The people in the best place to do election fraud are corrupt election officials.
There are lots of allegations. No evidence.
A "Malcolm" writes me:
Fraud, as I thought I’d explained clearly, would happen after the signatures have been validated, and the corrupt voting officials take the opportunity to swap ballots they, themselves, fill the ovals on, then switch them for legitimate ballots during the weeks/nights when early voters' ballots are stored in the Clerks' side rooms. And remember, this switch of ballots would NOT be revealed in a recount. Surely you, of all people, are not clinging to a preconceived notion that vote by mail can prevent massive voter fraud? What’s your response to my statements??"
The assertion here is that election officials can corrupt the system. I suppose that is a point of vulnerability.
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| Ballots ready to tally in Jackson County, Oregon |
The ballots are secured, but some number of election officials have access to the ballots. Otherwise they cannot be counted. Someone has the key to the ballot room. Re-voting a blank ballot and switching it with the existing one would be slow, tedious work, but a corrupt election official working alone could do it on a small scale. It would tip a close local election. It would require a larger group of corrupt people working together to change an election for a higher office and an unusually high vote in a county for a candidate for statewide office might not be noticed. As soon as multiple people are involved in a conspiracy the likelihood of exposure goes up substantially. People talk. People get careless. People get angry with the conspiracy leader. People take plea deals.
Partisans on both sides would welcome sworn testimony and physical evidence showing misbehavior by opponents. The 2020 election created enormous incentives for people to break the secrecy. A person testifying, if they had some physical or documentary evidence, would be a celebrity hero--certainly to Republican critics of the 2020 election. Trump and his campaign lawyers scoured the nation looking for evidence, interviewing and pressuring people to confess to corruption or to testify as a witness to it.
Democrats, too, would welcome evidence that corrupt Republican election officials in red rural counties switched ballots of absentee votes. That witness' testimony would get quick traction and credibility as an iteration of the trope of the corrupt rural sheriff and his good ol' boy buddies at the county courthouse. We all know the story: Speed traps, moonshine, payoffs, selective arrest and prosecution of Blacks, all-White juries. We have seen the movies and heard the banjo.
In 2020 Republicans voiced the most election suspicion. They have alleged that surely--surely!!--election officials in Fulton County, Georgia (Atlanta) and Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit) brought in suitcases full of fake votes. This allegation gets traction from a different trope, that of the corrupt big-city majority-Black, majority-Democratic cities. There is a racial stereotype combined with notions of machine politics corruption, coded as "urban." They combine to create easy credibility. We know what they are saying: Surely those people are corrupt. Republican legislatures in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania all ran audits and investigations in their big counties, hoping to "find" votes or disqualify others. Rumors abounded and partisans asserted allegations, but their allegations went nowhere in court. Courts require evidence.
Are election officials corrupt? Possibly some are. Critics of the 2020 election have a narrative that corrupt things simply must have happened. After all, their candidate lost, and lost to Sleepy Joe Biden who campaigned from home.
There are two great problems with that theory. One is that the vote totals "make sense" in light of overall national voting patterns and polls that showed Trump was behind. Trump was unique in the hostility he engendered. He underperformed other Republicans across the board.
The other great problem is that there is no evidence of election fraud of the kind the comments to me proposed. The question/accusation implies bad motives and behavior by election personnel. Possibly so. One cannot prove a negative. But there are no whistleblowers with documents to show. No examples of switched ballots. No conspirators came forward with sworn testimony, confessing amid plea deals. No one is seeking fame on Fox or MSNBC. There is lots of opportunity and incentive for evidence to emerge. It hasn't.
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22 comments:
Trump and his cult’s Big Lie about voter fraud is one of the most damaging conspiracy theories in politics, an existential threat to our democracy. There is plenty of evidence that it didn’t happen and none that it did, but the vast majority of Republicans believe it anyway. There has been a lot of speculation to account for this, but what it comes down to is they don’t know or care.
Thomas Jefferson noted that a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to a democracy. We don’t have one.
"Landslide Lyndon Johnson." That"s what he was called, and the election in question wasn't just a local election. It's worth looking up how Lyndon Johnson won that election, and also it's hard to avoid considering the "what ifs," were it not for Lyndon Johnson's rise through the ranks in politics thereafter.
Robert Caro wrote that one of Lyndon Johnson's rookie mistakes in politics, which perhaps cost him an earlier election, was allowing the vote count to be publicly announced before the polls closed. His opponent, hearing the running count as the closing of the polls drew near, knew exactly how many votes were necessary to close the gap and overtake Lyndon Johnson.
I guess my question would be:
What kind of person would risk prison, as well as financial and personal ruin, so that someone, (who paid them, presumably?) might possibly win an election they otherwise lost?
Could someone that deranged actually hold a position of responsibility without raising suspicions?
That seems like a stretch from the start, not to mention it would be hard for a single individual to pull it off, never mind the conspiracy necessary to do this in multiple locations.
C'mon...
People need to get over it. We don't live in a perfect, fairy-tale world.
There are systems, safeguards and controls in place. President Cheeto brainwashed the cult to be paranoid about everything.
The Big Lie is just poor sportsmanship on a dangerous level.
Do these whackos have no experience at losing? Did they wik every Little League and hopscotch game as a child? Of course, many of them are angry at others, mostly minorities) for being overall losers in life.
The idea that TFG couldn't have lost "because he draws a big crowd" is idiotic. Circuses (the other kind) draw a big crowd, too.
Heck, if it wasn't for the fact TFG has such ignorant and despicable supporters I might have attended his rally (preCOVID) just for the freak-show nature of it. But I would never vote for him.
There’s a long distance between don’t know and j’accuse. Accusations should not be made when there is no evidence.
Democrats have insisted on replacing a simple, difficult to hack voting system (same day voting) with a more complicated and easier to hack system (vote by mail). That raises questions about whether this system has in fact been hacked or not.
That doesn’t mean I know it has been hacked. I don’t know.
But what I do know is that the mainstream media, with its liberal bias, is fundamentally unmotivated to look for election fraud in the 2020 election, since it went their way. When they continue to assert there is “no evidence,” my first question is, “How hard did you look?”
Given their suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, with the help of their liberal allies at the tech platforms, I am not filled with confidence about their impartiality and commitment to the truth.
Bottom line, I don’t know whether the election system got hacked. I have low confidence in the mechanisms that were supposed to find out.
The fraudulent claims of widespread voter fraud have been thoroughly debunked to the satisfaction of anyone capable of rational thought, but there’s no convincing the True Believers. To them, the lack of evidence simply confirms how thorough the coverup was. Others parrot Donald Rumsfeld’s Iraq War scam “unknown unknowns” or clever cliches about absence of evidence and evidence of absence. To be clear, no evidence means there isn’t any, but there are none so blind as those who will not see.
Trump and his campaign was very public about looking for errors. The texts by Mike Lee to Chief of Staff Meadows literally beg for evidence. The legal team Trump put together was looking for evidence, taking affidavits from everyone. The Justice Department looked. The security chief looked. The incentives to find something were overwhelming. Then, the legislatures weighed in with so-called forensic audits in PA, MI, WI, and most famously in Arizona with the taxpayer financed Ninja people. Can anyone forget Donald Trump begging for evidence, any evidence, please some evidence in that phone call to Raffensperger. Is there any question about the incentives for Gov Kemp and Raffensperger to find evidence of fraud? The audit in Wisconsin is still going on, which makes for a new controversy because they cannot find anything and the costs continue. The Maricopa County board of commissioners with 4 of 5 Republicans has thrown in the towel in frustration over the repeated fruitless audits.
The assertion that maybe people didn't really try to find evidence is a "tell" from one of my favorite and most frequent commenters. If multiple audits by motivated, hostile investigators, plus tape recorded pleas from Trump to a fellow Republican, are not evidence of diligent attempts to find evidence, then it means that a person is willfully blind to what is happening in front of them. Of course there was a diligent search led by Republicans. Don't trust the media??? OK. Don't trust Trump lawyers and Republican-led and financed investigations in all battleground states? OK. But it is pretty obvious that the question posed in the comment--"How hard did they look"-- can be answered from the public record. As hard as possible, as if their jobs and the favor of Trump depended on it.
weighed
What kind of person would risk prison, as well as financial and personal ruin, so that someone, (who paid them, presumably?) might possibly win an election they otherwise lost?
This kind? :-)
Peter,
My question was, “How hard did they (i.e. the liberal mainstream media) look?” The question was specifically focused on a particular source of information. I was not asking that question in general.
Do you remember the tsunami of contempt that the mainstream media directed at all the various audit efforts? If any of those audit efforts had turned up evidence of election fraud, would the mainstream media have believed it?
We are in a very slanted media environment: the liberal mainstream media tilts one way, Fox tilts the other way. Extracting what might be true from this blizzard of bias is not trivial.
Again, I am not making any specific accusations about the presence or absence of fraud. I am sticking with, “I don’t know.”
Thank you, Peter. Very interesting two or three days, and your last post, imho, demolishes the "how hard did they look" question.
The fact is none of those audits did turn up any evidence of fraud because if they had, the people who pushed for the audits (who were fervently hoping to find fraud) would have taken follow up action to nullify state electors and such. Even the supposedly left leaning mainstream media would have reported on it.
Seeing as that did NOT happen, and seeing as the 60 something lawsuits filed on behalf of Trump alleging fraud were thrown out due to a lack of evidence (many by Trump appointed judges of all people), it seems pretty conclusive to me to say that the 2020 election was about as fraud-free an election as could be hoped to be had.
As with the anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, this demonstrates the difficulty of having rational debate in post-truth America, when we don’t even share a common reality. It's hard to reason with those who believe in "alternative facts."
In June 1873, Susan B. Anthony was tried and found guilty for voting. The federal judge ordered the jury to find her guilty. The case was United States v. Susan B. Anthony. The trial was held at the federal courthouse in Canandaigua, New York.
Ward Hunt, the judge in the Anthony trial, also was a recent appointment to the Supreme Court. How about that.
One other thing, according to Wikipedia, he refused to retire from the Supreme Court after a paralyzing stroke. He could no longer participate in the court, but was holding on to his position for the federal pension. Congress passed a special provision allowing him to retire early, which he did.
The trouble with mail in voting is it’s positive reputation is based on not experiencing much fraud. Unfortunately, surely at least SOME crooked politicians (e.g. elected county clerks) will take the opportunity to cheat, in order to help elect their preferred candidates. Even more discouraging is we will continue to believe this process is m/l bulletproof, because THERE IS NO WAY TO KNOW if fraud has happened or not. We could have fraud in 90% of elections, and tell ourselves that everything is copacetic.
Peter, filling out fake ballots can be done very quickly and easy. All you have to do is fill in a few ovals. Then, take your hundreds of fake ballots to the room where the real ballots are stored, and grab a handful that’s bigger than you pile of fake ones. Go home and count so the number of fake ballots = the number of real ballots. Next, return to the ballot storeroom and switch equal numbers of the fake for the real.
You could do this every night if you wanted to. And, since the courthouse is closed at night, the only people likely to see you would be the easily avoided cleaning crews
We witnessed what certainly appeared to be fraud, years ago. We were at a victory party at wild river pizza until after midnight. When we left, our candidate was the winner, by about 1/4 %. But the next morning, the county clerk announced the bad guy won, with the help of counting the last ballots during the night. Perhaps ironically, essentially all the night ballots were for the bad guy. Interestingly, the bad guy got just enough ballots to avoid an automatic recount. The good guy would have had to pay a few hundred$ to have a recount. Since a true recount was impossible, he passed.
BTW, the clerk was a staunch republican, married to the HMFIC of the local Republican Party. Very suspicious, but absolutely no way to prove fraud.
I truly believe we should return to voting in person, on Election Day, with officials counting, AND RECORDING the ballots before turning them over to the county clerks. Besides, it builds closer neighborhoods (standing in line with neighbors) and creates jobs.
Michael T. I agree with many of your conclusions. I would point out, however, re “Bottom line, I don’t know whether the election system got hacked. I have low confidence in the mechanisms that were supposed to find out.” that there is apparently NO WAY to find out, for reasons I’ve explained multiple times, year after year.
Politicos ive called and emailed refuse to even address my concerns, dammit!
Incidentally, I’m far from being a republican, or supporting most any of their platforms. If anyone is actually LIKELY to cheat on elections, it would be trump republicans. Nevertheless, I’d prefer an election process much less prone to fraudulent activities, and one where an actual recount was meaningful.
Incidentally, I’m far from being a republican, or supporting most any of their platforms. If anyone is actually LIKELY to cheat on elections, it would be trump republicans. Nevertheless, I’d prefer an election process much less prone to fraudulent activities, and one where an actual recount was meaningful.
Anyone who mentions liberal media shows their bias, and that they simply regurgitate republican talking points.
American media is owned by corporations that donate to the republicans.
Don't like the media? Then encourage republicans to renew restrictions on corporate ownership of media.
Regarding corporate media: Sinclair, which owns the local CBS affiliate, owns/operates stations in about half the country.
About 2/3 of its political contributions go to republicans, according to published sources.
Liberal media? Hahaha.
You think the owners of KOBI are liberal? Sure ...
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