Michael Ations American Greatness article Why Do the Election’s Defenders Require My Agreement? is very effective, depressingly so, at articulating the elements that insure that “the fix” (fraud) was in for 2020 and that without assertive measure will be for future “elections” as well. Before we comment on that, we have a critique of Anton suggesting he has doubts about the Dominion voting machine/software accusations.
Maybe he has reason to have doubts, but he does not even hint why, and we find it perplexing as to why he would throw that a=out there given the panoply of clearly organized frauds he lists. Why wouldn’t manipulating data tabulation /reporting be an avenue for the cause of stopping Trump and for the usual suspects to do and deny? We understand that his main theme was to question the left – that is – if they are so sure of their virtue, why be concerned with inquiry. Nevertheless we find that hedge a bit irritating even if it is just a rhetorical device in conversation with the anything but conservative Andrew Sullivan.
Indeed in listing the election fraud and illegalities that are in evidence, in the record, sworn to, etc. the first thing Anton mentions requires a vehicle such as data manipulation to be worth mentioning. Data manipulation has been implicated by election statisticians and competent cyber experts have said Dominion software is vulnerable to hacking. That does not mean the owners of the machines or software engaged in such activity themselves for the 2020 election. From the article: (bold our emphasis)
. . . The 2020 election came down to a narrower margin than the 2016 contest: fewer than 43,000 rather than 77,000 votes in just three states. In 2016, nothing fishy in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin—the states on which 2016 turned—was detected. Certainly nothing like:
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- Counting shutdowns in five states, in which one candidate was ahead, only to lose after the counting resumed;
- “Found” tranches of ballots going overwhelmingly—sometimes exclusively—to one candidate, the eventual “winner”;
- Sworn affidavits alleging the backdating of ballots;
- Historically low rejection rates—as in, orders of magnitude lower—of mail-in ballots, suggesting that many obviously invalid ballots were accepted as genuine;
- Mail-in and absentee ballots appearing without creases, raising the question of how they got into the envelopes required for their being mailed in;
- Thousands upon thousands of ballots all marked for one presidential candidate without a single choice marked for any down-ballot candidate.
- The absolute refusal to conduct signature audits—indeed, the discarding of many envelopes which alone make such audits possible—i.e., of the kind of recounts which are performed not merely to get the math right but to evaluate the validity of ballots;
- Other statistical and historical anomalies too numerous to mention here.
All of which, and much more, did occur in 2020. Any one of these things would have caused Hillary Clinton to march into court in 2016 with an army of lawyers larger than the force Hannibal brought to Cannae.
Sullivan dismissed all of this because “Trump tried in court and lost.” End of story. He alleged with a straight face that Trump put on a serious effort run by serious election experts. To put it mildly, that’s not the way it looked to me. In any case, quick dismissals by partisan or even impartial courts do not amount to “proof” that nothing was amiss, much less do they constitute a thorough vetting of what really happened. They might be “evidence”—but only of the fact that those particular courts wanted nothing to do with the election. Judges’ dismissals are certainly not dispositive evidence that there was no fraud. . . .
Follow-up commentary later
