Begging a Question Until It Bleeds: On “The Plot to Overturn the Election” (PBS, B-)

One must give credit where credit is due, and the PBS team behind this week’s documentary, “The Plot to Overturn the Election” deserve some credit. I will explain why, then will touch upon some slips of intellectual integrity displayed therein, then debunk the philosophical legerdemain which follows.

CREDIT is due the PBS team behind “The Plot to Overturn the Election” for two reasons:

• Courage – We live in a nation whose confidence in the integrity of elections is crumbling. A recent CNN poll shows that 56% of Americans have little or no confidence that American elections reflect the will of the people, up from 52% who felt that way in September and 40% in January 2021. According to the same poll, 59% now say that they doubt “elections are representative”. In such an environment, PBS has released a documentary saying that my allegations questioning election integrity of 2020 election fraud are a “myth” and framing me and those who question it as delusional. That takes courage. I don’t think it is going to work, in the end, but one has to admire how they put their backs into the effort.  Youngsters reading this will scarcely believe it, but there was a time that news outlets like PBS performed a public service by questioning authority rather than engaging in apologetics for it.

• Incremental Gain in Intellectual Honesty – Freudians and Marxists make a habit of not answering what their opponents say, but dwelling on what their hidden motives are for saying it. PBS did not do that. They did not question my motives. I think they make clear that they know I believe what I am saying. In general, they paint me as sincere, I think, though there were cheap shots taken in cuts to make those in the crowd look bad. I am not mistaken, near the end they may have implied that I stirred things up in early January 2021 deliberately in order to create a political movement, but if they made that point it was in a rather feeble and inconclusive way.

SLIPS OF INTELLECTUAL INTEGRITY were purveyed as well. These matter most.

When the PBS interviewer told me of Professor Halderman’s criticisms of the Antrim report, I made a two part response, but PBS included only (the lesser) one. I told them that the central claim of the ASOG Antrim report has never received rebuttal: the Security Logs were deleted on November 4 at 11:03 PM (which means that the history of the machine became unreliable, casting doubt on anything then found on it).  I acknowledged also that the report had indeed been rushed (it was an around-the-clock affair for a group of cybersecurity professionals for about 6 days), so there were indeed mistakes (such as in in one spot confusing the abbreviation for Minnesota with that of Michigan)…. but that central claim had never been challenged, let alone refuted. Rather than include this point about the logs being deleted the night after the election (though it was a point about which I jumped up and down with them), they included merely the latter concession. This is one key spot their work lacks integrity.

Wrapped into that is the riddle of adjudication in Antrim in 2020. There was a 63% ballot error rate (NB this does not mean that 63% of ballots had to be adjudicated, but merely that 63% of ballots had irregularities, but some irregularities do not require adjudication [e.g., paper failure]). Still, it is a high error rate, and indicative of there having to be a lot of adjudication going on.

Yet there were no Adjudication Files on the machine for 2020. To that Halderman scoffs, But there was not even an Adjudication Module on the machine. It was done by hand! But his answer raises some questions: there were adjudication files on the machine for 2016 and 2018, but not 2020. Why? Were they in fact hand-adjudicated, or were they on that second machine in the Antrim County offices from which my cyber-colleagues were shielded (though their subpoena covered it)? Or, even if we accept Antrim at their word that (unlike 2016 and 2018) in 2020 they hand-adjudicated, one must ask about their hand-adjudication: while one acknowledges that the 63% ballot error rate does not directly translate into 63% of ballots having to have been adjudicate, it would be nice to know, to what percent did it translate?

In other words: the contention is that ASOG found a 63% ballot error rate, compared it to the national average of ballot adjudication rate of ≈1.0%, and erroneously compared the two numbers though their definitions are not the same. OK, fair enough. Then I ask: of the 63% of ballots with errors, who many did have to be adjudicated? No one will say, no one can see the records of the hand adjudication, no one will show proof that the adjudication was done by hand (and if so, why was 2020 different than 2016 or 2018?) and this is the first election of my lifetime where asking a question like that is considered seditious. Yet in its baseless apologetics for the Establishment, PBS lets all such issues slide.

The deeper failure of intellectual integrity, however, is to pretend that our case hinges simply upon the ASOG Antrim Report. There were dozens if not hundreds of leads pursued, and numerous ones passed upon or quickly redirected (e.g., South-Korean-Jet and Italygate). With the passage of time, the picture painted by those leads we developed in November-December 2020 has been confirmed in all the states in discussion, as I recently pointed out in my (warning: neologism alert) “prebuttal” (i.e., preview-rebuttal) to Pro Publica, “Doug Bock Clark Goes Full Baghdad Bob!” I am going to crib that recent work so that you will understand all the developments that were brought o the attention of PBS as well:

• In Georgia:
  • A whistleblower has come forward deserving his participation in a Georgia ballot stuffing scheme where he was paid $45,000 to stuff 4,500 ballots and claims he was average size out of 242 people doing the same in Georgia (“Georgia Ballot Trafficking Whistleblower Admits to Making $45,000 for Stuffing Ballot Boxes — Just One of 242 Traffickers”).
  • His story has been confirmed by an organization called True the Vote, which acquired 10 trillion cell phone pings from 5 states over the weeks before the election, and found the cell phone trails among voter drop boxes of a couple hundred people in Georgia (as well as four other states, incidentally) doing just what the whistleblower claimed.
  • The story has then also been reconfirmed by Dinesh D’Souza, who has obtained the videos from cameras guarding the drop-boxes, and found thousands of films of hundreds of people doing just what the whistleblower alleged (and snapping selfies at each drop-box so they can get paid), as is shown in his upcoming movie 2000 Mules (early May release).
  • All of which may tie into the fact that 2021, VoterGA reports that 74 counties in Georgia cannot produce ballot drop-box transfer forms and two counties have over 300,000 missing ballot images each.
  • A more recent report puts an end to any remaining questions of the severity of corruption within the Georgia Governor’s and Secretary of State’s offices.
  • Which may give some color to the fact that on December 17, 2020, Georgia State Senator William Ligon (Chairman of Georgia Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Election Law) issued a detailed report discussing a myriad of voting irregularities and fraud in the Georgia 2020 general election (from the Executive Summary: “[t]he November 3, 2020 General Election was chaotic and any reported results must be viewed as untrustworthy”).

• In Michigan
  • A Michigan Court of Claims decision of March 9 2021 “invalidates absentee/mail-in ballot rule as improperly established” (a ballot rule that five months earlier, in November 2020, had affected 3.2 million votes). They found also that “actions of the Secretary of State Benson’s guidance regarding mail-in ballots and signatures were also “unlawful”. From the Court’s decision:
    • Benson’s guidance, issued on October 6, 2020, directed local clerks to treat signatures as valid if there are “any redeeming qualities in the application or return envelope signature as compared to the signature on file.” “Redeeming qualities” are described as including, but not being limited to, “similar distinctive flourishes” and “more matching features than non-matching features.” Allegan County Clerk Robert Genetski and the Republican Party of Michigan filed suit against Benson, alleging that her guidance violated the state’s election laws and the Administrative Procedures Act. The plaintiffs asked that the court strike down the guidance as unlawful and enjoin its enforcement in future elections.
    • Murray sided with the plaintiffs, finding that Benson’s guidance was in fact a rule “that should have been promulgated in accordance with the APA. And absent compliance with the APA, the ‘rule’ is invalid.”
  • The original Antrim County Michigan Report from ASOG, the official response to it by Michigan, and the flaws in that official response including:
    • It never addressed the central finding of the ASOG report: that Antrim deleted their Security Logs at 11:03 PM, November 4, 2020 (thus in the end nothing can be known with certainty, because they could have done anything to the machine and then just deleted the Security Log);
    • Explanation for the lack of any Adjudication Files (though the files for 2016 and 2018 were present on the machine).

• In Wisconsin
  • A Wisconsin Supreme Court decision of December 2020 that the actions of the Wisconsin Election Commission regarding “indefinitely confined” voters were unlawful.
  • Retired Wisconsin Supreme Court justice and now Senate Office of Special Counsel Judge Michael Gableman published a report in December 2021 claiming that Wisconsin election officials were engaged in a coverup, and a more recent report that gives eight solid accounts of serious criminal conduct, bribery, shocking revelations of private actors/activists trusted with official roles, a conclusion that the Wisconsin election should never have been certified, and a suggestion that decertification should be considered (naturally the MSM focused on dismissing the decertification suggestion and ignoring everything else in the report).
  • However, coverage of this shocking development is seeping into the edge of MSM, with “Wisconsin Special Counsel Finds ‘Widespread Election Fraud’ In Nursing Homes During 2020 Election” appearing in Federalist Papers and Tucker Carlson playing a four minute interview with Judge Gableman:

• In Arizona:
  • As is ably discussed in a report put together by Senator Wendy Rogers:
  • the Maricopa Audit, found that of Maricopa’s 2.1 million ballots, there are serious discrepancies (i.e., missing ballots and/or images) for 367,584 ballots (in a race won by 10k votes). A full 740k do not have a proper chain of title. But only if you count them all does Biden win by 10,000 (which our dutiful “independent” press reported as “Maricopa Audit shows Biden still won by 10,000!”).
  • The Maricopa Canvassing report shows about 300,000 illegal votes.
  • A Pima County, Arizona canvass that shows so many laughable irregularities (e.g., 35% of households have “discrepancies” such as a fraternity generating 27 votes from men of average age 45 whose names are not recognized by those who live there) that it has been mathematically proven that Pima County (Tucson) Arizona is a stellar example of election fraud.

• In Colorado, a Mesa County, Colorado forensic analysis of its election  equipment reveals that the November 2020 election has been 100% wiped out so that there is no way to audit it, as well as proof that before it was wiped, the hard drive showed that the November 2020 election had been compromised, with multiple election databases and an injection of 29,000 ballots.

• For final measure, the Halderman Expert Rebuttal Declaration (which, while not the full report, is devastating in its own right) has also been provided to Pro Publica.

PBS simply assumes away all such evidence. For them, it does not exist. It is rather a clever trick, that: not subtle, but one has to admire the brazenness (and the advantage of Information Dominance, again). I know that the medium of television has its limitations, but assuming away this mountain of evidence in favor of pettifoggery over a report compiled in an emergency situation weeks after the election (and doing so with chicanery, as I have catalogued above) is intellectually dishonest. It is Baghdad Bob-ism.

So while I give PBS credit for some aspects of the documentary, as I mentioned initially, for the reasons I have walked through I believe they committed intellectual chicaneries. I do not think it was random, either: I think it is done precisely at the base of what should have been their argument. Because they have assumed away all the contrary evidence, they reveal what is really their core assumption, that the election integrity movement is based on “a myth”. I call it an assumption because if it were a conclusion they would have provide argument for it against the mountain of evidence and events just cited. Because they neither mention such evidence nor argue against it, one can only see their claim as an assumption.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL LEGERDEMAIN of PBS simply assuming what PBS should instead be trying to prove brings opportunity to disabuse my readers of an infelicity of language frequently encountered, and that is misuse of the phrase, “begging the question”. To “beg a question” does not mean, “to raise a question” (as people generally use the expression). Instead it means, “to take the conclusion of one’s argument, the thing one is trying to prove, and making it one’s assumption.” That is truly what the expression means, and the PBS documentary provides beautiful illustration of this. They came to the election integrity issue with the assumption that “election integrity issues are a myth,” then they then spent 53 minutes “proving” that there is no election integrity issues through the simple artifice of screening out the massive amount of evidence developed since then (and through pettifoggery and selectivity in their discussion of Antrim). Please note that it is easy to “prove” something when you get to start off by assuming it is true and exclude all contrary evidence.

However, I have a fondness for PBS team.  Perhaps it is their courage and their small improvement in intellectual honesty, described above. For that reason I would be willing to continue interacting with PBS, but only in a live setting, which they will never do because deep down they are locker room heroes, afraid to test themselves in live play.

This story was first published on Deep Capture. Deep Capture features original investigative reporting on the all-too-cozy relationship Wall Street has with regulators, media, government and the intellectual establishment.