Trump’s reaction aside, what is a fair, rational, measured way to evaluate the results of the just-relased Rasmussen survey about voter fraud in the 2020 election?
The headline is “One-in-Five Mail-In Voters Admit They Cheated in 2020 Election.” The findings, in brief:
1. “More than 20% of voters who used mail-in ballots in 2020 admit they participated in at least one form of election fraud.”
2. “21% of Likely U.S. voters who voted by absentee or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election say they filled out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child, while 78% say they didn’t.”
3. “30% of those surveyed said they voted by absentee or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election. 19% of those who cast mail-in votes say a friend or family member filled out their ballot, in part or in full, on their behalf.
4. “17% of mail-in voters say that in the 2020 election, they cast a ballot in a state where they were no longer a permanent resident.”
5. “10% [of those polled] have a relative or acquaintance who has admitted …that they cast a mail-in ballot in 2020 in a state other than their state of permanent residence.
6. “8% say that a friend, family member, or organization, such as a political party, offer to pay or reward them for voting in the 2020 election.”
Rasmussen was commissioned to do the survey by the conservative Heartland Institute; the conservative-leaning polling service uses Pulse Opinion Research for its field work. The survey, which is of “likely voters,” supposedly has a sampling error of “+/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.”
Amusingly, the Washington Post sicced one of its most partisan, Trump-Deranged, untrustworthy analysts on the story, Philip Bump (EA dossier here), whom even the usually restrained and professorially diplomatic Jonathan Turley has designated as serial liar. In magnificent Bumpish fashion, this hack simultaneously accuses Rasmussen of faking data, then points to the survey’s findings that a lot of Republican voters cheated too. Someone explain to Bump that you can’t use statistics of a survey you claim is bogus in relation to your own party to impugn the opposition party.
I agree with Bump that the survey’s findings on voters offered money to vote for a certain candidate and voters who sent in ballots to a state where they didn’t currently reside seem fishy at best, and the headline stat that 20% of all voters admit to cheating in the election also seems too bad to be true.
Yet from a more general viewpoint, the poll results don’t surprise me. They shouldn’t surprise anyone. Mail-in ballots are obviously not a secure means of voting. Everyone but Democrats said as much before the election, and I have never read a sincere and plausible argument that such a system didn’t ensure widespread voter fraud. The fact that the Axis (…of Unethical Conduct: the resistance, Democrats and the news media) still adamantly insists that the 2020 election was as pure as the driven snow has always indicated to me that they know it was a crooked election but have settled on denial of reality as the best way to “get” Donald Trump.
No, that unreliable and insecure voting systems that Democrats used the pandemic to force on the public resulted in widespread cheating doesn’t prove that the election was “stolen,” as Trump continues to claim. The reckless use of mail-in ballots did taint the election, however, and the Rasmussen survey, at very least, provides a “base” for questioning the results after the mainstream media’s disingenuous mantra to describe Trump’s accusations for three years has been that they are “baseless.” That base might not be as large as Rasmussen’s survey suggests, but it’s still a base.
Ethics Alarms 
A base of evidence already existed. Consider, for instance, HereIsTheEvidence. It’s been around since 2020. Some of the individual bits are questionable, and many of them don’t establish proof of a stolen election, but they should at least count as probably cause to investigate. The “No Evidence” claim has been a Big Lie since it was first put out there. Anyone who looks can find scattered bits of evidence, and repeating an obvious lie to anyone who’s paying attention makes it a stupid lie.
Evidence does NOT equal definitive proof.
It is a stupid and obvious lie, but Democrats, 90% of the news media and most of my lawyer and actor friends both believe it and repeat it.
Claims about stolen election became a lot more believeable after the Democrats and the news media went all-in on the whole “Trump Colluded with the Russians®™ to Steal the 2016 Election” propaganda campaign.
“The headline is “One-in-Five Mail-In Voters Admit They Cheated in 2020 Election.””
This is one of those headlines I hate; I mentioned this in a comment to one of Curmie’s recent posts.
No one admitted they cheated. They admitted doing certain things that we conclude constitutes cheating. The article says all of these various practices are illegal. If true, fair enough. But, they did not ADMIT to cheating.
You could say one in five mail in voters broke violated election laws.
I really dislike the lack of precision in such descriptions. They are misleading.
-Jut
So, ‘violated election law’ is different from election cheating? Can you explain the difference because I am lost.
Voting in locations you aren’t registered to vote.
Voting more than once.
Allowing other people to vote in your name.
People paying you to vote.
That is what I normally think of when I think of election cheating.
This is why countries that care about election integrity, like Mexico, don’t allow mail-in voting because it is too insecure.
l heard an interview on the radio from one of the people who organized this poll, Chris Talgo. He said it was intentionally structured to never mention that the various questions were asking about fraud. So none of the respondents were told that they were essentially admitting to something that would have their vote invalidated, and was also potentially a crime. This way people would be more likely to truthfully admit what they had done.
The poll asked about things like signing a ballot for a family member, voting in districts where people were no longer residents, or taking money to vote. There were no “Did you bring in a suitcase full of fake ballots at 3 a.m.?” questions. While all of these are violations of election laws, most of them could be innocuous. It’s easy to imagine one person filling out a ballot for their family member without changing how the vote would go.
The respondents were 33% Republican and 36% Democrat, so it hardly says anything about the proclivities of one party over the other. All it really shows is that mail-in voting is a bad idea that has a lot of weak points for securely and legitimately tallying votes. Of course anyone paying attention already knew this. Leaving the house and physically voting in person once every 2-4 years should not be too low of a bar to choose the direction of your country.
And in-person voting would be even easier if each Presidential election were a paid national holiday…
Indeed. I’ve never heard a good argument for not doing this.
It wouldn’t have much affect on the self-employed like myself.
PWS
Nor on me.
I don’t know if this qualifies as a good argument, but this would free up all of the employees of the government.
We would get a president selected by AFCSME, SEIU, NEA, & the AFT.
I’d be all for expanding Election Day to a four or five day event. That should be enough to allow everyone enough time to cast their ballot.
I have been voting by mail for years. I like it. I like sitting at the kitchen table, reading through the blue book (do all states have a blue book?) and voting. I can drop off my ballot or check that it was recorded online. I realize there’s problems. Namely that people who don’t live at that address anymore get a ballot in the mail. Last cycle they had an entire mail truck who purposely delayed delivering the ballots. You tend to vote early and sometimes miss that last minute news, although nothing ever said has changed who my vote would’ve been for. I’m not sure voting by mail is any more hazardous or hackable than voting by voting computer systems, assuming there’s meaningful precautions. As far as voting for someone else… well… my kid was away at college and the ballot came here. I didn’t try to cast their ballot, it needs a signature which they do check so I can’t say if I could have voted for them or not. In a country of 333 million people there is naturally some cheating that goes on. The question is how much would influence the vote? For a president, that’s a lot. For a school district, that would be very few. So… is there some fraud? Probably. Enough to change a federal Presidential vote in a meaningful way by using mail in ballots? Color me skeptical. I think the biggest danger of all is the parties continue to want to alter the voting process without real proof that there’s widespread problems with the actual voting process.