Auditing Biden's 'Victory'

I’ve never heard of Joseph Fried before, and it was only a few days ago that I became aware of his four-month-old book Debunked: A Professional Auditor Reviews the 2020 Election. But it turns out that this veteran MBA and CPA, who recently retired from his own auditing firm and now writes at Substack, has given us what must surely be the definitive work on the topic. Having “professionally conducted and reviewed hundreds of audits,” he brings his decades of experience in that field to bear on the administration of the 2020 presidential election in each of the six swing states that were awarded to our current dotard-in-chief, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Throughout the book, Fried’s objective is to “analyze the major claims of fraud or irregularity, the credibility of those claims, the available evidence, and the threshold audit standards the states applied, or should have applied, relative to those claims.”...

... Fried is a very good teacher. Among much else, he explains that a recount is not an audit – the latter must be performed by independent professionals – and that a mere recount doesn’t preclude the need for an audit. Nor does a court’s ruling on procedural grounds negate an auditor’s findings...

In some cases, an election result cries out for an audit. One test is statistical likelihood. The 2020 election, as it turns out, failed this test spectacularly.... There’s more. Not in 150 years has a candidate whose vote total jumped as much as Trump’s did from one election to the next ended up losing the election. Never has any incumbent who received over 75 percent of the votes in his party’s primaries (Trump won 94 percent) lost the general election...

None of this, Fried underscores, proves anything. But all of it points to the urgent need for a legitimate audit. So do a number of other problems in several widely distributed jurisdictions...

For a responsible auditor, there are other questions to be asked. Were voter logs updated? Were ballot requests logged? Who emptied the drop boxes in which absentee voters deposit their ballots? Who, after the ballots were received, maintained chain of custody? Who had access to the computers used in ballot processing? Where were ballots stored? Who witnessed ballot counts?...

In a series of six chapters, Fried goes into detail about the way in which the election was conducted in each of the six swing states that Biden won...