The whole "election fraud" conversation makes me sad. The more people tell me it's proven to not be true, the more I shake my head. How can something that's never been investigated on multiple fronts be shown true or false?
You could define "election tampering" broadly in three ways:
1) propaganda--news outlets report falsehoods, fail to report truths, and tilt hard toward one candidate with demonstrable impact. The latter part was investigated for the 2016 election cycle and most analysts concluded Google alone was responsible for about a 500,000 vote shift, leading some to speculate Trump may have won the 2016 popular vote if the media had treated both candidates equally.
2) circumvented laws--a state's election laws are violated or circumvented in some way in the process of an election
3) outright fraud--ballot stuffing, ballot stealing, machine/software tampering, etc.
1 and 2 aren't even in question. The 2016 election cycle media treated Trump like Mother Teresa compared to the 2020 election cycle media. That I know of, no one has tried to quantify how much that impacted votes, but if 2016 was found to be impactful, 2020 was multiply so. The part about laws, again, nobody has ever focused on it or tried to explain or defend instances in question. The Wisconsin Supreme Court's (I believe it was Wisconsin) opinion on the case that was brought was eye-opening. It was a 4-3 decision, with the majority opinion basically saying "Eh, okay, yeah, looks like some BS went on here, but really, do we want to open that can of worms?" while the dissenting opinion was a scathing rebuke of turning a blind eye to the evidence presented. It's been a couple years, and obviously I'm beyond paraphrasing, but the point is this is but one example of credible skepticism. Not proof of election tampering, mind you....founded skepticism. There were other state legislatures presented with evidence, none of whom refused to ratify the electoral votes, but also nowhere in those hearings did anyone come forward with anything along the lines of "We can explain that. Here's where the people who think we violated state laws are wrong." Just silence, and the media didn't cover any of it. Some of the states went on to pass measures to tighten the electoral process. That's their prerogative, but why do that if they didn't see something that caught their attention?
#3 is where all the attention lies. I have never had an opinion on the Dominion thing. I simply don't know anything about it. I know Sydney Powell never produced any evidence of her claims, while some independent audits claimed they did. But I wasn't privy to their process and I wouldn't have understood it anyway. It doesn't help when parties wanted to audit Dominion machines and the courts repeatedly blocked access. The only two machines I know of that were gotten a hold of, eventually, turned up some pretty bad results. Again, the media is silent on this, and a natural skeptic like me has nowhere to turn--I don't trust that judges blocked access to the machines (why?) or the media when they ignore something, and I don't trust smaller, independent sources who relay the above information (I don't know you....why should I believe you and that you're not just trying to get my conservative hackles up?). Some data scientists began doing things like applying Benford's curve to election results and claiming things were off, which is not proof of fraud as far as I know, it just means deeper investigation is warranted. But that didn't happen. YouTube and Facebook just told everybody to shut the hell up or we'll boot you, which....look, anytime dissenting opinions, questioning, and free speech start getting squashed, I start getting really suspicious. D'Souza's Mules film was interesting, but unlike many conservatives' claims, it proved nothing. It did, however, point yet again to a reasonable warrant for more investigation. But that didn't happen either.
All that to say, people who claim there was outright fraud, imo, have a ways to go to back up those claims. But there is warranted skepticism that was never addressed, and as such, other people who sneer at the first group and call them conspiracy theorists and other pejoratives can STFU. Things that didn't make sense were never offered to be explained or investigated. "Just shut up and look the other way" is admittedly suspicious as hell. Some have told me it's because "they" don't need to waste time and money on ridiculous conspiracy theories. 1) that's begging the question--assuming the conclusion in consideration, and 2) "they" spent 3 years and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in Trump's presidency trying to pin Russian collusion on his administration in the 2016 election, and turned up jack squat. Well, no, actually the FBI did ultimately trace it back to Hillary Clinton's emails, suggesting that as a viable propaganda strategy. Don't tell me you can't investigate some genuinely eyebrow-raising stuff and put my mind at ease. When half the country thinks there was fraud, it's not a waste of time to reassure them they're wrong, imo.
So yeah, I don't know that fraud happened. I don't know that it didn't either. And I'm skeptical.
