Mea Culpa: I Was Wrong About 2020

By Captain Seth Keshel 4-1-2024

"Election Integrity" Expert Extraordinaire

Before you read this & say "what???" (like I did ), REMEMBER today is APRIL 1!!!

(photo from Seth Keshel FB page)

Humility is never an easy thing to display.  No one likes to admit fault, and that task gets increasingly more difficult as time marches on especially if you’ve invested countless hours, interviews, speaking appearances, and conversations into a cause.  As you’ve surely noticed, very few medical personnel who invested so heavily in the COVID-19 lies and propaganda have set aside hubris and come out with their own mea culpa.

Given that five out of every eight American likely voters distrust the results of the 2020 presidential election, my previously expressed positions don’t exactly put me in rare company; however, Reuters, The New York Times, NPR, and an endless list of assorted global, national, and regional publications have done everything in their power to run me off the road since 2021.  I’ve spent plenty of time ripping them in return, correcting their careless and novice mistakes, and rubbing their faces in their perpetual misery, even though they control practically all levers of power in our governments, federally and in the states.  Even though this has brought about cause for fun and camaraderie, it is important for me to finally own it…

I was wrong about 2020.

Sure, there are always some issues with elections, and with over 150 million ballots counted, it is inevitable that someone somewhere will vote twice – but no state was decided by closer than 10,457 votes.  At some point, we must move on.

For enabling distrust of our government and its election systems from her own citizens, I owe a great debt I fear I cannot repay.  After all, government officials would never preside over a system of elections that would potentially oust them from their positions of power, which provide prestige, access, and a career of notoriety.

Pennsylvania may have voted for Trump in 2016, after three decades of not backing GOP presidential nominees, and in its first evaluation of him as president seen the Republican Party out-register the Democrat Party by a ratio of 21:1, but clearly it was time for Joe Biden, five decades into his political career and as sharp as ever, to overtake Barack Obama’s record vote total in the Commonwealth the same year Donald Trump did the same.

In Wisconsin, we were only convinced something was wrong by our own desires to see Trump win.  It is perfectly normal, after watching Trump cruising to what appeared to be an inevitable landslide win on Election Night, for a ballot dump 85/15% in favor of Biden at 3:45 a.m. to take place, affording Biden a a narrow victory after mail voters were allowed to get around identification requirements if they belonged to a category of voter called “indefinitely confined,” which just happened to be four times larger in 2020 than it had been in the previous election.

Election workers in Detroit were most likely impaired from tabulating ballots by some sort of glare pouring in through the windows of the TCF Center, requiring them to put up obstacles that supposedly blocked the operation from view of an unruly mob outside the facility.  Even though one of the Republicans tasked with certifying Wayne County’s results reporting being coerced to sign off on them, it doesn’t mean we can just raise holy hell for three years and never take strides to get over it.  We were so unruly, Attorney General Dana Nessel had to threaten to use the police against those who were upset over the way the people expressed their political will.  That is not what the Republican Party is about.

Nevada has it in the law that they don’t need to count drop box ballots for a week after elections, and not only did those two counties who are most effected by that ruling provide the margin of victory for Biden, they did it again in the 2022 midterm U.S. Senate race, even providing the exact percentage split Adam Laxalt found unlikely and went to great lengths to advise his social media followers of.  We must accept laws that provide counties that contribute a disproportionate percentage of a state’s vote an opportunity to overcome small counties, or we are no better than the left who cries “foul” at every turn.

Georgia was primed for a blue turn, especially after the largest Republican gain in two decades in a state that Biden didn’t campaign in.  While Barack Obama gave it his best shot and came up short twice, it was Biden who truly motivated Atlanta’s black vote to get out to the polls in numbers that overcame a deficit of more than 300,000 votes near the end of Election Night.  Mistakes happen, and Brad Raffensperger is allowed to make them, too – even if it meant saying Georgia had 4.7 million votes cast on live TV the morning after the election, just weeks before it certified 5.0 million.

Arizona perplexes many, but just because every Republican but one had won the state since 1952, including Trump in 2016 when he won Maricopa County with fewer votes than Romney had in 2012, doesn’t mean that the Republican incumbent setting single-cycle Republican vote gains in both the state and in Maricopa County is going to hold it.  All it took was a gain 2.5 times larger than the largest Democrat vote gain in one election ever to pull off, and our friends at Fox News knew it with less than 1% of the vote counted.  Arizonans simply missed the normalcy that comes from not having John McCain in the Senate lobbying for the next place to send young Americans to valiantly serve their nation.

I could go on and on.  The case was there, and in some cases, it was made in front of courts who have affirmed Joe Biden’s half century of public service was honored with 81 million legitimate votes.  That ship has sailed now.   Just because it takes weeks to count votes in some states, but only hours in others, doesn’t mean we need to discourage others from participating in our democracy.  Instead of being selfish and wanting people to leave their homes to vote, we should deliver the disenfranchised the ballots ourselves – or better yet, lobby the government to allow everyone to text in their ballot choices.

If Republicans want to win – then the choice is clear…

Ballot harvesting will clearly change the game.  Government may close down the economy to alter the rules to win elections, use large pools of funds on personal largesse, promote diversity over real skill, crack down on some forms of speech but permit all others, weaponize the agencies of government against political opponents, and destroy every financial setup that is created in the name of security, but they will certainly tabulate ballots accurately for candidates who seek to vanquish everything they have ever created.  To believe anything else is un-American, and quite frankly, un-Democratic.

All the Republican votes you ever dreamed of lie just beyond the gated entryway of a secluded, upper-middle class neighborhood in Lampeter, Pennsylvania.  Sure, they couldn’t be bothered to vote with the fate of the country on the line in 2016 or 2020, but they are there, damn it.  Just because ten activists harvesting a single project for two hours in Philadelphia may net hundreds of votes in margin doesn’t mean we shouldn’t redirect our efforts elsewhere to find a dozen members of a sleeping Republican voter base that will surely be ready to vote now that Automatic Voter Registration has taken the headache of registering to vote away from them.

It's not the system that needs an overhaul.  It’s us.  Why complain about Joe Biden winning Automatic Voter Registration states 18 to 2 (243 electoral votes to 9), when we can rub it in their faces that they’ll never have West Virginia, and will need to wait at least a decade to have a crack at Alaska?  We need to stop finding negative in everything and look for how to see the glass as half full.  The left has their loud voices, sure, and we tend to paint all of them with the same brush.  Imagine this situation:

Joe Biden is President in 2020, up for reelection, instead of Trump.  He wins 18 of 19 counties nationally that have perfectly aligned with every election winner since 1980, wins four states that, when won together, have gone to every winner since 1896 (thirteen times), and by virtue of having the fourth highest share of party primary vote of all time, clearly possesses the full support of his party, destroying any narrative that there is a mutiny from within the party that will doom him.  From coast to coast, his base is organizing miles-long car parades and spontaneous boat parades in even the reddest of states.

He romps to an apparent massive victory, not only grabbing up the swing states, but giving Trump a run for his money in Texas, Ohio, and South Carolina, of all places.  Suddenly, after Americans have gone to count sheep expecting another four years of building back better, they wake up to find that it was Trump who miraculously turned the tide in Michigan and Wisconsin, flipping them immediately.  Within days, Trump also reversed his deficits in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, winning them narrowly.  When the counting is done, despite a gain of more than 20% in total votes, Biden becomes the first incumbent president to gain votes from his previous election and lose since Grover Cleveland in 1888.

The left would accept this, just like they peacefully accepted George W. Bush’s eyelash margin in Florida in 2000, which had to be greenlighted by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Despite their palpable anger over every hot-button issue, such as the George Floyd riots in 2020, no American cities would be burned to the ground in protest of Trump assuming the controls at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Why?  Because of our democracy.  Trump may have had the yard signs, the boat parades, and the rallies that filled entire stadiums and left a nearly equal population outside the stadium watching on overflow screens, but 2020 was just the perfect storm in that Americans were hungry for Biden’s third presidential run and enthused by his list of accomplishments in the Senate and Vice-Presidential offices since 1972. Never has China had such access to our leadership before – now that is building bridges, not bombing them.

If you’re reading this, I hope you understand why I’ve decided to walk back three years of commentary and own it.  You may be shaking mad, or maybe you’ve come to grips with how we are finally going to turn the tables and win these elections if we beg the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors not to shut down our voting machines on Election Day, and perhaps prepare for it like hostages by voting early. 

But most sincerely, I wish all of you a…

HAPPY APRIL FOOLS’ DAY!