By Peter Pavarini
In 1939, Winston Churchill is said to have described the intentions and interests of Russia with these words:
“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key.”[i]
How Biden Might Have Won Without Fraud
Because I want to believe in the honesty of most Americans – regardless of their political views- I’ve been struggling to understand how Joe Biden might have won the presidential election without fraud.
To begin with, I take everything in the media – mainstream, alternative, social or otherwise – with a huge grain of salt. By default, I must seek objective sources of data which have grown harder to find as the institutions of government and academia have become corrupted by a populace used to having its facts filtered through a political lens.
Preparing the Electorate for a Red Mirage
Prior to Election Day 2020, the media warned us to expect a “Red Mirage” when the ballots were counted.[ii] Why did those speaking through the media see the need to warn the public of this impending enigma? Could it be that how and when people voted didn’t matter because the “fix” for the Biden/Harris ticket was already in?
Two months before the election, a CNN commentator said:
“A Biden blowout could look like a comfortable Trump win on Election Night, based on partial results that come in quickly from in-person polling places that don’t reflect the millions of mail-in ballots that are still getting processed or haven’t arrived.”[iii]
Mail-In Ballots Are Not Determinative of Election Outcomes
The media’s anticipatory spin turned out to be a false flag. In fact, based on previous elections (presidential and mid-terms between 1996 and 2018), mail-in voting had been shown to have no statistically significant effect on election results. According to a University of Virginia study of 40 million voting records in Utah and Washington, in solidly conservative and Democratic-leaning states alike, the switch to mandatory mail-in ballots hadn’t made much of a difference.[iv] A Stanford University study of other states found similarly.
Nonetheless, political pundits claimed that, because of the COVID pandemic and Trump’s own claims that mail-in voting would disfavor Republicans, 2020 was somehow different. Well-respected political scientist Michael McDonald of the United States Election Project appeared to confirm that prediction when he reported on August 25, 2020 that in Florida 2 million Democrats had requested mail-in ballots compared with only 1.375 million Republicans. He did say, however, that he was unable to predict how this disparity would influence the election outcome.[v]
After all the Florida votes were counted, the mail-in versus in-person voting disparity had made no difference. Trump beat Biden by nearly 300,000 votes or about 3%, a greater margin than his 2016 win. A Pew Survey of voters conducted September 30, 2020 to October 5, 2020 did find that registered Democrats were more likely than registered Republicans to use mail-in ballots by a margin of 51% to 39%; however, an estimated 50% of Trump supporters said they would vote in person on Election Day compared with only 20% of Biden supporters.[vi] Despite all the partisan hoopla, we learned that an increase in mail-in voting (no matter which party uses it) is canceled out by fewer people voting in person for that election.
The Number of First-Time Voters Doesn’t Explain the Results
So, if mail-in balloting was a neutral factor, perhaps the “unprecedented number of new voters” using mail-in ballots produced Biden victories in both the popular vote and the Electoral College? A closer look at the results shows this was not the case.
Even if we accept at face value media reports that more than 158 million votes were cast in the 2020 presidential election (an unprecedented 66% to 67% of all eligible American voters participated)[vii], we still don’t know how many of these were cast by legitimate, properly registered voters.
In the 2016 election, 136,669,279 people cast a vote for president.[viii] Could it be that 22 million additional people voted for president in 2020 (an increase of 16% in a time when the US population was only growing at the rate of 0.6% annually)? Given the importance of this election, that’s certainly possible. However, there remains a problem with the number of voter registrations that no one seems to have addressed in any depth.[ix]
In 2018, just two years ago, only 153.07 million Americans were registered to vote.[x] Even in 2016, the last presidential election, only 157.6 million Americans were registered to vote. Just because someone has registered to vote doesn’t necessarily mean they will vote. In fact, for 158 million people to have voted in 2020, at least 50 million more people (an increase of 32 percent over 2016) would need to have registered.[xi] This is based upon the average of registered voter participation rates over the past forty years – 10 presidential elections since 1980. Remarkably, no one has been discussing this part of the enigma.
2020 Voter Registrations Were Not What Democrats Had Hoped For
Notwithstanding the Democrats’ heavy emphasis on getting new voters and infrequent voters to the polls, a number of sources reported a steep decline in voting registrations during 2020 due to the pandemic.[xii] Even Facebook’s legally questionable $400 million contribution to local election officials only produced, by its own accounting, 4.4 million new voter registrations.[xiii] For sure, some will also credit same-day registration laws in 21 states for a bumper crop of new voters, but most of those laws were already on the books before 2020 and couldn’t possibly explain tens of millions of new registrants. This hypothesis is particularly suspect when so many new voters said that, because of COVID, they were reluctant to vote in person much less take the additional time to register at the polls.
In response to claims made by Trump supporters that the number of votes in many jurisdictions greatly exceeded the actual number of registered voters, trusty “fact checkers” explained that many states had simply failed to update their official voting registration rolls (usually posted on the secretary of state websites).[xiv] Ooops – my bad! You have to wonder why such data would be posted on a public website if it was known to be inaccurate, especially when these same websites claimed to be the best way for citizens to check their voter registration records and confirm that their vote had been properly counted.
There’s also the inconvenient fact that, in a number of key battleground states (at least one of which is the subject of election fraud litigation – Pennsylvania), Republican voter registrations significantly outpaced Democratic registrations in 2020.[xv]
Changing Demographics Didn’t Do What They Were Supposed to Do
Furthermore, we’ve heard a great deal about the changing demographics of the US electorate and how that must explain Biden’s claimed victory. As predicted, younger voters – particularly those with college or graduate degrees – preferred Biden to Trump by a margin of 2 to 1.[xvi] But how much of a difference did the youth vote actually make? NBC News exit polling data showed that 13% of voters casting ballots for president in 2020 were doing so for the first time. Of these, 1 in 10 were new voters between ages 18 and 24.[xvii] Assuming that two-thirds of them were ineligible to vote in 2016 because of age, that would account for only 0.86% of the 158 million voters in 2020 or approximately 1.4 million votes. You still have a long way to go to get to 22 million new voters of any age.
Leaving aside other demographic anomalies such as Trump’s better than expected performance among Latin Americans and African Americans who historically haven’t voted at the same rate as white Americans, it’s almost mathematically impossible to account for 22 million new voters in 2020 when there weren’t nearly enough new registrations to produce that number of legal votes. Where did all those new voters come from? Where are the millions more unused voter registrations to support that growth? Does it have anything to do with the 650,000 people who left California in 2019 and the millions of others who move interstate every year? Maybe some of those people voted both before and after they crossed state lines. Additionally, has anyone properly accounted for the 10 million or so adults alive and voting in 2016 who were dead by 11/3/2020?
Numerical Incongruities Versus Voter Fraud
As I said in my previous blog “What About the 100 Million Non-Voters?”[xviii] I believe the number of people who actually vote in an election has much more to do with its outcome than any margin of voter fraud. After considering every explanation for why the 2020 election results fell outside the range of normal electoral probabilities[xix], I still think the number who actually voted – legally or not – will reveal what really happened this year.
To be sure, hastily adopted changes in election law do provide bad actors with the opportunity to commit fraud. That may or may not have been the intent of the lawmakers, but lax laws in and of themselves are not evidence of fraud. Rather, I expect to find the answer to this riddle within the mysterious pedigree of the 280,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona which are said to have given Biden an Electoral College victory. If those votes are attributable to “voters” not properly registered and appeared literally out of thin air, then more exotic theories of cybercrime and foreign interference are not needed to prove wrongdoing.
Follow the registrations, match them with real eligible voters – however they cast their votes – and there you will find the answer to the riddle wrapped in the mystery of this 2020 enigma.
[i] Winston Churchill Radio Address, October 1, 1939, in which he analyzed the events of the first month of World War II. www.wordhistories.net
[ii] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/09/02/trump-floats-rigged-election-as-democrats-concerns-about-election-day-red-mirage-grow/
[iii]https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/politics/2020-election-count-red-mirage-blue-shift/index.html
[iv] Warren Cornwall, “Do Republicans or Democrats Benefit from Mail-In Voting? It Turns Out, Neither”, Science Magazine, August 26, 2020.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] “US Election: Which Political Party Benefits from Mail-In Voting?” Daily Bulletin at https://www.dw.com/en/us-election-election-mail-in-voting-biden-trump/a-55433216
[vii] According to the US Elections Project, based upon census data, there were 239.2 million Americans of voting age on Election Day and otherwise eligible to vote. If, as reported by the Washington Post and others, 66.2% of those people actually voted, that would account for 158,350,400 voters. I know that they are still finding and counting votes in some places, but as of this writing, I’m assuming that Biden claims about 81 million votes, Trump claims 74 million votes, and the rest went to third party candidates.
[viii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016-United-States-presidential-election-results
[ix] In every state except North Dakota, a voter must be registered prior to voting. North Dakota has an exemption from the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 but requires valid ID and proof of entitlement to vote at a particular polling location.
[x] Erin Duffin, “Number of Registered Voters in the United States 1996-2018” Statista, August 9, 2019.
[xi] The percentage of registered voters who have actually voted in a presidential election has averaged 76.4% according to UC Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project. Even though I found a Politico report stating that there were “over 200 million registered voters” in a Politico article from 2016, there currently is no reliable number of registered voters for 2020. Applying the historical average participation, there must have been approximately 208 million registered voters on 11/3/2020 to produce 158 million recorded votes.
[xii] The Brennan Center reported on September 21, 2020 that voter registration had declined by 38% in 17 of the 21 states that were surveyed compared to 2016 registration rates. www.brennancenter.org See also, https://electioninnovation.org/new-voter-registrations-in-2020.
[xiii] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/10/26/voter-registration-facebook-drive-trump-biden-zuckerberg-election-2020/6041428002/
[xiv] D. Link, “Fact Check: States Don’t Have More Than 100% Voter Turnout in an Election”, USA Today, November 8, 2020; see also https://factly.in/these-are-not-actual-statistics-related-to-registered-voters-in-american-states/
[xv] L. Bronner, “If Joe Biden Loses, It Probably Won’t Be Because of an Increase in GOP Voter Registrations”, Washington Post, October 22, 2020.
[xvi] M. Bryant, “US Voter Demographics: Election 2020 Ended Up Looking a Lot Like 2016”, The Guardian, November 5, 2020.
[xvii] K. Rosenblatt, “Gen Z’s First Time Voters Celebrate Biden’s Election But Vow to Hold Him Accountable”, NBC News, November 8, 2020.
[xviii] https://alessandrocamp.com/2020/10/26/what-about-the-hundred-million-non-voters/
[xix] P. Navarro, “The Immaculate Deception”, Bannon’s War Room, December 15, 2020; https://alessandrocamp.com/2020/11/29/it-does-not-compute/
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