The Truth Is Still Getting Dressed

Five months later, real rigged election concerns are still 'breaking news'

“Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.” — President Abraham Lincoln

I’m reminded of that Mark Twain-ish saying about truth and lies. How a lie traverses the globe while the truth is still lacing up its boots — or pulling on its pants, or buckling its belt. Pick whichever of the many iterations out there you like.

Mark Twain specifically is credited with saying: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Winston Churchill supposedly said the same, but alluded to the truth “putting on its pants.” But no one knows for sure with whom the witticism originated.

Hence, the true saying about the truth proves its premise. This sentiment, though, about how the truth is easily smothered by a lie dates at least as far back as 1710 when Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift, a newspaperman at the time, wrote:

“Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it.

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”

In present day America, the “tale” for what feels like ages now has been having its devastating effect. And sometimes it feels like it’s too late. Traveling at light speed in this “advanced” technological age across the social media landscape where you can get your in-your-Facebook fake Fox News-fed fix 24/7, the lie has never been so ravenously effective at bludgeoning the truth — still limping along.

Which brings me to the story I broke five months ago, Nov. 16, 2024 about cyber security experts’ dual “Duty to Warn” letters, based on myriad red flags, urging Vice President Kamala Harris to demand hand recounts of the 2024 election in most of the swing states.

Five months later, the initial breaking news about genuine concerns with breached voting system software and unsettling signs of vote rigging essentially still is “breaking” for perhaps millions of Americans who have yet to hear a peep about it.

The Truth is Putting on Its Shoes

Never has the truth so vital to the defense of the faltering Republic taken so long to travel. But of late, after hiding under the covers all this time, there have been some mildly encouraging signs that the truth at least has gotten out of bed and is searching around for its shoes. It just hasn’t ventured out the door yet.

For starters — aside from a slew of judicial rulings cracking down on Donald Trump’s endless tyrannical overreaches, and a groundswell of protests — I’ve noticed in recent weeks a marked uptick in responses to the initial November Substack story about compromised software, uncounted votes, missing ballots, bomb threats, and an inordinate number of Trump votes compared to the Republican Party’s down ballot tallies in last fall’s election.

In the last few days, I’ve received replies like: “It might be time to revisit this..” or “I knew it!” or “Wow” … “Go for it”.. “Hell yes”… and “Yes, Please.” Many Substackers just now learning of security experts concerns with the 2024 election are inquiring when Harris is going to get around to requesting hand recounts.

Of course, the opportunity for the Vice President to call for hand recounts of paper ballots has long since passed (state electors voted Dec 17). For the record, I can’t answer why Harris didn’t call for recounts or why Democrats have essentially ignored the burning issue — and instead have elected to flog themselves over all the things they did wrong to lose an election that they may not have actually lost.

Now, the only opportunity to verify the election’s votes in swing states, lies with hand audits or forensic audits — which typically entails a closer review of how ballots align with tabulated votes. Audits must be authorized by the individual local and state governments or ordered by the court.

Non-partisan, non-profit election security groups, Smart Elections and Election Truth Alliance (ETA), which have been sounding the alarm about “non-human” voting patterns in the past election for months, are pushing for those audits.

But there’s a catch-22 gumming up the works.

Catch-22

Concerns with vote manipulation of the 2024 presidential race primarily in the swing states have only crystallized in the months since the “Duty To Warn” letters; computer security analysts and data statisticians have mapped and graphed signs of what they’ve described as a “vote-flipping algorithm” in at least five of the swing states.

ETA has petitioned Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and other state officials for hand audits of the 2024 election based on “patterns consistent with vote manipulation.” Smart Elections has a May court date in Rockland County, NY to argue for recounts there based on suspected vanished Harris votes.

But the chances of states endorsing audits after all this time appear slim without citizens’ insistence. And there’s the Catch-22.

How can the people lobby their state and federal representatives to pursue audits — which would confirm or deny analysts’ suspicions of vote manipulation in last fall’s election, if they don’t know about the election’s myriad anomalies?

Where’s The Fourth Estate?

We the people could use a little help on the issue of securing our elections from our esteemed Fourth Estate.

Admittedly, The Press, whose duty it is to hold power in check, is under attack by Trump and tending to keep their powder dry. And news outlets are stretched thin as reporters scramble to cover Trump’s intentionally distracting gut punches to the Republic. Most obviously, Americans have little stomach to tunnel down that rabbit hole of ‘rigged’ election claims. Not again.

Not after four and half years of Trump’s endless unfounded accusations about an alleged stolen 2020 election that led to the Capitol insurrection. The lifetime grifter is still whining about being cheated as he impulsively seeks retribution against anyone who called his bluff. That’s where Trump’s Putin-esque long game ‘big lie’ paid off.

Cry wolf long enough, no one pays attention when the wolf actually shows up to devour. And as Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Party propagandist Joseph Goebbels ill-advised: “The most brilliant propagandist technique is to accuse your enemy of what you are doing.” Donald J. Trump has practiced and honed that despicable art from the get-go. Remember his “rigged” claims prior to the 2016 election?

Let’s not forget the Nazi master manipulator Goebbels’ old chestnut about the big lie: “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” Ring any bells?

But election analysts’ evidenced-based suspicions of a 2024 hacked election has nothing to do with baseless blowhard bombast.

An Election Riddled With Breakdowns

For months, many of us who have taken the time to review ETA’s and Smart Elections’ findings and listen to cyber security experts concerns with the United State’s vulnerable voting systems, have lived with the certitude that something screwy and illegal went on leading up to, and on election day.

We’re talking about one of the most chaotic elections in the Republic’s history — marred by more than 200 bomb threats, voting machine breakdowns, flash drive malfunctions, uncounted votes, missing ballots, and unprecedented algorithmic voting patterns that conceivably swiped hundreds of thousands of votes from Harris and gave them to Trump.

In the 2024 election, the Republican presidential candidate managed to pull off the statistically improbable feat of winning all seven swing states by margins outside each state’s automatic recount mandates with less than half the popular vote (49.8%).

Just as unlikely, Trump flipped 88 formerly blue counties red, and Harris who was in a nip and tuck race with Trump in the battleground states — and was even leading Trump in some polls just days prior to the election — flipped zero red counties. By way of comparison, when President Ronald Reagan swept 49 or the 50 states in the 1984 election, Democratic Candidate Walter Mondale still flipped 30 red counties blue, reports ETA.

Dismissing such red flags while the Republic’s death knell ominously clangs from the White House, would be a monumental travesty of justice. If our elections aren’t secure, we’d best find out before the looming mid terms on the horizon. What good are elections in an autocrat’s era if the system is gamed?

“If we don’t do this now and manipulation did happen, there will be no mid terms,” says Nathan Taylor, ETA’s executive director of advocacy in a recent You Tube post. “There will be no next election. If the machines are compromised, the winner will always be someone who has been decided.”

“Public Sentiment is Everything”

Just a handful of years ago, the media would have been all over a story about legitimate signs of fraud in America’s historically highest stakes election which handed absolute power back to a twice-impeached convicted felon who has wasted no time acting on his darkest of autocratic ambitions.

Can you imagine Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters whose dogged reporting exposed the 1970’s Watergate scandal and led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation, fluffing off the truth that could very well save the Republic from going full blown dictatorship?

Arguably, if enough folks were informed about the 2024 various consistent election inconsistencies and subsequently lit a fire under their professed representatives, even turncoat GOP Trump enablers in Congress would feel the heat. And that’s key.

It’s already getting uncomfortably warm for Republicans as their leader with a king complex seems intent on defying a U.S. Supreme Court order, carving up the country for profit, and spins further out of control with each passing week.

Where the story leads if proof of election rigging is uncovered through even a single audit, is unclear. If the truth penetrated the frazzled news cycle covering the nation’s monolithic swirl of chaos coming out of Washington DC, and it should, is there even time to secure our elections before the crucial mid terms? That feels like a big lift.

But the public needs to know the truth. If fraud was discovered it could only bolster the accumulating record of Trump’s illegitimacy and arguably help lay the groundwork for his eventual ouster from the Oval. Impeachment, which Rep. Al Green plans to pursue, may appear unlikely now. But what about a month or months from now?

While the truth of Smart Elections’ and Election Truth Alliance’s alarm bells have been getting drowned out by Trump’s daily assault on justice to satisfy a sadistic lust to inflict pain, the goods news is that ETA’s Taylor has been gradually raising awareness about the suspected hacked election on several You Tube podcasts, most recently the Titus podcast. The truth at least appears to have found its shoes.

Remember what President Abraham Lincoln famously said about the power of the people: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”

The public needs to engage.

Unprecedented “Drop-off”

Smart Elections has illustrated through bar charts how Trump received upwards of 750,000 votes more than Republican Party down ballot races in six swing states, while candidate Harris was utterly snubbed by hundreds of thousands of citizens who otherwise voted for Democrats in the next major down ballot race. This is the phenomena Smart Elections calls the “drop-off” votes and signals “unnatural data patterns” with which they have “very serious concerns.”

The unprecedented dramatic drop-off difference between Republican and Democratic votes for president is pronounced in swing states, as the chart above shows. Interestingly, in eleven other non-swing states analyzed by Smart Elections, the drop-off is mostly unremarkable. That said, analyst haven’t ruled out foul play in non-swing states.

Percentage-wise, a drop off 2% or 3% isn’t unusual, analysts say. But Republican drop-off averages 5.58% in the swing states in 2024; Democratic drop-off dips into the negative at -1.48% in swing states, as democratic down ballot contenders out- performed Harris. The Republican drop-off is nearly 10% in some swing state counties, namely in Nevada and North Carolina.

ETA has also red flagged this unprecedented drop-off trend in swing states as “non-human” voting behavior. Analysts detected the same pattern in numerous swing state county tabulators — where Republican presidential votes start to spike after a machine’s vote count crosses a threshold of between 250 and 300 votes.

These shared anomalies in the swing states smack of a tabulator software hack, and suggest votes are swapped between the two presidential candidates or in some cases simply deleted, ETA says. This “vote-flipping algorithm” is evident during early voting in Clark County, Nevada where ETA initially focused their study and in Pennsylvania counties on election day.

Notably, Election Truth Alliance focused on the Keystone State after Trump bragged about Elon Musk’s “knowledge of those vote-counting computers” in Pennsylvania. ETA’s Taylor says these swing state voting patterns, when graphed, are similar to what analysts have coined the telltale “Russian Tail” - evident in Georgia's 2024 elections and in Russia's 2020 constitutional referendum.

Democracy Dies In Darkness

News outlets’ refusal to report on what surely is as crucial a story as any, has left the people in the dark — where The Post’s own slogan suggests Democracy “goes to die.” Newsweek gave the suspected rigged election concerns perhaps its most prominent play in a January piece after Trump’s “vote counting computers” remark. But the story was brief, perfunctory and went nowhere.

Sooner or later, the national press will have to cover the story outlining all the unsettling signs of a hacked 2024 election. Maybe the timing will be right on time. But if news outlets are waiting for that damning proof of foul play before covering it, they’re missing the point. Again, America first needs to hear the alarm bells and see the assorted red flags so they can ultimately demand answers.

As ETA’s Taylor recently urged in a You Tube post: “I need you to call (your state representatives), email them, message them, ask them and demand them to give and do audits of the paper ballots.”

In the meantime, while Trump enriches himself, trashes the Constitution, starts fires he can’t extinguish, eviscerates government oversight, and targets everything from the environment, social security to the right to vote, the courts for now are holding their own and doing their best to hold the despot in check.

And Judging from the simmering renewed interest in the truth about our last presidential election — amid the fallout of a tyrant’s reckless assault on our nation — at least the truth appears to have splashed a little water on its face. And it has started getting dressed.