June 15, 2021 Editor

‘Pure insanity’: Here’s perhaps the craziest election fraud conspiracy the Trump team pushed

Footnotes:
  1. Here are the comments at the end of the article:

    The draft [complaint to be filed on behalf of the federal government at the Supreme Court] mirrored the Texas lawsuit so closely that it included one particularly noteworthy claim.

    “The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,” it reads. “For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power.”

    On Dec. 4, I looked at this jaw-dropping claim. It’s not complicated: The analysis assumes that votes counted before 3 a.m. and after 3 a.m. would not be different. But they were different: The later votes at issue came from large cities that took longer to tally their results — and that were far more heavily Democratic.

    In other words, even setting aside the utter lack of evidence of fraud having occurred (that is, the lack of evidence of people actually changing any votes), this statistical analysis was flawed to the point of ludicrousness a week before the Supreme Court rejected the Texas claim. Yet two weeks after the court tossed that case, it appeared in near-whole-cloth in the inbox of the acting attorney general in hopes that it would be treated seriously.

    What mattered to Trump wasn’t that the claims be accurate. It was that they be treated as at least potentially accurate and — who knows? — maybe he’d get to stay in the White House. Trump had heard something he wanted to hear, and he wanted the federal government to agree with that, not with reality. His aides did their best to make it happen, despite the various ways in which their time could obviously have been better spent at the moment.

    Not for the first time, Trump was stymied by individuals unwilling to accede to his fantasies.[]

Editor

Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.

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