Voter Fraud and the Myth of E Pluribus Unum
by John Kendall Hawkins
Arizona and Georgia have been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. Each state is engaged in electoral fraud-making for the future -- in full view of the nation. They both want to ensure that voting in their states, especially for future presidential elections, is manipulable, that ways and means to recalculate votes is left to the discretion of the secretary of state, most likely to be Republican.
Until recently, the power of the secretary of state had eluded me. Like most American voters, I had simply assumed that the system had two parts: popular vote and Electoral College. They don't necessarily work together. For instance, in 2000, Al Gore won the national popular vote against GW Bush, but he lost the Electoral College vote. (Had he won his home state of Tennessee, the Electoral College votes there would have gone to him instead of Bush and he'd have won the presidency.) On election night, the MSM, though it tallies individual state popular and electoral college voting, rarely provides insight into how individual states handle votes, of what counts as a valid vote, who determines validity, and what the number of votes tossed away are. Turns out this individual determination of vote validity is crucial in presidential elections.
I didn't fully understand or appreciate the full significance of such state-by-state determination of vote counts until I read Greg Palast's How Trump Stole 2020, which I reviewedseveral months before the election. Palast lays bare the What and How of voter disenfranchisement, and shows specifically how states have manipulated votes and helped determine who would win the presidential election since at least 2000. How do they manipulate? By tossing votes away -- literally and by "technicalities" that hardly ever hold up to scrutiny. During the 2016 presidential election, Palast reckons that, despite all the distractions about DNC hacking and FBI interference, Hillary Clinton won the election -- not only the popular vote, but also the Electoral College vote had all the tossed votes, in swing states, been counted.
Palast has delineated the four key ways that votes get de-validated and not counted: stop registration; if they register anyway, then cancel their rego; prevent voters from getting to the polls; and, if all fails, then find a way to invalidate their vote (hanging chads, smudges, various anomalies). Palast says a favorite way of manipulating an election is dumping mail-in votes. In 2016, he says, more than 500,000 mail-in votes were tossed, overwhelmingly Democratic. Add in provisional votes lost, and millions of votes get tossed away by Republican-controlled states.
Some people will now disregard Palast's findings because his prediction that Trump would steal the 2020 election didn't come to pass. But such reasoning is unsound. If the Covid-19 pandemic hadn't led to a massive move toward mail-in ballots, Trump would have won again, by the same purges. Because there was such MSM attention paid to mail-in votes this time around, watchful eyes were on those votes like never before. This vigilance intensified in August when Trump was accused of trying to use the US Postal service as a means to losing votes. It's almost ironic, but more pathetically dishonest, that the MSM almost universally declared the 2020 presidential election 'the fairest, securest election ever.' (Maybe they were just f*cking with Trump and the language he uses.) If it was fairer, it's because they counted all the votes this time.
Despite the extra vigilance -- incredibly! -- Trump almost won the election anyway. He was within a couple of percentage points in four states -- Georgia (.2%), Pennsylvania (1.2%), Wisconsin (.7%), and Arizona (.3%), and even Michigan (2.8% is recountable). See below:
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