Posted on 05/27/2023 4:52:00 PM PDT by Ennis85
Elections are supposed to be about the future, but Donald Trump is stuck in the past. He is dead set on running for president in 2024 by campaigning on the very worst part of his record.
In his much-hyped return to the mainstream media, a CNN town hall on May 11, Trump doubled down on his claims that millions of fraudulent votes were the cause of his defeat in 2020. He said he had no regrets about his behavior before and during the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and that he does not owe Mike Pence an apology for ordering him to flout the Constitution and the federal law governing the counting of Electoral College votes. He recast his December 2022 endorsement of the “termination” of the Constitution when there is voter fraud as “cherishing” the Constitution. He said that if elected in 2024, he would pardon many of those convicted for illegally storming the Capitol, and he even left open the possibility of pardoning leaders of the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys who were recently convicted of seditious conspiracy for spearheading the attack on the Capitol.
But two and a half years after the 2020 election, the voter-fraud theories on which the “stop the steal” campaign was based look weaker than ever.
In November 2020, Trump and his allies eventually settled on the wild theory that Dominion voting machines had been programmed to “say that a Biden vote counts as 1.25, and a Trump vote counts as 0.75,” as Trump lawyer Sidney Powell said at the time. “The algorithm was likely run across the country to affect the entire election.” On January 6, in the speech he delivered near the White House, Trump promoted the Dominion conspiracy theory. But by then it had already been disproved by a hand recount in Georgia. Each voter used a touch screen to print out a paper ballot that stated in plain text the names of the candidates a voter selected. During the hand recount, with bipartisan election observers present, human beings read those ballots and sorted them into “Trump” and “Biden” piles. There was no way for those people to count a Trump or a Biden paper ballot as anything less or more than one vote. In other words, if there had been a systemic problem with the machine-counting of the ballots, the hand recount would have caught it.
In April of this year, the Dominion conspiracy theory received a final blow with the resolution of the company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The truth is an absolute defense against defamation, but the network settled with Dominion — after the process of legal discovery — for $787 million. Trump is unlikely to repeat the specific claims he made about Dominion while in office because he would open himself up to civil liability as a private citizen; he is likely protected from any personal liability for defamatory statements made while president. That’s one reason why he has shifted to a different voter-fraud theory.
“If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes,” Trump told Kaitlan Collins, the moderator of the CNN town hall. This is the claim at the center of the Dinesh D’Souza documentary 2000 Mules, released in May 2022, and it is a claim you’re likely to hear a lot more from the 2024 GOP front-runner over the course of the next year.
True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit, claims that by purchasing geo-location cellphone-tracking data it uncovered an elaborate scheme to steal the election. The scheme involved at least 2,000 people — the “mules” — who trafficked fraudulent ballots from liberal nonprofits to ballot drop boxes in the five key states that decided the election: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. True the Vote says it has obtained 4 million minutes — nearly 70,000 hours — of surveillance video of the drop boxes; the documentary shows a number of people dropping off a handful of ballots. “What you’re seeing is a crime: These are fraudulent votes,” D’Souza tells viewers as surveillance video shows one person dropping off a handful of ballots.
According to True the Vote, its criteria for detecting each of the “2,000 mules” is a cellphone that over the course of the month leading up to the election made at least five visits near a nonprofit and ten visits near different drop boxes. The organization estimates that the 2,000 mules made an average of 38 trips each to drop boxes, depositing an average of five ballots per trip, for a total of 380,000 fraudulent votes spread across the five states. In the documentary, D’Souza then runs the numbers: Without these ballots, Biden would still have won Michigan and Wisconsin, but Trump would have narrowly prevailed in the Electoral College by eking out wins in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
For a conspiracy so vast, the outcome seems a little underwhelming: Subtracting the alleged voter fraud facilitated by the supposed 2,000 mules would have given Trump a victory of just one-third of one percentage point in Arizona and Georgia, and the conspirators would not have been confident in advance that a small number of votes would deliver the election to Biden. But D’Souza has a solution to bolster the theory: more mules. “No one thinks that our 2,000 mules were the only mules trafficking illegal votes,” he tells viewers. Taking D’Souza up on this proposition, True the Vote then lowers the threshold for determining who was a mule, counting cellphones that were detected near a minimum of five drop boxes rather than the original ten. “This revealed a huge upsurge in the number of mules, from 2,000 to 54,000 mules,” D’Souza says. Voilà! Without the 54,000 mules, Trump would have handily won each of the five states.
D’Souza told me he was too busy to grant an interview for this article, and a spokesman for True the Vote also did not accept an interview request. So I can’t be sure why the movie is not called “54,000 Mules,” but I suspect it is because that title would have made the biggest flaws in the conspiracy theory even more glaring.
Despite the supposed existence of 54,000 illegal-ballot traffickers who placed fraudulent ballots at multiple drop boxes, D’Souza and True the Vote have publicly named precisely none of them. Trump’s political operation, flush with tens of millions of dollars, has identified no mules. Republican attorneys general in Arizona and Georgia, desperate for Trump’s support, have been able to expose not a single mule. According to True the Vote’s anonymous sources, the mules are criminals working for $10 a ballot. To evade public detection over the past three years, these 54,000 petty criminals must somehow have maintained operational security and secrecy that would put SEAL Team Six to shame.
Despite the 70,000 hours of surveillance footage, the documentary does not actually show a single person making more than one trip to a ballot drop box. If there were 54,000 mules — or even just 2,000 — shouldn’t the footage have detected hundreds of them?
In the year since the documentary was released, some individuals shown dropping off a handful of ballots at a single drop box have been publicly identified by their vehicles’ license plates, but there is no evidence that they acted illegally. The Georgia secretary of state’s office investigated three cases and dismissed each of them. In one case, an investigator tracked down a man seen in the film dropping off five ballots and was able to interview him and confirm by consulting voter data that the ballots had been cast legally by his family members. It is permitted in Georgia and many states to drop off the ballots of family members.
According to 2000 Mules, five left-leaning nonprofits filled out a million or more fraudulent ballots. For these ballots to count, the nonprofits would have needed to identify hundreds of thousands of people registered to vote and to know in advance that they would not actually cast ballots. Tellingly, the documentary and True the Vote have not publicly named these nonprofits.
In August 2022, D’Souza was set to publish a book based on 2000 Mules in which he did name the nonprofits, but his publisher, Regnery, claiming a “publishing error,” pulled the book from stores before it went on sale. “True the Vote had no participation in this book, and has no knowledge of its contents,” the group said in a statement to NPR at the time. “This includes any allegations of activities of any specific organizations made in the book. We made no such allegations.” When Regnery released D’Souza’s book two months later, the passage naming the nonprofits had been excised, according to an NPR reporter who had obtained a copy of the first version of the book.
What about the geo-location data? Even if the purported data show exactly what True the Vote claims, it does not prove a conspiracy. It’s entirely plausible that Uber drivers or deliverymen would come within 100 feet of ten different drop boxes over the course of a month. FactCheck.org reported that activists and politicians in some states held get-out-the-vote rallies at multiple drop-box locations. “The premise that if you go by a box, five boxes, or whatever it was, you know that that’s a mule is just indefensible,” Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr said in testimony to the January 6 Committee. The geo-location data “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting.”
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation observed in September 2021 that, because there was no “other kind of evidence that connects these cell phones to ballot harvesting,” it lacked probable cause to open an investigation or get a search warrant to obtain the geo-location cellphone data: “For example, there are no statements of witnesses and no names of any potential defendants to interview. Saliently, it has been stated that there is ‘a source’ that can validate ballot-harvesting. Despite repeated requests that source has not been provided to either the GBI or to the FBI.”
The conspiracy at the heart of 2000 Mules looks even more preposterous when one examines the election results in Pennsylvania. The movie claims that mules were responsible for 275,000 fraudulent votes in Philadelphia alone (under the theory that there were only 2,000 mules in the five states). That would mean that nearly half of all votes cast for Biden in Philadelphia — and a majority of all mail ballots — were fraudulent, without anyone’s having detected the widespread fraud in real time. In 2020, Donald Trump’s margin in Philadelphia actually increased by nearly four percentage points over 2016, when Pennsylvania did not allow ballot drop boxes. While Trump carried Pennsylvania in 2016, he managed to lose it in 2020 because Biden did better than Hillary Clinton with white voters statewide.
In the end, the 2020 election was as simple as that. Trump improved his performance among minority voters nationwide but lost the Electoral College by sliding among white voters. It was not fraudulent vote dumps in America’s inner cities that cost him the election.
Those who understand why the 2020 conspiracy theories are false may find it exhausting to present the truth, fact by fact, but that task is important. Trump’s insistence on debunked voter-fraud claims has major implications for the country’s present and its future.
In ordinary circumstances, Trump’s loss in 2020 would be politically poisonous for him as he sought the 2024 GOP nomination. But by making it an article of faith among many GOP activists and voters that he really did win the 2020 election, he has made it harder for his rivals to attack him over his biggest vulnerabilities. But by indulging Trump’s voter-fraud conspiracies, another GOP candidate will seem weak and submissive — as if aiming to be Trump’s running mate instead of president. Pointing out that the emperor has no clothes — that Trump really did lose in 2020 to a doddering old man who campaigned from his basement — is probably the wiser course, but a successful Republican challenger would find a way to make that point without sounding like a resistance warrior on MSNBC.
Trump’s obsession with 2020 could matter far beyond the 2024 primary, of course. The 2022 midterm results showed that swing voters were repelled by candidates who embraced Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign; but if he wins the nomination and the general election, January 6 would serve as a litmus test for cabinet secretaries and lower-level Trump-administration staffers. Anyone who served in the first Trump administration and was publicly horrified by January 6 — an official such as Attorney General Bill Barr — would be persona non grata in a second Trump administration. Few officials who were horrified by Trump’s postelection conduct would want to serve under Trump anyway. A second Trump administration would have to scrape the very bottom of the staffing barrel.
And if he becomes the 2024 GOP nominee and loses again, it’s reasonable to assume that Trump would again try to overturn the election result through extraordinary measures. True, the system held in 2020, and a reform of the Electoral Count Act that passed in 2022 reinforced it. Trump would not have the powers of a sitting president. And in the states that will very likely decide the 2024 election, Trump will not have lackeys serving as governor, who play a key role in certifying Electoral College results. Republican Brian Kemp, who stood up to Trump’s efforts to overturn the Electoral College results in 2020, will still hold the governorship in Georgia, while Democrats will hold that post in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona. But even a failed attempt — a second one, no less — by Trump and other political elites to overturn the decision of the voters would undermine the foundation of our democratic republic.
None of this, of course, is a future the country or the Republican Party is destined to face if enough primary voters simply choose to rally behind one other Republican presidential candidate.
I haven’t done any of that, or very very little. His response has been completely unacceptable. Starting with taking $250M from people after the election, donated specifically for election security and using it for other purposes. He still doesn’t even have a plan for 2024 outside of “out vote the cheating” which he could have paid anyone much for that idea, which is a loser. His outrage is fake. Actions, or lack thereof, show someone’s true intentions.
“His outrage is fake.”
Whatever. Everyone here knows what you think of Trump.
You can’t endlessly jump up and down and scream about something without ever actually lifting a finger, and not have your motives questioned. Trump would clearly rather play golf and have gay parties at his resort than actually try to secure the elections. Actions speak louder than words. Judge them by their fruits.
You don’t like Trump - we get it.
Found in the memory hole:
More than 4,000 votes vanished without a trace into a computer’s overloaded memory in one North Carolina county, and about a hundred paper ballots were thrown out by mistake in another. In Texas, a county needed help from a laboratory in Canada to unlock the memory of a touch-screen machine and unearth five dozen votes.
In other places, machine undercounting or overcounting of votes was a problem. Several thousand votes were mistakenly double-counted in North Carolina, Ohio, Nebraska, and Washington state. Some votes in other areas were at first credited to the wrong candidates, with one Indiana county, by some quirk, misallocating several hundred votes for Democrats to Libertarians. In Florida, some machines temporarily indicated votes intended for challenger John F. Kerry were for President Bush, and vice versa.
In the month since the election, serious instances of voting machine problems or human errors in ballot counts have been documented in at least a dozen states, each involving from scores of ballots to as many as 12,000 votes, as in a North Carolina county...local officials discovered problems and corrected final counts. In some cases, the changes altered the outcomes of local races. But in North Carolina, the problems were so serious that the state may hold a rare second vote..
Since 2000, watchdog groups have intensified their monitoring and cataloging of complaints and errors. The nonpartisan Verified Voting Foundation and other groups built a database of more than 30,000 ‘’election incidents” reported across the country this year. Most were routine, but nearly 900 involved significant e-voting problems, including malfunctions that shut down machines, lengthening waits at the polls. There were 42 reports of total breakdowns of machines in New Orleans and 28 in Philadelphia and ‘’15 reports of catastrophic machine failure” in Mercer County, Pa. [http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/12/01/voting_errors_tallied_nationwide?pg=full]
See also, “THIS DAY IN HISTORY: Election results between Al Gore and George Bush too close to call” [https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/presidential-election-al-gore-george-bush-too-close-to-call On December 12 Gore conceded to Bush] Also,
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/19/2004-kerry-election-fraud-2020-448604:
Steven Freeman felt, in his bones, that something was wrong with the election. It was November 2, 2004, and the exit polls had predicted an overwhelming victory for Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. But as the night rolled on, the margins grew for President George W. Bush—especially in Ohio, where the race remained uncalled as the clock ticked into the wee morning hours.
For most of the world, the uncertainty didn’t last. Kerry conceded the next day, making a cordial call to Bush, after concluding that a recount in Ohio wouldn’t change the outcome of the race. But Freeman, then a research scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, remembers wondering, “How could this be?” He dug around for the exit poll numbers he had fleetingly seen on TV. Then he went down a rabbit hole of statistical analysis, in search of explanations for the Bush votes that seemed to have magically appeared. A week after the election, he shared a draft of his findings with colleagues, with the conclusion that “fraud was an unavoidable hypothesis.” His analysis wound up spreading widely, drawing thousands of responses from around the country: people who believed, as he did, that the election had been stolen...
With a political will fueled by images of hanging chads and squinting Florida poll workers, Congress in 2002 passed the bipartisan Help America Vote Act, or HAVA. The act required states to set up voter registration databases, voter identification procedures and provisional ballots for people whose names didn’t show up on the rolls at their home precincts. It also helped local districts purchase the latest in voting technology: optical scan ballot-readers and touch-screen machines that would, in theory, eliminate the human error and potential fraud inherent in paper counting. Even so, the Kerry campaign was prepared for a fight: It had assembled a nationwide network of lawyers to fight post-election battles, if necessary...
But people like Freeman, who dug into the exit poll numbers, also circulated a darker theory, centered on fraud that occurred after the vote—via those high-tech voting machines, whose results couldn’t be verified against an independent paper trail. Questions about why the exit polls were so inaccurate—which the mainstream media and even the pollsters attributed to flawed polling methodology—led others to spin out theories ... those who believed that the election had been stolen got no help from the mainstream press, where even left-leaning outlets wouldn’t take up the idea of a vast web of fraud. - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/19/2004-kerry-election-fraud-2020-448604
Trump lost is the ONLY narrative they got.
PRETEND Biden got 81 million votes.
PRETEND there was NO election interference by Morrell and the FIFTY deep state stooges that KNOWINGLY used the cover of the CIA to promulgate that Hunter’s laptop was not authentic and was Russian disinformation.
Trump or Ron is an easy decision.
You either ACCEPT there was a coup or you either DENY there was coup.
This boy is a coup denier.
He has to be.
His pretension that Biden is in legitimate occupation of the White House means he MUST extend that pretension to there was no coup.
That is how it all breaks down for those who have voted Republican for a lifetime.
You either pretend that Biden is in legitimate occupation of the White House and get on Ron’s starship built by Musk or you get aboard the Trump train for one last ride.
Since I’ve always been a down to earth guy, I’m sticking with the Trump train.
The Bush train took me to nowhere.
And Ron’s starship has the same destination.
Why is it Romlims keep getting banned? droop, you, TexasGator; first you blame Trump supporters; then you blame administration and the owners; and so you've all sworn some sort of lame revenge against this website -- exactly like the Tedlims smacked down with the banhammer shortly after Cruz's implosion.
It doesn't have jack sh!t to do with DeSantis. You're all just auto-flaming, self-pwning chumps, a history of running your gob for the sake of running your gob, waiting for the inevitable -- Meatball runs 3rd in NH, 3rd in Iowa, and gets erased on Super Tuesday.
Arator, Prince P!zzpot of the Buchananites, was smarter than any of you, lasted longer than any of you will, and he is block-banned for life. Take the hint.
"Two months before he was Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pick to oversee Florida voting, Cord Byrd was a featured speaker at a seminar for people whofalselybelieve the 2020 election was stolen and wanted training to stop it from happening again.Leading the Orlando summit was Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer deeply involved in Donald Trump’s failed plot to overturn the 2020 election. In audio obtained by CNN, Mitchell introduced Byrd as someone committed to “election integrity ” – a phrase that has become a dog whistle for stoking myths about voting vulnerabilities. Mitchell described Byrd, a Republican state lawmaker at the time, as a trusted sounding board for new election policies and an active participant in weekly calls she hosted with like-minded officials across the country.
Byrd’s past collaboration with Mitchell, unreported until now, is illustrative of the access election deniers and those who have given oxygen to their conspiracies have gained in the highest levels of DeSantis’ government. For the past 10 months, top officials in DeSantis’ administration have met numerous times with Florida activists greatly influenced by Mitchell and other national figures involved in the scheme to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat, according to records obtained by CNN. These activists, who operate under the name Defend Florida, argue that even the election results in the Sunshine State – which Trump won by a healthy margin – were tampered with.
DeSantis went on to raise concerns about the election process in neighboring Georgia, dancing around the edges of the conspiracies that have rattled the state ever since Trump lost by less than 12,000 votes. He said there was “massive ballot harvesting” in Atlanta.. He alleged that Atlanta prosecutors wouldn’t investigate voter fraud even if presented with evidence. DeSantis took particular issue with the amount of time needed for Georgia to finish tallying votes. It took days for the state to report a result.
In the days after the 2020 election, DeSantis was among the first Republican leaders to suggest that Trump-aligned legislators in key swing states had the power to intervene in the choosing of electors, even after all the votes were counted. He floated the idea during an appearance on Fox News two days after the election."
You didn’t know that about DeSantis? Well, actually I’m not surprised in the least since you leave in a three layer deep Truump bubble. As usual DeSantis is right on top of things, and actually putting in the work to secure elections.
But since you only ever listed to Trump, did you see today where he called Disney “woke” and “a disgusting shadow of itself.”
Trump must have dementia because he’s been tweeting before today that DeSantis was out of line going after them. Either has dementia or he just got word they’re not going to backroll his campaign like they did in 2016 and 2020, when they were in his top five both times.
Sober up, and shut up.
Hey, but you do you, bEagle. I got a new name for you: Onan The Meatballahrian.
Sorry for the typos, in the middle of getting ready for the cookout tomorrow.
I see you have nothing but childish nicknames to offer in response, just like your empty headed idol. That one was is really pathetic, too. And you wonder why we don’t want people like this running the country again.
“Meatball runs 3rd in NH, 3rd in Iowa, and gets erased on Super Tuesday.”
Why do you think Yrump gets erased on super Tuesday?
Where do you get this "somebody gave Trump 250 million dollars"...? thing?
Notice the date of that article. At the time, I defended Trump here at FR from those claiming he was stealing that money, as I believed he would spend it trying to investigate who stole the election, and putting forth changes to prevent it from happening again. He’s done neither, and now that money is gone.
At this point it’s under investigation for campaign finance violation. It was originally a DC grand jury, that was interviewing Stephen Miller and others last year, but I believe they’ve now wrapped it up into the Special Counsel investigating J6.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.