Paul Kengor's recent article about the presidential election results got me thinking about what it would take to convince a friend of mine — or a Pennsylvania legislator or judge — that there really was something fishy going on in this election.  Kengor's piece focuses on an exchange between Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and Ret. Col. Phil Waldren at last week's Senate Majority Policy Committee hearings in Pennsylvania, in which Giuliani established that if you add up the total number of votes for Biden and Trump in a series of what Waldren described as Biden "spike anomalies," you get around 570,000 votes for Biden and only around 3,200 for Trump.

What Walden means by a "spike anomaly" is a bunch of votes that are dumped into the election results faster than they could have been processed by the voting machines, using the maximum possible speed as provided by the manufacturer of the machines.  My friend, a Trump voter but ever the skeptic, doubted that Waldren's calculations were correct and insisted that in any case, Waldren was wrong to conclude that votes must be fraudulent simply because it looked as if too many of them were processed in too short a period of time.

YouTube screen grab.

But this is not what Waldren said. It is true that, in his answer to Giuliani's question, Waldren says a big spike is a "prime indicator of fraudulent voting."  But a few seconds before that (at 1:29:38 in the hearing), Waldren explains that he and his team understand the spikes not as evidence of fraud in and of themselves, but as red flags: "These spike anomalies in this chart really show where for us to look forensically to actually determine what happened with these votes."  And a few seconds before that (at 1:28:00), he says, "Really only a detailed forensic analysis of the actual machines and software will truly show how many Pennsylvania citizens have had their civil rights violated." 

So what this comes down to is not so much — or not only — the questions of whether there were in fact spike anomalies in Pennsylvania, and whether Giuliani can prove it, as my friend insisted to know.  The real question is whether President Trump's lawyer (or independent attorney Sidney Powell) will ask the appropriate judge to issue a warrant to seize "the actual machines and software" in Pennsylvania so the appropriate parties can conduct a "detailed forensic analysis" of them.  I have not seen any reports to that effect, but Waldren's testimony plus the recent court order in Georgia forbidding the state to scrub the machines of the election results suggests that the answer should be yes.  Surely, the anomalies Waldren identifies rise to the level of probable cause, and Americans deserve to know if these allegations are correct.