How to Deprogram a Cultist Who Thinks 2020 Election Was Stolen

Almost three years on, as many as two-thirds of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.

In spite of that, in the first Republican debate just concluded, the question wasn't even asked whether the candidates agree or disagree. Fox News, which conducted the debate, was protecting them from having to answer.

A television reporter said this week she had met people "all the time on the road
throughout Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire" and in every conversation found that "it comes down to the central kernel which is that they believe that Trump won the 2020 election". They believe it because Donald Trump told them so and right-wing media had no compunctions about promoting the Big Lie to engender the worst schism in the American republic since the Civil War.

The believers typically cited one or another anecdote as proof (for them) of a conspiracy to subvert the election in Biden's favor: What about the suitcase of ballots brought out from under a table in Atlanta to be counted at night after other election workers had gone home? Why did an 18-wheeler filled with ballots travel from Long Island into Pennsylvania? How to explain another ballot-filled truck pulling into the Detroit counting center in the pre-dawn hours after the election? Three of several stories traded around social media as somehow proving a fraudulent election. The conspiracy-minded looked no further and locked onto these tales. They of course assumed, however nonsensically, that all such ballots, if they existed at all, had to be votes for Biden, none for Trump. It seemed never to have occurred to the millions who fell for this that these random anecdotes failed to cohere into any sort of consistent plot and only a vast, organized plot could have overturned an election.

If the media has ever confronted all these conspiracy theories comprehensively, we've not come across it. So last October, Let's Fix This Country ran a 5,500 world analysis which we think was determinative in laying to rest the major fables of 2020 election fraud because all of them had been investigated and disproved as we recounted. (That article is found here) .

This time we take a different and more conclusive approach. We did so once before in February but the article was about Trump suppressing a report that found no fraud and the argument we think is conclusive was buried a thousand words deep in the article. So below are six reasons that destroy any notion of a stolen election. The focus is on the mechanics of elections, replacing nonsense with common sense:

 How do you create imaginary people? Where is the logic of believing in Trump's repeated claims of dead voters in the key states he lost by narrow margins — 5,000 dead voters in Georgia, 1,500 in Nevada, and so on? How would that plot work? A small conspiratorial army in each state would be needed to comb through county records without raising suspicion to find thousands of dead people, and then check each to see which of them might not have been pruned from the voter rolls so that a phony ballot would be counted? Trump worshippers don't think through how unlikely, how impractical, such a scheme is (and with no one ever having a crisis of conscience to spill the beans, then or since). Trump counts on them being dunce enough to believe without a second thought.

 Doesn't anyone wonder about quantity? To flip the results in 2020's half dozen closely competitive states called for a few hundred thousand phony ballots. Why so many? Because before the election the postulated Biden conspirators could not know how many phony Biden ballots would be needed in each of the states so that enough of those states would be flipped to tip the election to a Biden victory. But Biden disciples didn't dwell on the impracticably massive quantities of illegal votes that would be needed. Instead, they fastened on this and that anecdote as if they were all it took.

 About those massive quantities of needed phony ballots. How would that be kept silent? In the thousands of polling places across the country, for a ballot cast in-person or mailed in to be counted, a person must have registered to vote. Ballots are checked against that registry and once checked, a redundant vote by that person is blocked (and flagged as illegal).

Each of those hundreds of thousands of ballots must be filled in with the unique names, addresses, and signatures of actual registered voters. If the data for fill-in could be obtained — which need to span several states and the hundreds of polling places where those voters live — how do the conspirators recruit hundreds of people to fill out the ballots, all of them willingly committing fraud and not one of them blowing a whistle?

That's the premise of the film "2,000 Mules". Its title tells us of the hypothesis that 2,000 people were recruited to collect and deliver fraudulent ballots to drop boxes. The film never mentions where those ballots came from — who performed the copious task of filling in those ballots with voter roll data and forged signatures. Here again, none of the mules has come forward to confess to the scheme because, while the deniers even went to the extent of making a theater-release movie, it was just an idea based on nothing but conjecture.

 Doesn't there have to be two of everyone? Let's anyway say there were enough souls angry enough at Trump and his party to run the risk — as much as five years in prison plus fines, each fraudulent ballot a separate count —of filling out scores of phony ballots for Biden. What happens when the ballot re aches the polling place where the actual person has already voted, or the actual person goes to the polling place and is told the vote has already been cast? How does this plot work when inevitably voters begin to complain, local newspapers begin to report fraudulent votes, the networks pick up the story and soon — remember those quantities above — hundreds of thousands voice outrage of stolen votes.

But that didn't happen, did it? Instead, there was silence. Instead, it was only Trump who supposedly knows of all this double-voting — "more than 42,000 double votes in Nevada", he told the crowd on January 6th. It is troubling to discover how stupid Americans are to be taken in by this.

 Okay, so it must have been the machines. Trump's entire premise was that masses of fraudulent mailed ballots would steal the election, but we've shown that cannot work. The strategy turned to allegations by Trump and members of his campaign that voting machines, such as those made by Dominion Voting Systems, used decade old Venezuelan software that flipped Trump votes to Biden. None of them had any evidence — the claim was loony — much less the slightest knowledge of the software and how it works. For repeated defamation of Dominion by Fox News hosts, the network had to pay $787.5 million to settle Dominion's suit.

The software is sealed in, and likely in compiled form (zeroes and ones) that is entirely unintelligible. Even if in a readable coding language, who in countless polling locations would there be to understand and tamper with it? Well, they could test-run batches of ballots and compare the tally with hand counts to find machine-switched votes, couldn't they? Yes, and they did, but not in batches, in entire recounts in which machine and manual counts came out remarkably close.

John Poulos, Dominion's founder and CEO, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal which shredded the absurd accusations by outlining the security of how U.S. election systems actually work:

"Third-party test labs, chosen by the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and accredited by a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, perform complete source-code reviews on every federally certified tabulation system. States replicate this process for their own certifications."

No single company in the American electoral systems could surreptitiously change votes, said Dominion in a 15-point rebuttal of right-wing conjurings. Such a plot would require “collaboration of thousands” of poll workers, auditors, and contractors who support state information technology and voting systems.

 That leaves election workers. The most reprehensible are those who think election workers rigged Biden's presidency. How do they imagine that certain poll workers had connected with others at polling stations across their state all willing to break the law and risk prison so as to change votes, that this phenomenon occurred in several of the battleground states, that not one of the workers would come forward to repent?

And how would they do it? Somehow erasing the ink marks on paper ballots? How would they change touch-screen selection? And we've already dealt with the fantasy of fiddling with the software in the sealed machines.

Psychotic Trump fanatics have gone after poll workers at random, finding where they live, stalking them, causing some to move, to live with relatives, fearful for their safety, even their lives. How do we rid our country of them?

By the way, one of those miscreants is Donald Trump, who has persistently attacked two Georgia workers, one testifying before the January 6 committee, "There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere" and choked with emotion asked, "Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?".

Dear reader,
Could you do what the media hasn't? They have not put forth this logic-based argument of why the 2020 election could not have been stolen. Millions of unthinking Americans have been left to still believe the myth. We urge that you send this article to your address list — here's a compressed link to cut/paste —   bit.ly/3EbyZTH    — and also ask them to pass this on as a way to help destroy Donald's ruinous Big Lie.