I did a whole segment on the radio Monday asking if the roles were reversed, and let's say Michigan in 2016 looked as if there might be some suspicious votes, would you be opposed to auditing the results?
Would you want the Democratic Senate to probe into the issue?
Would you want Michigan Republicans to entertain such an audit, or would you want them to obstruct it?
Would you believe the results, if they were led by a pro-Hillary audit company? What if they gave specific numbers, like this:
- 3,400 more ballots were cast than were recorded
- 9,000 more mail-in ballots were received than sent out
- 1,551 more ballots cast on election day than people who showed up to vote
- 2,500 ballots do not have a voter listed as casting them
- 23,000 votes by mail from people who moved after the October 5th cutoff
- 2,382 votes cast in one county after moving out of that county
- 300 votes cast by dead people
- 255,000 early votes that do not have a corresponding entry in the early voting returns file
I ask these questions genuinely. This is clearly a partisan issue, so a "flip-test" is a worthy way of examining your own consistency. I would like to think that I would want to know the answers to these issues, even if they did not benefit my guy.
However, in presenting this case on the radio, I failed to include the most important actor in the whole play: The Media. Shortly after finishing the segment, I got this text from a friend:
"So why does Howard Kurtz report on Fox Sunday Morning that no anomalies were found, but in fact they awarded Biden a few more votes?"
It makes you want to throw your hands up in despair. The board of election supervisors in Maricopa County, I.E. the county being investigated, leaked a small nugget of the audit report on Friday morning, a few hours before the official audit report was made public Friday afternoon. That nugget:
- 99 votes were added to Biden's total upon hand-recount of ballots
That news story ran ahead of the official results to confuse the public into thinking there were different results. There weren't. Just different reporting on the same results. Some news outlets chose to focus on that one (1) fact instead of the multiples (8) listed above. And it worked. Here are a few of those deceptive news stories from top news outlets:
• NPR
• CNBC
• Reuters
• The Washington Post
• The New York Times
• Al Jazeera
• The Guardian
• Fox News
As you can see, it's bipartisan.
Now we can have a rigorous debate about the multiple (8) claims made above. Are they legitimate? Are they faulty? But we won't ever have that debate, because the main actor in the play decided halfway through act 2 that the play was over, and shut the lights off. An audience member sees that and thinks the play is over, and goes home. But the other actors are going to figure out how to get the lights back on eventually, and finish the play.
The big question is, will there be anyone left in the seats to see it?
I don't know whether all of those 42,134 votes listed above (the 255,000 notwithstanding) went for Joe Biden. Maybe they were a bunch of fraudulent Trump votes. But don't you want to know?
You paid to see the whole movie. If I were you, I'd march up to the box office and demand to see the end. Maybe it will be great. Maybe it will suck. But at least you'll know how it ended, instead of being told not to worry about it.
Ryan Wiggins is the host of Wiggins America on 97.1 in St. Louis, MO, and the author of The Life of Human, a tongue-in-cheek science fiction robot novel.
