[EL] Accepting the results of the election

[Kogan, Vladimir]

Jim,

As others have already pointed out, it seems strange to draw some sort of comparison between Democratic complaints about the 2000 election and Trump’s claims that the election is “rigged” via voter fraud. If your standard for judging the fairness of election outcome is whether the winner of the vote count is the person most voters intended to support, than there is clear evidence<http://www.academia.edu/download/44616369/butterfly.pdf> that Gore should have actually won and lost only because the poor ballot design in Palm Beach County. By contrast, there has no evidence<http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2013.0231> that there is voter fraud on a scale anywhere approaching what would be needed to have altered the outcome of any (recent) presidential election. To claim that one set of concerns (backed up by empirical evidence) and the other (backed up by conspiracy theories and innuendo) are somehow comparable seems pretty disingenuous.

I can’t speak for others, but what I found equally problematic is your claim that “thousands of instances of voter registration fraud in 56 of our 92 counties that is obviously a precursor to massive voter fraud” (emphasis added). If by obviously a precursor, you meant that logically registration fraud must chronologically precede voter fraud (which you later implied was what you meant), that is simply inaccurate. There could be voter fraud without registration fraud (e.g., an employee at a nursing home takes the absentee ballots of the legally registered seniors citizens who live there and fills them out without their permission). If you meant that massive voter fraud always happens when there registration fraud as an empirical matter, which was how I originally interpreted your statement, than that is also not true, for the reasons that Rick laid out earlier.

Vlad Kogan

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