As I prepared for my Thanksgiving superspreader event, I listened to the Pennsylvania state legislature’s four-hour public hearing on irregularities witnessed by polling observers in the 2020 election. I expected the testimony would simply be a repeat of what we’ve heard from the Trump legal team. It turned out to be far more powerful, persuasive and riveting than anything I’ve heard before.
Listening to the witness stories, one after another, intensified their strength. The fact that poll watchers at random precincts and counting stations throughout the state were reporting similar experiences and the nearly universal hostility of the Democratic poll workers leaves one with the feeling that this was all planned.
I was surprised by the caliber of the individuals who had come forward with their stories. They were an impressive and highly credible group. Most, but not all, had signed sworn affidavits. The witnesses included computer experts, attorneys, former military officials, professionals, entrepreneurs and stay-at-home moms. There were even a few Democrats among them.
Here are some of the most compelling moments from the hearing.
The most stunning testimony came from Phil Waldron, a retired Army Colonel. He told the group: “I spent the first half of my career just like [Pennsylvania state Senator who was hosting the event] Colonel Mastriano here as a calvary officer conducting armed reconnaissance, counter reconnaissance. Last half of my career spent in information warfare as a psychological operations officer and information operations officer, conducted computer network operations, electronic warfare, special electronic warfare, deception, counter deception and op sec and a couple of other specialties.”
Waldron shows the group a vote chart from Election night which clearly shows several major spikes which represent large numbers of votes coming in for Joe Biden. He tells the audience that normally, you would see a smooth line. The series of spikes that we see are an indication of fraud. In this case, he says that 570,000 votes came in for Biden, and only 3,200 for Trump, in a short period of time. The crowd “gasps.”
Gregory Stenstrom is a former commanding officer in the Navy, a veteran of foreign wars, current CEO of his own private company, forensic computer scientist and an expert in security and fraud. He was a poll watcher in Delaware County, PA.
“I personally observed USB cards being uploaded to voting machines by the voting machine warehouse supervisor on multiple occasions. This person is not being observed, he’s not a part of the process that I can see, and he is walking in with baggies of USBs.”
“In all cases the chain of custody was broken. It was broken for the mail-in ballots, the drop-box ballots, the Election Day USB card flash drives. In all cases they didn’t follow any of the procedures defined by the Board of Delaware County of Elections.”
“I literally begged multiple law enforcement agencies to go get the forensic evidence from the computers. It’s a simple process. It wouldn’t have taken more than an hour to image all 5 machines. That was never done despite my objections and that was three weeks ago.”
The most frightening part of Stenstrom’s testimony came at the end. He had “just learned two days ago that virtually all chain of custody logs, records, yellow sheets, everything, was gone. All forensic evidence, all custody sheets in [inaudible] County are gone. They had a signing party where they sat down and poll workers were invited back to recreate those logs and our understanding is as of today, was that they were unsuccessful in getting them all. So we have a situation in where we have 100,000 to 120,000 ballots, both mail in and USB, that are in question. Now there’s no cure for this, there’s no remedy for this. As a home charter we could have a re-election in Delaware County for our own representatives within our own town. But there is no cure for that for the president of the United States. And I don’t believe, as a citizen and an observer to this, that anybody could certify that vote in any good conscience.”
Gloria Lee Snover is the chairman of the Northampton, PA, Republican Committee. She testified by Zoom. She has worked on presidential campaigns and has been involved in politics for 25 years. In Snover’s opinion, the “ever-changing rules” made this one of the most complex elections she’s ever participated in.
There was mass confusion regarding the mail-in ballot system, she said. Voters would call her asking all sorts of questions such as: “I received a mail-in ballot when I hadn’t requested one…I did not get my ballot…My ballot says it wasn’t received and I turned it into the election office in person… My ballot says canceled. What should I do?…I voted in person and it still says not counted.”
The registrar threatened to turn Snover over to the district attorney for posting a photograph of “a voter ballot harvesting a large bag of ballots at a Northampton County dropbox. She [the registrar] was more concerned that this individual had been exposed than by the fact this was happening.”
Republicans were not offered the same opportunity to cure their ballots as the Democrats. Snover said, “We also found in Northampton County more than 1,500 votes where the mail-in ballots were received in the election office on a date before it was even mailed.”
Perhaps the most egregious development Snover recounted was a pattern of old voter rolls being reactivated. People who had not voted since the 1990s were sent mail-in ballots. “This set up the opportunity for fraud on a massive scale that would go undetected.”
At a minimum, the testimonies of these three witnesses (and the many others who came forward to tell their stories) provide starting points for further investigation.
Americans need to watch these hearings, as well as those from observers in other battleground states. The hearings should be broadcast to the American people in the same way that the Senate confirmation hearing of Justice Amy Coney Barrett was.
It was from listening to this testimony that I began to feel as if the Trump legal team may actually have a chance.
