Rigging Elections

Many Christians believe that massive voter fraud allowed Joe Biden to unfairly defeat Donald Trump in the US presidential election. Rigging an election in a nation with a corrupt bureaucracy is easy, but in a nation with a professional public service with sound management skills, this is not as easy as is often assumed.

In any election anywhere, a few people will try to vote twice and a few will try to vote on behalf of their dead parents, but all these would not be enough to switch a national election. Transporting and scanning sufficient extra paper votes would be difficult, because 30,000 votes is a lot of paper. It would be hard to keep them out of sight if sound ballot management processes were in place. And the fake paper ballots would be easy to tracked and could be used as incriminating evidence the perpetrators.

Election administration tends to attract careful, conscientious people, who love operating in a rules-based environment. Once they have been assigned to a task, these people tend to become very loyal the objectives of their organisation. Their attention to detail means that getting fraud past them will be quite hard.

Therefore, if the presidential election was stolen, it would seem more likely that the software on the tabulation computers would have to be manipulated to change sufficient votes from one candidate to another. Change on that scale could not be done by a disaffected vote counter, while their supervisor was on a coffee break. Such an effort would need to be carefully planned in advance and be capable of switching the relevant states, when it became clear which were close enough to flip.

The perpetrators of the fraud would need to have been able to manipulate the tabulation software and databases without election officials noticing. I suppose that what can be done, can be hidden. The fraud would have to be carefully planned in advance by clever people, the effects would have to be carefully hidden with no evidence of the vote changes being observable.

The problem with most conspiracy theories is that they are beyond the capabilities of the proposed perpetrator. I doubt that the democratic party is capable of organising and hiding the widespread fraud that would have been needed to have swung the election. It couldn’t keep its servers secure before the 2016 election, so it seems unlikely that it could manage the much more complicated task of stealing an election.

Some are suggesting that the election was hacked by Iran, Serbia or China, which plays well to right wing voters who already hate these nations, but they are about as implausible as the claim that the Russians hacked the 2016 election. However, if the CIA and the NSA are not capable of tracking foreign attempts to hack election servers, they are incompetent. If the United States cannot keep its election computers secure against foreign intrusion, it is a long way from becoming great again.