A rumor circulated widely that more people voted in Wisconsin than were registered.  Although not true, it strikes me as an honest mistake.  The originator of the rumor was looking at the registration numbers for 2018.  More people did vote in Wisconsin in 2020 than were registered in 2018.

The real numbers are almost as incredible.  In 2020, an astounding 88 percent of those registered to vote seem to have voted.  In Ohio, another battleground state, the turnout was a much more typical 68 percent.  The highest voter turnout in recent years nationwide was 61.6 percent in 2008.  In 2012, the last year for which data are readily available for Wisconsin, the turnout was 65 percent.

If the Wisconsin average was 88 percent statewide, some parts of the state obviously had to have higher numbers.  In this regard, the City of Milwaukee is suspect, and not all of Milwaukee, either.  Contrary to expectation, in many of the wards with the heaviest concentration of black American voters, the turnout was relatively light.  Joe Biden was no Barack Obama, but more on this in a minute.

As a caution, let me call this a work in progress.  I am looking at a ward-by-ward spreadsheet that strikes me as a legitimate.  Those who know Milwaukee better than I should feel free to contact me through American Thinker.

The most striking feature of the data is a fact that cries out for clarification: in seven wards, voter turnout appears to have exceeded 100 percent.  In two of those wards, turnout exceeded 200 percent.  In another 15 wards, voter turnout exceeded 95 percent.  Joe Biden carried 21 of the 22 wards of the 95-plus-percent wards.  But then again, he carried all but one of the 67 additional wards in which the turnout was above 90 percent and won 80 percent of the vote citywide.

In 25 wards, Biden received 97 percent or more of the vote, none higher than 98 percent.  Based on exit polls, it is highly likely that these were overwhelmingly black districts.  No other demographic could produce those numbers.

One suspects that Democratic operatives could not afford a repeat of Philadelphia 2012, when Barack Obama received 100 percent of the votes in 59 voting districts.  They know that Trump is no Mitt Romney (thank God!).  Here is how PolitiFact tried to cover for this apparent fraud:

For Pennsylvania, the meme reads, "In 59 voting districts in the Philadelphia region, Obama received 100% of the votes, with not even a single vote recorded for Romney. (A mathematical and statistical impossibility.)" This kind of happened, and it's not actually mathematically impossible.

These fact-checkers do not know how foolish they sound.  Barack Obama outscored Romney by a combined 19,605 to 0 votes cast in these 59 districts.  Fidel Castro never did this well.  That said, not a single major media outlet followed up on the Philadelphia story.

They should have.  According to Roper, Romney received 6 percent of the black vote nationwide.  If those numbers held in Philadelphia, and there is no reason to believe they would not have, nearly 1,200 of these Philadelphia voters would have voted for Romney.

If only 14 people voted in those districts, the odds would have favored Romney's receiving at least one vote.  If 80 people had voted, Romney would have had a better than 99 percent chance of receiving at least one of those votes.  With nearly 20,000 voters, the odds of Romney being completely shut out are beyond any reasonable calculation.

According to exit polls, Trump doubled Romney's vote totals among black Americans to 12 percent.  To subtract all of his votes would have been too obvious.  Interestingly, in every one of these 97- to 98-percent wards, voter turnout was below the statewide average.  This suggests that if there were any mischief, it was of the traditional, small-scale kind.

Wisconsin has known voter fraud before but never on this scale.  According to the MacIver Institute, a Wisconsin free-market think-tank, nearly 4,000 cases of likely voter fraud were recorded by state officials after the 2016 election, close to a thousand of which were referred to district attorneys.

The likely large-scale fraud of 2020 calls way too much attention to itself.  If the data I am looking at are correct, there are people on the hard left who may want to get caught.  For them, a Biden win overturned by the Supreme Court would offer a whole lot more opportunity for mayhem than they could hope to find with a faltering old liberal as president.

Jack Cashill's new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is widely available.  See also www.cashill.com.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.