GOP undervote tanked Trump

Georgia's Brad Raffensperger: 

   "We do know now looking at the data that 28,200 people skipped the presidential race. Everything down ballot, but they actually skipped the presidential race."

It wasn't just Georgia. Trump lost in battleground states because many loyal GOP voters left the presidential race blank in 2020, or voted for Biden.

"Undervotes" are offices on a ballot where the voter chose not to vote. Undervotes aren't new and they aren't a surprise. There were more presidential undervotes in 2016 than there were in 2020. There was reason to look closely at undervotes in 2020 because of the persistent claims of a rigged election. There have been audits and re-counts in battleground states by groups eager to find fraud.

These audits are done by people and groups aligned with Republicans. In battleground states--Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania--Republicans hold key offices to administer elections and demand audits. They also have solid Republican majorities in the legislatures with the power to commission audits by people on record saying fraud surely took place. 

A pattern emerged in the audits. There was no flood of "extra" ballots for Biden. There was no Democratic wave. GOP officeholders have good reason to be content with the 2020 ballots and the electorate that produced them--with one exception. There was an unbalanced number of loyal Republicans who left the presidential office blank.

A Republican-aligned group in Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), was commissioned to audit their election. They announced that "There is no evidence of significant problems with voting machines." Their hand-audit found the same election count as the original one done by the Wisconsin Elections Commission. They also reported:

The review found no evidence of fraudulent ballots. The wards WILL reviewed came from: Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Fox Crossing, Mequon, Waukesha, and West Bend. In many of the wards examined, WILL found a significant number of voters who voted for Biden and a Republican for Congress, while far fewer voters split the other way. This is consistent with the explanation that a key driver of Trump’s loss was a segment of traditional Republican voters choosing not to support him.

In Arizona, in addition to the Cyber Ninja audit which found no fraud, a bipartisan group did an analysis of the Arizona vote. The ABC affiliate in Phoenix reported on their results. Click: ABC The audit looked closely for areas of potential vulnerability. They found no bamboo in ballots. They also found that the relatively few ballots that voted only at the presidential level--the ones that might suggest the Biden ballot-stuffing that Trump asserted--a majority of votes were cast for Trump. What was noteworthy and determinative in the close Arizona presidential race was the number of reliable GOP voters who failed to vote for Trump.

Across the board of partisan loyalty, scaled on the vertical axis showing the number of other partisan races in which a voter voted, even people who voted for  as many as 15 other GOP candidates on the same ballot, GOP voters abandoned Trump disproportionately to the Democrats.

Overall, there were more Republican voters in Maricopa County, Arizona than Democratic ones, but there was more erosion of votes at the top of the ticket, and that created the margin of loss.

Democratic partisans have reason to be concerned about the 2020 election. In battleground states, the Democratic brand did not do well. There is a lesson for Democrats there. Biden won because a singularly divisive president caused some Republicans to decide they just couldn't take it anymore.

That is the lesson for Republicans.