Ain’t That Peculiar
29th November 2020
Scott Johnson at PowerLine.
Spectator USA has posted Patrick Basham’s column “Reasons why the 2020 presidential election is deeply puzzling.” Subhead: “If only cranks find the tabulations strange, put me down as a crank.” I’ve asked our friends at Spectator USA to make the column accessible, but at the moment it is behind their (semipermeable) paywall. Basham is not a crank. He is founding director of the Democracy Institute and was an adjunct scholar with Cato’s Center for Representative Government.
In his Spectator column Basham first spells out anomalies in the stated results of the 2020 presidential election. He observes, for example, “President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent. By way of comparison, President Obama was comfortably reelected in 2012 with 3.5 million fewer votes than he received in 2008.”
The anomalies may be just that, but Basham then turns to nine peculiarities that “lack compelling explanations[.]”