Election

I haven't read an article since Wednesday, though I have seen some headlines. What I know, then, is based on information from past elections, the players involved, plus a few shreds of the current news.

There are a lot of small irregularities of varying believability.  Precinct managers who allowed a hundred questionable votes; mailed-in or otherwise vulnerable votes that may hit some thousands in total which break 2-1 for Biden and thus bear investigation; harvested votes from nursing homes, shelters, and poor neighborhoods at a hundred or two each, maybe even thousands in the hands of a real pro; directly paid votes for down-ticket elections in corrupt cities that added to the Biden votes as a throw-in, which is every election in Atlanta; intimidation that is hard to measure; physical harm to Republican turnout, such as the tire-slashing in Milwaukee for rides-to-the-polls vans.  Wisconsin was stolen by Kerry in 2004, after all. Look it up. Vote fraud is real, and ongoing.  But that doesn't mean that there are big swings in many states likely to happen.

So, a thousand incidents of a hundred votes each, or a hundred incidents of a thousand votes each.  Like always.  I don't buy the argument that this must be that much worse this time.  Just because the people pulling these stunts hate Trump twice as much as they hated Romney or McCain, it doesn't mean they can do twice as much damage.  Wanting to doesn't make it happen. Also, they are much more likely to occur in places where there is cover, where there is 90-10 advantage for Democrats anyway.  Places where it doesn't much affect the local race, which folks might care about, but can be used to pad the state total. Philadelphia is supposed to be ground zero for this.  Unsurprising.  Philadelphia has been ground zero before.  Skilled labor there.

Then there are the possible big-ticket items, the technological or systematic manipulations which can move a stack of 10,000 votes at a time, or even worse, 1% of the votes gradually or invisibly. Of necessity, most of these would have to be in places with good cover as well. I read that the Trump campaign has suggested that there is an enormous amount of votes nationwide because of software glitches, and this deserves to be looked into.  Well, it should be looked into, yes.  It's not likely to result in much, because if it moved that many votes it would probably have been heard of before.  Okay, maybe this is new and we need to nip it in the bud.  That's fine.  But if this is nationwide, then the national totals of fraudulent votes  don't mean much - not this time - as most of the cheating would of necessity have been in places that turned out not to need it.  We had it narrowed down to about ten battleground states, but no one knew which were going to be super-hot and come down to very few votes and which were only close in a relative sense.

Could this software issue really have resulted in 2 million fraudulent votes, 200,000 in Pennsylvania or a couple of other places?  Sure it could.  Not very likely, but it's possible.  There are plenty of folks out there who would do such a thing if they had the power.  But do they have the power?  A new method comes on the scene in this cycle and first time out it flips three states?  Unlikely. Still, not impossible.  Deserves a look. Conspiracies are common, but successful conspiracies are rare.

Forced recounts are nice.  It's like a report card on how honest and competent your state was going in. New Hampshire had a crazy close Senatorial election in the mid 70s, and the recount was very close to the original count.  Nice to see. 

I am catching downwind that Democrats are in a tizzy that Trump is contesting results for any reason whatsoever.  This will include, of course, Democrats who know nothing about voting procedures, or election law in any of the states in question.  Also, people who forget how long the recount in 2000 took. All very predictable. Anything that is uncovered will be ignored. Evidence will be demanded, but any evidence that comes in will be regarded as a creature from another planet. So we just ignore all that noise and keep investigating and recounting.

Update: So looking it up just now, despite my strong doubt that tens of thousands of  votes could be moved, Richard Baris's Big Data Poll notices that Biden underperformed Hillary everywhere except for four cities.  I mentioned three of the four above as particularly well-known examples of corrupt voting locations for decades. I missed Detroit.  Proves nothing, but maybe concentrating on a few cities where you control a lot of the observation is a better strategy than a little here, a little there.