Committing to the peaceful transfer of power is not incompatible with using the legal means provided to ensure that the election giving rise to that transfer was legitimate.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
“Don’t cry for help; there is no help; but give a signal.” – Allen Wheelis, “The Signal”
To begin at what some are calling The End, the morning of November 6, after a sleepless and terribly windy night — our home amid California’s immense redwoods and firs is in danger from falling limbs, trees, and now countries — my partner and I beheld a spectacular sunrise of dusty blues and pinks and oranges seen through the sliding door of our shelter room, where we had scurried in the wee hours just about as the election was called for Donald Trump.
As we beheld nature at its most glorious, and humanity at its most perplexing and grotesque, we held each other briefly, each aware that that dependable gesture of consolation was almost entirely bereft of effect. She, weeping and asking helpless questions. I, just listening, numb, trying desperately to stop the spinning and find the ground.
In less than two minutes the sunrise was gone and the dark reality of the next four years had begun. The next presidential election was, by my quick count, 1,463 days away, and here we were in the early hours of the morning of Day 1, looking out our window and seeing not trees and hills and sky but a seemingly boundless expanse of lone and level sands of time we had no plan for crossing.
In very rough terms, we could leave (to where?), put our heads down and become “good Americans,” or join the resistance (doing what?). I had this strange sense that I should be doing something — today, right now! But I was bone tired.
I have been writing and editing and analyzing, corresponding, conversing, urging, explaining, essentially nonstop for eight years and, before that, advocating for election reforms for decades.
Only for it to come to this: an election that, if it was not the product of systemic rigging, was the product of a national psychosis.
Either way, my work — and that of so many others — had failed. Abysmally.
How Was It Possible?
The nation, presented the clearest choice imaginable, had just — by a margin of a couple of percentage points, but, by modern electoral standards, decisively — rejected a decent human being offering a platform of forward-looking, inclusive, uplifting policies in favor of a deranged fascist offering nothing but bilious lies, snake oil, slanders, and promises of vengeance.
In spite of what certainly looked like the worst closing week of any campaign in living memory. In spite of the incoherence, the threats, the ever uglier repetitions of misogynist and racist and, yes, fascist tropes. In spite of the curious public embrace of a supposed “populist” by worker-hostile billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Timothy Mellon. In spite of the mile-long parade of former staffers, associates, and high-ranking officials who warned most publicly and vehemently about the dangers posed by the man they had come to know up close and personal.
How was it possible that none of that registered?
How was it possible that voters bought the line that mass deportations and Depression-intensifying tariffs would make their lives better?
Or that even more drilling and gutting of regulations would work out for them in the face of the hurricanes, floods, heat, drought, and fires that have brought (literally) home to so many the menace of global warming?
Or that the American economy — the strongest in, and the envy of, the world — was in shambles?
Or that a plutocrat who reveled in making the rich richer would mitigate rather than exacerbate America’s obscene wealth imbalance?
And how account for the fact that, in the national exit poll, concern about democracy was the most motivating issue for voters, ahead of the economy, abortion, and immigration? Or that, measured by Gallup in October, fully 77 percent of Democratic voters registered high enthusiasm, compared to 67 percent of Republicans, a very significant enthusiasm gap?
Were there really so many Americans for whom the cruelty package of this buck-naked authoritarian and his power-panting minions turned out to be such a source of delight and arousal that it trumped all concerns and all rational thought?
If our nation had been, as Germany was when it elected Hitler’s Nazi Party in 1933, mired in a great economic depression and desperate for rescue… If Trump had put on any sort of mask — of moderation, compassion, inclusion… If he and his backup singers had not doubled and tripled down on derision, on threats, on slurs, a steady crescendo of MAGA hate up to and through his menacing Nuremberg Square Garden rally… Then it might be possible to comprehend the bizarre contours of Election 2024’s returns. Then we might sigh and say “Yes, I can see how he managed to get reelected.”
Instead, we are left to ask: How, by what inane calculus, by what twisted non-Euclidean geometry, was this outcome possible? Were there really so many Americans for whom the cruelty package of this buck-naked authoritarian and his power-panting minions turned out to be such a source of delight and arousal that it trumped all concerns and all rational thought?
Apparently so. Donald Trump once again outperformed the polls — polls that had been “corrected” after his 2016 and 2020 performances to catch up with, and account for, his magical propensity to outperform them. He even won the popular vote, while sweeping all seven swing states.
While just about everyone with a keyboard or a mic has taken a crack at explaining how this all came to pass, and what the Democrats and media need to do going forward to keep it from ever happening again, there is very little agreement on either topic. The only consensus is that it did come to pass — that, in this mother of existential elections, America chose Trump. And MAGA.
I should note here that, as someone who has spent decades of work in statistical election forensics, I have long been a skeptic about the integrity of US elections in the post-HAVA computerized voting era.
I examined at length the anomalies of 2016 and the even more glaring anomalies of 2020, only to see those objective, data-based analyses drowned in the wild and baseless allegations of Trump’s Stop the Steal campaign. That national trauma — culminating, in one sense, on January 6, 2021, but still infusing America’s water supply four years later — left no one at the adult table with any stomach for ferreting out election process vulnerabilities, let alone data or patterns suggesting a more penetrating look into the possibility of actual interference.
Now Watch Closely, and Don’t Blink
When polls and vote counts go their separate ways, as happened dramatically in 2020, the pollsters get together (herding is a prevalent phenomenon in the polling biz) and “fix” their polls. They do this by tweaking their demographic weighting algorithms to nudge their results to where they believe they have to go to get the next election “right.”
In the case of 2020, they missed big to the left (pre-election and exit polls jibed with each other but were way left of the vote counts), so the tweak was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 percent to the right for 2024 — which may not sound like much but, in the context of electoral polling, is massive.
You can see the problem here, right? If computer-processed vote counts are taken as gospel, without adequate verification, and “failed” polling is then “tweaked” industry-wide to avoid making the same “error” in the next election, then that tweak will effectively “cover” a reprise of any thumbs on the electoral scale that might have contributed to the first polling debacle.
Put another way, a rigged election serves to corrupt the principal baseline we depend on for an assessment of the validity of the next election. If there is a rig, it finds its way into and compromises the model the pollsters develop and use next time.
Why I Wasn’t Exactly Shocked
My partner, and millions of others, were shocked and devastated because they didn’t believe the polling that showed a Harris-Trump dead heat. They relied on reports that the polling industry — behaving as a herd — had corrected and, in fact, likely over-corrected, to the right for their big 2020 miss to the left, such that Harris would comfortably outperform her polling numbers.
I was more pessimistic, noting that if whatever factors caused the big polling miss in 2020 were still kicking around (and we had no good reason to believe they wouldn’t be), then the polls this time would be accurate and the race very close. Since, historically, there is almost always a red shift, a close race in the polls has generally spelled disaster for the Democrats. Cue the funeral march music.
Donald Trump actually dramatically outperformed polls, both pre-election and exit, that had been methodologically tweaked to prevent that very thing from happening in a third straight presidential election.
We who follow the election circus around with a forensic pooper-scooper are still in the process of gathering and analyzing the data (no analysis can be completely reliable until all votes have been counted), but it is clear enough that when the final dust settles there will be a major red shift on top of the built-in red shift from the industry-wide post-2020 “correction.”
That’s right: Donald Trump actually dramatically outperformed polls, both pre-election and exit, that had been methodologically tweaked to prevent that very thing from happening in a third straight presidential election.
So did the lion’s share of down-ballot Republicans. And the red shift happened across the board — in swing states, safe states, bellwether counties. And it cut across demographic groups. Kamala Harris and the Democrats leaked votes just about everywhere and from just about every kind of voter.
Since tabulating computers can’t distinguish between “male” and “female” votes, or “college-educated” and “non-college educated” votes, or “old” or “young” votes, or — except perhaps geographically — between “White” and “Black” and “Latino” votes, when the overall outcome stems from strong or weak results from just a few of those cohorts it militates strongly against any theory of systemic vote count manipulation.
When, however, the damage is general, and includes cohorts with conflicting agendas that rarely if ever move in lockstep, it at least raises the possibility that votes or whole ballots were lost or miscounted by some sort of systemic error or interference.
The dropoff in Democratic votes from 2020 wasn’t huge; this wasn’t a landslide; Trump will likely wind up with a mere 1.4 percent popular vote victory; the House and Senate will both remain narrowly divided. But it was enough to give Trump and MAGA a trifecta and, with his Supreme Court supermajority, complete control of the federal government. (I heard the word “mandate” at least a dozen times from MAGAs today on NPR.)
Trump’s early appointments make evident what he plans to do with that control — uber-MAGA and unter-qualified Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense; Christian Zionist, Rapture-awaiting Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel; climate-denier Lee Zeldin to run the EPA; fellow fabulist and vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. to head Health and Human Services, setting the nation’s health agenda; Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to swing axes at government programs and personnel; Putin apologist, cultist, and national security risk Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence (!); John Sauer as solicitor general, to argue for Trump the government before the Supreme Court, where he was just recently so successful in securing Citizen Trump virtually blanket immunity from criminal prosecution; and, last but certainly not least, Matt “Generosity to Ex-Girlfriends” Gaetz as our new attorney general, ably supported by (which support he will need, having barely practiced law a day in his life, but can you say “conflict of interest?”) two of Trump’s own lead criminal attorneys, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove.
Hoo boy, the way it’s going, one can picture George Santos anxiously waiting by his phone.
In all cancerous seriousness, these appointments are pretty clear signals, in case anyone was harboring any doubts, that Trump and MAGA mean business. Or, as Liberty Valance said, “Alright, dude, this time, right between the eyes.” Get ready for Project 2025, squared. As Trump once put it, “Will Be Wild!”
Before You Give Up on America
Please stay tuned. When I have completed my statistical forensic inquiry, including the 2024 edition of the scatterplot analysis presented here (spoiler alert: it’s even more egregious than in 2020), I expect it to raise several data-based questions about the reliability of the 2024 election results, which I will present on this site. Not proof of interference or mistabulation, but certainly enough to justify a harder look at some of the paper ballots that have been ballyhooed as a guarantee that any attempt to rig our elections can and will be exposed and thwarted.
Unfortunately, timely access to those ballots remains, as it has been throughout the last two-plus decades of the computerized voting era, more of a theoretical than a practical possibility. Traumatized by the threats and attacks of Trump’s Stop the Steal, election administrators are understandably even more reluctant than they once were to “open the books” and let the public root around in their records.
Which means that the simplest, most straightforward way of verifying precinct-, county-, and state-level results — examining and counting a few tranches of voter-marked ballots and comparing those counts to the computer tabulations — is effectively foreclosed. Perhaps efforts to examine and reconcile digital ballot images (DBI), using a tool developed by long-time election transparency advocate John Brakey, will meet with more success.
Many have suggested that the patchwork of state- and county-level audits would expose disparities between computer counts and voter marks, rapidly revealing any systemic rig. But that is assuming that if an audit of a sample of ballots or precincts finds a disparity, it will be regarded as a red flag or potential iceberg tip and the audit expanded accordingly. That, however, while it makes all kinds of sense, is far from certain to happen in the real world.
Instead, what generally happens is the discovered “error” is fixed — by adjusting the sampled vote counts accordingly — and the administrators celebrate and congratulate themselves for their diligence and the “success” of their audit. I know this sounds absurd but, for election administrators more allergic than ever to bad publicity, expanding an audit — and potentially discovering an election rife with “errors” or, as will certainly be charged, fraud — is not an inviting prospect.
If Trump had found himself on the losing end last week, we would have seen Stop the Steal on Steroids. Instead, at best, we’ll have Stop the Steal on Quaaludes. Nobody is going to be storming the Capitol, and that’s a good thing.
But being forced to accept election results that just don’t add up, without any real transparency, with not so much as a peek under the hood? That is not a good thing.
I am aware of several groups working rather feverishly to access the ever-elusive hard evidence — poll tapes, voter-marked ballots, DBIs, cast vote records (CVR) — that would shed light on the causes of the curious statistical patterns that are emerging.
For all sorts of reasons, this effort pales to near invisibility compared to Trump’s 2020 Stop the Steal. Our election-related warfare is, to say the least, asymmetrical (with the kicker that Trump’s ingrained habit is projection, accusing his opponents of doing exactly what he himself is doing — the allegation being, in this case, “cheating”).
If Trump had found himself on the losing end last week — even without the red flags we’ve already identified — we would have seen Stop the Steal on Steroids. Instead, at best, we’ll have Stop the Steal on Quaaludes. Nobody is going to be storming the Capitol, and that’s a good thing.
But being forced to accept election results that just don’t add up, without any real transparency, with not so much as an official peek under the hood? That is not a good thing.
And that, with very rare and partial exceptions, is what we have been doing throughout the computerized voting era. And it is what has led us here, to the nightmarish place we are now.
Vice President Harris, if you are by some chance listening, I hope you understand that committing to the peaceful transfer of power is not incompatible with using whatever legal means are provided to ensure that the election giving rise to that transfer was legitimate.
In the coming days and weeks, along with a growing group of qualified analysts, I will be doing my level, objective best to determine whether the results of Election 2024 were in fact organic or synthetic, whether the electorate genuinely made this confounding choice, whether we are indeed in the grip of a national mass psychosis.
Meanwhile, as potential targets of Trump’s retribution pack “go” bags, I can only pray that, somewhere in the flotsam of this wreck of mind and heart, I find the fortitude, and you find the fortitude, to make it through each day of the four long years (at minimum) to come.
