One of the first lessons I learned about politics is that there is a blurry line between feeling and fact in public opinion. The way people feel is often equally or more important than what is happening in actuality in terms of dictating voter behavior and attitudes. However, it wasn't until this year that I understood firsthand how the relationship between feeling and fact could infiltrate into the government itself and change the ways in which an entire party messages and relates to its base of voters.
Donald Trump is a perfect representation of the blurred line between feeling and fact. He feels that the media is unfair to him, but the fact is that the negative coverage he receives is driven by his own self-narrative. Trump feels that the Democratic probe into his relationship with Russia was a hoax, but the fact is that he broke the law and exploited foreign policy relationships in order to benefit his own reelection. Most notably, Trump feels that the presidential election and recent Senate elections were rigged against Republicans, but the fact is that they were not fraudulent at all. To prove it, I decided to do a deep dive into right wing media to find the most popular election fraud claims and debunk them. Most of these claims are based on one screenshot or a tweet that was spread across media platforms and heightened by people in power like the President and his congressional supporters. Just like those videos you scroll past on Facebook that claim you can fix your cracked phone screen by putting toothpaste on it, these claims focus on a piece of information that is accessible to a wide audience and seems like it could be accurate, but requires action to prove or disprove which many people are simply unwilling to do. So, I did the research for you and debunked below the top 5 most popular election fraud claims.
1. Dominion voting machines were hacked
It's easy to understand why this claim has spread so far and has become so believable. It relies on people having a low level of knowledge about technology and voting machines, which is an accurate analysis of a majority of American citizens. The theory circulated initially unsubstantiated, but later included imagery of what appeared to be a circuit board of a Dominion voting machine showing how easy it would be to hack. This image was later revealed to be an image of an electric guitar floor pedal, not a Dominion voting machine at all. Additionally, this theory can be debunked by examining the parts of the machine which could potentially be hacked. The feeder and scanner components of a Dominion voting machine do not have a modem or router meaning that they do not connect to the internet or WiFi. If something is not connected to the internet it cannot be hacked via the internet. It just doesn't work that way. The only component of the machine that could potentially be hacked are the poll pads which are connected to internet to allow election workers to download updated voter lists. However, these poll pads are only connected to the internet and not to WiFi, and WiFi is disconnected before the poll pads are used at a polling location. Furthermore, the touch screens and attached printers associated with the poll pads are never connected to the internet and are air-gapped meaning they are not connected to the internet. All this goes to say, no, Dominion voting machines were not hacked by anyone on election night.
2. Dead people voted
This is a classic voter fraud claim that has been spread for many many years, and it's still not true. While it's possible that someone voted early and then died before November 3rd, it's highly unlikely that there was a widespread conspiracy or effort to cast votes using names of deceased Americans. If you have ever voted before, you know how thorough the process of identification is before you are allowed to cast your ballot. You must provide valid ID, match your signature, and verify other identifying information such as date of birth and home address. Imagine you are trying to vote using a deceased person's name in order to cast two ballots. You must know that the person is dead, know that the state does not have record of their death, know what their signature looks like, know how to access their ID and other identifying information, and know that they were registered to vote in the first place. These conditions are difficult to fulfill especially on the scale at which Trump and his supporters allege to have occurred. While it may be the case that a handful of people have successfully pulled this off in the past, it's important to recognize the difference between an extensive amount of fraud and an extensive amount of coverage of a small amount of fraud. It is easy to extrapolate that fraud is pervasive based on the amount of coverage of fraud in right wing media, however these stories of fraud often rely on faulty means of measurement or focus heavily on one case of proven irregularity in an election which intentionally leads readers to assume that the fraud must be occurring at a higher rate than it actually is. Rest assured, dead people voting did not have any sway in the 2020 election.
3. Biden got 100% of the vote in a late night “ballot dump” in Michigan
This claim of fraud was debunked almost instantly when it first began to spread, yet I still see it with a lot of prevalence throughout right wing media. The story goes that in the middle of the night, Joe Biden received around 130,000 votes in a ballot dump while Trump received 0. Someone grabbed a screenshot of election maps showing the unusual boost for Biden, and the image echoed throughout right wing media. The original tweet was deleted by its author after he learned the truth behind the image but the screenshots live on and continue to misinform people. The facts behind this alleged fraud are that there was a clerical error in the polling place where an election worker accidentally typed an extra 0 at the end of a number of votes tallied for Biden. Instead of logging 15,371 votes for Biden, the worker logged 153,710 votes. The difference between these two figures is 138,339 votes which explains the alleged "ballot dump" that appeared to show a net gain of around 130,000 votes for Biden. The error was quickly reversed and the polling was fixed to show that Biden and Trump were still locked in an extremely tight race in the state. While this claim is popular and continues to circulate, it's simply not true and had no impact on the results of the election.
4. More people voted than live in a state/than were registered to vote
This is another common allegation of voter fraud that has been pushed by Trump and his supporters in recent months. Most theories and claims like this one stem from a tweet or other social media post that show images of numbers or graphs that appear to highlight discrepancies between the number of people voting and the number of people who are registered or otherwise eligible to vote. The claim that more people voted than lived in a state originated largely with data from the state of Georgia. The claim states that only about 3 million people live in Georgia while there were over 4 million votes cast. This claim is false though, because the data on the population of Georgia is actually the population of the country of Georgia not the US state of Georgia. Currently, the population of the state of Georgia is about 10 million and the number of eligible voters is just around 7 million. Moving onto the next claim, some people argue that there are more votes cast than registered voters, and therefore there must be fraudulent votes or people who have successfully voted more than one time. This claim suffers from several issues, but the most prevalent is that the number of registered voters has never and will never match the number of votes cast because each state has different voter registration laws. For example, the state of North Dakota doesn't require voter registration at all, so if you look at the number of registered voters in the US versus the number of votes cast, it will inevitably leave out an entire state's worth of legitimate votes. The theory, like most others, spread from a tweet that claimed that the number of registered voters who turned out to vote (which the tweet estimated as 133,000,000) and number of votes cast (159,000,000) didn't match and supposed that if it did match, Biden would have only been able to get 59 million votes instead of 81 million. However, a more accurate measure of number of voters would be to examine eligible voters as opposed to registered voters. Reuter's calculations found that there were over 200,000,000 eligible voters in the 2020 election, and assuming voter turnout around 66.7% (instead of the inaccurate 62.5% the original tweet used), the number of votes cast matches up with the number of voters participating.
5. Poll workers changed votes from Trump to Biden
This final claim hinges on videos of poll workers opening and filling out ballots at tables inside polling places. These videos are often shared with the narrative that poll workers are finding ballots marked for Trump, changing them to be marked for Biden and then disposing of the original Trump ballots. What's actually happening in these videos is a common practice in elections all over the country. Poll workers in these videos are fixing ballots that arrived folded, torn, damaged, or marked improperly by voters. Workers take proper flat and undamaged ballots and transfer the votes to them so that they can be counted by a voting machine. This process is carried out on camera in places visible to poll watchers and the press to make sure that no switching of votes occurs. That’s why videos of the process are so easily accessible and why the tables are sitting out in the open not tucked away in secrecy. Again, this is another example of a piece of "evidence" said to "prove fraud" that is really a completely different piece of information that has been taken out of context and presented to the public in a way to make it appear to represent a fact rather than a feeling.
While I know that these debunkings won't convince everyone that the election wasn't rigged, it's important to continue to share information about election security and integrity. If one person regains faith in democracy and US elections as a result of looking further into false claims, doing this kind of research and sharing this kind of information will ultimately be worth it. Elections in America are secure. Your voice counts. Joe Biden won the election fairly and will be the next President of the United States.
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