RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/the-disinformationists/

Pollsters were widely wrong in 2016, yet learned nothing about their flawed methodologies. So how do they remain credible after 2020?

A republic is not just a nation of laws. It also relies on its good-faith watchdogs, such as honest pollsters, the media, and bipartisan institutions.

We still didn’t know the final result of Tuesday’s presidential election as of Wednesday night. But there are lots of reasons to worry that something in America has gone terribly wrong.

Many of the mainstream pre-election polls predicted that Donald Trump would lose in a landslide. He did not — to the shock of a host of propagandists.

A CNN poll had Trump down 12 percentage points nationally entering the final week before the election. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in late October claimed Biden was leading in Wisconsin by 17 points. That state’s voting ended up nearly even. YouGov’s election model showed Biden prevailing with a landslide win in the Electoral College. Progressive statistics guru Nate Silver had for weeks issued pseudo-scientific analyses of a Trump wipeout.

Pollsters were widely wrong in 2016. Yet they learned nothing about their flawed methodologies. So how do they remain credible after 2020, when most were wildly off again?

A cynic might answer that polling no longer aims to offer scientific assessments of voter intentions.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/stealing_pennsylvania.html

Regardless of the outcome, Pennsylvania Democrat Governor Tom Wolf, the Pennsylvania state courts and the Democrat State Party have pulled every dirty trick in the books.

They have changed the rules mid-game, using COVID scare as a cover, but their chicanery is so overt, the curtain has been pulled back on their thug tactics.

First, months out, they claimed they would need three extra days to count the votes.  Then, against all extant state laws, they said they would accept illegible or ballots with no security envelope postmark.  Then, incredibly they said a voter’s signature on the mail-in ballot didn’t have to match the voter’s signature in the voter registration books.  Banana Republic, anyone?

But that’s just the everchanging rules of the game.  On the ground, it got worse and worse.

Certified poll watchers were not allowed into many Philadelphia polling stations.  This is an old Philly trick.  Why is it important? Because without a poll watcher from the opposite side, numbers at the poll can be jiggered.  But even that wasn’t enough. 

Montgomery County, where this author resides and works as a Republican committeeperson, is the third largest county in Pennsylvania.  Historically solid Republican, over more recent decades, the balance of power has gradually eroded to majority Democrat, with some pockets of resistance.  However, in this election cycle, Republicans outpaced Democrats in new voter registrations significantly.  They didn’t outstrip the Democrats, but the trend was pro-Republican. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-election-goes-to-court-11604618993?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

“The media is already accusing the Trump campaign of attempting to litigate its way to victory, but practically every issue in play arises from the Democrats’ march through the courts in the run-up to Election Day. For all the cries of “disenfranchisement,” both sides agree that every lawful ballot should be counted. But after so many conflicting court decisions over the past year, what’s uncertain now is the law, and there’s no dishonor in asking the courts to say what it is.”

Whoever first quipped “It’s all over but the counting” forgot about the lawyers. Over the past year, Democrats and their allies marched through state after state in an unprecedented legal campaign to upend longstanding rules of election administration. The result is more uncertainty than ever over the basic rules of voting, and an increased likelihood that races will have to be called by the courts. Although it’s too early to say for certain, that may include the presidential election.

The battle lines are being drawn in states President Trump needs to win. Pennsylvania provides a typical illustration. In 2019 the state overhauled its election code to allow everyone to vote by absentee ballot. What had been a relatively restrictive regime, with early deadlines and limited availability, was transformed into one of the most liberal in the nation, requiring only that ballots be received by the statewide voting deadline, 8 p.m. on Election Day.

Even that wouldn’t hold. After three lawsuits to extend the deadline struck out this summer, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party hit a home run on the fourth at-bat. What changed was that the secretary of state, charged with defending state law, switched sides to support her own political party. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that the ballot-receipt deadline, established by state law, violated the state constitution’s “Free and Equal Election Clause” and legislated a three-day extension along with a presumption of timeliness for unpostmarked ballots received by Friday. It dismissed out of hand arguments that the U.S. Constitution’s Elections and Electors clauses vest exclusive authority in state legislatures to set the rules of federal elections that can’t be rewritten by state judges or executive-branch officials.