Several media outlets this week have made much of the fact that an international team of observers saw nothing awry in the American elections.
Meanwhile, The New York Times, which is fiercely anti- President Donald Trump, declared Wednesday that no election fraud occurred because election officials told them so.
This type of superficial scrutiny is akin to a doctor looking at a patient and declaring her to be in good health without taking her temperature or blood pressure. It’s like an auto mechanic certifying a used car is a good buy because it is shiny, without looking under the hood.
The 2020 election was unlike any in American history due to the heavy reliance on mail in ballots and the use of voting machines that use software and internet technology. And there is reason for concern.
President Donald Trump is performing a public service by demanding accountability in the 2020 election. If he simply accepted the election results and stepped down, Americans would never know what’s under the hood. Is the election system that is the heart of our democracy truly healthy or was it infected by a virus or a cancerous tumor?
Cybersecurity
Independent cybersecurity experts who specialize in voting systems and elections said in January that while voting machines are not designed to be online, many states are putting them on the internet and that is “putting the process at risk.”
“We kept hearing from election officials that voting machines were never on the internet… We found over 35 [voting systems] had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,” said Keevin Skoglund, a senior technical advisor at the election security advocacy group National Election Defense Coalition.
If a 16-year-old can hack Apple, it is not inconceivable that determined political operatives or a foreign country can hack state voting systems. There is no love lost between Trump and China, but the same cannot be said for Biden and China.
So it is concerning that a supposed “software glitch” in Michigan incorrectly gave 6000 votes to Joe Biden that belonged to Donald Trump before county election officials noticed. A glitch in software in Georgia affected 80,000 absentee ballots. The NYT is willing to take the word of partisan election officials that these incidents were caused by human error but American voters shouldn’t be.
The NEDC did not respond to an email request for comment on Wednesday.
Changing Rules, Statistical Anomalies
Allegations of fraud and voting irregularities have been leveled in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The Democratic majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court changed the state’s election rules at the last minute to permit the Democratic Secretary of State to count absentee ballots up to three days after election day – even ballots that did not contain proper identifying information.
In Fulton County, Georgia, officials told Republican poll watchers that they would stop counting ballots at 10:30 p.m. but they kept counting until 1:30 a.m.
And there are on-going anecdotal reports of fraud.
Statistical analyses are not evidence but they are troubling when they uniquely favor the winner. For example, it is troubling that an unusually large number of people voted only for Biden in two battleground states, Michigan and Georgia, while Trump’s vote total tracked the vote totals for Republican senate candidates.
The media, now controlled by a small number of multi-national corporations and billionaires, repeatedly assures Americans that there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the elections. That’s not true. More importantly, the only way to uncover fraud is to open up the hood and take a look. For some reason, they’re not willing to do that.
Keep in mind, this time, you may be pleased with the election results but next time you may not be.
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