Voting Fraud, Trump’s Prediction and Jack Dorsey’s Petulance

Voter fraud and “irregularities” are real. There really does exist the potential for large-scale voting fraud because of known system irregularities. Irregularities mean messed up voting results due to a variety of problems and defects in the systems of voting.

In 2012 the Pew organization published a study of voting systems. Among documented findings:

“Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate. More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters. Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.”

24 million people had inaccurate or invalid registrations. 2.8 million people were registered to vote in more than one state.

Imagine mass mailing out of ballots under these conditions. The potential for fraud is immense. Voting is supposed to result in an unbiased count of voter political preferences. It will be impossible to have any reasonable degree of confidence in voting results if mass mailings are made to millions of people who have questionable registrations and identities, whose votes can’t be verified, who are deceased, who have moved, who vote several times or in several places, etc.

A different study has an eye-opening section on Rhode Island as a case study:

“According to data supplied by the Rhode Island Secretary of State’s office, 466,499 votes were cast by Rhode Island voters in the 2016 general election. More than 30 percent, or 143,111 votes, were cast by individuals who did not register to vote with either a social security number or driver’s license number…”

That’s only for starters. This study goes on to detail the incredible security lapses and holes in the Rhode Island election system.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, has flagged a message of Trump about voter fraud with a fact check label. Twitter writes “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud”.

Let’s examine that statement. It’s a certainty, based upon past events, that voting systems have big flaws, including voter rolls and registration. It’s a certainty that mailing out ballots does nothing to eliminate those flaws. It’s surely true that voting by mail raises new questions and possible loopholes because identities, addresses and registrations may be fudged. It’s clearly a prediction, and a sensible prediction, that mail-in ballots will have a higher chance of fraud. Trump says “If you stand in the middle of a busy road, you stand a good chance of being clipped by a car.” “No,” Dorsey says, “you’re making an unsubstantiated claim”.

Is Trump not supposed to exercise judgment and make reasonable predictions? Is he not supposed to put 2 and 2 together and get 4 without counting them again and substantiating the sum? Are people not supposed to use their imaginations and to foresee causes and effects?

It would appear that Dorsey denies Trump a reasonable degree of judgment because he disagrees with the result, a negative assessment of mail-in voting. Dorsey’s fact-checking comes across as a phony excuse to inject his politics into Trump’s message and cast doubt on the idea of mail-in fraud. If he wants to do that, he should do it in a separate venue and speak his mind, rather than hide behind a Twitter flag. That’s childish.

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2:36 pm on May 27, 2020