How Trump (and his lawyers) keep the election-fraud mirage alive
Joe Biden was elected president in November 2020, earning more than 81 million votes nationally vs. incumbent Donald Trump’s 74 million. Despite Trump’s immediate insistences, the election was not “stolen” or “rigged” in a way that doomed his bid for a second term. Over the three-plus years since the election, no evidence of any schemes that affected the vote has been uncovered — despite the enormous effort from Trump and his allies to uncover some.
But this is not important to Trump. What is important to him is telling his base of support that he, not Biden, was the legitimate winner of the 2020 contest. It’s a surprisingly effective argument, given the lack of evidence supporting it; 6 in 10 Republicans told CNN last year that they believed Biden didn’t legitimately win. More than a third said there was solid evidence to this effect.
How does Trump — with his allies’ help — convince his supporters that the election wasn’t legitimate? In part because his supporters are predisposed to think that official sources and the media are lying to them or misleading them. (This was a central part of Trump’s political appeal in the first place, after all.)
It also depends on Trump relentlessly boosting the idea that something untoward happened. He throws out whatever purported evidence he can muster, however tenuous, to convey a sense of wrongdoing. This mechanism is useful because it doesn’t matter if one particular aspect is shown to be false — or even if most are. He just needs to give his supporters something they can point to as evidence of the belief they want to hold in the first place.
We can see how this works in part of a court filing presented by Trump’s legal team on Wednesday. A 37-page document offered in defense of Trump’s effort to claim presidential immunity as a defense against federal charges filed by special counsel Jack Smith purports to demonstrate that there are legitimate questions about the 2020 outcome.
But of course, it doesn’t, since it can’t. Instead, it just provides scores of bullet points meant to suggest that maybe something somewhere occurred that affected the outcome of the race, though at no point is there demonstrated evidence of actual voter fraud that would affect the outcome of any race.
We can look at the claims made about the outcome in Michigan to see how this works. In 2020, 5.5 million Michigan voters cast presidential ballots, with Biden beating Trump by a margin of more than 154,000. This was not a close race; 18 states had closer vote-total margins than Michigan and six had closer percentage-point margins. But Michigan flipped from red to blue between 2016 and 2020, so Trump has long been eager to prove that this loss was somehow a function of cheating.
The document included with the filing contains more than two dozen bullet points meant to suggest wrongdoing in the state. Any objective assessment, though, shows the arguments fail to display any illegal vote submissions, much less more than 154,000 of them.
The 27 bullet points can be grouped (as above) into seven broad topic areas.
Voter counts. The section on Michigan begins by asserting that more people voted in the state than were included in its “qualified voter file.” It asserts that the most voters included in this database was just north of 5.5 million, in April 2021.
On Nov. 5, 2020, just after the election, the office of Michigan’s secretary of state reported that there were more than 8.1 million registered voters in the state. It’s not clear whether that total included people who’d registered under the state’s Election Day voter registration system, which added tens of thousands of voters on the day of the election itself.
What Trump hopes to do is suggest that there’s some broad manipulation of voter files that proves the presidential vote count is inaccurate. There is manipulation of voter rolls, people being added or removed over time. But the idea that somehow there were more votes than voters in the state and it went unaddressed for more than three years is ridiculous.
Vote counting. The document next asserts that the process of counting and certifying the vote was somehow tainted. It elevates old claims about observers being blocked from viewing the count (which was dismissed by courts in November 2020) and about votes coming in to the vote-counting center late at night — claims that were shown to be unimportant or overstated years ago.
Notice, by the way, that none of this demonstrates proven fraud, even if the claims were true.
Senate report. Next, the document cherry-picks findings from a report completed by the Republican majority in the state Senate. The Trump document does not include an important quote from the beginning of the report: “This Committee found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election.”
Election systems. The next two bullet points look at investments from an organization aimed at boosting election systems during the pandemic-afflicted 2020 election. That the group received funding from Mark Zuckerberg — leveraging long-standing right-wing distrust of Facebook into the effort — is mentioned prominently. What isn’t mentioned is that, despite this purported effort to gin up Democratic votes in Detroit, Trump did better in the city than he had in 2016.
“Mules.” The document moves on to even more ridiculous terrain, amplifying a claim from the robustly debunked film “2000 Mules” that ballots were “trafficked” in Michigan. No concrete evidence of any such scheme exists, either in the movie or from the group that first made these assertions, True the Vote.
The document also elevates a claim popularized by the conspiracy-theory site Gateway Pundit in which a woman is apparently seen on video signing ballots. In Michigan, it was and is legal to return someone else’s ballot, within certain guidelines. It was also the case in 2020 that the back of submitted ballots had to be signed by the voter — and by anyone who assisted the voter with completing their ballot. There’s no evidence that the woman cited in the report wasn’t signing ballots for that latter purpose.
Verification rules. The next bullet point notes that an effort to change ballot-verification rules was thrown out after the election. It also points out that the number of ballots rejected under those rules was lower than in prior years. This was true in other states, as well, with an obvious answer presented: The huge increase in absentee voting triggered by the pandemic vastly increased the effort to ensure that people followed rules governing how those ballots should be returned.
Again, though: No evidence is offered of fraudulent votes cast using absentee ballots, despite three years of looking. An Associated Press review found a maximum of 56 questionable ballots submitted in the state.
Registration questions. The last chunk of the document focused on Michigan considers the apparent submission of invalid voter registration applications before the election. Reporting indicates that no votes were cast on behalf of those applications. The issue was publicly known before Election Day that year.
And that’s it. That’s the “evidence” that the Michigan results can’t be trusted. Notably, the results in Antrim County — marred by misconfigured electronic vote-counting machines — weren’t included here, given how Trump has promoted this long-debunked claim for years. That one is apparently now so substantially disproved that it doesn’t warrant inclusion. Or maybe it’s that it involves Dominion Voting Systems, and Trump’s lawyers are wary of poking that particular bear.
Walking through all of this took a good deal of time. It’s far quicker to skim the Trump team’s claims and get a sense of wrongdoing than understanding why that sense isn’t warranted. It’s equally easy to see that the hated, mainstream Washington Post has debunked the assertions and dismiss the rebuttal out of hand — which is how this entire election-fraud thing has worked all along.
On Thursday, Suffolk University released polling conducted for USA Today. Among its findings? Nearly half of Republicans think that the 2024 presidential results won’t be accurately counted.
Not hard to figure out why.
