Final Jeopardy Answer:

Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas

Final Jeopardy Question:

In which states were all or some ballots cast through direct recording electronic systems (DRE) without a paper backup in 2018?

This morning Mika Brzezinski told viewers she would never step foot on 5th Avenue in New York City.  Why?  Because Donald Trump has said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it.  In her words, “And I believe him!”  Her evidence?  During the past three and a half years he has telegraphed every attempt to corrupt the system or break down norms of behavior.  He told us he was going to seek illegal campaign assistance from foreign powers.  He said he would separate babies and young children from their mothers at the Mexican border.  And just yesterday he admitted he opposes emergency funding for the U.S. Postal Service so it cannot be relied on to process and deliver mail-in ballots in a timely fashion this November.

No surprise.  In March Trump told Fox News, increased funding for vote-by-mail would result in “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”  Trump, better than anyone, understands a fact of political life in America.  When Democrats vote, Democrats win.  The logical response?  Suppress the vote.  Make it hard for Democrats to safely vote in person, and make them skeptical their mail-in ballot will be counted.

If you believe this is the beginning and end of this story, you will again be underestimating Donald Trump.  When it comes to this master of misdirection, you have to ask, “If he’s making such a fuss about the timing of mail-in ballots, dragging out the election for days, weeks or even months, what doesn’t he want us to see?”  An answer that no one in the media is talking about.

This week, FiveThirtyEight released its first forecast of the 2020 presidential election.  Without boring you with the methodology, it is based on the following process.  Nate Silver and his team simulate the election 40,000 times, each with a difference variation of distribution of electoral votes.  So when they predict Biden now has a 72 percent chance of becoming the next commander-in-chief, it simply means there are still 28 percent of possible scenarios where Trump carries enough states to garner the necessary 270 electoral votes  for re-election.  And in almost every one of those story lines, the following four states are critical:  Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Texas.  Trump must carry those four states.

What do they have in common?  In 2018, George employed DRE statewide with no paper backup.  The same was true for some jurisdictions in the remaining three states.  This did not go unnoticed.  In 2019, the Pennsylvania legislature mandated all newly purchased voting machines must have audit-able paper or image backup.  However, jurisdictions are allowed to continue to use older machines without this safeguard.

Georgia has also replaced it paperless system with one that prints a hard copy that can be reviewed by the voter before the final scan by a tabulating machine.  The paper version is retained in the event of a recount or audit.  However, as we learned during the Georgia primary in June, the system ran into several problems ranging from poll worker training to insufficient electrical power at some polling locations to handle the increased power demand.

Say what you will about the potential for fraud using mail-in ballots, it remains the only voting system in which there is a hard copy of every ballot cast.  And concerns about the integrity of mail-in ballots are dwarfed by suspicions paperless Diebold voting machines in Ohio accurately tabulated votes in the 2004 presidential election.  Equally alarming was the fact Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell was a major fund-raiser for George W. Bush and Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell owned shares of Diebold stock. In 2006, Barry Levinson wrote and directed Man of the Year in which a long-shot presidential hopeful (Robin Williams) is declared the winner due to a voting machine programming error.  [NOTE: Whether the manufacture and maintenance of voting machines should be the purview of a private company without some level of external oversight is a topic for another day.]

During Michael Cohen’s February 2019 testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, he knew his past actions on behalf of Trump made him a less than credible witness.  His solution?  He brought the “receipts,” including copies of hush-money checks to Stormy Daniels signed by Trump.  Mail-in ballots are another stack of receipts Donald Trump does not want you to see, which is an equally compelling reason for him to undermine the Postal Service’s ability to operate at maximum efficiency.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP