Here's How We Know The Election Isn't Rigged

Donald Trump, perhaps aware of the fact that he's probably going to lose to Hillary Clinton in November, is ginning up fears that the presidential election will be rigged. There’s no evidence that this is the case or that it will be the case; rather, Trump’s claims are more likely the result of his own inability to see himself as a loser. In fact, not only is there no evidence the election is rigged — there’s good reason to believe that it would be almost impossible to rig a U.S. presidential election, as a recent tweetstorm from the Ashby Law Firm demonstrates why.

The thread is quite long — 33 tweets long, to be exact — and details the many reasons why it wouldn’t be feasible for anybody to rig a presidential election. The argument is multifaceted, but a lot of it boils down to how decentralized presidential elections are in America.

There isn’t really a single presidential election in the U.S. so much as there are 51 mini-elections —one in each state, plus the District of Columbia. They’re all carried out independently of one another, and the entire process involves countless volunteers, elected officials, and party members who often have no contact with each other.

The Ashby Law Firm also noted the many checks and balances involved in presidential elections: Many crucial stages of the process, such as the testing of voting machines and counting of the votes, are either carried out by citizens or overseen and cross-checked by representatives from both candidates’ campaigns — sometimes the process includes both citizens and representatives.

“To rig an election, you would need (1) technological capabilities that might exist only in Mission Impossible movies, plus (2) the cooperation of the Rs and Ds who are serving as a precinct’s elex offs, plus (3) the blind eyes of R and D poll watchers, plus (4) the cooperation of another set of Rs & Ds – the officials at the post-elex canvass, plus (5) the blind eyes of their watchers,” Ashby Law wrote. “Then you’d still have to trick lawyers, operatives & elex admins, who are scrubbing precinct-level returns for aberrant elex results.”

Keep all of this in mind when anybody insists that the election is rigged. The point isn’t that the parties are too honest or full of integrity to rig an election; it’s that even if they wanted to, they couldn’t. It would be too unwieldy and disconnected of an undertaking — like trying moving a pile of frogs in a wheelbarrow, as they say.

“[A]ny candidate who implies that his/her followers need to take the law into their own hands on E Day is horribly manipulating them, inciting them to disrupt the election, setting them up to break laws and be arrested,” the firm wrote. “Which may be exactly what he/she wants.”