Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.
- Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) May 16, 2017
So there is an issue here that has been festering for decades and will get worse, and everyone--especially people on the left--needs to talk about this issue with intellectual honesty and consistency, and without being captivated and blinded by the orange sun of Donald Distraction Trump. That issue is the absence of fundamental democratic electoral integrity in the U.S., and why we accept so many elements of our elections--from voter suppression, to electronic voting machines, to the Electoral College--that make our elections untrustworthy.
And, yes, including absentee/mail-in voting--about which "there is a bipartisan consensus that voting by mail... is more easily abused than other forms" and "the largest source of potential voter fraud." Because it breaks the chain of custody, undermines secrecy, allows ballot-harvesting, and depends on "witchcraft" AI signature-matching algorithms, both parties have agreed that "votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth." (See also here and here.) No matter how necessary it might have been this November, it is bad faith to pretend that all of those concerns never existed and/or did not apply to this election's unprecedented scale of mail-in voting. (And it's a terrible idea to dismiss these concerns for elections going forward.)
It all makes for a voting system that is farcically un-democratic and designed to enable fraud, and we should be asking why, though everybody knows that, nothing has been done about it.
Really, as the Democratic senator said, it was a mistake not to object twenty years ago, because then it happened again sixteen years ago, and then four years ago. But, though Trump lost the same way Hillary did four years ago--by a small number of votes in a few states, a number that could easily be manipulated--the Democrats now decree it to be crazy, unhinged, a mark of sedition and the very destruction of democracy to think it could have happened in this election.
Even this guy knows that you can "manipulate the [voting] machines, manipulate records":
I know, one will say, "But it was investigated!" Sure, just as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Republicans decreed that it was "investigated" in 2004, and only tinfoil-hat "conspiracy theorists" could doubt that the result was absolutely correct. Except declarations are not investigations. Some specific allegations are refuted, but it was not investigated in any real sense, not in 2004 or 2016, because, for all intents and purposes, it can't be.
What the losers have in these situations are complaints about policies in 50 different states and hundreds of different voting precincts that were already argued about and decided on before the election, and clues about possible cheating in the election itself--extreme statistical anomalies, voting-machine irregularities, suspicious ballot-handling and counting procedures, etc.--that may have affected the outcome. There's also the inconvenient fact that some methods of cheating, like the ones Biden mentions above, are undetectable.
It is effectively impossible, in a national election with 150 million voters, to actually do a thorough forensic investigation of all that between election day and January 6th, when Congress counts those Electoral College votes (the only ones that matter). And, absent indisputable smoking-gun evidence of fraud in a specific jurisdiction that indisputably changes the result (or even with such evidence, which was arguably the case in Ohio in 2004), it is hardly conceivable that any court would cancel 150 million, or even 20 million votes and order a do-over. It's a very high bar, as it must be.
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