By Dan McLaughlin
Thursday, December 17, 2020
How can you spot a stolen election? Maybe just as
important, how can you spot an election that isn’t stolen? You can never be entirely certain when the margins
are fairly close, which is why stolen-election theories hold a natural
attraction for conspiracy-minded partisans. But in terms of evidence, there are
three signs to look for that might show that an election’s outcome was the
result of fraud by voters or election officials: (1) direct evidence of
illegally counted or discounted votes, (2) evidence of an unlawful process, and
(3) anomalous results that make sense only if the election was fraudulent.
In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his
supporters have claimed to find all three. But the evidence presented of
actual fraud has been persistently underwhelming and often just wrong. Trump’s
legal team has, in multiple cases, withdrawn claims that it could prove fraud
when it came time to lay its proof on the table. Everywhere it has tried to
prove fraud with evidence in court, it has failed. Even the best arguments for
direct proof of fraudulent votes end up a long distance from the tens of
thousands of votes across multiple states that would be needed to overturn the
outcome. Multiple conservative judges, several of them Trump appointees to
the federal bench, have reached this conclusion.
Evidence of procedural irregularities has likewise come
up short. Unquestionably, some rules were bent or mutilated in ways that
favor Democrats, ranging from the Pennsylvania supreme court’s throwing out the
state’s mail-in ballot deadline to a lenient approach taken in various states
to curing defective mailed ballots (including fixing mistakes such as a missing
signature). But the deadline extensions did not affect enough votes to change
the outcome in any state; neither did any other legal issues or skullduggery in
the obstruction of observers. Baroque theories of computerized vote-counting
fraud have proven even more fantastical. It turns out to be untrue that
Dominion Voting Systems used the Smartmatic software blamed for Hugo Chávez’s
manipulation of Venezuelan elections; it also turns out to be untrue that
Dominion has any ties to Democrats aside from having donated some voting
machines to the Clinton Foundation for use in the third world. Many other
things alleged have proven untrue, and the Trump legal team has not inspired
confidence with its many rudimentary errors, such as challenging the results of
precincts in Michigan that turned out to be in Minnesota.
Given the absence of evidence of election fraud of a size
sufficient to alter the result, Trump supporters who believe the election was
stolen have fallen back on the most amorphous category: anomalous results. This
election, we are told, doesn’t make sense.
The problem is, it does.
The first argument is that it does not make sense that
Joe Biden, a 78-year-old political fossil who has been running for president
and failing for 33 years, and who spent the bulk of the campaign season hiding
in his basement and tripping over his sentences, could have inspired 81 million
Americans to vote for him against an incumbent president who held big rallies
and exudes vigor and brio. Trump supporters may find this dispiriting, but it
does not require a great flight of imagination to see how it could happen.
Biden was on two national tickets that commanded a majority of the national
popular vote, something Trump never did. Biden swept away a field of
challengers more inspiring to Democratic partisans and activists, almost
entirely on the basis of voters who wanted to ensure a candidate who would
help them beat Trump. He was not loved, but people turned out for him anyway.
Sure, it is easy to look at Biden and ask, “How could we
possibly lose to this guy?” But Democrats are at least equally baffled that 63
million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and, after four years of
watching him in office, that 74 million did in 2020. The candidates on offer in
both 2016 and 2020 were deeply distressing to a lot of Americans, many of whom
no longer understand their neighbors and most of whom decided to choose what
they saw as a lesser evil. Trump, in particular, spent four years inflaming his
critics’ loathing of him. He made the infuriating of liberals (“owning the
libs,” in Internet-speak) central to his brand. Should we be surprised that
liberals turned out in droves, if not to support Biden, then simply to stop
being infuriated by Trump?
Yes, Biden held few in-person events, and drew far fewer
in-person votes. But Biden’s supporters were disproportionately people who
preferred to err on the side of caution. For months, Democrats preached that
in-person voting was unsafe; for months, Republicans preached that mail-in
voting was untrustworthy. It should surprise nobody that the two parties’
voters behaved in starkly different fashion.
As for the late-night “vote dumps” in Wisconsin,
Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all of them resulted from mail-in ballots being
counted late. Republicans have long, dark, ancestral memories of Democratic
precincts voting late, with the specter of some Mayor Daley figure asking, “How
many does Kennedy need?” This goes back to 1916, when Charles Evans Hughes went
to bed thinking he had won California, and 1948, when Tom Dewey was
prematurely declared the winner by a Chicago newspaper. But the timeline of
vote counts was so predictable in 2020 that it had a name before Election Day:
the “red mirage.” Because Democrats were more likely to vote by mail, and
because the most heavily Democratic cities already tend to be the last counters
owing to urban inefficiency, it was widely predicted that in those cities the
counting of mail-in ballots would delay the most Democratic portion of the vote
tally until the end. This did not happen everywhere: States such as Florida and
Texas allowed mail-in ballots to be tabulated before Election Day. But
Republican legislatures in the Midwest blocked early counting, and the result
was in fact a high concentration of Democratic ballots at the end. Everybody
who was paying attention saw this coming a mile away.
The Texas v.
Pennsylvania lawsuit that was dismissed out of hand by a unanimous Supreme
Court included an “expert” analysis claiming that there was a “one in a
quadrillion” chance that these late ballots would break so heavily Democratic.
As Robert VerBruggen observed on National
Review Online, theories such as that one “simply assume that different
batches of ballots should have similar breakdowns by candidate or party.” Thus
“if Biden got more support than Clinton had, or if late-counted ballots were
more heavily Biden-leaning than early ballots, that’s treated as evidence of
fraud.” Such theories ignore three obvious realities. One, the 2016 election
was a different setting from 2020, in that the Democrats had been in power for
eight years. Two, Biden was a less disliked candidate than Hillary Clinton.
Three, the patterns of mail-in voting were affected by the pandemic. The
underlying logical flaw is the assumption that voters and their opinions do not
change from one election to the next. The whole history of American democracy
argues otherwise.
For that matter, in terms of probabilities, the margins
of both the 2016 and 2020 elections — Trump winning three states by less than a
point, Trump losing three states by less than a point — amount to little more
than a coin toss. A coin landing heads-up three times in a row followed by
tails-up three times in a row is mildly improbable; it does not mean the coin
is loaded.
Is it shocking that Biden added almost 19 million votes
to the Democrats’ column in four years? Again, historically, no. Turnout
overall was up by 15.6 percent, which is lower than the 16 percent increase
from 2000 to 2004, let alone the 26.5 percent increase from 1924 to 1928 or the
26.6 percent increase from 1948 to 1952. Biden increased his party’s vote
totals in one cycle by less than Bush did in both 2000 and 2004, Ronald Reagan
in 1984, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Richard Nixon in 1972, Lyndon Johnson in 1964,
Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, John F. Kennedy in 1960, Wendell Willkie in 1940,
Franklin Roosevelt in both 1932 and 1936, and Herbert Hoover and Al Smith in
1928.
Some have claimed that Biden did suspiciously well in
four key swing-state cities: Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. We
are told that Biden did worse than Hillary Clinton in every major metro area
except these four. This is almost the opposite of the truth. Look at the 50
largest cities in the country. If you count New York City’s five counties as
one, these cities are based in 48 urban counties (Long Beach, Calif., shares a
county with Los Angeles, and Mesa, Ariz., shares a county with Phoenix).
Clinton won 41 of the 48 counties; Biden won 45. In 44 of those 48 counties,
Biden’s margin of victory was greater than Clinton’s (or his margin of defeat
was smaller). Moreover, Philadelphia was one of the four where he did not win by more votes than Clinton had.
In fractional terms, 36 out of 48 swung in Biden’s direction. And in Wayne
County, Mich. (home of Detroit), Trump was the first Republican since 1988 to
crack 30 percent of the vote.
The numerical reality, when compared with that of 2016,
is that Trump did not lose the election in the big, blue, machine-run
Democratic cities. He lost it in the suburbs of Atlanta, Phoenix, Philadelphia,
and Detroit, and in and around Madison, Wis. But neatly manicured suburbs do
not make for a convincing narrative of fraud.
Another supposedly anomalous result is the contrast
between Trump and down-ticket Republicans. How, we are asked, could Republicans
gain at least ten seats in the House while losing the White House? But this has
happened before. In 1892, in a close general election coming off a midterm
wipeout, Republicans regained 38 House seats while the Republican incumbent
lost. In 1916, Republicans picked up 19 seats while failing to unseat the
Democratic incumbent. In 1960, Nixon lost to Kennedy while House Republicans
gained 22 seats. Moreover, nationally, the Democrats won the popular vote in
House races by a margin, 50.8 percent to 47.7 percent, that does not look very
different from that of the presidential race.
Some Senate Republicans ran far ahead of Trump, but this,
too, is historically normal. In Maine, Susan Collins got 70,000 more votes in
her race than Trump did in his; in 2008, she ran 150,000 votes ahead of
presidential candidate John McCain. Presidential candidates often diverge from
their party in the Senate. State by state, McCain ran, on average, four points
ahead of Republican Senate candidates; in 1980, on average, Jimmy Carter ran
almost ten points behind Democratic Senate candidates.
Ticket-splitting has been a feature of American politics
forever. Skeptics argue that Republican voters would not choose Republican
candidates for House and Senate without also supporting Trump. They point to
high ratings for Trump among self-identified Republicans in opinion polls. Even
if we trust these polls — which should be taken with a grain of salt, given how
poorly they predicted the election — this ignores independent voters, who
remain about a third of the electorate in most states. Just because Trump has
high poll ratings among self-identified Republican voters does not mean he is
universally approved among independents who might vote for some Republicans.
The very same polls say otherwise.
On the flip side, we are told that it is suspicious that
more people voted for Biden than for Democrats down the ballot, and that
“Biden-only ballots” are proof of fraud. But again, this is not anomalous.
Voters who turn out only for presidential races frequently leave the rest of
the ballot blank. In states with contested Senate races in 2016, there were 1.8
million more votes cast in the presidential race than in the Senate races. More
than three times that many voters in 2016 left the ballot blank for House
races. In Georgia in 2016, 248,220 voters — almost a quarter of a million
people — cast ballots in the presidential race but not the Senate race. That’s
5.9 percent of all ballots. Leaving the bottom of the ballot empty was
particularly predictable in Pennsylvania, which for the first time in 2020 did
not permit automatic straight-ticket voting (i.e., one mark to select the same
party’s candidates for every office), a practice many Pennsylvania Democrats
were accustomed to.
More broadly, the voters who support Trump are not, in
all cases, the same people as the voters who support other Republicans. You do
not need a ton of familiarity with American politics to notice that there are
still people out there who vote for Republicans at every level but are not fond
of Donald Trump, and people who like Trump but are not straight-ticket
Republican voters. When you drilled down to the county and precinct level in
2016, and again in 2020, you could see that in some places Trump did
significantly better than Senate or House Republicans and in others
significantly worse. Millions of people split their tickets in 2016. This is,
historically speaking, normal.
The same goes for changes in the states and counties that
are traditionally bellwethers. As voting coalitions shift, so do the people
and places that form the center of the electorate. Before 2020, only one
candidate (Nixon in 1960) had won both Ohio and Florida and lost the election.
New York and California were once crucial swing states. Mitt Romney won voters
over 30 and a raft of other swing groups — independents, white Catholics,
suburban women — but he lost because the center had shifted away from them.
This happens all the time in American politics, and with a candidate as
unorthodox as Trump, in a year of a once-in-a-century pandemic, it should not
surprise us that it happened again.
Voter fraud and election fraud happen; the American
election system is not foolproof. In elections decided by a few dozen or even
a few hundred votes, it can be a real concern. But in an election decided by
10,000 votes in Arizona, 12,000 in Georgia, and 20,000 in Wisconsin, let alone
81,000 in Pennsylvania and 154,000 in Michigan? In the age of computerized
records and data analysis, fraud on that scale across multiple jurisdictions
simultaneously is mind-bogglingly difficult to pull off without leaving
significant footprints.
The turning point for the difficulty of concealing voter
fraud on that scale was the 1982 Illinois governor’s race, which was almost
stolen by Democrats by means of 100,000 fraudulent votes in Chicago. That
scenario presented the ideal conditions for fraud: a single city with a
well-oiled one-party machine that had many decades of experience in such
shenanigans. It was still not truly that well hidden: A grand jury was shocked
at the “boldness and cavalier attitude” of Chicago Democrats. With the aid of
“a unique tool in the investigation of vote fraud, namely, the use of a
computer,” the FBI obtained sufficient evidence to convict 63 people of fraud.
Courts have thrown out a few close races for fraud since then, but nothing on a similar scale has been observed. And in the absence of evidence, nothing in the results of the 2020 election should compel us to believe that something comparable happened this year.
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