ROGER KIMBALL: Time for a reckoning on the 2020 election.
In 2008 the super-smooth historic cleans-up-well rocket man Barack Obama got 69.4 million votes, crushing John McCain. (In 2012, Obama snagged just shy of 66 million.) In 2020 sleepy Joe Biden, campaigning from his basement, seems to have blown by Obama’s historic victory. Biden, remember, clocked in at 81.3 million votes. Turnout in that election was an astonishing 66.6 percent, a number that dwarfed Obama’s 61.6 in 2008. Amazing. Astonishing. Or anomaly number two?
It was such numbers that led some observers to speak not of “turnout” but rather of “turn-in” in the 2020 election. All those mail-in ballots. All those drop boxes. There were plenty of recounts following the 2020 election. But how many audits were there? It is one thing to count the number of pebbles in a box two or three separate times. It is something else to find out how the pebbles got there in the first place.
We haven’t done that. And, as the canny former prosecutor who writes on Substack under the soubriquet “Shipwreckedcrew” observed in a newsletter on October 26, it may well be “impossible to know with any certainty… whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump received more validly cast and counted ballots in the 2020 election.”
And that fact, the fact that we just do not know what happened in the 2020 election, means that lurking just behind the word “anomaly” is the word “fraud.” As Shipwreckedcrew notes, because every state has its own procedures for administering presidential elections and for dealing with challenges to the results, “there is no uniform standard for what is to happen if outcome-determinative fraud isdiscovered.” Moreover, “we do not have a solution for the problem of fraud that changes the outcome of a presidential election.”
Flashback: Time for Consequences: The “Cabal” who bragged about rigging the 2020 election stuck us with an incapable president at a time of crisis. Examples need to be made. “I would like to see some accountability for the election of 2020. A cabal of insiders colluded to control the outcome, through all sorts of underhanded tactics. (Tech companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story broken by The Post, and retired intelligence officials falsely claimed it was fake, Russian disinformation). The press allowed Biden to campaign from his basement, covering up the truth that he was already unfit for office.”