‘Democracy dies in darkness’ is on the masthead of the Washington Post. They say it as if it is their fear, but they behave as if it is their hope (for example, when hiding the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop). One thing it isn’t (yet) is literal fact. Despite the efforts of many, there’s still enough light around that anyone who chooses to look can see some of what is happening to democracy in the US today.
PART I: let’s examine an example – Arizona.
PAST PERFORMANCE …
The usual suspects spun the Arizona-State-Senate-mandated audit of the 2020 election and its results like a top – but they could not literally suppress it. Anyone who wanted to could (and still can) watch the presentations and/or read the audit reports themselves, not the spin about them.
“None of the various systems related to elections had numbers that would balance and agree with each other. In some cases, these differences were significant. There appears to be many ballots cast from individuals who had moved prior to the election. Files were missing from the Election Management System (EMS) Server. Ballot images on the EMS were corrupt or missing. Logs appeared to be intentionally rolled over, and all the data in the database related to the 2020 General Election had been fully cleared.
On the ballot side, batches were not always clearly delineated, duplicated ballots were missing the required serial numbers, originals were duplicated more than once, and the Auditors were never provided Chain‐of‐Custody documentation for the ballots for the time‐period prior to the ballot’s movement into the Auditors’ care.” [FYI, this is a reformatted summary from ‘Maricopa County Forensic Election Audit Volume I: Executive Summary & Recommendations’. As there was a draft release of the report shortly before the late september presentation and filing, there is more than one version of this text extant, all very very similar but not quite identical.]
Anyone who wanted to look could also see that the people who administered the 2020 Maricopa County election were very hostile to being audited.
“By the County withholding subpoena items, their unwillingness to answer questions as is normal between auditor and auditee, and in some cases actively interfering with audit research, the County prevented a complete audit,”
They were also keen on deleting records (the MSM tried to spin that too), and they continued to withhold information in the face of pressure from the Arizona Senate and Attorney General:
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann and Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen have pressed the county and Dominion Voting Systems to produce routers, traffic logs, mail-in ballot envelopes, and other information in their investigation. The county has refused. … in its response MCBOS [the Maricopa county election administrators] failed to explain why it is not required to comply with the legislative subpoena. Its only response was that the Arizona Senate is not currently in session, so MCBOS could not be held in contempt. (August 21st, 2021)
This very cautious audit nevertheless found 23,344 mail-in ballots voted From prior address (and no one with the same last name remaining at the address), 9,041 more ballots returned by voters than were sent to them, and so on and so on for a total of well over fifty thousand flagged ballots (more than five times Joe Biden’s declared margin of victory) – the data breakdown is in the Maricopa County Forensic Election Audit
Volume III: Result Details (scroll to page 5, ‘Findings Summary Table’).
The canvas audit was a private effort (it resembled some of the follow-up checks the official audit advised in its report but was not a state-run activity: hundreds of canvassers went door-to-door verifying registration and voting information for thousands of residents (and, of course, very properly not asking for whom any responder voted). This method found examples of what the state audit’s methods could not:
“American citizens living in Maricopa County who cast a vote, primarily by mail, in the election and yet there is no record of their vote with the county and it was not counted in the reported vote totals for the election.”
Unlike the state audit’s method, the canvas audit’s statistical samples (and so the estimates made from them) are capable of being overstated, not just of being understated – for much the same reason as an opinion poll can be off in either direction (albeit the canvas audit was on a larger scale than typical polls of comparably-sized populations IIUC). People could simply forget that they had not in fact voted. Or they could lie; it is possible (but a bit odd) that someone who had not bothered to post or cast their vote in the election might nevertheless be motivated to lie that they had. Etc. But the canvas audit found enough cases to estimate 173,104 such “missing or lost” votes (plus four times as many unknown-at-address/departed-from-address mail-ins as the state audit reported). That’s enough for a many-times-over result reversal even if your estimate of the unreliability of the canvas’ audit’s estimates is high. (And of course it would be a additional challenge to justify estimating the lying or errors of audit-canvassed voters very high while estimating those same qualities very low in the unprecedented 2020 statistics of mail-in voters from the same population – or in the administrators who verified them.)
… IS A GUIDE TO FUTURE BEHAVIOUR
The 2022 election had the same post-pandemic-look as before: floods of ballots were mailed out, a long postal-voting prologue ended in an election day of bizarre oddities and implausible errors, followed by a dragged-out post-election-day count.
– Beforehand, there was great media hostility to the idea of Elon not controlling voters’ tweeting about any problems they might encounter. There was great DoJ hostility to the idea of checking whether voters were citizens (as there had been to the audit).
– The self-same bureaucrats who ran the Maricopa country election last time were still in place administering it this time (their nominal party affiliations vary but their agenda is shared). They were presided over by secretary of state, Katie Hobbs (who was running for governor). Here’s an earlier example of her approach to election-integrity law:
Arizona has a law against ballot harvesting, A.R.S. 16-1005. After it was passed in 2016, the Democratic National Committee sued to stop it from going into effect, and when Secretary of State Katie Hobbs refused to defend the law, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich stepped in to defend it instead. He ultimately won at the U.S. Supreme Court in Brnovich v. DNC. Hobbs tried to go around the decision by revising the state’s Election Procedures Manual (EPM), resulting in Brnovich suing her, which ended with an impasse that left the 2019 version of the EPM in place – contrary to statute, which requires it to be updated every other year.
– On what we once called election day and should now call in-person-voting day, the opening of the polls instantly revealed printer problems, ballot reader problems, people waiting hours to vote or giving up and visiting another station and finding they could not vote there either, and so on. The administrators said they would sort it all out and ensure everyone got to vote – then issued incorrect instructions to their subordinates on how to work around the problems. Etc., etc.
PART II: what is Arizona an example of?
My main point is not specifically that Arizona risks going the way of Illinois, California, Colorado and Etcetera. My main point is: this is not happening in complete darkness.
FIRSTLY, while the data I’ve reported has been hit by a ton and a half of spin, it is not literally hidden. Nothing I’ve said above cannot be read about by anyone who chooses to seek it out, and even the spun denunciations of audits and certification fights tell readers that these investigations exist and can be found on the web.
SECONDLY, it not does not have the darkness of hard-to-understand-why either.
– In recent years, much criminal law (and much enforcement of that law) has been cut down or weakened by no-cash bail laws, Soros prosecutors, etc., etc. Also in recent years, crime rates have risen. In woke logic, the latter is just a puzzling and/or exaggerated coincidence, unrelated to the former, something prejudiced right-wingers fuss about. In unwoke logic, it’s a simple and very obvious case of cause and effect.
– In these same recent years, many a law against vote fraud (and much enforcement of laws against vote fraud) has also been cut down or weakened. The pandemic was made the excuse for flooding the system with ballots, abolishing or ignoring vote-by-mail restrictions, greatly extending the time period, razing verification laws and/or practices, etc., etc.
So saying that the 2020 election was “the most secure in history”, calling claims of vote fraud in it ‘baseless’, etc. is like believing that crime rates have not risen – both are treated as right-wing lies, and if you can manage to believe that of one then I guess you’ll manage to believe it of the other. However if you think crime rates have risen because corrupted prosecutors, intimidated police, dishonest legislators and activist judges ensure it is less fought, less risky and less punished (and resisting crime more risky and more punished), then you not only can but in logic should apply the same reasoning to vote fraud (example in comments here).
THIRDLY, it not does not have the darkness of ‘everything looks the same’. We all see how gross the change is as we (still) wait to be told the final 2022 election results. As recently as 2016, people in the UK, never mind the US, found out who’d won a US election when they woke up the morning after election day. Now the very people who razed or nullified the anti-vote-fraud laws are the ones most eager to tell everyone to accept the count taking weeks. That is a huge change in how US voting operates – and while 2020’s halting the counts in six states took place in the hours of darkness, the fact that the day after the election is now the week or the month after the election is not hidden. It was aggressively predicted and defended as a good thing beforehand in 2020 and in 2022, and it was (indeed, still is) very visible afterwards.
LASTLY, it not does not have the darkness of ‘how could this happen?’ A century ago, in the days of New York’s Tammany Hall, there were ‘repeaters’ (sometimes party members, often gang members) who each voted many times on election day.
“Even in the most ordinary discussions you are reminded more and more of New York as it used to be when the grip of the Tammany machine was heavy on it. You could have spent weeks in New York in those days and never “run across” Tammany. There were plenty of British visitors who came back thinking that the Tammany grip, the Tammany violence, the Tammany cruelty and corruption of every phase of civic life, were grossly exaggerated. But the New Yorker, when he chose, could tell a different story. He knew. And the Berliner knows too. But he talks less. He looks on.
Sometimes, as among the ardent Christians who see their religion torn to bits, and the walls plastered with the barbaric obscenities of Der Sturmer, or among the working class people with all their traditions of independent organisation, the Berliner not only looks on but works to end all this. But sometimes, like the toads in the Tiergarten, he just sits and looks.” (Picture Post, Spring 1939)
But because election day was just one day, a typical Tammany Hall repeater might vote as little ten times per election. A few decades later, that was still the order of magnitude of Mayor Daley’s “Vote early, vote often!” goons in Chicago, when they had only a single day in which to get each vote, write it and then walk back to a polling station after having it checked by a senior (Mayer Daley needed a lot of goons to reach the amount of fraud he required, and it seems he did not trust every low-level Chicago goon to vote as instructed if the goon’s ballots were secret Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
).
All this limited how much vote fraud was possible back then; the saying was (and among the naive still is)
“If it’s not close then they can’t cheat.”
A year ago, by contrast, California police in Torrance checked on a man who appeared passed out in his parked car – and found 300 ballots for the upcoming governor’s recall election.
“Having 300 ballots in your possession is suspicious. Having the ballots AND several drivers’ licenses clearly establishes intent to commit voter fraud.”
(Some people are slower to suspect vote fraud than others; possessing 300 ballots without lawful explanation would be enough for me. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. ) No single Mayor Daley goon or Tammany Hall repeater could have hoped to vote 300 times in one election, but it’s obvious that Torrance-guy (whom I suspect of not being the most skilled or committed vote fraudster activist that California can boast) had found it straightforward to acquire 300 ballots, and expected to find it easy to post them all in the months available to him before the election, or in the week(s) after, or give them to harvesters. The only hard thing to believe would be the idea that the day the police chanced to find him stoned in his parked car was the only day in all that election’s months of postal voting when his car contained hundreds of ballots. Maybe the pair of California activists who faked 4000 voter registrations each in three months before the 2020 election were caught because they were greedy or maybe they too were just unlucky, but either way it’s clear the feasible-fake-votes-per-activist average has risen by two orders of magnitude or more.
So it’s not exactly happening in pure darkness. Which, alas, means, it cannot exactly be fought solely by saying, ‘look at this’.