot processing? Where were ballots stored? Who witnessed ballot counts?

After Election Day, there were reports around the country of specific cases of election fraud. A New York Post reporter interviewed a New Jersey Democrat who professed to run a ballot-harvesting operation whose participants collected voters’ completed mail-in ballots, took them out of their envelopes, discarded the ones containing votes for Trump, replaced them with new ballots marked with votes for Biden, then sent them in to be counted. The man running this scheme told the Post reporter that he knew of anti-Trump postal workers who’d thrown out ballots en masse in Trump-friendly neighborhoods.

There were also some abstruse mathematical observations. A mathematician named Edward Solomon noticed unusual patterns in the Georgia and Pennsylvania votes: in some precincts, the total vote and the Trump vote had a much lower percentage of co-primes (i.e., numbers that don’t share a common factor other than one) than would be expected. Some co-prime patterns were oddly repetitious: one Trump vote to 18 for Biden; one Trump vote to 24 for Biden. Solomon found this suspicious. Similarly, scientist Douglas Frank, studying the election results by county in several states, noticed that while the voting pattern by age was pretty much the same in each county of a given state, that pattern differed significantly from state to state. What did that signify? Some observers cited violations in the vote tallies of Benford’s Law, which states that in a large batch of random numbers there will be a certain distribution of their first digits (for example, about 30% of the numbers will begin with 1; 18% with 2; 12% with 3; and so on); but Fried considers this test “too unreliable” to take very seriously.

Then there were the post-election observations whose import could easily be grasped without an advanced math degree. In several swing states there were sudden late-night jumps in voting tallies, all of them massively favoring Biden, and many of them occurring after a mysterious period during which vote counting, or at least vote reporting, stopped. In no fewer than 353 counties in 29 states, there turned out to be more registered voters than voting-age citizens.