A few days ago I posed a question about the possibility that Donald Trump ‘stole’ the 2024 election. This stemmed from a court case in New York State challenging the result in Rockland County. The case was brought by independent candidate, Diane Sares, who claims her votes were somehow undercounted. Her attorneys raised a point about a phenomenon known as ‘drop-off’ where voters cast a vote for (in this case) a Republican candidate for president but Democrat candidates for other positions lower down on the same ballot. The initial brief in the case cites an academic study carried out by researchers at Yale and published in Nature, the world’s premier academic journal, which reviewed 42 million votes across 20 US states from the 2020 election and found the ‘normal’ drop off rate is between 1.1% and 1.9%.
They did this by analysing the Cast Vote Record, an electronic record of the result held by individual counties (not at the state level) and published by a man named Jeffrey O'Donnel in support of his assertion that
"America was the victim of a coordinated, multi-state, conspiracy to defraud the 2020 General Election." O'Donnel obtained the data from what is described as a "
surge in requests for cast vote records by anonymous constituents" between 2020 and 2022. His PDF is titled: fingerprints of fraud volume one v1.07.pdf and you can view it
HERE.
Ironically, O'Donnel was trying to uncover fraud by Democrats, and he was supported in this by Mike Lindell also known as the My Pillow Guy and Mike Pillow. He's a big Trump supporter, a wealthy businessman, political activist, and conspiracy theorist.
Despite 60+ legal challenges, there has been zero success in proving the 2020 election was stolen, although we know Trump tried to force Georgia into adding 11,780 votes to his tally to ensure he would win by a single vote. This is all on tape.
However, the CVR data used by the researchers in Nature assumes it is a faithful record of the paper ballot filled in either by the voter using a special pen or produced via a machine known as a BMD or Ballot Marking Device, where voters use a touch screen to choose their candidates. The ballot can be more than one page and contains candidates for President, Senator, Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Judges, and so on. Each county would have its own individually designed ballot paper.
The ballots (of both types) are then read by another machine to count and record the votes, sometimes called a tabulator, using optical scanning.
Someone recently sent me details of an election that took place in Georgia in the 2018 mid-term for Governor and Lieutenant Governor (LG). The Democrat lady who stood for LG was Sarah Riggs Amico. She lost, but later launched a challenge because she believed the result was manipulated.
She discovered her drop-off rate (between Governor and LG) was markedly different from other candidates in the 2018 election, compared to 2014. She also uncovered apparent problems in the voting machines and/or the tabulators. She did this by comparing the drop-off rate between paper ballots filled in by hand and ballots produced by a BMD.
Hand-marked paper ballots showed similar and virtually identical drop-off rates to those of both Republican and Democrat candidates in 2014 while BMD ballots in 2018 showed a much higher negative drop-off rate for her, the Democrat candidate. In short, it meant that if you voted by mail or early or on-the-day by hand marking the ballot paper yourself, you were statistically as likely to vote the same way for both Governor and LG as a Republican voter.
But if you were a Democrat who voted by a BMD machine, and lived in predominantly Democrat voting counties in Georgia, you were far more likely to cast your votes for different candidates.
Weird eh?
Moreover, as voting took place, the more Democrat a county looked like voting, the more Republicans voted. This seems to start at 25-50% of votes being cast. In other words, it looked like the voting machine(s) sensed the voting trend and decided to head it off by inserting or changing votes to produce a Republican result.
Ms Riggs Amico can be seen telling her story on YouTube
HERE.
You might ask why anyone would want to rig the result of an election for what is a relatively minor post in Georgia. The answer is because that person controls which bills are heard in the Georgia Senate!
The case went all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court, which decided there was no case to answer.
Amazing.
