Piling on the Kraken-Busting of Waldron...
This week the TrustTheVote Project posted an article that is a breakdown/take-down of a slide presentation circulated inside the Trump Administration in the final weeks leading up to 1-6-21. In sum and substance, that damning post makes clear several things about the “Waldron Deck” (mostly centered on Slide 11), and here are just a few top lines:
Counting ballots takes place inside an election office locally; no ballots are digitally transported anywhere where they can manipulated.
Counting ballots and posting results use two different systems which are not interconnected.
Ballots are pieces of paper. They are not “routed” or “downloaded” or “re-uploaded” or “manipulated” with a spreadsheet.
A “spike” in reporting out due to a new batch of tallies is not an “injection”—it’s just a report of more votes from another batch of ballots.
Once a ballot counting process is completed and all the counted ballots are archived, there is no method to look at them and identify “counterfeit” ballots—all of the counted ballots look alike.
Even if a crooked election official did make fraudulent ballots—without being caught—they would use the same pre-printed blank ballots. There would be no way to “disqualify” a “counterfeit” ballot.
In the midst of yesterday’s remembrances we noted a Missouri statehouse presentation of continued disinformation and misinformation on the 2020 election by another “Krakenist,” Douglas Frank (the polynomialist-wacky-doodle who also tends to spew into dangerous territory). That unfortunate, counter-productive presentation by the same guy, combined with our TrustTheVote Project’s post (and we encourage you to read it) drove us to add a couple of points here.
In mid-December, The Associated Press published a review of “every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states” where Trump disputed Biden’s victory. It found fewer than 475 cases. “Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president,” the A.P. reported.
“The disputed ballots represent just 0.15 percent of his victory margin in those states. The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.”
So, we have a minority of 475 ballots that might have been "illegal ballots." However, here is the big point for the Waldron failed “fuse” to ignite a coup: due to the sanctity of the secret ballot, no one can tell, out of millions of paper ballots archived, which of them are one of the about 100-ish possibly fraudulent ballots.
That's why there's no point in examining already-counted ballots to attempt to "find fraud."
The responsible option is to do what state canvass boards do, but in a post-election setting to "check their work"— that is, perform the investigative work to determine the scope of possible or potential fraud, and determine whether there is even a slim chance that it could have effected the election outcome.
In the case of the 2020 election as to Biden vs. Trump, the scale was so tiny as to have effectively zero chance of changing the outcome. There was genuinely nothing more for anyone to do unless state law enforcement decided to investigate and find cause to proceed to prosecution, but that is a state’s matter only.
Finally, its worth noting that the only time in recent memory that a state canvass board discovered enough possible fraud that we can recall was in Bladen County, North Carolina, where instead of performing a detailed analysis of every fraud possibility as a prerequisite to certifying the election, they conducted a “do-over” election for the congressional seat instead. And that was (and had to be) all handled before the election certification. There is no recourse after an election has been certified. However, that's on purpose by design—because we cannot have a peaceful transition of power otherwise s constitutionally mandated. As an aside, we note Bladen County carries some baggage on the issue of fraud as explained here.
