The fundamental reason all these claims remain “unsubstantiated” is that the very people who reject them on this basis are the ones who are supposed to be substantiating them—and they have absolutely, entirely abandoned this basic duty.

This is such a bizarre sentence. Why would government officials, investigators or journalists or whoever be duty bound to substantiate the existence voter fraud. They've basically done the opposite actually, and debunked the claims. Nearly every single case of claimed voter fraud has been shown to be inaccurate, a lie, simply misleading and/or a misunderstanding.

"Suitcases" of ballots? Actually it's photography equipment of local news broadcasts. Poll watchers getting "pushed out" of wards? Because PA law says you are legally only allowed a set amount of pre-certified watchers in each precinct, who must wear face masks. "Dead voters" appearing in ballot rolls? Could exist, doesn't matter though because votes are crosschecked with databases, and even if you died on the way home from dropping off your mail-in ballot, your vote will be deleted, let alone if you're some potential fraud voter who died 30 years ago.

In fact, here's a good nice long Twitter thread explaining most of the major accusations flying around social media:

November 5, 2020

Delays in ballot counting alone are enough to cause concern.

How is this a concern? Do people know nothing about elections?

I have been repeating this all day on TAC, but almost half of the states still aren't counted! It's 1AM Saturday morning and Alaska is still sitting at 50% of the vote reported. Utah is at 91%! Louisiana is at 95%! South Carolina is at 94%! This is how elections work! They're slow, it takes forever to tabulate this stuff. The only reason it's a "concerning" delay is that you care about the results from Nevada and Pennsylvania, but you don't care about Utah because you know it's firmly red!

Add to that Wisconsin’s level of voter turnout—not over 100%, as some online rumors earlier suggested, but still near unbelievably high.

No, it's not unbelievably high. Did you research this claim?

1) Wisconsin is one of 19 states to allow same-day voter registration.

2) The current estimated turnout percent was 73%, the same turnout percent as in 2004.

The same thing is happening in Detroit, where cardboard has actually been placed over the windows to prevent people from seeing inside the central counting location.

The reason the windows were papered over was because:

A) The people outside were trying to photograph and video the room and the poll workers, which as far as I understand is not allowed. Particularly the filming of poll workers.

B) They were screaming and chanting disruptively things like "stop the count," while pounding on the windows and doors, which is obviously blatant disruptive behavior distracting the poll workers, and again, prohibited by law.

As long as there were both GOP and Dem watchers within the room, the people outside the room are of no matter.

I'm just going to reply to my own very long post with an addendum:

The example of Detroit is given in the article as if papering the windows over was some heinous thing.

The reason why we have to protect the identity of poll workers is intimidation. We already have a situation in Fulton County, GA where some enterprising conservatives have doxxed a poll worker and actually sent the poor man into hiding.

His license plate number was posted onto Twitter, and he is now hiding at a friend's house, because conservative activists falsely accused him of throwing out ballots.

November 6, 2020

So much for the law-abiding right huh?

You are a liar. You obviously have never actually WORKED an election. I have. Several, in fact.

I have personally witnessed ballot fraud on a large scale, coupled with utter incompetence. Palm Beach county, 2012.

I oversaw the correction of 60,000 "defective" absentee ballots. Each correction table was to be staffed with 1 Dem, 1 Repub, who cross-checked each others work. The corrupt Supervisor of Elections harassed and threatened Republican workers and monitors. Nasty as hell. Corrupt as hell. AND SHE NEVER FOLLOWED HER OWN INSTRUCTIONS, AND WHEN CHALLENGED POLITELY, SHE THREATENED TO THROW ALL REPUBLICANS OUT OF THE ELECTIONS SITE.

I PERSONALLY witnessed CORRECTED ABSENTEE BALLOTS taken to the back where the voting TABULATORS were, and watched as each ballot was removed from the box, examined, and some were thrown in the trash can. And I had seen a lot of ballots with Romney marked for President, with a straight Dem ticket down-ballot races all Dem. This is a BLUE county.

I reported this, and nothing was done. Cowardly Republicans do this... Nothing. I often wonder how many other blue cou ties have threatened Republican poll watchers & workers.

Your slander of decent people means NOTHING, except that you are a liar of gigantic proportions. Go over to Daily Kos, where you can fellowship with your vile compatriot scumbags.

I have personally witnessed ballot fraud on a large scale, coupled with utter incompetence.

If you had witnessed such systemic abuse, it should have been reported and made the news. You have no hard proof except your word, and your claim is as about as credible as one of the Chain Email Forwards that my nutty extended family used to send around.

and watched as each ballot was removed from the box, examined, and some were thrown in the trash can.

None of us know how truthful your story is, but based on this and the unhinged manner in which your comments are written, it sounds like it's possible you were getting yelled at and your work was getting thrown out because you were bad at your job.

And I had seen a lot of ballots with Romney marked for President, with a straight Dem ticket down-ballot races all Dem.

I'm a little confused by what the implication of this is?

So the Romney votes were fake? Or the down-ballot votes were fake from someone who didn't like Obama? Or that it's somehow impossible that someone can vote one-party down-ballot, but have a different party at the top of the ballot?

I often wonder how many other blue cou ties have threatened Republican poll watchers & workers.

In reality, some non-zero, but likely statistically insignificant number of blue counties have treated Republican poll-workers and watchers badly. I don't think most would deny that as a serious possibility.

And in all likelihood, the same is true of red counties. You want me to believe every little backwater county in the Deep South for the last 50 years has been run cleanly, with no suppression of the few Democrats or minorities that live in the area? Sorry, don't believe it.

Your slander of decent people means NOTHING

Decent people don't promote false stories of voter fraud without proof, try again!

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

I support the view that it is entirely possible for a county full of good people to lean hard against the "other side" in a hot disputed election. In 2014 and 2016 the polling place was a strange church miles away; the workers there had a hand-lettered sign posted that demanded driver licenses as ID, even though State law did not demand that form of ID alone. This year I was one of the people who were locked out of the voting process; the details do not matter, but it happened, and I refused to kowtow to the system to get my registration card renewed. My county went 80% for Trump, so in fact my lone vote would not have mattered for much anyway.

No doubt some people were denied the right to vote. Historically, the right to vote is denied blacks and latinos more often than whites. But to make a blanket claim of a stolen election, just the President, mind you, is an extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary proof. Trump does not even claim that any of those down ballot Repubs, candidates who did just fine for themselves, were denied votes. Just him.

It's a perfect storm of narcissism denied.

Excuse me . . . latino citizens denied the vote --- that I would need some support for. They have absolutely no relations in terms of magnitude as what occurred against black citizens --- noting it for political correctness is cozy but a false comparison.

What ethnicit/race was the elections supervisor? Curious.

Because that is an absolutely critical piece of information that is missing...

If the democrats rigged the election then why didn't they give themselves the Senate? Why did they lose seats in the House? And why did they not take back a single statehouse? Trump lost because the DNC opened their arms to the Bush-era neocons from the Lincoln Project. They're all republicans that voted for Biden and down ticket republicans and now Biden will be putting them in his cabinet. If the election was rigged then you can thank the those republicans for betraying their party, but the DNC is incapable of rigging anything without help from the other side.

Your mistake is conflating "Republicans" and "republican voters." Not the same thing. Trump was sent to DC to deal, among other things with the "Republicans."

Why didn't they give themselves the senate? A couple of hundred thousand ballots with a 100% tally for one side were manufactured to influence one election. Only one really mattered. Several million Americans were impoverished and terrorized all year long to ensure this result.

In any case, they don't need the Senate -- the "Republicans" will simply roll over. They always do. Cocaine Mitch is already signaling his intent to do so.

I saw his spokesperson the other day said any Biden cabinet picks will have to be approved by him. Doesn't sound like Mitch is rolling over at all. We're going to see the Lincoln Project repugs (Bush era neocons) in his cabinet and giving the MIC a seat at the table again. Just another 4 years of Bush/Obama policies. I think we can agree that both sides lost this election and that's sadly not new either. Maybe its time the for "fringes" to unite against the center.

Doesn't sound like Mitch is rolling over at all

At the moment.

Maybe its time the for "fringes" to unite against the center.

"Bush/Obama" look interchangeably disastrous now, in hindsight, but we both know they're not. The 2016 election was the "fringes" uniting -- to some extent, at least -- against the center -- or, stated another way, the outside bum-rushing the inner party.

Speaking as a progressive myself, I dont feel like we united as much as we stayed home. No one in the 2016 election was representing anything we wanted. The only thing that united us was our hatred of Hillary. ;) hahaha

We can't unify under either established party. I'm talking about really uniting and taking both out with a real populist platform (healthcare, ending our wars and getting money out of politics), all things most Americans are in favor of. What do we have to lose at this point? There's something horribly broken with our government when every 4 years both sides are left frustrated when the will of the people is never represented in our supposed representative democracy. We gotta try something different.

hatred of Hillary

Can't argue with that.

What we unite in, I think, is our sense that we're being screwed. We don't fully agree on why or how or by whom.

For example, I don't have any general problem with a good old-fashioned war, because sometimes the situation will merit it -- but for God's sake, fight it to win it, and do it quickly. Icing the Iranian general this year was a fine example.

For another example, I would imagine your viewpoint is that healthcare is a "right" and that the job of government is to provide, but mine is that it is a product and a service, and has to be paid for, and it is less, not more, government necessary to address these costs because the laws of economics will not be denied.

For yet another, no one at all voted for all the level of immigration we've got, and the laws on the books were sold with lies. No one wants an amnesty. No one wants 30 million people illegally in the country. It's not good for Americans. Yet.....here we are. And the one person who even said so in public was vilified and attacked in the most ridiculous ways for it.

I dont think America will get behind a platform based around "we're getting screwed", we're gonna need a little more substance than that. Who's is going to back a group of people with no plan on how to lead if elected? That will be less effective than the Greens and the Libertarians.

As far as healthcare goes, the American people just spoke on it. Exit polls showed 72% of voting America wants a "government run single payer" system (even a majority of republicans now). When 52% of the country makes less than $30k a year and the average healthcare plan for a family of 4 is over $30k/year, most people now realize what we're doing isn't working. This pandemic also exposed the failure of an employment based healthcare system, when over 40 million lost their jobs this year, they lost their health insurance as well, its no surprise why we lead the world in cases and deaths.

Thankfully your view on healthcare in now a minority opinion and one that continues to shrink daily. I'm a veteran and get my healthcare through the VA, single payer isn't as scary as the propagandists make it out to be. People shouldn't have to worry about bankruptcy and losing everything they own just because they got sick. I think protecting the precious free market myth as it pertains to people's health is inhumane. Everyone loves to sing the praises of our system until they know someone that gets sick and loses everything or it happens to them.

First, all polling -- all of it -- serves to shape public opinion, not reflect it. Cite whatever you want, that's the way it is.

Second, if that is true, then it simply reflects economic illiteracy and ignorance. There's no way around that.

You're absolutely correct that insurance tied to employment is a bad idea. But, like so many other things, that's a result of bad government policy, as are most things that drive up the price.

Medical "insurance" isn't used as insurance. It's a price-spreading scheme. You may entitle people to the fruits of other people's labor as much as you want, but the laws of economics are as ironclad as the laws of physics.

Funny how those "ironclad laws of economics" never apply to Wall St banks and the wealthiest corporations on the planet. ;)

But they do. The difference is how those laws are applied. When you're in a position to manipulate -- and the same is true of governments...

Check the newest post on the comment section. I left a pic for ya. Figured it would make ya smile. Have a good night comrade. ;)

Well, it is probable in Florida, as past elections have shown. In fact, Biden probably really won Florida, but there was too much election fraud there for Trump.

Other way round. Its ALWAYS the Dims that commit the fraud.

Fox News has aired video of certified poll observers in philly being prevented from entering polling places. but keep running interference- its obvious you wouldn't care if you KNEW fraud had taken place...

Just to clarify, are you referring to the case of Gary Feldman in Philly, the guy in the video posted by Will Chamberlain?

The guy who had this one polling place mistakenly refuse him entry?

Because if so, as I said in another thread, congratulations! This is how a misunderstanding boils into a conspiracy theory.

What does that video not actually show us?

What it doesn't show us is that the DA's office calls that polling station to inform the workers that he is in fact allowed to be there, it doesn't show that he was subsequently let in and did observe the poll with no noticed irregularities, and it certainly doesn't show that by his own words he reported conducting his poll watching in various other sites around the city without issue.

And the last part, that he hopped around to polls throughout the city without issue, is important Why? Well there's another tidbit the news probably left out: PA law recently changed. It used to be that you could only poll watch at whatever ward you were assigned to, but they changed it so that you could go to any ward that had room for you.

Which would imply that this was not a systemic fraud plot of the Democrats of the "Philly Machine," but a simple misunderstanding based on a law change. Whoop-di-doo.

Fox News, as in news, or one of the crazies from the evening lineup?

Yeah I guess the Fox evening crazies faked the video in a studio somewhere in Deep Texas where Fox News keeps replica sets of each Democratic city's vote-counting locations.

What are you claiming exactly? Are you just emoting?

Other Murdoch-owned news companies have done much worse! In England, his reporters spoofed a call from a dead girl's phone, giving her parents false hope. They bugged and bribed politicians, pretty ugly stuff. Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Fox News is a subsidiary NewsCorp, peddler of tabloid propaganda , promulgated by an Australian plutocrat Rupert Murdoch, who is no friend of the USA. He has been ripping us apart now for decades for his profit, power, and ego. He has made the GOP his b**ch. Note how recently he has turned on Trump (not that I mind).

Never trust a pundit who writes for Crisis.

Why would government officials, investigators or journalists or whoever be duty bound to
the existence voter fraud.

What a ridiculous thing to say. Those who claim to "speak truth to power" have as their function the investigation and reporting of charges of voter fraud.

Instead, they are nothing but rank partisans, licking the government hand that feeds them, and simply memory-holing anything that might damage their boy or be thought helpful to their opponents.

Liars and frauds, every last one.

simply memory-holing anything that might damage their boy or be thought helpful to their opponents.

Whatever you want to claim about lefties with "TDS" or whatever you want to label them, this sentence is literally a word-for-word description that applies to Trump supporters.

Just endless ranks of simpletons who will thrust off every piece of evidence and correction to their accusations.

Write out a comment to debunk things being misconstrued, twisted or lied about, and Trumpists will waste your time blathering and ranting on about "rank partisans" without even a hint or lick of irony and self-reflection about how their entire post is actually about themselves.

I can just as easily dismiss you the same way, but the idea that FB, Twitter, CNN, and yes -- even Fox -- aren't nakedly partisan is ridiculous nonsense. The least you could do is pretend to understand what got Trump elected in the first place.

People will someday realize there is no US government, only corporations that tell their elected stooges what laws to pass and when. Biden will come up against them just as Obama and Trump did. Trump wanted to drain the swamp, but he had been living in his own little swamp for so long he couldn't see the forest for the trees. Out of 46 cabinet level appointees 23 or so were discarded, set aside, tweeted into the "You're Fired!" column of the Trump Show. The NSA/CIA/FBI alphabet soup will force Biden and Harris into the Obama mold, and whistle blowers will again be prosecuted rather than let them reveal the myriad of illegalities of the intelligence community. The overseas wars will continue. We will still have 800 overseas bases and a huge military draining our economy using the fiction of "protecting us". We the people will give the generals and admirals whatever they want, and they can't even begin to show us how that money gets spent; maybe it just evaporates, nobody knows. The 'all-volunteer' Army will still consist of a draft of wage slaves who need a trade, and education, maybe some group to belong to, or some discipline in their lives, and turn to the armed forces when the job market freezes them out for being black, latino, college dropouts, or for wanting a living wage and a job with some future, any future, even if it means being shot at and coming home with PTSD for the privilege , or simply for being people of only average IQ and no college prospects.

We passed the point of no return when Eisenhower left office. He warned of the "Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex", but even he, the savior of Western Europe, and a popular eight year President with the foresight to start the Interstate Highway system, had to bow to pressure and change his warning to just the "Military-Industrial Complex", leaving Congress out of it entirely, when in fact he knew they were in the thick of things, because they approved the military and spending budgets.

You left out the part 'and you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beel!'

Wall St and the MIC work hand and hand with our corporate media, an industry that's dominated by 6 corporations. They're not liberal nor conservative, they are only motivated by money and power and keeping the population divided so that they dont unite and come for them all.

One only has to look at the Citizens United Supreme Court decision to see how far down the US has fallen. Now a corporation is a person? If that is so, can't they get 20-to-life when they kill someone? Can't they get the death penalty? NO, they can't; but they can get all the good things that come from that ruling, without any of the negatives at all.

I call them supper humans. They enjoy more rights and privileges than most people with none of the accountability. And a FED willing to give them endless amounts of money for every mistake they make.

Not every last reporter is a rank partisan, but many of them prefer the easy route to a paycheck. Look up Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Tom Engelhardt, and others like them. There are honest historians like Howard Zinn and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. There are also honest whistleblowers who get a bad rep, like Chelsea Manning, Eric Snowden and Julian Assange. There are still a few journalists of the old school in the world. But they have to be careful less they find themselves charged with treason under an old law, and spend the balance of their lives locked down 23 1/2 hours per day in a tiny cell in a US SuperMax prison.

I respect Greenwald from walking away from his creation when it tried to eat him alive. Taibbi is a blind squirrel who finds the odd acorn once in a while. On these occasions, he spits fire at something that richly deserves it, yet fails to connect the dots back to the people, parties, and ideas he supported who made these things possible.

I'm sympathetic to arguments on both sides re: Snowden and Assange, but Manning should be in a Supermax.

As for historians, Zinn is the very, very worst. Perhaps you favor a "warts-and-all" approach, Zinn's miserable life's work has poisoned education in the USA. A Peoples' History ought to be completely rejected and thrown out of every public school classroom in the country.

'Warts and all' is fine with me, if it is true, and reflects the times in a way the people of that time would understand. I think Zinn's book would get a nod of agreement from Columbus, Daniel Boone, the Founding Fathers, and most slave owners - and I haven't even got to the Civil War era yet.

We of today may be horrified, but not so in 1492 through the middle 1800s and on into just before the germ theory/antibiotic age. Casual death, deadly diseases of unknown origin or cure, and near-genocide of populations was not uncommon at all. At various points the most horrible deadly punishments attracted crowds, who came and brought their children to see the screams and blood and lifeless body or bodies. It was entertainment, and people worked the crowds to sell snacks and pick pockets.

Now we have football and baseball and basketball and such, and would never sanction a deadly blood sport - we even add groin and hand protection to cage fights, both MMA and Boxing.

Truly, we are only recently civilized, and not very civilized if we can't even stand to look at the behavior of our ancestors from just a few hundred years ago.

we are only recently civilized

Sort of. The level of civilizational attainment certainly isn't linear, and certainly isn't progressing forward or consistently improving in the way we are led to believe.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Germany was the very height of cultural refinement and achievement, nevertheless set up and carried out one of the most well-documented examples of mechanized slaughter the world has ever seen.

We pride ourselves on having freed slaves, and rightly so, and yet Zinn would have us endlessly flagellating ourselves for having held any in the first place. He gives the founders zero credit for having worked to set slavery on a path to extinction in North America, and we now excuse wanton looting, violence, and destruction of property.

Without school systems -- government and union controlled, I hasten to add -- having made his nonsense the centerpiece of history and civic education in the USA, not only would this be a healthier and freer society, but none of this year's turmoil would have been necessary.

If, as you suggest, all was squeaky clean then you can’t object to verifications of the process. Perhaps all doubts can be eliminated and we can all be assured of our nearly flawless election process and a thoroughly legitimate President Biden.

It is a little strange that no Biden supporters showed at his “rallies” while Trump attracted tens of thousands, but that is not the election.

Courts might have something to say.

So far courts are saying 'get lost' to the lawsuits being presented to them. I am in favor of following whatever laws are in place to insure an accurate count of votes, and want to have a good sense that no widespread illegality has taken place. But it seems that Trump just wants to invalidate Dem votes, to make wild assumptions with no facts to back them up. He can't stand to lose at anything and he thinks this is the biggest loss of them all.

No, Mr President, the worst loss will be when you try to run again, and your fellow Republicans refuse to even consider you as their candidate.

Excellent article. I am very happy Trump is pushing to open up this election to legal review, public inspection, recounts, bipartisan review of the ballots, process violations. We were supposed to be patient and wait for the count, why not the recount. What is the hurry. If he lost, fine, I want to know that, not just trust anti-Trump, Democratic activist officials telling me that. There are so many oddities - the Biden surges coming after down time, always so conveniently. Software turning Republican votes into Democrat votes. The dead voting. Blocking access to GOP observers. Given the closeness of the results in the key states that are determining the outcome, it is not that hard to turn things one way or the other.

Huh? We ARE being patient and waiting for the count... that's what is making Trump lose bigger...

I must say, I’m enjoying the tears here at the Trump loss. I find the cries of “voter fraud” to be highly amusing. Nothing like watching losers cry about it. January 20 can’t come soon enough.

"January 20 can’t come soon enough."

Then what?

Then Joe at the Oval Office desk asks Bernie, Liawatha, Schumer, Peolsi, et al , all who stand around him, okay do I just sign all these documents?

Why are you not yet in your bunker , with the entrance hermetically sealed up .

Kerr aren’t you late to your GLADD meeting?

Hmmmmmm . . . laugh. i m not crying much. I won't even if the matter is as announced. I know the country is going to be a lot less the country and I will have to prepare for that. I have no regrets about my vote for the current executive -- none. Not in the 2016 election and not today.

It's a reminder to watch liberals and democrats like hawks because they are always messing with the rules, redefining, obscuring meaning to get there way.

Crying . . . no . Expressed doubts about what went on -- you bet.