After the 2020 election, on a message board site in which I participate, a post appeared declaring that Trump actually picked up 100 million votes in the election and actually won almost all of the states and their electoral votes. My response was a post asking for actual evidence for such a claim, which was even more outlandish than the idea that Trump really won, even though he lost the popular vote. About 30% of those who responded to the post were "pretty sure" that Trump really won, but only a few of them picked up on the post and joined the "100 million club."
Most of those in the discussion dropped away as those who dealt with real facts and had real evidence bombarded their conspiracy theories and refuted, one by one, all of the collection of fakes and paid informants paraded around by Giuliani and Powell. But there was this one guy who kept insisting not only that Trump won, but that he got 100 million votes. He got that from somewhere else, because I've seen billboards and advertisements claiming the same thing. But of course, he couldn't explain how he was so certain that was true.
His arguments are purely anectodal. Everyone he knows voted for Trump. Who, after all, in his world would vote for Biden? All the bumper stickers and yard signs around where he lives were for Trump. When I posted that, for the entire election season, on my commute to and from work, I passed only one house displaying a Trump sign, while I passed literally hundreds of Biden-Harris signs. Well, OK, he conceded, I must live in a heavily Democratic area. Well duh! But it just didn't seem to register that the city in which I live has twice the population of the entire state in which he lives.
For a while, he was on to the theory that thousands of ballots had been trucked across state lines from New York into Pennsylvania to boost Biden's numbers and give him the 20 electoral votes, since New York had plenty of Democrats and didn't need the ballots. That's one of the most outlandish theories about voter fraud. First of all, New York ballots would not run through Pennsylvania machines. And these wackos keep forgetting that the ballots are not just for the Presidential election. Why truck ballots across the border into Pennsylvania that had the names of New York candidates on them? If thousands upon thousands of ballots were trucked across the state line, where's the discrepancy in the down ballot races? Why didn't New York officials notice that thousands and thousands of ballots that had been registered as cast were missing from the final count?
Ultimately, it doesn't really matter whether Trump got 100 million votes or not. Biden got 306 electoral votes, and that's what elected him.
Perhaps the epitome of phony accusations of voter fraud is the video of Mellissa Carone, who appeared at a "hearing" in front of hastily gathered Michigan Republican legislators in what was a made-for-camera event, but was not a legitimate "hearing". Carone, who appears either drunk or impaired by something, makes claims about falsified records while one of the legislators is holding the records and noting that they are not falsified.
Then there's the whole saga of the "Cyber Ninjas," a group led by major Trumpie Doug Logan, which claimed to be a legitimate "auditor" and was engaged by Arizona Senate President Karen Fann to "audit" Maricopa County's ballots. Aside from the fact that neither Fann nor the Arizona Senate has the legal authority to order an audit of one county's ballots, the project went forward. It was a comedy of errors, from mishandling of ballots, which is a crime, to exposing expensive counting machinery, which the county will now have to replace, to having to ask the county's election commissioners multiple times for instructions on how to manage their computer records, like kindergartners who can't remember the teacher's instructions after a minute.
Ultimately, after pocketing $150,000 of state taxpayer dollars and $6 million from Trump campaign financiers, they released an ambiguous report in which the bottom line was their "discovery" that Biden actually got a few hundred more votes in Maricopa County than had been previously reported. I'm not sure how they actually arrived at that conclusion, since they couldn't seem to walk and chew gum at the same time. Nor can I explain why they arrived at that conclusion when their obvious intention at the outset was to prove Trump really won Arizona. They claimed they had a "magic camera" that could detect "bamboo fibers" in paper ballots, which was supposed to prove they came from China. No bamboo appeared.
What they did accomplish was to make sure Karen Fann loses her Senate seat, and that the Democrats take over statewide offices and both houses of the legislature.
The only thing you can do with all of this is laugh. In 21st century America, the world's most powerful, wealthy country, there are people who believe the wildest thoughts from someone's imagination, but not what their own eyes and ears see and hear.
And no, you can't fix......
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