Nov 29, 2020
The only fraud is in the white house
The election’s been over 3 weeks and I’m still stuck watching this trainwreck.
I guessed that Biden would win. He won by 6 million votes overall, but the electoral college gives Republicans a huge advantage. A vote in Wyoming counts 3 times as much as a vote in California. Swap 50,000 votes in a few close states and the electoral college could have gone the other way.
I said that Trump would complain about voter fraud. He would complain about the unfair media. He would try to challenge the election in the courts. He’s done all three, but much more aggressively than I imagined.
I said that things would be mostly peaceful, but we’ve seen proud boys brawling with antifa in the streets of Washington DC.
I said that Trump would ultimately just have to leave. We won’t really know for 2 months. But I’m not really sure how this all plays out.
When the president is still tweeting inflammatory things like this…
…you have to wonder. Does he have a case? What the hell is his plan?
The first thing to notice is that Trump has tried this act before. When he lost to Ted Cruz in the Iowa caucuses, he called the results fraudulent:
And complained on twitter:
After Trump won the 2016 election but lost the popular vote, he said the popular vote was fraudulent. He ordered a commission to study voter fraud. That didn’t really go anywhere and got cancelled after 6 months.
Seems like this is just his game plan. Any time he doesn’t get what he wants, he says the results are fake. And none of his supporters seem to remember he’s cried wolf before.
The next thing to notice is that you can disprove most of his claims with a few seconds of searching.
Like, Trump keeps saying that voter turnout was over 100%:
That would be obvious evidence of fraud. It would put the election in doubt.
But it’s easy to check that it’s wrong. 669,610 people live in Detroit. 506,305 voters are registered. 257,619 voted this year. Turnout was about the same as 2016.
He said the same thing about Michigan:
Surprise, surprise, that’s not true either! There are 10 million people in Michigan and 5.5 million voters.
If that were true in any state, that state would be a huge problem. But, of course, it’s not. Looks like the highest turnout was in Minnesota, at around 80%. Some states didn’t even break 60%:
And then there’s this:
Yeah, Detroit’s a problem. 94% of people in Detroit voted for Biden.
But you know, maybe if we just don’t count black people’s votes, then Trump wins?
He’s talking about spikes of votes stealing the election:
First off, even the math here is wrong. 134886 / 149772 is 90%.
So, I’m not sure how much I should trust this data. There were spikes of votes reported during counting. As far as I can tell, the spike in Michigan was from Detroit reporting, where 94% of people voted for Biden. The spike in Wisconsin was Milwaukee reporting, where 80% voted for Biden. I ran the numbers in more detail here. Those cities had the same voting ratios in 2016. Turnout didn’t change much. Some cities just don’t like Trump.
It’s unfortunate how this all played out. Some states (like Florida and Texas) counted mail-in votes first, so they started out blue and swung red. Other states (PA, MI, WI, GA) counted mail-in votes last, so they started out red and then swung blue.
Republican legislators in PA and MI set those rules, though. If they were worried about fake votes being made overnight, they could have done it the opposite way.
Also, the number of mail-in ballots was known, going into the election. Democrats had sent in 1.1 million more absentee ballots than Republicans, before election day. The final count ended up a bit higher, more ballots for both Trump and Biden arrived on election day. Even if you count only the mail-in ballots we knew about, the day before the election, Biden would still win Pennsylvania.
If the election was stolen, it was stolen before the counting even started.
This one was convincing at first. Someone on twitter posted names of 100 year old people that voted. I went to the Michigan voter registry, the names checked out. But, a local news article tracked down some of these people and they are all still alive:
And then, he’s telling us that some voting machines with scary names stole the election:
You know, he’s got a really bad track record so far, so I suspect this is also bullshit. I don’t have access to those machines, I can’t prove or disprove something like this. It’s worth investigating, in court.
I can read a bit and find out that Georgia Republicans voted for the Dominion machines last year, against the objection of Democrats. Georgia Democrats wanted a paper voting system. If the Democrats were planning to rig the election, they sure did a bad job preparing to do so.
For that matter, if Democrats were planning to rig the election, couldn’t they have won the senate and picked up some seats in congress?
The next thing to notice is that Trump’s lawsuits have little resemblance to his tweets. He’s tweeting that Dominion voting machines stole millions of votes. That trucks full of Democratic ballots stole the election in the middle of the night. That spikes of 100% Biden ballots threw off the count.
In court, he’s mostly suing about a few small problems with ballot signatures, postmarks, and sharpie markers.
Why the discrepancy? Probably because lying in court is perjury, but lying on twitter is not.
So far, Trump’s had one win in court and dozens of losses. The win wasn’t related to fraud, he just got social distancing rules changed for observing the count.
In Arizona, we had the case Aguilera v. Fones. The lawsuit said that some voters marked their ballots with a sharpie pen and then those weren’t counted right. The claims didn’t hold up, the case was dismissed. Another suit was dismissed because the complaint only affected a hundred votes, not enough to swing the election. Biden is ahead by 10,000.
Arizona doesn’t recount elections unless they’re very close, within 200 votes. An audit was done by hand in Maricopa county and found zero difference in the number of votes. I see no way that Trump can win Arizona.
Votes in Georgia were recounted by hand and again by machine. The recounts all ended up about the same. 500 votes changed, not enough to change Biden’s 12,000 vote lead.
Trump says that signatures didn’t get checked on the recount. Signatures were checked the first time, but there’s no way to recheck them — voting is anonymous, so ballots are separated from the envelopes during counting. Even if you could go back and find bad signatures, you wouldn’t know which ballots to throw out.
Did Georgia do a bad job checking the signatures? This year, 0.15% of ballots were rejected because of bad signatures (2,011 rejected out of 1.32 million). In 2018, 0.16% were rejected (454 out of 284,000). I can’t say how good or bad the checking is, but it’s the same as it usually is.
Those were the two closest states, the other 3 should presumably be even harder to flip.
In Michigan, there was Donald Trump v Secretary of State, which complained that Trump’s campaign didn’t have enough access to the ballot counting process. The judge threw this one out, Trump didn’t provide any proof that he didn’t get access.
In Pennsylvania, a lawsuit claimed that election observers couldn’t watch the counting. Trump’s own lawyers chose to remove that part of the claim and then decided the lawsuit was about some lesser claim — some counties used different rules about fixing mail-in ballot with mistakes (i.e. missing a signature when it was first sent in). The lawsuit was rejected, appealed, and rejected again. The court wrote:
“Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here… calling an election unfair does not make it so.”
Another lawsuit in Pennsylvania said that mail-in voting itself is unconstitutional. The mail-in voting law was approved by both parties. But, then Democrats won the election, so now the Republicans aren’t sure if the rules were fair. The Pennsylvania supreme court shot down this case. I don’t think the US supreme court will take this up, but I’m not positive.
Sydney Powell has a case complaining about Dominion, but she only just filed a few days ago. I suspect it’s bullshit, but I hope the court hears it and proves or disproves it.
It doesn’t seem like any of these cases will change the outcome. And even if Trump wins one case, he needs to overturn 3 states.
Trump isn’t trying to win in court.
He’s making an argument in the court of public opinion.
When you aren’t under oath, you can say any absurd thing that you want to. There’s no penalty for lying and the jury might not even notice.
You can tell people that turnout was 200%, and most won’t even check. You can say that dead people voted.
I can do the math to debunk these claims. But I don’t think it will help.
Trump’s supporters aren’t crunching numbers to see what’s true or not. The problem isn’t that they did the math wrong. The problem isn’t that they clicked on the wrong link to find the voting turnout in Detroit.
The problem is that they didn’t fact check at all. They trust Trump and they don’t trust mainstream news. They’ve heard Trump make 50 different claims about fraud, didn’t look into any of them, and now they think the whole election is fake.
It’s easier to believe things you want to be true, and they want to win. Trump isn’t trying to tell the truth, he’s just trying to set the narrative.
And it’s working. One recent poll said that 73% of Trump voters think he won the election. 3% think Biden won. The rest aren’t sure.
We normally expect a political debate to use facts and logic and reasoning. We’re not prepared for one side to just get up and yell “FAKE!”
And, apparently, if you say that often enough, people think it’s true.
This is the man who started his political career by questioning Obama’s birth certificate. He describes all criticism as “fake news” and offers his own claims as “alternative facts”. He’s now trying to steal an election, with an operation called “stop the steal”. George Orwell would be proud.
From ‘The Art Of The Deal’:
The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.
I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.
Innocent exaggeration is selling investors on “the biggest new casino”. It’s not so innocent when you’ve made up “the worst fraud in history”.
So, what’s the plan?
Could Trump still be planning to win?
Yes. But I don’t think he can pull it off. He needs to overturn 3 states. He could have Republican state legislators override the election and send pro-Trump electors to the electoral college. He’s invited Michigan lawmakers to the white house to discuss that. 30 Republicans in Pennsylvania have endorsed that plan.
I don’t think it will work. There’s very little time left to pass that legislation. Most of the swing states have Democratic governors. Governors could veto any law passed. At best, they would end up sending two sets of electors and congress would have to settle things.
Trump could also be inspiring individual electors to go rogue. Maybe he’ll even ask for electors to defect.
Only a few states have laws blocking this:
Electors in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania could all decide to vote for Trump, and that would be enough.
I don’t think this would work, because the electors are party loyalists.
But I’m not positive. It would take 37 defectors to overturn the results of the election. That’s 7% of the people voting. Unlikely. But not impossible. 73% of Republicans think they need to save the country from Biden stealing the election.
If Trump somehow flips the electoral college, does he win?
I think the answer is no. Congress still gets to count the electoral college votes. The rules are complicated, but Democrats have a majority in congress, and they can pull some tricks so that Biden still wins.
When congress meets, they first elect the speaker of the house. They nominate Pelosi, then they need to swear in every other member. She could delay swearing in the Republicans, maybe by saying there’s been so much voter fraud in the election, they need a committee to investigate. Then the Democrats vote for Biden.
Or, Pelosi could just refuse to vote so the process drags on. If there’s no president selected by January 20th, for some reason, then the speaker of the house becomes President. This seems like it would be chaotic, but Democrats would still win.
Could Trump win by force?
Yes. But I’m not sure if he’ll try, or how that would play out.
Barring new evidence, there’s no legal way for him to win. But, he’s still the commander in chief of the military. He’s got the backing of millions of armed people.
Trump intends to hold a big rally in Washington DC on Saturday, December 12th. Presumably this is to influence the electoral college vote on the 14th.
Just like with the last rally, some angry counter-protestors will show up. Antifa will hurt a few people, like they always do. Any violent videos will be shown repeatedly on right wing news and social media. Trump will retweet some himself, just like he did last time.
Suppose there’s widespread violence during that protest. It could be spontaneous. It could even be a false flag attack to make the left look bad. Trump could invoke the insurrection act, and deploy troops in cities.
Or, suppose we get to January and Pelosi needs to fight the election in congress. That process might take two weeks of stalling and refusing to vote. During that time Trump complains that Democrats are stealing the election. And it will look very much like theft, to his supporters. Maybe he calls them out to protest in the streets.
Last time, I downplayed the numbers of the proud boys. There really aren’t that many, maybe 6,000 men, maybe 20,000 if you count every “white supremacist” militia in America. Most people aren’t racists or anarchists, no one wants to have a race war.
But if you convince people somehow that the Republic is threatened, there are probably a lot more people willing to fight for what they think is a virtuous cause. 74 million people voted for Trump. Maybe 50 million think the election was stolen. That’s a lot of angry people with guns.
It seems crazy to think that Democrats, CNN, and Venezuela are working together to steal an election. But Trump has convinced tens of millions of people that’s true.
Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities — can make you commit atrocities.”
We saw proud boys fighting antifa, this month. The proud boys won, easily.
But a true militia face-off could be a lot more violent.
We saw opposing militias gather, this summer, with 3 percenters and armed black militias like NFAC:
In the end, the question might come down to “whose side will the military be on?”
And, I don’t know. Are the soldiers watching CNN or reading Trump’s tweets? Are the commanders loyal to Trump?
This all seems very unlikely. It seems most like Biden is just going to win, while Trump keeps complaining.
A more benign explanation is that he’s just doing all this to make money.
Trump has been fundraising for his recounts. Looking at the fine print, we see:
Okay, so you’re paying off Trump’s debts. It’s one last grift, on his way out.
Which is about what you expect from the man who went bankrupt 6 times. Sold greasy frozen meat as high quality Trump steaks. Started Trump university only to get sued for fraud. Was fined 2 million dollars for spending charitable donations on his own interests.
Look at what Trump said when the 2016 election was recounted by Jill Stein:
In a statement, Trump blasted the effort as a way for Stein to “fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount. All three states were won by large numbers of voters, especially Pennsylvania, which was won by more than 70,000 votes,”
“This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing,” the president-elect added.
Trump considered his 70,000 lead very large in 2016 but he thinks Biden’s 81,000 vote lead this year is fraudulent.
Jill Stein only raised 5 million dollars. Trump has raised 210 million dollars, last I checked. He spent 3 million on the Wisconsin recount. Add up his legal fees and maybe he’s spent 10 million and banked 200.
Maybe the next step after this is he makes his own TV network. People who feel confused or cheated by the election can tune in to watch some “alternative facts”. Maybe he riles people up to cause havoc. Maybe he plans to run again in 4 years. Maybe he just wants to make more money.
In 2016, we made jokes that liberals needed to live in a bubble where the election never happened. We joked that they needed safe spaces.
Well, now the tables are turned. Conservatives are leaving fox news, to watch newsmax and OANN. They’re leaving Facebook and Twitter to join Parler. They want a participation trophy for losing the election.
And soon, maybe they’ll have a safe space watching MAGA TV.
