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It’s the debate that won’t go away: did Joe Biden win the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election legitimately, or as a result of voter fraud?

The official story, carried by most of the media, is that Biden won fair and square with 306 electoral college votes to Donald Trump’s 232. Any suggestion otherwise is predictably shrugged off as the grumbling of sore losers who refuse to face facts.

“Baseless” and “without evidence” is how mainstream reporting frames the pushback from Trump, his legal team, and his never-say-die supporter base. Some outlets even accuse Trump of staging a coup and undermining the American republic. These pundits are egged on by elected Democrats compiling lists of political figures who’ve dared voice support for the embattled President.

In truth, though Trump’s protests may be an irritation to the chattering class, they’re perfectly legal under the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, they have widespread public support: a poll taken in December found that almost 40 percent of Americans do not trust the results of the election, including three quarters of Republicans and a third of Independents. To date, a dozen senators and at least 140 House representatives have vowed to stand with Trump on this issue.

As we consider the controversy in America, what must be borne in mind is that electoral politics is not machine-like in its function. It is a very human endeavour — a game of trust and conferred legitimacy.

Americans on both sides of the aisle know this well. After all, the recent election is not the first to have faced claims of corruption. The integrity of the 2016 result was questioned for years by the corporate media and Trump’s defeated foe Hillary Clinton, who peddled the “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory until it was decisively debunked by the Mueller Report.

If precedent is anything to go on, Joe Biden won’t find it easy to lead an America in which four out of ten voting citizens question his right to even be in the White House.

Those happy with November’s result should at least stop to ponder this: if there’s no evidence of widespread fraud, it is indeed true that Trump is jeopardising democracy. That being the case, it is also true that democracy is in crisis if Biden won by fraud and that fraud is never investigated. The knife cuts both ways.

In other words, Biden supporters shouldn’t merely want a Biden victory: they should want transparency and truth. One needn’t like Trump to like the truth.

Of course, the truth has been clouded by a lot of white noise. Certain assertions of the Trump camp are by nature difficult or impossible to prove; footage circulating online supposedly showing fraudulent activity is open to varying interpretations; and some actors are unfortunately muddying the waters with unfounded conspiracy theories.

But let’s take stock of those things we know to be true.

For a start, Democrats themselves have invoked the spectre of election fraud for many years. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar — whom Biden beat in the primaries — in fact filed a complaint with Dominion Voting Systems in 2019, concerned by the possibility of machine vote-switching. All the major networks — from CNN to NBC to The New York Times — likewise warned of voting machine vulnerabilities, despite now vowing this didn’t impact 2020’s result.

Joe Biden himself spent decades of his career warning about voter fraud until he recently and conspicuously changed his mind on the issue.

Here’s something else we know to be true: Joe Biden overcame breathtaking odds to beat Donald Trump. Biden won a record low of just 17 percent of the nation’s counties and yet somehow pulled off a win. Remarkably, his win also came in spite of his party losing 13 seats in the House of Representatives, and their failure to flip even a single state legislative chamber. This is almost unheard of. But it was just the beginning of 2020’s election anomalies.

For 60 years, no one has lost the bellwether states of Florida and Ohio and won the presidency — but this election, Biden managed that feat. Likewise, there are 19 bellwether counties that have an almost perfect record in predicting the winner of an election. Biden lost 18 of them — but somehow still won the White House.

Bellwether predictions were bound to fail eventually — but that they collapsed so neatly in a single election is implausible, to put it mildly. As curious commentators have noted, that’s a lot of rabbits to pull out of one hat.

Perhaps most intriguing is that Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals in every urban county of the United States. Yet, among the very few places he outperformed Clinton was in the metropolitan areas of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — precisely those districts most embroiled in the present scandal.

Let us now consider the evidence from these states, which the legacy media assures us does not exist.

In Georgia, Joe Biden was certified the winner with 11,779 more votes than Donald Trump. Biden’s margin would have been closer to 20,000 were it not for an election monitor discovering some 9,000 extra votes that had been assigned to Biden by mistake.

Other issues in Georgia cannot so easily be attributed to human error. Voter data in that state shows that over 4,700 absentee voters listed non-residential addresses as their home. One analysis uncovered 1,000 voters who apparently tried to disguise post office box numbers as apartment numbers — for instance, listing “P.O. Box 123” as “Apartment 123”.

There was also highly unusual activity when it came to the absentee ballot rejection rate in Georgia. Normally, around 3.5 percent of mail-in ballots are rejected due to signature, identity and eligibility issues. But in the recent contested election in which absentee voting was far more popular than usual, only 0.34 percent of mail-in ballots were rejected. That’s one tenth of what is normal. Had the usual scrutiny been applied, some 40,000 votes would have been rejected.

Two other concerning events took place in Georgia. The first was a sudden data dump that occurred at 1.30am, three hours after ballot counters had been sent home. Over 80 percent — or 136,000 of those votes — went to Joe Biden.

In another incident, suitcases holding an estimated 15,000 ballots were brought out from under a table and counted. This took place late at night, after poll watchers and media personnel had been told to leave the facility since counting had stopped.

Michigan certified Joe Biden as its winner with 154,188 more votes than Trump. This margin would have been higher were it not for the discovery of 6,000 rogue votes that a software glitch had at first gifted to Biden.

In Michigan, at least 1,600 mail-in ballots were cast in the names of deceased voters. One data researcher actually puts that figure as high as 9,500.

To maintain election integrity, the Federal Election Commission allows a maximum error rate of just 0.0008 percent for computerised voting systems. But a forensic audit in Michigan revealed that in one county, 68 percent of ballots were ruled erroneous by voting machines. The voting software then required a human to adjudicate the errors in bulk — with “no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail,” according to the report. At least 15,000 ballots were affected by these issues.

As in Georgia, an unusual out-of-hours data dump occurred in Michigan. Taking place at 6.30am on the day following the election, this upload assigned just 4 percent of votes to President Trump, while an incredible 96 percent — or 140,000 votes — went to Joe Biden.

In one of the more dramatic stories to emerge from Michigan, two Republicans responsible for certifying the results in a key county were bullied and misled into approving the county’s results. They’d first voiced deep reservations about the county’s many irregularities. But after facing accusations of racism and threats against family members, the two rushed to certify the state’s vote — only later seeking to rescind their decision.

Joe Biden was certified the winner of Pennsylvania with an 80,555-vote lead over President Trump. But this state’s result is also mired in controversy.

As in Georgia, some 1,400 absentee voters in Pennsylvania sought to disguise a post office box number as a residential address. A further 2,400 mail-in ballots were cast in the names of deceased Pennsylvanian voters.

The rejection rate of absentee ballots was also highly unusual in Pennsylvania. Normally hovering at around 1 percent of ballots, in November’s election that rate was 30 times lower, at 0.038 percent. This far lower level of scrutiny led to at least 25,000 fewer rejections than would normally be expected — the majority of which, on being included, most certainly favoured Biden.

Mail-in ballots were controversial for other reasons in Pennsylvania. According to the U.S. Constitution, election laws are the responsibility of state legislatures. But in Pennsylvania, a Democrat-heavy Supreme Court circumvented this, changing the rules just before the election so that mail-in ballots without authentic signatures or postal dates could still be counted, along with any ballots arriving up to three days after the election.

In addition to this, an analysis of Pennsylvania’s data revealed that no fewer than 190,000 mail-in ballots were tainted by unscrupulous activity — whether they were assigned new return dates; counted though received after the deadline; or deleted altogether from the official government website.

In Wisconsin, Biden was certified the winner with 20,682 more votes than the incumbent President. But this lead is also highly questionable.

According to a damning report, at least 20 of those votes were stolen from disabled voters who were pressured by their support workers to vote for Joe Biden, or had votes cast on their behalf against their will.

Similar to other battleground states, Wisconsin saw a most suspicious dark-of-night data dump: in one fell swoop, Trump’s previously strong lead disappeared entirely at 3.40am. A suspicious 85 percent of those votes — 143,000 in number — went to Biden.

In Wisconsin, the only voters not required to present identification are those who are “indefinitely confined”. At the previous election, around 72,000 people voted this way. But when clerks in two counties illegally encouraged voters to claim “indefinite confinement” because of the pandemic, that number surged to 172,000 in November’s vote, creating a 238 percent increase in ballots lacking ID proof.

Dozens of such voters were certainly not confined at home since their social media accounts showed them at weddings, concerts and on interstate vacations.

Across all contested states, up to 2 million votes may have been touched by some kind of anomaly or fraud. Given the nature of these allegations — and Biden’s wafer-thin lead over Trump in most battleground states — it is clear that 2020’s was one of the most dubious American elections ever held.

Ultimately, it seems to be a foregone conclusion that Joe Biden will be inaugurated as President on the 20th January. Most of the Trump team’s lawsuits have failed to gain traction in the courts — rejected in many cases for procedural reasons, before much of the evidence was seen by judges.

The cynically-inclined would suggest that it’s simply time to move on. But that’s not an answer that will satisfy all Americans. In truth, it is precisely this “move along, nothing to see here” response that has emboldened Trump and his populist movement. Everyday Americans — and people across the globe — realise that there’s two sides to this story, even if only one of them is being told. The media’s whitewashing of the issue, along with overt Big Tech censorship, has only served to awaken a sleeping giant.

Whatever happens later this month, don’t expect that giant to go away any time soon.

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Image courtesy of Markus Spiske on Unsplash.