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Let's Talk About Election Fraud

Hi everyone. It's time to talk about election fraud.

I know. I didn't want to do it either. The reality is though, a huge percentage of Americans right now believe that there is widespread election fraud and that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the election. Whether you are one of the people who believes that, or you are one of the people who think all these fraud allegations are bogus nonsense (and I think we all know people on both sides of that line), it's a problem worthy of concern. Either the fraud is real, in which case the fraud itself is issue for concern, or the fraud is false, and the lack of confidence in our election is reason for concern. 

As I've written before, I'm deeply concerned about the erosion of truth in our present day. I'm primarily concerned about it among Christians who, because of the God we worship, should care more about truth than the rest of the world. We, of all people, should be careful what we believe, what we say, and what we share. It concerns me when I see that care for truth disappear in the face of political partisanship.

It's in light of that concern for truth that I want to take a look at the various arguments and evidence I've seen presented for electoral fraud. They are serious allegations, and so I want to take them seriously. Fair warning, this is a very long post. I'm doing my best to actually seriously hear and respond to all of these various allegations. Below, there's a Table of Contents that links to each of the different claims and my response to them. 


What we mean when we talk about "Voter Fraud"

Lets clarify what we're talking about when we talk about voter fraud. There is almost certainly some level of fraud in every general election. We see small, provable examples of it here and there, and certainly there's some that won't get caught. The general election is a massive undertaking involving millions of people, different standards in different states, and an enormous time pressure to get things completed quickly. In the midst of that, we have two competing interests, access and security. We want the election to be accessible. Voting is one of our fundamental American rights, we want every eligible American to be able to vote if they want to. That means we want low barriers to be able to exercise that right. On the flip side, the election needs to be secure. We need to have faith that the vote we cast matters. Security can necessitate higher barriers. There is a constant, and legitimate, push and pull between these things. Lets consider an exaggerated example. If you were required to pay $1000 to vote, you would all but eliminate voter fraud. The expense it would take to influence a significant enough number of votes would be astronomical, and it would leave a huge paper trail. However, you would disenfranchise most of the US, who simply wouldn't be able to pay for their vote. A real example of this is the fight over voter ID. Democrats typically argue that requiring voter ID will disenfranchise voters, particularly the poorest among us. Republicans argue that requiring voter ID prevents fraud. They're almost certainly both overstating their case. Elections live in a constant tug of war between these two interests, and they're both valid interests! The way this is usually painted though is that my side is righteous, and the other side are cheaters. You can argue that elections should be more secure and not be motivated by wanting to disenfranchise minorities. You can argue that elections should be more accessible and not be motivated by committing fraud. Those are valid stances to take, and we do our fellow man a disservice when we assign to them the worst motives we can.

Even beyond the issue of fraud, the general election is an administrative nightmare. It's a huge clerical undertaking, and the process could absolutely be improved. People on both sides can acknowledge this. There's a woman who I'll reference later who is on a board of county canvassers, and she testifies to various inefficiencies and clerical issues that need to be cleaned up, and she's right. There are all kinds of things that we could, and should, improve in our election process. This is hindered by both sides of the political spectrum in various ways. Democrats typically are concerned with lowering all barriers to access and dedicating resources to expanding the electorate, not cleaning up the process, even if that means the process is unwieldy and has some holes. Republicans don't like funding the government in general, so aren't inclined to pour in resources to fix election problems, and are willing to make the process slower and harder to access if it makes it more efficient. That can lead to some of the situations we've seen like Atlanta, where people often have to wait in line for hours to vote (and, lets be honest, that happens more often in heavily minority areas, which is not a good look for our country given our history of voting discrimination). Despite those differences, there are plenty of places where we should be able to say "we can both agree that this needs fixing", and plenty of places where we can find compromise to improve the electoral system. Even still, the perfect system is probably not a system with zero fraud. The measures that you would have to take to ensure no small scale fraud across the entire country are likely too demanding and restricting, and it's better to live with a more accessible system that can tolerate small scale fraud. Think about it as if I were a company that manufactures widgets. The machine and staff that I have produces and ships widgets without defect 99.9% of the time. I have the opportunity to buy a new, more precise machine, and to hire more staff to inspect every single widget that goes out, to take that number up to 100%, but in order to do that I need to triple the price of my widget. It's simply not worth it. I'm willing to live with a little bit of error, because the tradeoff to be completely foolproof isn't worth it. 

So, all that to say, no one is alleging that there was no fraud at all in this election. There is always some degree of small scale fraud or opportunity to commit small scale fraud. What I want to address is the argument being advanced by Donald Trump and his legal team, which is that there was large-scale, coordinated fraud across multiple states orchestrated by the Democratic party to steal the election. That is a vastly different claim than the simple assertion that there was some fraud in the election. It is an extraordinary claim. It requires extraordinary evidence. You can't just show that there are flaws in the system that need to be cleaned up. You can't just show that there are clerical errors. You can't just show that there's a crack in the wall, you have to show that Joe Biden crashed the truck through it. I don't think that Trump and his allies have showed that evidence. In fact, I don't think they've come close to it. What they've actually done, as I'll show below, is lied over and over again and relied on extraordinarily flimsy arguments.


Table of Contents

The Claims

1. XXX had more absentee votes than ballots that were sent out.

The Claim: This one has been all over the place in many states. For example, Rudy Giuliani mentioned at a press conference in Philadelphia "You sent out, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 1,823,148 absentee or mail-in ballots. You received back 1.4 million, approximately. However, in the count for president, you counted 2.5 million." The President retweeted PA senator Doug Mastriano's claim of the same thing:


I've seen the same claim made about Wisconsin as well:

This has been claimed about all kinds of places in the last few weeks. Just days after the election, the same claim was circulating about Lancaster County, PA.

The Response: These are actually really easy to check, because you can just look up the state election commission and see if the amount of ballots/votes they reported really matches with the claim. In Pennsylvania, the requested ballots numbers that Rudy and the President are citing came from the Pennsylvania primary, not the general election. In the general election, 3 million ballots were requested. In Wisconsin, you can look at the absentee ballot report here. They had 2,068,464 ballots requested, and 1,957514 ballots returned. Wisconsin also has in-person absentee voting, and they had 651,422 votes cast that way. These are easy things to check

    2. XXX had more voters than were registered.

The Claim: This is similar to the one above. The claim is that certain states or counties had more votes come in than registered voters, which is obviously proof of fraud. Early on, we saw this claim about Wisconsin, which went viral.


The president and his legal team have continued to amplify this claim.



The Response: Again, these are really easy to check. The 3,129,00 registered voters number comes from the 2018 midterm. If you check the Wisconsin Election Commission, you can see that on 11/1/2020, they had 3,684,726 registered voters. That's putting aside the fact that Wisconsin has same day voter registration, which sometimes can lead to a 100+% turnout being temporarily reported, since the reporting for votes is updated faster than the reporting for registered voters. For example, here's an enthusiastic article about how same day registration/address changes from students at UCF drove the voter turnout in the precinct to be over 100%. 

But what about Rudy's claim of their being 150%, 200%, 300% overvoting? This one was actually part of one of their court filings, so we know where the claim is coming from. The claim comes from a guy named Russ Ramsland (remember that name, we'll come back to him), and the numbers come from a sworn affidavit he provided to the Trump legal team. As part of his argument that Dominion voting machines are changing votes to Biden, he lists all of these Michigan counties that have huge overvote numbers.


That would be extremely concerning...except that those aren't counties in Michigan. They're counties in Minnesota. The guy mixed up his MI states. None of those counties used Dominion machines, they're mostly rural, Trump-leaning counties, and his numbers don't actually match the numbers reported by the Minnesota secretary of state. Other than that, though, he nailed it. As for Wayne County, where Rudy claims there were 70% more votes cast than voters? Again, it's super easy to check this. Wayne County had 1,406,355 registered voters and 878,102 votes cast. That's 62.44%, not unusual in the slightest.

    3. Dead people voted!

The Claim: You may have seen one of the many viral tweets claiming they had found dead people who voted in the 2020 election, like these:


Lindsey Graham went on Fox News and claimed that there was evidence of dead people voting. Rudy Giuliani claimed in his Pennsylvania press conference that there were thousands of dead voters. There was even an affidavit filed in one of Trump's Michigan lawsuits where a woman swore that her son, who passed away in July '16, supposedly had a ballot cast in his name in the last two elections.

The Response: We've reached the "no due diligence" and "ascribing malice to clerical error" section of the claims. Claims of dead people voting happen every single election, you've almost certainly heard them before. Here's a Brennan Center document about voter fraud from 2007 that lists several allegations from many different years. On occasion, there are isolated cases discovered where someone votes in place of a dead relative. For example, it happened with a Republican man in Pennsylvania this year. Largely though, those allegations come because of faulty list-matching or simple clerical error. An election is an enormous undertaking involving millions of people, and a lot of those people have the same or similar names. Sometimes the clerk accidentally marks the wrong name on the role. Sometimes when the lists of voters and death records are matched up, it will match someone with the same name as a dead person, even though they are very much alive. That viral tweet about William Bradley? The man who voted was his son, also named William Bradley. A clerk had entered the wrong Bradley as having voted. The woman who swore in her affidavit that her dead son had voted in this election? Another case of being confused by a common name.

If you were some official entity and actually seriously concerned about this, you would do some due diligence. You could easily select a sample from these lists, track those people down, and see if it is an actual case of a dead voter. Both CNN and the BBC did this. Unsurprisingly, they found that none of the cases were actually fraud, because that's what happens every single time there are these allegations of large amounts of dead people voting. 

    4. Mail-In Ballots received too quickly

The Claim: In Sydney Powell's filing in Georgia, there is an affidavit by the aforementioned Russ Ramsland (you remember, the guy who thought all the Minnesota counties were in Michigan). In his affidavit, he claims that 96,600 mail in votes were counted, but that county records show were never received back. He also claims that a bunch of ballots were received back impossibly fast, some even received back before they were mailed out.


Rudy echoed a similar claim during his "hearing" in Pennsylvania, that large amounts of votes had been received before the ballots had been sent out.

The Response: What you see in the above picture is the only "evidence" that we've seen of this claim. Ramsland provides no citation to show where his data is coming from. There is no attached exhibit showing where these claims come from. That's it. There's absolutely no way to check whatever work he did because he doesn't tell you where any of the numbers come from. You can, however, check the official data that Georgia reported. As of their 11/5 report, there were 1,781,429 ballots requested and 1,318,392 returned (and not rejected). According to their official vote tally, they had 1,316,943 votes by mail for the presidential election. That's a difference of 1,449, which can easily be explained by slightly updated numbers from the recount and from people who didn't vote for president on their ballot. It's a far cry from the 96,600 votes he claimed have no return record. 

As to the issue of "impossible ballots" that were returned too quickly, again we have absolutely no sourcing for this data. I actually did some research of my own, because you can actually pull .CSV files giving you general ballot information for each ballot in each county. I did a quick check on Fulton county (where Atlanta is located), and found a few such votes that were reported as received back before they were mailed out. You'll be shocked to find that they were pretty clearly clerical errors. On one, the date received was listed as 1/1/1900, which is what clerks do when they have to enter a date but there's not one on the form. One of them was listed as applied for on 9/9, mailed out on 11/3, and received on 10/23. That's clearly just an error in marking down the mailing date, they didn't receive the application and then wait till election day to mail out the ballot. The election is a MASSIVE undertaking involving a huge amount of data entry. No matter how tightly you control for things, you're going to have these little clerical errors. They aren't proof of fraud. Also, Georgia had drop boxes for absentee ballots, you didn't have to mail them back. Given that, it's certainly not impossible you could have returned a ballot a day after it was mailed out, and it's definitely possible after two days.

    5. Joe Biden got 80 million votes!

The Claim: I've seen this in several places, but I'll specifically reference this article from the Federalist, and this one from Spectator (Both of which the president has retweeted. I'll be discussing more of their claims below). It's not really a claim of fraud, but more a "look at how suspicious this is." Joe Biden, who nobody seems very enthusiastic about, somehow got the most votes of all time, and got 10+ million more votes than when he ran with Obama. Surely, that's suspicious, right?

The Response: The problem with this is that it's purely subjective. It amounts to "I didn't think Joe Biden was a good candidate, so how could so many people possibly have voted for him?" Either large spikes in voting are suspicious, or they aren't. Why is it suspicious that Joe Biden's vote spiked 14 million over Hilary (or the Obama/Biden 2012 election), but not suspicious that Donald Trump's vote spiked by 11 million? The Federalist cites high enthusiasm for Trump and low enthusiasm for Biden as a reason why this is so strange. What's comical is that the article they cite specifically cites that Trump won in 2016 largely because he was seen as the lesser of two evils, not because of high republican support for him. Now it's absurd that the same thing happened for Biden? We could just as easily cite Trump's underwater approval ratings and ask "How could he possibly have gotten so many votes?" The easy explanation is that second term elections are usually a referendum on the incumbent, and people feel passionately, one way or the other, about Donald Trump, which brought a lot of people to the polls. This is not unusual. George W Bush received 11.5 million more votes in 2004 than in 2000. Reagan got 10.5 million more in 1984 than 1980. Richard Nixon got 15 million more in 1972 than 1968. I doubt anyone advancing this as a valid point would question the validity of those elections of Republican presidents.

    6. Donald Trump won all of the Bellwether Counties/States

The Claim: This one is also referenced in the above articles, and I've seen it all over the place. Various states/counties in America are considered "bellwethers", which means that they have nearly always voted with the eventual presidential winner. Several articles and tweets pointed out that in this election, a whole lot of bellwethers broke for Trump, but he lost anyway. How could that possibly be?


The Response: I will say this as clearly as I know how. If someone is claiming that bellwether performance is proof or indicative of anything, they are not a serious person and you should genuinely question whether they are a reliable source of information. Bellwethers have no predictive power, they never have. When we talk about bellwethers, it's strictly a descriptive label we've decided to apply to a pattern we see, but they do not in any way help to predict the results of the election. By definition, a Bellwether is a bellwether until it's not. Now that these counties all got it wrong, there will be a whole new crop of bellwethers in 2024. Look at the below list of bellwethers from Wikipedia
Yes, a bunch of them went for Trump this year even though Biden won...but almost as many went for Hilary in 2016 even though Trump won! 

If I flip a coin 1000 times, I'm going to have stretches where I flip heads a bunch of times in a row. It's not because anything in the coin has changed. It doesn't mean that I'm more likely to flip heads going forward. It's just randomness. There are 3000+ counties in the US. There are always going to be a handful of them that have picked the last X number of elections correctly. That doesn't mean that they will predict the winner going forward. There's a study on this from all the way back in 1975. They concluded that supposed bellwether districts are no better at predicting the result of the election than a random sample of counties. Of course, that's not a surprising result. Any statistician could have told you that.

    7. Biden underperformed Hilary in cities, except for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Michigan

The Claim: Again, this is listed in the above Federalist article, but has also been parroted far and wide in right wing media. This comes from pollster Richard Baris, who stated: "Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.” It's since been repeated all over the place, and it's another thing that Rudy has referenced in his press conferences/hearings.

The Response: It's a lie, pure and simple. National Review writer Dan McLaughlin actually ran the data here. Biden improved his margin of victory over Hilary in 31 out of 36 urban counties, and Philadelphia was actually one of the 5 in which he didn't. In fact though, most of Biden's improvement didn't come from the big cities (which are supposedly Democrat-controlled and rife with fraud), but from the surrounding suburbs.

To the Federalist's credit, they've actually posted a retraction on this claim. Too bad nobody else has.

    8. Biden won even though down ballot Democrats lost

The Claim: How is it possible that Joe Biden could have won when Republicans did so well in all the other races? They actually picked up seats in the House, that never happens when your presidential candidate loses! This is, again, listed in The Federalist and Spectator articles above. It's also been listed as a cause for concern in plenty of other places. This article, cited by the Federalist, states that "The only example of an incumbent president losing and his party gaining seats is 1992, nine of them to be exact." Surely, this indicates some sneaky stuff going on, right?

The Response: Setting aside the question of why this is evidence of fraud and not evidence against fraud (if you're going to go through the trouble of rigging the election, why wouldn't you do it so that you win down the ballot as well?), this is really only extraordinary if you have a very narrow view of election history. Ticket-splitting happens all the time. Since 1916 (26 elections), the party losing the presidential election has gained or held neutral in the Senate 12 times. In the House, it's happened 6 times ('16, '56, '60, '88, '92, 2000). "But wait," you say, "didn't that guy in the above article say that it had only happened once?" Actually, he said that there was only one instance of an incumbent losing and his party gaining seats. I've seen people use that as their metric a lot, and it's nonsense. Incumbents usually win, so we have very few data points for incumbents losing. It's like when you're watching a baseball game and they put up a graphic saying "this pitcher has a 2.0 ERA against lefties in June when it's raining." I mean, technically it's true, but it doesn't mean anything.

So it's not historically unique, but it also isn't even remotely surprising in the case of this president. We all know that Donald Trump is divisive, and has turned away many independents who would otherwise be inclined to vote Republican. It should not surprise us that he ran behind the Senate and House races, it's the same thing that happened in 2016. In '16, Republican senate candidates ran 1.1% ahead of Trump. House Republicans ran well ahead of him, actually winning the popular vote, 49.1% to 48% (remember, Trump lost it 46.1% to 48.2%). It is not surprising in the slightest that Republicans down ballot outperformed Donald Trump. 

    9. The Math Proves Fraud!

The Claim: There are so, so many of these. The general idea is that if we model the data in this way or that way, the numbers we find are so wildly unlikely that they must be fraudulent. One widely shared example of this is appealing to Benford's Law. Benford's Law is one of those very weird mathematics things that sounds fake but isn't. Basically, it says that in most naturally occurring sets of numbers, the first digit isn't uniformly distributed so that it's equally likely to be any digit 1-9, it actually follows a logarithmic distribution. For example, here's a chart of the first digit of the county population for each county in the US:


Weird, right? That's Benford's Law. Now, lots of people have claimed that Biden's vote totals don't follow Benford's Law, so they must be fraudulent. For example, this viral post

At the very least, isn't that evidence for concern?

There are countless other mathematical arguments, of varying degrees of indecipherability. One article I saw shared several times listed this as "the definitive statistical analysis of anomalies thus far." So I'll take a look at that one.

The Response: People arguing that Benford's Law proves fraud are wrong, wrong, wrong. Here's a good explainer on why from an expert on Benford's Law. Basically, Benford's Law doesn't work for elections for a lot of reasons she lays out in that article. There's a lot of research on whether or not it works if you're looking at the second digit of the vote totals and the conclusion of most mathematicians is that it's sketchy at best.  However, if you're not convinced of that, you can look to Walter Mebane, a professor at the University of Michigan. In 2006 he wrote a paper about applying Benford's Law to the US presidential election, and said that even though it has limitations and can't prove fraud, it's "worth taking seriously as a statistical test for election fraud.” What does Mebane think of the 2020 election? "To date I’ve not heard of any substantial irregularities having occurred anywhere, and the particular datasets examined in this paper give essentially no evidence that election frauds occurred."

Now, as to this article, "the definitive statistical analysis of anomalies so far." It is, to put it charitably, a mess. I've had to read it half a dozen times to make heads or tails of what he's trying to argue, and even now it isn't particularly clear. I don't want to waste your time, so here are the highlights:
  • Here's what is essentially the core premise of his argument: "The basic intuition is: big margins are one thing, and so are super-skewed results, but it’s weird to have them both at the same time, as they generally become inversely related as either value increases." This is...not actually intuitive at all. It's true that, all other things being equal, smaller sample sizes tend to have larger variation, but none of the sample sizes we're looking at here are particularly small (even the smaller dumps are thousands of votes). In samples of the same size, this is explicitly false, samples with a high ratio must have a large margin. For example, if a sample is 1000 votes and the ratio of Biden:Trump is 2:1, the margin is going to be +333 for Biden. In a sample of the same size, if the ratio is 3:1, the margin is going to be +500 (yes, third party votes exist, but in nowhere near enough volume to change the basic principle I'm demonstrating here). In samples of the same size, this "basic intuition" is always going to be false, so why is he using margins instead of total votes? It's unclear why and he never addresses this.
  • The author goes on to state that "We will demonstrate below that the data overwhelmingly follow this intuition, but that four key vote updates identified by this report cut against this intuition." Here's the key thing. He never demonstrates that the data follow this intuition. He never even comes close. At no point in this whole thing is there a hypothesis test. There's no demonstrating that the non-intuitive thing he's claiming is actually true. He just plots a bunch of points and says "when you look at it, it's shaped like the line 1/x". I'm not joking, that's the extent of his proof.
  • That's all the reasoning he gives. If he wanted to actually say, "this data follows the shape of 1/x, and here's how closely it follows it," there are ways to do that. He could run a regression and do some actual statistics (there is a distinct lack of actual statistics in this "definitive statistical analysis"). He could produce an R-Squared value to show how closely the data actually fit with his intuition. He doesn't, either because he has no idea what he's doing, or because he knows that doing actual math doesn't yield the result he wants.
  • After the above nonsense where he says "well, it looks like 1/x, so that's good enough," he follows it up with this all but unreadable paragraph: "We similarly expect points to be in both the top-right and bottom-left quadrants, and between an outer line which has the shape of y = 1 / x and the origin.  Since these values will thus mostly be either both negative or both positive, we can see that multiplying each point’s x-coordinate with its y-coordinate is a useful way of assessing the extent to which it follows this sort of distribution.  Since there are more points near the origin than there are on the visible “boundary lines” (i.e. the sequences of points on the outer edges in the first and third quadrants which visibly form these lines which look like a graph, if perhaps scaled, of y = 1/x)." Again, we have no idea why 1/x should be an outer bound of this distribution, he has not proved that in the slightest. He states that multiplying each point's x-coordinate with its y-coordinate is useful way to analyze it. WHY? You can't just multiply things together because you want to! What is the mathematical justification for that? Also, the last sentence gets lost in its parenthetical and he forgets to complete it.
  • After all this nonsense, he finally arrives at the following table:

  • First of all, here's where it becomes crystal clear that he started with an answer he wanted and worked backwards. If you're just running numbers and analyzing the results as they come, why are you interested in just these 4 vote dumps and not all of the results that your math says are anomalous? Why don't you care about the vote dump in Maine that ranks 3rd on your list? Why don't you care about the one in New York that has by far the largest margin? Because you started with the answer that you wanted, and worked backwards from there, that's why. Second, what actually is the number in the "Score (2dps) column? What is 2 dps? He never tells us. I think that it's his number that he got from the multiplying he references above. So let me sum up what he did. He subtracted Trump votes from Biden votes. He also took the log of the ratio of Biden votes to Trump votes. Then he standardized them from each state (which he did by assuming they were normally distributed, though he offered no proof of this). Then he multiplied them together. That results in this number, which is supposed to prove...something? Also, he doesn't tell us anything about the distribution of this mystery number he's produced. How many standard deviations out are these measurements? Just how anomalous are they? It seems from the graph he provided that they're pretty far off the mean, but I don't know because he doesn't give me any numbers to quantify it. The raw number doesn't actually give me any information at all. This is high school Stat 101 level stuff!
  • Here he does some probability calculations to tell you how unlikely this all is, except that he does it wrong, and admits that he does it wrong in the footnote because he couldn't be bothered to do it correctly. "[17] These probabilities are rough not only because they are rounded but because they are calculated assuming sampling with replacement.  We are, however, sampling without replacement"
  • On top of all of this, there are huge assumptions that the author makes about this data that go unstated. There are assumptions of normality baked into his calculations that he makes no effort to justify. He treats every vote dump as if it's coming from the same population, even though we know there are vast differences not just from county to county, but from in-person to mail-in ballots. It's extraordinarily sloppy.
  • TL;DR - There's no consistent methodology. There's precious little actual statistics here. The author makes large assumptions that they neither state nor justify. The whole thing could be summed up by saying "look at these graphs I made. Don't those 4 points look funny?"
There are wild, hare-brained mathematical arguments like this in every corner of the internet, and I could spend the rest of my mortal life trying to read them and debunk them. I looked at this one because I got referred to it as "the definitive analysis", and if that's the best they've got, it is sorely lacking.

    10. Many counties have more registered voters than voting-age citizens

The Claim: This is another one that is hardly new to this election. You may have heard this claimed by President Trump in his recent speech. The most notable example this year is an October report by Judicial Watch which claims that 353 counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than voting-age citizens. This is not an accusation of fraud, per say, but something that could open the possibility for fraud.

The Response: As I said, this isn't a new claim, and it's not entirely without merit. Our voter rolls could use cleaning up. However, in the case of this specific complaint, there is a lot wrong with it. First of all, the Judicial Watch study includes both active and inactive voters. In North Carolina, If you get sent a letter to update/confirm your registration information (namely, your address) and you don't fill it out and return it, you get marked as an inactive voter. I know, because it's what happened to me. I moved, didn't update my registration because I'm lazy and it fell through the cracks, and I got marked as inactive. Not a big deal, I updated my address when I went to vote. For this study though, it's important, because inactive voters have likely moved, and have perhaps moved out of the county. Why, then, are we counting them in this study? That's the first issue. The second issue is that the study uses data from the American Community Survey (ACS) to get its voting-age populations. The ACS is not a census, it gives approximate population estimates based off of sampling. It's an approximate snapshot, not an exact count. Those approximations are also less accurate at the county level (due to smaller sample sizes) than at the state level. The study also uses a 5 year average population (from 2014-2018), but is looking at current voter registration in 2020. In growing areas, that 5 year average is going to substantially undershoot their actual population. This isn't to say that voter rolls are perfect, but this study's methodology has far too many holes to make any actual conclusions. Also, as stated above, even if this were true it isn't proof of fraud.

    11. This video proves fraud!

The Claim: There are an awful lot of these, and they come in all shapes and sizes. There's the video clip of Joe Biden saying they have the “most extensive and inclusive voted fraud organization”. Eric Trump shared a (now deleted) video of someone burning 80 Trump ballots. Here's a tweet showing video of a ballot counter filling out ballots. Surely that's not allowed.  Most recently, Rudy and the President started promoting this video from Georgia, which they claim shows ballot stuffing. 

The Response: There were a LOT of videos like this flying around in the days immediately following the election. Without fail they fall apart under the slightest investigation. The Biden video was shared far and wide, primarily by the president himself. If you watch the full video of the interview it was taken from (and again, it's not hard to find), the context makes it crystal clear that Biden is talking about an organization to fight voter fraud, not to perpetrate it. The Eric Trump video was a fake, the city of Virginia Beach (where the video took place) debunked it, showing that the ballots in the video were sample ballots, not official ballots.

As to the videos from voting centers, what they show is normal vote counting procedure. One of the things I find really interesting about this election is that it genuinely is an extraordinarily transparent election. All across the country, we had cameras in these election centers livestreaming the process. If you wanted to, you could sit there and watch the ballot workers all day. However, one of the things that happens when you get a look at a process you're not familiar with is that it can look strange, because you don't have a baseline to compare it with. Most of us don't have any idea what the inner workings of an election should look like, because we've never paid attention to it or had the opportunity to watch it before. Now, as to those specific claims, the ballot worker filling out ballots is simply remaking ballots with readability problems. They work with a partner, one person reading off the ballot and the other filling in the new one. Here's an article from Bloomberg News from before the election that describes that process. You can see that very thing happening in that video, and you can see an observer sitting right by their table and watching the whole process. For the most recent "smoking gun", a local TV station in Atlanta did a great report on it. He talks to the State's lead election investigator and they go through the hours of film to show exactly where those "mystery ballots" came from. They're not mystery ballots, and there's nothing suspicious or mysterious about it. It's just normal process.

    12. States stopped counting ballots on Election Night

The Claim: This one had a lot of traction the night of/day after the election. On Election night, the New York Post reported the counting stopped in Philadelphia. A burst water pipe in Atlanta cause a pause in counting. Viral tweets claimed that swing states had paused their counting overnight.



President Trump has repeated this claim, including in his recent speech, "In multiple swing states, counting was halted for hours and hours on election night, with results withheld from major Democrat-run locations, only to appear later." Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell have referenced it as well. The theory (and we'll get to this more in depth later), is that Democrats paused counting in these big cities so that they could bring in a bunch of fraudulent ballots in the middle of the night to swing the election to Biden.

The Response: It's just not true. The reporter who the New York Post relied on for their story? He posted a correction almost immediately. The counting continued, but there was a delay in reporting, because mail-in ballots take longer to count. There are extra steps to counting mail-in votes, which is why they take longer. That's why there were those election night delays in reporting. Everyone finished their in-person counting, then the mail-in counting started.  In Wisconsin, they counted through the night, as the director of the State Elections Commission reported the next morning. That burst water pipe in Atlanta? It didn't happen in the middle of the night, it happened at 6:00 AM on the morning of election day.

    13. Republican observers weren't allowed to observe the counting process

The Claim: We've heard this over and over again since the day after the election. Rudy refers to it every time he summarizes their version of the events (Here he is at the RNC news conference). The President claimed it in his recent speech. There was a big social media outcry about it on election day when poll watchers in Detroit claimed they were being kept out of the TCF center. 

The Response: Just being a poll watcher doesn't mean that you are allowed to walk into any polling station. There is a process to ensure an even number of partisan watchers. In the case of the TCF center, they were already at capacity with an even number of poll watchers (as explained in the above story). Here's a CNN reporter's photo from 11/2 (the first time they could start opening the envelopes for absentee ballots and getting them ready for counting) showing both Republican and Democratic poll challengers entering the TCF center. The Trump team has argued this in court and lost. You can read the filing in Philadelphia and the counter-statement from the Philly board of elections. The judge (a George W. Bush appointee) denied their motion, and in the hearing the Trump team lawyer admitted that they had observers in the room:

Judge Diamond: “Are your observers in the counting room?”
Trump campaign lawyer: "There's a non zero number of people in the room"
Diamond: "I’m asking you as a member of the bar of this court: are people representing the Donald J Trump for president, representing the plaintiffs, in that room?"
Trump campaign lawyer: "Yes."
Diamond: "I'm sorry, then what's your problem?"

This claim is simply not true, and they've admitted as much in court. 

    14. Nobody checked the signatures on the ballots

The Claim: Again, we've heard this from Rudy at the RNC press conference. Most recently, we've heard this again and again from President Trump in relation to Georgia. The gist of the claim is that no one checked the signatures on the mail-in ballots in these states, so we can't possibly know if they're legitimate, and even a recount won't help us, because once the ballots are separated from the envelopes, there's no way to know which ballot went with which envelope.

The Response: That last part, at least, is true. You can't match the ballot with the signature once they've been separated. That's by design, because we vote by secret ballot. However, the claim that no one checked the signatures is simply a lie. In most of these states, the signature is checked both when the application for an absentee ballot is received, and when the ballot itself is received. The clerk checks the signature against the signature on file when the ballot is received, not during the canvassing process. That's so that clerks can alert voters if there's something wrong with the ballot in time for them to cure the missing/mismatched signature. Here's an article from Oct 29th from a local Arizona paper about Maricopa county vetting thousands of ballots with mismatched signatures. Here's the Michigan Election Officials' Manual, where you can read about the signature requirements (pages 6 and 11). Here's the Georgia election code, where they also have the double signature requirement (b.1 and a.1.B). Rudy and Donald may not like the way that signatures are checked, but it's the laws of the state, and nobody has actually claimed or shown any proof that these clerks didn't do their jobs and check the signatures upon receipt of the ballots. Also, if they had a problem with this procedure, perhaps they should've addressed it prior to the election. Georgia has a Republican-controlled house and a Republican-controlled senate, and this procedure for absentee ballots has been on the books since at least 2006. The rejection rate for absentee ballots in Georgia due to missing or non-matching signatures was .15%, exactly the same as during the general election in 2018. There is literally no evidence that signature-matching wasn't done.

    15. The State Legislature Hearings

The Claim: In the last week or so, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis have been traveling to the state legislatures of all these swing states and presenting their evidence of fraud, trying to persuade these legislatures to reject the results of the election and choose the electors themselves (which they absolutely do not have the legal right to do). One thing that I've seen posted a lot recently is "If you don't think there's evidence of fraud, you should watch the hearings." So I did. Here's their hearing in front of the Michigan House Oversight Committee:


The Response: Lets start with the fact that this is as friendly an environment as you could find for Rudy and his witnesses. It's not a court room. There's no one cross-examining them. They get to speak (they're not under oath) for hours, and at most the legislators get to ask one question of them. These are the people that Rudy and Jenna have chosen to bring to these hearings. They're the best witnesses. Honestly, some of them offer stories that are compelling if listened to in isolation. What's not on display in this "hearing" is the fact that a court has already considered these witnesses (the first 4, we'll get to the other two in a minute), and found them wanting. You can ready the judge's decision here (the case has been appealed twice and denied both times). Judge Kenny finds the witnesses unfamiliar with the voting process, that they ascribe sinister motive to mundane process, that they did not file any formal complaints or consult with their supervisors, and that they just aren't credible. He also notes that there was a walk-through of the TCF Center on Oct 29th to explain the process, but none of the witnesses attended. "Perhaps if Plaintiff's election challenger affiants had attended...questions and concerns could have been answered in advance of Election Day. Regrettably, they did not and, therefore, Plaintiff's affiants did not have a full understanding of the TCF absent ballot tabulation process...Plaintiff's interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible." On the flip side, the State submitted testimony by Christopher Thomas, who has served with the State Board of Elections for 40 years. If you find the above testimony compelling, I encourage you to read his response to those claims. Among other things, you'll find:
  • The instruction to not check signatures that Jessy Jacob alleges is simply because the signatures had already been checked by the City Clerk.
  • The "backdating" allegation has a perfectly reasonable explanation (basically, clerks had entered dates and forgotten to click "save". Yes, it's that dumb and mundane). The situation was explained to Republican challengers who declined to challenge any of the ballots.
  • On the allegation that challengers weren't allowed close enough to see the ballots, the Department of Elections had video set up and had provided large monitors so that observers could clearly see the process.
  • On the allegation that ballots had been brought in from the back of the TCF center...all the ballots were brought in from the back of the TCF center.
  • Ms. Jacob continually confuses two different systems, the QVF ("Qualified Voter File", a statewide registration file) and the EPB (E-Pollbook), which is used in precincts to create the poll list of voters who voted.
  • Challengers often congregated in groups instead of being near their stations next to a counting board, and at one point were chanting "Stop the Vote!", but nonetheless were not removed.
  • "It is clear from the affidavits attached to the Complaint that these challengers do not understand absent voter ballot processing and tabulating. It is clear also that they did not operate through the leadership of their challenger party, because the issues they bring forward were by and large discussed and resolved with the leadership of their challenger party. The leadership on numerous occasions would ask me to accompany them to a particular counting board table to resolve an issue. I would always discuss the issue with counting board inspectors and their supervisors and the challengers. The affiants appear to have failed to follow this protocol."
Several of them testify to essentially what amounts to bad behavior and bullying by Democratic challengers. Look, I'm sure there was some of that. I'm also sure that there was bad behavior and constant disruption to the process by Republican challengers, because we've seen reporting of that as well. Also problematic is that the most direct allegations of fraud come from by far the least credible witness. If you can watch Melissa Carone and look me in the eye and tell me you find her to be a credible witness, I'll eat my phone. Watch how she responds to the Republican legislator who asks her the perfectly reasonable question "if people were running ballots through these machines multiple times, why is it that the poll book isn't off by 30,000 votes?" It's insane. She's simply not credible. 

After the four witnesses at the TCF center, we have Col Phil Waldren, who is the "technical expert" who tells us about how the data proves fraud and that Dominion machines are cheating. You'll note that he talks about a lot of the things that I addressed above: precincts reporting over 100% turnout, dead voters, etc. He also makes some claims that are stunningly ignorant of the process. He talks about how his team calculated 4 "vote dumps" that were so large that it was impossible for them to have been counted in the time since the last update. However, as Republican Representative Steve Johnson (who is the real star of this hearing) points out, that's not how vote counting and reporting works. The precinct counts all the ballots and then uploads the results. The ballots were being counted all day. Waldren just doesn't understand the process. He also alleges that those 4 spikes caused them to question Dominion machines, except that two of those 4 counties (Oakland and Macomb) don't use Dominion machines. He also references a case that happened in Antrim county, where a reporting error initially showed the county as going to Biden instead of Trump. The error was almost immediately corrected and recognized as human error, and something that would have been caught in the county canvass even if it hadn't been noticed initially. Waldren categorizes this as a "glitch", which it was not. Waldren pontificates a lot and doesn't give straight answers, so it's a bit tough to follow, but here's what he says when asked about Antrim county and the Dominion machine which he and his team looked at. The county ran a retabulation 3 days after the election to double check, and everything matched except for 3 ballots which were damaged in the retabulation. Waldren and Rudy make a big deal out of how many mistakes there were, but the reality is that the only major discrepancy is over school board, there was no change in the presidential vote (except for the 3 missing ballots). Now, it's worth examining why the school board vote was off by so much, but unless you're arguing the the Democratic party is trying to rig the Antrim County school board, it's not fraud!

We also have Monica Palmer, a Wanye County Canvasser. I empathize with Ms. Palmer the most out of all these witnesses. She's speaking mostly to administrative issues that need to be cleared up and clarified, and seems to genuinely want to improve the process. The issue she brings up is that precincts are out of balance, which means that the number of ballots given to voters at a precinct does not match the number of actual votes. This is actually not an unusual thing in elections. If a ballot is poorly filled out or a voter requires a new ballot and poll workers do not account for the spoiled ballot, that creates a discrepancy. Another possible explanation for a discrepancy is that a voter was handed a ballot but got tired of waiting in line and left without voting. During the primary in August, 71% of Detroit's precincts were out of balance. In the general election, only 28% were out of balance, and the highest estimate for the number of actual ballot errors that consists of is 450. This is a non-issue in deciding this election. If you want to talk about places to improve going forward, I can totally get behind that. For this election though, this is not a problem, and it's not proof of fraud.

    16. The Lawsuits

The Trump team has filed dozens of lawsuits in all of these swing states, and it would be impossible to cover them all. I'm going to talk about three here that I think are representative of the issues in them.

        A) Kelly v. Pennsylvania

I'm going to start with this one, because I think it's the most representative of the clear motive behind all of these lawsuits. While this is not a lawsuit brought by the Trump legal team, they have publicly supported it, and have been arguing for other state legislatures to take a similar approach. In the suit (complaint here), Congressman Mike Kelly and house candidate Sean Parnell (among others) allege that Pennsylvania law Act 77, which established no-excuse mail-in voting, is unconstitutional. Throughout the complaint, they refer to mail-in voting as a "scheme". The relief they request from the court is that the court issue an injunction that prohibits certifying the results of the election, and that the court should either throw out all mail-in ballots or direct the Pennsylvania General Assembly to choose the state's electors. Either of those, of course, mean giving Donald Trump the win in Pennsylvania. Now, I'm not going to go into the legal reasons why they argue that Act 77 is unconstitutional, because they don't actually matter. They don't matter because of the legal doctrine of laches. Laches (roughly speaking) says that you can't assert a legal right if you took a long delay in asserting that right, and that the long delay would cause harm to your opponent upon asserting that right. See, the thing about Act 77 is that it wasn't passed right before the election in some sinister plot to steal it for Democrats. It was passed in October of 2019. If they genuinely thought it was a bad law, they had plenty of time to challenge it. It was in place for the primary this year, and could easily have been challenged then. By waiting, if the court were to grant them relief now, they would be disenfranchising millions of voters who voted under the provisions of that bill, clearly causing them harm. The state Supreme Court dismissed the case, and you should really read the opinions(per curiam, concurring). They're pretty scathing.
  • "Petitioners’ challenge violates the doctrine of laches given their complete failure to act with due diligence in commencing their facial constitutional challenge, which was ascertainable upon Act 77’s enactment."
  • "Thus, it is beyond cavil that Petitioners failed to act with due diligence in presenting the instant claim."
  • "Petitioners could have brought this action at any time between October 31, 2019, when Governor Wolf signed Act 77 into law, and April 28, 2020, when this Court still retained exclusive jurisdiction over constitutional challenges to it...Petitioners certainly knew all facts relevant to their present claims during that entire period."
  • "There is no basis in law by which the courts may grant Petitioners’ request to ignore the results of an election and recommit the choice to the General Assembly to substitute its preferred slate of electors for the one chosen by a majority of Pennsylvania’s voters."
  • "Having delayed this suit until two elections were conducted under Act 77’s new, no-excuse mail-in voting system, Petitioners—several of whom participated in primary elections under this system without complaint—play a dangerous game at the expense of every Pennsylvania voter. Petitioners waived their opportunity to challenge Act 77 before the election, choosing instead to “lay by and gamble upon receiving a favorable decision of the electorate.” Toney v. White, 488 F.2d 310, 314 (5th Cir. 1973) (en banc). Unsatisfied with the results of that wager, they would now flip over the table, scattering to the shadows the votes of millions of Pennsylvanians. It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters. Courts should not decide elections when the will of the voters is clear."
So here's why I think this case is worth spotlighting. I've seen a lot of people say "Why shouldn't they be looking into fraud? Don't you want our elections to be safe? If these lawsuits and investigations lead to cleaning up our electoral system, why is that a bad thing?" It sounds like a reasonable view, but it's also completely divorced from the actual lawsuits that are being filed. That bill in question here, Act 77? 8 of the 9 cosponsors for it were Republicans. It passed the Republican-led House 138-61 and the Republican-led Senate 35-14. It's a Republican bill through and through. It was passed over a year ago. It's not even remotely in the realm of the fraudulent activity that is being alleged elsewhere. This lawsuit was not about fraud, it wasn't about cleaning up the election process, it was about stealing the election for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. It is beyond the pale. That's what these lawsuits are about, and we should be very clear on that.

        B) Trump v. Boockvar

This is another case from Pennsylvania (Kathy Boockvar is the Secretary of State there). You can read the complaint here and Boockvar's brief for the motion to dismiss here. Basically, the Trump team spends a bunch of time whining about irregularities, but their legal arguments only rest on two things. First, that observers couldn't meaningfully observe the process. Second, that the Secretary of State's decision to allow voters to cure ballots created an Equal Protection violation. 

To the first point, Boockvar's brief points out how the Trump team had already sued over this in other courts and either lost or reached an agreement and didn't appeal (that was actually the case we looked at previously with Judge Diamond). Basically, the Trump team argued not that there weren't any observers there, but that they weren't allowed to be as close as they wanted (due to Covid precautions). The state pointed out (and the courts agreed), that there's nothing in Pennsylvania law stipulates that they be able to stand over a ballot worker's shoulder and read every ballot.

To the second point, here's what happened in Pennsylvania. on Oct 21st, the Pennsylvania Department of State issued guidance that a provisional ballot should be provided to a voter if their mail-in ballot was rejected in the canvassing process (this is called "curing" the ballot). On Nov 2nd, they sent out guidance (Exhibit A on page 22 here) to all county election officials reminding them of this, and that they should communicate this with voters through party/candidate representatives and through updating their online system where voters can check the status of their mail in ballot. This guidance was issued to every county in the state. What then happened is that some counties followed the guidance and allowed voters to cure their ballots, and some did not. A number of predominantly Democratic counties (like Philadelphia) did cure ballots, but so did some predominantly Republican counties (like York). Notably, Allegheny county, which includes Pittsburgh and is a Democratic stronghold, did not attempt to cure ballots. This is not an issue where “Democrats were allowed to do it and Republicans weren’t”. It’s an issue where guidance was given, and some counties applied it and others didn’t. The Trump team is arguing that this violates the Equal Protections Clause, because not every ballot was treated equally. They note that in a State Supreme Court case in October, the Court ruled "unlike in-person voters, mail-in or absentee voters are not provided any opportunity to cure perceived defects (to their ballot) in a timely manner." Boockvar's brief correctly points out that they have taken this out of context, and that the full context shows " the Court did not determine—nor was it asked to determine—whether counties were permitted to provide such notification even if the Election Code and state constitution did not affirmatively require it." Basically, the state election code doesn't say that you must alert voters if their ballot is rejected, but it gives no guidance saying you can't alert voters.

You can actually listen to the oral arguments in this case if you want. Rudy himself argues this case, and he spends a lot of time in his opening statement making nebulous claims of fraud. Most notably though, later in the hearing the judge asks Rudy what standard of review he should apply to this case. Rudy answers "the normal one", which is...not a thing. The judge again asks "are you arguing that strict scrutiny should apply here?" Rudy answers "No, normal scrutiny should apply here. If we had alleged fraud, yes, but this is not a fraud case." While Trump and Rudy go on and on about fraud in their press conferences and speeches, the truth is that they are not alleging fraud in any of their court cases. There is one group of cases that actually alleges fraud (and we'll get to those in a second), but in case after case, the Trump team have tried to get the election overturned on minor procedural issues, not on actual fraud allegations, because they know they don't have the evidence to prove fraud.

Just like all the other cases they're filing, this one failed. Judge Brann, a Federalist Society member who served on the PA GOP State Committee and on his county Republican committee for 18 years, dismissed the case. Here's his opinion. Again, he does not mince words about either the bad faith argument or the shoddy legal work.
  • "Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise almost seven million voters. This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated. One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens. That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more."
  • "Plaintiffs’ only remaining claim alleges a violation of equal protection. This claim, like  Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent...That Plaintiffs are trying to mix-and-match claims to bypass contrary precedent is not lost on the Court. The Court will thus analyze Plaintiffs’ claims as if they had been raised properly and asserted as one whole for purposes of standing and the merits." (i.e. "you screwed up and didn't actually give us a proper legal theory for this case, but I'm going to analyze it as if you did")
  • "The standing inquiry as to the Trump Campaign is particularly nebulous because neither in the FAC nor in its briefing does the Trump Campaign clearly assert what its alleged injury is. Instead, the Court was required to embark on an extensive project of examining almost every case cited to by Plaintiffs to piece together the theory of standing as to this Plaintiff – the Trump Campaign." (i.e. "you didn't tell us why the Trump Campaign has standing to bring this case, and you made us try to piece it together for you")
  • "Even if Plaintiffs had standing, they fail to state an equal-protection claim."
  • "Defendant Counties, by implementing a notice-and-cure procedure, have in fact lifted a burden on the right to vote, even if only for those who live in those counties. Expanding the right to vote for some residents of a state does not burden the rights of others."
  • "Granting Plaintiffs’ requested relief would necessarily require invalidating the ballots of every person who voted in Pennsylvania. Because this Court has no authority to take away the right to vote of even a single person, let alone millions of citizens, it cannot grant Plaintiffs’ requested relief."
Essentially, the judge ruled that 1) they didn't have standing to bring the case, 2) their legal argument didn't support their claim, 3) the relief they sought was disconnected from their injury claim, and 4) the court couldn't grant the requested relief even if all those other things weren't true. Trump's team doesn't keep losing these cases because of "liberal activist judges", like they keep whining about. They lose these cases because they're frivolous lawsuits solely designed to overturn the will of the American people and keep Donald Trump in office. 

        C) Sidney Powell's "Kraken" lawsuits

You may recognize Sidney Powell from the RNC news conference on Nov 19th where she appeared with Rudy and Jenna Ellis as part of the Trump legal team, or from the President's tweet on Nov 14th where he announced her as part of his legal team


The Trump team then distanced themselves from Powell mere days later, saying that she was not part of the team and practicing law on her own. We'll see in a minute why they distanced themselves from her, but she's the only person who is actually alleging fraud in court. All of the allegations about Dominion voting machines come from Powell (and Georgia lawyer Lin Wood), and she's the only one filing court cases about them. Despite the fact that the Trump team has distanced themselves from Powell, the underlying theory under all of their fraud claims is the same as hers, they just don't say it out loud or present it in court, and we'll see why. In the lead up to filing the lawsuits, Powell teased that she was going to "release the Kraken", hence the name of this section. 

So, what is the theory that Powell is presenting? Well, you can hear much of it in that press conference, and I'm going to present it here straight-faced without commentary. Dominion Voting Systems is connected with a company named Sequoia. Sequoia is connected with a company named Smartmatic. Smartmatic made voting machines for Hugo Chavez to rig elections in Venezuela. The Democratic party, backed by money from George Soros and from communist countries like Venezuela and China, used these machines across the country to steal the election for Joe Biden. The machines had an algorithm which switched fractions of votes from Trump to Biden. However, because the support for Donald Trump was SO overwhelming (in this theory, Trump did not lose the election by a slim margin, he actually won by millions and millions of votes), it "broke the algorithm". The Democrats then needed to scramble, stopping the count on election night and bringing in millions of fake mail-in ballots to make up for the difference. It's not just Democrats though. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (who has been one of Donald Trump's most ardent supporters for the past 4 years) and the Republican Secretary of State were paid off by communists to purchase Dominion machines at the last minute. Not only that, but the DOJ and CIA actually already know about the scheme and have turned a blind eye to it. There were also foreign actors using the internet to dial in and hack some of the machines.

That is the actual theory of the case, as presented by Sydney Powell and Lin Wood. They've made filings in all the different swing states (here's a tweet that links to all of them). It's in these cases that we get to see the "hundreds of affidavits" that the Trump team is always bragging about. So, what do these filings look like? Here's their complaint in Michigan. Lawyer Mike Dunford was crazy enough to live-tweet his way through it on Thanksgiving, explaining things along the way for us non-lawyer folks. I strongly recommend the thread, it's quite something. Some highlights from these filings:
  • Citing a statute that doesn't exist.
  • Her star witness on the Dominion stuff is [REDACTED], but at least we know they're "an adult of sound mine." They didn't file this under seal to protect the witness's identity, they just redacted it. That is not how this works.
  • One exhibit is a paper with no indication of source or if it is peer-reviewed, and it is printed in landscape, cutting off significant portions of the paper.
  • One of the exhibits is just some tweets.
  • Here's the affidavit from Russ Ramsland, who you may remember from earlier when he mistook Minnesota for Michigan.
  • Another redacted affidavit from the impressive-sounding 305th Military Intelligence, which is...an initial entry training unit.
  • In the 75 page document, there is no table of contents.
  • The whole document is full of this nonsense:
  • Powell refers to the same person as both an election challenger and an election watcher, apparently unaware that there is a legal difference between the two. 
  • Here's an affidavit from someone who saw someone drop off some trash bags at the post office and thought it looked suspicious. Seriously, that's it.
  • Here's an affidavit from Ronald Watkins, whose whole affidavit is "I read the manual for the Dominion voting machine, and it says you can do shady stuff with it." Watkins is the son of Jim Watkins who owns 8kun. 8kun is the internet message board that is the primary home for the QAnon conspiracy theory.
That's just the Michigan complaint, and that's just a handful of the nonsense in it. It's one of the least professional documents you'll ever read. Here are a few highlights from the rest of the filings:
These filings are absolute disasters. They are full of lies, vague allegations, bad math, and witnesses who simply are not credible. Here's an affidavit from an expert witness for the defense in Georgia. He actually provides real credentials, and lays waste to the various wacko mathematical arguments in these filings. Sidney Powell clearly didn't take these filings seriously, you shouldn't either.

Conclusion

There is no real evidence of fraud here. None. What we do see is lies, misunderstandings, fabrications and baseless allegations. Look, if you're suspicious of the election, I get it. This was, undoubtedly, a weird election. The large amount of mail-in voting and the difficulty of voting during a pandemic made election night and the days that followed look different than any other election in our history. If you're a Trump supporter, your candidate lost, and you don't see how that could be the case. He's claiming fraud, other people that you've trusted in the past are claiming fraud. You're trying to make sense of what happened, and a whole lot of people are trying to tell you that something fishy happened. The facts just don't support it though. There is no case here.

It's easy to say, "well, what harm does it cause to look into it and see what happened?" but the reality is that real harm is happening. Peoples' character is being defamed. People like Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger in Georgia. We should care about that. It's a violation of the 9th commandment not to bear false witness. People are being threatened. Trump has poured millions of dollars into frivolous lawsuits, much of that coming from small donors who are being aggressively marketed to. Lin Wood and Sidney Powell are telling people that the country is headed for a civil war and the President should declare martial law. These things matter. There is a cost to this nonsense.

For four years, the President of the United States has spewed lies on a near daily basis. Now that he's lost, the President just lies all the more, refusing to acknowledge reality and blaming his failures on fantasies conjured from delusional fever dreams. Enough is enough. It's time to call this what it is. President Trump lost an election, and he and his lawyers are lying to the country in an attempt to either steal the presidency, or at least sooth his massive ego. That's all that's going on here.









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Objectionable Objectors

 For, hopefully, one last time, let's talk about the election. For months, President Trump and his allies have been lying to his supporters that the election was stolen. That culminated in a tragic scene yesterday, when a mob of his supporters, incited by the president, overran the Capital building in an act of sedition. There was, to put it lightly, a lot  that went on yesterday, and we'll be unpacking it for weeks, but in this post I want to focus on the Republican members of Congress who objected to the counting of electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. All told, 145 Republicans in Congress (138 house representatives, 7 senators) voted to object to the counting of the votes. That's about 68% of Republicans in the House. Initially we'd heard that as many as 14 senators would object, but several of them backed out of the charade after the building was overrun by insurrectionists. Even after the appalling events of the afternoon, the president and his lawyer wer...
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