Reasons why the 2020 presidential election is deeply puzzling

Patrick Bosham writes in The Spectator

To say out-loud that you find the results of the 2020 presidential election odd is to invite derision. You must be a crank or a conspiracy theorist. Mark me down as a crank, then. I am a pollster and I find this election to be deeply puzzling. I also think that the Trump campaign is still well within its rights to contest the tabulations. Something very strange happened in America’s democracy in the early hours of Wednesday November 4 and the days that followed. It’s reasonable for a lot of Americans to want to find out exactly what.

First, consider some facts. President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent. By way of comparison, President Obama was comfortably reelected in 2012 with 3.5 million fewer votes than he received in 2008.

Trump’s vote increased so much because, according to exit polls, he performed far better with many key demographic groups. Ninety-five percent of Republicans voted for him. He did extraordinarily well with rural male working-class whites.

He earned the highest share of all minority votes for a Republican since 1960. Trump grew his support among black voters by 50 percent over 2016. Nationally, Joe Biden’s black support fell well below 90 percent, the level below which Democratic presidential candidates usually lose.

Trump increased his share of the national Hispanic vote to 35 percent. With 60 percent or less of the national Hispanic vote, it is arithmetically impossible for a Democratic presidential candidate to win Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. Bellwether states swung further in Trump’s direction than in 2016. Florida, Ohio and Iowa each defied America’s media polls with huge wins for Trump. Since 1852, only Richard Nixon has lost the electoral college after winning this trio, and that 1960 defeat to John F. Kennedy is still the subject of great suspicion.

Midwestern states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin always swing in the same direction as Ohio and Iowa, their regional peers. Ohio likewise swings with Florida. Current tallies show that, outside of a few cities, the Rust Belt swung in Trump’s direction. Yet, Biden leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of an apparent avalanche of black votes in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Biden’s ‘winning’ margin was derived almost entirely from such voters in these cities, as coincidentally his black vote spiked only in exactly the locations necessary to secure victory. He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states, which is highly unusual for the presidential victor.

We are told that Biden won more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history. But he won a record low of 17 percent of counties; he only won 524 counties, as opposed to the 873 counties Obama won in 2008. Yet, Biden somehow outdid Obama in total votes.

Victorious presidential candidates, especially challengers, usually have down-ballot coattails; Biden did not. The Republicans held the Senate and enjoyed a ‘red wave’ in the House, where they gained a large number of seats while winning all 27 toss-up contests. Trump’s party did not lose a single state legislature and actually made gains at the state level.

Another anomaly is found in the comparison between the polls and non-polling metrics. The latter include: party registrations trends; the candidates’ respective primary votes; candidate enthusiasm; social media followings; broadcast and digital media ratings; online searches; the number of (especially small) donors; and the number of individuals betting on each candidate.

Despite poor recent performances, media and academic polls have an impressive 80 percent record predicting the winner during the modern era. But, when the polls err, non-polling metrics do not; the latter have a 100 percent record. Every non-polling metric forecast Trump’s reelection. For Trump to lose this election, the mainstream polls needed to be correct, which they were not. Furthermore, for Trump to lose, not only did one or more of these metrics have to be wrong for the first time ever, but every single one had to be wrong, and at the very same time; not an impossible outcome, but extremely unlikely nonetheless.

Atypical voting patterns married with misses by polling and non-polling metrics should give observers pause for thought. Adding to the mystery is a cascade of information about the bizarre manner in which so many ballots were accumulated and counted.

The following peculiarities also lack compelling explanations:

1. Late on election night, with Trump comfortably ahead, many swing states stopped counting ballots. In most cases, observers were removed from the counting facilities. Counting generally continued without the observers

2. Statistically abnormal vote counts were the new normal when counting resumed. They were unusually large in size (hundreds of thousands) and had an unusually high (90 percent and above) Biden-to-Trump ratio

3. Late arriving ballots were counted. In Pennsylvania, 23,000 absentee ballots have impossible postal return dates and another 86,000 have such extraordinary return dates they raise serious questions

4. The failure to match signatures on mail-in ballots. The destruction of mail in ballot envelopes, which must contain signatures

5. Historically low absentee ballot rejection rates despite the massive expansion of mail voting. Such is Biden’s narrow margin that, as political analyst Robert Barnes observes, ‘If the states simply imposed the same absentee ballot rejection rate as recent cycles, then Trump wins the election’

6. Missing votes. In Delaware County, Pennsylvania, 50,000 votes held on 47 USB cards are missing

7. Non-resident voters. Matt Braynard’s Voter Integrity Project estimates that 20,312 people who no longer met residency requirements cast ballots in Georgia. Biden’s margin is 12,670 votes

8. Serious ‘chain of custody’ breakdowns. Invalid residential addresses. Record numbers of dead people voting. Ballots in pristine condition without creases, that is, they had not been mailed in envelopes as required by law

9. Statistical anomalies. In Georgia, Biden overtook Trump with 89 percent of the votes counted. For the next 53 batches of votes counted, Biden led Trump by the same exact 50.05 to 49.95 percent margin in every single batch. It is particularly perplexing that all statistical anomalies and tabulation abnormalities were in Biden’s favor. Whether the cause was simple human error or nefarious activity, or a combination, clearly something peculiar happened.

If you think that only weirdos have legitimate concerns about these findings and claims, maybe the weirdness lies in you.

Patrick Basham is director of The Democracy Institute

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3 Responses

  1. It is not puzzling.

    It is pre-planned, coordinated, systematic fraud committed by the Democrat Party on an industrial scale to disenfranchise half the population. It will not stand.

  2. It is amazing to me how easily the left have pulled this scam off. I have alienated quite a few friends, friends who I thought were quite intelligent, with my simple view that the mail-in votes generated results that were statistically impossible. From about 50/50 for walk-in in voters to about 85% in favour of Biden in the mail-ins. For some reason, and God only knows what reason, they won’t accept any suspicion of vote rigging. It’s probably egged on by the media calling all attempts “baseless” or “without merit” even though the results do scream out for an investigation.
    I hate to say it, but President Trump’s weakness at the moment is the lack of coordination with his legal team. They seem to be all over the place like broken glass, when they should have been focused months before the election itself.
    No one in their wildest dreams would have thought that a smart President like Donald Trump would be the victim of an institutional coup, but it looks increasingly like he’s been done in by a nasty and lucky Confederacy of Dunces

  3. It’s stunning how my closest friends and colleagues (all ‘educated’ in universities) are not only unquestioning of Biden’s improbable comeback in vote counts, but celebrating the very fact. The world on social media is blaring car horns and waving American flags and drinking cocktails, and I’ve never felt more alienated than I do now. I’ve talked about this with some of them and have been dismissed for being “conspiratorial” on what I consider suspicious events– thousands of votes in favor of one candidate found and counted at 3 a.m. in Wisconsin, crucial battleground states continuing to count votes for three days until Biden overturned a massive deficit from in-person voting, large states (re: Florida, Ohio and Texas) not having the same problems in counting votes as the blue quartet that is PA, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, observers barred from watching the vote counts in those states, and the statistical anomalies mentioned in this article. The mail-in voting system is also fraught with suspicion– why were “batches” of votes rolled into precincts well after election night? Every eligible voter in the United States had 3 weeks(!) to vote early and in-person, or at least to submit mail-in votes that could’ve arrived to vote counters well before the evening of November 3. There is a right to inquire when these mail-in votes were put in their mailboxes, when/how they were verified, and how long it took USPS to deliver them to the vote counters. The election could’ve been settled on election night, but I guess that would’ve been too inconvenient. Better to wait until ALL the votes are in, and to count ALL of them until we’re 100% sure of the winner, even with 90% of precincts reporting on election night and the improbable chance of a turnaround of 500k+ votes. I’m looking at you, Pennsylvania.

    The worst part is the ensuing powerlessness of the American voter. Really, what is the average voter supposed to do when 100k+ votes are “counted”, almost all in favor of one candidate, in a precinct in Michigan or Pennsylvania?

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