It is astonishing how effective the narrative of “no proof of voter fraud” has proven. Stalwarts of the Right, people who should know better, capitulated almost instantly. They eagerly joined the Left to delegitimize, dehumanize and even criminalize any voice dissenting from that narrative.

The best dissent I’ve seen so far comes from Michael Anton, author of the famous Flight 93 Election essay. Anton chronicles a meeting of minds between himself and our old friend and ally Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan really is an endearing character of whom I’ve always been strangely fond, but of course he’s also a glassy-eyed lunatic who needs cult followers to fund his HIV treatment. Anyway, Anton tried to talk Sullivan off the ledge, and in the process he hit the rhetorical mark with precision.

I will now echo, amplify, and expand on Michael Anton’s thesis, but do take the time to read Anton as well.

Gentle Reader, you may someday come under pressure to confess the 2020 Presidential election as legitimate. Perhaps an associate or family member, or worse yet an official, will demand this acquiescence. The way to win is to keep your arguments in the realm of the provable, the indisputable, the things that people can’t unsee.

Item 1: Non-Transparency

The 2020 election hinged on five key swing states: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada. At midnight on election day, President Trump had comfortable leads in all those states. Then Democrat election officials halted the counting in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukie, and Las Vegas. They ejected Republican poll watchers, in some cases by physical force, and then for the next three hours they did…something, in secret, and Biden mysteriously pulled ahead in each statewide race. Biden’s total margin of victory in all five states combined was only about 70,000 votes.

Look at this picture:

Those are poll workers in Michigan, blocking the windows to prevent the public from observing their activities. At best, that’s highly suspicious. But notice what they’re blocking the windows with. It’s 8-foot sheets of what looks like posterboard. They didn’t just nip out to the art supply store at midnight and buy that stuff. That’s a specialty item; they probably had to order from a regional supplier and wait six weeks for delivery. They had a plan, in advance of the election, to render the process non-transparent by literally making the windows opaque. There is no innocent explanation for this.

Just to rub salt in the wound, the NY Times pretended there was an innocent explanation for this:

By around 3 p.m., there were dozens of calls posted on Facebook, and people responded by showing up; over 100 people were at the vote-counting site by then.

NBC News earlier reported on a private Facebook group, Stand Up Michigan to Unlock Michigan, that was part of the calls; Facebook removed the group shortly after.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After the protesters arrived, workers began to cover the site’s windows, leading to unfounded rumors about their motivations. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, shared one such video, and captioned her post, “SHADY …” It collected 62,000 likes and shares on Twitter, and 7.3 million video views. On Wednesday evening, President Trump tweeted about the falsehood, generating more than 350,000 likes and shares.

The people who came to observe the polls wouldn’t have called themselves protesters. The rumors were well-founded, and even if they weren’t that’s not the same thing as a lie. The NYT makes no effort to reason out the argument or persuade anyone. It merely asserts, you will believe us when we say this is a lie. Such assertions betray a psychopathic level of contempt for the reader. It gets worse:

Lawrence Garcia, the city of Detroit’s corporation counsel, said the windows had been covered because poll workers inside had expressed concerns about people taking unauthorized photographs and videos of their work.

“Only the media is allowed to take pictures inside the counting place,” he said, “and people outside the center were not listening to requests to stop filming poll workers and their paperwork.”

Only the media is allowed to take evidence of election integrity? Well, having such power and privilege, surely the media dutifully observed and recorded the proceedings. Oh wait, they didn’t? Nobody checked the poll-workers’ work?

Voting is the most public of insitutions, and an institution in which the public has total interest. To impose any limitation on the public’s right to understand and observe their own elections, can only mean you want to cheat. There is no innocent explanation for the opaque windows. Garcia goes on to blandly assert that the process was transparent, free and fair.

That’s how they did it in all five states. Then they just handwaved away legitimate concerns. Nothing to see here.

Proprietary code

There have been various claims made about Dominion voting systems, claims for which the public has no proof. We’ll talk about these claims later, there is one claim that can’t be denied: Dominion systems use proprietary code.

That should absolutely be illegal. Any source code for voting equipment should be open-source, available for public review. Tallying votes is not rocket science; there’s no need for a patented algorithm.

Dominion can program their equipment to do literally anything to vote tallies. Because their code is proprietary, nobody outside of Dominion can ever know what Dominion programs its machines to do. With trivial ease, Dominion can decide the outcome of any election where their machines are used.

Even if Dominion is on the up-and-up, they are still subject to fiendish temptations to abuse their power. Those temptations should not legally exist.

That’s all that needs to be said about Dominion. Any election result that comes from proprietary software is a result that can’t be proven, can’t be verified beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s unacceptable in a nominal Republic.

Shut Up Shut Up Shut Up

There are reams of circumstantial evidence that are damning to the supposed integrity of the 2020 election. Rather than cite all that eye-glazing information, just note how desperate Democrats are to close the book on all this. They make no effort to persuade; they just assert and assert that the election was legitimate. And now they’re moving to criminalize as terrorist incitement any public pushback against that assertion.

By taking this line they tacitly admit they would have lost a fair, transparent election. Or at least, they admit they can’t win the argument. We can’t prove they cheated, but they can’t prove they won. That’s all on them, it’s all their fault, they brought this on themselves.

Michael Anton cautions against “believing” the election was stolen. For rhetorical purposes he is correct. To be persuasive, you mustn’t believe things you can’t prove. A stolen election is by far the most likely explanation for everything we know, but it’s not proven and it won’t be proven. The trail is cold, the evidence despoliated.

A prosecutor making a criminal case tries to develop evidence of method, motive and opportunity. There can be no doubt as to the Democrats’ motive: they intended to win. There was also ample opportunity, and Democrats clearly went out of their way to create opportunities for fraud, with unsolicited mail-in voting and secret shenanigans with the ballots. But we can only guess as to the exact method. It seems to have been pretty crude, blatant stuff; the resulting anomalies are obvious.

That’s all you can say for sure. It’s enough.

FINAL WORD!