April 3, 2024
All sorts of allegations have been made concerning the fairness of the 2020 election.
The mainstream media continues to claim that the election was fair because there were more than 60 legal actions (the "challenge" cases) brought by Donald Trump supporters alleging significant improprieties that all went down to defeat in the courts. On the other hand, Trump supporters continue to allege that the election was not fair because there were few if any evidentiary hearings in those 60 legal cases relative to irregularities surrounding election certification, voter I.D. issues, mail-in-ballots and a host of other anomalies. Indeed, an overwhelming number of these cases were summarily dismissed for "lack of standing" or some other purely procedural issue.
For a review of the challenge cases see this.
FAIRNESS: SPORTS AND ELECTIONS
So was the 2020 election really fair or not?
To understand the issue of fairness, let's compare election results to the score in an NBA basketball game. Assume that the Celtics scored more points than the Knicks in a game played last night. Scoring more points than your opponent normally means that you win the game and that any recount of points scored would confirm that result.
Election results are similar to basketball scores. The candidate with the most votes-the highest score-is normally declared the winner. Now the loser might challenge the result by asking for a recount of votes
but should that recount produce very similar results, the candidate with the most votes would still win.
But let's assume that an analysis of the game confirms that the referees allowed the Celtics to double-dribble (a standard rule infraction) while the Knicks were not allowed. And let's assume that the analysis shows that the referees allowed the Celtics to continue to use players with more than 5 fouls; the Knicks were not allowed to do that. Finally, let's assume that the analysis showed that each Celtic free throw counted for 2 points while each Knicks free throw counted for the usual single point. Now, would we still have confidence that the game was fair and that the Celtics-who scored the most points-were really the legitimate winner?
You get the picture. Every competitive contest has rules that must be followed by both teams if any competitive process is to produce a legitimate result. And in an election, the process cannot produce a fair result if the participants don't follow the rules or if the courts refuse to allow an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the rules were really followed or not. (The fairness of the rules\ themselves is a separate issue). To be sure, counting and recounting votes accurately is an important procedural rule; but it is only ONE procedural rule and not necessarily the most important in terms of producing a legitimate outcome.
THE GEORGIA 2020 ELECTION
To see why this is so, let's take the controversy over the results in the 2020 election in Georgia.
We know the final score of that election. After counting and recounting votes cast, Joe Biden scored 6,580 more votes than Donald Trump and was declared the winner. But were all of the procedural rules followed so that the election was fair?
One way to tell would be to do a database analysis searching for "anomalies", i.e., for procedural rule irregularities as to how votes were cast and counted. The methodology is fairly straightforward: cross-compare databases for registered voters and votes cast in Georgia (2020) with other certified Georgia databases such as death certificates for registered voters; addresses and locations of registered voter; voters who moved out of state prior to the election; and the number of voter I.D.'s per registered voters. If significant "irregularities" appear with any of these comparisons, there could be a problem with the election process.
As an example, a common procedural rule for voting in state elections is that dead voters and voters that have moved out of state can't legally vote. (Sounds fair!) Most states are supposed to scrub deceased voters and out-of-state voters from their voting roles prior to an election or, failing that, to disallow votes that can be traced back to such voters. But did Georgia do that in the 2020 election? It is unclear that they did. This means that some votes may have been counted from registered voters who had died or moved out of state prior to the election.
State law in Georgia requires that all registered voters must have a legitimate residential in-state address. A federal post office location or a commercial warehouse cannot normally be considered a legitimate residential address. Yet hundreds of votes in the 2020 election seem to have originated from federal post office locations, commercial warehouses, and several other non-residential locations, an almost certain violation of the procedural rules.
Finally, voters with multiple I.D. photos or numbers are an obvious red flag for voting irregularities. After all, more than one identification card or number could translate into more than one vote per registered voter, an obvious violation of the procedural rules. Yet a computer cross-check of voting roles and I.D. numbers in Georgia discovered hundreds of individual registered voters with MORE than one identification number at multiple addresses (i.e., college students, etc.) and some voters with as many as five.
An analysis of these specific anomalies (and many more) has been done recently by a private firm called Omega 4 America. See Georgia 2020 - Who Won Georgia? .
Omega 4, or Fractal, had previously assisted state governments in uncovering fraud in their medical and health care databases by employing the same methodology, i.e., comparing legally eligible recipients for state programs with actual funds received. Similarly, in this particular case involving the fairness of the 2020 Georgia election, Omega's "fractal" analysis concluded that there may have been more than 12,000 separate procedural rule violations; actually the number was probably far higher. And since the election was officially decided by just 6,570 votes, Omega then concluded that there was really no way to determine who legitimately won that election. After all, the "irregular" votes could have all gone to Joe Biden, or they could have all gone to Donald Trump, or they could have gone to either candidate in some unknowable percentage. So, fair and square, who really won? Who knows.
CONCLUSION
If election fairness means following procedural rules, then by facts and logic alone the 2020 election process was unfair, despite the much ballyhooed sideshow of counting and recounting of votes. Given the scope of the identified irregularities, Joe Biden may have won the election with more votes than the official tally, or by fewer votes than the official tally, or may have even lost the election entirely to Donald Trump; absent any additional analysis, there is just no way to tell. It will be interesting to see how the mainstream media-so allegedly concerned with fairness issues-intends to spin this one.