Actual Election Fraud
Serial and NYT have a podcast series about election fraud called "The Improvement Association". Specifically, it's about the 2018 North Carolina 9th congressional district election, which appears to be the only time in recent history that a congressional election was thrown out because of verified fraud. The fraud, as you probably can guess just by who is releasing the podcast, was committed by Republicans. The byline of the podcast perfectly encapsulates the issue: "Democrats like to talk about this case because it was Republicans who did the cheating. Republicans like to talk about it without mentioning who did the cheating because it proves that election fraud does happen, which it does."
I think the podcast is worth listening to, because it's fairly detailed examination of fraud allegations within a very localized (basically one county) and narrow set of incidents (a couple of elections are implicated). The basic gist is that it appears that it is uncontroverted that Republican operatives and campaign workers were paid to collect absentee ballots and either modify them or throw them out, all to favor Republican candidates. There isn't a ton of ambiguity about this point, it really did happen and it was admitted by witnesses and corroborated by a ton of evidence.
At the same time, what appears to have happened is that this political advocacy organization known as the "Bladen County Improvement Association" was run by black residents of the area, and seemed extremely effective at marshalling support for its favored candidates. They also are accused of committing voter fraud. The line from the Republican side appears to be "Yeah sure, there was fraud by Republican operatives, but the Improvement Association was up to some shady shit too". There's a lot of vague allegations floating around, including some claims that the Association was surreptitiously handing voters cash right before the polling place (the woman who makes this claim hedges the accusation by saying "I'm not 100% sure").
The latest episode (Chapter 3) stood out to me. The reporter, Zoe Chase, spends a lot of time trying to corroborate a claim made by the Republicans that individuals associated with the Improvement Association took advantage of nursing home residents who were known to be too infirm or competent to make decisions on their own in order to fraudulently fill out ballots to benefit Democratic candidates. Skip around to the 23:00 mark on Chapter 3 for what was to me a very entertaining exchange to listen to between Chase and one of the Republican county commissioners, Ray Britt. She keeps asking him, repeatedly, for evidence. He keeps dodging the question, claiming that he has overwhelming evidence but he's not at liberty to share it, and she should just keep looking, and that time will tell, etc.
Of course, this is extremely similar to what Sidney Powell was doing. She spent several weeks hyping up a "Kraken" lawsuit that would blow the election fraud case against Trump wide open. This never happened, and the most that Powell did was file a bunch of lawsuits using poorly sourced affidavits, including citing the admin of 8chan, Ron Watkins, as an "election software expert" (Ron Watkins is widely suspected to be the person behind the Q posts on 8chan, which means Powell was literally citing Q in court to support proof of fraud). Powell's "just you wait" response when pressed to showcase evidence made me suspicious of her claims, and it appears to have been a reliable heuristic to discount her. Britt is doing the same thing, and knowing nothing else about the allegations, I'm inclined to discount his claims.
I am curious to see if that's a good heuristic. The "just you wait" tactic appears quite common among attorneys, but it strikes me as a poor stalling strategy, intended to deflect attention when someone's case is poorly supported by evidence. Has there been a scenario where "just you wait" actually panned out? Curious.