There are two theories that allies of Donald Trump promote to assert that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate.<\/p>\n
The first is that rampant fraud \u2014 maybe with mail-in ballots, maybe from voting machines, maybe both, maybe something else \u2014 resulted in Joe Biden earning more votes nationally and in the states he flipped from 2016. This theory suffers from the minor flaw that there is no evidence in favor of it and lots of evidence against it. It also suffers from the secondary flaw that the lack of evidence means that those who most loudly adhere to it are often those with whom reputable people are the least interested in associating.<\/p>\n
So the second theory gained traction. It holds that the election was illegitimate because a number of ancillary things shifted the results: late changes to election rules, including some that let more people vote early (meaning, the argument goes, more Democrats); big donors helping fund election administration; social media companies putting their thumb on the scales, including by (briefly) limiting the sharing of a New York Post story about Joe Biden\u2019s son Hunter. In short, the election was \u201crigged\u201d for Biden not by direct cheating but by indirect influence, and that made all the difference.<\/p>\n
There are a few benefits here. One is that it\u2019s essentially unfalsifiable; you can\u2019t flatly disprove vague claims about influence. Another is that it separates the presenter from the disreputable characters alleging fraud and from being tied to the already false claims about illegal voting. It also allows you, a Republican and\/or Trump supporter, to lament how The System weighed in on behalf of Biden in an unacceptable way.<\/p>\n
Such voices are noticeably quiet now that it\u2019s Republicans who are doing the rigging.<\/p>\n
In Georgia, for example, the State Election Board passed a new rule last month mandating hand counts of submitted ballots \u2014 a rule driven by false claims about election fraud and enacted on the strength of the board\u2019s pro-Trump majority. As ProPublica has noted, the new rule empowers local officials to potentially shift the outcome of the election by excluding pockets of votes offered in favor of Trump\u2019s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n
One of the ways in which the Georgia results were suspect, according to a January 2021 memo written by Trump attorney John Eastman, was a change in rules resulting from a settlement agreement reached in March 2020, seven months before the election.<\/p>\n
The right has also grown much more comfortable with social media executives weighing in on politics \u2014 one in particular.<\/p>\n
In 2020, a contribution made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s private foundation to an organization that planned to provide grants to elections officials was cast as a devious effort to turn out more Democrats. Zuckerberg was broadly pilloried on the right despite the lack of evidence that the donations aided Democrats or even were meant to aid Democrats. Yet there\u2019s no outcry for X owner Elon Musk\u2019s explicit effort to use his platform (known four years ago as Twitter) on Trump\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n
For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally<\/p>\n
\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2022<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Musk has received only praise from Trump allies for explicitly endorsing the former president and for his support of a political action committee, America PAC, that aims to turn out Republican voters by paying people to help identify targets. Musk\u2019s activity on behalf of Trump goes far, far further than anything Zuckerberg did, including massive (quiet) funding of right-wing efforts in 2022 and (loud) pledges to do more in 2024. X took over the platform\u2019s handle @America and handed it to the PAC to explicitly promote Trump\u2019s candidacy.<\/p>\n
Nor did Republicans express outrage at Musk shutting down the account of reporter Ken Klippenstein. Klippenstein obtained and published a report that was allegedly part of the vetting process for Trump\u2019s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). Soon after, his account on X was shut down for sharing private information \u2014 \u201cdoxing\u201d Vance, in the vernacular.<\/p>\n
The information was allegedly stolen from a Trump aide by hackers in Iran. The reason that the story about Biden\u2019s son Hunter was limited for several hours in October 2020 was concern that the information in the article was a function of Russian hacking, as information made public shortly before the 2016 election had been. The muffling of the Hunter Biden story (which, despite slanted polling, almost certainly had no effect on the election) became a central element of the right\u2019s insistence that social media companies were censoring their politics. The response to Klippenstein\u2019s ongoing ban has been silence.<\/p>\n
Musk\u2019s purchase of Twitter was in part a reflection of his sharing a widespread belief on the right, one that predated the 2020 election, that the company specifically and social media companies broadly were intentionally censoring conservative users. The companies argued that they were, instead, reducing abuse and misinformation, with some prominent conservative users affected.<\/p>\n
That argument was clearly robust from the outset, but it has been bolstered by recent research demonstrating that right-wing users were more likely to share false claims on social media. If the social media company implements limits on sharing false claims, those users would be more likely to be affected \u2014 which, the research suggests, they were. Once Musk bought Twitter, those limits were largely abandoned, allowing false information to spread. Information that still often emanates from the right and that is still often offered in service to Trump\u2019s political goals.<\/p>\n
To use the parlance of the right, X has now been \u201crigged\u201d in favor of Trump, just as voting in Georgia has been. If Trump wins next month\u2019s election, Harris supporters will have a ready-made excuse for why that election was illegitimate. Except, of course, that Harris is very unlikely to be promoting the idea that it was. And except that there\u2019s no evidence that such \u201crigging\u201d would have much effect this year any more than it did four years ago.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
There are two theories that allies of Donald Trump promote to assert that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate. The first is that rampant fraud \u2014 maybe with mail-in ballots, maybe from voting machines, maybe both, maybe something else \u2014 resulted in Joe Biden earning more votes nationally and in the states he flipped from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10716,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}