The Homey & Appetizing Taste of Lies

Don't look behind the curtain

Martha Ellis Gellhorn

“Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.” - Martha Ellis Gellhorn

Courage is hard. People often don’t do or say what you wish they would. It’s easy to get discouraged. Or never start. Martha Ellis Gellhorn had an amazing career. As a journalist, she covered World War II. “On D-Day, June 6, 1944, she stowed away on a hospital ship, the only woman to land at Normandy. And she was there when the Allies liberated Dachau.” But a PBS bio page focuses mostly on her relationship with Ernest Hemingway (whom she married in 1940). After her divorce from Hemingway, Gellhorn preferred that people not mention she had ever been involved with him, so she would have been horrified at the PBS bio page.

“She committed suicide at her home in London on February 15, 1998, at the age of 89.”

Prior to her suicide, she made some other salient observations.

“Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it. Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.”

We Were Naive

Many people believed that the 2024 election would be a real election, and that only if Trump won the election would he implement authoritarian measures. Why did we believe he would wait until after the election to implement authoritarian measures? That doesn’t make any sense. Why take a chance on not winning?

Why were the Democrats so intent on assuring everyone that there were no problems with the 2020 election, when there were clearly some problems with the 2020 election?

In case you still believe that the 2020 election was perfect, take a look at this excerpt from a paper by the leading expert in the country on election audits: The distinguished Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, Philip Stark. The paper is a review of Georgia’s risk-limiting audit of the 2020 election, which he did not find reliable. (We featured this quote in our Substack on U.S. election audits.)

“There is no indication of widespread fraud, but there is reason to distrust the election outcome: the two machine counts and the manual `audit' tallies disagree substantially, even about the number of ballots cast. Some ballots in Fulton County were included in the original count at least twice; some were included in the machine recount at least thrice. Audit results for some tally batches were omitted from the reported audit totals.

The two machine counts and the audit were not probative of who won because of poor processes and controls: a lack of secure physical chain of custody, ballot accounting, pollbook reconciliation, and accounting for other election materials such as memory cards. Moreover, most voters voted with demonstrably untrustworthy ballot-marking devices, so even a perfect handcount or audit would not necessarily reveal who really won …

Georgia [in the 2020 presidential election] illustrates unrecoverable errors that can render recounts and audits `security theater' that distract from the more serious problems rather than justifying trust.”

Trump Won 100% of the Swing States

People also seem to believe that when scholars warned us about authoritarian government—and the end of U.S. elections—that the end of our elections would take place in an obvious way. As though Trump would openly announce that we weren’t having elections. But many countries continue to have elections for decades, long after they cease to be meaningful elections. Why risk the unpopular pushback that comes from cancelling an election, when you can have a show-election and everyone will go along with it nicely?

Trump’s victory in 100% of the swing states reminds us of other countries where victors get close to 100% of their vote.

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Controlling 100% of the Government

Even if Democrats had the spine to object to the electoral count (which they don’t) they would have no chance of succeeding in their protest. According to the Electoral Count Reform Act, which was passed after the January 6th insurrection of 2021, an objection to the electoral count must be raised by 20% of the members of each chamber of Congress, and then supported by a majority in each chamber. Since the Democrats now control neither the House, nor the Senate, they would lose both votes.

“The law requires one-fifth of each chamber of Congress to support a valid objection to electoral votes in order for a vote to be held on that objection and requires a majority vote in both chambers to sustain such an objection.”

Misconception, Misrepresentation, and Ridicule

Let’s look at a quote from some forward-thinkers that preceded Gellhorn.

“July 19-20, 1848, In the first women’s rights convention, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men, including Frederick Douglass (the only Black member attending), sign the Declaration of Sentiments.” It was an important step toward women in the U.S. gaining the right to vote, which would take 72 more years for white women, and another 45 years after that for many Black women—and many Black men as well— because it was 1965, when the Voting Rights Act finally passed.

“In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.

Firmly relying upon the final triumph of the Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this declaration.”

Lucretia Mott
Harriet Cady Eaton
Margaret Pryor
Elizabeth Cady Stanton

(& 96 others)

What Will You Do?

Below is a graph showing the results of the North Carolina presidential election. This is a different presentation of our previous drop-off analysis.

Drop-off is not a formal term, as far as we know. It refers to the difference between the votes for the President and a key down-ballot race. In North Carolina we chose the Attorney General's race.

Previously we calculated the drop-off in raw number of votes for each county in North Carolina, by subtracting the number of votes for the Republican Attorney General from the number of votes for the Republican presidential candidate (Republican drop-off). To calculate Democratic drop-off, we followed the same procedure on the Democratic side. We subtracted the number of votes for the Democratic Attorney General from the number of votes for the Democratic presidential candidate.

The Democratic drop-off in North Carolina is negative in every county. Because according to the official election results, in every county in North Carolina, Kamala Harris, the presidential candidate, got fewer votes than the Democratic candidate for Attorney General.

In this case, we are illustrating one state, North Carolina, by showing you a barcode for the drop-off in each county. The red barcodes are for the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump. The blue barcodes are for the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris.

In the format above, with a bar chart for each county - it becomes very clear how unusual—how absurd—the pattern is. It is unusual to have every county voting in an identical pattern, and when that universal pattern suggests that in every county in North Carolina more voters voted for the Democratic attorney general candidate than for the Democratic presidential candidate, it is absurd. Yet we see this pattern, of more votes for Democratic down-ballot races than for the Democratic presidential race—as the Republican presidential candidate Trump floats far above Republican down-ballot candidates—we see this pattern replicated in state after state in the 2024 presidential election. The exact same pattern exists in Arizona, Montana, and Ohio to name a few. The pattern is close to this in Nevada, New York, North Dakota, and Connecticut.

We were inspired to display the data this way by the Election Truth Alliance, who showed our data in this format. We find it to be a useful lens, and so our data team created this chart. We will be bringing you more of this presentation in different states, as well as a statistical analysis of the drop-off rates in different states that we are working on. Plus so much more coming. Please stay tuned.

By the way, we have not verified the other charts and graphs from the Election Truth Alliance.

Let’s end with another salient quote from Gellhorn":

“Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his[/her/their] own informed opinion and stand by it.”

It’s a Hell of a Bed That’s Been Made

Photo by Yaroslava Bondareva

We must not lie in it. We must pull the covers back, wash the sheets, get a new mattress, rebuild the frame. Scrub the floors. Air out the room. So much work to be done.

Please get involved.

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Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.

~ Henry David Thoreau

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