A good friend called “bullshit” on my suggestion that the 2020 election was shady.
In a kidding-not kidding way, he diagnosed me as having had a mental breakdown. My experience bringing automation into heavy manufacturing plants required me to develop a thick skin. I take no offense, and interpret my buddy as not kidding about his actual puzzlement at my election assertion.
I am interested in what actually happened in 2020, and find the numbers to be abnormal. I explained all that in the previous post. My friend suggested that Covid accounts for the extraordinary voter turn-out in 2020. That’s plausible, so I looked into it.
This graph shows in-person voting on election day, mail-in ballots and early in-person voting.
In 2020, 43% of votes were mail-in ballots. That’s about 50% more than would be expected from historical trends. My friend would attribute the increase in mail-in ballots to the fear of Covid that existed at the time. That would be plausible if Biden had not gotten 15 million more votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Why would Covid cause more apathetic people to take the time to vote?
An increase in voter turn-out could be attributed to a strong ground game by the campaign. It’s unlikely that during the Covid epidemic, more volunteers would knock on doors and more apathetic voters would take the time to talk to masked strangers making the case for their candidate.
Mail-in ballots are subject to ballot harvesting and other election interference in ways that in-person voting is not.
In my previous post, I lamented my inability to do a more sophisticated analysis to determine where all of the extra votes came from in 2020. The Washington Post has done some of that analysis.
The WaPo article looks at several cities, and graphically presents the voter shift toward Trump, change in votes for Harris, and change in votes for Trump, compared to the 2020 election between Trump and Biden.
This isn’t a sophisticated analysis. For each city, there is a three-panel picture. The first panel is the net shift in votes between 2020 and 2024. That isn’t interesting because voters change their minds. The second panel shows the change in voters for Harris between 2020 and 2024. The third shows the same thing for Trump. It’s interesting to compare those two panels, and look for areas where Harris lost votes, but Trump did not gain them. Those would be areas where fewer people voted.
The theory is voter harvesting in 2020 yielded many more votes for Biden in 2020. That wasn’t done in 2024, so Trump did not gain those votes.
Atlanta:
Detroit:
Houston:
Miami:
Milwaukee:
Phoenix:
Philadelphia:
I’m aware that my three-panel graphic isn’t high-res and the analysis isn’t thorough. To really dig, an analysis would investigate the precincts with extraordinarily high mail-in ballots in 2020, along with the difference in the number of votes cast in 2020 compared to 2024. It doesn’t matter because 2020 is over, and nobody cares. There is substantive evidence that JFK stole the 1960 presidential election from Richard Nixon.
Election integrity matters, and as a country, we should insist on the most secure balloting achievable.
Not too many years ago, the Democratic Party insisted that requiring valid identification in order to vote, was an effort to discourage Black folks from voting. Everyone else argued that it was racist to assume that Black folks don’t have driver’s licenses. Now, it’s well understood that not requiring valid identification facilitates cheating. California insists on cheating.
Mail-in voting is less secure than in-person voting. Perhaps President Trump can encourage states to improve their election procedures.