The stolen election thing is very dumb, but people forget the same argument was made in 2016 with Russia “hacking the election” with no evidence found.
An information campaign and a disinformation campaign are hardly the same.
Can we normalize just saying "lies" when things are lies?
[1]https://theintercept.com/2022/09/19/house-republicans-chambe...
The big question is the scale of the operation and whether it impacted the results. It appears to me that the opinion people have is very related to how much they like the result.
We investigated claims of 'stolen election' (Arizona, other states) and found marginally more votes for Biden in subsequent recounts. Even if that had been reversed, the numbers would have not have been impactful.
Other investigations in the last few years have turned up smatterings of 'voter fraud', and it usually seems to be Trump supporters voting fraudulently.
My opinion is that we've always had small bits of 'bad' votes (intentional or not), but with continued drumbeats on that topic, it's motivating some Trump supporters to commit fraud in an effort to try to balance out what they believe (wrongly) to be 'the other side' committing fraud.
I had a friend die on Election Day 2020. He'd cast an early ballot. I often think of him when we get these refrains of "dead people voting!!! it's fraud!!!". I do not know if his vote was counted or not (I assume it would have been) - this was in southeastern PA, so there may have been some recounts that removed ballots like that???
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
Please identify specific people and times for any claims - I’m sure you can find some nut on truthout.org claiming that the GRU hacked voting machines but that’s not the same as a lie becoming the most important GOP litmus test leading to a violent assault on the U.S. Congress trying to prevent the election process from being accurately completed.
But that phrase specifically, I'm not sure exactly what you mean.
In 2016, Russian hackers hacked both the DNC and GOP, and selectively released information collected from the DNC in order to hurt their ongoiong campaign. Russian actors also ran interference campaigns on social media. These are all established facts. They are also not allegations of fraud, simply pointing out that these actions quite possibly had an impact on the outcome of the election.
What Republicans have been claiming for almost two years now is that Democrats have committed outright election fraud. They have accused Democrats of everything from tampering with voting machines to ballot stuffing to throwing out Republican votes, and they make all of these accusations without a shred of evidence. Many Republicans in office today have taken the hard stance that Joe Biden was not elected President.
By who? A handful of internet nutjobs, surely. No one in a position of power or influence ever claimed that the election results were fraudulent in the sense that today's elected republicans are straight up claiming.
(What was claimed, and largely substantiated, was that one campaign appeared to be coordinating closely with Russian interests during the campaign. And indeed people were upset by that. But again, that's not a claim about the election.)
This is 100% revisionist history, and a typical ploy to try to excuse bad behavior.
'Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
> "No, it doesn't kill me because he knows he's an illegitimate president. I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used – from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did," she said.
("Hacking" here refers to the undisputed hacking of Democrats' internal emails, not the voting machines. https://apnews.com/article/technology-europe-russia-hacking-...)
I wasn't aware of the interview that the article you posted above covers. What she says is dumb, and dangerous, and damages norms, and she shouldn't have said that.
That said, you have to admit that what Trump has done is many orders of magnitude more serious than this. It's effectively the official position of the Republican party that Trump actually won the 2020 election and that Biden is not the rightful POTUS. That's wildly dangerous in a democracy.
- Trump committed crimes in hiding campaign finance violations, for which he was an unindicted coconspirator, unindicted only because he was President. Funny how that works: commit crimes to become President and then become immune to prosecution for said crimes because you're President. We now know from Geoffrey Berman that Trump's political appointees in the DOJ leaned heavily on prosecutors to make that issue go away for Trump.
- His campaign met with a Russian spy to discuss an exchange of dirt on Clinton for relaxed Russian relations, and lied about it. Dirt came, and relations were indeed relaxed.
- The Trump campaign had over 100 contacts with Russia when Trump lied and said there were 0. Jeff Sessions lied about that under oath in front of Congress, and ended up having to recuse himself and appoint a Special Counsel because of it.
- That the biggest deal of Trump's life, Trump Tower Moscow, was in development when he said he had no business deals in Russia.
- Trump's campaign manager was meeting with a Russian intel operative, and it was later shown he was coordinating campaign strategy with him by exchanging internal campaign data.
- Russians had hacked the DNC and disseminated the data through wikileaks, and Trump promoted it as much as possible. The leak of that data was coordinated exactly with the publication of the Trump's serial sexual assault admission on the Access Hollywood tape.
- Trump made public statements directed at the Russian GRU to hack Clinton, which the GRU heeded.
- Trump fired the FBI director for investigating all of the above conduct (which was obstruction of justice), and then obstructed the subsequent special counsel investigation multiple times.
- Trump's AG Bill Bar lied about the contents of the Muller report to the public in his executive summary and then kept the actual report hidden, which turned out to be exceedingly damning, contrary to Barr's public statements.
I mean... if all of this was "legitimate", why did they lie constantly about it? 2016 was the dirtiest, most underhanded campaign in US history. That doesn't scream legitimacy to me.
I've been watching the show American Crime Story: Impeachment, and it just rings so hollow as to what offended people in the 90s compared to what happened in the Trump years.
Most importantly, Hillary Clinton conceded the election the next day, as did Al Gore in 2000 once it was clear he didn't have a path to victory. Both pledged to support the victor. Trump hasn't done that, two years on.