Was The Election Rigged?

If Robert Mueller's investigation is allowed to move forward* the end result will be devastating not only for the Trump presidency, but also many Republicans in Congress and operatives in the party. The conspiracy -- and that's the best word for it -- goes very deep into GOP politics and touches almost every state.

* - I have my doubts

_Howard wrote:

Kris Kobach, vice chair of the commission, said that voter suppression is part of the investigation.

..

Dale Ho wrote:

Kris Kobach is the king of voter suppression. He has an obsession with trying to show that there is widespread cheating in our elections when there isn’t. In Kansas, he’s instituted a “Show Me Your Papers” law which requires people to show a birth certificate or passport when they register to vote. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in a unanimous opinion by Judge Jerome Holmes, who was appointed by George W. Bush, found that Kobach had engaged in “mass denial of a fundamental right” by blocking 18,000 motor voter applicants from registering to vote.

After he was ordered to fix that problem, Kobach said fine, I’ll let those voters vote in federal elections, but I’m not going to let them vote in state and local elections. We had to go back into court and this time, a state judge said Kobach had no authority to separate Kansas’ election system into a bizarre two-tiered system where some people could vote for president, but not governor. Kobach tried to justify these laws by saying that there is widespread voter fraud. The 10th Circuit called that “pure speculation.”

In yet another case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that Kobach had “precious little record evidence” of noncitizen voting. So this is a person who shamelessly spreads a myth of widespread voter fraud, has no evidence to back it up, and uses it as a justification for laws which suppress voting. One out of seven people who’ve tried to register in Kansas since his “Show Me Your Papers” law went into effect have been blocked from registering to vote.

It’s been a complete disaster in Kansas and it’s obvious he’s trying to replicate that disaster nationwide. It’s an effort to freeze the electorate in place. It disproportionately affects young people, people who register for the first time. Half of the people in Kansas who have been blocked by this law are under the age of 30. This is a voter suppression plot.

All of the news reports are saying:
1. That the Russians, under the direction of Vladimir Putin, hacked our election by stealing internal DNR emails and giving them to Wikileaks, by breaking into the electronic tabulators that count the votes, and by tampering with eligible voter lists.
2. That the Russians were actively working to discredit Hillary Clinton and advance the candidacy of Donald Trump (presumably because he is beholden to Russian interests for hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, and is thus manipulatible)
3. That as far as anyone has been able to determine, no votes were CHANGED by the Russians, so the results of the election should not be called into question.

I can't help wondering if 3 is true though.  Trump was WIDELY expected to lose by a considerable margin, by almost every poll and commentator. But he didn't. Seems suspicious to me.

Wouldn't it be interesting shall we say if Mueller turned up evidence that the election was tampered with, the result was altered, and that Clinton actually won?

NoCoPilot wrote:

Wouldn't it be interesting shall we say if Mueller turned up evidence that the election was tampered with, the result was altered, and that Clinton actually won?

I seriously doubt that they will be able to prove that the election result was changed. But even now, there is considerable doubt about the validity of the result. The clarion call ever since the end of voting has been "you lost, live with it", but I never believed the result, and anybody with an ounce of cynicism (ie, not a Trump supporter) should be seriously dubious at this point.

Report on NPR yesterday about how Russia, who is at war with Ukraine, has been using the Ukrainian elections as a test bed for trying out and perfecting election interference techniques. Russia manipulated the vote count so that a far-right candidate appeared to have won, although Ukrainian officials were suspicious and uncovered the tampering within hours. The far-right candidate had actually polled only a low percentage.

I heard this and went, "Hmmmm?"