October 25, 2023

Sidney Powell is a tall, dignified-looking attorney who became something of a cult figure among Trumpsters.  Shortly after the election, Powell unleashed her “Kraken” in four legal cases aimed at overturning or at least modifying the 2020 election results of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  None succeeded.

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I remember watching Powell on television, where she talked confidently about foreign governments that used voting machines to shave votes from one candidate so they could be given to the other candidate.  These foreign voting irregularities happened many years ago.

Powell cited a credible witness in support of her claims: CIA subcontractor Navid Keshavarz-Nia.  Regarding this man, the New York Times used to be very complimentary.  It reported that his co-workers in U.S. Intelligence felt that Keshavarz-Nia “was always the smartest person in the room.”  Keshavarz-Nia filed an affidavit that made many assertions supportive of Powell’s arguments.

To say the least, these claims were intriguing.  However, I kept waiting for Powell to slide her story into the current decade.  Were her claims applicable to the 2020 election?  After all, elections had changed in several ways, such as these:

  1. During the last 15 years, most states started using paper backups.  In a post-election audit, those could be used to spot electronic cheating.
  2. There was a proliferation of mail-in ballots, and they are inherently more susceptible to identity theft.  (Just ask Jimmy Carter.)
  3. In the 2020 election, many states dropped or severely reduced signature-matching requirements.  That made the illegal harvesting of ballots safe and easy.

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To me, cheating with machines is possible but no longer necessary unless the fraudsters miscalculate.  (For example, they do not submit enough harvested ballots to alter the election results.)  If they have enough time, motivation, access to registration lists, and access to ballots, then stuffing drop boxes with harvested ballots is probably the fraud methodology of choice.  And that is exactly what happened in the 2020 election.  If you doubt it, watch 2000 Mules again.

For these reasons, I was skeptical that Powell had witnesses who could testify regarding the recent use of machines to shave votes.  Although it was theoretically possible that Powell’s conjectures were correct, she never produced the evidence.  That only hurt the person she was trying to help: President Donald Trump.

Shortly after January 6, Powell was, apparently, part of a group that sought to test one of the Georgia voting machines.  This is being portrayed as the crime of the century, and it led to Powell’s recent plea deal.

Powell pleads guilty

By now you have heard that Sidney Powell pleaded guilty in the so-called Georgia election interference case.  However, it seems that she has not recanted her views regarding election fraud.  Her guilty plea concerns only a misguided effort to test an election machine in Coffee County.  It is barely a crime at all, since there was no criminal intent.  The so-called Powell conspirators made pictures of ballots after getting permission from Misty Hampton, the Coffee County elections administrator.  No one was trying to destroy records, change votes, or damage equipment.  Big deal!

Of course, the mainstream media (MSM) are not satisfied to see Powell get hit with a few little misdemeanor charges related to her efforts to examine a voting machine.  After all, she is not even going to jail!