Into the Details

The Loyalty Investigation

Jakob & Irma Ehrlich My father’s grandparents Jakob and Irma (my great-grandparents) lived in Austria in the 1900s. Jakob Ehrlich [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Ehrlich] was a well established lawyer and politician, known for helping Jews in a bigoted society, and was prominent in the Zionist movement which led to the creation of Israel 10 years after his death. In 1938, the Austrian Nazi Government raided their home while they were out, ransacked the place, and took their passports (in a coordinated raid that included Sigmund Freud’s house and others). Jakob refused to flee the country, believing in the work he was doing supporting his community. In her nineties, Irma told the story to a tape recorder. Here’s what she said about this moment: > It is hard to revive the feelings and agonies of the next weeks. I was in complete shock. There was certain protective numbness, which made it possible for me to function reasonably well, and also an outrage. Suddenly you have been transformed from a respected citizen into a non-person. Dangers were all around. People were picked up in the streets and disappeared. Nobody knew what was going on and what would happen next. Any moment anything could happen. I thought the world would not allow it. That Roosevelt would stop it. There were ominous knocks on the doors in the dark hours. Prominent people, mostly Jews, but also Marxist and noted Catholics were arrested. I heard of friends, political allies, who disappeared. Who would be next? Jakob was taken from his home, in front of his family. He was sent to Dachau [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp]. The closest Irma and their fourteen year old son Paul ever came to seeing him again was when his casket was returned two months later, sealed, hiding the beatings which killed him. The camp had been operating since 1933 to end political opponents, before being scaled up 100-fold in the Holocaust. > Long after the funeral people visited Jakob’s grave as that of a martyr’s to pray and leave small stones, an old Jewish custom. I was told it was covered with innumerable tokes from these visits. Irma stayed in Vienna in weeks of shock after that, until Paul asked one day “Everyone is leaving – when do we go?”. Their story out is a riveting one which I won’t detail here. One moment that stands to memory is when an old acquaintance comes back to help Irma escape through the Netherlands – someone whom she had spent an entire mountain hike with as he spouted hatred and death to Jews, before becoming quite abashed when Irma let him know she was one. Irma and Paul ended up on one of the last flights out before the state-sponsored violence of Kristallnacht [https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kristallnacht]. Their bank accounts, property, and passports were seized by the government. They arrived in Britain, and later the US, penniless and stateless, but with their story. Irma spent the rest of the war as a traveling speaker to help get kids out of Nazi-occupied Europe. Paul Ehrlich After coming to the states, Paul served in the US army in WWII. Thanks to being multi-lingual and having obtained a chemistry degree, his job was to drive a jeep behind enemy lines as part of T-force [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-Force], stealing German secrets before they could be destroyed by the Germans or captured by the Russians. In a stroke of luck, this re-assignment kept him out of the Battle of the Bulge. In 1951, with a new PhD, he was working for the National Bureau of Standards and slated for a job designing new rocket fuels. That all changed when he was suddenly denied security clearance, and for decades he had no idea why. Harvard professors saw the opportunity, and hired him there instead. He went on to do much interesting work - including research on the polymerization of polyethylene at very high temperatures. Decades later, he put in a Freedom Of Information Act request. I am proud and unsurprised to learn from these documents [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1daLJI7mtDsSTt-do60kPkxPWnfECQRjp/view?usp=sharing] that Paul was stubbornly against political persecution, and recognized McCarthyism for what it was, despite it being anti-communist, not anti-fascist. He did not like communism, and he did not think communists should be working for the US government. But he did not discriminate, kept communist friends, and called out war crimes and propaganda when done by his own country. That was enough to cost him his job. It appears that a pro-McCarthy grad student at University of Madison reported Paul to the FBI for the following: * Had a friend who was a Communist, but declined to tell the name because he feared that might cause them harm. * Commented on a photo of POWs killed by North Koreans that it was propaganda, that in a war all sides commit such acts. * Thought the South Korean authoritarian government was unworthy of our support. * Had a wife that did not support Communists in government, but also did not support “Hooverism” – spying on the American people (often in support of senator McCarthy) – which continues strongly to this day. America 2025 Too much today feels like evil playbooks of the past are being used by those countries which sacrificed so much to defeat them. ICE is one small example - Stephen Miller’s starting point [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/09/what-does-plenary-authority-mean-stephen-miller-trump] for what may be his vision and Trump’s vision of a police state. Their military helicopters pull people out of their homes in the night, and deport them en-masse - sometimes to offshore torture [https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/07/inside-cecot-mega-prison-el-salvador/683646/] & concentration camps [https://www.nilc.org/resources/tracking-the-cecot-disappearances/]. Deportation, and even denaturalization, is nothing new in the US – for example the Obama administration deported more than three million [https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/obama-record-deportations-deporter-chief-or-not] immigrants, where the focus was on those who had recently crossed the border, and were not yet embedded in US communities. Historically, courts have been very strict on denaturalization – limiting it to cases of fraud committed during the citizenship process. The current administration’s approach is far more violent and direct, seemingly built to test the limits on what a US police-state could be. Even citizens are being rounded up and held, even without warrants (170 temporary detentions, by a recent count [https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-arrested-detained-against-will]). On Sept 25th, Trump issued a new directive to the three letter agencies, NSPM-7, [https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/countering-domestic-terrorism-and-organized-political-violence/] (Also see: ACLU’s writeup [https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-nspm-7-seeks-to-use-domestic-terrorism-to-target-nonprofits-and-activists] and The Intercept’s [https://theintercept.com/2025/11/04/trump-terrorist-list-nspm7-enemies/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter]). In it, the FBI’s ~200 task forces are directed to fight “terrorism”. > This “anti-fascist” lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include- anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity;- support for the overthrow of the United States Government;- extremism on migration, race, and gender;- hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality If one were to write about how the United States Government may be illegal, which I did [https://pehrlich.substack.com/p/making-sense-of-election-fraud-claims], could that be seen as supporting the overthrow of the current U.S. government? So far, their work to expand powers on removing citizenship [https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5445398/denaturalization-trump-immigration-enforcement] has been through exploiting naturalized citizens (such as Mamdani [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/9/republicans-push-to-strip-zohran-mamdani-of-us-citizenship-is-it-possible]), but in their words, Homegrowns are next [https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-jail-u-s-citizens-homegrowns-el-salvador]. How many will be stripped of their assets and deported, on threat of being sent to an offshore concentration camp? Unfortunately, this is not unprecedented within the United States. 105 years ago, president and KKK supporter Woodrow Wilson unleashed the “Palmer Raids”, sending 4,000 American Citizens to prison because of “Hostility to American Values”. This was among a litany of abuses, including asking Americans to spy on one another (queue J Edgar Hoover), having postmasters ban magazines for being critical of the US, France, or Britain, and sending a competing presidential nominee to 15 years of prison. [Source: fee.org – The Palmer Raids: America’s Forgotten Reign of Terror [https://fee.org/articles/the-palmer-raids-america-s-forgotten-reign-of-terror/]] Hope for the Mid-terms? That depends on us. As these numerous outrages “flood the box” the one I keep coming back to is the simple fact – one which appears more likely every day – of the outright theft of enough votes to change the 2020 election outcome. > I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.– Joseph Stalin Many Americans – particularly Democrats – hold unshakable faith in the security of our voting systems. We push to the 2026 mid-terms to change the balance of power. But to do so puts total trust in voting systems which are almost certainly crooked. In some of his latest work [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfUYoWQJyQw], journalist Scott Carney outlines a few things, including: * The research-backed psychology behind cheating in politics. If every candidate is committing fraud, new participants have to play the game, or become pariahs. This can create a hedonistic downwards spiral, which we are now in. * There are well known flaws in our voting machines, full stop. Published security vulnerabilities are well documented and have not been fixed. It is illegal for private citizens to test the security of our voting machines. This “security through obscurity”, an arguably flawed principle to begin with, has failed completely. At least one, if not both, of our main political parties have stolen both physical machines and their accompanying source code. * The reaction of people when they learn of Carney’s work. Generally: anger at the messenger, and disbelief that fraud happens in the US, which it does. And then: despondency. * In this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfUYoWQJyQw], he covers it all to a shocking (but not sensationalized) degree. With needing to discuss voter and vote manipulation, which is odious and rampant [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PXQfDHr9Aw&ab_channel=DemocracyDocket], there is enough scale of theft to potentially have changed the election outcome. There’s so much more on this topic. We have increasing evidence from the Election Truth Alliance. In one example they did a hand recount of paper ballots in MN [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSV1vgRZz9g], and found significant differences from the automatic vote tabulators. And on Friday, they filed suit [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XERg8QilFA] for election audits in PA. And in the meantime, while we’ve seen most swing states using one brand of voting machine and potentially seeing significant fraud, the other main brand covering 27 states, Dominion, was just bought by former GOP rep Scott Leiendecker [https://www.wired.com/story/scott-leiendecker-dominion-liberty-votes/]. Israel’s Hypocrisy When I was probably in my early teens, I had a book called Great Escapes. It had some pretty graphic stories: It told stories of endurance of men and women walking thousands of miles to escape Siberian gulags, Nazi prisoner of war camps, cattle-cars filled with people and abandoned on sidings, and so on. People told of maulings by German Shepherds, and scrabbling on the floor in straight jackets, trying to eat potato skins. I didn’t think I’d stumble on to another such example written about Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Aid volunteers [https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/25LgKq/greta-thunberg-they-kicked-me-every-time-the-flag-touched-my-face], and by extension, certainly any Palestinian prisoner they get their hands on. The following quotes Greta Thunberg on a recent aid trip to Palestine, which was intercepted by the Israelis: > At one point, around 60 people were put in a small cage outdoors, in the middle of the sun… Most of them did not have enough room to sit down… It was so hot, like 40 degrees [104°F]. We begged the whole time: Can we have water? Can we have water? In the end, we screamed. The guards walked in front of the bars the whole time, laughing and holding up their water bottles. They threw the bottles with water in them into the trash cans in front of us… When people fainted, we banged on the cages and asked for a doctor. Then the guards came and said, ‘We’re going to gas you.’ It was standard for them to say that. They held up a gas cylinder and threatened to press it against us… In the words of Israel’s National Minister of Security Ben-Gvir [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir]: “I will personally make sure that you are treated like a terrorist and that you rot in prison.” Shame. This is not what Jakob Ehrlich died for. Appendix | Films Getting friends together for documentary & discussion of these issues has been one of the more cathartic ways to handle recent news. Here’s some favorites in case they’re interesting to you. (Comment yours below!) - Winter on Fire – A Ukrainian Netflix documentary with terrific background on Ukraine, and the successful deposition of their Russian Puppet Leader 2014 via mass unrest. - Good Night and Good Luck – on McCarthyism and how it was ended, in part, by journalist Edward Murrow. - The Sound of Music – On the ascent of Austrian Nazi power, and the escape of political opponents - Where’s My Roy Cohn – On the lawyer who worked for McCarthy and took Trump under his wing. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pehrlich.substack.com [https://pehrlich.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Making Sense of Election Fraud Claims

Trump has claimed that the 2024 US Presidential election was rigged. In this post, I want to take that at face value, analyze the results shared by people looking for election fraud, and understand the context of election fraud at large. The scary part – perhaps even crazy-making – is that to a layman there does appear to be fraudulent data patterns. Understanding them fully, and what they mean (there may be boring explanations, or there may not), will take both time and heavyweight emotional processing. We place nearly blind trust in a system which has tremendous power over our future, and is meant to represent our personal choices. We have every right to understand why we should trust the results even when we are not technical experts. And regardless of what the data may show (personally, I expect seeing fraud from both sides), this right is what keeps our country democratic, not dictatorial. On March 7th 2025, Trump on video [https://youtu.be/44PSaIfKGtE?t=127] declared without context: “What happened is… they rigged the election, and I became president. So that was a good thing.” Well Mr. President, in whose favor was it rigged? Let’s take a look. 🫡 There’s four sections to this post: * Election fraud is possible in the US. There’s a court-proven track-record * Putin’s regime has expertise in election fraud, and we’ve learned how to see it * Looking at the data 2024: Weird things happened with the votes * How you can help Election Fraud in the United States Sources include Harpers - How to Rig an Election (2012) [https://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/], ChatGPT [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c0wTJGRSH7ZL2S8TwHEuD1beA_tK70N3aswcCgHtOzQ/edit?tab=t.0] (which links to further sources in turn), and HBO’s 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy]. The USA has both a long and rich history of election fraud, and has simultaneously maintained a virtually un-assailable reputation for election integrity. We are in many ways so conditioned to trust our elections that in earnestly questioning them we often must work through layers of fear, insecurity, shame, and re-evaluation. That has certainly been the case for me. It has helped to accept that one: there is always fraud, at least at some scale, and two: we have a right to demand open and scientific study of the data. Here are some examples [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c0wTJGRSH7ZL2S8TwHEuD1beA_tK70N3aswcCgHtOzQ/edit?tab=t.0] of historical fraud, carried out by both parties: * [New York City’s Mayor’s Office] Tammany Hall was bought for more than a century. * [Lyndon Johnson’s] biography [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Lyndon_Johnson#Book_One:_The_Path_to_Power_(1982)] describes buying votes from his “fixer” to get his Senate seat in Texas * [2003, Mayor of East Chicago, Indiana] The mayor had such widespread absentee ballot fraud that it was nullified by the state supreme court. * [2009, Troy NY Primary] Four officials plead guilty in absentee ballot fraud in the party primary. * [2014-2016, Philly Primary] An election worker plead guilty to adding fraudulent votes in primary elections for years, focusing on specific precincts in which he was bribed. A congressman was indicted for organizing the scheme. * [2018, North Carolina U.S. House] Ballot tampering of absentee ballots led to a do-over of a U.S. House election. One of the rare elections invalidated due to ballot fraud. * [2000 Presidential Election] Touchscreens were on video, in mass, casting votes for a different candidates. Florida counties were caught changing vote totals and sending false receipts, including negative votes for one candidate. The entire Diebold source code leaked, and it turned out any election worker could change vote totals using a spreadsheet. * [2004 lost ballots] During the 2004 presidential election, North Carolina experienced an electronic voting machine malfunction that caused 4,438 votes to disappear forever. “Random” selections for spot-checks in Ohio were not actually random. Memory cards were able to be “preloaded” with negative votes. And the list goes on. The past 100 years of US voting machine technology goes back and forth between reliability and convenience. In the 1900s, the first machines which mechanically tallied [https://www.iowapbs.org/iowapathways/artifact/1435/time-travel-iowa-1906-voting-machine] votes were used, but they had no paper trail or way of auditing. These were switched out for paper ballots until the onset of touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRE_voting_machine] (DRE) voting machines in the 2000s, which again had no papertrail. Over the next 20 years those machines were decertified as fraud-ready and replaced with what we have today: paper ballots which are filled in, and then optically scanned by tabulator machines. Meanwhile, Europe skipped all this and just stayed on classic paper ballots. The ability to verify ballot-counting with one’s own eyes and without technical knowledge is even considered a German constitutional right. U.S. States have guidelines and thresholds for when to do a recount, when and how to do spot checks [https://verifiedvoting.org/audits/whatisrla/], how to test machines and verify results, and so on. These are not always perfect, as we’ll see below. Election Fraud in Russia It is widely believed by many analysts that electoral manipulation under Vladimir Putin’s leadership dates back to the early years of his presidency. Since his first presidential win in 2000 observers have noted unusual patterns in vote tallies. These include margins exceeding 70% in key contests, such as a constitutional amendment to allow him more terms. One of the most compelling indicators of potential fraud in Russian elections is what researchers refer to as the "Russian Tail [https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-election-manipulation-russian-tail/33183374.html]." In a genuinely free and fair election, the polarity of one candidate across polling stations typically forms a smooth bell curve—a natural outcome of statistical variation. Most polling stations are near the average for the election, and a low number are heavily favoring one candidate or another. However, in several Russian and Russian-influenced elections, the shape of the curve instead appears to be made up of two bell curves overlaid. This indicates a second normal distribution consisting of false votes which were injected. An alternative explanation for the shape has yet to be found. The U.S. 2024 Presidential Election Without publicly available election audits being pursued by Kamala or (as far as we know) intelligence agencies, several volunteer organizations have sprung up in their stead. * Election Truth Alliance [https://electiontruthalliance.org/] is a small volunteer group which has so far found the Russian tail in data available in the swing states of both Nevada and Pennsylvania. If their data is correct it would mean the election outcome should have been different. They’re running a petition to audit the votes [https://www.change.org/p/demand-a-hand-count-audit-of-pennsylvania-s-2024-presidential-election], and a fundraiser [https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with-nathan-for-fair-and-free-elections] for when the petition fails. * SMART elections [https://smartelections.substack.com/p/so-clean] is one of the first volunteer groups to have raised the alarm. They published the first findings of a phenomenon called ballot drop-off, which is a measurement of how often ballots vote entirely for one party, but the opposite party for president. When widespread, consistent, and with one-sided biases, this can be a sign of vote tampering. Let me be clear: these organizations are not claiming this is evidence of fraud. Weird data patterns alone are not enough for that. But they are reasonable cause to keep digging. And that requires time, money, and loud public demands. Per-Machine “Turnout” Analysis The data made available for analysis by counties is limited. They release the proportion of vote which went for each candidate, with the highest granularity ranging from the precinct level (Pennsylvania) to the voting machine itself (Nevada). When data is analyzed carefully however, one can learn a lot. One angle to look at the data from with a histogram [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histogram]. In the following chart, datapoints are lined up in percentiles left to right. A precinct all the way left would have had nobody show up to vote, and on the right would have gotten votes from everybody who’s registered. The Y axis is the number of votes which each candidate got in that precinct. Just mail-in votes first: Some things stand out: * Harris got a lot more votes. This makes sense, as cities are expected to lean heavily blue, as is mail-in voting. * This looks at total vote numbers, so as expected the right-hand side of each line is a little higher than the left-hand side. * There’s big spikes in the blue line. I haven’t looked at which counties those are, but I’m guessing some counties pull strongly towards Harris. Now, looking at election-day results: What stands out? * Still, Harris got more votes here. Also note the absolute numbers are different, topping out at ~30k votes, not ~10k. Curves are correspondingly less jaggy. * It’s hard to be sure, but there’s what could be a tail on the right hand side of the red votes. It looks like it’s dropping off, but around 60% turnout it spikes back up again sharply. This is far from conclusive, but I built a little tool so you can try for yourself fitting curves to these charts. This doesn’t really seem too crazy by itself, but it demonstrates a concerning trend. This same shape appears in precinct after precinct in Pennsylvania, and tabulator after tabulator in Nevada. The research is still ongoing [https://www.youtube.com/@DireTalks]. Counting Votes-Per-Machine in Nevada Election Truth Alliance’s analysis is able to look at the results of individual voting machines in Nevada. They look at each machine, count the number of votes on it at the end of the day, and look at the fraction per candidate. For machines with low numbers of votes, you should expect to see a wide range of percentage from each candidate, as a small number of polarized people in that area can make a big difference. There should be a convergence as number of votes per machines goes up. ..And it does cluster, but not in the way one would expect: * In a fair election, you would expect to see the right hand of the graph converging in about the middle of the dots on the left hand. In this graph, that would be at about a 50% share. * In a fair election, you would expect to see the convergence happen gradually as counts per machine go upwards. Neither of those is the case here. Around the 300 votes-per-machine mark, there’s a sharp upswing towards 60% trump. That line is held out to exactly 60% at the very rightmost dot. Votes are Aligning to Exactly 60% Trump Another analysis also counts votes per machine, but this time at a tabulator level, not per-voting-machine. Similarly, we would expect a noisy/jaggy line in the beginning (where sample-sizes are smaller), and convergence to the average outcome as the number of votes per tabulator go up. Indeed, we do see this. The line is thicker on the left (especially obvious in the flattish looking part), and narrow on the right. But we see something else as well: a seeming convergence around 45% trump on the left for low numbers of votes, then a sudden jump, and then an asymptote heading towards 60% of the vote. For reference, an asymptote is a curve which always approaches a certain value, but will never reach it. What could explain this? Could it perhaps be a rural-versus-city difference again? Unlikely. Once you take the geographic location of individual tabulators into account. Mail-in versus in-person selection-bias? Nope – these are all early voting. And neither of those would explain the perfect asymptote. What could cause this is an algorithm which is designed to fix the vote at 60%, but not activate until there are enough votes in the system to obscure its own operation. In an adversarial frame-of-mind, this would make sense. Such an algorithm could get past the initial tests done by election staff, and make a high enough margin to be outside of any default hand-recount thresholds❗️ To test this idea, I implemented [https://pastebin.com/yq4MV6wj] the same algorithm myself. My script makes 10k tabulators, each with one more vote than the previous. When a tabulator has less than 300 votes, each vote is random. For the 301st vote and onwards, it is biased 60/40. The orange line in this chart should take the same shape as the first chart above: And it does. There’s the same extremes in the less-than-30 votes area, a flat line around 50 when less than 300, and then a sharp increase after that point, gradually reaching an asymptote around 60%. For comparison, I included a blue line which is an election which pulls 60% to one side, regardless of how many might have people voted before you at the polls. It stays centered on 60% the whole time, and is always just a little bit above the orange line (because it doesn’t have those first 300 votes on each tabulator dragging it down). Comparison to other elections In comparison, we can look at the 2014 Wisconsin governor's race. The green line is fair, and the red lines are stuffed with more fake votes as more votes go into the machine. This was a slightly different algorithm (going up forever, instead of targeting 60%), but a sign of fraud. Ballot Drop-off Analysis The simplest way to fake a ballot is to change the selection of their vote for President, while leaving the rest of the ballot unchanged. This is simple enough, but leaves a tell. People often vote consistently and predictably along party lines. If you change just their vote for the office of the president, it will show an increased-from-normal fraction of people not voting along party lines. This is called Drop-off. People broke party lines a shocking amount in the 2024 election. To the extent that immediately afterwards, AOC took to social media to ask why [https://www.newsweek.com/aoc-supporters-donald-trump-split-ticket-reasons-establishment-1983849]. SMART Elections [https://smartelections.substack.com/p/so-clean] did some of the first data-science here, comparing the drop-off in swing states and other states. They found that the Drop-off was always a little bit in Trump’s favor, but it was hugely in Trump’s favor in the swing states. Again, this doesn’t mean much on its own. Swing states are swing states for a reason, after-all. Probably because they don’t like to vote on party lines. Where it gets weird is when we look at every county – here’s North Carolina and Ohio. What I see is drop-off favoring Trump, which is expected. But we also see total uniformity. Not one county had more Republicans that favored Kamala than Democrats who favored trump. Not even in Deep-Blue [https://indyweek.com/news/durham/for-democrats-in-deep-blue-durham-a-big-push-and-a-heartbreaking-finish/] Durham, NC and Columbus, Ohio [https://www.axios.com/local/columbus/2024/11/21/ohio-trump-harris-2024-presidential-election-precinct-results] – where Kamala won 78% and 95% of the vote, respectively. Below are some more typical elections. Note that bars of both colors appear on with both positive and negative dropoff. In software engineering, we have the term a "code smell" to indicate something that is not objectively wrong, but a sign of something which feels like it will lead to trouble later. Indeed, these explorations from SMART Election’s are what inspired Election Truth Alliance to take on their first analysis of Nevada. These are not a sure sign of something wrong. For example in Vermont we essentially had no Democrat competing with our incumbent Republican governor, despite the state being very Democratic-leaning in general. That meant that 100% of counties had strong negative Republican Drop-off. You can hear directly from researchers at Election Truth Alliance, here: What's next for Election Truth Alliance? You may be wondering why, if we’re trying to find fraud, we’re just looking at end-of-day totals for voting machines, or even higher up at the tabulator or precinct level. Unfortunately, no state makes better data publicly available by default. In order to get it, you either have to not concede the election (we’re way past that), the state needs to ask for a recount, or a third party organization needs to sue for the right to do forensic audit. We learned from the 2000s, and the paper ballots at least exist. Suspicions of the source of fraud center on how the ballots were scanned, not how they were marked. So a hand recount has a chance of actually showing something different. You can support that by signing this petition on Change.org [https://www.change.org/p/demand-a-hand-count-audit-of-pennsylvania-s-2024-presidential-election]. It won’t always be possible to get states to intervene. To that end, they are establishing a legal fund to get the data anyway. This is not cheap – estimates range from $30k to $4M depending on scope. They are running a fundraiser on GoFundMe [https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with-nathan-for-fair-and-free-elections]. Until Next Time Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end here. In my next post, I’ll be talking about hypothetical attack vectors which could have made possible an attack of this magnitude. The post will be both grounded in past computer-hacks and also, in parts, far more speculative than some of my other posts. We’ll talk about election-day bomb threats, Elon Musk’s odd campaign to get signatures in swing states (and why he’s doing it again now in Wisconsin), and DOGE’s crazy purges (including defunding the agency which made the russian tail explainer used in this post). We’ll also discuss members of the DOGE team, and the large disparities seen on election betting sites in the days leading up to the election. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pehrlich.substack.com [https://pehrlich.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

When does electrifying a widget actually reduce emissions?

For many people wanting to electrify something in their home - be it a car, water heater, or something else - there remains a burning question: do I do it now, or wait for my appliance to fail? The simplest way to answer this is by looking at the ratio of new pieces of equipment made in the world, and making sure as many of those are the clean version as possible.  I.e., the way to reduce the most CO2 emissions is to buy a new electric car, and sell your old car to someone who would otherwise buy a new ICE vehicle.  Not only does this maximize the electric equipment being deployed at home, but dollars spent frequently support new companies developing these products at a time when they need the sales the most. There are many other nuances to this question, from analyzing the emissions of a particular widget being manufactured, to gauging the cultural influence of someone seeing their peer make new technology choices - and be happy with them.  Let's dive in. Electric Vehicles Emissions from Manufacturing Large corporations will typically produce annual sustainability reports.  These are intended to be easy for anyone to read.  Partially thanks to pressure from ESG investor groups like Parnassuss [https://www.parnassus.com/] this is becoming more of a reality.  (I'm linking to parnassus because their website [https://www.parnassus.com/sustainability/esg-integration] has third-party vetting material, including their own impact studies.) Tesla's annual report [https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2023-tesla-impact-report-highlights.pdf] shows their cars need to be driven about 13k miles for emissions of manufacture to be net-zero. This depends on a number of factors, such as where the vehicle was produced and the cleanliness of the grid where it is operated.  Bottom line - even if Tesla is padding by a factor of two, vehicles would be likely to be net-zero within two years for most drivers, and then just keep getting better as vehicles are used on increasingly clean grids.  When a vehicle reaches its end of life, that battery can be recycled (such as on Currents Marketplace [https://currents.market/]) or used for static grid-storage. On average, EVs emit roughly a quarter [https://www.cotes.com/blog/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-ev-vs-ice-vehicles] more CO2 during manufacturing than ICE cars, but this quickly pays off even on the dirtiest electric grid, as the images below show.  Even mining itself is showing its first hints of electrification– this electric excavator [https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2024/03/25/electric-excavator-edging-diesel-alternative-at-fortescue-mine-site/] has been operating in Australia since 2023, and has moved more than one million tons of ore. Global emissions are reduced the fastest if the ratio of new cars sold moves quickly to electric.  For someone in the position to do so, buying a new EV and selling a good used ICE car helps EV manufacturers on the one hand, while discouraging the purchase of new gas cars due to a healthy used-car market. Emissions from Driving It may be a surprise to hear that even an EV on North America's dirtiest electric grid is still a cleaner choice than operating a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. We can explore the data with CarbonCounter, a little gem out of MIT [https://www.carboncounter.com/#!/explore?taxfee_state=VT&price_Gasoline=2.3&price_Diesel=2.7&price_Electricity=15&electricity_ghg_fuel=250].  The tool creates a chart of emissions (Y axis) vs cost (X axis) of all sorts of cars, and even lets you see results set to the electric makeup of particular US states.   Even a grid with coal is more efficient than a gas car. This is partially due to the efficiency of industrial-scale generators, which can sometimes get to 50% efficiency compared to the 30% of a gas car, and partially due to the fact that every EV has regenerative braking, letting it charge up when slowing down or going downhills. Emissions from the Home Emissions from heating a home can be notoriously high – for most households, slightly more CO2 is emitted annually from heating than from driving.  Modern Heat Pumps are state-of-the-art, as they use electricity to move heat from outdoors to indoors at about 25-35% the cost of the traditional electric-resistance heating briefly popularized in the 70s.  For 98% of U.S. houses today [https://www.rewiringamerica.org/circuit-breakers-heat-pumps], a heat pump will produce less emissions than what is currently installed. How it works: A heat pump can be thought of as a large sponge, soaking up heat outdoors and "wringing it out" inside.  You can learn more on my Homeowner's Guide to Cold Climate Heat Pumps [https://thezeropercentclub.org/cold-climate-heat-pumps/]. Manufacturing emissions of heat pumps is rarely talked about.  I suspect this is because they don't have a battery requiring co2-intensive mining.  Nonetheless, I took a quick look at Mitsubishi's sustainability report [https://www.mitsubishi-motors.com/en/sustainability/pdf/report-2023/sustainability2023-environment.pdf?20231110], and confirmed they do have Net-Zero commitments with milestones at 2050, 2030, etc. A secondary source of emissions occurs if a heat pump leaks high-pressure refrigerant into the atmosphere.  Even accounting for this [https://www.nrdc.org/bio/pierre-delforge/dont-let-refrigerants-slow-heating-decarbonization#:~:text=Most%20current%20heat%20pumps%20use,as%20a%20pound%20of%20CO2.], a heat pump is by far the preferable choice.  Also, modern refrigerants, such as R-454B, Propane, and CO2, are working their way to North America, reducing the cost of leakage. In New England, Heat Pumps + Wood Stoves are a popular combination, in part thanks to the sentimentality of woodstoves and the unreliability of the electric grid.  There's a huge range between the CO2 of a tree cut in your own lawn with emission-free tools, and wood trucked in with diesel, or even brought across the Atlantic ocean (shipping wood to England for their "green" bio-fuel has become a recent scandal [https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=p9Ngoi8Gy6Y]).  Modern woodstoves have secondary burners and catalysts in their exhaust manifold, letting them burn all night, and pushing efficiency up to 80% or more. Cook-Stoves Induction and electric stoves may have a longer CO2 payoff period than a heat pump water heater [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGiNL9IT54] or mini-split at home, as they typically use less fuel annually and don't have the greater-than-100% efficiency which heat pumps have.  Still, there's a strong rationale to switch, including well-documented asthma correlations [https://asmith.ucdavis.edu/news/get-your-government-hands-my-gas-stove]. Cultural Effects A single homeowner cannot solve climate change on their own, but they can as part of a movement.  That only happens if one follows a piece of entrepreneurial advice I saw years ago: Do Things, tell people [http://carl.flax.ie/dothingstellpeople.html]. Any new technology, from heat pumps to green steel smelting, will fall somewhere on the "market penetration" curve below.  As we electrify everything, myriads of people are working in every industry to move their particular puzzle piece forward and incrementally more "green".  And almost every one (perhaps outside of solar and wind) is in an early adopter phase.  And none of them get out of that phase without those early adopters buying in, trying the tech, and telling people. Right now US steelmaking is in its infancy – it's in the "innovators" phase for green steel.  Green steel plants have been being built across the US for years, with billions more in funding being awarded just weeks ago [https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-carbon-free-steel-with-clean].  In a world perfectly optimized for fastest CO2 reduction, this curve for green steel might overlap exactly with that of electric stoves and other manufacturing – but trying to time your purchase to force that is guesswork at best. US households might be somewhere in the "Early adopters" phase with our electric or induction stove usage. Although the technology is mature, their popularity is more nascent.  Reasons for this range from from induction stoves having taken longer to invent and being more costly, to the more adversarial "Operation Attack [https://www.npr.org/2023/10/17/1183551603/gas-stove-utility-tobacco]" in which the American Gas Association, funded by your utility bills [https://heated.world/p/the-electric-utility-screwing-over], went on the offensive to downplay stove emissions while glorifying the superpowers of cooking on gas (including an infiltration of Julia Child's wonderful TV show [https://www.vox.com/23941889/julia-child-cooking-stoves-natural-gas-industry-hollywood]).   Contrary to the belief that gas cooktops can't be beat, If you ask a person who owns an induction stove they will probably tell you about how quickly it boils water and how easily it keeps constant heat. Electric vehicles are in the early majority, with Europe and China leading the way.  Back in 2022, 22% of vehicles sold in China were all electric! The Hard Part - Living with it Like it or not, the world we live in is built on fossil fuels.  It's the unfortunate truth that, as Bill McKibben says, to care about one's own emissions today is an uncomfortable exercise in hypocrisy.  There's usually no easy or fun way out.  But we can take some solace in the fact that every EV on the road, heat pump installed, or stove electrified brings down our own emissions and that of the fields we work in.  If it wasn't for the very first EV drivers, there would not be infrastructure for today's EVs to use. If it wasn't for the first homes with solar, we wouldn't see today's homes with negative power consumption. Special thanks to Jordan Angerosa for reviewing & contributing to this post This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pehrlich.substack.com [https://pehrlich.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

An Address to the Jericho Affordable Housing Committee

Six months ago, as my town was reviewing its town plan, I delivered a passionate (but somewhat limited in effect) public comment asking them to address climate change in our upcoming town plan. As projects wrapped up in the ensuing months, I had more time to think about how we as a town can be proactive in doing our part to prevent climate change, and I kept coming to the same conclusion - limit the usage of fossil fuels in new construction buildings. Over time I’ve learned that many cities/towns [https://buildingdecarb.org/zeb-ordinances] and even several states have passed laws requiring renewable or clean energy be used in any new buildings built. These include California, New York State, Colorado, Montreal, Quebec, and many others. These places see how much easier it is to build without fossil fuels in comparison to retrofitting existing buildings, and they see great benefit in being proactive. Burlington and South Burlington in Vermont have passed similar laws, but the state as a whole remains silent on how we build our buildings. (Vermonters are of course known for being both stubbornly independent and intentionally considerate – two competing & complementing elements in this decision). Over time I’ve gotten to know the stories of Seattle WA [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/8-decarbonizing-seattle-and-loving-cities-with/id1691043164?i=1000618870569], Beacon NY [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmCe4jEIP6Y], and South Burlington [https://youtu.be/ca8zpvu_BXU?t=1748] as citizens have enacted change in their cities. Those stories proved inspiring, and so I teamed up with my neighbor Maeve to give this a shot. In December we held a pot-luck for anyone curious about the conversation, and to our amazement, about twenty people showed up, of different ages, political parties, and knowledge levels on the issue. We shared a rough plan, designed in imitation of South Burlington: require that 85% of heating and water needs in a new building can be met with renewable energy (effectively that means installing heat pumps). Engaging discussion left us motivated to continue, and connected us with folks on the Planning Committee and Affordability Committee. In January I presented to the Jericho Affordability Committee – 30 minutes on the costs of new construction with heat pumps (in most cases there’s small savings, in almost no cases is it an outsized expense), and another 30 minutes of discussion with committee members. Some folks found it hard to believe that a heat pump is 300% or more efficient, while others had already gone fully-electric and were happy to share their experiences with the technology. From there we went to discussions with the Jericho Energy Task Force (which I’m a member of), where we met up with Andrew Chalnik from South Burlington to learn from his experience, and even one of our district’s house-members stopped by. At this point, the Planning Commission has agreed to a joint meeting between them, the Jericho Energy Task Force, and the Affordability Committee. Scheduling is to be determined. If that goes well, the Planning Commission would hold a series of public hearings, and eventually update our zoning. I’m eager to see where this goes, have met many lovely people, and have immensely enjoyed the process so far. There’s so much that I’ve learned about climate-friendly technology over the past year, so it’s gratifying to find that there are many folks who are eager to learn what steps are feasible for them to take as the whole world muddles through that same question. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pehrlich.substack.com [https://pehrlich.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

How I decarbonized my home for $3,000

From growing up on a small farm in upstate NY, I have vivid memories of holding the blow-torch for my dad on a plumbing project when I was probably 10 years old.  He did all the work on the house himself (with the occasional help from an offspring), and so when it came time to electrify my house, I decided to DIY it as well.  Here's how it went. The Stove We have a propane stove.  Perhaps some love them, but for me it means a dose of asthma and venting all the heat out of the house.  Fortunately, there's one very simple solution I got from a friend - we bought a couple of $50-$100 induction hot-plates online, and placed them on top of the stove.  They serve most of our cooking needs, and give us a chance to learn what pots work (cast iron: yes, enamel and steel: yes, glass and aluminum and copper: no). In some respects this is a poor facsimile to a proper induction stove-top, however.  The burners, although more responsive than either "classic" electric or propane, are still small.  At some point, we hope to finish our upgrade, either to a normal induction stove (perhaps keeping our propane camp-stove around in-case of multi-day power outages), or getting one of those swanky stoves [https://www.channingcopper.com/] with a built in battery [https://www.impulselabs.com/] and a 110V hookup which avoids requiring any electrical work. The Water Heater We looked at our water next.  It was right before summer, and some A/C in the house would be a nice perk.  Besides that, ditching our propane water heater in favor of one with a heat pump would save us money - $300-$400 or so a year [https://thezeropercentclub.org/water], and so we wanted to start saving right away. Out-of-pocket cost was around $2k, with a few hundred more for tools.  We went from a 50-gallon tank to a 65-gallon one.  The small price difference seemed worthwhile to make sure we had a good experience with the new technology.  The heater comes with four buttons, which let you change modes from full heat-pump (most cost efficient, but puts out cold air you might not want in the winter) to full classic/resistance electric (more expensive, but doesn't remove heat from the house).  We've found the cooling effect to be mild. If I were to do this again, I would consider getting one of Rheem's 110v versions instead of a hybrid on 240v.  That wouldn't have the classic/electric heating element, but we've been fine only using the heat-pump mode, and that would have saved us the extra wiring as well as valuable space in our circuit-breaker box. Heating our House The trickiest job, saved for the end.  Our home has a wood-stove on one end, and a propane monitor on the other.  To do this by the book, one would first weatherize the home, and then have mini-splits installed to replace the propane, while leaving the wood-stove for backup.  We decided to take the Window Dressers [https://windowdressers.org/] approach for weatherization, and move on. We gathered a few quotes for the mini-split, which ranged about $6k-$7k, without including wiring from one end of the house to the other.  While I was obsessing over the technicalities, I discovered that Senville makes a decent cold-climate rated heat pump, available online.  (Note: make sure any heat pump you consider in this area is rated for full heat output [https://thezeropercentclub.org/cold-climate-heat-pumps/] at -13°F or below). (Second note: the current Senville heat pumps are unfortunately significantly less cost-effective to run than the Mitsubishi, Fujitsu, Daikin, and others. Typical COP of 2 vs 3). Joining forces with a friend, we undertook the significant task of teaching ourselves to become amateur HVAC technicians.  On the plus side, we'd get heat pumps for one third the cost for both of our homes.  On the downside, we would not have warranties on the completed projects, and if we messed up, we would run the risk of destroying the units, or venting refrigerant into the atmosphere with thousands of times the Greenhouse Warming Potential of CO2. After about a month of prep, $600 in tools, and a couple of days' install per-house, we have two units installed and holding strong as the winter months kick in.  Yes we messed up along the way, and no we didn't accidentally leak refrigerant. If I were doing this again, I would consider a monobloc unit. These are uncommon, but far friendlier to install DIY.  A monobloc heat-pump keeps all its refrigerant inside a single machine (the block), avoiding the need to run refrigerant lines into the house - the hardest part of the install.  Instead, air or liquid enters the house after being warmed.  These are far more common in the UK, but I'm not sure if they provide cooling in the summer.  Heat pumps in the US often have an efficiency factor (COP) of around 4.  They output four times the energy in heat as they take in in electricity.  This factor drops as outdoor temperatures drop.  A seasonal average for Vermont is typically around 3, or less if you're at higher elevation.  New heat pumps will eventually get here, with Propane, CO2, or R32 as refrigerants, which can push that COP up to 5x. Total costs: $150 induction burners + $2,100 water heater + $2,000 mini-split + $600 tools + $300 misc = $5,150 Subtract 30% tax credit [https://assets.ctfassets.net/v4qx5q5o44nj/3FYfJiYMILiXGFghFEUx0D/279f180456183d560d9c68d4de8baa67/factsheet_25C_25D.pdf] and $650 Efficiency Vermont incentive for the water heater and we get: $2,955 total cost! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pehrlich.substack.com [https://pehrlich.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]