More News Coverage of the CPRC’s Research on Vote Fraud
According to economist John Lott, whose good work we’ve trusted since we began a relationship with him while at Investor’s Business Daily, Biden carried these states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – by only 313,253 votes. Take out Michigan, and the gap was 159,065. In other words, it’s possible that the man in the White House is not the legitimate occupant.
His objective, however, “isn’t to contest the 2020 election,” Lott writes in RealClearPolitics in reference to his peer-reviewed paper, “but to point out that we have a real problem that needs to be dealt with. Americans must have confidence in future elections.”
Add Lott’s work to the Zuck Bucks that “helped swing the electorate” away from Trump, elections rules changes made by Democrats that helped Biden, the shadowy and all-encompassing “well-funded cabal of powerful people” that was determined to keep Trump from being reelected, and other reports of voting irregularities, and the 2020 presidential outcome looks shadier today than it did in the weeks after the election.
But, like Lott, we’re not interested in revisiting 2020, as much as we’d like to see Biden and Kamala Harris removed as far as possible from the levers of executive power. What we want is an honest accounting of what happened, followed by a consensus admission that our system has problems, which then should be identified and fixed.
Editorial, “Are we sure the 2020 Election was Clean?” Issues & Insights, March 30, 2022.
John R. Lott is a highly respected scholar and author. His 1998 bestseller, “More Guns, Less Crime,” settled the question of whether gun control or gun ownership contribute to safer streets. He has recently turned his scientific mind toward the issue of vote fraud, studying it from a different point of view than most.
Mr. Lott’s peer-reviewed research, to be published in Public Choice, studies the 2020 General Election by statistically comparing neighboring precincts in neighboring counties, predominantly looking at the critical swing states of Pennsylvania and Georgia.
One might assume, with Republicans motivated and confident with President Trump’s successful presidency, and Democrats demoralized and uninspired with an elderly and likely senile sacrificial lamb at the top of their ticket, that Republican turnout would be strong and Democrat turnout would be sluggish.
Mr. Lott’s research of Republican-majority and Democrat-majority counties largely showed that very difference in voter enthusiasm and turnout, with an interesting exception: the vote totals indicate that Democrat turnout increased to match Republican enthusiasm only in the Democrat-majority counties where vote fraud has been reasonably alleged.
Mr. Lott points out that the precincts he studied – in six key swing states – are neighboring precincts along county lines, generally identical demographically except for that invisible county border down the middle of the street. The only significant difference between them is whether normal Republican city and county officials run their election apparatus, or if that apparatus is controlled by a suspect Democrat machine.
His research indicates some 255,000 extra votes in just the areas he studied.
And when you expand that to the entire country? This is a pattern of fraud worthy of all the attention that Republicans have always said it merits. . . .
Leahy: We welcome to our newsmaker line again, our good friend John Lott, the head of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Good morning, John.
Lott: Doing great. I hope you’re doing well, too.
Leahy: We are. So I read this piece you had in Real Clear Politics. Let me just read this. New research, by you, is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed economics journal Public Choice, and it finds evidence of around 255,000 excess votes, possibly as many as 368,000 for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
In six swing States where Donald Trump lodged accusations of fraud, Biden only carried these states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – by a total of 313,000 votes. Excluding Michigan, the gap was 159,000. Tell us about this study.
Lott: Well, I’m not trying to re-litigate the 2020 election, but I think given the concerns a lot of people have about possible problems, it’s important to know what went wrong or might have gone wrong to try to avoid this in the future. I mean, you look at surveys.
There’s a survey out this month by Rasmussen Reports that shows that 34 percent of Democrats believe that there was sufficient fraud to alter the outcome of the 2020 election. And obviously, large supermajorities of Republicans and Independents feel the same way.
And that’s pretty corrosive to people being involved in politics if they think that there is a continued problem. And so we had a lot of rules that were violated during the 2020 election. And it’s important, I think, to try to measure the extent of the problem so that we can try to avoid that in the future.
Leahy: John, you’re a statistics guy. Let me ask you this. At some point when we look at all these statistical analyses, people’s eyes glaze over because it’s kind of hard to follow the thread of logic. Now you say evidence of 255,000 excess votes. How do you define an excess vote and how do you measure it?
Lott: So the tests that I have are actually very simple tests. It took a lot of gathering of data, but let me go through the first one, for example, and that is one of the main accusations involved mail-in or absentee ballots.
And so you have counties where fraud was alleged versus a county being right next to other counties where there were no allegations by anybody that there were improper things going on.
Now you can’t really just compare the whole counties in terms of get-out-the-vote efforts or other things, because you have a county like Allegheny County next to Westmoreland in Pennsylvania.
In Pittsburgh, there are huge differences across the whole county … there are big differences in terms of demographics and voter registration, and what have you. And so what I aimed to do was to look at the precincts at the county border.
You have to understand that precincts tend to be very small. In Allegheny County, there are 1,323 precincts just within that one county.
Precincts are very small, very homogeneous areas. And so if I’m looking at two precincts, one on either side of the street that kind of separated the county there, you’re talking about two small areas that are very similar demographically in terms of votes and how they voted.
Simon: Hey, John, Roger Simon, if you don’t mind my breaking in here.
Leahy: Roger Simon, by the way, is an all-star panelist. He’s a columnist with The Epoch Times. He’s in-studio with us as our co-host every Thursday. Roger has a question for you, John.
Simon: You started out by saying you don’t want to re-litigate the election, but when I hear that roughly a quarter of a million votes are essentially illegal, the first thing I want to do is re-litigate the election. (Chuckles)
Lott: We can go and try to do that. But to be honest, I’m worried about what happens in future elections, and that’s what I want to try to concentrate on.
Maybe at some point in the past this would have been something to go after, but I think that this is a significant problem.
Leahy: You want to fix it, John, for the future. So your methodology here is you’ll take two adjacent counties. I’m guessing that some of the counties that you’re looking at got a lot of money from Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Technology and Civic Life to do kind of, ‘election administration.’ A lot of critics call that “get out the vote for the Democrats.” Am I right in that?
Lott: Yes, sure. So if I can just finish what I was trying to say earlier. So you have these two precincts that are very similar. They vary in just fractions of a percentage point in terms of how they voted, in terms of in-person or absentee votes in 2016, for example.
And if you look at how they voted in 2020, in terms of the in-person votes, they were also very similar. But in terms of the mail-in ballots, you find a big gap as soon as you walk across the street or in the county where fraud was alleged.
So one of the things just to point out that is the in-person votes are counted at the precinct level. The issues involving fraud or other things were occurring for the absentee or mail-in ballots that were counted centrally at some central counting facility there.
And so it’s kind of hard. If you’re going to go and have some get-out-the-vote effort, what you’re going to do is, it’s a statewide campaign. You don’t care about winning an individual precinct that’s there.
And you’re going to target precincts based on their voter registration, based on the type of voters, whether they’re black Democrats or whatever you’re aiming for to be able to go and get.
You can drive across the street between these counties and you’re not going to notice any difference in terms of the demographics or anything when you’re talking about these very tiny areas. . . .
