Rasmusen: Why Do 55% Think 2020 Election Was Stolen?
by Eric Rasmussen, Ph.D.
Why do 55% of voters think Biden stole the 2020 election? I think it boils down to three things. First, Biden’s vote was peculiarly high in just the places he needed votes, and those votes appeared late. Second, an astounding 68 million votes were by absentee ballot, which are notoriously the easiest place to cheat. Third, there was no audit of the absentee vote count, and the propaganda press has been so overheated in its denial that vote fraud could ever happen that it sounds like a guilty conscience more than anything else.
Recall that election night 2020 saw Donald Trump ahead in Pennsylvania by 700,000 votes, in Georgia by 120,000, in Michigan by 295,000, and in Wisconsin by 116,000. A week later, Biden was the winner in all four states, by 82,000, 12,000, 154,000, and 21,000 votes. Never before had the vote count appeared so slowly and reversed so drastically. Despite nobody much liking Biden as a candidate, he received a record number of votes nationwide. Of 19 bellwether counties that voted for the winner in every presidential election from 1980 through 2016, only one county voted for Biden in 2020. In all but one election since 1964, the party of the candidate who won the Presidency gained seats in the House of Representatives, but in 2020 the Democrats lost seats. Not so in 2020: the Democrats lost House seats. So how did Biden manage to win in those battleground states when he did badly elsewhere?
Biden’s success with a no-campaigning campaign was one of the two notable features of the 2020 election. The other was the increase in absentee voting — from 39 million in 2016 to 68 million in 2020. Absentee voting is more vulnerable to cheating than in-person voting. Traditionally, absentee voting was only allowed if the voter had a good excuse for not voting in person. In 2020, most states allowed it without any need for an excuse or an ID. Pennsylvania even got rid of the requirement that the ballot’s signature match the signature the government had on file for the voter. In most European countries, in sharp contrast, even a good excuse isn’t enough– the absentee voter has to live abroad to qualify. Of the exceptions which do allow absentee voting, all except Germany and Hungary require photo-ID’s. Why restrict absentee voting so much? The reason is that in-person voting occurs under the eyes of election observers from both parties; the cheater can only cast a few illegal votes; and the vote-buyer can’t tell whether the bought votes were actually cast for the right candidate.
And in fact we know that there were 329,614 attempts to cast invalid absentee votes. That’s the number of ballots that were rejected for signature mismatch, for a blank signature, or because the voter tried to vote twice. A Rasmussen Reports poll after the election found that about 18 percent of absentee voters admitted to signing on behalf of someone else, which would amount to an astounding 12 million votes. We just don’t know who sent in the fraudulent votes.
So, a) the details of the Biden victory were surprising, and b) it was easy to cheat. What was needed was an audit: to check a large random sample of absentee ballots to see if their signatures matched, an audit like accounting firms do all the time for businesses, with Republicans and Democrats both observing closely.
But such an audit didn’t happen. The Democrats and the propaganda press objected. In the four years since the election, whoever brings up the subject of vote fraud or audits is called an election denier who wants to cast doubt on the democratic process. That the press denies the possibility of fraud so strenuously shows that this is a sensitive subject for them. It makes me think of police investigating a woman’s murder. They’ve checked the murder bedroom, and they ask her husband, who has been quite charming, if they can look in the other bedroom. “No! Never!,” he say, “There is no reason whatsover to look in that room. It would be a waste of time. You’ve already looked in one bedroom and found nothing. And you don’t have a search warrant. Go to a court and come back tomorrow if you want to force me to let you into that bedroom, which is totally free of bloodstained clothes and a big knife.”
Did Biden cheat? Nobody can prove there was cheating, but also nobody can prove there wasn’t cheating. Without an audit, we just don’t know. I can understand why the statehouses and Congress certified the election — what could they do when all they had were the official results? — but certification is not legitimization.
Eric Rasmusen, Ph.D., now retired, is the former Dan R. and Catherine M. Dalton Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University-Bloomington. He has also held visiting positions at Yale and Harvard Law Schools, the Harvard and Tokyo Economics Departments, UCLA, the University of Chicago’s business schools, and Nuffield College, Oxford. His complete vitae can be found at https://www.rasmusen.org/vita.htm
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