A Little Civics Lesson

On Saturday, when rallies were scheduled to take place in key battleground areas to demand only legal votes were counted, the major networks announced Biden-Harris were the winners. Apparently, they are under the impression that they decide election results. They don’t. On December 14, electors chosen by state legislators cast their votes. No one else but the state legislators have that right. (Article II, Sec. 1,§2 of the Constitution). Certainly not the press, nor state boards of elections, secretaries of state, governors, or courts.

If they have reason to believe the elections in their states were unlawfully conducted and the results fraudulent, they can act to override them. (You can see a detailed history of this section of the Constitution in this fine article by Daniel Horowitz.) The Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania  legislatures are majority Republican. At first glance these states -- particularly the precincts in Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia -- are the most suspect.

Is there ample evidence of fraud sufficient to have altered the will of the legal voters in these states? It sure looks that way.

Specific Evidence of Fraud

Saturday, Rudy Giuliani conducted a press conference in Philadelphia in which he brought forward some of the 50 Republican poll watchers who will testify in a civil rights suit to be filed in federal court tomorrow that despite state law and a court order, they were deprived of a right to observe the counting of the sea of late-coming absentee ballots which turned the tide against the President who had closed Tuesday night by a huge margin. Preliminarily, those were 500,000 mail-in ballots, the most fraud-susceptible kind. He indicated similar affidavits were being collected by Republican poll watchers in Pittsburgh involving an approximate 300,000 absentee ballots. He noted there was evidence of backdating of the ballots to meet a deadline, an utter lack of security for these ballots, and there were other infirmities as well -- including votes by dead people (including Joe Frazier, who died five years ago), that the uniform votes in these batches for Biden was statistically impossible.  Pennsylvania was not the only state in which the Trump team was receiving such information -- he saw the same thing in Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina and anticipated the challenge might well involve more than Pennsylvania as the evidence is coming in.  Kyle Baker has tweeted a number of such anomalies:

Swing state voting irregularities:

Biden outperforms Senators in swing states, underperforms in VA, NH, RI

Biden underperforms Hillary/Obama in cities, except in MI, PA, GA, WI

Biden mail-in dumps with 100% margins

GOP lose ZERO House races

You can find more of his analysis here:

While we are not privy to what steps the FBI is taking nationwide, there is confirmation that the FBI is investigating backdating of ballots in Detroit, and Attorney General William Barr has authorized deployment of armed agents to observe recounts. (The only time in the process agents can go in is after the voting  when the votes are being canvassed and tabulated.)

The Supreme Court has issued a temporary order to Pennsylvania requiring them to separate all ballots which arrived after Election Day. 

In October, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court granted a three-day extension for mail-in ballot counting. The decision was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 4-4 ruling, a vote shy of the five votes needed to grant a stay. The split ruling came just days before Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the bench. 

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling in October allows ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by Nov. 3 or in cases where the postmark isn't legible. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has also ruled that mail-in ballots cannot be thrown out when the signature on the ballot clearly doesn't match the signature on the voter's application. 

If the Court had applied the Constitution, then we wouldn’t have this mess, for it’s clear under Article 1 Sec. 4, cl 1--that the Pennsylvania court had no constitutional power to change the “times, methods, and procedures of elections.” 

(A full rundown of the already pending litigation authored  by Hans von Spakovsky is valuable background for those who want an accurate state of the play as of November 6.)

The willful deprivation  and defrauding of state residents of a fair and impartially conducted election constitutes a criminal offense, but should Biden be declared winner, the U.S. attorneys in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, and Milwaukee thus have only about 10 weeks in which to initiate fraud cases that the attorney general could pass on to a special counsel he designates.

Apart from federal litigation, investigations, and prosecutions, the states involved themselves can and should look into these claims of fraud and interference.  In Wisconsin, the Speaker of the House has directed an investigation into mail-in ballot dumps and voter fraud. Pennsylvania has subpoenaed election officials.

In Texas, a  social worker has been charged with falsifying 134 votes of people in state hospitals 

I’m sure there are other cases like this pending or of which I have no knowledge at this time.

It is difficult to prove that the fraud you can find in such a short timeframe was sufficient to so substantially affect the election that it must be redone. I know, I was a member of the legal team that got the UMWA fraudulent election for Tony Boyle over Jock Yablonski thrown out and a new election ordered. It was a long battle and involved the work of countless volunteers throughout the country to document the fraud and intimidation. (All of this is well- documented in the recently released book Blood Runs Coal: The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America. )

So, it would be wonderful if there were a simpler way of documenting widespread fraud than these. I’ve seen two claims. The first is that the DHS printed all the ballots using a secret infrared watermark so all the manufactured ballots would be easily detected. Nonsense. This would be impossible, and DHS has already debunked it. Ballots carry not only the top of the ticket, but countless local candidates and initiatives and they are printed and distributed locally.

The second claim was made on Friday by General Michael Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell on Lou Dobbs’s show that there is a likelihood that

“three percent of the vote total was changed digitally, by using the “Hammer” program and the software program “Scorecard." That would have amounted to a massive change in the vote. [snip] In addition they ran an algorithm to calculate votes that they might need to come up with for Mr. Biden in specific areas.

It doesn’t seem that implausible when it was proven that a “computer glitch” in Michigan had switched thousands of Trump votes to Biden votes.

The computers need to be checked in all the other districts in Michigan and in the disputed battleground states which all use the same program from an outfit called Dominion.

Powell says this all can be documented and the case on the computer-falsifying results will be filed in federal court in multiple states to enjoin the certification of any election results. If the Trump team can prove the tallies were changed digitally, it has its easiest, fastest route to enjoin certification of the results. 

What if There’s no Winner Declared by Inauguration Day?

I’ve seen lots of assertions that in such a case Nancy Pelosi will be the interim president. Nope. Should that eventuality occur, the House votes for an interim president and the Senate for an interim vice president. (The House votes are by state -- one vote each -- and the Republicans hold a majority of 26 states. Our founders were geniuses. Never forget that.)

Aftermath

Iowahawk who seemingly hates all politicians, is quite correct:

Trump loses

Pelosi & Schumer face insurrection after election disaster

The Squad is now radioactive

Polling industry is dead

Silicon Valley torches $5 billion for absolutely nothing

Fox News beheaded by their own viewers

my God, it's like the Red Wedding

Don’t give up. My friend “The Infamous Ignatz” shares my view about pessimism:

Reality exists but we prioritize what parts of it we react to. However that is more to do with our prejudices and has little bearing on their real importance. Pessimism or optimism not only illuminates what we think the future holds it animates what we do to shape and alter [or not] the future and it influences those around us in the same way.

Seems to me, in a realm with as long a time frame and as many variables and the unending tidal swings in public opinion and culture that politics feature and with as many opportunities for influence it presents, pessimism really not only makes no particular rational sense, it tends to the self-fulfilling prophecy end of things. And since it prophesies ruin, what rationale can be advanced that it presents any social utility?

Personal pessimism, to the extent it isn't "contagious" no doubt has considerably more utility, but as soon as it becomes a pathogen that infects others it has become a drag on whatever virtues and values it represents because it no longer is a private prudent guard against impending danger, but instead becomes disaster's unintentional agent.

So what is the point of it and somewhat in the manner of Pascal's wager, how does it make sense to choose it?

And I have good experience with why we have to remain optimistic. After Mr. Yablonski and his wife and daughter were murdered, we begged the FBI to come in and investigate. At the time, media outfits like Time, then a major influencer, suggested on no basis except perhaps disinformation from interested parties that the Mafia did it, while organized labor wanted this swept under the rug, as did politicians in big coal areas.  Joe Rauh and I met with Attorney General John Mitchell, who told us he’d just been on a call with  Secretary of Labor George Schultz who poo-pooed the idea of union involvement, saying Yablonski had lost, so the union had no motivation to kill him. I showed Mitchell our research that Boyle had lost among working coal miners and his victory had been because he’d rounded up the retired miners into separate locals and threatened them with loss of their pension and health benefits if they voted for Yablonski. I argued that Boyle couldn't continue to run a union when his only support was among retired workers. The next day the FBI was ordered in. The roundup of all who participated took place bit by bit. Tony Boyle was convicted of murder and died in jail.

The vote for Biden was made up of the dead and the nonexistent voters, so he won’t be able to do much. Only live voters count in real life.

Never give up the good fight. Never hamstring your will to fight on with pessimism.

Image courtesy Michael Ramirez