What Trump’s Election Denialism Hath Wrought
Some direct evidence of the effects.
This piece from 60 Minutes is worth your time, Arizona election officials subjected to violent threats undaunted in defense elections. It is an interview with a number of persons, all Republicans. Primarily it is focused on Stephen Richer, who was elected as Maricopa County’s recored in 2020 as well as Shelby Busch, an election denier and Maricopa County’s Republican Party vice-chair. In addition, Clint Hickman, the Republican chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and Ben Ginsberg, a prominent Republican attorney are interviewed. Ginsberg was once general council to the RNC, he represented the Bush campaign in the 2000 Florida recount, and worked for the Romney campaign.
Let me stress: four Republicans (two of whom are currently in office). But one is quite unlike the other. There is also the Republican who wasn’t interviewed who is also discussed below.
I would note that Richer and Hickman have both faced intense public opprobrium because they followed the law and the data and, worse, have faced numerous death-threats. At least one of the men who threatened Richer in serving a prison sentence as a result (two others have been convicted and are awaiting sentencing). One of the men who threatened Hickman is also in prison.
First, Richer.
Richer took office after the 2020 election, when his own party was up in arms over allegations of fraud. It was Richer’s first elected office and he knew what to do.
“They just need answers,” Richer said he thought. “It’s not that complicated of an issue. It’s just people are uncertain. They expected Donald Trump to win. I expected Donald Trump to win in Maricopa County. He didn’t win. They have questions. As soon as we give them logical, factual answers, all will be well.”But that’s not what happened. There were multiple investigations. The Republican-led State Senate commissioned a hand recount of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million paper ballots, which reconfirmed Mr. Biden won. Statewide, prosecutions for illegal voting involved a total of 19 ballots.
Note a couple of things.
First, the fact that evidence and reason did not work (indeed, the piece makes it quite clear that no amount of evidence matters to those denying the veracity of the results). It didn’t matter than reality could be demonstrated, nor that the officials conducting the process were Republicans who almost certainly voted for Trump. To reiterate Richer above: “I expected Donald Trump to win in Maricopa County.”
Second, there were 19 ballots that led to prosecutions for illegal voting statewide. There were 3,420,565 ballots cast in the state in 2020 according to official numbers from the Secretary of State’s office. That means 0.00005554637903% of the vote was found to be illegal in AZ. This is a number so small as to be meaningless to the outcome. Moreover, given how hard perfection is to achieve in any endeavor, it is almost a miracle that that is the number. But, it is also why honest people cannot say, “There was zero fraud in the election” and why other can claims that fraud exists without any sense of proportion if not the implication that something very sinister is going on. But scope matters. Nonetheless, those 19 ballots are the kind of thing that will go into the Heritage Foundation’s Electoral Fraud Database, likely as 19 separate entries and then be used as examples of massive fraud. (I have written extensively on that database here and here).
Second, Hickman.
He has been a supervisor on the board for 11 years and was among Trump’s most loyal supporters in 2020. Then-President Trump publicly thanked him in 2020 at a campaign rally days before the election. But after all the votes were tallied, Hickman found no evidence of fraud and said so when he and the Republican majority Board of Supervisors voted to certify the county’s election. Since then, he says he has been accused of treason and received death threats.
“I’ve lost count. I have lost count,” Hickman said. “And so have my colleagues. And so have election workers.”
In one instance, Hickman got a call from Mark A. Rissi, who threatened to “lynch your stupid lying Commie a—.”
Rissi, who in the voicemail went on to threaten to hang him, received a two-and-a-half year prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to sending threatening communications. Hickman recalled another message he received he called “chilling”.
The caller stated, “‘We know the restaurants that you are in. And we know where your kids go to school,'” Hickman said.
Again, Hickman was a Trump supporter. And, again, these threats are serious enough to put people behind bars. Moreover, the notion that an elected official, properly doing their job, should face threats to their children is sickening.
Third, Busch.
“What I am doing is, I am shining a big bright light on the disdain and the arrogance of some of the elected officials,” she said. “They are elected to represent the interests of the people. And until they are ready to step up and do that, then there will be unrest.”
Busch believes state statutes and regulations were violated. She still questions whether signature verification was proper and whether some ballots were collected illegally. In a recent case, a judge disqualified Busch — an administrator in a medical practice — from testifying as an expert because he said she was “obviously unqualified…not even in the ballpark.”
“That’s one judge’s opinion who is a radical leftist who is legislating from the bench and I don’t believe that it had any merit in my credibility whatsoever,” she said.
The write-up leave out, I think, the most telling interchange wherein Pelley tries to get Busch to explain what evidence she has. Eventually Pelley says something to the effect that she is right because she says she is and Busch agreed. Additionally, she claimed divine inspiration.
In a speech, recorded on video earlier this year, Busch said she would “lynch” Richer.
“If Stephen Richer walked in this room, I would lynch him,” she said in March. “I don’t unify with people who don’t believe in the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country.”
Busch later said she was referring to a “political lynching.”
“It’s referred to as destroying someone’s career. It was not ever meant physically in any way, shape, or form,” Busch said. “Probably a poor choice of words.”
A “poor choice of words,” indeed. But a very telling choice.
I would note that the word “lynch” showed up in one of the threats to Hickman. Not only does lynching have a troubled history in the United States, it is a word directly associated with mob justice.
By the way, Busch was rewarded for her behavior by being a delegate to the RNC and being the delegate who announced Arizona’s delegation for Trump during the roll call of the states. The GOP is now the party of people like Busch, rather than Richer or Hickman. If you are reading this and you consider yourself a Republican, ask yourself which Republican Party you would prefer. Then consider that as ironic or counterintuitive as it may seem, voting for Harris (or, at a bare minimum, not voting for Trump) is the best pathway you have is avoiding the party being controlled by people like Busch who reject evidence and threaten violence on those who present it.
Fourth, Ginsberg.
“The evidence to back up the allegations of fraud and elections being unreliable simply does not exist,” Ginsberg said.
[…]
“Donald Trump and his supporters brought 64 cases. They lost 63 of them outright,” Ginsberg explained. The case they won related to a small number of ballots “far from outcome determinative,” he says.
Election deniers have said that they lost in court because the judges weren’t fair.
“Under the rule of law, you have every right to submit your litigation,” Ginsberg said. “But under the rule of law, a conservative principle, a Republican principle for as long as I’ve been practicing election law, you have to accept the rulings of the court.”
Again: this is a man who has spent his career working for Republicans at the highest levels.
The Missing Fifth Republican.
Let me conclude with a fifth Republican–the one who decided not to be interviewed: Donald Trump. He is the source of all of this discontent, anger, and threatened violence. This kind of behavior does not spontaneously emerge. The Trump campaign, and Trump himself, seeded doubt before the election and stoked the flames of denial and discontent for months. It is why we had an attack on the US Capitol on January 6th. The same anger that lead to death threats against Richer and Hickman and for people like Busch to toss around words like “lynching” and motivated an insurrection.
The source is Trump.
Part of the reason, for example, that Richer received threats is because Trump lied on social media about what Maricopa County officials were doing with the data. Likewise, Trump lied about basic processes, such as the notion that all the voting should be counted by election night. That is, and always has been, impossible.
For example, from official remarks he made on election night in 2020:
Good evening. I’d like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts to protect the integrity of our very important 2020 election. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late — we’re looking at them very strongly. But a lot of votes came in late.
[…]
As everybody saw, we won by historic numbers. And the pollsters got it knowingly wrong. They got it knowingly wrong. We had polls that were so ridiculous, and everybody knew that at the time. There was no blue wave that they predicted. They thought there was going to be a big blue wave; that was false. That was done for suppression reasons. But instead, there was a big red wave.
These are all lies. But people like Busch believe.
(A book could be filled with Trump’s conscious, public lies on this subject–I will stick just to the ones above because this post has already gotten very long).
None of this will get better if he wins. He will put people with Busch’s mentality (i.e., facts are irrelevant, only what I believe matters) into positions of power. Significant, serious power.
But let me stress: Trump is the source of the denialism. He is the source of the anger. He is doing nothing to squelch it. And, as I have noted, he himself frequently uses violent rhetoric. Leadership and character matter and Trump is leading many of his followers down a dark path and is demonstrating an utter lack of character.
Here are just some examples:
- Radicalizing Rhetoric
- Donald Trump’s Ninety Minutes Hate
- Trump: I Am “The Chosen One”
- Trump and the F-word
- The Politics of Images
- Speaking of Democracy-Eroding Rhetoric
- Violent Rhetoric: Legal But Dangerous
- Trump’s Rhetoric and the GOP’s Test
- Trump Calls Political Rivals “Vermin” and Seeks to “Root Out” the “Threat from Within”
- Trump Salutes Insurrection ‘Hostages’
Look, for example, just in the last week at the lies he is telling about hurricane relief. He is actively cultivating anger and resentment against FEMA and other officials because he thinks it helps him politically.
I would note that the write-up provided above of the interview is adequate, but that the piece for TV has more information and is also more impactful. The video can be found here.
As a bit of a postscript, I also wrote on piece on in 2021, The Arizona Audit that is relevant and the follow-up: BREAKING: Biden Wins AZ. The first piece details a lot of the legal outcomes in the state in advance of what was, to me, a stunt audit aimed at proving all the formal governmental types were wrong. The spoiler for the follow-up is that even the audit proved Biden won. To quote from a NYT piece noted in my post: “In fact, the draft report from the company Cyber Ninjas found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for President Biden and 261 fewer votes for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County, the fast-growing region that includes Phoenix.”
The evidence that Trump lost is overwhelming, and yet he still insists he won and inflames the passions of many of his supporters in so-doing.
Note that JD Vance would not say who won during the VP debate. And then, later that week, claimed the Trump won.
I know that people will say that all politicians lie, and this is true, if anything, because all humans lie. But there is a profound difference between claiming you will get a certain policy passed if you are elected, knowing that you probably can’t, exaggerating about past accomplishments, or not owning up to a change of policy position and blatantly claiming that reality isn’t real while knowing it is leading to your followers making death threats against innocent local officials.
Trump does not care what effects his words have. Should such a person be President?
And you wish to claim that he just doesn’t know or understand what effects his words are having, then I ask you: should such a person be President?
Nothing out of Trump’s mouth is the truth. When it happens to coincide with objective reality, it is the bait to set you up for the next lie. I remember when the Trump Tower opened in the early 1980s. I walked around in it and thought that it was total kitsch and couldn’t understand the hype in the papers at that time. Many New Yorkers agreed with me which is why he never got above 35% of the vote in Manhattan. He does appeal to Christian Nationalists, racist, and the laughable “alpha male” contingent.
This is an issue that requires clarity from anyone (including the press) who writes or talks about it. There is election fraud and there is voter fraud. Election fraud is the systematic commission of fraud on a wide scale. Voter fraud is an individual act. Commingling the two just allows dishonest people to write and say dishonest things.
John Stewart on last Monday’s show, “We do not decide things in this country by asking who has the most guns.”
Trump is a bullshitter, period. He doesn’t care about the truth; he has no connection to the truth. He knows what he wants, and he acts to get it.
But I’d disagree with James: he does care what effect his words have. But he only cares about this inasmuch as it advances his goals. I don’t know if he accepts other people are real or just doesn’t care about them in any way a normal person would understand. I find it genuinely hard to imagine what his brain/thought process is like.
But this is also the problem I have with court reform, say, which I’m for. I say “we need court reform because the current makeup of the Supreme Court was in no way democratically appointed, and several justices have clear conflicts of interest that they ignore.” And they say “we need court reform because the judges keep ruling against us because of the space lasers.” Those are two very different things, but they get conflated as saying “both sides want court reform.”
@Scott: I think the semantics can be subtle and also imprecise.
Speaking as someone who has studied elections for decades, I am going to say that the terms “electoral fraud,” “election fraud,” and “voter fraud” can be used interchangeably and tend to rely on context.
This is partially why the Heritage database that I discussed is a problem (well, one of the reasons): it is a collection of violation of election laws–and is more or less a catch-all.
As you note, some fraud is linked to a singular voter (which is mostly what we see) and then there is systemic fraud, which is more expansive.
As with most things, the alarmists don’t mind being vague, and don’t really care about subtlety and those who want to be accurate need five minutes to explain reality.
So, in a rhetorical contest, we know who tends to win.
Post could use some copy editing…
@Steven L. Taylor: In general, the most important distinction, to me, is if the illegal action could influence the outcome or not. It is very, very rare in the US that illegal voting or electoral activity can influence the outcomes. Usually the actions are mathematically insignificant.
@Michael Cain: I try. I will give a further read through. I am not my best editor, especially immediately after I have written (and when I have a lot to say). I truly did proof it more than once.
@Michael Cain: @Steven L. Taylor: I have gone over it again, and found some additional errors that I corrected, although I may have simply proven what a terrible editor I am.
If there is some error worth nothing that I missed, please let me know.
None of this will get better if he loses, either.
Mark my words, Trump is going to declare victory on November 5th, 2024, before sufficient votes are counted. Trump is already on record stating that the legal cases against him are “election interference” from the Biden/Harris DOJ. He’s named other interference as well, from Biden stepping aside to the ABC debate moderators. His enablers have queued up weather control as a culprit. I can’t gauge if there is a margin of defeat large enough to keep Trump from making this play. I don’t think there is.
Then, all the chaos agents the Republicans have already placed in election management across the country, Busch types all, will be activated. I don’t have a good idea of whether the 2024 version of election denialism can do more damage than inevitable questioning of a Harris adminstrations legitimacy, but it is certain that Trump will not lose gracefully and he will not concede.
The belief that Trump won isn’t based on facts; it’s a religion.
Think about the depressing absurdity of this.
For nearly 9 years Trump has been saying that if he doesn’t win it’s because he was cheated of victory, he was robbed. He said it advance of two elections, and he’s saying it now. There is of course NO EVIDENCE of statistically significant voter fraud.
All it took was a low-life career criminal /slash/ grifter like Trump to break the system down to the point where a vast majority of one political party believes, in the ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE, that our voting system is rife with fraud.
Make no mistake; one person, one political party is responsible for this.
@Scott F.: Mark my words, Trump is going to declare victory on November 5th, 2024, before sufficient votes are counted.
Just going to quote this and tag it, because I sadly think you’re absolutely right.
To me the only question is how long after the polls close he decides the race is “over”. I would guess he’s declaring himself the winner around midnight on the East coast. That’s long enough that the small counties have come in for his critical states, but short enough that only about half the urban votes will have been counted and absentee ballots won’t really be in the system. He’ll be “firmly” (by percentage) ahead in all or almost all of the swing states.
It’s also a time when half the country feels like they can go to bed if they know the result – asserting that he’s won is permission to believe that any changes must be theft.
– clip –
The lack of self awareness is breathtaking.
@Steven L. Taylor: Reading at ~1:20 EDT. Yes there are still typos/mistakes. None of any consequence. My definition of “consequence:” errors that lead to misreading the content of the message. Consequential errors are small in number in posts on this site. Most of the things readers point out would be mistakes I would identify as concern trolling if I questioned the motives of the reader.
Research that I’ve read consistently shows that it takes more than 24 hours separation from text for a writer to be able to successfully and completely self-edit. It’s why newspapers used to have copy editors.
@Hal_10000: And desire to not pay income tax. Economics is always a factor in elections. 😉
@ptfe: I always wait until Wednesday to look for election results.* But I’m a “nations get the governments they deserve” guy, too.
*Streaming TV has been a boon for me. Lots of streaming sites have no news at all.
@Scott F.: Sadly, you are not wrong.
Trump losing is a necessary step toward correcting this situation, but it is far from the final step.
And I very much fear him falsely claiming victory.
@just nutha:
This strikes me as quite accurate in my own experience. If I go back for some reason to reference an old post, I almost always see errors immediately that I clearly overlooked after likely multiple readings.
When I first write, my brain knows what it is supposed to say and clearly does not believe my lyin’ eyes.
@al Ameda:
Well, Trump and the Heritage Foundation database that laid the groundwork, per @Steven L. Taylor.
It is really important that we understand that Trump has been the necessary catalyst, but the wider Republican apparatus – pols and think tanks – is keen to leverage Trump to further their minority rule ambitions. The preferred agenda is unpopular (see the reception Project 2025 has received) and whatever backroom power there is has determined there is no interest in moderating their plans to appeal to a broader electorate. So, they have to seize power without the majority. Election denialism, EC shenanigans, “immigrants are taking our votes” – all of it is of a piece of winning elections without moderating policy.
Consent of the Governed be damned.
In the lead-up to the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, it was well documented and widely reported that: Far more Democrats than Republicans had requested mail-in ballots under the new (2019) state election law that gives all voters the option to use mail-in ballots; mail-in ballots, under the law, are not allowed to be processed until election day; and many counties, including more populous ones, were planning to complete the mail-in vote tallies after the in-person vote tallies. So it was well known that the returns would favor Republicans early but would trend toward Democrats as election night wore on. No doubt this will again be the basis of an easily disproven bogus complaint–that the changes in vote margins on election night mean there’s gotta be some shenanigans going on.
This is very much worth reading:
http://www.thebulwark.com/p/donald-trump-plan-b-contesting-election-loss
@Steven L. Taylor:
This is exactly the phenomenon: we read what we intended to write. And the longer one’s short-term memory is, the longer it takes to see the actual text instead of the intended one.
Why it also carries over into spelling errors mystifies me, tho.
@CSK:
Thank you for sharing! Here are the nut grafs from that Bulwark piece if you ask me:
Both the press and the wider public can mitigate what happens here by being vigilant and resisting normalization.
@Eusebio: The discussion here has motivated me to write to all the major news orgs asking how they plan to minimize the ability of fraudsters to use stills and video of their election night broadcasts to spread misinformation about vote counting.
I firmly believe that one of the biggest problems in election night discourse is the use of “percent precincts reporting” – a metric that has no relation to the population but is often used as a proxy for it by media orgs. When Virginia hits 95% of precincts reporting, the election will be notably in Trump’s favor; when it hits 99%, the election will be called for Harris. This is a simple fact of the relative populations of the uncounted precincts, but EVERY media org continues to use this as though it’s real. They don’t use these numbers to decide when to “call” a state! Actual vote tally bars representing the organization’s min/max voter bounds, along with the current absolute vote tally, would go a long way to dispelling voter confusion.
I have no doubt we’ll still be served “Trump is up 62-38!” and you look closely and it’s like 12,000 votes from the most rural counties in a 4M-person state. That’s not a useful number, and the danger is that we’ll see reporting of it as though it represents a relevant slice of the electorate.
Anyway, I have little faith in media to do something helpful on this front. I suspect we’ll see the same BS we see every 4 years, with a lot of “deeper analysis!” that can be ignored when someone wants to use screenshots of states swinging wildly at 2am to declare widespread fraud.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Oh, there’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that if Trump loses to Harris he’ll claim that he actually won. A MAGA uproar will invariably follow. Whether this will be limited to screaming and threats or escalate to physical violence and shooting I can’t say. I DO believe that Harris is going to need several extra layers of Secret Service protection.
@CSK:
It’s not well remembered or much remarked upon, but El Weirdo claimed fraud when he won in 2016. That was how he “explained” having lost the popular vote by over 3 million.
@Kathy:
I do recall him claiming that he’d won the electoral vote by “a landslide” (a blatant lie) and that if millions of fraudulent votes hadn’t been counted, he’d have won the popular vote by a landslide as well.
Have you noticed lately El Felon is now calling any negative coverage of him, and any positive coverage of Harris, “election interference”? His minions do this, too. The Deloitte flap the other day was so branded as well. Such things also get labelled threats to democracy (that’s rich).
So, in short, one cannot campaign against el Weirdo, nor tell the truth about him. That’s election interference.
Just like you cannot disagree with him. that’s Communism.