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Commentary
He said, she said
It turns out that your opinion about Dominion Voting Systems depends not only on who you are but when you are asked.
If you zip way back to December 2019, then, if you are Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, or Amy Klobuchar, you are very worried about their security.
Back then, these high-minded public servants wrote letters warning that these widely used voting systems were “prone to security problems.” “We are particularly concerned,” they wrote, that “voting machines and other election administration equipment, ‘have long skimped on security in favor of convenience.’”
That was in December of last year—the good old days when NBC, for example, warned about “Chinese parts” and “hidden ownership” of the machines.
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“Chinese manufacturers,” they noted, “can be forced to cooperate with requests from Chinese intelligence officials to share any information about the technology and therefore pose a risk for U.S. companies,” not to mention “the concern of machines shipped with undetected vulnerabilities or backdoors that could allow tampering.”
As I say, that was a year ago.
Today, post-Nov. 3, 2020, you don’t hear the Democrats worrying out loud about the security of the machines that counted (not to say manufactured) the votes that led to Joe Biden’s apparent victory.
On the contrary, to raise questions now about Dominion Voting Systems and the software that powers them, as Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and others have done, is to obstruct “democracy” and promulgate “conspiracy theories.”
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Zip back to 2006, and you find CNN running stories about how vulnerable electronic voting systems are to interference and hacking. Back then, the watchword was “Democracy for sale.”
It was all especially worrisome since the machines are used in some 2000 counties across thirty states.
Today, the response from the Dems is a cross between Alfred E. Neuman (“What, Me Worry?”) and Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
So who are you going to believe?
Sidney Powell says that the Dominion system got its start in Venezuela, where it assured the victory of Hugo Chávez. She says it can be programmed to weight the results, giving one candidate an automatic advantage, and she says further that this actually happened in the 2020 election to favor Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates. (She says it happened in 2016, too, only the software was not programmed to give Hillary Clinton enough votes to beat Donald Trump.)
It will be interesting to see if she can prove it. Apparently, the Trump legal team has worries, since on late in the afternoon on Nov. 22 Jenna Ellis, part of that team, pointedly announced that Powell was “not a member of the Trump legal team.”
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For its part, a Dominion spokesman claims that the company is “non-partisan,” that it has “no connections” with “Venezuela, Germany, Barcelona,” or other countries.
He claims further that “It is not physically possible for our machines to switch votes from one candidate to the other. . . . There is no way such a massive fraud could have taken place.”
That makes me feel so much better. How about you?
Shocking Results
I especially like it that, according to this Dominion rep, “the electronic vote can be audited via a paper trail.”
I suspect that I am not the only person who would like to see audited paper trail for the states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
Meanwhile, The New York Times has performed a public service, albeit inadvertently.
It turns out that the Times had recorded and published real time data from the election.
It did not report on the data, but one alert commentator, Woody Jenkins, has analyzed the data for Georgia and Pennsylvania.
The results are shocking.
The data for Georgia shows Joe Biden picking up 16 tranches of exactly 4800 votes each over the course of a few days, first erasing Trump’s lead and then skipping into the lead. “How did it happen? There is no possible explanation,” Jenkins notes, “except vote fraud.”
A similar tale unfolded in Pennsylvania, except that there were 44 tranches of vote dumps, each of 6000 votes. “In both states,” Jenkins writes, “the ‘votes’ counted were not the votes of real people. They were simply added digitally, which a complete recount of both states would detect.”
What are we waiting for?
Abraham Lincoln, in a message to Congress on July 4, 1861, early in the Civil War, noted that “ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”
Note the qualification: “When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided.” What happens when they are not fairly and constitutionally counted and, moreover, when they are widely seen not to be?
Sixty-odd years before Lincoln spoke, John Adams, in his inaugural address of 1797, noted that
“We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our Liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.”
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Adams went on:
“If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, the Government may be the choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good.”
I wonder what Adams would say about the election we are living through now?
Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books. His most recent book is “Who Rules? Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Fate of Freedom in the....
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....WITH MARK LEVIN
Commentary
The United States and America-watchers elsewhere are now in the uneasy vortex between the American political establishment’s overwhelming assertion that the presidential election has been decided, and the presentation by lawyers for the Trump campaign of what they claim will be incontrovertible evidence of a massive attempt at election fraud.
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Since 95 percent of the national political media of the United States was so hostile to Trump that it rarely hesitated to misquote him, give entire credence to totally unsubstantiated allegations against him, impute discreditable motives to him, and simply invent and propagate malicious falsehoods about him, it is no surprise that 80 percent of the discernible opinion is celebrating the end of Trump.
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The more worldly members of that group, whatever their affectation of confidence, have a disagreeable feeling that they may not have seen the end of this president. And the, admittedly arbitrarily estimated, remaining fifth of political observers are the president’s more vocal supporters, who are generally confident that the election has been stolen and concerned about whether the theft can be undone or avenged.
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Just as before the election, America’s political community is sharply divided between two groups that seem not to share any common beliefs, apart from a reluctant acknowledgment that they live in the same country.
For the more benign and civilized of the president’s opponents, the terrible meteor has already vanished. The president no longer speaks to the press and is not addressing political meetings and by virtue of that fact alone the political temperature of the country has settled down appreciably.
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Large numbers of Republicans have flocked to these colors and made the traditional noises about being a good sport, enabling the system to function smoothly, and acknowledging that rough-and-tumble though it is at times, the governance of Norman Rockwell’s America moves steadfastly on and the president, having made a valiant effort, and even somewhat acknowledged to have rendered some service, should do the proper thing, shake hands warmly with the victor, and look forward to retirement, which for American ex-presidents always means a high general popularity after a short interval has passed since they left office..
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Dropping the Curtain Prematurely
The Democrats generally are simply telling Trump to go, and adding as the Biden spokespeople did a couple of days after the election, that “The U.S. government certainly has the resources to evict trespassers from the White House.”
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To them, Trump’s claims to have been cheated at the polls concludes his freakish and nightmarish sojourn at the summit of American public life with a controversy as squalid and unfounded as the birther nonsense in the midst of which Trump entered American public life.
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And in between these two episodes, they say, it has all been vulgarity, egomania, posturing, and failure. Good riddance to it, and to him.
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To the tatters of the Bush, McCain, Romney Republicans, Trump was practically as odious as he was to the Democrats but he was after all a Republican president, so let us see him off without any more recriminations, and let’s set about rebuilding a Republican Party that occupies the White House half the time but leaves the great gelatinous mass of liberal democratic bureaucratic government in place and unvexed.
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And now elements lightly attached Trump are also starting to peel away; former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the Washington Examiner, the National Review, are not withholding credit from Trump for what he achieved as president but are claiming that his attempted scrutiny of the election result has yielded no serious evidence of fraud and therefore it is time to throw in the towel.
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They are all, for their own reasons, trying to bring down the curtain prematurely. Trump did not run for president as a marginal opponent like John McCain, the Bushes, and Mitt Romney did, or even as Ronald Reagan did: someone opposed to big government but once in office focused practically exclusively on two admirable objectives which he attained—a low tax, low unemployment economy and bloodless victory through military superiority in the Cold War.
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Trump was and remains a mortal threat to the complacent bipartisan political establishment that gave us the 20 awful years of poor administration that preceded him, with its endless Middle Eastern wars and humanitarian disasters, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, increasing poverty and violence at home, and a steady loss of ground to China in the world.
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He was not just another Republican and the Democrats did not oppose him as if he were just another Republican. The reason the country is so polarized is that Trump wanted to throw out practically the entire establishment, and the establishment fought in and for their entrenched positions with the arrogance and the desperation of incumbency.
The Speed of an Anti-Missile Missile
That is why Trump is not finished yet. Approximately 74 million people voted for him, not desultorily and not because he was the Republican candidate, but for HIM and against the OBushinton establishment.
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President Trump’s lawyers, especially Sidney Powell, a fierce and talented former prosecutor who has exposed and denounced the corruption of the American prosecution service and the criminal legal system generally, held a press conference with Rudolph Giuliani last week in which they promised an assault upon what they described as the most massive electoral fraud in American history and the reversal of an election that Trump had, if the votes were counted fairly, won by “a landslide.”
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The outcry from the gallery of the skeptics, from Chris Christie to Barack Obama, is that the president’s counsels have presented no evidence. But that is how the system works; when people launch a lawsuit they make a statement of claim and provide the evidence later. In this case, because of the deadlines laid down by the Constitution, the evidence will have to be produced with extraordinary promptness and the issues evoked to high courts with the speed of an anti-missile missile.
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On Nov. 21 Sidney Powell said the allegations will be “Biblical”; earth-shaking in their scope and implications. But the credibility of this minority, fading position was not fortified when Ms. Powell was abruptly disembarked from the campaign on Nov. 22.
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The voting patterns in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were very peculiar and the argument that the algorithms of the voting machines were overrun and harvested ballots were “dropped” in dead of night after the counting inexplicably stopped, to top out Biden, is plausible. This deserves an investigation and not just pieties about fair play.
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But if the president is making wild and unfounded allegations, it will be a less dignified end to his very successful presidency than he deserves, and the following he built and reinforcement of the Republican Party that he wrought will be dissipated.
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Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world. He’s the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and, most recently, “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other,” which is about to be republished in updated form.
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