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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Here's my reference: in 1948, Lyndon Johnson created and harvested hundreds of thousands of ballots for his election to Senate. Robert Caro has documented this extensively in the second volume of his LBJ biography, "The Means of Ascent". It took decades for the people involved to come forward and talk to Caro, and only a few of them were really required. If you scale that up from one state to a dozen, millions of votes are not an implausible idea. And millions of votes were not even needed given the final tallies in a few swing states.

Now, there's a very obvious mechanism here: mail-in ballots can come from anywhere, and once they're mixed up with regular ballots it becomes impossible to prove which votes are "real". It's hard to prove what has happened. And everyone has motive. This does not need to be a "wide-ranging" conspiracy.

Trump has said many things about the election. I've never heard him say, as above, "the deep state stole the election". I've never heard him say, "there was a wide-ranging conspiracy". I have beard him say that mail-in ballots are not secure.

The idea here is really plain: the election wasn't stolen by some unalterable cabal that runs the world in secret. There is not a central committee that decided 2020 was not Trump, so that now we have to answer why bother with 2024 at all. Election fraud is boring and quotidian stuff. It can be greater or lesser depending on lots of contingent factors. And Trump can think he has a better show this time, while still also thinking 2020 was stolen.