At midnight on New Year’s Eve Joe and Jill Biden posted a message online. The finale of the greeting was to be a pop-up confetti firecracker. It failed in its mission like a wet squib. 

A perfect ending to a rotten year in which after riots and a rapidly spreading Chinese virus, we got a highly suspicious election in which the apparent winners were a crook demonstrably suffering from dementia and an unprincipled leftist with no evident qualifications for a job she may have to assume in his stead. Maybe though it’s an omen of things to come.

On January 6 a large demonstration in support of Stop the Steal is scheduled. President Trump says he will produce evidence of a stolen election. If you only get your news from the major media you might think there is no such evidence, but there is. 

The President’s counsel, Rudy Giuliani (Sidney Powell  who’s working on hardening election procedures, and Lin Wood who is representing himself, do not directly represent Trump) tweeted: 

@RudyGiuliani

Dec 31, 2020

In a country with a free press, you would know:

1. The Georgia Senate Judiciary Committee issued a report demonstrating the vote was stolen from 

@realDonaldTrump

2. The vote was unanimous and BIPARTISAN to audit Fulton County’s Absentee ballots.

3. And to de-certify Biden.

Scott Adams (Dilbert's creator) looked at the findings of the Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee that heard the evidence Giuliani presented and agrees that Trump won Georgia and the problems demonstrated in the machine in use at the precinct where they got to examine one evince a far broader steal: “If you can find a problem in one machine you can throw out the whole election.”

Here’s the report that summarizes the testimony presented under oath in person and by affidavit.

Among the findings were these:

• Protocols to ensure the proper chain of custody of ballots “throughout the Election, after the opening of ballots prior to the elections, and during the recounts” were not followed.
• "It was possible or even likely that large numbers of fraudulent ballots were introduced into the pool of ballots that we're counted as voted.”
• There were pristine ballots in the mix “whose origin looked suspicious and which could not be verified “ and poll workers were unable to distinguish “between test ballots and absentee ballots.”
• Poll watchers observed that “ballots were not secured, that seals and security tags were not used,” both during the count and recount process.
• “There was a lack of enforcement of the law, sloppy handling of the ballots by those handling and counting, deliberate covering-up of voting numbers by poll workers, unsafe handling of military ballots and “insecure data such as on laptops and flash drives.”
• Equipment failures were frequent and some ballots would not go through the machines while others were counted more than once.
• Republican observers were deliberately blocked from observing the counting.

Even more troubling than this was the subcommittee’s findings about the Dominion voting machines:

The Subcommittee takes notice of the various publicly reported functions of the machines and heard evidence that the machines can duplicate fraudulent ballots to the point that not even trained personnel can tell the difference between a test ballot and a real ballot. Testimony also suggested that the system responds wirelessly to being reset from an unknown location as happened with the poll books. The Subcommittee also heard that Dominion machines can be programmed with algorithms that reallocate votes between candidates. In addition, the Dominion machines are programmed to count votes using percentages of whole numbers rather than actual votes, which is a feature incompatible with the actual voting process. The Subcommittee learned that the history and control of the company that owns the Dominion voting system is unclear and provides serious implications of foreign interference in the U.S. election.

The details of the testimony upon which the report is based are in the report. 

A number of recommendations in the report go to future election procedures. The report also recommends prosecution of those who violate election laws by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the attorney general, “including those conspiring to place fraudulent ballots into the system and the 1,000 persons identified by the Secretary of state who voted twice in the 2020 primaries.” It recommends forensic audits of the ballots and machines by third-party auditors.

From the point of view of the present, the most significant recommendation is this:

The Legislature should carefully consider its obligations under the U.S. Constitution. If a majority of the General Assembly concurs with the findings of this report, the certification of the Election should be rescinded and the General Assembly should act to determine the proper Electors to be certified to the Electoral College in the 2020 presidential race. Since time is of the essence, the Chairman and Senators who concur with this report recommend that the leadership of the General Assembly and the Governor immediately convene to allow further consideration by the entire General Assembly. 

Voters have good reason to believe that the numerous incidents of malfeasance found in Georgia were repeated elsewhere. Gateway Pundit summarizes the problems, noting three states alone that counted one million illegitimate votes for Biden: Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court held that more than 200,000 ballots cast (estimated to be heavily for Biden) in the 2020 election were illegitimate.

In Georgia 460,000 absentee ballots, most of which went to Biden, were counted with no compliance with the chain of custody requirements of Georgia law.  

In Pennsylvania there still is a case pending before the Supreme Court. There the state allowed “hundreds of thousands of ballots to be counted even though they were not turned in until after 8 p.m. on election day as state law mandates.”

Regardless of the outcomes in other disputed states, decertifying and refusing to count the votes in these three states alone would hand the election to President Trump. 

Those of us who believed all along that this election was stolen for Biden had good reason to think so.

There was an overwhelmingly obvious disparity in enthusiasm between the huge crowds for Trump throughout the country and the turnouts even smaller than those that greeted Hillary when Biden occasionally emerged from his basement.  President Trump forcefully criticized the riots and looting in Democrat-run cities while Biden remained in a muddled “mostly peaceful” camp. The President’s stopping flights from China and his effort to quickly get a COVID vaccine created and distributed so that the country could get moving and lives saved contrasts with Basement Biden’s criticism of the flight stoppage and support for more lockdown and mask gimmickry. Finally, Biden had no coattails which in an honest election one would expect. The Democrats lost 27 out of 27 tossup elections. Looks close to a pantsing to me.

What Congress will do before January 20’s inauguration is beyond my poor powers of prognostication, but the numbers of legislators saying they’d be willing to challenge the certifications keeps growing. It has taken this long to amass the evidence supportive of our rational doubts. In large part, this is the nature of such things where the equipment used is solely in the hands of the very people who created or, at a minimum, indulged this mess and would not release them for inspection, and a court system reluctant to get involved in election disputes.