In the days after the US Presidential election was called for Joe Biden, many supporters of Donald Trump are crying foul. Voter fraud. And a key piece of evidence? A century-old quirk of math called Benford’s Law. We at Radiolab know Benford’s Law well, and have covered it before. In this political dispatch, Latif and Soren Sherlock their way through the precinct numbers to see if these claims hold up. Spoiler: they don’t. But the reason why is more interesting than you’d expect. This episode was reported by Latif Nasser.
Thousands of President Trump's supporters were out in Washington, D.C., on Saturday for a day of rallying to echo the false assertion that the presidential election was marked by fraud.
One week after Joe Biden's presidential victory brought about spontaneous celebrations in the nation's capital, a crowd that included the group Women for America First, right-wing activists and conspiracy theorists gathered in the city's downtown near the White House.
A number of factors may have primed the American public to seek out, believe and share disinformation since Election Day. Trump’s monthslong allegations of impending fraud, the collective stress and anxiety caused by the pandemic, and the rare delay in learning election results all combined to create a perfect storm of disinformation.
The fear is that Trump and his followers will never give way, that he will remain the head of a “Trumpian government in exile”, as the historian Sean Wilentz puts it, antagonistic to the legitimate, elected government, armed with allies in Congress, sustained via social media and nourished by grievance and the romance of a lost cause: a new, virtual Confederacy.
The word is apposite because, inevitably in America, so much of all this turns on race. When Trump’s cheerleaders locate the supposed voter fraud in Philadelphia or Detroit, their listeners get the message: it’s that black cities are corrupt and, at root, that black people shouldn’t be allowed to decide who gets to be president of the United States. As Barack Obama writes in his upcoming memoir, these are “dark spirits” that have “long been lurking on the edge of the Republican party – xenophobia … paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”.
His only win during a short-lived Democratic bid for the White House was in the territory of American Samoa. And after pledging to spend “whatever it takes” to defeat President Donald Trump, he routed $110 million to Florida, Ohio and Texas — all states that President-elect Joe Biden lost.
Bloomberg, who built a media and financial services empire before turning to electoral politics, has long used his $55 billion in estimated wealth to play kingmaker, with no shortage of candidates and causes seeking favor.
Yet after dumping $1.1 billion into his campaign, he waited until September to follow through on his vow to spend big to unseat Trump. His investment was especially disappointing in Florida, a battleground state that is normally decided by razor-thin margins but that Trump won this year by 3.4 percentage points.
President Donald Trump has asked top aides about a wild plan that involves replacing electors in swing states with loyalists to secure himself a second term, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
The Times report came hours after Business Insider reported that the plan was gaining currency among Trump allies.
The plan hinges on Republican state legislatures deciding to ignore the states' results and instead send a new group of electors to the Electoral College who would cast their votes for Trump.