It Does Not Compute

By Peter Pavarini

As I’ve wrestled with the results of the 2020 election the past few weeks, I’ve found myself thinking about the unnamed robot in the 1960’s era television series “Lost in Space”.  Like that vintage automaton, I’ve found myself saying “it does not compute” every time I encountered another surprising wrinkle in the election returns.  If my memory serves me well, the Robinson Family’s robot quit working every time it received an illogical command from one of the human members of the cast.

If you look beyond the mainstream media’s mantra that there is “no credible evidence of fraud or other misconduct” in the presidential election, you’ll find a plethora of tabulated results which are at odds with every known rule of electoral probability. This mountain of evidence would normally strain the credulity of even the most ardent partisan; however, this was not a normal election. The compulsive wish of some (perhaps most) Americans to “move on” has relegated any honest inquiry to the realm of conspiracy theories.

It Doesn’t Take a Math Genius

I never claimed to be a mathematical whiz but I’ve been blessed with an innate ability to discern when someone is cherry-picking numbers to obscure the truth. The sheer magnitude of Joe Biden’s reported lead in the popular vote at the national level[i] does not negate the need to take a closer look at voting irregularities in key battleground states which determine the all-important Electoral College. Just as COVID case data has been regularly manipulated to exaggerate the actual health risk of this disease to Americans, the mainstream media’s platitudes about how many more “new voters” there were in 2020 shouldn’t dissuade anyone from asking tough questions about statistical anomalies surrounding the election.

As Aristotle aptly said some 2300 years ago:

“Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.”

Think about that in the context of what has already been reported about this election. To believe that Joe Biden collected over 80 million votes[ii], many improbable things must have happened. Even during a pandemic causing an unprecedented loosening of mail-in and early voting protocols, that outcome simply does not compute.

Joe’s Magical Outperformance

For Joe Biden to have won more votes he needed to magically outperform any number of election norms.  J.B. Shurk does an excellent job of summarizing these supernatural feats in an article for the The Federalist[iii], but I’ll highlight some of them here and add a few of my own:

• No incumbent president in almost 150 years has gained votes in a reelection campaign and still lost. As of this writing, at least 74 million votes have been recorded for President Trump – an increase of 11 million from his vote total in 2016. To appreciate that accomplishment, remember former President Obama won his reelection in 2012 despite getting 3.5 million fewer votes than in 2008.

• Biden’s supporters have yet to explain how their candidate did better than Obama in either his campaigns and yet saw Biden’s support fall sharply among blacks nationally. It is widely accepted that Democrats must get 90% or more of the black vote in order to prevail at the polls. Nevertheless, Trump increased his vote share among blacks by 50% over 2016 and, according to preliminary exit polls, received 18% of the black male vote.

• Trump increased his share of the national Hispanic vote to 36% (with 60% or less of the Hispanic vote, it is arithmetically impossible for a Democratic presidential candidate to win Florida, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico).

• Biden’s claimed victory can be attributed to the 524 counties (17% of the total) where he beat Donald Trump. Compare that to Obama who won 873 of the Nation’s 3,143 counties (27%) in 2008. Is it possible to lose in 83% of the country’s counties and still win nationally? Yes, but chalk that up as an improbable possibility. More amazing is the fact that Biden lost 18 of the so-called 19 “bellwether counties” that have had a perfect track record of picking presidents over the past 40 years. Yet, he prevailed nationally.

• Biden is said to have won despite being the first president in 60 years to lose both Ohio and Florida. For a century or more, these two states have consistently predicted the national outcome because they are roughly representative of America’s overall demographic makeup. Despite polls that gave Biden the edge in both of these states, he lost Ohio by 8% and Florida by 3%.

• Biden also overcame historic trends in the industrial Midwest. States like Michigan and Wisconsin always swing with their regional peers Ohio and Iowa.  This year, they didn’t. What would explain that? What’s especially confounding is that Trump did remarkably well (generally better than he did in 2016) throughout the Rust Belt.  Nonetheless we are supposed to believe that because of an avalanche of votes in just three cities – Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania ended up in Biden’s column.[iv]

• Another statistical oddity is the fact that Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area except for Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Atlanta. In all four of those Democratic-run cities the vote is said to have exceeded the number of registered voters. Where it mattered most, additional mail-in ballots continued to appear until Biden made up the deficits reported by the networks after the polls closed on the evening of November 3^rd.

• Winners usually have down-ballot coattails, but Joe Biden did not. In fact, he seems to have had the opposite effect on Congressional races.  Republicans won all 27 of the “toss-up contests” in the House, leaving the Democrats with the narrowest margin in decades.  The Republicans did not lose a single state legislature, reportedly picked up the legislature in New Hampshire, and made other important gains at the state level in a year that’s critical to re-apportionment.

What Makes It Impossible to Overlook Evidence of Voter Fraud

In the absence of these mathematical improbabilities, it might be easy to overlook run-of-the-mill allegations of voter fraud for the “sake of the democracy”.  After all, polling in a country of over 330 million people is messy and bound to have some voting irregularities. What sets this election apart, however, is how those voting irregularities were so carefully targeted.

• Late on election night, with Trump comfortably ahead in the returns, several key swing states just stopped counting votes. Observers were escorted out of counting facilities, but counting continued without observers.
• Statistically abnormal vote counts appeared when the counting resumed early on November 4 (these vote “dumps” were not only unusually large – in the hundreds of thousands – but were overwhelmingly in favor of Joe Biden).
• Late arriving ballots with impossible postal return dates were counted.
• Mail-in ballots without matching signatures were counted.
• Absentee ballots were accepted at historically high levels despite the massive expansion of mail-in voting (if states had merely applied the same absentee ballot rejection rate as recent cycles, Trump would have won the election).
• Approximately 50,000 votes on 47 USB drives went missing in one key county – Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
• Non-residents voted by the thousands as evidenced by national change of address data base.
• Serious chain of custody problems plagued both physical ballots and electronic data tabulations.
• Invalid residential addresses were ignored.
• A record number of dead people voted – some always do, but 2020 gives more credence to stories about the Zombie Apocalypse.
• Many absentee ballots in pristine condition were found to be all filled out exactly the same way.

At Peace With the Results of a Constitutionally Sound Election

Despite these apparent shenanigans, yours truly would be at peace with a Biden victory if I believed it was the result of a fair, Constitutionally sound election.  If enough of my fellow citizens truly wanted relief from the drama of the Trump years and thought a 78-year old man in visible decline would achieve that, I’d accept that result with alacrity even if it did not compute.

How could I be sanguine if Trump eventually concedes? Because I still believe America has the ability to self-correct politically as it has done for 244 years. The tide has already turned against extremism from the Right as well as the Left. Over the past three election cycles, Progressives have maxed out their potential to make gains among constituencies who are fundamentally moderate. The radical Left “jumped the shark” with the BLM riots last summer. As their supporters go back to their regular lives, they will blend in with the apathetic, self-absorbed masses.

A Thorough Reckoning

My reasons for wanting a thorough reckoning of the 2020 election has less to do with my choice of candidates and more to do with the preservation of the American model of governance. If half or more of the electorate doesn’t trust election results, I can’t imagine how our Republic will survive much longer. A Trump presidency brought to light a whole host of the systemic flaws in the federal bureaucracy – what he called “the Swamp”. This election did the same with how elections are run at the local and state level. For me, fixing those problems is far more important than who occupies the White House on January 21, 2021.

My greatest concern for America stems from the moral turpitude of an Establishment that is so eager to dispatch Donald Trump they are willing to sacrifice what remains of our national honor. Cheating has always been the modus operandi of lesser people. The overwhelming majority of Americans know that dishonesty is wrong and eventually catches up with those who engage in it. If we permit ourselves to become like nations which accept corruption and untruthfulness as cultural norms, do we have any reason to hope that our children and grandchildren will inherit a better tomorrow? Such an ethical collapse would be the end of the Great American Experiment.

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[i] Skewed by a more than 4 million vote differential in California.

[ii] www.npr.org/2020/11/25/937248659/president-elect-biden-hits-80-million-votes-in-year-of-record-turnout

[iii] “Five More Ways Joe Biden Magically Outperformed Election Norms”, The Federalist, November 23, 2020.

[iv] Coincidentally, Biden’s black vote only spiked in those cities needed to secure the electoral votes of those battleground states. Funny how that happened. He did not receive comparable levels of support from urban blacks in other states, which again is highly unusual for someone who wins the presidency.