I seem some discussion in this thread about Trump's claims that the 2020 election was stolen or fraudulent. There has been very little good evidence presented that electronic voting machines were compromised. However, there is very strong evidence that a massive ballot harvesting operation was conducted, especially in the swing states and in large cities. Some of it was legal, some illegal, and some in a gray area that merits further investigation.
I believe the reports of ballot harvesting because I witnessed it myself. I'm an election officer in my county and have been since about 2017. At the 2020 election I worked for a couple of weeks at the county government office processing absentee/mail-in votes. The post office would bring in boxes of ballot envelopes each day, and we would open them up and get them assembled to be run through the electronic tabulators. We worked in pairs and I was usually paired with a Democrat representative (I'm registered as a Republican). Interestingly, my regular partner was a retired government intelligence analyst.
We noticed a pattern right away. Boxes of ballots from nursing homes and apartment complexes with a high density of naturalized immigrants would come in at the same time. Many of the ballots had a voting assistance form with them which means someone was declaring that they were assisted in completing their ballot by a third party. Many of the voting assistance forms were incomplete, often missing the assistant signature, or the name was illegible. The ballots in the group often had the same mistakes which caused some of them to be declared void and trashed, but most were mistakes that did not disqualify them.
We reported it to county election officials who were dismissive. I told the Democratic and Republican election observers, who seemed at a loss about what to do about it. I also told the election integrity committee for the local Republican chapter. I explained that in order to fully investigate what had taken place, they would need to examine all 100,000 or so mail-in ballot envelopes (preserved in a warehouse) to find the patterns and then put shoes on the pavement in those areas to interview people to see what had occurred. The party decided to focus their resources on ensuring integrity in future elections which was probably a good decision based on the resources available.
I should add that this type of ballot harvesting is legal in my state, if it is done correctly. If the political operatives who perhaps were harvesting those ballots were completing them without the voter being present, then that would be illegal. Also, this type of ballot harvesting is not legal in other states. There is quite a bit of video on X/Twitter of harvested ballots being deposited. One, which I can't link to because X doesn't make it easy to find tweets in a web browser, shows an operative bringing a stack of ballots to a remote deposit box, noticing that the envelopes haven't been signed, then takes them all back to her car and signs them then brings them back and stuffs them in the box.
Trump's campaign has highlighted some of this in his election fraud summary:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... r-AA1mwV01
Since then, I witnessed gaming of the provisional ballot process in 2022. I was working as a precinct chief at a polling station and, right before closing time, about 10 homeless-looking people came in together, said they were not registered to vote, and requested provisional ballots. I was helping one of them complete his provisional ballot cover (not the ballot itself) and congratulated him on voting for the first time. He chuckled, looked me in the eye, and winked. Again, this is not illegal, but if my observation is correct it shows that one of the political parties was using an angle to try to get more votes.
The thing is, before the 2020 election there were strong rumors that the Democrats were running a big ballot harvesting machine and Republicans failed to act on it. The way elections work, you have to have that kind of thing run to the ground BEFORE the election takes place, because afterwards is a struggle to put together a case in the limited time you have to contest the results.