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President Joe Biden received hundreds of thousands of “excess” votes in some Democratic states where possible voter fraud was reported, according to a recent academic study of election security standards.
Conservative economist and political commentator John Lott Jr. responsible for the study, compared performance over the past two presidential elections between predominantly Democratic areas and those largely Republican in the so-called swing states.
Lott Jr. found that voter turnout in Republican areas increased from 2016 to 2020 while voter turnout among Democrats dropped, except in those areas where voter fraud was claimed.
As a result, Lott Jr. determined that Biden received at least 255,000 votes above the expected.
“In some of those swing states, you had counties where vote fraud was alleged. And yet, [the Democratic Party] you only had huge increases in turnout where vote fraud was alleged,” Lott Jr. told The Washington Times in an interview.
Biden, benefiting from mail-in voting
Lott Jr. says he selected specific voting precincts, near each other, making sure that one was in a Republican-dominant county and the other in a Democratic-leaning county.
The most suspicious variable he found in these cases was mail-in voting. The percentage of in-person voting was similar in both cases, but mail-in voting was disproportionately skewed toward the Democrats.
In the researcher’s view, there is no objective reason why mail-in voting turnout should increase only in Democratic-leaning districts.
“You are comparing two tiny areas that are very homogeneous, very similar to each other, across the street from each other, and what differs between these two, regarding absentee ballots, is where the ballots were counted,” Lott Jr. added.
His paper has been accepted for publication in Public Choice, a peer-reviewed journal specializing in the intersection of economics and political science.
William F. Shughart ll, Public Choice editor and professor at Utah University, called the study “provocative” and said Lott Jr.’s strategy could serve as a new way to detect “irregularities” in the electoral system.
“By comparing differences in election results for 2020 presidential candidates between in-person and mail-in ballots in matched samples of precincts in selected states, [the study] offers a novel way of detecting ‘irregularities’ in mail-in voting,” Shughart explained in an email to the Washington Times.
“To my knowledge, Dr. Lott is the first scholar to examine the most recent U.S. presidential election at the voting precinct level and, actually, presents statistical evidence supporting allegations of fraud in at least two key states (Georgia and Pennsylvania).”
Lott Jr. heads the Crime Prevention Research Center and worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy towards the end of the Trump administration.
