Election conspiracy theories suggest that Republicans know of what they speak

 

You had to know it would happen with a demented soon-to-be ex-president and his crazed followers. Despite the fact that even Fox News called the election for Joe Biden--and even today anchor Neil Cavuto felt compelled to cut away from Kayleigh McEnany's evidence-free claims of fraud--that hasn’t stopped most of its game show hosts and pundits from voluntarily checking into the funny farm. Maria Bartiromo--who hosted that bizarre rant by Donald Trump in which even two blatant falsehoods per sentence was not enough even to elicit a quizzical change of expression--brought aboard Michael Flynn attorney Sydney Powell the other day, and Fox News viewers were fed a whole day’s quota of the usual insanity within the space of a few minutes.

Powell alleged a “massive and coordinated effort to steal this election,” claiming that “her team” allegedly “discovered” that Democrats "have done it in every way imaginable, from having dead people vote in massive numbers, to absolutely fraudulently creating ballots that exist only voting for Biden. We've identified identified at least 450,000 ballots in the key states that miraculously only have a mark for Joe Biden and no other candidate."  How her team discovered all of these ballots was not explained, nor was documented evidence provided or an explanation of how this number was calculated. Perhaps there were  a few people who thought that the only important vote was for or against Trump and didn't care about the rest, but that would not make the vote “fraudulent.” More likely this was a completely arbitrary number, like how Eleanor Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate just picked the number "57" off the Heinz ketchup bottle for her senator husband to claim the number of "communists" in the State Department.

Powell went on to claim that malicious actors "used an algorithm to calculate the votes they would need to flip, and they used computers to flip those votes from...Trump to Biden, and from other candidates to their competitors also. It wasn't just president Trump, there were many people affected by this, We have got to fight tooth and nail in federal court to expose this abject fraud and the conspiracy behind it, and get a recount and audits in every place its' needed, which is frankly most of the country." Does any of this sound “familiar”? It should, because those were the things that Republicans were accused of doing in the 2004 election; in that election, Ohio’s 20 electoral votes would have swung the election to John Kerry. After allegations of irregularity in the state, John Conyers conducted a House Judiciary Committee  investigation (which Republicans refused to participate in); it reported that

We have found numerous serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousands of voters and votes in Ohio, raise grave doubts about whether it can be said that the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner conforming to Ohio law, let alone Federal election commission and constitutional standards. 

Votes that were “spoiled, uncounted and outright stolen...were Kerry votes [being moved] to the Bush column." The report claimed that “There were 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, the majority of which have yet to be inspected” and that "We learned of improper purging and other registration errors by election officials that probably disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide." Furthermore, “In Miami county, voter turnout was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55 percent, and after 100 percent of the precincts were reported, an additional 19,000 extra votes were recorded for President Bush." The report concluded that "In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio." 

It sure sounds to me like these far-right activists have some “experience” with this kind of thing; remember how in the 2012 election, Karl Rove--after Fox News called Ohio for Barack Obama--went on a completely bizarre, whiny rant claiming that it was all wrong and that Mitt Romney “really” won the state, and Megyn Kelly took that long stroll down to the election “war room,” and the election watchers had to explain to her why they thought Obama had won Ohio. Why was Rove so convinced that Obama would “lose” Ohio? Because he had personal knowledge about what "worked" in 2004 was going to "work" in 2012? Perhaps at the present time we can surmise that Trump fanatics just dug-up some old news stories and pasted “Democrat” over “Republican.”

While being mindful of the fact that it has been Republicans who have tried to rig elections with various laws and rules meant to suppress the vote of Democratic-leaning constituencies, let's ask what vote fraud “evidence” has the far-right and the lunatic fringe--meaning folks like Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz--presented for our edification? Conspiracy theorists jumped all over a story about how 342 votes had mistakenly not been uploaded to a computer in Georgia’s Fulton County, where Biden was leading Trump by a whopping 72 to 26 margin; this was in fact more evidence that the vote counting was working, in that the polling station where this happened was double-checking that the votes received were aligning with those in their computer system. It is symptomatic of the desperation of Trumpworld that the only “evidence” of “fraud” that they can dig up is for votes that most likely added to Biden’s lead in Georgia.

Meanwhile, Miranda Devine, a far-right columnist for the New York Post, claimed that the “closeness” of the vote in some states was reason enough to claim “fraud.” It is not “outlandish or unprecedented,” she says, “to accept the possibility that at least some of those margins may be erroneous, whether through human error or, indeed, fraud.” Of course the problem with this line of “reasoning” is that there are close state votes in every election, and Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin--which had all gone “blue” in the previous six presidential elections--were all won by Trump in 2016 by less than one percent of the vote.

So why wasn’t it “fraud” in 2016? Or 2004? Or 2000 for that matter? Because what we are seeing now is Republicans trying to complete the wreckage of our democratic principles, with Trump the unashamed standard bearer, knowing that ahead for him  is the reckoning of the whirlwind that he has sown. William Barr with his threats of probes of phony election fraud  might not believe this, but there is no denying that over 76 million voters and counting really do hate Trump that much.