Rhetoric will likely always rule politics, at least until the very nature of humankind changes. The politics of hate however corrupts and twists the ideals of logic and rhetoric and changes a classical tradition of debate into loud shouts, insults, inflamed emotion, people who somehow don’t believe the rules apply to them.
And somehow, there seem to be people for whom the rules actually don’t apply.
The question before our Republic now is hauntingly the same that the election should have answered. The election should have clearly decided who was President. Biden says he won. Trump says that Biden stole the election and we should “stop the steal.”
Somebody is wrong. At least one side, if not both, are lying.
Biden’s claim is pretty straight forward. We can quibble all day long about the individual votes, but the electoral votes (assuming that the polling numbers as reported are correct) simply are what they are. Biden has 306 electoral votes. Two hundred seventy are required to win, so Biden wins.
Trumps claim is built on the belief that some states actually voted for him instead of Biden, but those states were effectively stolen from him via fraud. This claim is a lot harder to evaluate.
As a simple person with a fly by night blog, I’m going to keep my analysis simple.
Trump needed thirty six electoral votes to win. Three contested states could have provided him that. Arizona with eleven, Georgia with sixteen, and Wisconsin with ten votes would have been enough to turn the tide. I list these three because of the states that went for Biden, these were the ones with the smallest margins of difference, and thus the easiest way for Trumps claims to be valid would be for the margins to be accounted for by fraud.
Arizona was carried by Biden by 10,457 votes. Let’s examine the likelihood that there was enough fraud to account for 10,457 votes. Trumps claim is that the database for the entire county of Maricopa, Arizona’s most populous, was deleted. Let’s be fair, if that were true, there would at least be grounds for suspicion of fraud, or gross neglect on the part of the vote counters. According to their own website, there are 2.6 million registered voters in Maricopa county.
https://www.maricopa.gov/5539/Voting-Equipment-Facts
That would give Trump grounds to question the election there…..however……
An independent group calling themselves the “Cyber Ninjas” (a name that inspires even more trust than Tired Blogger What Blogged at midnight” recounted votes and while they found mistakes….the mistakes actually meant Biden had won by some three hundred votes more than had been reported.
My last point to make before moving on….the data base had not been deleted. I’m going to cite two sources here, one that at least explains why there is so much confusion on this topic, the other definitively discounting the data base deletion.
So while it is confusing, I think we can accept that Arizona went to Biden.
Next we go to Georgia.
Georgia went to Biden by a margin of 11,779 votes. Let’s examine Trump’s claims there.
So Trump’s claims in Georgia were twofold. Votes were sold for ten dollars a pop, and that five thousand dead people voted. I gotta be honest, I’ve heard claims like that in various parts of the United States for about thirty years, and both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have been claiming for at least the last twenty years or so that Democrats win by using the names of dead people and voting under those names to pad out their vote. Now let’s examine these claims, remembering that we need to find at least 11,779 votes to change these sixteen electoral votes for Trump.
The claims about pay to play votes have been tracked to an organization called True the Vote. I’ve never heard of them before, they may be the best thing since sliced bread, and I certainly don’t want people to be payed to vote. (Unless I get to be paid to vote. Please make out your checks to Tired Blogger, and place the checks….what….the FBI wants to talk to me….uh….never mind). But evidently there is some debate about how many people have done this, and the best I can gather is that one person who is refusing to allow his identity be known has shared this information. While I do get the happiness of my party to find one witness to the fraud….I really don’t like to make decisions with only one witness. So let’s file this one under “maybe true, maybe not.”
So what about the Zombie Apocalypse of dead voters? According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, an investigation only uncovered four fraudulent dead voters. On one hand this frankly does prove there is fraud, and the Republican claim that dead Democrats vote is not baseless. Having said that, we basically account for four votes.
That means our friend with the secret identity had to somehow drum up 11,775 votes for Trump to actually have a valid claim to the state. I’m not even going to talk about the audits, frankly, we could have saved millions by just turning the IRS loose. Find the person in Georgia who didn’t claim exactly $117,750 in income and we have both our culprit and one more state toward Trump being the legitimate winner.
I won’t hold my breath.
I’m at 982 words now, and have satisfied my own curiosity about at least the two most likely states. I may come back to Wisconsin or other states later if enough readers ask, but I honestly think we can put this question to rest. For good or ill, I think Biden won, fair and square. But what do you think? Please let me know in the comments.
Tired Midnight Blogger (What Blogs at Midnight) 
I love the tone of this blog!
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Thank you very much! You are too kind…..now where is that link to Red Dirt D&D….?
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