Since November I have been hearing that phrase tossed around rather casually, “not enough fraud to change the results” of the election. It gives off the appearance that someone has managed to pinpoint, or at least ball-park, two numbers and compared one to the other, something that I doubt has happened. Let’s look at it.
AZ: 1,672,143 votes for Biden, 1,661,686 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 10,457 votes, 0.31% of all Arizona Biden/Trump votes, 0.0129% of Biden’s national total.
NV: 703,486 votes for Biden, 669,890 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 33,596 votes, 2.45% of all Nevada Biden/Trump votes, 0.413% of Biden’s national total.
PA: 3,459,923 votes for Biden, 3,378,263 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 81,660 votes, 1.19% of all Pennsylvania Biden/Trump votes, 0.1005% of Biden’s national total.
GA: 2,473,633 votes for Biden, 2,461,854 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 11,779 votes, 0.24% of all Georgia Biden/Trump votes, 0.0145% of Biden’s national total.
WI: 1,630,673 votes for Biden, 1,610,065 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 20,608 votes, 0.64% of all Wisconsin Biden/Trump votes, 0.0254% of Biden’s national total.
MI: 2,804,040 votes for Biden, 2,649,852 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 154,188 votes, 2.83% of all Michigan Biden/Trump votes, 0.1897% of Biden’s national total.
Total votes that gave Joe Biden and Kamala Harris these six messed-up can’t-count-’em battleground states: 312,288, which is 0.3842% of Biden’s national total. Three eights of a percent. What would change the election? Not all six. Pennsylvania and one or two others.
Mary Trump says any discussion of this should begin with a demand of acceptance of the “fact” that Biden won overwhelmingly, and if this demand is not fulfilled immediately the entire discussion should come to a screeching halt. Which is not how we do things in America. But former Clinton administration official we’re supposed to think of as a journalist George Stephanopoulos took it on himself to do it that way anyway. It didn’t go well. It ended up with everyone on his side saying his guest, Rand Paul, “melted down” or some such thing, but if you watch the video you see it’s Georgie who couldn’t handle his end of the non-conversation conversation.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Sir, there are not — there are not two sides to this story. This has been looked in every single state.
PAUL: Sure there are. There are two sides to every story. George, you’re forgetting who you are. You’re forgetting who you are as a journalist if you think there’s only one side. You’re inserting yourself into the story to say I’m a liar because I want to look at election fraud and I want to look at secretaries of state who illegally changed the voter laws without the permission of their state legislatures. That is incontrovertible, it happened. And you can’t just sweep it under the rug and say, oh, nothing to see here, and everybody is a liar and you’re a fool if you bring this up. You’re inserting yourself into the story. A journalist would hear both sides and there are two sides of a story….
STEPHANOPOULOS: There can be more investigations. The investigations that have taken place have shown there’s not enough fraud to change the results of this election…
There’s that phrase again. People think they’re quantifying the fraud, and they must think very highly of their own attempts to quantify it if they really believe there’s 0.0129% or less.
Of course that is not what people are doing when they say this. They’re doing what they were taught to do in second grade to fourth grade: Pick up a vibe that seems to represent the majority viewpoint, and act like they made it up themselves.
What’s fraud? The worst kind would be capturing a vote for Donald Trump, inside the machine perhaps, and transforming it into a Biden/Harris vote. If we’re talking about that then you can cut the 312 thousand in half, and plug in the number 156 thousand. After that, there is manufacturing votes for Placeholder Joe, or “losing” Trump votes. Then there are the honest “oopsies” like what briefly happened in Michigan. I see people wanted to get Trump himself in trouble for using the word “fraud,” and that’s not fraud but Trump would definitely call it fraud…take that to the bank. Trump would call anything that changes the results from what they should be, to benefit his opposition, “fraud.” And that’s actually quite alright. But just try explaining that to fact checkers.
Then there’s all the spurious nonsense that can arise from the Vote By Mail baloney. People whose ballots are being filled out by someone else and they have no idea what’s happening. They haven’t lived at that address in many years and someone intercepted the ballot. Ballot harvesting. Vote swapping across state lines. Double-voting. The Secretaries-of-State arbitrarily changing rules, outside the perimeter of their authority, as Sen. Paul mentioned. All the votes that were counted or discounted because of decisions like those. The list goes on and on…
“Not enough fraud to change the results” rests on the faulty premise that we can inject all of those ingredients into the stew…and expect a final concoction that is 99.6158% pure, or purer. That is where this second-grade, show-hands, swivel-head-side-to-side see-what-the-other-kids-are-doing child-thinking gets you. The honestly expressed state of affairs is that the loudest among our fellow citizens learned to “think” this way somewhere around age seven, and never refined it beyond that.
As Sen. Paul pointed out in his interview, courts don’t like to get involved in elections so they sidestep the cases by citing technicalities and allowing things to stand without a decision from them. Biden-backers like to call that by deceptive terms like “hearing the evidence and deciding there’s nothing to it” or something like that. I heard Sidney Powell in another interview say that this (at the time) never happened. I don’t know that this strong of a statement can be accurately made now but it really doesn’t matter. We have a lot of instances, most notably at the Supreme Court, in which the court reviewed the case and opted not to take it…too hot to handle…and then our media sprinted away trumpeting falsehoods about looking at the evidence and deciding there’s nothing to it.
It is a lie. It is fraud.
And this should be comforting to people, although a lot of them won’t see it that way. It means that a lot of these troublesome Trump supporters who “refuse to accept” (more honest description: have trouble believing) the “results,” far from being fringe-kooky whack-a-birds you see muttering to ourselves in the city park…we’re merely imposing standards on the process we came up with ourselves, and forming our opinions when we see things fall short. Which is not a huge disaster, it is the expected outcome. We reformed election practices all across the fruited plain, in response to the China Virus, remember? It’s going to take a few election cycles to get some quality out of it.
I don’t think much of this Mary-Trump way of discussing things. She can do it that way if she likes…others who think the way she does, can follow suit…I can’t stop them.
But when truth has something to do with what you’re doing, and you could lose life or limb by being wrong, that isn’t how we do it. In America, we discuss things. And we don’t “accept” flimsy results that we can’t measure properly and that are at odds with what we can observe ourselves, then refuse to discuss them with whoever else might see something wrong. That’s what little kids do before they’ve engaged in any grown-up activities that are potentially dangerous, and might hurt other people.