The tighty righties believe to their souls that they are the majority. That the only reason they ever lose elections is because of massive voter fraud. I have two questions that arise mostly from morbid curiosity.
Numero uno, nobody here is that fucking stupid, right? Not even our own private contingent of Trump chumps, who apparently will believe almost anything…they are not that Ricky Retardo. They don’t really believe that anyone could do that, right?
Which leads to question numero two-o…if you do believe that, how? How could it be done? Are the Dems bussing them from polling place to polling place? In every state, they suck up all the available charter busses to move their ringers from poll to poll? Anyone ever seen one, a rented Trailways pulls up to a polling place and disgorges a busload? Where pre-arranged voter registration exists? Or what, exactly.
Or some other scheme? So far as I know, I have not heard any explanation as to how this could be done, only that it was done.
This is the beauty of the sceme- it’s right under everyone’s noses. The voting is illegal for another reason, age. That’s right, Dems have children who vote stashed in pizza joints around the country and busses are not required. Children dressed like adults in suits that don’t fit with their sleeves flopping about.
Good to remember that registered Republicans make up 24% of the electorate right now. You can probably get 11% of American adults to believe their own heads are on backwards.
I am not authorized to speak for the tighty righties nor for the Trump chumps, but I charitably spring to their defense.
First note that exaggeration is a fundamental tenet of conservative thought. If 3 to 5 voters committed fraud it is fine to say “3 to 5 million voters committed fraud.” Just as “literally” no longer mean “literally”, so “million” is just an idle adjective to make language more colorful.
So literally only 3 instances of voter fraud need be uncovered to make the allegation literally true, or at least, in modern diction, trueish. I’ll link to one instance cited by several sources including the Washington Post.
In a variation of the “Twinkie defense” made famous by murderer Dan White, Steve Curtis blamed his crime on his diabetes. This January he was sentenced to four years probation and 300 hours of community service.
septimus: You forgot to mention that if those 3 or 4 individual voters were proven to be voting Republican, then the conservative narrative is that those 3 to 4 million illegal voters were voting Democrat.
Yes, the use of ‘literally’ as an intensifier is literally a recent change to the language, assuming you consider the 1700’s ‘recent’. Language Log: Literally: a history
(BTW: Do not, PLEASE NOT turn this into an argument on the word “literally”. Duly noted and move on.)
The megafraud claim is of course bulldada. Or, in the most generous of approaches, what level of voter eligibility fraud there is, is “baked in” statistically and has been for many elections already (are we now claiming half a million illegal voters chose Gore in 2000?).
But the claim is underlain by a philosophy that predates it becoming a “Republican” issue in this current generation. It was also an underlying position of the Dixiecrats: that there is a dire threat from people voting who should not be voting. Literacy tests, “grandfather rules”, poll taxes, etc., these were all instruments in the past to prevent becoming outpolled. Now those have been overruled and the move is in the direction that if “wrong” voting cannot be prevented, we are going to delegitimize the process itself if it does not produce our desired result.
These MAGA Republicans, like Rudy, are total idiots who prove that education really does leave people behind. You think trump lies, look at the stuff Rudy is pulling out of his ass.
From the OP’s link: “Just under one-quarter of Democrats said they believed the allegations that millions of votes were cast illegally, while 51 percent said they didn’t and 26 percent said they were unsure.”
Every couple of months some polling group with nothing better to do decides to get some clicks by baiting the bear. These polls tell us nothing about the actual beliefs of Republicans, but only the extent to which knee jerk partisan reactions can be triggered. TheDemocrats aren’t immune to this. I’m pretty sure that if, back in 2008, a poll asking “Do you believe that Sarah Palin in actually Trig’s mother” , Democrats would have come off looking pretty bad. The main reason that there are more of these polls targeting Republcans than Democrats is that Republican media outlets and law makers are more likely to spout nonsense, so its a lot easier to find Republican bear bait than Democratic bear bait.
As for the 25% of Democrats who voted in favor of millions of illegal votes, I suspect that they fall into three categories. 1) People misunderstood the question and just answered at random. 2) Democrats who believe that millions of votes were illegally cast for Trump by Russian hackers or some such. 3) Staunch conservatives who (like some on this board :rolleyes:) claim to be Democrats despite the fact that they haven’t voted for a Democratic candidate since 1968, but feel that saying their a Democrat will allow them to claim that their whacko right wing ideas aren’t partisan.
They have to believe it. Because to believe otherwise would, to that exact degree, acknowledge an illegitimacy attached to the trump presidency. Not his holding the office, I understand how the Electoral College system works and need no further reminders on its functioning from the likes of Hurricane Ditka, but on his ability to claim anything remotely resembling a mandate for the kind of sweeping change he and his are putting forth. It’s a variant on Coulter’s “Well, real Americans voted for trump.” statement. The day the Ann Coulter’s of the world get to define who is or isn’t a “real American” is the day that many will willingly relinquish the title.
I’m interested in whatever underlying rationale there may be. Has anyone heard any? I recognize that my fantasy about thousands of buses rolling illegal persons from place to place is redonkulous. But has any other been offered? Does this question even arise, in their minds?
And the conversely perverse: show them evidence, indictments, confessions, documents…and they wave it all away, its a fake, the fugatz. Reason is all we have, and it appears to be nerfed, they don’t even blink. Further, this myth gives them license, they don’t feel a twinge when they stack the gerrymander deck, when they cheat, because…its just payback, isn’t it? What right have we to bitch about cheating when we are doing it on a massive…and utterly inexplicable…scale? First thing they think is how to do you some dirt, and the second is why you deserve it.
I know Trump hasn’t backed up his bullshit, never does. But has anyone stepped up to offer something, some semblance of an explanation as to how this was even possible? Knowing won’t help much of anything, but that itch…