Secret Laser Watermarks on Ballots
Maybe I'm biased, but it seems if you sincerely believe the election was "stolen" (however you want to interpret that), then the best place to look is at the evidence and the arguments the Trump campaign lawyers are willing to offer in court. That seems to me the best filter to cut through the soggy chaff that is currently flowing around us. Because otherwise, the allegations are so numerous and so vague and sometimes so dramatic that it's impossible to keep up with except maybe if you're a journalist assigned exclusively to this beat. Does anyone disagree with this heuristic?
With that said, the Trump campaign legal efforts have been almost uniformly embarrassing. To pick on just one example (and there are many), the Trump campaign filed in Michigan 234 pages of affidavits from about 100 different people. Some journalists read through all of them and basically did not find anything remotely interesting. Brad Heath, a reporter for Reuters, went a step further and looked up some affiants' social media and one of them had posted this:
On Sunday, November 8, 2020, a recount of ballots nationwide was being done by elite units of the National Guards. To prevent fraud, official ballots had been printed with an invisible, unbreakable code watermark and registered on a Quantum Blockchain System. As of writing, in five states, 14 million ballots had been put through a laser scanner - 78% of which failed because there was no watermark to verify the ballot. Of those ballots that failed, 100% had checked for #Biden.
It's just not a good look. Lawsuits cannot happen without sworn declarations of facts. If one of the witnesses you are relying on to unearth voter fraud also believes there are Elite National Guards who are investigating secret laser watermarks on ballots, you probably do not have a case. I understand the lawyers are working on a time crunch and may indeed be doing the best given the circumstances. But I'm a solo practitioner, and I'd be mortified at the idea of brandishing a witness as key to breaking a case wide open without doing some basic digging into their history and credibility. It does not inspire any confidence in the rest of the claims.
Multiple outlets reviewed the affidavits. I'll just link to WaPo to start as well as The Blaze, but you can also search for others you deem are more reliable. You can also skip all of that and read all 234 pages yourself. It's impossible to have an election without any voter fraud whatsoever (people do indeed periodically get convicted, for example 19 non-citizens were prosecuted in North Carolina for voting, out of millions of votes cast), so the falsification here is widespread or systematic voting fraud. So far, I have not seen any evidence of that. The Republican poll observer issue in Philadelphia was litigated and found to be without merit.
I cited just one example because fairly covering more is a lot of work, and I already have a full time job. I would love to devote myself to this full time if it paid because I find the topic interesting. I appreciate those skeptical of journalists, but this issue does not require relying on them at all. Check out DemocracyDocket, which is an admittedly biased source, but they collate all active sources and link to the Trump campaign's own court filings which means you can read the complaints directly from their mouths.
If you want more examples of embarrassment, here's a sample:
Nevada lawsuit included an affidavit (aka a sworn declaration), but they couldn't even bother to abide by Nevada law governing the specific requirements of sworn declarations. The other affidavit had a poll observer complaining that the election department did not accept his media credentials.
Trump campaign tries to file a lawsuit challenging vote county in Detroit, but accidentally files it instead in an obscure administrative court in DC.
Circling back to the Philadelphia poll observer lawsuit, because it included this beauty of an exchange:
Judge Paul Diamond to the Trump campaign lawyer:
Diamond: Are your observers in the counting room?
Trump campaign: "There's a non zero number of people in the room"
Diamond: "I’m asking you as a member of the bar of this court: are people representing the Donald J Trump for president, representing the plaintiffs, in that room?"
Trump campaign lawyer: "Yes."
Diamond: "I'm sorry, then what's your problem?"
On and on.
There is no legal justification for the poor showing on display. You don't file a lawsuit and then hope that maybe you'll find evidence of wrongdoing later to justify your lawsuit. Especially when so many of these claims crumple apart at the merest mention of an evidentiary hearing. And even if you take the claims as true at face-value, none of them come anywhere near close to being determinative. Maybe the highest number of votes I've seen contested was in the low-thousands, which means you'd have to multiply that by each swing state, and then multiply again to meet anything close to the voting margin (reminder that Biden won Michigan by 146,000 votes).