The news conference President Donald Trump’s lawyers held at the Republican Party’s national headquarters soon after the 2020 election is remembered mostly for former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s odd tonsorial drooling. But it must also be remembered as one of the first iterations of the clumsy effort to tie together seemingly contradictory strains of election-fraud theorizing: that the election was stolen on election night by manipulated electronic voting machines — but also later by illegal or fake mail-in ballots.
Trump attorney Sidney Powell attempted to square this circle.
The voting machines “probably” were used all over the country to flip Trump votes to ones for Joe Biden, something that “we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system, and that’s what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in.” Only after the flood of votes “broke the algorithm” — you can perhaps hear the sound of computer engineers slapping their foreheads — did the fraudsters come “in the back door with all the mail-in ballots.”
Obviously this is all nonsense, every part of it, as months and years of analysis have proved repeatedly. But there’s something about Powell’s formulation that seems to linger as the 2022 midterms approach. Republicans who say they are worried about the upcoming elections being stolen have come up with a way to beat the system: Vote only at the very last minute to potentially stymie those devious hackers/fraudsters/Democrats.
One iteration of this idea cropped up in Washington state, where every voter casts a ballot through the mail. There, a hard-right GOP candidate for the U.S. House, Joe Kent, encouraged his supporters to wait to submit their ballots until the last day of the campaign.
At a town hall event, Kent recommended that people learn about “why holding on to your ballot until the last day is one of the surest ways to ensure that if there were to be any funny business … they would have the least amount of time to do said funny business.”
Officials in the state quickly rejected the idea. One, Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall, accurately attributed it to “the lie that’s happening across the country” — that there’s rampant fraud that must be counteracted.
The same theory has appeared in states that have more-traditional voting systems, as well. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported recently that an ally of Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano had compiled a five-part “Plan for Victory” that made similar recommendations aimed at disrupting purported election-stealing.
“Make [the election hacker] think he’s got the cheat in the bag and nobody will notice,” Toni Shuppe wrote, “then overwhelm him during the last hour with a turnout he can’t keep up with.”
Then it cropped up in Maryland.
“Vote on November 8th as late in the day as possible,” said Macky Stafford, a campaign staffer for Michael Peroutka, the Republican candidate for attorney general in the state. “If everyone could stand in long, long lines at 6 o’clock, that would actually help us.” In an email sent earlier this week, Stafford repeated the same plan: “Let’s all pray we wait in historically long lines and while we are standing in line, inform fellow voters to only vote on paper once in the polls: no touch screens!”
These are irrational concerns being addressed with an irrational strategy, so no rational deconstruction of them is likely to have an effect. But let’s engage in one anyway.
The idea here is that “hackers,” people somehow controlling what the electronic voting machines will produce, will be flummoxed by a late surge in votes for Republican candidates. This presupposes that the hackers are as limited in their time frame as voters themselves, that once polls close the hackers can’t adjust anything — that they track voter turnout, set the number of stolen votes needed to ensure victory and then go about their evenings. Then, all of a sudden, a rush of late votes and their plan is upended!
This, like so many other unsupported conspiracy theories in modern America, is largely born of ignorance about technology. This purported algorithm, for example, needs to do nothing more complex than set Democratic vote total to Republican vote total plus one. Sure, the hackers might want to be slightly more sophisticated than that, distributing votes proportionally depending on who’s voting where. But that’s something that 1) could be baked into the program from the outset and 2) isn’t time dependent! Wasn’t the whole thing in 2020 that the vote was “stolen” slowly over hours and days? The “hackers” would have way more time to influence things than the voters themselves do.
Again and importantly: There’s no evidence at all that this occurs, and there are, in fact, various reasons (technological, statistical, logical) to assume that it doesn’t. It’s all nonsense — but nonsense that various people appear to be taking seriously.
This isn’t just born of ignorance about technology, of course. It’s also a response to the very human impulse to want to do something to address a problem that strikes you as urgent. People do things like this all the time, taking steps that don’t necessarily solve a problem but seem as if they might be aimed in that direction. It is expected that some people might seize on a way to combat the fraud they think is rampant, to empower themselves and their allies against their imaginary oppressors.
What this reveals isn’t really anything about the process. It’s the electoral equivalent of recommending that people wear tinfoil hats to block mind control. What it reveals instead is how deeply these false claims about the election have burrowed into the consciousness of some American voters and how irrational those claims have become.
Vote when you want to. It doesn’t matter. You’re not tricking hackers by voting late. You’re not “breaking the algorithm” by doing so. All you’re doing is making yourself wait in line.