How easy is it to rig a U.S. election?

published Oct 22, 2016, last modified Dec 28, 2021

Turns out, not as hard as you may have thought.

How easy is it to rig a U.S. election?

As election day in the U.S. approaches, several media reports of election fraud have come to light.

Naturally, there are folks who resist these reports.  One particularly recalcitrant person recently asked me "Do you really think it's possible to rig all 50 states?"

To be fair, that's a valid question — rigging all 50 states would be conspiracy theory-level difficult — but that's not the right question we need to be asking.

No one has suggested all that U.S. states are — or need to be — rigged, in order to steal an election.

The nature of battleground states gives them election-deciding importance.  Rigging two or three states is probably enough to guarantee a victory in a close election.

So how hard is it to rig one state?

In a close election, one would only need to rig a few counties to tilt the entire state.

What that means is that only a few counties of a handful of states need fraud, to tilt a close race.

This is just a simple matter of elementary school arithmetic.

In case you are still skeptical: the same people saying "rigging the election is impossible!" were telling you, not a decade ago, that the election from Al Gore, first in the popular vote and then in the Supreme Court.  "Hanging chads" is the search term you need to confirm those historical facts.

Now, we have video evidence that there are several counties where this fraud was already planned to happen.

But now the media is casting fear, uncertainty and doubt over the evidence.  In effect, they are playing the "Who are you going to believe?  Us, who keep pumping one candidate up and the other down?  Or your lying eyes?" card.

I think it's time you believed your lying eyes.

Keywords
democracy fraud