(Or, How Many Ways Does MAGA Try To Steal Elections? Let Me Count The Ways.)
If voter fraud were easy enough to commit en masse to alter the outcome of an election, MAGA would already be committing it themselves. And I can pretty much prove it with inductive logic.
Inductive logic is logic that reaches a likely conclusion from consistent, predictable patters of prior behavior. For example, the last 500 times that you flip the bathroom light switch up, the lights come on. Inductive logic predicts that the lights will come on the next time that you flip it, too.
It turns out that right wing has a very long and firmly established pattern of trying to steal elections. Let’s review them:
The Fake Electors Scheme.
In the 2020 election, MAGA cheats in seven battleground states signed falsified certificates stating that Trump, not Biden, had won the electoral vote for those states, and sent those certificates to the National Archives and to Congress.
These MAGA cheats falsified these “alternate slates of electors” based on claims of voter fraud that had already been roundly and soundly debunked. These slates of fake electors are concrete evidence of MAGA attempts to cheat the electoral college in the 2020 election.
The Insurrection of January 6, 2021.
Activists and lawmakers who participated in or otherwise supported the insurrection had planned to obstruct the counting of the electoral vote that day, and pressured Vice President Pence to disregard the electoral college and decree Trump to be the winner.
The maneuvers by MAGA lawmakers and activists on January 6th concrete evidence of MAGA attempts to cheat the 2020 election by simply throwing out unwanted electoral votes during the day’s proceedings.
Trying to throw out votes in Democratic cities with large Black populations.
In Wisconsin, MAGA tried to preemptively throw out more than 220,000 votes in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, two counties with large Black, minority, and Democratic populations. In Michigan, MAGA tried to toss huge numbers of votes in Wayne County, the county in which Democrat- and minority-rich Detroit resides. In Pennsylvania, MAGA tried to toss out approximately 10,000 lawful mail-in ballots.
All in all, Trump filed at least 42 lawsuits aimed at tossing out votes in Democrat- and minority-rich areas. Not one lawsuit was successful.
Intentionally suppressing the Black vote.
A 2013 Voter ID law in North Carolina was shown in court to have targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision” to make it difficult for them to vote. Texas deliberately passed a law limiting drop-off locations for absentee ballots to one location per county, knowing full well that it would severely burden Democratic voters in highly populous Houston. MAGA lawmakers in Georgia deliberately reduced the number of polling location in minority districts, with the clear intent of forcing them to wait in line for hours.
selectively alter state-by-state allocation of Electoral College votes so as to favor Republicans.
Years before the Fake Electors scheme was hatched, MAGA entertained plans to alter how electoral votes are allocated in carefully selected swing states, so as to cheat the Electoral College to favor Republicans. From the linked article: “In Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire, GOP lawmakers want to award Electoral College votes by congressional district, just like Nebraska and Maine currently do. But in Nebraska, Republicans want to do the opposite, and return to the same winner-takes-all method used by, well, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Hampshire, and almost every other state.”
A similar MAGA plan to cheat the Electoral College was concocted after President Obama’s decisive electoral college win in the 2012 election. “In the short run, of course, such changes would probably help Republicans siphon off electoral votes in states like Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But these rule changes would also make a mockery of the concept of fair elections, and harm the twin Republican principles of conservativism and federalism.”
Mounting special recall elections to steal elections from Democrats after the fact.
The original idea behind launching a recall election was to remove officials who were engaging in clear and obvious malfeasance in office. But MAGA routinely uses the recall election process to simply steal Democratic victories from the winners and from the voters who selected their Democratic leaders and representatives fair and square. “Don’t like the election result? Mad that your boy didn’t win, MAGA? No problem! Just have another election six months later, and steal the voters’ choice from them after the fact!”
The most prominent recall election in recent times was the attempt to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom before his term was up. There was no malfeasance on Newsom’s part; MAGA was simply being spoiled brats who saw an opportunity to overturn the 2018 gubernatorial election, attempting to steal what a majority of Californians had won fair and square.
Another act of MAGA election theft was the successful 2018 recall of state senator Josh Newsom. Newsom won back his seat two years later and is now authoring a ballot initiative to stop future abuse of the recall election.
In 2017, MAGA in Nevada launched recall elections against three Nevada Democrats. None of them had been accused of malfeasance or wrongdoing. It was just a petulant, spoiled-brat attempt to steal what Democratic voters had won and what rightfully belonged to them: their representatives of choice.
In Wisconsin, even Republican lawmakers aren’t safe from MAGA’s selfish, petulant tantrums. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, pretty far right himself, is being targeted by Wisconsin MAGA simply for having angered Trump.
Recall elections without cause are attempts to steal elections after the fact, pure and simple.
Strip Democratic governors of their powers after voters give them victory, but before they assume office.
A variation of MAGA’s stealing elections after the fact that Democratic voters had won fair and square is to eliminate the powers of incoming governors before they take office.
This amounts to stealing the election after the fact for these reasons:
- Voters choose a Democrat to be their state governor.
- Voters chose that candidate on the expectation that their candidate would assume the existing powers of governor once they take office.
- MAGA then comes along and then eliminates some of that governor’s powers in the interim, during the lame duck period.
- The incoming governor now has fewer powers than the voters wanted him or her to have on Election Day..
- Therefore, MAGA has stolen from voters some of the gubernatorial powers that the winning voters wanted their new governor to have. MAGA stole from the winning voters some of what had rightfully belonged to them.
In Wisconsin, MAGA stripped powers of incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers, with outgoing governor Scott Walker’s approval. Wisconsin’s move came with a helping of voter suppression on the side. MAGA is still trying to steal powers from the Democratic governor today.
In North Carolina, MAGA passed a similar lame duck bill to steal gubernatorial powers from the Democratic victor that his voters wanted him to have. That bill was struck down in court.
And in Kentucky, MAGA cheated voters by stealing incoming Democratic governor Andy Beshear’s power to fill Senate vacancies.
Conclusion:
Now that we have a established a clear, proven track record of MAGA trying to steal elections in seven different ways, one can safely conclude that if “widespread voter fraud” were easy enough to commit that doing so could change an election outcome, MAGA would already be doing it. After all, it would fit their established behavior patterns perfectly.
But they aren’t, therefore widespread voter fraud is not only impossible, but is not, in fact, taking place.
Q. E. D.