I’ve never heard of Joseph Fried before, and it was only a few days ago that I became aware of his four-month-old book Debunked: A Professional Auditor Reviews the 2020 Election. But it turns out that this veteran MBA and CPA, who recently retired from his own auditing firm and now writes at Substack, has given us what must surely be the definitive work on the topic. Having “professionally conducted and reviewed hundreds of audits,” he brings his decades of experience in that field to bear on the administration of the 2020 presidential election in each of the six swing states that were awarded to our current dotard-in-chief, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Throughout the book, Fried’s objective is to “analyze the major claims of fraud or irregularity, the credibility of those claims, the available evidence, and the threshold audit standards the states applied, or should have applied, relative to those claims.”
I don’t know the first thing about the work of an auditor. But Fried is a very good teacher. Among much else, he explains that a recount is not an audit – the latter must be performed by independent professionals – and that a mere recount doesn’t preclude the need for an audit. Nor does a court’s ruling on procedural grounds negate an auditor’s findings.
In some cases, an election result cries out for an audit. One test is statistical likelihood. The 2020 election, as it turns out, failed this test spectacularly. A few examples: for almost sixty years, the winner of the electoral votes from Ohio and Florida has also won the nationwide election – but in 2020, no. Since 1898, any candidate winning those two states plus North Carolina has taken the presidency – but, again, not in 2020. For forty years, nineteen bellwether counties around the country have correctly predicted the ultimate winner of the presidential sweepstakes – and who won eighteen of them in 2020? Trump.
There’s more. Not in 150 years has a candidate whose vote total jumped as much as Trump’s did from one election to the next ended up losing the election. Never has any incumbent who received over 75 percent of the votes in his party’s primaries (Trump won 94 percent) lost the general election. Rarely has a president lost a re-election bid even as his party picked up seats in the House. Then there’s the blatantly obvious difference in voter enthusiasm between Trump – with his epic campaign rallies – and Biden, whose events sometimes seemed to draw more journalists than voters. Then there’s what is apparently a suspicious variation in turnout rates between otherwise very similar cities: for example, 84 percent in Milwaukee, but only 51 percent in Cincinnati.
None of this, Fried underscores, proves anything. But all of it points to the urgent need for a legitimate audit. So do a number of other problems in several widely distributed jurisdictions. For instance, several Democrat-run states, purportedly seeking to make the voting process safer (because of COVID) and easier (especially for minorities, who, it was claimed, somehow had special difficulties in navigating the process), dramatically broadened the use of absentee ballots and relaxed (or entirely removed) ballot signature requirements. Some states even sent out unsolicited ballots to every registered voter. All of these actions were blatant invitations to massive fraud. Republicans who protested were condemned as racist reactionaries – even though most countries in “progressive” Western Europe ban absentee ballots entirely for resident citizens, and those that do allow them are much stricter in distributing them.
Some states hired election workers who weren’t able to operate the computers involved. In many locations, there was large-scale “vote harvesting” – the practice, by political operatives, of going door-to-door to collect voters’ completed absentee ballots and then delivering them (perhaps intact, perhaps not) to the appropriate polling place. And a number of state governments – often at the last minute – made illegal changes in election procedures.
For a responsible auditor, there are other questions to be asked. Were voter logs updated? Were ballot requests logged? Who emptied the drop boxes in which absentee voters deposit their ballots? Who, after the ballots were received, maintained chain of custody? Who had access to the computers used in ballot processing? Where were ballots stored? Who witnessed ballot counts?
MUCH MORE HERE https://www.frontpagemag.com/auditing-bidens-victory/