SocraticGadfly: No, elections aren't being rigged

November 03, 2016

No, elections aren't being rigged

Yes, per friend Brains, or the Snooze, voting machines can occasionally malfunction.

But, rigging elections? Besides Trump Train nutbars who will inevitably make that claim this year?

In Ohio 2004, the two most prominent claimants of that are Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a huge autism conspiracy wingnut, and Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog, a known JFK assassination conspiracy theorist.

Friedman doubles down by claiming, breathlessly, that just 6 flipped votes in each Ohio precinct would have given the election to John Kerry.

Well, he lost by 115K votes. Simple math says Ohio has more than 19,000 precincts. Yes, per his math, there was fraud in one county in the recount. And that's it.

Seriously, if this were the case? The 2012 election was close enough, and Mitt Romney was an upstanding GOP candidate. Why didn't Diebold flip that one?

Per Wikipedia's 2012 info, 70,000 flipped votes in Florida would have given that to Romney and made it 303 for Obama, 235 Romney. Another 550,000 combined would have flipped Pennsylvania and Ohio, 38 EVs, and given the election to Romney.

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