For anyone that values science and math, the United States has an apparent winner of the 2020 election. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in enough states by enough votes to ensure that he is the president-elect of the United States of America.

This is an irrefutable fact. Statistically, mathematically, there is no way that there was a multi-state, nationwide conspiratorial collusion to generate hundreds of thousands of fake ballots to steal the election from Trump. There is literally no way. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and his lawyers from filing a dozen legal challenges in order to try to invalidate as many votes as possible in the hopes that they can force the results the other way — that also shouldn’t be possible, but since the president can appoint federal judges, and Trump has been the president, there is always the possibility that one of these judges could make up some bullshit justification, but so far that has not been the case.

There is an active coup to steal power currently underway in the United States, which is extremely horrible, although not the first time this has happened. The fact that we as a nation don’t consider the actions of southern racists and Confederate sympathizers post-Reconstruction with the passing of Jim Crow laws to be similar coups is very illustrative of our nation’s inability to come to terms with our racist past. But it doesn’t make a modern coup any less terrifying.

So let’s talk about election fraud. There is an ocean of digital ink that has been spilled over the past decade about voter fraud and how it’s not a thing. Conservatives have been talking about this as a thing since at least 2006 if not before. It has been used to justify passing tons of laws to make voting more difficult for people. And yet, time and time again investigations have found there is virtually, statistically, no voter fraud. It’s not that there is literally no voter fraud — that’s absurd, there’s always at least one dumb ass doing something stupid — but the issues of voter fraud are limited, isolated, and on such a small scale that they couldn’t affect something as massive as a presidential election.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a tour of articles over the past 13 or so years.

2007:

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

The New York Times – 4/12/07 – “In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud” by Eric Lipton and Ian Urbina

2010:

A report by the public-integrity section of the Justice Department found that from October 2002 to September 2005, the department charged 95 people with “election fraud”; 55 were convicted.

Among those, fewer than 20 people were convicted of casting fraudulent ballots, and only 5 were convicted of registration fraud. Most of the rest were charged with other voting violations, including a scheme meant to help Republicans by blocking the phone lines used by two voting groups that were arranging rides to get voters to the polls.

The New York Times – 10/27/10 – “Fraudulent Voting Re-emerges as a Partisan Issue” by Ian Urbina

2012:

[…] But multiple studies taking different approaches have all come to the same conclusion: The rate of voter fraud in American elections is close to zero.

In her 2010 book, The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine Minnite tracked down every single case brought by the Justice Department between 1996 and 2005 and found that the number of defendants had increased by roughly 1,000 percent under Ashcroft. But that only represents an increase from about six defendants per year to 60, and only a fraction of those were ever convicted of anything.

Mother Jones – 7/2012 – “The Dog that Voted and Other Election Fraud Yarns” by Kevin Drum

[Hans von Spakovsky, a Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Administration and is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation] cited a 2000 investigation, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of voting records in Georgia over the previous two decades; the paper reported that it had turned up fifty-four hundred instances of dead people being recorded as having voted. “That seems pretty substantial to me,” he said.

He did not mention that the article’s findings were later revised. The Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after the Georgia Secretary of State’s office indicated that the vast majority of the cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn’t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical.

The New Yorker – 10/22/12 – “The Voter-Fraud Myth” by Jane Mayer

2013:

In 21 districts in Wood County Ohio, Obama received 100% of the votes where GOP inspectors were illegally removed from their polling locations — and not one single vote was recorded for Romney. (Another statistical impossibility).

A precinct-by-precinct breakdown of the official voting results from Wood County, Ohio, for the 2012 election shows that Barack Obama received nowhere close to 100% of the votes cast in any of that county’s 97 precincts. The highest percentage he achieved in any one precinct was 75.5%.

In Wood County Ohio, 106,258 voted in a county with only 98,213 eligible voters.

The official Voter Turnout statistics for Ohio show Wood County recorded a total turnout of 64,342 voters, an amount far smaller than the number of registered voters in that county (108,014).

Snopes – 1/7/13 – “Does This List Prove Voter Fraud in 2012?” by David Mikkelson

2014:

All of these restrictive measures take their justification from a perceived need to prevent “voter fraud.” But there is overwhelming scholarly and legal consensus that voter fraud is vanishingly rare, and in fact non-existent at the levels imagined by voter ID proponents. That hasn’t stopped many Republican lawmakers from crying “fraud” every time they’re faced with an unfavorable election outcome (see also: McDaniel, Chris).

The Washington Post – 7/9/14 – “7 papers, 4 government inquiries, 2 news investigations and 1 court ruling proving voter fraud is mostly a myth” by Christopher Ingraham

So far, I’ve found about 31 different incidents (some of which involve multiple ballots) since 2000, anywhere in the country. If you want to check my work, you can read a comprehensive list of the incidents below.

To put this in perspective, the 31 incidents below come in the context of general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014. In general and primary elections alone, more than 1 billion ballots were cast in that period.

The Washington Post – 8/6/14 – “A comprehensive investigation of voter impersonation finds 31 credible incidents out of one billion ballots cast” by Justin Levitt

2016:

A study by the Pew Center on the States entitled “Inaccurate, Costly and Inefficient: Evidence that American Voter Registration Systems Needs an Upgrade.”The 2012 study presented a number of disquieting findings, including:

– About 24 million voter registrations are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.
– More than 1.8 million dead people are listed as voters.
– Approximately 2.75 million people are registered in more than one state.

The Pew report certainly underscores deficiencies in the voter registration system. But the Trump campaign doesn’t say how these deficiencies disadvantage his candidacy. For example, there is no evidence in the Pew report that people who have registrations in two states are voting twice for Democrats or for Republicans.

CNN – 10/18/16 – “Reality Check: Trump’s claims of ‘large scale’ voter fraud” by Steven A. Holmes

For example, in 2012 South Carolina’s attorney general notified the U.S. Department of Justice of potential voter fraud after finding 953 ballots cast in the 2010 election by voters listed as deceased, in some cases as long as six years. The finding ran in the Augusta Chronicle at the time in an Associated Press story under a headline, “South Carolina attorney general informs Justice Department of voter fraud.”

But a subsequent review by the State Election Commission found no evidence of fraud and that mostly the cases were clerical errors.

FactCheck.Org – 10/19/16 – “Trump’s Bogus Voter Fraud Claims” by Robert Farley

[…] As of 2014, 28 participating states (up from 15 in 2012) provided the [Interestate Crosscheck Program] with their registration records and in return received a list of registrations in their own state that matched the first name, last name, and date of birth recorded on a registration in another member state.

[…]

In the 2012 presidential election, for example, 8,575 ballots were cast under the name John Smith among the votes we analyzed. Just considering people born in 1970, 141 votes were cast by people named John Smith. And among these 141 John Smiths, there were 27 pairs that had the exact same birthdate and so would be flagged as potential double voters under Crosscheck’s methodology. But in a group of 141 people, you would in fact expect to see 27 pairs that share the same birthday by chance alone.

Slate – 11/7/16 – “Chasing Electoral Ghosts” by Sharad Goel, Marc Meredith, Michael Morse, David Rothschild, and Houshmand Shirani-Mehr

2017:

A team of Dartmouth researchers undertook a comprehensive statistical investigation of the 2016 results, looking for evidence of abnormal voting patterns. They checked for evidence of noncitizen voting, dead people voting and tampering by election officials. They didn’t find any. “Our findings do strongly suggest, however, that voter fraud concerns fomented by the Trump campaign are not grounded in any observable features of the 2016 presidential election,” they concluded (emphasis theirs). “There is no evidence of millions of fraudulent votes.”

The Washington Post – 1/25/17 – “Here are nine investigations on voter fraud that found virtually nothing” by Christopher Ingraham

2018:

President Trump on Wednesday abruptly shut down a White House commission he had charged with investigating voter fraud, ending a brief quest for evidence of election theft that generated lawsuits, outrage and some scholarly testimony, but no real evidence that American elections are corrupt.

[…]

In fact, no state has uncovered significant evidence to support the president’s claim, and election officials, including many Republicans, have strongly rejected it.

The New York Times – 1/3/18 – “Trump Disbands Commission on Voter Fraud” by Michael Tackett and Michael Wines

As [George W. Bush appointee Judge Julie Robinson’s] opinion noted, Kobach insisted the meager instances of cheating revealed at trial are just “the tip of the iceberg.” As she explained, “This trial was his opportunity to produce credible evidence of that iceberg, but he failed to do so.” Dismissing the testimony by Kobach’s witnesses as unpersuasive, Robinson drew what she called “the more obvious conclusion that there is no iceberg; only an icicle largely created by confusion and administrative error.”

ProPublica – 6/19/18 – “How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed” by Jessica Huseman

The now-disbanded voting integrity commission launched by the Trump administration uncovered no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud, according to an analysis of administration documents released Friday.

In a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who are both Republicans and led the commission, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said the documents show there was a “pre-ordained outcome” and that drafts of a commission report included a section on evidence of voter fraud that was “glaringly empty.”

Associated Press – 8/3/18 – “Report: Trump commission did not find widespread voter fraud” by Marina Villeneuve

2020:

In a press briefing on election security on Aug. 26, senior FBI officials said they’ve found no evidence of coordinated fraud with mail-in ballots and also highlighted how unlikely the scenario would be.  

“It would be extraordinarily difficult to change a federal election outcome through this type of fraud alone, given the range of processes that would need to be affected or compromised by an adversary at the local level,” the FBI said.

CNET – 11/4/20 – “Mail-in voting fraud is nearly impossible to commit” by Alfred Ng

I think you get my point.

Something that you may notice is 1) how this usually only comes up during election season, and 2) this is basically only ever brought up by Republicans. That’s awfully funny since Republican presidents have lost the popular vote for 7 of the last 8 elections, and yet have yielded sitting presidents in 3 of the last 8 elections, and held the majority of the House for 20 of the last 30 years¹.

Seriously. The last Republican to actually win the popular vote (besides W’s 2nd term) was George H. W. Bush back in 1988 when he defeated Mike Dukakis roughly 49 million votes to 42 million. Since then?²

• 1992: Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush 45 million to 39 million.
• 1996: Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole 47 million to 39 million.
• 2000: Al Gore beat George W. Bush 50,999,897 to 50,456,002 and yet LOST the presidency to Bush because of the Electoral College.
• 2004: George W. Bush, surprisingly, won the popular vote and the electoral with 62 million votes to John Kerry’s 59 million.
• 2008: Barack Obama beat John McCain 69 million to 60 million
• 2012: Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney 66 million to 61 million
• 2016: Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump 66 million to 63 million, and yet LOST the presidency to Trump because of the Electoral College.
• 2020: Joe Biden beat Donald Trump 78 million (so far) to 72 million.

Not to belabor the point, but before George W. Bush, do you know the last time a president won the Electoral College and lost the popular vote? 1888 when Benjamin Harrison lost to Grover Cleveland but won the Electoral College.³ 112 years prior. That’s how rare it was. And yet it’s happened twice in the past 20 years.

The Electoral College is a goddamned travesty to democracy, a nonsense compromise made by the white male founders of the US to appease slave states⁴ because their disenfranchisement of slaves meant that they were at a disadvantage in a popular vote even if the North and South populations were roughly equivalent — if you counted the slaves. Places like South Carolina would be at a popular vote disadvantage because slaves comprised half their population. And thus, the Electoral College was born along with the Three-Fifths Compromise⁵ — in which slaves counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of determining population for Electoral College points and representatives.

Instead of a tyranny of the majority, the founders ensured a tyranny of the minority by weighting smaller states’ votes far more heavily and overrepresenting them in Congress — in the House smaller states are actually given more representatives than they should have based on population, and in the Senate states each get only two senators regardless of the states size — meaning that California, with a population of 39,510,000 has the same number of senators as Wyoming, with a population of 578,759.

My wife and I were discussing Trump’s continued lawsuits and how they keep getting thrown out of court. I think folks are confused by how frivolous and insubstantial they are because they somehow expect these lawsuits to be in good faith. They aren’t. Trump lost the national popular vote by somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million votes, and he lost in the states he’s trying to dispute by tens of thousands. Those are inarguable margins. Anytime a state’s votes have been recounted, historically it never shifts the total more than a few hundred ballots one way or another. As I said, casting fraudulent ballots on a wide scale is just not a thing.

So if it’s been shown time and again that voter fraud is fake, why do Republicans crow about this every single election cycle? Because the modern Republican party is a very unpopular party that would not win elections if everyone were allowed to vote freely and fairly. That’s not my opinion by the way. That’s Lindsey Graham’s opinion.

In two different interviews, Graham has said the same thing. In an interview on 11/8 on Fox News, Graham said⁶, “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again. President Trump should not concede.”

In an interview the following day on Fox News, Graham said⁷, “Mitch McConnell and I need to come up with an oversight of mail-in balloting. If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we are going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.”

And that’s the thing. The modern Republican party believes that they are the only rightful rulers of the US and any power gained by their opposition was done through cheating. They think that because that’s almost the only way conservatives have been able to gain power since the Civil War. That’s why Trump is currently suing for Wisconsin to invalidate all ballots in 3 specific counties⁸ — Milwaukee, Dane and Menominee — where Biden beat Trump with nearly 70% of the vote or greater.

By county⁹:

• Milwaukee County: 317,251 votes for Biden (69.4%) vs. 134,355 (29.4%).
  • Milwaukee County, I’m sure entirely by coincidence, is home to the city of Milwaukee, which is approximately 40% Black.
• Dane County: 260,157 votes for Biden (75.7%) vs. 78,789 (22.9%).
  • Dane County, I’m sure also entirely by coincidence, is home to the city of Madison, another city with a large Black population.
• Menominee County: 1,303 votes for Biden (82.2%) vs. 278 (17.5%).

Milwaukee and Dane County contain 90%¹⁰ of the Black population in Wisconsin. Biden won Wisconsin 1,630,570 votes to Trump’s 1,610,030 votes (a margin of 20,000 votes), but if Trump were able to successfully argue that those ballots should be tossed — 578,711 for Biden and just 213,422 for Trump — then suddenly Trump would “win” Wisconsin 1,396,608 to 1,051,859.

Wisconsin is actually a perfect example of why the Electoral College is trash. You can see the exact same math play out on a state level that would play out on a national level. Check out this map:

The red counties are ones where Trump won the majority. In the blue counties, Biden won the majority. I should mention: counties don’t matter for Electoral College points. The state’s EC points go to whichever candidate won the popular vote in the state, but the counties provide a useful illustration.

In the two counties with large cities with large Black populations, Biden won, while Trump won the mostly white smaller counties. If states were run like the EC, then each of those smaller counties would be worth points, meaning that Trump would likely have won the state despite losing the popular vote in the State. And since two of those counties, as I mentioned before, have 90% of the black population, that would mean that all of those black voters counted less than their white counterparts in the rural counties.

And that’s what the EC does on a national level. Look at this US map by county¹¹ vs this US Electoral map.¹²

You can see that there’s a lot more purple and mixed voting than the EC map implies, but there’s also a lot of deep blue. You can see that my home state, Arkansas (Ark on the map to the right) has its own sections of blue in the center and upper corners, but those sections get invalidated because the state’s points go to Trump because he won the popular vote.

That is the real threat to our democracy. Not voter fraud, but voter suppression. As I said, every year, Republicans start claiming there are these cases of widespread and unabated voter fraud, which they use as a justification for closing polling places, enacting voter ID laws, and otherwise making it more difficult to vote.¹³

Harris County, Texas, which has 4 million residents, had to close 11 polling locations¹⁴ just a few weeks before the election because the Republican governor claimed he was trying to stop voter fraud. That meant that all of those voters now had…one polling location to drop off their ballots.

Our country passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to combat discriminatory actions by many states, but especially southern states, against Black voters. Section 5, in particular, was important because it made sure that voting laws from several states (known for historically attempting voter suppression and discrimination against Black voters) were vetted federally before they could be passed to ensure they weren’t discriminatory. It wasn’t perfect, but in 2013, the Supreme Court voided section 5, resulting in 1600 polling places¹⁵ being closed across the country since.

Within 24 hours of the Supreme Court’s decision, Texas enacted new voter ID¹⁶ laws which have been shown time and time¹⁷ again to impact elderly, Black, Latinx, and poor voters¹⁸ more heavily¹⁹ — all of whom tend to vote majority Democrat.

One of the remarkable things about the coronavirus is that, by allowing mail-in voting, it may have been one of the most equitable ways for people to vote in decades. Mail-in voting had to be early to make it in by Election Day, and it meant folks didn’t have to worry about long lines since they could just drop their ballots in the mail. Because voting in person is so risky, it was difficult for even Republicans to argue against allowing them. Which, of course, meant that Trump’s Postmaster general appointee had to enact policy changes²⁰ that caused major delays²¹ and began ordering that mailboxes start being removed²², while removing 711 sorting machines as well²³.

And of course, if they can’t suppress voters through discriminatory laws, they can always set up fake ballot drop offs²⁴ and refuse to remove them when caught, encourage armed white supremacists to “guard”²⁵ polling stations, ignore a federal judge’s²⁶ order to sweep for missing ballots, or run fake third party candidates²⁷ to siphon votes from the Democratic candidates.

All of this, and I haven’t even touched on how Republicans used the 2000 Census²⁸ to gerrymander districts wildly in their favor — in some cases, getting college students in the Young Republicans to submit “maps from the community”²⁹ to provide a veneer of being “fair” and “unbiased.”

This is why I’ve said time and time again…Trump isn’t some strange anomaly. Trump is the result of decades of decisions and strategies that the Republican party has put into place since at least Nixon if not earlier. He’s just one more example in a long history of the US choosing the appeasement of racists over justice for Black people and other people of color.

As I said, the US is undergoing an active coup. But for comparison, the Democrats are certainly flawed themselves. They’re currently undergoing some soul searching of their own as the centrist and more conservative members of the party blame progressives and more left-wing members of the party for “alienating voters,” while the progressives argue that the party should embrace their progressivism, and instead of chasing white moderate Republicans, appeal to Black and brown voters while working to ensure they can vote as easily as possible.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have been walking in lockstep with a man who constantly praises dictators and is trying to argue that any votes cast for Democrats are illegitimate because when it all comes down to it, Republicans — not just Trump, but the whole Republican Party — believe that they alone have the right to rule, and they will do anything they can to stay in power.

___________________________________________

¹ “In Control” by Charles Apple (The Spokesman-Review, 6/25/20) – Link

² “List of United States presidential candidates by number of votes received” by Wikipedia Staff (Wikipedia, updated 11/12/20) – Link

³ “List of United States presidential elections in which the winner lost the popular vote” by Wikipedia Staff (Wikipedia, updated 11/12/20) – Link

⁴ “The Electoral College’s Racist Origins” by Wilfred Codrington III (The Atlantic, 11/17/19) – Link

⁵ “The Proslavery Origins of the Electoral College” by Paul Finkelman (Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 23:4 2002, 6/9/02) – Link

⁶ “Lindsey Graham Fox News Video Clip” from Matt Wilstein (Twitter, 11/8/20) – Link

⁷ “Lindsey Graham Wants To Destroy ‘Mail-In Ballots’ Because They Hurt Republicans” by John Amato (Crooks and Liars, 11/10/20) – Link

⁸ “Lawsuit on behalf of Trump seeks to exclude votes from Milwaukee, Dane and Menominee counties” by Molly Beck (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 11/12/20) – Link

⁹ “Wisconsin presidential results” by Politico Staff (Politico, 11/12/20) – Link

¹⁰ “African Americans in Wisconsin: Overview” by Wisconsin DHS Staff (Wisconsin Department of Health Services, 9/10/18) – Link

¹¹ “Four maps that show how America voted in the 2020 election with results by county, number of voters” by Mitchell Thorson, Janie Haseman, and Carlie Procell (USA Today, updated 11/10/20) – Link

¹² “Presidential election results” by Politico Staff (Politico, updated 11/12/20) – Link

¹³ “New evidence that voter ID laws ‘skew democracy’ in favor of white Republicans” by Christopher Ingraham (The Washington Post, 2/4/16) – Link

¹⁴ “Texas governor cuts back on voting locations weeks before election” by Anthony Zurcher (BBC, 10/1/20) – Link

¹⁵ “Report: More than 1600 Polling Places Have Closed Since the Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act” by Matt Cohen (Mother Jones, 9/10/19) – Link

¹⁶ “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes” by Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi, and Lindsay Nielson (The Journal of Politics Vol 79, No 2, 4/2017) – Link

¹⁷ “Getting a photo ID so you can vote is easy. Unless you’re poor, black, Latino or elderly.” by Sari Horwitz (The Washington Post, 5/23/16) – Link

¹⁸ “Study: Those Allegedly Racist Voter ID Laws Are Actually Pretty Racist” by Jay Willis (GQ, 2/15/17) – Link

¹⁹ “Courts are finally pointing out the racism behind voter ID laws” by J. Gerald Hebert and Danielle Lang (The Washington Post, 8/3/16) – Link

²⁰ “What’s wrong with the mail” by Adam Clark Estes (Vox, updated 8/18/20) – Link

²¹ “Postmaster general’s changes causing mail delays, USPS workers say” by Michael Sainato (The Guardian, 8/16/20) – Link

²² “USPS removes thousands of mailboxes each year; in 2020, mail-in ballots make it political” by Katie Wedell, Josh Salman, and Dak Le (USA Today, 8/31/20) – Link

²³ “USPS removed 711 sorting machines this year, new court documents show” by Kristen Holmes and Paul P. Murphy (CNN, updated 9/9/20) – Link

²⁴ “California Republican Party Admits It Placed Misleading Ballot Boxes Around State” by Glenn Thrush and Jennifer Medina (The New York Times, updated 11/3/20) – Link

²⁵ “Trump’s call for poll-watching volunteers sparks fear of chaos and violence on Election Day” by Amy Gardner, Joshua Partlow, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Josh Dawsey (The Washington Post, 9/30/20) – Link

²⁶ “USPS data shows thousands of mailed ballots missed Election Day deadlines” by Jacob Bogage and Christopher Ingraham (The Washington Post, 11/4/20) – Link

²⁷ “Evidence suggests several state Senate candidates were plants funded by dark money” by Glenna Milberg (WPLG Local 10, updated 11/10/20) – Link

²⁸ Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count by David Daley (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 7/4/17) – Link

²⁹ “GOP’s Terraferma testifies that pieces of his redistricting maps were public submission” by Mary Ellen Klas (Tampa Bay Times, 5/27/14) – Link