Massive Election Conspiracy Not Required

Sometime ago, I read this article in The Washington Post on the topic of election fraud: had the presidential election suffered from it. This is the bit that has continued to niggle:

Similarly, it strains credulity to think that there was some sort of massive, coordinated effort to steal an election. Such a conspiracy would have had to cross state lines, involve hundreds or thousands of people and trickle down from the heights of power to the lowest precinct worker.
[…]
"This is not the first election with errors — and the simplest explanation is probably the right one. I think fraud on a massive scale that their conclusion essentially requires is totally implausible. To make it plausible it would have a lot of people working together, and you know from being in the news business how hard it is to keep something secret. …" [said Warren Mitofsky, the president of Mitofsky International, the company that performed the exit polling]

["Vote Fraud Theorists Battle Over Plausibility: Study Gets Blog Love, But Comes Short of Proof", by Terry M. Neal, Washington Post, 24 April 2005.]

It's a bit difficult to see this as the typical strawman argument so popular in today's political discourse ('Why do liberals hate America so much?"), but it is.

The strawman: that election fraud would have required a massive conspiracy. Massive conspiracy in a society of reality TV and reveal-all talk-shows is beyond imagination (it is claimed), so it couldn't have happened. However, massive conspiracy was not required, and that's the point that is pointedly allowd to slip past in this masterly sort of misdirection.

"Conspiracy" is one or more people getting together and agreeing to keep silent or lie about something. Watergate was a conspiracy. The Bush Administration's WMD lies as a prelude to invading Iraq was a conspiracy. Real conspiracies tend to unravel sooner or later because it is indeed difficult for all the conspirators to keep their mouths shut 100% — the urge to tell someone something is usually just too great. The more conspirators, the harder it is to maintain silence.

However, what it alleged to have required widespread fraud in [at least] the 2004 national election, does not need widespread, "massive" conspiracy. Not at all. All it requires is the uncoordinated, non-conspiratorial actions of perhaps a few hundred people to alter the outcome of the election.

NB: none of these people need to work out the details with any of the others. They can each be separately motivated by such misguided loyalty to their candidate as they need to justify the means to their ends. The alleged election fraud, large as it seems to have been in overall effect, nevertheless was easily the result of localized contributions contrived by one or two people at a time.

There are numerous way in which the actions of one person could be greatly amplified here or there, adding small amounts at a time to the accumulated fraud, and each of these little acts of sabotage can be repeated over and over, one person at a time, without working out the details with any conspirators.

Time and again reports have shown how there were hundreds of separated, uncoordinated instances of "little fraud", events that were readily controllable by the actions of one or two or three people. No "massive conspiracy" was required at all, although the result of lots of these "little frauds" was one great big fraud with widely distributed responsibility. It makes it all seem so much more insubstantial that way, as though it's all in one's peripheral vision. It also might make it seem not worth the bother of prosecuting all these "minor" little transgressions.

It does not, however, make the fraud less real just because it was not the result of "massive conspiracy". Of course, the claim will be made that there are alway errors, things always go a little bit wrong, but in the aggregate, when one looks at the entire population of votes cast, it is truly beyond belief that each of hundreds of accidental errors would all err in the direction that favored one and only one candidate. That is the capstone that marks this monument to "accidental conspiracy" and the large-scale fraud that resulted from lots and lots of conspiratorially isolated little frauds.

So, no "massive conspiracy" required at all, none needed, when a multitude of "little frauds" will accomplish the same thing with no significant responsibility resting anywhere. After all, what's a few hundred votes here, a thousand votes there, when surely it wouldn't affect the outcome of the election….

———-
Some references that I found useful when I was making notes for this post:

Posted on July 20, 2005 at 17.58 by jns · Permalink
In: All

One Response

Subscribe to comments via RSS

  1. Written by Bearcastle Blog
    on Friday, 2 June 2006 at 13.26
    Permalink

    Massive Election Fraud

    Well, the buzz today is all about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s piece in Rolling Stone ("Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"). Sometimes I feel like I'm just waiting for everyone to catch up to the obvious (see my "Massive Election Conspiracy Not Required"…

Subscribe to comments via RSS

Leave a Reply

To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.

I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.