When the candidate they supported loses, some percentage of that candidate’s most avid supporters will suspect–or even allege–a conspiracy to “steal” the election. Before Trump, those allegations used to be limited to fringe folks and sore losers. (They’re still voiced by sore losers…Trump being a prime example.) Most of us properly consider these recurring accusations of electoral impropriety as one common type of conspiracy theory. Eminently dismissable.
So I was stunned to read about a lawsuit in New York, where “electoral impropriety” would be a kind word, at least if the facts are as the local news media have reported.
A seminal case questioning the accuracy of the 2024 Presidential and Senate election results in Rockland County, New York, is moving forward. In open court last Thursday, Judge Rachel Tanguay of the New York Supreme Court, ruled that discovery must proceed, pushing the lawsuit brought by SMART Legislation into the evidence-gathering stage. The lawsuit seeks a full hand recount of the Presidential and U.S. Senate races in Rockland County.
The Court has now ordered that hand count, in an effort to explain the statistical anomalies.
As stated in the complaint, more voters have sworn they voted for independent U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare than the Rockland County Board of Elections counted and certified, directly contradicting those results. Additionally, the presidential election results exhibit numerous statistical anomalies. The anomalies in the presidential race include multiple districts where hundreds of voters chose the Democratic candidate Kirsten Gillibrand for Senate, but where zero voters selected the Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Additionally, a statistician determined that the 2024 presidential election results were statistically highly unlikely in four of the five towns in Rockland County when compared with 2020 results.
It certainly appears that Rockland County experienced “irregularities,. Granted, it is highly improbable that those same irregularities were widespread enough to throw the national election to Trump (although a finding that he did, in fact, “steal” the election would certainly improve my opinion of the electorate…) While it might be technically possible to interfere with a presidential election, successfully altering the national outcome would require the thief to overcome overwhelming legal, logistical, and security barriers. The states, after all, are in charge of administering these elections–the decentralized nature of the nation’s federal elections would make large-scale manipulation incredibly difficult.
Would it be impossible?
At risk of descending into a Pillow Man degree of insanity, I keep thinking about Elon Musk’s complaint that Trump is insufficiently grateful to him for Musk’s help in getting him elected. The media (undoubtedly correctly) attributed that help to the many millions of dollars Musk donated to Trump’s campaign. But what if Musk’s techie bros figured out a way to overcome those legal, logistical and security barriers?
What if some proportion of that huge number of “no shows”–the millions of missing voters– actually did cast ballots, but those ballots disappeared?
What if it turned out that the madman currently desecrating the Oval Office stole the election?
Let me be clear: much as I’d like to believe that, I don’t. But just by indulging in that bit of conspiratorial daydreaming, we can see how much damage such suspicions can do to the civic trust that democracy demands. Trump’s accusations–and his cult’s acceptance of them–didn’t just trigger the insurrection on January 6th. It poisoned large parts of the body politic, sowing a distrust that has affected and damaged virtually every aspect of American political life.
If and when the U.S. emerges from its current downward spiral, restoring that trust–in democracy, in science, in education, in accurate history–should be the first order of business. But restoration of trust won’t come from the sorts of people who currently occupy America’s public offices. And while I’d love to believe that We the People didn’t really elect some of these sleazy lunatics, we probably did.
Just not, apparently, in Rockland County…
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