How would a fraudulent election in the US today really be handled?
December 15, 2020 4:28 AM   Subscribe

If there was reasonable suspicion of voter fraud on the scale the Trumpies are claiming, practically speaking how different would the response from state and federal governments look from what we're seeing instead?

I'm trying to explain to some low-information relatives why it's so obvious that what we're seeing right now is political theater and politically-motivated propaganda, not what would happen if there was actually any weight to the massive voter fraud accusations. Who would be involved, and what specific actions would these entities be taking, as opposed to rage-tweeting and holding phony hearings and filing BS lawsuits? What would their communications with the public about the situation look like?
posted by Rykey to Law & Government (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
fivethirtyeight: north Carolina do over

The most famous case I can think of recently was 2 years ago in north Carolina. The above article is about the do over election but has a ton of links in it, covering how the fraud was uncovered in the first place.
posted by TheAdamist at 4:39 AM on December 15, 2020 [3 favorites]


Here's more info about the 2018 NC election: The wikipedia entry.

A new 9th District congressional election — if called — would be a full do-over.

Hold a new election in NC’s tainted 9th District.

In that election the alleged fraud was ballot harvesting and falsification organized by a Republican operative, McCrae Dowless. It was a huge mess with all kinds of shenanigans. Eventually there was a do-over election and a grand jury investigation and a lot of indictments.
posted by mskyle at 5:45 AM on December 15, 2020


why it's so obvious

This may be a bit subtle for low-info voters, but again and again and again the Trump campaign and those allied with the campaign will not actually claim fraud in actual court in front of a judge under oath. Nor will they do so in front of full formal legislature hearings under oath.

In fact, in many cases both the formal suit filing paperwork and in direct statements to the judge they will say, "This is not a fraud case." Which of course they then try to introduce fraud "evidence."

Lots of the "hearings", especially those that have gotten traction in social media, are in reality technically informal gatherings of some state legislators held in hotel meeting rooms and such, with, again, nobody under oath.

IOW, when it really counts, when there are actual consequences for lying to a judge or a legislature, the lawyers won't say these are cases about fraud. Because they know they would be lying, and would be in trouble if they got busted.

Even simpler, if there was anything to this, of the 60 cases that have been presented, they wouldn't have lost 59 of them. So it might not look that different in some ways - the difference being the Trump lawyers would willingly state under oath that these cases are about election fraud and they would have had enough credible proof that they would have won cases.

Unfortunately I don't really have a ton of links to prove this to your low-info voter - I've been following a lot of this on Law Twitter - but here's a Time.com article: Donald Trump And His Lawyers Are Making Sweeping Allegations of Voter Fraud In Public. In Court, They Say No Such Thing
posted by soundguy99 at 6:11 AM on December 15, 2020 [13 favorites]


The other thing you'd see would be reporters intensively attempting to uncover the conspiracy. Maybe not immediately, but the saying "Three can keep a secret if two are dead" is not just a pithy expression. Small elections can be swung by tiny numbers of people, but falsifying a big election takes a true conspiracy. Conspiracies require that their members recruit other members, plan their activities, and carry them out, all under the threat of discovery and prosecution.

Look at Watergate, that was a small operation to burgle a single office and gather intelligence. If you read "All the President's Men", while the break-in itself was discovered quickly, the significance and connection to people in power came out in drips over months. Nixon even got re-elected in the meantime, despite evidence already in print that he, at minimum, tacitly endorsed the "plumbers". Small operation, akin to a single precinct. The truth would come out a lot more quickly if you had multiple counties involved, even within a single state. Especially if you were having to collect or fabricate ballots, inject them into enough precincts so it wouldn't be numerically improbable, and leave no evidence. From a project management and operational security standpoint alone, it would be a nightmare.
posted by wnissen at 10:31 AM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]


The fact that every state--and every county or other relevant political subdivision within each state--basically runs its own elections is a nightmare in some ways but also a huge firewall against really massive widespread fraud and cheating in another way.

So if there really was widespread fraud and such happening, what you would see is investigations going on in dozens and dozens of different jurisdictions all across the country. You would see dozens and dozens of investigations going on--by the media, but elected officials, by election boards, and by local and state prosecutors. And you would see many, many results being published in newspapers and cases being brought and successfully prosecuted in counties and states all across the country.

If reporters even had a whiff of this, you wouldn't be able to stop them or keep them from investigating and publishing, no matter which political party was engineering the fraud. Maybe they wouldn't be able to sniff out every single case of fraud, but if there were provable fraud in dozens and dozens of counties around the country there would be at least a few really big stories happening in different places in the media. And these would be a big deal and would be getting national attention. AND they would be carried in all varieties of media, not right-wing blogs etc only. These kinds of stories are a BIG DEAL. News organizations would not be overlooking them--and certainly not every new organization overlooking them--if there were any believable evidence at all. Again, regardless of which side were doing the cheating.

And these kinds of stories are like catnip for local and state prosecutors. If there were anything there they would be investigating the bejeezus out of it because a case like this is a career-maker.

Again, one or a few prosecutors stopping investigations--ok, that's potentially believable. But we're taking about some kind of magical massive coordination among prosecutors from both political parties, from dozens and dozens of jurisdictions all across the country, etc etc etc. You might be able to stop SOME of these but you could never stop ALL OF THEM.
posted by flug at 1:01 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]


Also--simpler but more compelling to me--if Republicans, and Trump, were really serious about this they would have seen it coming for at least months ahead of time and they would have been working their patooties off fixing things and putting a stop to the election fraud ahead of time.

We would have been hearing about this all year long, or maybe for the past couple of years at least, as one of the Republican's top issues. "Stop the Fraud" by XYZ. Republicans have controlled the Senate for the last two years; why haven't we seen them pass a single bill addressing ways to prevent this nefarious fraud in the past two years?

If you really believed this was a significant threat, you would have been doing everything in your power to prevent the fraud in advance. Before the election. This would have been your #1 top priority, you would have talked about it night and day, you would have taken vigorous action.

You don't wait to stop this existential threat to democracy until after election day, when you've already lost. You stop it from happening beforehand, so that you don't lose.

Instead, we heard nothing. We heard no priorities.

The uproar all started after the election when it became clear Trump had lost.

Additionally, why the uproar only about the presidential election? If the fraud were really that widespread, it would affect dozens and dozens and dozens of key races all across the country. We'd be seeing every candidate who lost by 1-10% doing what Trump is doing. We'd see dozens of lawsuits from dozens of candidates--not from one candidate only.

Instead we see nothing of the sort. One candidate, one person only, is pushing this narrative forward and--aside from a little half-hearted rhetorical setup during the campaign--the commotion and smoke only started after it was clear that one candidate had lost.
posted by flug at 1:11 PM on December 16, 2020


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