The unreliability of voting by mail, the stop and go of counting and the dirty game of polls
Don't worry: it will not be thanks to a "conspiracy maneuver" that Trump will be able to stay in the White House. It is evident in fact that irregularities and fraud will have to be demonstrated and certified, not on Twitter , but in the legal seat, up to the Supreme Court. At the same time, however, the best way to fuel conspiracy theories, which can withstand decades by poisoning the political climate in the United States, is not to give it the right to ask for recounts, make appeals and clear up any opacity in the vote counting process. And, unfortunately, there was a lot of opacity. Certainly due to the voting system adopted en masse in these presidential elections due to Covid .
As we had foreseen , in fact, the vote by post was decisive and proved to be the only truly decisive effect of the pandemic on the elections.
The risk of contagion in the polling stations has led many states to extend the vote by post from an exception reserved for certain categories of voters to a "system", so by a strange twist of fate the Chinese virus has ended up changing the voting system of the rival superpower of China in the most important election, and apparently succeeding in taking out its most feared opponent, the only Western leader who had had the courage to challenge Beijing's hegemonic ambitions.
The record turnout (second in percentage only to the presidential elections of 1900) is largely due to the extension of the postal vote and this has favored Biden in particular in the key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Whether or not systematic fraud has been committed, the problem with this voting system is its inherent unreliability, so it will be difficult to dispel any doubts about this election, unless one of the two candidates calmly acknowledges defeat.
Voting by post does not protect freedom and secrecy, there is no real guarantee as to who has filled in and posted the card (if, like in Pennsylvania, cards without postmark and signature are also accepted …), it lends itself to heavy conditioning "Environmental" and the exchange vote, loss and discovery, votes attributed to people who have died for years. Let's be honest: if someone in Italy proposed to extend the vote by mail from Italians abroad (where irregularities are proven) to the whole country, to avoid gatherings at the polling stations, he would be immediately accused of competing in a mafia association, of wanting to favor the vote exchange, corruption and mafias.
Now, the minimum guarantee is that there is a deadline for voting operations, that is, that only the ballots that are inside when the polling stations close are counted. If you allow exceptions, you open a Pandora's box …
When Trump said at a press conference on the night of November 3, stop counting votes, he didn't mean that all valid votes shouldn't be counted, as reported instrumentally. He said, and repeats, stop voting, meaning stop counting votes that arrived after the polls closed.
For how many days after November 3rd can ballots sent by post be accepted and counted? It's a question we talked about before election day . And here Trump can objectively raise the legitimate suspicion that procedures in many states, such as Pennsylvania, have in fact made possible illegitimate votes and favored fraud.
Votes cannot be accepted beyond November 3, Pennsylvania state law states, but the state court potentially made it possible, effectively opening to fraud, when it ordered that unmarked ballots be accepted up to three days later. postmarked or with illegible stamp, assuming they were posted on November 3.
For this reason, the dynamics of the scrutiny operations in many states, in the night between 3 and 4 November, can only arouse suspicion. Counting stopped in Pennsylvania earlier in the night, with Trump leading by about 700,000 votes (15 percent), which Biden could overturn if the remaining votes doubled in his favor. But it is realistic that a similar result could come from large urban centers and at that time the ballot in Philadelphia was far behind the state average. Why stop and not continue counting, if the votes by mail were already inside the polling stations? Same dynamic stop and go also in Detroit (Michigan), Milwaukee (Wisconsin), Atlanta (Georgia). In these states it was not even clear how many votes there were still to be counted.
But we see that this stop and go dynamic still continues in these hours in Georgia and North Carolina – in the latter state it is possible to accept and count ballots up to 9 days after election day (!). The suspicion is that if Trump overtakes Biden in Arizona or Nevada, and stays ahead in Pennsylvania, we will see more votes overturn Georgia and North Carolina.
There is another anomaly found in the Wisconsin vote. Out of 3,684,726 registered as of November 1, the votes counted were 3,288,771, an astonishing turnout of 89 percent, abnormal both with respect to neighboring states and with respect to the historian of Wisconsin, even considering the specificity of this election. . In Milwaukee, in 7 seats, the turnout on registered (again as of November 1) exceeded 100 percent, and in 2 seats 200 percent. But Wisconsin also registers on voting day, so there could be many more registered than on November 1, which would bring turnout to more realistic levels. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported a turnout of 71 percent of those eligible. It is probably something more. But it would still mean hundreds of thousands of new ones registered between 2 and 3 November. In two days. Anything can be, we are not alluding to fraud here, but it certainly demonstrates the decisive role of the postal vote, which is intrinsically vulnerable to fraud and irregularities.
The two suspicious leaps of votes in favor of Biden in Michigan and Wisconsin seem to have found an explanation: in the first, a transcription error from a county, which added a zero too much to 15,371 votes for Biden, and in the second, the the votes arrive by post from Milwaukee, a strongly "blue" city, which seems to have decided to count all the postal ballots in a single seat – a decision that would raise some doubts anyway …
The large margin with which Trump won Ohio (8 percent), suggested that he could also be successful in some of the states between Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. This, among other things, indicates another oddity, perhaps unprecedented, of these elections: Trump would not be able to be re-elected despite 1) he won Ohio and Florida, which was respectively since 1960 and 1992 that did not vote for a candidate who then failed to make it to the White House and 2) the Republicans probably retained control of the Senate and gained positions in the House.
But the battle has been fought and is still being played out a lot in terms of communication.
President Trump has been talking about the risk of fraud, of "rigged elections", with the postal vote since June. Cheating or not, the postal vote also had a negative impact on the narrative. States where Trump had the advantage on the night of the vote reversed hours and days later. Were assigned to Biden prematurely during election night , like Arizona, with a result on the wire after counting days. It was made sure that it was President Trump who had to contest the outcome of the vote, thus being able to feed a narrative – which has actually been going on for four years – which sees him as the "usurper". Biden was the first to speak, claiming that he had in fact won on election night. And precisely to prevent Biden's victory in terms of communication, the president had to respond. The most correct behavior would have been on the part of both (including Biden) to wait for the end of the counts and, if necessary, for the appropriate checks and any appeals.
Vote by mail, narration about Trump as usurper. The elements that add to the scenario are street riots and social media censorship. Twitter is unleashed in the mass blackout of tweets about possible fraud, even censoring those of President Trump, while some are asking to close his account .
The bogus polls also helped set up this narrative, fueling the expectation of a foregone victory by Biden. Nationally, the averages gave him an 8 percent advantage (for now we're at 2.5, although it could go up), but every day the mainstream media gave maximum evidence to polls that reported a double-digit gap, even 12 or 14 percent.
Even in individual states, Trump has clearly won in Florida, Ohio and Texas, in the former much more smoothly than four years ago, when all of them had to be heads-up. In the Rust Belt it was a heads-up to the last vote, while Biden should have won easily. There remains a heavy doubt about the role of Trump's turnout suppression played by the polls: a significant number of voters may have been discouraged from voting for Trump in those states where he was seen as uncompetitive.
Polls on congressional elections also failed: they indicated that Democrats would win back the Senate and widen a majority in the House. This is not happening: in these hours the Republicans are expected to maintain control of the Senate and win 8 seats (6 net) in the House.
Obviously, the polls are not expected to get it right, but especially on the presidential elections, the error was so sensational, so shared among all the most "listed" institutions and taken up by the mainstream media, that the possibility that there was malice to influence behavior of many voters must be taken seriously. Not just the suppression of the turnout for Trump. The polls have certainly contributed significantly to creating a narrative in which Biden cannot have lost, it is Trump who is trying to steal the election by leveraging the fact that in some states the gap has been less wide than expected. But if the gap of 8-10 points that was continually touted had never existed between the two, public opinion today would be more prepared for a result on the wire and a contested election.
The post The unreliability of the vote by mail, the stop and go of the counting and the dirty game of the polls appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/linaffidabilita-del-voto-per-posta-lo-stop-and-go-dei-conteggi-e-il-gioco-sporco-dei-sondaggi/ on Thu, 05 Nov 2020 14:19:01 +0000.