The Big Lie and the Big Liar
It has been nine months since the election and the Big Liar and his sick sycophants continue to promulgate the Big Lie. We know that the Big Liar’s ego and desire to continue to be the focus of media attention will not allow him to concede. We already lived through the years after he was elected but continued to say the 2,868,686 votes Clinton beat him by were, without presenting a scintilla of evidence, illegal ones.
The Big Liar is incapable of admitting defeat, but how can those who do not have their egos at stake stick to the Big Lie? Trained and trustworthy professionals counted and recounted the ballots in Arizona three times. In Maricopa County out of 2.1 million votes cast they found one, not 100 or 1,000, or the 275,000 fraudulent ballots that Trump spokesperson
Liz Harrington said were fraudulent on Fox.
It seems like the crazyas-a-loon Cyber Ninjas recount of Maricopa County should have been done in the smaller Pima County because that recount identified 176 duplicate votes. It should first be noted that none of those votes was counted twice in the original vote count. The recount found that they were duplicates of people who voted by mail and later voted at the polls. While they have not said so, many may have been intentional because Trump actually told his voters to do that. They may even have been duplicate Trump votes, not Biden votes.
Pennsylvania where the Big Lie pushers claim there was widespread voter fraud turned up only four cases after careful inspection and recounts. All four were Republicans attempting to vote twice for Trump.
A number of official sources have reported that 2020 was the most secure and accurate election. The voter fraud that Republicans keep saying is prevalent has no factual basis.
Here are a few of the many voter fraud studies reported by the Brennan Center for Justice:
One found the rate of fraudulent impersonating votes ranged between .0003 percent and .0025 percent.
A Washington Post study covering 2000 to 2014 came up with 31 credible voter impersonation attempts out of a billion cast. A study of 2012 voting found .02 percent incidents of double voting. A 2014 study found 0 percent non-citizen voting incidents.
Biden won by about 7,000,000 votes. If you take the highest double vote rate from above and assumed, incorrectly, that the attempts actually ended up as counted votes even after recounts, and that none of Trump’s votes were double votes, that would result in 1,400 votes nationally, not enough to change any state’s win-lose result.
That, and no provable evidence being found by investigators or shown in courtrooms, is why the Big Liar and his followers have to come up with conspiracy theories.
Cyber Ninjas looked for bamboo fibers in the Arizona ballots. It would appear that they intend to say those ballots for Biden came from China. Sounds good out of context, but the U.S. is the largest importer of paper and China is the largest exporter so there should be no surprise and nothing nefarious about finding bamboo fibers.
Mike Lindell, the biggest conspiracy theory spreader, said he would expose evidence for his theory that votes were changed on vot
ing machines by China. He did not present the evidence at his big event, but Dominion Voting Systems, the major provider of voting equipment, is suing him, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell for over a billion dollars, and Fox posted a disclaimer when Trump was promoting the conspiracy theory on air, no doubt trying to avoid being sued. One major hole in his argument is that the voting machines used paper ballots and the recounts of paper ballots matched the machine counts.
Enough already!!! It is time for the Big Liar’s followers to face reality, that the person who over his four years as president lied to them 30,513 times (documented) is telling them a lie, the Big Lie, a gigantic one that is a disgrace to our country, its democracy, and its 150 million voters. They should also see it as an insult to their intelligence.
It is also time for Republicans to quit using the Big Lie as justification for passing laws suppressing voting and creating partisan systems for overturning election results. With money and the help of Heritage Action 389 bills have been introduced and 28 bills in 14 states have already passed. Making it against the law to give voters in hours-long lines water does not improve the integrity of ballot results. It does say something about Republican organizers’ integrity.
(Tim Willoughby moved to the Eastern Sierra more than 10 years ago after a 30-year career as a teacher and principal. He was the Democratic candidate for the 25th Congressional District in 2004. Willoughby also pens a weekly local history column for the Aspen Times.)