What Is Trump Doing?

What do 2000, 2004, and 2016 have in common? They were all closer than the 2020 election. And still one month later, Trump is still trying to overturn the results? Why? What are his ultimate goals?

Before I continue ... a quick word to my conservative friends, of which there are many who sincerely just want to see Trump serve four more years. And I get it ... I hate it when my candidate loses. I really wanted Romney to win in 2012, but got four more years of Obama instead.

My friends are great ... and they give me a lot of leeway. But I am very concerned -- not only for our country, but also for my conservative friends, who I believe to be deceived by a charlatan. I've been trying since early 2016 trying to convince them that Trump is not the best pick for a conservative candidate, of which my friends are fully aware.

I am in no way concerned about Trump actually winning, but I am very concerned with what comes next. So, perhaps I'm writing to prepare my friends. I'm also hoping to save what's left of the conservative party I used to love. As I've said before to my friends, I'm playing the long game -- I would love to see conservatives back in power, but we've got to remove this cancer that has infected us, and I'm hoping to help bring some of this to light.

I see this (sincerely) as the first step for preparing for 2024 -- if conservatives want to have any hope of regaining power, the Trump just has to go. He lost, and as I'm about to show, the widespread fraud that he claims just doesn't exist ... at least not to any degree that could overturn the results.

In 2000, Bush beat Gore in the state of Florida by less than a 1000 votes. That was CRAZY! This time 20 years ago, I really had no idea who are next president was going to be -- it was that close. Gore really could have won.

Bush won the original count in Florida, and he won the automatic recount (though his lead narrowed some). And here I lose count, but he won all subsequent full and partial recounts until the Supreme Court finally put it to rest just in time for the electoral college to vote in December.

Did Gore have the right to do what he did? Heck yeah. The first recount was automatic. And he had the right to request another recount. I did not agree with his creative counting, but I do not fault Gore one bit -- he fought till the end.

The same happened also in 2004 and 2016, but to a much lesser degree. Both Kerry and Hilary asked for recounts in battleground states -- there was at least hope for them for a turnaround in the vote. And there was nothing wrong with that.

Technically, there's nothing wrong with Trump in 2020 doing the same thing as Gore, Kerry, and Hilary: asking for recounts and launching lawsuits, but -- oh my -- the degree that he's chosen to carry this makes 2000 look like nothing. But the funny thing is ... Gore ACTUALLY HAD A CHANCE with less than 1000 votes separating him from the presidency. Can Trump really hope to achieve what Gore couldn't? The mathematician in me knows it's not going to happen, as there are hundreds of thousands of votes standing in his way. And get this ... Biden's leads in most of these battleground are actually LARGER than what Trump won in those same states in 2016.

And so far Trump is keeping everything "legal," but he's now starting to put pressure on conservative legislatures to send alternative electors to the vote next week, which would be very ... interesting. However, I believe that what he is doing now is still damaging the trust in our own democracy. Trump believes (or he says he believes) that he lost the election because of fraud, and many of his base believe him ... so much that they're willing to give him hundreds of millions of dollars AFTER ELECTION DAY, protest, and otherwise try to pressure legislatures.

But where is the fraud? One of my friends argues: "If they're really good at the fraud, you're not going to be able to see it, and that's why we have to stop it." This is all well and good, but in order for judges to do anything, it has to be something ACTIONABLE. That is, something you can point to and say, "See here?" and they look and have no choice but to rule "fraud." But this just isn't happening. (Have patience ... I'm getting there.)

So far, judges are throwing the vast majority of these cases out ... with prejudice even, and not just liberal judges, but even conservative judges ... some of whom Trump, himself, appointed. Conservative secretaries in several states (who voted for Trump and want him to win) are testifying there is no fraud. Even people high up in Trump's cabinet are testifying there is no fraud -- knowing they may very likely lose their jobs.

As for myself, I've found that I can take most claims that Trump and his team come up with, do just a little bit of research, and discover with ease that they're false or unprovable -- it's not really that hard. Information is readily available on the webs -- you just have to be willing to go past the one or two sources most ultra-conservatives hit (which apparently does not include Fox News right now -- so funny!). 

This is also the MOST AUDITED election the US has ever had. It almost had to be because Trump kept talking about voting fraud for the entire four years in office. There were measures that he himself helped to be instituted to fight fraud. So, Trump is at a catch-22 here ... either he really lost the election or he really failed to stop fraud.

And the best part ... every state has a freakin paper trail. We saw in Georgia, which uses the Dominion software, that their hand recount came out very close to the first count, and the same with the second recount that just now finished. If Dominion had been flipping votes as Trump insists, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN CAUGHT IN THESE HAND RECOUNTS. I would swear this on my whole career as a mathematician, actuary, modeler, and audit-minded dude. I have to deal with auditors all the time, and believe me ... you can't get anything past those guys.

But where to even begin with the debunking of Trump's claims? It would take forever because there is so much -- Trump is very prolific. The best I can do is to hit the claims in classes. Perhaps it would be good for you to start with this recent debunking by the BBC.

One of my favorites is from that article ...

Dead People Voting

Just one year ago, I sincerely believe that dead people were voting, but then I saw the movie "Selma," and then I realized what's really going on. I reexamined the dead people voting claims I've heard throughout the years -- and sure enough ... it's mostly no proof at all, or hearsay, or misunderstandings (except for onesies/twosies here and there).

As the BBC article above indicates, they looked into a list of 10,000 identified dead people who voted, took a random sample and then performed research. Out of 31, they found 28 were still alive, 1 was a real case of a dead person trying to vote ... but the vote had already been tossed out, and 2 cases of people who had died within weeks of the election (alive when they sent the ballots). You can get even more information on this research here.

The situations uncovered (from that article and others like it):

• Some of the alive people on the list had names coinciding with people of the same name in the same state (and sometimes even the same birthday) who had died. (When you have millions of people in a state, the chances of this happening are actually quite high -- which I may explain one day.)
• People who were able to confirm that they were truly alive.
• Cases of Jr / Sr confusion.
• Cases of a wife signing her name as her husband (Mrs. John Doe), like they used to do in the olden days.

More People Voting Than Registered

Think about it: if this were really going on, it would be very easy to prove. I've looked at a few of these, and in all cases, the numbers being used were outright wrong, and it was very easy to find the right numbers.

For example, consider this picture retweeted by Trump on Nov. 27:

In case this picture gets deleted, it shows: PA mailed out 1,823,148 ballots. 1,462,302 were returned. However, PA reported 2,589,242 mail ballots tabulated. Where did 1,126,940 votes come from?

Sounds like a slam dunk case of fraud caught with its pants down. But wait just a second. What happens if I were to do something different ... like ... look up the numbers myself?

The U.S. Elections Project does a pretty good compiling statewide voting data. You'll find these may be a little off from earlier reported numbers due to timing issues, but they are pretty close to the supposed 11/24 numbers -- except for one exception. The total number of ballots requested was 3,087,524 (the number I see today). Not 1,823,148.

Some sites conjecture that the person compiling the 1,823,148 number either got the Democrat requested (1,941,131) mixed up with the total requested. Or perhaps the number came from the Primary election and not the General. In either case, it didn't take very long to confirm that 1,823,148 was never right at any time.

When Trump decided to retweet this errant, he could have taken five minutes to do the same kind of research, but instead he chose to propagate this misinformation. Either because he was lazy, or he was simply forwarding what he wanted to hear, and damn the consequences. Hopefully you didn't fall for the same trap.

This is just one example, but I'll leave you with a challenge. Trump's team has uncovered plenty of these types of bad data. Wherever you hear that 120% of the people voted, or any variation of "more than registered," I bet you can find the true numbers and see that the allegations are plain wrong. I've done it a few times, and it really is eye-opening.

Strange Vote Surges

In the picture at the very top of this post, Trump is holding a timeline of the vote counts in Wisconsin, showing how he was winning and then ... BAM ... all these Biden votes come in one big surge ... just enough to put Biden into the lead.

And again, there was this strange one in Michigan (a famous screen shot that Trump retweeted):

The numbers are really small in this graphic, but it shows absolutely no change in the vote counts for Trump, but it shows an increase of 128k votes for Biden. Trump is in the lead in both pictures. What up with that?

For the Michigan surge, we know that it was a human error -- a typo from one county that was corrected. In fact, Matt Mackowiak deleted his initial tweet the very next day, because he knew it was a non-event. In a review, the error was found and corrected -- it was only a matter of time before it would be discovered.

The surge in Wisconsin is more of a case of "so what?" Votes aren't all counted simultaneously. If you look at the entire graph, you'll see surges for both candidates throughout the whole night. Most likely, a big (blue) county reported its large number of results all at the same time, giving a large boost to Biden. Timing of reports just isn't any kind of evidence of fraud.

Though, didn't anyone else find it strange that Trump tried to claim victory in several battleground states in his late night speech on Election Night -- even before there were still many votes left to tabulate? And at the same time, wasn't it funny that Trump tried to stop the votes where he was in the lead, but not in states where he had fallen behind? (If you look at Trump's words more closely, you'll see a lot of these types of contradictions -- it's very strange how many people seem to be missing this.)

Shenanigans at Voting Precincts

There are a lot of unsubstantiated reports of strange happenings at precincts. Reports of shredding, pulling ballots from under tables, trucks delivering many votes for Biden and other Democrats, running selected ballots through the machines multiple times, using sharpies to sabotage the ballots, and so on. I'm not going to try to attack specific cases, but in general:

• Voting precincts will tell you exactly what they were shredding (blank envelopes, faxes, duplicate documents, etc.) and report that they can produce all the ballots as needed because they've kept them all -- and yes -- all the mail-in ballots have creases (in some states).
• There were indeed trucks delivering certain items such as food, equipment, etc., but there is absolutely no evidence that generated ballots (that is, not filled out by real people) were in any of these trucks. The lack of evidence means nothing for judges to act on. In many cases, the precincts will tell you what was in those trucks. For a fraud claim to be any good, evidence has to be ACTIONABLE.
• Some districts were indeed running ballots through multiple times any time a batch was thrown out due to an error (thus requiring a rerunning of all the ballots in the batch once the error was fixed).
• Any ballots that can't be read by computers must be handled by hand. This is standard practice in ALL states. It's silly to think a sharpie could sabotage a ballot, because a human being could clearly see what was marked.

I will hit the "ballots from under tables" thing separately here, because it's by far the most annoying. We have a video from Georgia that shows a "mysterious" table that is pretty much left alone all day, and then people are told to go home around 10:30, and as soon as they leave, election workers pull out these four bins of ballots and resume counting. How do we know this happened? Because the narrator of the video told us.

But when you talk to people who were actually in the room, they tell a different story. I won't go into it here, because I'm sure you've already looked it up. But I don't think it really matters, because, we, on the outside, don't know exactly what was in those bins. Yet there exists a perfectly plausible scenario ... (I figure if others can conjecture, so can I, and it took me less than a minute to think this one up) ... those were early vote or absentee vote ballots.

According to Georgia law votes can't officially start to be counted until 7PM on election date. However, the earlier ballots can be preprocessed -- verified and scanned -- anything but counted.

So, you have all the Election Day ballots. The first thing you're going to do is verify and scan those puppies, and then start the counting process at 7PM. At some time during the night, you're going to pull out all those earlier ballots that have already been preprocessed and start counting those -- but you don't have to do so much with them because they're already preprocessed.

Yeah ... maybe it's my wishful thinking -- I don't know what was in those bins, and you don't know, either. We can only speculate (or ask the election workers).

Again, there is no ACTIONABLE evidence that those ballots were pre-generated Biden votes. No evidence, no case, and absolutely no convictions on PURE SPECULATION in our justice system.

Dominion Vote Flipping
Again, there is no evidence that this is happening. In fact, as I've said above, if there were vote flipping, it would have been caught by the hand recount in Georgia ... BOTH TIMES. And it wasn't. 

I realize there's that stupid tweet going around today about running an equal number of Trump and Biden votes through a "sequestered Dominion" machine, which showed a 26% lead for Biden. 37 votes were flipped. The argument continues that if that same flipping rate flowed throughout the whole country, then Trump really did beat Biden in the popular vote!

First off, it's a very strange coincidence that 37 additional votes were indeed awarded to Trump in Ware County after an audit revealed an error. That's 37 votes for the entire county ... not from some random small test. I'm thinking someone got their signals crossed.

And who exactly performed this test? And where exactly is this sequestered machine? Evidently Debbie Browning of the Tift County knows, but then it turns out that she doesn't know, but her friend knows. See where I'm going with this?

So again ... no ACTIONABLE evidence. And certainly one could recreate the experiment just for kicks ... that's how science works. But there's no reason to do so when the alleged "bad" test can't even be proven to have taken place.

As many secretaries and even the DOJ have attested, there is absolutely no evidence of vote flipping by computer software.

Republican Leaders Attesting to No Fraud

This is probably one of the biggest puzzles to many conservatives. Why is it that Attorney General Barr, Chris Krebs of election security, several secretaries of state, the governor of Georgia, and several other conservative officials -- who most likely voted for Trump and wanted him to win -- all testified that no substantial fraud existed in this election and that the results are the most accurate results yet produced? Could they all be in the pocket of China?

It may seem like cognitive dissonance, but maybe -- just maybe, there wasn't really any fraud? The fact that all these guys are strong conservatives gives more credence to the idea that there really is something to this idea.

I strongly recommend watching this entire interview of Chris Krebs (13 minutes well spent if you want to get down to the truth), who spent two years beefing up election security throughout the nation, only to be fired by Trump for DOING A GOOD JOB and then be accused of intentionally sabotaging the election.

Republican Hearings

People ask me why I'm not watching these hearings. They think if I watch, I will be impressed with the mountain of evidence and finally be won over. And my answer: it's all a big waste of time. It's one big show with no substance. It reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Homer complains about a pail of bad shrimp, and when Apu throws in another pail, Homer says, "Woohoo!"

I see it as no different than what the Democrats tried to do in the Kavanaugh hearings. All for show, and accomplishing nothing. These are all hearings, and not binding courts of any kind. That's why the mainstream media isn't covering them -- because they're inconsequential. 

They're also hilarious ... at least bits and pieces that I've captured. SNL did a good job covering lots of the funny business ... and then I come to learn that most of what they made fun of actually happened! The funny witnesses, the terrible proceedings, and even the MyPillow Guy in the mix.

Most of what happens in these hearings are more of "all the above" that I've covered in classes. None of it is ACTIONABLE. Or it's bad data that's easy to disprove. Or PURE SPECULATION impossible to prove. If anything, I believe these hearings just make Trump and the entire Republican Party look bad, drastically lowering the chances of the two conservative Senator candidates being chosen in the next couple of weeks, giving all power to Biden. And possibly damaging the Republican Party for 2024 chances as well. But we'll see ... sometimes our memories are short.

Alternative Theory

I actually have an alternative theory that fits Occam's Razor pretty nicely.

I think that Trump planned all of this from the beginning. When the coronavirus hit, and things weren't going his way, he knew that his chances of winning in 2020 were dwindling. 

He saw early on that Democrats were more likely to be scared of the virus and be more likely to use mail-in ballots. It would take time for these ballots to be delivered in the mail, and some would even come in after Election Day (but postmarked on or before Election Day). He also knew that Election Day votes would be counted first, which would show bias toward Trump, and that more Biden votes would appear the next day and later when states started counting more mail ballots. I explain all of this in this analysis.

So, what did Trump do? He went after mail-in ballots, claiming they were bastions of fraud. He went after drop boxes, knowing it would make it harder for people to get their votes in on time (would you believe one county cellophaned their only drop box and marked it CLOSED?) His appointee instituted several new policies to slow down the mail, including dismantling automated sorting machines ... though most of these were reversed. He went after ballot receipt deadlines.

Trump floating the idea that the Americans deserved to know the winner on Election Night, as if it were a Constitutional right, which is far from the truth. There has never been an election when all votes are finished tabulated that night. (Alaska, anyone?) That's why the Constitution allows for weeks for the votes to be tabulated before the electoral college votes in December.

But sure enough, Trump claimed victory in several battleground states while they were still counting -- where he was far from mathematically clinching the majorities. 

And then he did what no other candidate had done in the past. He sued for some states to stop counting, when they hadn't even FINISHED THEIR FIRST COUNT. In 2000, 2004, 2016, each losing candidate at least waited for each state to finish their original count before taking any kind of action.

And as each stage of Trump's plan failed, he moved on to the next stage: suing to stop certifications, trying to get state legislatures to send alternative electors, and I'm not sure what comes next. Maybe after today he's done?

Perhaps he truly thinks that fraud occurred, and he's sincerely trying his hardest to expose it. But my alternative theory makes a lot of sense: Trump simply wants to stop the Biden votes. Attack the mail, the ballots, the timing, ... anything to keep power.

And yes, from where I stand, I see one the biggest onslaughts ever taken by a sitting president on our Constitution -- almost as if trying to pull what Putin successfully pulled off in his country earlier this year. And I can't tell you how elated I am to see that the Constitution is surviving this onslaught, and how I can fully appreciate the wisdom of our Founding Fathers when they created our government. It really gives me hope for the future of this country, for the first time in years.

Yes, it could just be my theory ... but man, does it fit the observations quite nicely!

Closing Thoughts

Whatever happens, we're in this together. I am pretty tough on Trump in this blog post, but I believe it's warranted. It's not directed toward any of my readers. I do not condemn anyone who voted for Trump. I fully understand why you like him. He does have some good traits that liberals have a hard time seeing.

Do you remember the protests four years ago and the whole "Resist" and "He is Not My President" movements? Do you remember how conservatives felt these movements were unconstitutional and disrespectful to the office of the president? Do you remember many saying how un-American it was?

I would likewise love to see all of you resist the temptation to do exactly the same when the electors choose Biden to be our next president next week. I hope you don't stoop to the same level and ignore the system that our Constitution has set up. The last thing I would want to see is a stupid civil war because some can't accept our chosen president as President.

More urgently, I'd like to say this to my conservative Georgia friends (of which there are many): you had better go vote in the special election. I really don't understand this self-destructive movement to boycott the vote because Trump is losing his election. I'll reiterate something I've said at least twice this year: if you don't go vote, I believe you will lose the right to complain about Biden getting full power when both Senate seats go to the Democrats. If you don't want Biden to get this power, then NOW is the time to act. Put it on your calendar: January 5, 2021. There is only one way for you to help keep the Senate red -- go vote! I know you have a beef about the Republican Party not supporting Trump, but the time will come later to take care of that.

Eventually I believe that this will all pass. My wife implies to me that I don't have to write this post, but you know me -- when I have something to say, I don't mind saying it. I'm hoping that going forward we can work together to find someone else better than Trump for 2024 who can do a much better job of reuniting America and truly strengthen our country. I think ultimately, we will figure it out.