Senior election official admits vote-rigging

The Guardian reports that

A senior official in Pakistan has admitted to election rigging amid protests breaking out across the country over claims that its general election results were unfair.

The confessional statement throws further questions over the legitimacy of the 8 February elections, which were marred by controversies and allegations of rigging in Pakistan.

Commissioner Rawalpindi Liaqat Ali Chatta told reporters that authorities in Rawalpindi, Punjab province, changed the results of independent candidates – referring to candidates backed by the former prime minister Imran Khan’s party – who were leading with a margin of more than 70,000 votes.

Chatta said there was so much “pressure” on him that he contemplated suicide, but that he then decided to make a public confession. “I take responsibility for the wrong in Rawalpindi. I should be punished for my crimes and other people involved in this crime should be punished.”

He also accused the chief election commissioner and the chief justice of Pakistan for their roles in the rigging. Chatta was arrested by police after the statement.

For those unfamiliar with Imran Khan, the currently jailed former prime minister and leader of the party against which Mr Chatta says the vote-rigging was directed, in the 1970s, 80s and 90s he had fans worldwide as one of the best all-rounders in cricket history. During this period he was “known as a hedonistic bachelor and a playboy who was active on the London nightclub circuit” as Wikipedia puts it. Then he went home to Pakistan and binned his previous liberalism like a used condom. He encouraged the strict enforcement of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, and has pushed for insulting Muhammad to be made a crime all over the world. He is a hypocrite and a jerk. But those things do not change the fact that there is a strong prima facie case that his party should rightfully form Pakistan’s next government. His being in jail on an obviously trumped-up charge strengthens not weakens that argument.

The Guardian article was light on detail about how Commissioner Chatta (also spelled Chattha and Chatha, and I think the Guardian article is mistaken when it says his first name is Rawalpindi – it looks as if they have mixed up his name with his job title) says that the vote-rigging in which he participated was done. This article from Arab News gives more detail. It quotes him as saying,

“The wrongful act I have committed in this election [is that] we have made people, who had lost [the election], win 13 MNA (member of the National Assembly) seats from Rawalpindi. We have turned up to 70,000[-vote] lead of individuals into their defeat,” Chattha said.

“Even today, our people are putting fake stamps [on ballot papers]. I apologize to all my returning officers who were working under my supervision, who were crying when I was asking them to commit this wrongful act, and they were not willing to do it.”

I toyed with the idea of just posting about Pakistan, and leaving it up to the commenters to make the obvious parallels with the United States, but decided that would be a cop-out. On December 9th, 2020, the official YouTube blog posted the following statement:

Supporting the 2020 U.S. election
BY THE YOUTUBE TEAM

DEC 09, 2020 – 5 MINUTE READ

Over the past weeks and months, we’ve seen people coming to YouTube to learn more about where and how to vote or learning more about a candidate or an issue. We’ve seen news organizations grow their audience. And we’ve seen people turn to YouTube for the latest election results or simply to follow an historic event with the highest voting turnout in over a century in the U.S.

Our main goal going into the election season was to make sure we’re connecting people with authoritative information, while also limiting the reach of misinformation and removing harmful content. The work here is ongoing and we wanted to provide an update

Removing content that violates our policies

Our Community Guidelines prohibit spam, scams, or other manipulated media, coordinated influence operations, and any content that seeks to incite violence. Since September, we’ve terminated over 8000 channels and thousands of harmful and misleading elections-related videos for violating our existing policies. Over 77% of those removed videos were taken down before they had 100 views.

We also work to make sure that the line between what is removed and what is allowed is drawn in the right place. Our policies prohibit misleading viewers about where and how to vote. We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election. However in some cases, that has meant allowing controversial views on the outcome or process of counting votes of a current election as election officials have worked to finalize counts.

Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come. As always, news coverage and commentary on these issues can remain on our site if there’s sufficient education, documentary, scientific or artistic context.

Note the astonishing breadth of the censorship involved in “We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election.” That’s any U.S. election. It is forbidden for a historian to make a YouTube video arguing that fraud affected the outcome of the the U.S. election of 1876. As often happens, censorship that broad ends up silencing defenders of the case the censors want to make. For instance the arguments made in this article by Daniel Finkelstein of the Times, “It’s vital for democracy Trump admits he lost”, would have been caught in that net if someone had quoted the article in a YouTube video. Lord Finkelstein’s article gave serious consideration to the argument that in the American election of 1960 vote fraud might have swung Texas and Illinois to Kennedy, and praised Nixon for conceding rather than tear the country apart.

The habitual dishonesty and censorship practised over the last few years by the U.S. and British media has had a considerable effect on my opinions on many things. In this case it has caused me to increase my estimate of the probability that Joe Biden was falsely elected.

Note the words “increase my estimate of the probability”. I cannot place an exact figure – or even an inexact figure – on the likelihood that vote fraud changed the result of that election, but when censors won’t let me see the arguments made by one side, I assume that is because the censors are not confident that the arguments of the other side would prevail on their merits.

To believe that Biden must have been falsely elected because the media were in the tank for him would be illogical. But of course there was substantial vote fraud. Until 2016 the need to do something about the endemic insecurity of American elections was not controversial. Here is a video of one Senator Joe Biden talking about it in 2007. I cannot find that video of Joe Biden in 2007 itself on YouTube now, only embedded in Matt Margolis’s article, which itself was difficult to find. The direct link to it I had put on file did not work, but, strangely, a search for a stretch of text within the article took me to the same URL.

Also acknowledged by all sides prior to 2016 was the fact that postal voting / voting by mail makes vote fraud easier to commit, and there was an unprecedented amount of postal voting in 2020. Any British readers tempted to feel superior to the Yanks, read this first: “Judge slates ‘banana republic’ postal voting system”

Richard Mawrey QC, presiding over a special election court in Birmingham, warned that there were no realistic systems in place to detect or prevent postal voting fraud at the general election. “Until there are, fraud will continue unabated,” he said.

He found six Labour councillors in Birmingham guilty of carrying out “massive, systematic and organised” postal voting fraud to win two wards during last June’s elections for the city council.

And if you think that surely systems must have been tightened up since then, visit Lutfur Rahman’s fiefdom of Tower Hamlets.