Conspiracy Theories and the Election
November 12, 2024
I am really worried about the intellectual state of American society. Four years ago so many people threw absolute rationality out the window to believe in a self-serving lie that Trump won the 2020 election. It is a lie that cost some people their careers, defamed and threatened innocent people, and help send more and more people down the rabbit holes of pseudohistory and pseudoscience. There was never one iota of credible evidence to support the Big Lie or even any of the little lies that grew up around it.
I had just started writing this blog and until Election Day it was all about understanding the polling and where you could make your biggest impact with your checkbook or as a traveling volunteer. For the next few months I was writing frequently about how elections, the law, and the Constitution work in response to absolutely outrageous and highly ignorant claims by Trump and his supporters.
I have heard some griping among Harris supporters that the election must have been fixed. Maybe by Musk or other big techies. One difference in this griping from the allegations of four years ago is that people are not lying (yet); they are just stunned by the results and have not accepted them yet. There may yet be evidence that some fishy things occurred in some places. However, that does happen all the time. It’s just never enough to impact the result.
I am worried that too many people are buying into the notion that losing means your opponent must be cheating. We cannot turn into folks who think Trump can only win by cheating just like he thinks he can only lose by cheating. If he was in on fixing the election he would have been talking up how fair an election he thought this would be instead of screaming like a banshee that it’s being stolen from him again. (I really think he thought he was going to lose.) But we risk undermining the electoral process altogether with this line of thinking, finishing the job the fascists began and making democracy untenable in this country for years or decades to come. Or even permanently.
Do not let yourself be seduced by conspiracy theories. It leads to a dark place. I have said this before and I will say it again: when it comes to conspiracy theories, all roads lead to Auschwitz. I am not going to clean that up with euphemisms because the end-game here is so horrifying it deserves to be recognized. Conspiracy theories are not based on evidence; in fact, the lack of evidence is often used to support the claims. There is always some big bad secretly controlling things. And the longer you dwell on that kind of thinking, the sooner you find yourself waking up one day surrounded by Nazis agreeing with you. Look at the wellness community, for example. How many of these hippy-dippy health-conscious people who started out being concerned about toxins in the environment have ended up screaming about dark conspiracies pushing vaccines on us alongside Nazis? Nazis so cleverly conflate Big Pharma (or Hollywood or Banking [Globalists], whatever fits the narrative) with Jews that these folks don’t realize at first what they are signing up for. It has happened to a lot of originally good intentioned folks.
Yes, there are criminal conspiracies. But they are distinguished from conspiracy theories in one key aspect: there is credible evidence to support the allegations. For instance, the special prosecutor has laid out an extremely well-documented case against Trump for conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election. The evidentiary appendices includes hundreds of pages of supporting documents and testimony. And there is another distinction that bears mentioning: there is no worldwide conspiracy to control every aspect of your life for sinister means. Conspiracy theories are predicated on this kind of conspiracy. One that is vast, but yet so secretive only a select few conspiracy theorist can riddle it out. And that conspiracy is run by or on behalf of some sinister force that is definitely unlike “us.”
Don’t be seduced by the easy answer of “they stole the election.” You are dipping your toe into the grievance culture that fascists, and Trump in particular, exploit. Focus on evidence. It may come out that there was electoral fraud in this election, but I highly doubt that it will be anything that rises to the level that would change outcomes. Here’s why:1
A presidential election is actually 51 state (including DC) elections that are managed at the state level and often implemented at the local level.
As such, while there might be room for some fraud at the local level, too much over too many local jurisdictions have to happen to make a difference - and if that happens, it becomes noticeable.
Even after the slew of voter suppression laws in many states over the past several years, our elections remain very secure.
Voting machines are not connected to the internet; there is no way for someone off-site to change votes (if I am wrong, please present me evidence).
Votes totals are matched with votes cast at the polling place, and then at the city or county level, and then finally at the state level to ensure there are no discrepancies (or explain them; sometimes there might be a slight mismatch due to human or machine error); this is the certification process.
States audit vote totals by taking samples of ballots and hand-counting them against machine tabulations.
Here’s an added one that especially applies this year and in 2020 since the incumbent party lost; the incumbent administration has in its control the intelligence apparatus of the country, which can spot attacks on the electoral system.
And an added bonus for this year as well: All seven battleground states have Democratic governors except for Nevada and Georgia (which has the same leadership as 2020, and you may remember they famously would not “find” 12,000 votes for Trump to change the results there.
Even with the means and will to somehow change enough votes to change the outcome, it will only work if the election is close enough that a few changed votes in one or more states can flip the result in the Electoral College. Yes, we appear to have an election like that. So, how difficult would it be to fix the election in this environment? Let’s look at the closest battleground state: Michigan.
As I write this, Trump has a lead over Harris of less than one-half of a percentage point with over 95% of the votes counted in Michigan. Sounds really close, right? It is possible that Harris could end up winning the state, but it’s unlikely. This 1/2 of one percent margin represents about 80,000 votes. That is the net number of votes Harris needs to win to overtake Trump. If we assume that only 95% of votes have been counted, then there are still about 291,000 votes left. In order for Harris to net out 80,000 votes from the remainder, she needs to win 211,000. That means she needs to win over 72% of the remaining votes, which probably is not possible unless they were all from Detroit (but they are not). Close elections at the state level are almost never close in terms of raw votes.
There is no way to just add votes to the total in Michigan. If there were a 100,000 more votes for Trump in Michigan but that also represented 100,000 more overall votes than people who voted, we would know that right away. Somehow, votes that were cast have to be switched. And for the conspiracy to be successful, this would have to replicated in many different states to ensure success. If it were only in Michigan, and Harris ended up winning Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, it would not have mattered. Harris would have won anyway.
I don’t want to beat a dead horse here, but it is so incredibly difficult to fix an American presidential election in advance. Trump tried very hard to do it after the fact last time, and I am not saying that could never work but that’s not the issue this year.2 All the money and noise billionaires dumped into this race to sow chaos and support Trump is seriously problematic, but it is not fixing the election nor is it evidence that anyone was trying to. They were exploiting our incredibly weak campaign rules to their favor.3
The problem here is not the election results, it is voter suppression and disinformation. I hope now more people see how important HR 1 was in 2021 and why that had to be passed before anything else could be done. Please do not focus on conspiracy theories. If there is evidence of crimes, then let’s see it. If not, then focus on the things that can be done to make a difference. Contact your state legislators and demand they dismantle the voter suppression laws in your state. Tell your US Senators and Representative to do the same - particularly if any of them are Republicans. Make sure they are hearing from at least some constituents that voting rights is important.
Here are some resources about voting rights and voter suppression in your state:
I noted just about every one of these reasons four years ago when Trump supporters said the election was stolen. It hasn’t changed because the outcome changed.
And the evidence we do have is that Trump and his supporters were preparing to do just that: try to prevent Harris from being certified as president if she won. But, while very troubling to say the least, that is not fixing the outcome in advance.
I favor a Constitutional amendment to create a rights-balancing election process whereby our anything-goes free speech rights are tempered by the need for a fair electoral process (this would include an explicit federal right vote). I can never get the conversation past that point because even liberals jump down my throat at the idea of balancing free speech rights, even though every single other democracy in the world has some version of this idea in place.
I may have gotten math wrong on the remaining votes in Michigan, but it doesn’t change the point.