Thread by @cppinvest

1/ I just listened to a fascinating call arranged by our friends @TweetMacro with John Fund, the Wall Street Journal columnist and author of books on voter fraud. Here’s the punch line: there was undoubtedly fraud in this presidential election but not enough to move the needle.

2/ Fund’s basic point was this election was rife with improprieties – probably more than most – but it’s too much for Trump to prove it in a short timeframe, and then get the establishment that has attempted to thwart him at every turn for four years to do anything about it.

3/ So Trump needs to run the process through to the December meeting of the electoral college, and then concede. But, that doesn’t change Fund’s other important point: we spend too much time on who is in office and not enough on how they got there.

4/ Fund points out that 35 states rushed through changes to their electoral laws IN RESPONSE TO COVID. Those steps lead to Biden’s win.

5/ Some of the rushed changes Fund pointed out were the elimination of postmarks on mail-in ballots and the abandonment of voter ID verifications to a wide degree. He named PA, NJ, NV and CA as egregious examples.

6/ For example, while many western states have been moving toward mail-in ballots for years, those changes in process have been gradual and planned over multi-year periods, not rushed through in three to five months as they were in many eastern states this year.

7/ In PA for example, historical absentee ballot ratio was 4%. It was 60% this year. Fund’s contention, to which I agree, is that the Democrat parties in important states used COVID to create “planned chaos” in the election (more on that momentarily).

8/ He outlined Trump’s position as one of playing catchup with not enough time and that Trump’s legal team, which varies in quality by state, will run out of runway. The Supreme Court will use the 2000 precedent to not allow this to go past the Electoral College date.

9/ He called this election irredeemably tainted with irregularities everywhere but Trump simply doesn’t have the time to run them all down.

10/ He made an excellent point about our electoral system and idiot Republicans who deserve everything they get: since Bush v. Gore, the Democrat apparatus has been singularly focused on altering election outcomes through process changes. The GOP has done. . . nothing.

11/ He made many other good points. Specifically, that recounts rarely reverse outcomes. He spent alot of time on PA and NV stats. The normal rejection rate for absentee ballots in PA is 4-18%.

12/ With PA election officials now swamped by mail-in ballots, they now had wide latitude to alter the process.No valid postmarks? Ballot counts. No sig matching? Ballot counts. Have to get the count done tonight.

13/ NV completely rewrote its election laws after COVID and mailed a ballot to EVERY PERSON on its voter rolls. He pointed out how notoriously fishy and outdated most state voter rolls are and called this move a disaster.

14/ Ballots were piling up in lobbies, mailed to people that moved out of the state, etc. 60-75k workers in Vegas lost their jobs due to the COVID. Many of them moved out of state. The state GOP has 3100 examples of people no longer resident in the state of voting in the state

15/ Not going to move the needle but still a problem. Also in NV, signature verification screens were turned so low, 98% were declared valid. His point about all this was the result could only be that ballots don’t get the necessary scrutiny.

16/ He called this election the “perfect heist.” The planned chaos is done deliberately because the point is to blur the line where chaos ends and incompetence begins. Election officials are happy to be called stupid; they just don’t want to be called “the defendant.”

17/ He noted how Republicans have woken up. In 2018 in Orange County, Democrats won every house race due to effective ballot harvesting. They used the changes in the law to their advantage. In 2020, the state GOP stopped bitching about the bad law and acted.

18/ They built a network of 1400 churches and harvested ballots under the new law very effectively. Look how many House seats the GOP flipped in CA this year.

19/ Finally he notes that GA has a history of runoffs. For literally every office. University provosts, governors, senators, utility commissioners. Democrats have won exactly zero runoffs in GA throughout history.

20/ He suggests Trump should appoint a bi-partisan commission to examine the process. The Dems are reaping the rewards of 20 years of subverting election laws.

21/ He dismissed virtually all of the viral accounts swirling around social media about the OUTCOME of the rumors, not that those irregularities didn’t occur but that they didn’t occur in sufficient volume to help Trump.

He closed with some excellent observations. An unfettered Trump could be fascinating to watch. Trump as a media mogul could have a huge impact, though he thinks Trump doesn’t have enough money to make that happen and compete against CNN or FOX.