And over at RedState - more voter fraud disinformation

As someone who cares deeply about my country, and democracy as an idea, I certainly feel that we were on the precipice of allowing a minority party, losers of 7/8 popular votes for president, to create an autocratic state.  This new "Republican" party, which does not even have a platform, is following the authoritarian playbook laid out by other authoritarian regimes of the last century.  In addition to denying basic facts, and promoting a non-thing "alternate facts", one of the biggest propaganda tools in the authoritarian playbook is to accuse your opponent of exactly the misdeed you intend to do.  Republicans have been trying to “steal” elections for years through systematic efforts to suppress the African-American vote in particular, and have frankly, been successful in doing so.  This essay will look at one of the right wing propaganda sites, posing as a news site: redstate.

There was no fraud in the election of 2020.  Repeat, no fraud.  Yet, this is all you will find at red media like RedState.  An article from today entitled “President Trump Must Never Concede This Election to Joe Biden”, by streiff (?) is full of simple disinformation.  In a rambling opening couple of paragraphs that espouse debunked conspiracy theories, there is ONE piece of evidence given for fraud.  “more and more ballots appeared, often in tranches of tens of thousands that were 100% for Biden.”  The implication is that this happened regularly.  It didn’t.  This happened once and it refers to one instance in Pennsylvania that was quickly explained.

 

 “This one batch of votes in Philadelphia has been picked up by some people, including a commentator on Fox News, as possible evidence of fraud. It's not. According to Edison Research, which aggregates vote data for ABC News and other networks (and is the source of the data in question), sometimes election officials and vote aggregators unintentionally enter vote updates one candidate at a time, rather than entering all candidates together. Other candidates' votes are then included in a subsequent batch.

That appears to be what happened here, and in the next update from Philadelphia, Trump got about double the share of votes that he was getting in the other updates from there during that stretch of time.” This was paraphrased from fivethrirtyeight blog.

 

I remember seeing this last Wednesday, questioning it myself and then doing my research until I found a suitable answer.

 

This is the ONLY mention of fraud, yet the rambling continues:

 

 “three separate soft-coup attempts on the part of the Deep State,”

 “voting system that can’t be manipulated by Democrat machines.”

“disenfranchised Trump supporters”

 

The propaganda here is clear to see.  First, the “evidence” but stated as if it were regular and symptomatic when in fact it was not fraud, and not regular.  Then the red meat for the Trumpists, essentially a regurgitation of all the other lies that they have been led to believe the last five years.  The effect to is defend the claim of fraud without actually, you know, producing any evidence.  This is exactly what the Trump lawyers are doing as well.

 

If you present real facts, like the New York Times above, or this from the Washington Post, then the Trumpists will fall back on their guy’s favorite saying about anything with which he disagrees, it’s “fake news”. 

 

In short, the playbook says to suppress the vote, do everything in your power to cheat and steal elections, but to make sure that you accuse the other side of doing the same thing. Then, when confronted by actual facts, to deny they exist. 

 

Side Note: Something I came upon while researching this piece

 

In the comments, you see a discussion of all the other allegations.  One particularly caught my eye: Trump and Perdue getting almost identical vote numbers in Georgia, but Biden outpacing Ossoff by 100,000.  The claim here is that no significant number of ballots would have been cast for Biden and not Ossoff.  At least this one was trying to show something using actual facts.  Doing this research, I found that you had to click +more candidates to see all the votes cast for president.  The libertarian appears to have gotten 62,000 more votes for the senate race than the libertarian in the presidential race.  Thus 38,000 ballots were cast for Biden, with no senate vote.  This is common.  Over 1.7 million ballots were cast without voting for Clinton or Trump in 2016. 

 

The hard thing for the Trumpists to understand is how much the majority of Americans despise Trump, how many new voters there were and how motivated they were to do one thing; dump Trump.