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This is "Part 2", the follow-up of my blog post of earlier this month. In that post I discussed a small selection of presented evidence that mainstream media pretended did not exist - except when it was debunked.

But first: it turns out that the not-really "smoking gun" video - a video that undoubtedly millions of people have seen - contains an unnoticed "smoking gun" after all!

embed vimeo.com 512060668

This video is an enhanced zoom of the top-right camera view. You can see abnormal ballot counting, as follows:
11:03:35 - instead of putting the whole pack of ballots in the scanner, the "yellow" woman in the center selects a number of ballots to omit from scanning.
11:04:25 - start of scanning (1x). She seems to change her mind and reinserts a few of the omitted ballots. The scanning progresses smoothly until it stops when the last ballot has been scanned.
11:06:40 - she scans the same ballots again! (2x)
11:08:40 - and again! (3x)
11:11:05 - she seems to put the selected ballots back in the paper tray on her desk. But later she takes a stack of ballots out of that same tray and scans the ballots - apparently for a fourth time.

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the woman on the left was apparently struggling with paper jam; that gave her the possibility of plausible denial. It's less clear what the woman on the right was doing but it looks as if she similarly scanned a number of ballots several times (and outside of the zoomed area was another person scanning).

Note also the "red" guy on the phone. I read about Georgia law : "All persons conducting the tabulation of absentee ballots during the day of a primary, election, or runoff[...] and all monitors and observers shall be sequestered until the time for the closing of the polls.  All such persons shall [...] not use any type of communication device including[...] cellular telephones". I suspect that he must have had a very important reason for that phone call.

Together with the preceding fake "water main break" and the pretended stop of ballot counting, I find this compelling evidence of organized vote fraud in Georgia. At an estimated maximum of 2000 ballots per machine per hour, they may easily have achieved a count of around 10'000 votes with the four ballot scanning machines in operation.


Statistical analysis (Summary with comments; more details of this and the following here)

A good discussion about statistical irregularities can be found at Metabunk.org. Huge, unexplained errors were made in the vote counts that were visible on live TV (see here for a plausible, innocent explanation). They also discuss the usefulness of Benford's law for detecting possible fraud.

An academic article by Savva Shanaev and colleagues came out that uses Benford's law. The authors account for many criticisms and analyze the first as well as the second digit of numbers; according to Prof. Mebane the second digit test should be "taken seriously" as a statistical test for election fraud.
They observed "statistical significant irregularities" "for Democratic votes in key battleground states", while "no anomalies are detected for any of the tests in states won by the Republican candidate" (that is not a sign of "vote switching", but possibly a sign of "ballot stuffing"). They also found in swing states a big difference in Democratic votes compared with past elections.

Yet another Benford's law analysis found only a significant deviation for the Biden Pennsylvania mail-in vote; however, that supports the whistleblower story as discussed in my earlier post.

Another strange result - concordant with the above-mentioned findings of Shanaev - is shown in this article. Counties that historically were good predictors of the final outcome - also in 2016 - spectacularly failed in 2020:

ezgif_7_9dab99e1043f.jpg

That list matches rather well with a list in the corresponding Wikipedia article from before the election; see also Wikipedia's discussion page on that topic.

It's fair to say that some common statistical indicators did raise red flags.


Allegation: voting machine scams of fractional counting and ballot stuffing (Summary)

- An amazing observation by the mathematician Edward Solomon was also discussed on Metabunk : precincts would often have a certain ratio of votes, for example 53 votes for Trump on a total of 265 votes for a 1/5 ratio, and then when new votes came in, other precincts would get that same exact ratio instead of the earlier precincts!

However that would imply an overly complicated way of cheating. Moreover, there are thousands of precincts; the higher the number of precincts, also the more likely to get such strange looking results. Solomon did not manage to convince statisticians that it's "impossible"; despite that spectacular first impression - and it got a lot of attention from Trump supporters - it may very well be normal.

- Fractional votes as brought up by Russ Ramsland in an affidavit based on the ASOG Forensics Report on Antrim, Michigan. He claimed that data directly coming from voting software showed fractional votes. If so, that would be a sure sign of fraud. However, that data was not found on voting equipment but on an official Michigan Internet site. Moreover, I found that the NYT data feed (which comes from Edison news data) corresponds exactly to the so-called "raw data" file of Ramsland. Calculated from the there provided fractions I exactly reproduced the suspect looking "fractional votes" for Biden and Trump - thus, instead of fraud, it probably just shows sloppiness of a web administrator - and not incredible sloppiness of a fraudster.

Ramsland's team also messed up when claiming that more people voted than were registered in Michigan - they mixed up data for Michigan (MI) with data for Minnesota (MN)! Nevertheless their investigation did include forensics on voting machines, which was their focus and expertise. I found most striking:

Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes. [...]
Likewise [...] all security logs for the day after the election, on election day, and prior to election day are gone. [...] Other server logs before November 4, 2020 are present; therefore, there is no reasonable explanation for the security logs to be missing.

The suspicion of tampered voting machines should be taken seriously as explained in the 2016 Fraction Magic video. That video makes clear that at least some voting systems allow for a perfect cover-up, after which no forensic investigation can discover any tampering. See here for an explanation how such fractional voting software found its way inside voting machines.

A hand recount in Wayne county, Georgia revealed that a small but significant amount of votes had been switched from Trump to Biden; however it is not known how that happened.

And so, despite wild claims that it did happen, I haven't found concrete evidence of important voting machine software manipulation - only that it could have happened, without leaving a trace.


Allegation: Impossible vote spikes in multiple swing states

Graphs of Michigan and Wisconsin in the report Votepatternanalysis

The nightly vote updates of several swing states were cause for much debate as those almost or completely eliminated Trump’s lead.

Several commentaries concluded that while spectacular looking, it wasn't abnormal as those "spikes" merely showed the finalizing of absent ballot counts in left-leaning cities such as Detroit.

However, one analysis of those "vote spikes" during the night after the election provides a different perspective of those data. In particular the update for Michigan that arrived at 6:31am ET on November 4th was by their metric the single most anomalous vote update in the USA (and not just in Michigan). Thus the explanation that it simply "accounted for largely left-leaning urban counties" is insufficient.

Interestingly, that report also puts attention to the vote update following the ballot "counting" in Georgia as shown in the video at the top of this post:

a vote update which arrived at 1:34am EST on November 4th, is the update with the largest margin of all of the updates in Georgia.

Thus, while not "impossible", those nightly vote spikes in swing states do raise some doubts.


Conclusion

The considerations here above, together with my earlier post, are only a small sample of the evidence, allegations and witness accounts that I looked at. All together I've seen a lot of unsustained claims, which were broadly spun out in the media. But putting those aside, there still remained ample evidence of widespread voter fraud - even without the newly found evidence. And there was some support from statistical analyses as well.

The next question is then, if there was so much fraud that it changed the outcome. But contrary to what each side pretends, that isn't easy to answer. It's now pretty clear that it must have been a much closer race than it seemed to be from the official final results. In other words, it looks like there was a successful effort to make sure which candidate would win the race; but from what I've examined it's unsure if the winner wouldn't have been the same without cheating. The police should have assisted with finding and safeguarding evidence that might have helped to answer that question, but I only found the police covering up for the perpetrators.

Anyway, the "there is no evidence" mantra was certainly false. The distorted media coverage may be explained by a revealing article in Time magazine that tells the story of how "a cabal" "saved the elections". It has a tongue-in-cheek admission that "there was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes", "between left-wing activist and business titans [...] with crucial contributions by non-partisan and conservative actors";

After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result [by means of] a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. (emphasis mine.)

I'm mainly interested in the topic of the US elections for gauging the reliability of US media sources; see next for one of the most striking examples of "steering" that I came across recently.


Extra: Reuters Fact Check and paper shredding

Reuters.jpg

On Nov.26, "Reuters Staff" fact checked claims with video evidence that voting materials had been shredded in Cobb county, Georgia. The video and pictures to which they link do not show any evidence of shredding of voting materials and Reuters concludes that it were papers from the tax office and “no items from Cobb Elections were involved” in those videos - because "officials said" so.
Move on people, nothing to see here!

However, those pictures and videos were taken on Tuesday morning 24 November. Reuters Fact Check muddied the waters by only discussing the events of 24 November without mentioning the much clearer evidence of 20 November - photo evidence that was mentioned and shown in the Tennessee star; in view of the thoroughness with which they commented on the story, it's hard to believe that they could have missed it.

And although Google deleted the first video from YouTube, it has later put back at the end of a longer video. You can watch the whole story here, starting at . 1:02:09]. On the video and the picture we read "...AL Absentee ballot". I found that to match the "OFFICIAL ABSENTEE BALLOT" outer envelopes in which ballots were sent back, as shown in the ballot opening video here.

See also the Nov.21 commentary by Leadstories that cites the admission by the Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration that Election Department documents were shredded at the Jim R. Miller Park Event Center; that admission was also linked from a Twitter thread to which the Reuters fact check linked. And also that follow-up was discussed in the Tennessee Star; it's not credible that Reuters Fact Check staff didn't see any of that information that I found easily.

On a side note: Cobb county ended their statement with "Elections workers remain at the Jim R. Miller Event Center to help prepare for the January 5th runoff." That run-off in Georgia yielded a double victory for two Democratic Party senators over the incumbent Republican senators, which happened to just tip the balance of power in the US Senate.