Indeed. About a week after the 2020 election, Georgia SoS Raffensperger made an announcement about Republicans who voted by mail in the primary and didn’t vote at all in the general. It seems there were about 25,000 of them, which is more than double Biden’s margin of victory in that state.
I expect the numbers were similar in other swing states. In other words, Trump shot himself in the foot in that election.
The irony – it burns.
Shhhh! Don’t say anything about that - remember, facts are the enemy here. If Republicans want to sit-out elections to own the libs, I will feel majorly owned (just dangling the bait out there).
Here is an article on this:
The brief TV statement, at the heart of the article above, seems based on non-public linking, at the individual voter level, of database tables for different elections. Raffensperger did not repeat the claim in his USA Today op-ed a few days later, or anywhere else I can find.
The first follow-up question the TV reporter should have asked was how many Democrats voted in the primary and not in the general election.
But let’s say the missing Democratic number, that should be subtracted from the 24,000, was zero. It wasn’t, if only because some voters died between the primary and general election. But let’s just say zero, and say that the proportions were the same in every state. By my calculation, Trump flips Georgia and Arizona but still is behind in the electoral college.
Do I really believe in taking Raffensperger’s TV claim literally, with no opportunity to pin down exactly how the analysis was run? No.
Is saying that elections are rigged a high risk strategy? Yes. I expect it increases your campaign contributions a bit at the cost of some votes. I advise Biden to avoid it. But saying that the attack on election integrity lost Trump the White House is an extraordinary claim requiring more evidence.
A charitable reading of what she said might be that she didn’t like all the FUD and whatever surrounding the election, and that it reduced her confidence in the election.
Which is kind of the point of all that BS from the Right- make people question the veracity- a lot of people think “where there’s smoke, there must be fire” is true, but then don’t account for the possibility of haze, fog, dust, or in this case a theatrical smoke machine hidden just out of sight.
Exactly. They don’t have to prove the election was rigged, which is hard. They just have to make suggestions and create doubt, which is easy. Especially easy among people who are either not paying very much attention, or are getting their information from just one source.
A network so nefarious, so devious, that while they were busy cheating to put Biden in office they managed to lose a Democratic majority in the House and didn’t get anywhere close to a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
To me, that’s the obvious explanation of cheating not happening - if you’re gonna cheat, make sure you can actually govern.
The problem is that there are a number of these people who hold a similar view but conclude, “They are cheating so we should too, its the only way to keep things fair”.
From this article
Clearly, the balance of evidence shows that the overwhelming majority of voter fraud cases was found to involve Trump supporters.
Probably because they accepted the fallacy that voter fraud was trivially easy and everyone did it. Or they did it to “test the system” and found that the system works just fine. This wasn’t helped by Trump actually encouraging his supporters to vote twice.
It’s that same authoritarian business where their opponents are simultaneously diabolically devious and competent as well as hilariously and ridiculously incompetent, depending on the needs of the rhetoric.
Case in point- the Democrats have the purported ability to orchestrate and engineer this whole shady election rigging business across the entire country and get everyone on the same page, yet they’re supposedly comically incompetent and corrupt when it comes to actually governing and making policy.
And, ironically, the Republicans do have a fairly cohesive national election-rigging strategy, and they’re actually comically incompetent and corrupt when it comes to governing and making policy.
And hopefully election-rigging but that remains to be seen.
Except that the GOP has lost the demographics battle. They are sure that the less people vote, the better it is for them. The Kremlin back them up in this, which is why you see lost of propaganda “both parties are the same” “dont bother to vote”, etc.
Right. The GOP is just trying to get the indys and the undecideds to not vote, or vote 3rd party. It worked in 2016, didnt it?
This is totally the point of the whole Reactionary Wacko Traitor election denial. Their sympathizers aren’t necessarily certain the election was stolen. But they’re certain they’re not certain it wasn’t. It’s become an article of faith that elections are stealable and in fact are stolen often enough to matter.
And all this is straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook.
If you can destroy the faith that there is such a thing as actual truth or trustworthiness in anything, pretty quickly you have a bunch of cynical nihilist people who totally do not buy the official version of anything. Which makes it very very easy to sell them any other version of everything.
A pithy aphorism on point:
If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.