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In the wake of his electoral loss to Joe Biden, President Trump and his sycophants have been repeatedly claiming with no evidence that the election was stolen from them by some vague sort of fraud.
Some claims of "fraud" are actually far less suspicious than conservatives believe.
Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce, for instance, went to Twitter to claim something fishy was going on in "key states" because many ballots were filled in for Joe Biden and no one else.
Of course, Twitter quickly rebuked the claim, pointing out that "it is common for more votes to be cast for presidential candidates than House or Senate candidates, according to data from previous elections."
🚨 Attorney @SidneyPowell1 tells @MariaBartiromo they have ID’d “at least” 450k ballots in “key states” w a vote onl… https://t.co/5tNXVUwJck— Tammy Bruce (@Tammy Bruce) 1604852318.0
Bruce was quickly inundated with Twitter users seeking to calm anyone worked up by her misinformation.
More votes are cast for president than Congress in every presidential election year. 2004: 121 million votes for G… https://t.co/O0aqyG6CZf— John McCormack (@John McCormack) 1604865623.0
https://t.co/VD6Y9Pyupw— John McCormack (@John McCormack) 1604865729.0
This data is absolutely not significant. People vote for the president and no one else regularly. It’s called under… https://t.co/agacSw55wk— Jessica Huseman (@Jessica Huseman) 1604867201.0
Not only is only voting for the President not unusual, it also has a mirror opposite called "over voting."
Sometimes it happens the other wat around! A very popular choice in 2016 was to vote the down ballot and leave pres… https://t.co/OsbKfhIfD8— Jessica Huseman (@Jessica Huseman) 1604867299.0
Uh... no, this isn't evidence of voter fraud. It's common in every election for some number of voters to leave the… https://t.co/yYHhYJrBSS— Matthew Chapman (@Matthew Chapman) 1604869810.0
Twitter user Dan McLaughlin, a conservative pundit at the National Review, even gave Bruce a deep dive on how the things she brought up weren't unusual.
Consider Pennsylvania. In 2016, there were 6,166,938 votes cast in the presidential race, 6,051,856 in the Senate r… https://t.co/CJdY6L1bcU— Dan McLaughlin (@Dan McLaughlin) 1604863489.0
Overvotes in presidential races, like ticket-splitting, is an extremely longstanding & well-known pattern in Americ… https://t.co/ohOdvtwVxB— Dan McLaughlin (@Dan McLaughlin) 1604863725.0
At this point, it seems Trump's supporters are truly grasping at straws.
It is not unusual to see people show up & only vote for a presidential candidate, for the same reasons why it is no… https://t.co/rWos5qB0rz— Dan McLaughlin (@Dan McLaughlin) 1604863943.0
Even conservative analysts have been forced to acknowledge that Trump's claims of "fraud" seem to be completely without merit.
Here is my chart from Dec. 2016, computed from the US Election Atlas county data; the final numbers were slightly d… https://t.co/ntTVVwG2iE— Dan McLaughlin (@Dan McLaughlin) 1604866427.0
Also a reason why you'd expect there to be more presidential overvotes in Pennsylvania in 2020 than in past electio… https://t.co/t0EaUjNVTb— Dan McLaughlin (@Dan McLaughlin) 1604868162.0
This is far from the first Trump-centered conspiracy theory to bite the dust, and it will probably not be the last.
One can only hope, under a President Joe Biden, that there will at least be less of them.