How To Steal An Election
To catch a crook, you have to think like a crook.
I've never claimed the 2020 General Election was stolen. I've never used the term 'fraud' in conjunction with the 2020 General Election. Why? Because I have not personally examined every ballot, nor every machine, nor have I interviewed everyone who voted.
That said, there were enough tidbits scattered across the entire spectrum of election administration to fog my confidence in the official statewide election results. Between the Department of State's ever-evolving "guidance" to counties prior to the election, to election observers not being afforded meaningful observation, to the hasty certification of statewide results - and everything in between - let's just say I have questions.
But as always, I try to keep an eye on the big picture rather than get caught up in going down rabbit holes. It is that big picture mentality that tells me that the subpoenae issued by the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee were the right move to make.
I mean, take a step back for a minute and think this through. If there were some bad guys out there who really wanted to steal an election or commit widespread election fraud, they would need to have a solid plan to pull it off. How would you do it if you were a bad guy?
Many critics of the direction the Senate has taken want to subpoena ballots and machines instead. But if you're a bad guy wanting to mess with an election, coordinating a massive hack to swap votes or vote counts would be too easy to uncover. A simple full hand recount of a few precincts, and the jig would be up. Because ballots must be kept under lock and key for 22 months, the bad guys would be biting their nails throughout. It would be a very risky proposition.
But because Pennsylvania now actually uses paper ballots everywhere, and because those paper ballots must be preserved, you'd have to think more like other bad guys who've managed to pull something off on paper.
The tax cheat doesn't just lie to the IRS, he keeps a second set of books and even may go so far as to create fake receipts to back up his second set of books. Many truckers used to keep two separate log books of their commercial driving hours; one to show to their boss to get paid, and another to show the government when pulled over for a safety or compliance inspection.
To pull something off on paper you need to produce actual paper to back it up if you don't want to easily get caught. Additionally, the paper you produce must appear to be legitimate.
Organized crime does not take big piles of cash from drug dealing to purchase fancy cars, diamond rings, or furs for their mistresses. That money is first laundered through some legitimate business entity so it can later be freely spent without triggering red flags.
So if you were a bad guy, how would you go about producing the paper required to back up the election results you wanted to produce?
I suppose you could print up tons of counterfeit ballots and mail them in, but even the worst of Pennsylvania's counties would be hard-pressed to count a mailed in ballot that isn't tied to a voter already registered in that county. Some discrepancies still exist in this area of electoral administration, but I suspect it's more due to horrible records and record keeping than completely counterfeit ballots being submitted en masse.
If a submitted ballot needs to be tied to an existing voter, wouldn't generating and submitting ballots on behalf of real voters who won't notice be a better plan? Or maybe even by spending years registering names that do not represent actual eligible voters, and then generating and submitting ballots on their behalf, in true money laundering fashion?
Those laundered ballots would be genuine ballots, applied for, delivered, submitted, and counted because to everyone charged with looking, they would appear to be legitimate ballots from legitimate voters. If I'm a bad guy trying to fudge an election, that's how I'd do it, and that's why the Senate's subpoenae for voter records are appropriate at this time.
Let's face it, stealing an American presidential election wouldn't just be the crime of the century, it would be the crime of several centuries. If there were bad guys out there trying to pull this off, such a plan would take a lot of time to devise and execute, and great care would be required to avoid easy discovery.
If you recall my previous post regarding auditing the voter rolls, I laid out all the problem areas I'm aware of with our voter registration system. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to realize that these problems could potentially be exploited to provide both the method and time required to commit ballot laundering.
I'm not saying this is what happened, and I'm not saying that anything else didn't happen. What I'm saying is that beating a system that preserves a paper record requires the production of paper records that appear legitimate, and that the motive, opportunity, and mechanisms existed to do so in the 2020 General Election.
The Senate's subpoena action will help determine if the voter rolls can be relied on. I lean no on that question, for reasons I've previously mentioned. Bad record keeping policies and practices make the voter registration system messy and behind the times, which in and of itself could potentially assist in providing cover for bad guys in a ballot laundering scheme.
We may eventually need to subpoena ballots for review. We may eventually need to subpoena machines as well, but we've already heard that the Wolf administration intends to decertify any machines examined by third party investigators. $150 million of taxpayer money was spent to purchase these machines just two years ago. Having to go through that all over again would be a very expensive proposition.
Examining and confirming the voter rolls is the least costly method to discover what appears to be (at least based on what I know) the most likely scenario for actually stealing an American presidential election. It may also preclude any need to examine ballots and machines. I wanted to do this prior to the May 2021 primary election with those important constitutional amendments, but no one would listen to me.
To catch a crook, you have to think like a crook. The Senate's subpoena of voter records is the right place to start.
