The Election Wasn't Stolen

[introduction; Trump has insisted the election was stolen and people believe him, and bad things are happening because of it, etc, etc, you know this already]

Let's look at some numbers, and actually think about what it would take to have stolen the election. Biden received 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232. For the election to go to Trump, he would have needed at least 38 electoral votes to flip. That's basically any three out of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, or Arizona.

All of those states were close; no one has really argued otherwise. Georgia, in particular, was decided by less than thirteen thousand votes, of almost five million cast. But for Trump to win, he still would have to flip three of those, and thirteen thousand votes is an awful lot of votes.

The easiest scenario for Trump here is to win Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona; that flips forty-seven votes, giving him 279. (Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona leave the election in a 269-269 tie.) Trump lost PA, GA, and AZ by a total 104,787 votes. For the election to be stolen, that means at very least that many net votes were either added to Biden's totals, or subtracted from Trump's.

Think what it would take to be able to steal that many votes. A hundred thousand votes is a lot more than it sounds. To get that many false votes, Democrats would have had to alter results or 'dump ballots' in county after county after county, all across at least these three states. The biggest county in Pennsylvania, Allegheny County, counted about 713,000 votes. How many votes could have been faked there, with no one noticing? Five thousand? Ten thousand? Let's say ten thousand ballots were faked, which feels high; that's about one fake vote for every seventy real votes. That would then have to happen again, eight more times, before Trump would win Pennsylvania.

And that would have to happen in polling place after polling place, in county after county, throughout at least these states, if not others.

The sheer scale of this operation is inconceivable. The entire system is set up to prevent exactly this from happening. Results are (usually; rules change from state to state) certified at every level from the county and then by the state, and then by Congress. Consider how many people would have to be involved in an operation like this. This isn't some secret Deep State operation, with five, or even a hundred, shady agents of the Real Left dumping ballots or hacking the voting machines with a DDOS attack (which is, by the way, not how DDOS attacks even work.) No, this alleges thousands and thousands of people, working in a very carefully calculated scheme to steal the election.

It would be the most colossal, and most consequential, crime in American history.

This is what Trump and his followers are saying happened; yet they have no evidence. To anyone who takes a moment to appreciate the massive scale of this operation, it is clear that evidence would be innumerable; even one person having a change of heart, or the quiet rumor, the quiet gloat, 'I stole the election'. Do not say that evidence is being or would be censored by social media and the Liberal Fake News. Do you think Fox wouldn't take that story? Do you think that even that rumor wouldn't spread like wildfire through the Republican ranks? Stealing the election would need coordination, and collaboration. It would leave a huge paper trail, and evidence would be everywhere.

But Trump's supporters cannot come up with any. All they have are accusations that 'they' stole the election, relying on a fear, built by the President himself, of a they who seek to steal America and destroy everything we hold dear. But the allegations they have are speedily fact-checked and disproven; now it is the President and his followers who believe only what they want to be true. They have little basis in truth; no honest lawyer wants anything to do with these cases, and Trump is forced to rely on the seedy help of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. Almost without exception, these lawsuits are thrown out of court by Republican, Trump-appointed judges. Are they in on it too?

It's not that Trump needed proof anyway. It was the morning after the election when he famously tweeted 'I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT! [sic]' and the message has not changed since then. This election was the most scrutinized election in American history; Trump had been throwing accusations of fraud even before it happened. And yet, after extorting every drop of opportunity from the legal process, Trump continued to insist that the election was stolen, and people have believed him; believed him to the point where they have attacked our nation's Capitol while somehow believing they were saving America. In reality, they were doing the opposite.

“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

-- Adolf Hitler

although it turns out he may not have actually said this which is so often the case with famous quotes like this