Professor Lichtman and his Political Crystal Ball

Perhaps you have heard of Professor Allan Lichtman and his prediction for the 2024 presidential election. He says that Kamala will win.

Lichtman uses a prediction system based on 13 historical “keys” that measure the strength of the incumbent party in a presidential election. Some of his keys, such as the charisma level of the challenger, are highly subjective. A list of keys is found here in an article by Andrea Widburg.

Lichtman’s prediction for 2024 may come true, but if it does, it won’t be due to the “13 keys” of his analysis. Instead, it will likely be attributable to a missing 14^th key — the cheating key.

The professor is a committed Democrat so he may not believe it possible that fellow Democrats might cheat their way to victory. That is what they did in 2020, but before we get into that, let’s talk about Lichtman’s skill with his political crystal ball. It’s not so great.

Professor Lichtman says he has been correct in predicting presidential elections since 1984. That is false for these reasons:

• He dismisses his bad prediction in the 2000 Gore-Bush election because, according to Lichtman, Gore really won... I see.

• In 2016 the Professor received great credit for correctly predicting the upset win by Trump. The problem? He got it wrong. (Lichtman’s prediction was that Trump would win the popular vote, but Trump lost it by 2.1 percentage points.)

• After 2016, Lichtman officially changed from predicting popular vote winners to predicting electoral vote winners. Based on that change, he correctly predicted that Biden would win the 2020 election. However, I don’t believe it had to do with any of his 13 keys. This requires explanation.

In 2020, the cheating was so massive in the swing states that several state elections should not have been certified. I am not saying this based on conjecture or estimates. Rather, it is on the basis of solid facts that have never been debunked, or even examined in many cases.

• The Pennsylvania election was a fraud because there were far more ballots cast than active voters. When Pennsylvania certified its election on November 24, 2020 the excess was exactly 202,377. On December 28, 2020, sixteen Republican legislators issued a screaming press release about the voter deficit. A day later, the Pennsylvania Secretary of State issued a response: “[S]ome counties have not yet finished entering into the SURE system...the record of the individual voter who cast a ballot....” In other words, the check is in the mail. That was two months after the election. Those voters were never identified. That was the conclusion of Verity Vote, a very credible data analysis firm. I tested the logic, calculations, and source data in the Verity Vote analysis, and no errors were found. When last checked — nearly 3 months after the election — there were still about 121,000 ballots that had not been matched to voters.[1] To make matters worse, Pennsylvania’s super left-wing Supreme Court declared that no voter could be disqualified simply because his signature looked phony. So in Pennsylvania there was no ID requirement, no signature checking, and there were more than one hundred thousand mysterious ballots for which there were no voters.

• In Wisconsin, it is a fact that Democrat officials in the two very large counties of Dane and Milwaukee posted public notices “urging all voters who request a ballot and have trouble presenting a valid ID to indicate that they are indefinitely confined.” (See WILL report, page 26.) As a result, that special category of voter increased by nearly 200,000 between 2016 and 2020, and tens of thousands voted without ID. After the election (in December 2020), Wisconsin’s liberal Supreme Court ruled that the instructions were illegal. Nice timing!

• In Michigan, the Secretary of State mailed out an extra 4 million ballot applications that could be returned without ID (after they were retrieved from mailrooms, trash cans, and landfills?) Each application had to be signed by the voter but the Secretary declared that she and the county clerks would “presume” all signatures were legitimate. Trump and other Republicans told the Secretary she was wrong and, after the election, a judge declared that the “presumption” was illegal. More nice timing! (By the way, if the Secretary were a Republican, this would not be a matter of simple illegality: It would be criminal, and she would be indicted.)

• In Georgia, a member of the Fulton County Board of Registrations and Elections reported — years after the election — that no signature matching, whatever, took place in the county for the 2020 election. Fulton comprises Atlanta, and is the largest county in Georgia. It is large enough to easily change the state election results. In addition, an analysis of Fulton County ballot images by VoterGA showed numerous “impossible” images. For example, thousands had identification files (SHA files) dated hours or days after the dates on image files (TIF files). In the rest of the universe those two files are created simultaneously. I urge you to listen to this overview of Fulton County’s many questionable and impossible ballots. It is a presentation by Garland Favorito, the founder of VoterGA. The pertinent part starts at the 27:00 meter mark.

I could provide more examples but you get the point. Lichtman needs to add a “Cheating Key” to his list.

Before concluding I’d like to briefly address the likely outcome in this November’s election. I am not a political pundit or pollster but I suspect that Donald Trump and JD Vance are likely to get enough votes to win the swing state elections. Before Joe Biden dropped out it appeared that the Republican ticket might win by enough to overcome any Democrat cheating. Now, however, the margins are closer, and the outcome is in doubt.

Most people don’t understand the Machiavellian brilliance of Democrat cheating. Democrats are happy to allow endless counting and recounting of ballots, but they will fight ferociously against anything that can demonstrate the validity of the ballots (or the lack of it). In the swing states they have eliminated or weakened requirements for:

• Voting in person

• Obtaining a mail-in ballot

• Voter ID

• Proof of citizenship

• Signature identification

• Addresses on ballot transmittals

• Postmark dates on ballot envelopes (to show they were mailed on time)

• Meaningful participation of poll watchers

• Verification of registration voter lists

• Regulation of unmonitored ballot “drop boxes”

As a result, the Republican “loser” will probably have nothing to take to court in a lawsuit, and his/her case will be dismissed. However, there is a way to obtain the evidence needed to void a stolen election: canvassing.

I have discussed it before (here) but here is a recap:

• For counties where cheating is suspected, hire a qualified statistician to select a representative sample of voters who, according to election department records, voted via mailed ballot.

• Organize teams of volunteers to visit each sampled voter to ask if he/she voted and, if so, by what method (mail or in person). The teams should be organized and supervised by bipartisan civic leaders.

• Document all responses and, where possible, obtain affidavits to support any claims of irregularities.

• The percentage of irregularities in the sample should be extended to the mail-in voting population of the county. If the extended results are large enough, a new election will be warranted.

Let’s hope such a plan is never needed.

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[1] In response to other articles some readers have argued that there were far more registered voters in Pennsylvania than ballots cast. However, I am talking about active registered voters. Pennsylvania’s unique system tracks registered voters and registered voters who actually voted in the prior election. That is how the 16 legislators and Verity Vote were able to spot this fraud.