I have written before about the phenomenon of poll defying victories for Republicans post the 2002 shift to electronic voting machines, commonly dubbed the ‘red shift.’ While you may mock this, gentle reader, as the purview of the tinfoil hat brigade, I would like to remind you that a federal judge ordered Georgia to get rid of it’s paperless electronic voting machines in 2018 and the very next election that state elected 2 Democratic Senators and rejected Trump’s bid for a second term.
You may well argue that correlation does not imply causation, but Federal courts rarely order a state to dismantle and replace wholesale their electoral apparatus. Of course I suppose (or at least hope) that it’s rare that a Secretary of State supervises his own election to Governor. (Yes that happened.)
I would say Federal Courts don’t order anything lightly, but I am still somewhat sore at a Federal judge who after an entire bench trial decided he wasn’t going to issue a verdict and required a written trial brief due in two weeks…but I digress.
So lets assume there is a problem with electronic voting machines. (I mean there are numerous problems, they’re easily hacked, they connect to the internet though they’re not supposed to, e poll books don’t work right and cause delays, votes get lost, they are vulnerable to foreign countries changing vote totals.) And it’s true that Dems proposed numerous bills after 2016 to make our elections more secure so they must have believed at some point there was a problem right? So why when Donald Trump outperformed his polls and 27 out of 27 toss up elections in the House went Republican, was it Trump’s personal clown, I’m sorry lawyer, and Sydney Powell yelling from the rooftops about electoral fraud and not Dems?
Some of this can be chalked up to Rs dominance of the media narrative. (Fox gets the highest ratings and they frame the issue most of the time. Sad but true.) Some to the fact that Dems were playing defense since Trump had said he wouldn’t accept the results of an election if he lost. But he said the same in 2016 (fighting against recounts in court despite his passion for them in 2020) so Dems had four years to prepare for the phenomenon (commonly called projection) where Trump might be both cheating the system while accusing Dems of doing…
