Sorry, Trump Lost(hurl alert)

Elections are supposed to be about the future, but Donald Trump is stuck in the past. He is dead set on running for president in 2024 by campaigning on the very worst part of his record.

In his much-hyped return to the mainstream media, a CNN town hall on May 11, Trump doubled down on his claims that millions of fraudulent votes were the cause of his defeat in 2020. He said he had no regrets about his behavior before and during the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and that he does not owe Mike Pence an apology for ordering him to flout the Constitution and the federal law governing the counting of Electoral College votes. He recast his December 2022 endorsement of the “termination” of the Constitution when there is voter fraud as “cherishing” the Constitution. He said that if elected in 2024, he would pardon many of those convicted for illegally storming the Capitol, and he even left open the possibility of pardoning leaders of the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys who were recently convicted of seditious conspiracy for spearheading the attack on the Capitol.

But two and a half years after the 2020 election, the voter-fraud theories on which the “stop the steal” campaign was based look weaker than ever.

In November 2020, Trump and his allies eventually settled on the wild theory that Dominion voting machines had been programmed to “say that a Biden vote counts as 1.25, and a Trump vote counts as 0.75,” as Trump lawyer Sidney Powell said at the time. “The algorithm was likely run across the country to affect the entire election.” On January 6, in the speech he delivered near the White House, Trump promoted the Dominion conspiracy theory. But by then it had already been disproved by a hand recount in Georgia. Each voter used a touch screen to print out a paper ballot that stated in plain text the names of the candidates a voter selected. During the hand recount, with bipartisan election observers present, human beings read those ballots and sorted them into “Trump” and “Biden” piles. There was no way for those people to count a Trump or a Biden paper ballot as anything less or more than one vote. In other words, if there had been a systemic problem with the machine-counting of the ballots, the hand recount would have caught it.

In April of this year, the Dominion conspiracy theory received a final blow with the resolution of the company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The truth is an absolute defense against defamation, but the network settled with Dominion — after the process of legal discovery — for $787 million. Trump is unlikely to repeat the specific claims he made about Dominion while in office because he would open himself up to civil liability as a private citizen; he is likely protected from any personal liability for defamatory statements made while president. That’s one reason why he has shifted to a different voter-fraud theory.

“If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes,” Trump told Kaitlan Collins, the moderator of the CNN town hall. This is the claim at the center of the Dinesh D’Souza documentary 2000 Mules, released in May 2022, and it is a claim you’re likely to hear a lot more from the 2024 GOP front-runner over the course of the next year.

True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit, claims that by purchasing geo-location cellphone-tracking data it uncovered an elaborate scheme to steal the election. The scheme involved at least 2,000 people — the “mules” — who trafficked fraudulent ballots from liberal nonprofits to ballot drop boxes in the five key states that decided the election: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. True the Vote says it has obtained 4 million minutes — nearly 70,000 hours — of surveillance video of the drop boxes; the documentary shows a number of people dropping off a handful of ballots. “What you’re seeing is a crime: These are fraudulent votes,” D’Souza tells viewers as surveillance video shows one person dropping off a handful of ballots.

According to True the Vote, its criteria for detecting each of the “2,000 mules” is a cellphone that over the course of the month leading up to the election made at least five visits near a nonprofit and ten visits near different drop boxes. The organization estimates that the 2,000 mules made an average of 38 trips each to drop boxes, depositing an average of five ballots per trip, for a total of 380,000 fraudulent votes spread across the five states. In the documentary, D’Souza then runs the numbers: Without these ballots, Biden would still have won Michigan and Wisconsin, but Trump would have narrowly prevailed in the Electoral College by eking out wins in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

For a conspiracy so vast, the outcome seems a little underwhelming: Subtracting the alleged voter fraud facilitated by the supposed 2,000 mules would have given Trump a victory of just one-third of one percentage point in Arizona and Georgia, and the conspirators would not have been confident in advance that a small number of votes would deliver the election to Biden. But D’Souza has a solution to bolster the theory: more mules. “No one thinks that our 2,000 mules were the only mules trafficking illegal votes,” he tells viewers. Taking D’Souza up on this proposition, True the Vote then lowers the threshold for determining who was a mule, counting cellphones that were detected near a minimum of five drop boxes rather than the original ten. “This revealed a huge upsurge in the number of mules, from 2,000 to 54,000 mules,” D’Souza says. Voilà! Without the 54,000 mules, Trump would have handily won each of the five states.

D’Souza told me he was too busy to grant an interview for this article, and a spokesman for True the Vote also did not accept an interview request. So I can’t be sure why the movie is not called “54,000 Mules,” but I suspect it is because that title would have made the biggest flaws in the conspiracy theory even more glaring.

Despite the supposed existence of 54,000 illegal-ballot traffickers who placed fraudulent ballots at multiple drop boxes, D’Souza and True the Vote have publicly named precisely none of them. Trump’s political operation, flush with tens of millions of dollars, has identified no mules. Republican attorneys general in Arizona and Georgia, desperate for Trump’s support, have been able to expose not a single mule. According to True the Vote’s anonymous sources, the mules are criminals working for $10 a ballot. To evade public detection over the past three years, these 54,000 petty criminals must somehow have maintained operational security and secrecy that would put SEAL Team Six to shame.

Despite the 70,000 hours of surveillance footage, the documentary does not actually show a single person making more than one trip to a ballot drop box. If there were 54,000 mules — or even just 2,000 — shouldn’t the footage have detected hundreds of them?

In the year since the documentary was released, some individuals shown dropping off a handful of ballots at a single drop box have been publicly identified by their vehicles’ license plates, but there is no evidence that they acted illegally. The Georgia secretary of state’s office investigated three cases and dismissed each of them. In one case, an investigator tracked down a man seen in the film dropping off five ballots and was able to interview him and confirm by consulting voter data that the ballots had been cast legally by his family members. It is permitted in Georgia and many states to drop off the ballots of family members.

According to 2000 Mules, five left-leaning nonprofits filled out a million or more fraudulent ballots. For these ballots to count, the nonprofits would have needed to identify hundreds of thousands of people registered to vote and to know in advance that they would not actually cast ballots. Tellingly, the documentary and True the Vote have not publicly named these nonprofits.

In August 2022, D’Souza was set to publish a book based on 2000 Mules in which he did name the nonprofits, but his publisher, Regnery, claiming a “publishing error,” pulled the book from stores before it went on sale. “True the Vote had no participation in this book, and has no knowledge of its contents,” the group said in a statement to NPR at the time. “This includes any allegations of activities of any specific organizations made in the book. We made no such allegations.” When Regnery released D’Souza’s book two months later, the passage naming the nonprofits had been excised, according to an NPR reporter who had obtained a copy of the first version of the book.

What about the geo-location data? Even if the purported data show exactly what True the Vote claims, it does not prove a conspiracy. It’s entirely plausible that Uber drivers or deliverymen would come within 100 feet of ten different drop boxes over the course of a month. FactCheck.org reported that activists and politicians in some states held get-out-the-vote rallies at multiple drop-box locations. “The premise that if you go by a box, five boxes, or whatever it was, you know that that’s a mule is just indefensible,” Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr said in testimony to the January 6 Committee. The geo-location data “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting.”

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation observed in September 2021 that, because there was no “other kind of evidence that connects these cell phones to ballot harvesting,” it lacked probable cause to open an investigation or get a search warrant to obtain the geo-location cellphone data: “For example, there are no statements of witnesses and no names of any potential defendants to interview. Saliently, it has been stated that there is ‘a source’ that can validate ballot-harvesting. Despite repeated requests that source has not been provided to either the GBI or to the FBI.”

The conspiracy at the heart of 2000 Mules looks even more preposterous when one examines the election results in Pennsylvania. The movie claims that mules were responsible for 275,000 fraudulent votes in Philadelphia alone (under the theory that there were only 2,000 mules in the five states). That would mean that nearly half of all votes cast for Biden in Philadelphia — and a majority of all mail ballots — were fraudulent, without anyone’s having detected the widespread fraud in real time. In 2020, Donald Trump’s margin in Philadelphia actually increased by nearly four percentage points over 2016, when Pennsylvania did not allow ballot drop boxes. While Trump carried Pennsylvania in 2016, he managed to lose it in 2020 because Biden did better than Hillary Clinton with white voters statewide.

In the end, the 2020 election was as simple as that. Trump improved his performance among minority voters nationwide but lost the Electoral College by sliding among white voters. It was not fraudulent vote dumps in America’s inner cities that cost him the election.

Those who understand why the 2020 conspiracy theories are false may find it exhausting to present the truth, fact by fact, but that task is important. Trump’s insistence on debunked voter-fraud claims has major implications for the country’s present and its future.

In ordinary circumstances, Trump’s loss in 2020 would be politically poisonous for him as he sought the 2024 GOP nomination. But by making it an article of faith among many GOP activists and voters that he really did win the 2020 election, he has made it harder for his rivals to attack him over his biggest vulnerabilities. But by indulging Trump’s voter-fraud conspiracies, another GOP candidate will seem weak and submissive — as if aiming to be Trump’s running mate instead of president. Pointing out that the emperor has no clothes — that Trump really did lose in 2020 to a doddering old man who campaigned from his basement — is probably the wiser course, but a successful Republican challenger would find a way to make that point without sounding like a resistance warrior on MSNBC.

Trump’s obsession with 2020 could matter far beyond the 2024 primary, of course. The 2022 midterm results showed that swing voters were repelled by candidates who embraced Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign; but if he wins the nomination and the general election, January 6 would serve as a litmus test for cabinet secretaries and lower-level Trump-administration staffers. Anyone who served in the first Trump administration and was publicly horrified by January 6 — an official such as Attorney General Bill Barr — would be persona non grata in a second Trump administration. Few officials who were horrified by Trump’s postelection conduct would want to serve under Trump anyway. A second Trump administration would have to scrape the very bottom of the staffing barrel.

And if he becomes the 2024 GOP nominee and loses again, it’s reasonable to assume that Trump would again try to overturn the election result through extraordinary measures. True, the system held in 2020, and a reform of the Electoral Count Act that passed in 2022 reinforced it. Trump would not have the powers of a sitting president. And in the states that will very likely decide the 2024 election, Trump will not have lackeys serving as governor, who play a key role in certifying Electoral College results. Republican Brian Kemp, who stood up to Trump’s efforts to overturn the Electoral College results in 2020, will still hold the governorship in Georgia, while Democrats will hold that post in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona. But even a failed attempt — a second one, no less — by Trump and other political elites to overturn the decision of the voters would undermine the foundation of our democratic republic.

None of this, of course, is a future the country or the Republican Party is destined to face if enough primary voters simply choose to rally behind one other Republican presidential candidate.

“Trump has had to provide something (anything) to prove his case.”

It is so annoying that so many Freepers hatred of Trump has twisted their minds. They know that there is not one facet of government that is not corrupt from the FBI, CIA, DOJ, Politicians, Government Agencies, Presidency, Ad nauseam... yet they still believe elections are fair and Trump and we lost in 2022 despite all the facts below. This list of is not even close to complete, there is plenty more, it is suppressed.

It is a fact that millions of votes were not signature checked (every battleground except Florida).
It is a fact that numerous court actions and audits call into question systems used to cast millions of ballots in the 2020 election.
It is a fact that nine states and Washington, D.C. automatically send presidential election ballots to anyone even on unclean voter rolls.
It is a fact that ballot counts and machine tallies are only as reliable as those in charge.
It is a fact that Drop boxes had no video monitoring or had their line of site blocked.
It is a fact Zuckerberg illegally paid out 400 Million Dollars for Dropboxes.
It is a fact that there is a vast far-left network of donation harvesters / money mules (all unemployed) donating to out of state campaigns like Raphael Warnock
It is a fact a Texas social worker charged with 134 voter fraud felonies just got 13 days in jail.
It is a fact 50 Intel Officials Fraudulently Signed the letter about Hunter’s Laptop.
It is a fact FBI meet with all social media companies to censor dissident voices and NY the Post.
It is a fact 100s of thousands of votes did not have a proper chain of custody.
It is a fact since February of last year, Los Angeles County, California, New York City, and North Carolina belatedly agreed to remove a combined 2 million ineligible people who shouldn’t have been on the voter rolls in 2020
It is a fact 100,000s ballot adjudications were done outside of two parties and not properly supervised.
It is a fact millions of ballots were mailed out illegally against state constitutions.
It is a fact In Michigan, Shiawassee County added 100,000 votes for Biden on election night that he didn’t actually get. Observers flagged the error and the tally was corrected.
It is a fact a lot of elderly care homes had 100% participation and some black precincts over 100%.
It is a fact that several precincts’ military voted 80% for Biden (never happened in history). Military votes Republicans.
It is a fact they covered up windows at counting centers so the public could not witness the vote counting.
It is a fact they used COVID to keep Republican election watchers ten feet away during counts in heavily Democrat areas.
It is a fact that Dropbox videos were illegally deleted in several states so reviews could not happen.
It is a fact that they set the machines alogirythm to kick out excessive ballots for adjudication and subject huge numbers of ballots to arbitrary change.
It is a fact in AZ 58% of the ballot tabulators failed logic and accuracy testing.
It is a fact in AZ Maricopa County according to “testimony of over 200 witnesses who were voters at vote centers that 59% of Maricopa County vote centers experienced severe malfunctions of tabulators.
It is a fact in AZ Maricopa County they were verifying 100,000s of signatures in less than a sec (if you count the time it took to load the next ballot). Total less than 3 seconds.
It is a fact Pennsylvania failed to maintain accurate voter rolls per federal law. Other swing states too.
It is a fact vote rules were unconstitutionally changed without the state legislatures.
It is NOT a fact that Biden outperformed every living previous president in history by 20,000,000 votes. The clown could not draw a crowd of 50 and insulted blacks weekly.

Trump does not have to prove anything. Anyone with eyes and not bias by the media or TDS can see it.

Not even considering the coordinated counting halts and the following “Glitch”...

Simply hiding the reality of the Hunter Biden Laptop alone was likely enough
all by itself, to “Seal the Steal”... as was “Russia, Russia, Russia”.

For a preview of what some of the Military Tribunals should be about, read the
Durham Report:

https://www.justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf

It was and is, Treason. All of it.

We can have justice, Civil War, or Slavery.
The choice between the three is fast approaching us.

There is a little time left to Demand Justice, before EVERYBODY loses.

~Easy

they still believe elections are fair

I made it clear that I believe something was at least odd about the 2020, and even mentioned there are videos still on my FR homepage showing votes being taken from Trump that were originally aired on live TV. I put them there back when I was a huge Trump fan, and expected something would be done to investigate it, but Trump has never even mentioned those videos once.

I only then went on to say Trump has done nothing about the election, but complain. And I’m sick of hearing him complain when he was donated $250 Million immediately after the election, to investigate it, but he spent that money on other things instead. It’s come out he supposedly hired a couple of firms for a quick study, but when they said they couldn’t find any evidence of the election being stolen, he dropped any attempt to actually investigate it, and used the money for rallies and travel etc instead.

So why should I now trust he will ever anything about election security except pout about it? His supporters seem perfectly fine with him posing as a victim endlessly like Democrats while sitting on his butt. Maybe you were allowed to whine and cry in your house and not actually get off the couch (or golf course in this case) and actually go do something about whatever your issue supposedly was, but not in mine. It’s pathetic. All he’s done the last two and a half years is get behind a podium and wave his hands around.

I will proudly vote for Trump in the primaries and the general election, and will also donate to his campaign. I voted for him and contributed to his campaigns - proudly - in both 2016 and 2020. But he will do better by not mentioning the fraud (and it WAS fraud) the prevented him from winning in 2020. People on the fence don’t want to hear that stuff (and they will decide this election), even if (as I believe) it is true; they want to hear a forward-looking set of policies that will leave them and their kids and grandchildren better off, certainly better off than another 4 interminable years of this senile, corrupt, Leftist, pervert and the freak-show that is his administration.

Please, President Trump, stick to pure 2024 campaign issues - how Biden & Co. are destroying our country and leading us into WW3, vs. your record of peace, prosperity and making our country great again.

Simply hiding the reality of the Hunter Biden Laptop alone was likely enough all by itself, to “Seal the Steal”..

I was following the hunter laptop story as close as anyone, watching every full episode of the Bannon show with Rudy for weeks, and even going to Miles Guo’s website in China, and Rudy and Bannon deserve as much blame for the story flopping than anyone.

Rather than release all the laptop info at once, as Wikileaks had done with the Clinton e-mails, Rudy and Bannon decided to milk the story to drive up ratings to Bannon’s show. They would only release one little e-mail a day, with no context, no corroboration, and it gave the press an opportunity to say they couldn’t judge the accuracy of a single e-mail without seeing them all.

As horrible as the press is, this was actually a legitimate complaint that there was no way to investigate what was in the laptop when given just one e-mail out of thousands. They never did release it all, which is why I was even going to Guo’s site in China out of frustration.

Trump’s team botched the rollout, pure and simple.

“ Trump has had over two years, and $250 Million donated to him specifically to find out and present exactly what happened, and he has completely failed in conclusively proving anything illegal. Anywhere.”

———————————

Please provide a detailed list of what Trump should have done to prove election fraud. You may be right, you may not but without specifics…….it’s nonsense.

My take, those who rely on Trump to do and fix everything will always be disappointed. A better approach would be to provide support by voting out RINOs, protesting and pressuring the existing RINOSs to do something. But most are not doing that……they are too busy playing armchair quarterback, complaining.and eyeballing shiny new toys (who will be treated the same way in DC as Trump).

Sources of data and info re elections in general and/or the 2020 election

Ballotpedia
https://ballotpedia.org/

FreeRepublic.com - articles and news
https://freerepublic.com/tag/elections/index?tab=articles

Here is the Evidence - crowdsourcing tool for organizing anomalies and legal issues
https://hereistheevidence.com/

Heritage Foundation - A Sampling of Recent Election Fraud Cases from Across the United States
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/

Example: Texas:
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search?state=TX

Heritage Foundation - Election Integrity Scorecard
https://www.heritage.org/electionscorecard/index.html

True the Vote
https://www.truethevote.org/

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Poll Watchers and Challengers
https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/poll-watchers-and-challengers

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August 31, 2022

Michigan’s Secretary of State Fights to Keep Dead on Voter Rolls
https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/michigans-secretary-state-fights-keep-dead-voter-rolls

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May 11, 2023 Thursday

Pennsylvania Settles Voter Roll Lawsuit with Judicial Watch
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4152903/posts

Pennsylvania admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications from Judicial Watch.

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May 12, 2023 Friday

Georgia court revives 2020 ballot inspection case
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4152919/posts

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May 15, 2023 Monday

John Durham releases final report concluding FBI had no verified intel when it opened probe on Trump
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4153416/posts

“Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Durham wrote.

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May 18, 2023 Thursday

Maricopa County Mail-in Ballot Reviews were done at Election Officials’ Homes in 2020 - NO Observers present
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4154255/posts
https://twitter.com/karilakewarroom/status/1659313974481911808

"Maricopa County Elections Director Reynaldo Valenzuela testified at Republican Kari Lake’s election challenge trial Wednesday that mail-in ballot reviews were done at election officials’ homes in 2020 with no observers present."

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