Jack Smith Makes Me Think Trump Won in 2020
Vote early and often
I used to be agnostic on the victor in the 2020 presidential election.
I simply didn’t know since our system is so botched and riddled with holes in almost every state it’s difficult to determine the winner in any of our elections that are even relatively close.
I still remain somewhat agnostic, but the tenacity, resembling monomania, with which our Torquemada-like special prosecutor Jack Smith seeks to indict and convict Donald Trump leads me to believe Mr. Trump actually won.
Many may also feel that way because of the manner in which Mr. Trump’s poll numbers tend to grow the more he is indicted.
I admit my reaction is to some extent psychological/emotional, but it does have a factual basis.
It is not for no reason that the French abandoned voting machines in 2008 in favor of verifiable paper ballots. They feared, as have Americans of both parties in the past, the machines were too open to sabotage.
A number of examples have been put forward indicating that occurred in 2020. They have been “debunked” by various supposedly knowledgable parties, including then Attorney General William Barr who, with questionable credibility because only three weeks past election day, shut the door on investigation, declaring there was, as always, some cheating but it was insufficient to affect the election.
The word “debunked” itself at this point should be debunked.
Meanwhile, the reason for the persistence of these computerized voting machines, despite this possibility of technological flummery, is that they are a staggeringly successful business with many opportunities for one hand to wash the other.
A May 2019 article at the PA Post tells us that 18 Pennsylvania counties chose the company ES & S for their machines at an estimated total cost of $48 million.
That’s just one state—in only 18 of 67 its counties.
“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s….” Well, you know the rest.
The opportunities for corruption abound. And that’s not to mention the early voting (before debates are held), ubiquitous mail-in ballots (something even Barack Obama originally opposed), pervasive ballot harvesting with reams of envelopes dumped anonymously in the middle of the night, non-citizens automatically registered to vote when they get driver’s licenses, no ID necessary in various states, no real signature verification in various states, people voting from non-existent addresses, people voting in the wrong state, dead people voting and so forth.
I could go on, but, in sum, our election system is a national disgrace that our officials, local and national, have allowed, even here in supposedly conservative Tennessee.
Some purported Republicans pay lip service to fixing this, but they are being, in the parlance, largely performative. Nothing much has happened to improve the situation and Donald Trump has had to resort, against his professed beliefs and those of many of us, to acquiesce to an inherently unsound early voting/mail-in voting system.
All this when the French, with their paper ballots, are able to declare a winner in one day.
Which brings me back to Mr. Jack Smith.
No matter what he tells us, or tells himself, he knows no more than we do about what happened in 2020.
Nevertheless, his pursuit of Mr. Trump, whatever its legal niceties (to employ an overly-polite word), depends on the unproven assumption that what happened on January 6, 2021 was indeed an “insurrection,” rather than what it more likely was—the often-exploited reaction of bewildered citizens for whom our electoral system did not compute with what they had seen in the streets. Everything went haywire from there.
Further, as Alan Dershowitz points out on his Substack, Smith’s indictments also depend on the premise that Donald Trump secretly believed he had lost the election but pretended otherwise, an assumption with no evidence that puts Smith in competition with Uri Geller as a mind reader.
Others, like law professor Jonathan Turley, have written that Smith’s new indictment “does not hold together well.” But worse than that, the special counsel's bullheadedness serves to divide an already divided nation even further.
So when I say Smith’s ongoing lawfare jihad against Trump makes me believe 45 actually won in 2020 more than I ever did, it is another way of saying something that should be apparent to those in and outside the legal world.
Something fishy is going on here that goes beyond what is already obvious to many of us—the flagrant attempt to interfere with the 2024 election.
That interference has long run ramifications that are yet greater than the current election. Smith's indictments are new form of propaganda that utilizes the legal system to distract from and render harmless those who seek to discover what actually happened in 2020 and therefore to analyze and repair our hugely unsatisfactory electoral system for the future.
It’s not just the election of Donald Trump that is under threat. It’s the already-besmirched electoral process.
Mr. Smith continues to do a disservice to America on multiple levels. Let’s hope the electorate continues to react negatively.
And for goodness sake, let’s finally reform our elections.
I followed the vote tabulation closely from the Pacific time zone, so I had the benefit of an extra three hours to watch returns being posted. Up until about 10;00 pm Pacific time, the count was going along about as I expected. What was particularly noteworthy was that the standard bellwethers, like Ohio having gone for the successful candidate in 14 of the past 15 elections, were consistently showing Trump as the winner. (I don't remember the numbers, nor do I remember all the bellwethers, so don't hold me to any of the specifics I cite.)
At 11:00 Pacific time (2:00 am in the east) counting had slowed or stopped, and the election appeared to be in the bag for Trump. There were still enough votes to be counted, and the count was close enough, that it could swing to Biden, but I was satisfied that in a normal election Trump would be declared the victor, so I went to bed.
There were still a lot of absentee and mail-in votes to be counted, but in the past they had not swung an election in any large number of examples. And Trump had something like 14 of the 15 indices ("bellwethers") that people watched on election night, so I thought it highly unlikely Biden would pull out a victory, especially after his listless basement campaign.
But there was one thing that was different about this election. Using Covid as an excuse, a number of swing state governors had opened up mail-in and dropbox voting, most of them allowing ballots to be counted even if they were not signed or if they arrived several days late. My own governor, in Nevada, had done this, and it particularly favored the vote count in Clark County (Las Vegas), where a very large bloc of votes were coming in from hospitality workers' unions, reliably Democratic.
I wrote an op-ed for the local paper listing all the anomalies in the vote count, but they spiked it and I can no longer remember them all. As I say, it sticks in my memory that there were about 14 out of 15 that showed a Trump win, just as the count had indicated up until about 2:00 am eastern time. Two that I do remember were Ohio (where I was going to move to in a few months) and the count from Philadelphia, where voter turnout was above 100% of the registered voters in several precincts.
Then there's the infamous video of boxes of ballots being pulled out from under tables late in the count. I don't know how they came to be there, but I will give the counting offices the benefit of the doubt there. I will also not give a lot of weight to AG Barr's comment that there didn't seem to be a lot of problematic counts. At the point in time when he made that comment, it would only have stirred up trouble to raise the specter of a corrupted vote. The same thing happened when Kennedy's vote was put over the top by a bunch of votes in Illinois, and Nixon conceded. There comes a time to stand aside for the good of the nation, even though Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had promised Kennedy he would deliver the necessary votes.
Bottom line: I don't think Biden's win in 2020 reflected an accurate count of ballots cast by individual voters. But the Covid pandemic made this a unique time, and the opportunities opened up by it were seized by unscrupulous politicos. Paper ballots probably would have made that a little harder, but not impossible since ballots were still being counted days after the election, especially in Democratic precincts.
Can we prevent this in future? Perhaps, but only if we can convince politicians that an election should reflect the will of a majority of voters, and not just satisfy their hunger for power. Sorry this was so long.
I find it more than ironic that we are criticizing the Venezuelan election.