The GOP and Its "Evidence" of Voter Fraud
How the party championed rules to manufacture its "proof"
A bank manager demands that tellers count all the institution’s cash. But he creates two sets of rules: One group of tellers can use machines to count half the money. A second group must count it all by hand and inspect every bill to make sure it is not a forgery. And they both must start at the same time.
The process is slow because of all the restrictions on hand counts. So, the bank manager accuses the tellers of embezzling the cash.
And that is exactly how the GOP manufactures its “proof” of voter fraud in swing states. For the stated purpose of preventing fictional fraud, the GOP in different states create rules that, at least in the world of reality, forces the entire counting process to slow down. In other states, they don’t. And then they point at the two states and scream, “Ah hah! Poll workers are delaying the results so they can cheat!”
The nonsense, as expected, already started shortly after the midterms this week. Florida was fast in its count, Arizona was slow. Republicans quickly attacked.
“How come Florida w/ population of 22 million can get same day election results and Arizona w/ population of 7 million can’t?” Greta Van Susteren, a Newsmax anchor, tweeted Thursday. Kari Lake, gubernatorial candidate in Arizona and general all-around loon,” declared that the state was delaying the results to “pour cold water on this movement.” She means MAGA, not bowel.
Here’s why, Greta, Kari and all the other liars: Just like in our fictional bank, there are two different sets of rules. Each of those swing states handle things differently because each has different rules created by the legislators, all dealing - of course - with mail in ballots.
Florida counties have in-house scanners that process the ballot envelopes. And, to explain this to Republicans, being able to immediately scan ballots makes things quick. Maricopa County in Arizona - the site of most GOP accusations of fraud - doesn’t have those machines easily available. Instead, the folks working at the polling places - a dwindling number because of all the death threats they’ve received since 2000 - must take all the ballots with their envelopes, pack them following a specific process, then take them from Mesa, Glendale, Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler, Peoria, Gilbert, and other towns to a different location in Phoenix, where they are scanned by Runbeck Election Services.
But it gets worse. Before the ballots can be packed by Arizona election officials, poll workers must verify every signature on the envelopes. Because of the state’s rules, the officials in Maricopa County had 290,000 mail in ballots that required signature verification - with the effort starting on election day.
Florida is, of course, different. Under their rules restricting the means of getting their mail-in votes to qualify for counting, the signature verification can begin weeks earlier. The state doesn’t have a mountain of ballots to start verifying on Election Day.
As Maricopa County just started verifying the 290,000 mail-in ballot signatures, poll workers in Florida were essentially putting their feet up on their desks. That’s because the state had been confirming and counting mail-in-ballots for three weeks and were finished just as Arizona workers started with their flood of ballots. For example, in Leon County, Florida, about 95% of the mail-in ballots have been verified, tabulated, and ready to be uploaded into the on-site election management system by 7:00 PM that same night, according to Mark Earley, supervisor of elections there. Gee, why does Arizona take so much longer?
Now let’s look at Pennsylvania, and focus on 2020, given the number of times Donald Trump has screamed about voter fraud there. Once again, the GOP’s “evidence” of fraud was manufactured by the GOP itself. As Florida poll workers started heading home, the results have been already announced, Pennsylvania officials were barely getting started with counting 2.6 million mail-in ballots.
Why? Because the Republicans in Pennsylvania forced rules that prevented mail-in ballots from even being opened until Election Day, much less counted. The Republicans were warned repeatedly that their rules would significantly delay the state’s ability to report the outcome, but the legislators just shrugged. Why did they do this? Who knows? Maybe it was to create ways to claim voter fraud if things didn’t go Trump’s way.
The result was that poll workers were forced to verify and count those millions of ballots around the clock, in a process that not only took days, but that everyone knew ahead of time would require that much time. And that’s why it wasn’t until Saturday, four days after the Tuesday election, that enough ballots had been counted to call the race for Joe Biden.
Trump - who had been told that the mail-in ballots would take days to count - declared himself the winner on Election Night, even though almost three million votes remained to be counted. Democrats were much more likely to vote by mail - after all, Trump told his MAGA followers not to do so - and so literally everyone outside the cultists knew there would be a “blue wave” as more mail-in ballots were counted. But when the wave came along - just as every honest and sane person knew it would - Trump and the MAGA cult declared it was evidence of fraud, even though it was just the consequence of the time it took to count the mail-in ballots and the partisan skew that was known to be coming. This chart by the Philadelphia Inquirer shows the impact of the wave in 2020.
Now let’s look at Nevada this year, where rules adopted because the state wants resident’s votes to count, also slowed things down. Add to that the impact of a shortage of poll workers who really don’t like being threatened with murder by MAGA lunatics, and the time it takes for counting extends even further, once again fueling rage and conspiracy theories from Republicans. (And, in all probability, an ignorance that will spur more death threats, slowing things down even more in 2024.)
Under Nevada’s rules for mail-in voting, ballots must be postmarked on Election Day, and can be counted so long as they arrived by Saturday. Add to that the fact that - in another effort to make sure the ballot of almost every vote is counted - if the signature on a mail-in ballot doesn’t match the signature on file, voters can fix the disparity as late as Monday.
With reality causing the outcome that reality causes, Trump came out spewing more conspiracy theories, focusing on Clark County which - surprise! - has the highest percentage of minorities of any populous county in the state. Trump of course declared the counting was “corrupt” there. (Clark also is the country with the largest shortage of poll workers because of the MAGA death threats following the 2020 election.)
Fortunately, Clark County shot back at Trump’s racist-based lies with a statement saying he was “still misinformed about the law,” just as he had been in 2020. (Clark County gave him too much credit; he’s not misinformed, he’s just a stupid malignant narcissist.)
“All of our election systems are certified by the state and federal governments for use in the state of Nevada, and there are several state required audits done before, during, and after each election,” the statement said. “We could not speed up the process even if we wanted to.”
But there’s also something to remember: Trump, as a malignant narcissist, has never acknowledged losing anything without it being the consequence of fraud. Even in high school, when he received the second-highest grade on a chemistry test, he accused the kid who did better of cheating. His reality show never received an Emmy because the Emmy Awards were rigged. The Scottish man who won “Scotsman of the Year” because he stood up to Trump was only victorious, he said, because of fraud in the vote. He lost the Iowa Caucus to Ted Cruz because of fraud. And on and on.
Probably the best - or most disturbing - accusation came in 2012, when Republican nominee Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency to President Barack Obama. On the night of the election, Romney was winning in the popular vote, but losing in electors for the Electoral College. So of course, Trump - who hated Obama (of course) and supported Romney - tweeted that the Electoral College was an abomination that needed to be ended. (That position flipped in 2016, when Trump won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote - an outcome that led to years of claims by him that the popular vote was fraud.) Then when Arizona went for Obama, Trump tweeted out that the voting machines were flipping votes from Romney from Romney to Obama. And then when Romney lost, Trump declared it was all the consequence of fraud, and called for Republicans to march on the Capitol.
Machines flipped votes, march on the Capitol - in 2012. When someone shows you who they are, don’t expect anything different later.
So be prepared. For 2024, the GOP is certain to create more rules intended to set up a nighttime “blue wave.” Then Trump - if he’s the nominee - will scream fraud if he loses and will likely demand that MAGA march on the Capitol. All because the GOP wants to create bogus “evidence” of fraud. These are people who want to destroy faith in democracy, all so they can clamp down more on voting in their endless pursuit of a Russian-style autocracy.