Trump is Right to Investigate, Even If Nothing Happened

As this is being written, the US is in the middle of the fight for the presidency. Joe Biden is being declared winner by the media while Donald Trump is launching legal battles to put the ostensible results in key states in question.

According to the US press, Trump is being a sore loser. Just as he cannot be gracious while having won, he refuses to do the obvious when he is defeated. This video has gathered over 60 million views just on Facebook at the time of writing.

It is not surprising that Trump would not concede without exhausting all his options. However, whatever his personal reasons for continuing his fight for reelection might be, it is possible that he is not in the wrong. What follows should be something of a summary of what has happened in the election so far. Although the veracity or accuracy of many of the points below are difficult to prove, there has been more than enough warning signs to warrant a thorough investigation of what went on and is still going on during this election.

Before the election, the press was priming people to accept the validity of the legal battle over the presidency. Perhaps amid uncertainty of a resolute Biden victory, resolving election disputes in court was a major news theme in the last days before November 3rd. When the situation reversed, however, this exact route which Trump ended up taking became wrong - a way to question democracy rather than a way to uphold it. This is, of course, neither a comment on Trump or on election integrity.

Throughout the election, Project Veritas has been putting out videos and reports alleging voter fraud on a massive scale. Among the discrepancies alleged was, for example, vote buying. Based on another Project Veritas video, a story was more widely reported of a USPS worker apparently blowing the whistle on his supervisors. Project Veritas videos typically feature first-hand footage, but are often heavily edited and cut. While it has a history of reasonable reliability, it is difficult to base any definitive verdict on their reports.

On the night of the election, some key states stopped counting votes for some time. Sometimes the explanation given was that the vote counters needed sleep. Beyond that, this piece of the story was not significantly commented on, as pointed out by Stephen Miller. Furthermore, in some states, after having stopped counting for several days to let additional mail-in votes come in, the remaining votes were counted much slower than the rest, with small percentages taking hours and days to get added to the fast-counted total.

In the middle of the election night, there was a sudden large increase in the total votes casted for Joe Biden in Michigan. While some conservatives were quick to allege fraud, this was identified quickly as a mistake or a typo - an additional zero was inserted when adding votes of a small county. The mistake was fixed within approximately 30 minutes.

Perhaps the biggest story of the election night itself and the following morning were the now-famous big bumps for Biden in Wisconsin and Michigan. The official explanation of this was that a big batch of mail-in ballots came in at once. The explosive nature of these reports drew wide attention, with reactions and memes being made, claiming proof of election interference by the Democratic Party. However, although it has been widely claimed that 100% of these votes went to Joe Biden, this is contradicted by the graphs themselves. The blue, Democratic line overlaps the red, Republican, but it is clear from both the Michigan and Wisconsin pictures that at the point when the big batches of new votes came in, both parties’ totals increased. It is true that a significant majority of the votes went to Joe Biden, but this is not implausible in this election in the case of mail-in ballots. Perhaps there has been some questionable conduct in relation to this story, but it certainly did not reach the proportions attributed to it by some.

Among the information circulating on election night were also hoaxes, soon to be revealed as such. Allegations were made of more ballots being counted in Wisconsin than the total number of registered voters. This turned out to be simply wrong - the number of registered voters in Wisconsin was actually approximately half a million higher.

There were also allegations that some votes in Arizona were not being counted at all. Although the initial report indeed seems suspicious, this could be due to delays in counting, as at the time of them coming out Arizona had not yet reported 100% of the votes. A relevant related question, though, is why the delays were occurring at all.

An interesting story which gained more credence over time was #SharpieGate, which started with this video becoming viral. Arizona voters were supposedly encouraged to use sharpies to fill in the ballots, with those ballots then being thrown out as invalid. Conflicting official information has been coming out in relation to this issue - while Maricopa County Elections Department published a video claiming that the use of sharpies would not invalidate a ballot, supposed photos of written election instructions prohibit the use of sharpies instead. At the time of writing, a lawsuit has been filed to restore the ballots cancelled over the use of sharpies, if there were indeed any.

[Update: This lawsuit has since been dropped.]

One of the avenues Trump’s campaign led by Rudy Giuliani is pursuing in their legal case is the issue of poll watchers. There has been ample evidence suggesting that poll watchers were being excluded from the rooms and locations where the counting took place. Starting with this report, with allegations mounting, Giuliani vowed to make this case official in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, key locations for the possible overturning of the election results in Pennsylvania. Furthermore, a questionable scene has played out in Detroit, Michigan, where windows to a ballot counting centre were being boarded up. In the video a large number of journalists and observers are seen on the scene, which suggests that the issue might have been some kind of harassment of poll workers rather than fraud. No conclusive evidence can be observed in this video. Nevertheless, the optics of this event amid all the other allegations of fraud were indeed disastrous.

Presumably following allegations of secret ballot counting being conducted during the first night of the election, Fulton County, Georgia (which includes the city of Atlanta) held a process to review some of the votes which had already been counted. Although nothing overly suspicious seemed to be happening at the time, the state was later flipped by Joe Biden, who is now reported to have won by a razor-thin margin. Any irregularities happening in Fulton County, therefore, are a prime target for any election review or investigation.

More people have come forward with information alleging irregularities. In this video, a poll worker is seen agitated, throwing out crumpled up pieces of paper. In this one, what appears to be some kind of ballots are being filled in, always for the top candidate. And here, a ballot count watcher in Michigan alleges 130 thousand new votes suddenly appearing, all for Joe Biden. These are, for the time being, indeed just allegations or observations without context, and it is difficult if not impossible to assess whether they really show what is alleged. None of these prove fraud and all can be dismissed with fair reasons and plausible explanations.

A story which has only been developing in a notable way for a few days is the ballot backdating issue. First brought forward by James O’Keefe, Rudy Giulinani now claims to have witnesses to this practice. Republican senator Lindsey Graham has already called on the DoJ to investigate alleged ballot backdating in Pennsylvania.

Trump has expressed intentions to recount all votes in Wisconsin. As Biden’s winning margin here is especially slim, this will likely happen. Trump’s focus on Wisconsin came amid reports of possible illegality of some of the ways incoming ballots were being handled and processed. Due to the already mentioned slim margins in Georgia, a recount of all votes has already been announced there.

Over the course of the counting process, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit against Michigan in the hopes of stopping the count until the presence of poll watchers from the two major parties is assured and an overall transparent process is followed. This was not a success for Trump, as Michigan finished the count, with Biden being proclaimed winner. The campaign also said it will be bringing more lawsuits against the state over alleged duplicate registrations, suspicious numbers of voters, and the issue of dead ‘voters’.

One minor win has already been delivered for Trump. In a case against Pennsylvania a court issued an order to set aside and not count a portion of the ballots until investigated further.

Serious allegations have been made in relation to dead people ‘voting’ in some states. While investigations into singular allegedly dead-and-voting individuals have mostly shown these to be well explained, this issue is reported on a much larger scale. That this is at least a real possibility is hinted at by a foiled attempt in Florida of registering dead voters as Democrats, uncovered before election day but well into the mail-in voting period.

Republican lawyers have been making allegations of voter fraud in other respects as well. It has been reported that the company responsible for counting disputed votes has ties to elected Democratic officials, which could hint at possible conflict of interest.

Further stories have been developing in the light of statistical data which started being reported. It is clear, for example, that Joe Biden received significantly more votes than Democratic Senate candidates. This is seen as unusual, the expectation being ballots filled in whole, in an overwhelmingly straight-party pattern. Whether justifiably or not, many Republicans view this as a major indicator of fraud. A turnout issue has also been raised - in some states and not others, the voter turnout has been showing statistical anomalies. The author of this report does not draw conclusions from this but calls on political analysts and statisticians to focus on and investigate this data. Lastly, Benford’s law has been invoked in relation to the election data. This method, which can be used to detect fraudulent data sets, has been used by some to cast doubt on the authenticity of the ballots in this election, too.

[Update: Benford’s law is rarely a suitable tool for detecting election fraud. Data from ballots cast for Joe Ballot (or for anyone else) cannot be properly screened for inconsistencies using this method.]

Throughout the election, Twitter has been active in its content moderation efforts. A significant story was its interference with Trump’s tweets, often hiding them behind a warning label claiming the spread of false information. On many more of his tweets, the like and/or retweet functions have been disabled. While Trump’s case was, of course, the most prominent, Twitter also suspended many other accounts, including DuckDiver19, an account sharing live updates on election night, covering with only limited commentary what was happening around the country. On Facebook, the fast-growing group ‘Stop the Steal’ was banned among others, followed by Twitter too.

Stories from the not-too-distant past show that election interference has been attempted and practiced in the US on other occasions. In May, a Philadelphia election Judge was found to ‘stuff ballot boxes for Democrats’ in three primary elections. He is reportedly facing 15 years in prison. 

It has long been known and considered a security issue that some US states use voting machines with access to the internet. These machines could theoretically be compromised, and votes put into question. Elsewhere, the so-called ‘ballot harvesting’ practice has been reported, which could be another security issue. These problems are, of course, not evidence of fraud, but realities which unfortunately make any reported result slightly less reliable in any election, not just this one.

A general discussion has also been raised about the concept of ‘calling states’ for either candidate before all the votes are counted. Mark Levin explains that through this practice, the media can create the perception in some situations that a given candidate is and never has been close to winning. Even though not election interference in any way, a broader debate about state calling this is certainly warranted.

An interesting view on the entire situation playing out now has been offered by Bernie Sanders. Before the election started, he had predicted virtually precisely what has turned out to be the case. Whether it will continue along his lines, however, is still up in the air.

In September 2016, the BBC published a story titled: ‘Vote rigging: How to spot the tell-tale signs’. Speaking in the context of Africa, they list 6 signs which suggest something suspicious might be happening. Those are: ‘too many votes’, ‘a high turnout in specific areas’, ‘large number of invalid votes’, ‘more votes than ballot papers issued’, ‘results that don’t match’ and ‘delay in announcing results’. Even though today the same BBC denies any of the claims of election inconsistencies with respect to Trump and Biden, readers are invited to put their list of common signs against the allegations and reported events listed in this article. Although neither here nor yet anywhere can election discrepancies or fraud be proven, Trump is right to investigate. Even if it turns out that nothing wrong actually happened and that the reported results of the election are legitimate.