The biggest and worst myth among the MAGAs is the argument that Joe Biden didn’t actually win the 2020 election. With them it is gospel, it is sacrosanct. But then their actual reasons and justifications for it have a tendency to contradict one another.
Here are some sample posts by MAGAs from my anti-propaganda Facebook Group: Army For Truth.
Bonnie McGuire
When you look at the whole picture there’s no way Biden became President legally. Huge crowds supported Trump everywhere’s he went. Hardly anyone showed up for Biden.
Oretha Haddock Campbell
The election was stolen for Biden!!!!! Why do u think Biden stayed in basement all time!!!!! & never campaigned!!!!! Duh!!!! Free speech. !!!
Gerald Ladig
We all know the election was stolen so bring back the real President are everybody suffers even people that stole the election will have to pay!
Elaine Anderson
Dominion is just sorry that instead of fixing the fixable glitches it wants to whine and say pay me. Part of the woke mentality.
It's okay foreign countries elections had problems and it was swept away but USA we had problems.
Both machines glitches and humans with deceitful intentions. I will wager their machines are not the first with problems nor will they be the last.
It's too easy to manipulate their software.
Every major power country has voter ID laws and yet America the former leader of the world wants to behave like 3 rd world country when it comes to elections. That is crooked Democratic Party Maneuver.
So, it doesn't matter that there is no evidence for any of this. There is no record of voter fraud, there is no evidence of “vote flipping”, and there is no evidence of ballot harvesting. Every court, every audit, every recount, every examination of the facts has come back that the winner of the 2020 Election was Joe Biden.
And still, they deny it.
They have plenty of confidence, They have plenty of entitlement. They don’t have much justification for any of it.
Leading into the election this is what the polls looked like.
Trump never had a lead. Trump was never even close to Biden during the entire election. By November he was 8 points down. That is absolutely outside the margin of error. When we were surprised that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, the polls had her up by 3%, which is actually inside the margin of error, so it may have been surprising it wasn’t as totally unexpected and improbable as Trump somehow pulling it out in 2020.
There is the complaint that Biden couldn’t have produced 81 Million voters, while Trump had 74 Million.
In 2016 Clinton has 68 Million voters while Trump had 65 Million, so while the number of Democratic voters increased by 13 million, Republican voters increased by 9 million. That’s fairly comparable. Republicans gained but Democrats were already ahead, they just gained a little more ground. In fact, it’s fair to point out that Democrats almost always have an advantage in the popular vote. They have won the popular vote for president in every election since 1988 except for once in 2004 when GW Bush received 62 Million votes and John Kerry received 59 Million.
There’s nothing shocking here. Nothing surprising.
While campaigning Biden abided by Covid protocols and didn't allow large crowds, it wasn't really a matter that he couldn’t draw a crowd — he was choosing not to do that on purpose. By ignoring Covid protocols Trump spread the disease to 8 different people during the event for Amy Coney Barrett. It is really odd that the MAGA have this fixation on crowd size when frankly, quite of a few of the people at Trump rallies are the same people over and over again like people who follow the Grateful Dead from town to town. Also, the GOP used to completely downplay the sizes of the crowd when the person drawing them was Barack Obama, but then they’d tout them again when it was Sarah Palin. So this isn't really proof of anything since Palin — even with her big crowds — still lost.
It was not a surprise that there was a “Red Mirage” as the votes came in. It was well documented that people who were concerned about Covid infectious were choosing to vote by mail and that many of those people were Democrats while Republicans voted in person. Mail-in Votes are not counted on election night, they are counted during the following days — so yes — initially Republicans had a lead in many states and then as the additional vote was counted that lead evaporated. This was to be expected because of circumstances.
People have said that the various states, in making allowances for mail-in voting and covid protocols “violated their constitutions”, but that claim is false. Most election boards have some flexibility to make emergency election decisions without requiring a legislative session or Constitutional Amendment first.
Nearly one year after Joe Biden won the presidential election, some Republicans still stand by the falsehood that the election was stolen. One of their arguments is that state officials improperly changed election policies due to the pandemic.
That’s what Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., repeated in an Oct. 10 interview with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday." Scalise, the No. 2 House Republican, wouldn’t say whether he thought the election was stolen. But he rehashed a talking point he has used for months to question the validity of the result: accusing state officials of doing an end run around election laws passed by their own legislatures.
"If you look at a number of states, they didn't follow their state-passed laws that govern the election for president," Scalise said Oct. 10. "That is what the United States Constitution says. They don't say the states determine what the rules are. They say the state legislatures determine the rules."
Scalise’s claim draws on a legal doctrine based on a strict reading of Article 2 of the Constitution. But it ignores the fact that courts have shut the door on challenges based on his argument, made in dozens of lawsuits by Donald Trump and his allies seeking to invalidate certified election results. It also ignores that some election officials have powers to set rules without legislative changes, especially during emergencies.
Of course, the chief argument has been the “Democrats cheated.” Yeah? How did we do that?
The main argument there has been that it was with the help of Dominion and Smartmatic voting systems, but then again — as revealed by the Dominion suit against Fox News, OAN and Newsmax — even those stations knew at the time that their claims against Dominion were bogus.
A newly unearthed email shows that an unidentified Fox News producer frantically tried to get the network to keep host Jeanine Pirro off the air for pushing false claims about Dominion Voting Systems stealing the 2020 election for President Joe Biden.
NPR, which obtained a copy of the email and verified its authenticity with two sources, reports that the "anguished" email was sent by an unnamed Fox News producer in November 2020, and it objected to Pirro pushing claims that Dominion's voting machines supposedly "flipped" votes from Trump to Biden.
"The producer warned: Fox cannot let host Jeanine Pirro back on the air," writes NPR. "She is pulling conspiracy theories from dark corners of the Web to justify then-President Donald Trump's lies that the election had been stolen from him."
It wasn’t just Fox News who knew this was a pack of lies, it was people inside the Trump Campaign who knew the claims against Dominioni were false before Rudy Giuliani went on his great disinformation tour.
The Trump campaign debunked election fraud claims involving Dominion Voting Systems’ voting machines days before Trump allies like attorney Rudy Giuliani started widely promoting those same allegations, court documents discovered by the New York Times show, suggesting the campaign knew the fraud claims were false but let them spread anyway.
According to the documents, released Monday in a state defamation case brought by Dominion’s security director Eric Coomer, the Trump campaign prepared an internal memo on November 14 at deputy communications director Zach Parkinson’s request that debunked multiple fraud allegations involving Dominion.
The campaign memo debunked claims alleging Dominion and its leadership had ties to Venezuela and “left wing ‘antifa’ activists,” and that Dominion had used voting technology from rival voting machine Smartmatic, whose machines were also involved in election fraud claims.
Less than a week later, Giuliani and far-right attorney Sidney Powell, who Giuliani said in a deposition were acting as “active supervisors” of the Trump campaign’s post-election legal challenges, pushed those same fraud claims about Dominion at a televised press conference at the Republican National Committee, in which they falsely alleged widespread election fraud and tied Dominion to Venezuela.
So these guys know that they’re lying, but they went out and did it anyway.
Many years ago I was among the many people who were up in arms about the issue of electronic voting, particularly with ES&S and Diebold machines. Those diaries are still here. One of them got me a cold call from the LA Times asking for more details and information about the subject.
One of the safety features that was added to electronic machines that people demanded all those years ago was the option of a paper backup. It was using that paper backup that Georgia did their hand recount — and again, with the electronics and the machines taken completely out of the picture they found that Biden still won the election.
ATLANTA (AP) — A hand tally of ballots cast in Georgia for the presidential race has been completed, and it affirms Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow lead over Republican President Donald Trump, according to results released Thursday by the secretary of state’s office.
The Associated Press declared Biden the winner of Georgia and its 16 Electoral College votes on Thursday, after the hand count confirmed the former vice president leads Trump by roughly 12,000 votes out of nearly 5 million counted.
The complete hand recount stemmed from an audit required by a new state law and wasn’t in response to any suspected problems with the state’s results or an official recount request. The secretary of state’s office has until Friday at 5 p.m. to certify the election results. The results that will be certified are the totals certified by the counties, not those resulting from the audit, elections officials have said.
Then there’s the claim of “ballot harvesting” that we’ve seen portrayed in ex-convict Dinesh D’Souza’s little passion play “2000 Mules.” The best answer to this comes from former Attorney General Bill Barr himself.
Barr points out that the photographic evidence of one person with a ton of ballots really doesn't mean much of anything. People are allowed to drop off ballots for other people in their own families, so who are you to argue how large that family is?
Secondly, each and every ballot has to either have a signature, a Drivers License # or the last 4 digits of a Social Security # — the reason it takes longer to count mail-in votes is that all this information first has to be checked and verified before the ballots are counted. Therefore in order to generate fake ballots you have to have the original person’s name, match their signature and also their DL# and SS#. How is that even possible?
People have in the past tried to do this: and they’ve been caught, easily.
YUMA COUNTY - Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced that Guillermina Fuentes of San Luis pleaded guilty on Thursday to one count of Ballot Abuse, a Class 6 Felony, for her role in an August 2020 Primary Election "ballot harvesting" scheme where early ballots from other voters were collected and deposited into a ballot box on primary Election Day.
In December 2020, Fuentes and Alma Juarez, also of San Luis, were both indicted
for 1 count each of Ballot Abuse, also known as “ballot harvesting.” In March 2022, Juarez entered a guilty plea to Ballot Abuse.
Arizona law only provides for a family member, household member, or caregiver of the voter to collect voted or unvoted early ballots from another person. Under Arizona law ballot harvesting is a class 6 felony.
Fuentes admitted that she "knowingly collect[ed] ballots from another person, and those early ballots belonged to individuals for whom I am not a family member, household member, or caregiver." Fuentes further admitted that the early ballots were later provided to Alma Juarez.
The third claim from “2000 Mules” is the claim that phone GPS data proves that more people visited the ballot drop-off boxes than should normally be possible. The film claims that their GPS data is accurate to 16 inches, but GPS.gov says that cellphone GPS is only accurate to 16 feet. So they weren’t just seeing people who visited the ballot box, but also people who were casually driving by on the street.
How accurate is GPS?
It depends. GPS satellites broadcast their signals in space with a certain accuracy, but what you receive depends on additional factors, including satellite geometry, signal blockage, atmospheric conditions, and receiver design features/quality.
For example, GPS-enabled smartphones are typically accurate to within a 4.9 m (16 ft.) radius under open sky (view source at ION.org). However, their accuracy worsens near buildings, bridges, and trees.
There was the claim that in Atlanta some of the poll workers “pulled out suitcases of Biden ballots” and inserted them into the process. The problem with that claim is that members of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations and the FBI and DOJ reviewed those tapes and found that those were normal ballot boxes with normal ballots in them.
This was covered in detail during the January 6 hearings as was the fact that the DOJ under Bill Barr and then Active AG Jeffrey Rosen investigated each and every claim of voter irregularities that was presented to them by Trump or anyone else. “It was like wack a mole.”
Rosen testified that he even looked into the claim that an Italian satellite had been used to “flip” votes through some method involving the internet. He talked to the US Ambassador to Italy who reported that the claim was false.
There was also the argument that one state had more votes submitted than the number of voters in the state, but on examination, Jeffrey Rosen discovered that the discrepancy was caused by the fact that three counties hadn't yet submitted their voter totals to the state.
This argument was also made about Ohio, but it was false.
Ohio GOP candidate: According to the Census Bureau, "5 million more people voted than were registered to vote" in the 2020 election.
PolitiFact's rating: Pants on Fire!
[...]
"Five million more people voted than were registered to vote," Gibbons said March 28. "And that’s according to the U.S. Census Bureau. There’s a problem. We need to investigate it. The Jan. 6 commission should be investigating that instead of some sort of false accusation of some sort of insurrection."
Fact-check: Why some voters faced challenges voting in the 2022 Texas primary
Gibbons is wrong. No numbers back up his claim of 5 million more votes cast than there were people registered to vote. We’ve checked iterations of this statement before and found them false. Gibbons’ invocation of the Census Bureau failed to improve his accuracy.
The Census Bureau reported in April 2021 that its surveys found 168,308,000 registered voters, and 154,628,000 votes cast in the 2020 election. Neither is an exact figure; these estimates are based on people’s answers to survey questions. But since Gibbons name checked the Census Bureau, it’s worth noting that, according to the bureau, there were at least 13 million more registered voters than people who voted.
There was a video of “Trump ballots” being burned in a bag, but the fact is that those were actually Sample Ballots and the video was faked.
Yet another claim was that “dead people voted” but that simply wasn't the case. Well, not in sufficient numbers to change the results. The Georgia Secretary of State investigated the issue and found that there were 4 ballots submitted by supposedly "dead voters” that were really alive.
False claims that there were thousands of ballots cast in the names of dead Georgia voters can now rest in peace.
Election investigators found just four absentee ballots in the 2020 presidential election from voters who had died, all of them returned by relatives.
The State Election Board referred the cases to the attorney general’s office this month after investigators reviewed dozens of allegations. Almost all voters were found to be alive.
The tiny number of ballots actually cast on behalf of deceased voters contrasts with then-President Donald Trump’s false accusation that there were 5,000 dead voters in Georgia’s election.
It’s the latest in a series of unsubstantiated claims of fraud that have since been debunked, including allegations of counterfeit ballots, ballot stuffing and forged absentee ballot signatures. Three vote counts showed that Trump lost by about 12,000 votes in Georgia.
In Arizona Cyber Ninjas claimed that 300 dead people voted. That was wrong.
After spending months reviewing the 2020 election in Arizona last year, Cyber Ninjas, the firm overseeing the so-called audit said it believed nearly 300 dead people may have voted. It was one of a series of allegations the company made as part of an effort to sow doubt about the election results in Arizona.
It turned out not to be true. After investigating the allegations thoroughly, analysts found just one person who was actually dead at the time of the election.
Then there’s the fact the Chris Krebs, the head of Cybersecurity at Homeland Security, stated that this election was one of the most secure in history.
Chris Krebs: I have confidence in the security of this election because I know the work that we've done for four years in support of our state and local partners. I know the work that the intelligence community has done, the Department of Defense has done, that the FBI has done, that my team has done. I know that these systems are more secure. I know based on what we have seen that any attacks on the election were not successful.
Two years ago, President Trump put Christopher Krebs in charge of the new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs, a lifelong Republican, was confirmed unanimously by the Senate.
Scott Pelley: Why are you speaking to us?
Krebs, who's 43, worked on cybersecurity in the Bush administration, became director of cybersecurity policy at Microsoft and joined the Trump Department of Homeland Security in 2017. His priority was to stop anyone from repeating Russia's 2016 election hacking and disinformation.
Chris Krebs: So we spent something on the order of three and a half years of gaming out every possible scenario for how a foreign actor could interfere with an election. Countless, countless scenarios.
Scott Pelley: So back in 2017, as you're looking ahead to the election in 2018 and then ultimately the election in 2020, you have a to-do list. And the to-do list includes what?
Chris Krebs: Paper ballots. Paper ballots give you the ability to audit, to go back and check the tape and make sure that you got the count right. And that's really one of the keys to success for a secure 2020 election. 95% of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper record associated with it. Compared to 2016, about 82%.
Following the election, Sydney Powell and Rudy Giuliani filed 62 lawsuits to block the counting of votes or to lodge complaints. They lost all but one of those suits. Most were thrown out for lack of standing, but in most cases, their “evidence” was completely insufficient and lacking. Powell was eventually sanctioned for presenting evidence in court that she hadn’t even confirmed first.
A federal judge in Michigan sanctioned pro-Trump attorneys including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood that alleged widespread election fraud Wednesday, ruling the attorneys should face a range of punishments—including undergoing legal education and potentially facing disbarment—for their lawsuit that attempted to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in the state.
Ruling their lawsuit was “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process,” U.S. District Judge Linda Parker ordered the attorneys to pay the defendants’ legal fees and attend at least 12 hours of “continuing legal education” on pleading standards and election law, as well as referred the attorneys to disciplinary boards where they’re licensed “for investigation and possible suspension or disbarment.”
[...]
Parker agreed with the defendants, ruling the lawyers “abused” the judicial process by making claims that were “not backed by law” or evidence—and instead based on “speculation, conjecture, and unwarranted suspicion”—making “factual allegations and claims” without doing their due diligence to ensure those claims were true and “dragging out these proceedings” even after it was too late to overturn the election results.
Rudy Giuliani has subsequently had his bar license suspended for his actions in these cases.
A New York appellate court Thursday barred Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump, from practicing law in New York because he made false claims about the 2020 election.
The state’s bar association first said in January that it would consider pushing for Giuliani to be disbarred after his statements helped fuel the violent mob that invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 with the aim of overturning the presidential election.
Giuliani called for a “trial by combat” that day, drawing rebuke from prominent lawyers who filed complaints with the state Supreme Court's Attorney Grievance Committee, who accused Giuliani of playing a “role in fomenting a violent insurrectionist attack” on the Capitol.
I've made all these arguments to MAGAs and still, they don’t listen. They always manage to find yet another excuse, yet another thread to dangle their hopes.
Randy McEachern
Apparently you forgot about the Arizona and the Wisconsin audits. Both found massive fraud and election irregularities. You didn't forget you just conveniently don't mention then because they destroy you fake news libtard commie narrative.
None of the “irregularities” that were found were sufficient to change the outcome of the election, and frankly, most of them were mistakes that the auditors made because they didn't understand the election process.
As noted by the Arizona Mirror.
The long-awaited and repeatedly delayed report of the Senate’s purported “audit” of the election in Maricopa County featured a plethora of unsubstantiated allegations that files were deleted, equipment was improperly connected to the internet, signatures weren’t properly verified and ineligible voters may have cast ballots.
The county vehemently denied all of the allegations, and said the election review team’s ignorance of election laws and procedures led them to make false claims.
What effect the “audit” will have remains to be seen. The hand-recount of nearly 2.1 million ballots reached the same result as the official tally: Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Maricopa County and in Arizona. (The “audit” concluded that Biden actually won by about 260 more votes than the official election results.)
Maricopa County produced a 93-page Report debunking “irregularities” allegedly found by Cyber Ninjas in their audit. The Wisconsin Audit also found that Biden won the election and that there was absolutely “No Election Fraud.”
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin judge said Thursday that a Republican-ordered, taxpayer-funded investigation into the 2020 election found “absolutely no evidence of election fraud,” but did reveal contempt for the state’s open records law by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and a former state Supreme Court justice he hired.
[...]
All of American Oversight’s lawsuits stem from records requests it made to Vos and Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice hired by Vos in June 2021 to investigate the 2020 presidential election won by President Joe Biden. Vos ordered the investigation under pressure from election loser Donald Trump, who continues to falsely claim there was widespread fraud in Wisconsin and that Biden’s win should be decertified, which is impossible and which Vos has repeatedly refused to support.
And where does that leave us? Claims of fraud failed in court. Even in courts run by Trump-nominated judges. Ballot harvesting has been debunked. Burned ballots have been debunked. Dead voters have been debunked. Electronic manipulation of the votes has been debunked. The “Black Suitcases” have been debunked. Every recount has confirmed Biden’s win. Every audit has confirmed Biden’s win.
You can calmly explain all this to a MAGA and what you will get back is something like this:
Randy McEachern
you can believe whatever bullshit you want. That what it is. Bullshit. Do you honestly think the voting machines are infallible? Do you think the people who make them, sell them, install them, use them are infallible? Do you really have zero clue about the globalists wet dreams for a new world order? Do you think they are going to leave their plans up for grabs in free and fair elections? If your do I have a bridge to sell you.
So we’re beyond specific complaints here. No more specific allegations. Somehow, voting machines are all compromised because I say so. It's now that the “global elites” don’t want “free and fair” elections.
Yeah, ok, so then — how did Trump “win” in the first place?
You don't think there weren’t “global elites" who were trying to influence that election? [We know there were, they were caught hacking the DNC and releasing their Kompromat via Wikileaks] Now we’re into Jewish Space Lasers and Italian Spy Satellites. One has flown over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was the Illuminati behind the curtain in the courtyard. We should know better than to ask for “evidence” — the global elites don’t leave evidence or fingerprints behind. They’re like magic.
I know there’s little point in ultimately trying to have a rational conversation about any of this with a MAGA. They’re not really operating in the same reality as the rest of us. They don’t trust information from CNN, NPR or whatever source they’ve decided is too “lefty” or too much part of the “Deep State” or whatever. It doesn't matter even if the information is coming from a Fox News email, or from a Trump campaign memo — it doesn't matter if it’s true.
All that matters is the name of the person saying it and whether their sufficiently MAGA enough.
Even when the person saying it is Fox News. Even when the person saying it is Trump’s own Attorney General. Even when the person saying it is Trump’s own White House Council or members of his own campaign.
This way leads to madness.
And ultimately, madness is exactly what we all saw erupt on January 6 — and all this is exactly why. They don’t care what the facts are — they only care about what they choose to believe.
They simply can't believe that their Cheeto Jesus could be defeated. He just couldn't possibly fail, he couldn't be beaten, and he couldn't be overcome. His great Wall couldn’t possibly fall over and fail, it can't be cut through with household goods. To quote Luke Skywalker: It's not possible.
They choose to believe the election was magically stolen without leaving a trace. It’s not the result of a fair analysis of facts, it’s an article of faith.
Faith always triumphs over facts.