I'm skeptical of any and all articles like this that link to 404 pages as their proof. Maybe an innocent error. Maybe a sham. Given the way the article is written, and its broken links, I really doubt this is anything more than propaganda. One would expect the information to be available elsewhere.
Their definition of "real clear" doesn't really match mine, but at least the second article is clear about why the first one is untrue. There is clearly a demographic that will ignore their self-rebuttal and believe the first one as gospel.
That's quite a jump from 'broken link' => 'must be propaganda'.
Rebuttals should be analyzed just like the target of the rebuttal. Just as you say the original article should not be taken as gospel, the rebuttal should not be taken as gospel either. The author's accounting of the 28M votes breaks down into 2 categories:
1. 12M voluntarily not cast from the 3 states that auto-send to every registered voter. The author arrives at this calculation by taking an average vote percentage of those states, and applying it to the mail ballots. You can't just apply general vote rate to the mail ballots, then further assume the EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 12M remaining vote was due to people just not bothering to vote. Baked into the author's calculation is that none of the mail ballots in those 3 states could have been involved in fraud...
2. 16M (building on the previous flawed calculation) the author just assumes were people who manually requested the mail ballot, but just decided not to send it in. Why? because there were a total 120M mail ballots sent and 16M / 120M amounts to 13% not voting, which is way lower than general population 50% not voting. This is an assertion with no evidence, and we would expect the percentage of people who do not vote when they MANUALLY request a mail ballot to be much lower anyways. Even a fraction of 16M should raise eyebrows.
So as I understand it, the author's calculations are very hand-wavy and unjustified. But you say this is a 'clear' rebuttal. Can you share how you interpreted the article?
It's also important to note that they also have an article rebutting the one posted here. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/06/there_...
Their definition of "real clear" doesn't really match mine, but at least the second article is clear about why the first one is untrue. There is clearly a demographic that will ignore their self-rebuttal and believe the first one as gospel.