January 6 Redux

The Reality of January 6^th Part 1

To understand January 6^th you have to understand the backdrop of January 6^th. 

It is crucial to the January 6^th narrative that there was no vote fraud.  The position is mandatory to paint January 6^th as an insurrection instead of an act of patriotism.  That is why many Democrats become rabid when you mention the vote fraud in the 2020 election.  If there was massive vote fraud – Trump was right (again) and his opponents were wrong (again).

There were enough “in kind” contributions from the mainstream media, social media, and various Internet companies to throw the election.  They hampered Trump's message and hindered his fundraising efforts (such Twitter/Facebook/Google cutting off some Trump fundraising in the days before the election).  But that is interference not fraud.

Let’s talk vote fraud.  It is odd when you look at vote fraud cases, the majority of vote fraud used to occur in the primaries.  Typical is the Compton Council race where Isaac Galvan conspired with Jace Dawson (another primary opponent) to defeat Andre Spicer in the Democrat primary runoff election by having people from outside the district vote for Galvan.  In fact most vote fraud that was prosecuted prior to 2016 appeared to occur in Democrat Primary Elections That's not good, it means Republicans were facing the best cheaters in the Democrat party as their general election opponent.  In the 2016 election there were about two dozen cases of non-citizen voting mostly from two counties that looked closely at the general election for some reason, and an uptick in mail-in fraud.

But the 2020 election introduced a new element, widespread mail-in ballot use, that was ripe for fraud.  This is demonstrated dozens of cases like Trenae Ryesha Rainey, a nursing home employee who ordered, filled out, and returned two dozen mail-in ballots for residents without their knowledge during the 2020 general election. Or Krista Michelle, Conner who sent in her deceased mother's mail-in ballot.  The 2020 election had few non-citizen voting convictions but about 30  mail-in ballot fraud and duplicate voting convictions primarily in the general election.

The claim there was 2020 vote fraud was denied by the media, the opposing political party and much of the “establishment” Republican Party.  Fraud investigations were not vigorously, thoroughly, or competently pursued anywhere.

Election Officials by and large resisted the investigations and were uncooperative.  What investigators were able to piece together were:

• Numerous problems with chain of custody and other election procedures
• Interference in the election by non-election officials (mostly Zuckerberg funded partisans)
• Various weaknesses in election machines
• Communication hardware (wireless cards and such) in actual voting machines.
• Problems with voter rolls,
• Some destruction of records and log files 
• Accusations of late or oddly sourced mail-in ballots.

But the lack of cooperation and failure of various secretaries of state to bring down the hammer and force a real investigation left us with an inconclusive picture.  Putting a number to how bad the election day machine fraud was, and whether it changed the election, is not possible with current information.

Trump's two legal teams assembled prior to the election were forced by the woke mob and some establishment Republicans to withdraw before the election.  He was unable to secure competent replacements, in my opinion, from reading some of their legal briefs. The evidence wasn't laid out in a clear way, and various unproven theories and back of the envelope calculations made their way into the filings. I did not find the filings persuasive and was not sure there was enough provable fraud until “True the Vote” laid out its case. 

What we do know is 2020 election in Fulton County Georgia and some of the surrounding counties was a complete mess on all levels with less than 5% of the chain of custody documentation filled out in Fulton County and excessive numbers of mail-in ballots (literally truck-loads) ordered too late to mail out.

We have known for a long time that elections in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major cities aren't clean.  The fraudulent vote in Chicago has been said to be about 10% since 1960.  Yet the Republican establishment apparently can't be bothered to take an interest and seems to treat it as a cost of doing business, in part because it is a fools errand to ask the winning Democrat cheaters to investigate their own cheating.

As bad as inner city elections are, mail-in balloting is worse.  The mail-in ballots were supposed to be returned by mail, or dropped in drop boxes, which in theory preserves chain of custody.  The only people touching ballots between the voter and the election officials were supposed to be USPS personnel acting as agents of the election officials.  But in some states (like Maryland) “ballot harvesting” is permitted.  “Ballot harvesting” is when an unlicensed unregulated agent picks up ballots from voters and delivers them to drop boxes.  While “Ballot Harvesting” may be legal in some states, it should be banned since it breaks chain of custody.  What happened far too often (7% of the time in swing states according to “True the Vote”) was that the ballots didn't come from voters but from partisan organizations.

Ballot trafficking is when ballots are delivered from partisan groups to drop boxes by people they hire, typically for $10 per ballot.  This is illegal and was done anyway in swing states.  There is no way to know how the partisan organizations got the ballots to begin with.

The REAL election fraud was by mail-in ballot trafficking.  “True the Vote” used GPS data and drop box video to match people to drop box locations. They identified cell phones that got within licking distance of multiple drop boxes and scrutinized what they were doing. There have been fact-checks of the evidence from True the Vote.  To summarize the position of the fact-checkers: “We don't like 'True the Vote', and it is completely normal for people to pick up hundreds of ballots from partisan organizations (like Stacey Abrams' Atlanta office and 2 Democrat Atlanta non-profits), deliver them to 28 or more drop boxes in 5 counties, fan the ballots to make the bar or QR codes visible and take a picture (to get their $10 per ballot), then drop them by the dozen into drop boxes.”

The amount of ballot trafficking exceeds the amount needed to overturn the election in swing states.   The level of ballot trafficking blows the “elections are fair” narrative out-of-the-water.  It also undermines the voting machines are safe narrative. If ballot trafficking can occur on this scale without leaks to news organizations, a large scale voting machine fraud program is also possible.

Yet there has been no serious investigation by the Georgia Secretary of State (a Republican).  Establishment Republicans used to care about elections.  The 12,000 vote cheating in the 1994 Sauerbrey vs Glendening election was challenged.  But as demonstrated by the Sauerbrey campaign’s lawsuit, having the Democrat winners who cheated investigate their own cheating is not a winning proposition.  However the 2020 election brought cheating to a wholesale level with 2000 ballot traffickers who drop boxed hundreds of thousands of ballots in the swing states to turn the election. Both “Never Trump” (establishment) Republicans and Democrats have ignored the evidence or taken a mulligan on investigating it.

The difference may be Trump.  Establishment Republicans and Democrats worked hand-in-glove to persecute an innocent Trump when he was in office. Perhaps Establishment Republicans and Democrats are still buddies.  Or it could simply be that establishment incumbents of all stripes routinely cheat against their primary opponents and don't want elections to be examined closely.

Since it is obvious from the “True the Vote” investigation that there was massive fraud, it is curious that establishment politicians, Democrats, and news media claim there was none.  Just to be clear – there is no benign explanation for the “True the Vote” data.  But then the anti-Trump narrative has to be maintained.

Ballot harvesting and ballot trafficking in federal elections must be made federal crimes. Further, there should be a right to force a 100% audit and 100% canvass of a limited number of problem precincts.  A 100% ballot audit/canvass won't stop fraud – but it will give us some solid data on how bad things are.  The 100% audits/canvasses must be done by an independent group with complete access to all records.

The Democrats have been fighting to stop fair elections for a while now by opposing Voter-ID, opposing the cleaning of voter rolls, making it easier for illegal aliens to vote, and expanding mail-in voting among other measures.  “Dirty” voter rolls are required for massive mail-in ballot fraud.  There has to be a pool of voters on the rolls that are guaranteed not to vote.   The position of the Democrats is unsupportable. Having insecure elections invites fraud by everybody.

 We need to elect Republicans who will fight back, Republicans who will take election integrity and election interference seriously. And we need to thank the patriots who showed up on January 6^th, not condemn them, because, after all, they were right.

God bless everyone and God bless America.

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Paul Agle is a Member of the Montgomery County Republican Central Committee.