Connect with Point of View   to get exclusive commentary and updates

Excess Votes

Postal workers bins of mail in ballots 2
never miss viewpointsKerby Anderson

An academic study conducted by Dr. John Lott concluded that Joe Biden received hundreds of thousands of “excess” votes in Democratic-controlled areas in the 2020 election. In his research, he compared areas where Democrats are dominant to places where Republicans were dominant in the past two presidential elections.

Looking at six swing states, he crunched the numbers and discovered that voter turnout in Republican areas increased from 2016 to 2020. Voter turnout among Democrats dropped, except in places where voter fraud was claimed. In those few counties where voter fraud was alleged, John Lott explains, there was a huge increase in turnout.

He not only examined and compared counties in these swing states, but he also looked at specific voting precincts that touched each other. Sometimes these precincts were separated by one street and in every other way were homogeneous. He said there was no clear reason why absentee turnout should increase in just Democratic jurisdictions.

Does this study prove voter fraud? No, it does not, especially since this happened more than a year ago and there is no forensic evaluation that can be done now. But remember that in many of the court cases alleging voter fraud, the judges dismissed those cases because they lacked concrete evidence of voting irregularities.

Last year, when John Lott wrote an op-ed about his findings, two Stanford University professors argued that Lott relied on “faulty” data. He went back and reworked the data to accommodate their concerns and found that the excess votes persisted.

Statistical anomalies don’t prove voter fraud. There may be other explanations. But this study is a reminder that we need to pay more attention in the elections this year to how votes are cast and how they are counted. viewpoints new web version

Viewpoints sign-up