A little from column A and a little from column B. I'm sure there's some fraud. Someone likely tries to get away with a little every election. However what we're seeing now is likely little signal and a lot of noise. People are coping by concluding there must be fraud and trying to find it. Unfortunately most people are doing it with no training or experience in detecting fraud. Worse, most of them are doing it with no training or experience in helping run a polling station or helping count votes. Much less any knowledge of how each state goes about it's counting process, handles problems with ballots, or goes about releasing preliminary data, or even taking into considering that it is preliminary data and thus more vulnerable to typos than the final certified count. Worse still they're doing so without much in the way of critical thinking or verifying claims.
So the result is that on one hand, they'd finding some of the more sketchy and ramshackle parts of the election system. Purging voters from the rolls being a touchy issue no one really likes to push and get done, means that
clerical errors can make it look like the dead voted when the reality is that it was a kid of theirs with the same name who voted. States using real but ridiculously old years as placeholders when a real date of birth is unavailable for one reason or another makes it look like hundreds or thousands of people who couldn't possibly be alive are on voting roles and are active. Popular voting systems have concerning ties to politicians people are uncomfortable with. Stuff that's sketchy and really should be fixed, but isn't actual examples of fraud.
On the other hand, they're coming out with dubious or outright dumb shit as well. Like the sharpie thing in Arizona. People ran with that one without stopping to ask: 1) Does bleed through even matter for the ballot or is it one sided? If it's double-sided is there even any problematic overlap in the bubbles? 2) What is their real procedure for handling ballots that cannot be properly read by the machine? Do they really not just count them manually? 3) If this is such a problem, why didn't the Republican poll watchers who have been there the entire time raise objections? And similar critical thinking questions. Or touting Benford's Law claiming it proves that the democrats are committing fraud. When they probably don't understand the math, only heard about it for the first time when someone claimed it proves fraud, and it takes very little checking to reveal people have done studies in the past to see if it could be used to detect election fraud, and it came up lacking due to a tendency to produce false positives for elections. The last likely being the reason why it's not already wildly used by political campaigns and by news organizations. Or people watching video or even livestreams of the election workers at work counting, not understanding what's going on, and leaping to "committing fraud" as the explanation, even if poll watchers are present in the video.
And so on and so forth. So to put it simply, people are finding weaknesses in the system, but not actual evidence that fraud was successfully committed. They might stumble across a few actual instances of fraud, but most of it is making mountains out of molehills.
www.politifact.com
