The Scrapbook has been experiencing déjà vu recently. Our memories of the vast left-wing paranoia during the Bush years had become hazy, but this week they all came flooding back. The left was already displaying unusual difficulty in coming to terms with Donald Trump’s election victory, but then New York magazine ran an article headlined “Experts Urge Clinton Campaign to Challenge Election Results in 3 Swing States.”
Of course, calling these people “experts” is something of a stretch. The gist of the article is that some liberal academics and activists claim to have found voting irregularities between areas using paper ballots and those using electronic voting machines, and they say this is potential evidence of foul play. It just happens that these putative irregularities are in three states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—where overturning the results would hand a victory to Clinton. Remember, Clinton won Minnesota by just a 1 percent margin, which was dramatically less than polls predicted, yet no one is wondering about voting irregularities there.
Respected liberal election wonks such as Nate Silver and the New York Times‘s Nate Cohn immediately threw cold water on the idea that these ballot irregularities suggested something sinister. They noted that once you control for demographics and other relevant factors, the discrepancy between paper and electronic ballots disappears. “There’s nothing about Trump winning WI that’s odd, given how well he did in IA/MN—where there’s a paper ballot,” observed Cohn.
Nonetheless, a glimmer of false hope was enough to send many credible voices on the left off to the races. CNN’s Dan Merica picked up on the “hacked election” story and ran with it, failing to note any criticism of the claims. (Merica was last seen in a WikiLeaks email, where one Clinton staffer noted that he was so friendly to Hillary, “they are basically courting each other at this point.”) Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman went on a Twitter rampage: “Conspiracies do happen.” Even Adam Johnson, a leftist journalist who writes for the Nation, responded dismissively to Krugman, saying, “log off, my man.”
Invoking voter fraud is a curious turnabout, because the line from the left during the Obama years was that voter fraud was “a myth” concocted by the right to support racist voter ID laws. For the record, Clinton lost Wisconsin, where they require ID to vote, but won Virginia, where they also require identification. She also lost Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, where there is no ID requirement. Voter ID laws aren’t a legitimate reason why she lost.
Ah, but if you don’t see the conspiracy here, you’re just not looking hard enough. Proud liberal Joss Whedon, the hugely successful creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and director of the Avenger movies, went full bugnut ballot-truther: “The crafty move was forcing the Dems to debunk voter fraud, so when the Trump/Putin cabal ACTUALLY COMMITTED it, we’d sound hypocritical,” he tweeted.
Well, Whedon’s right about sounding hypocritical. The rest of it is bonkers. If liberals are sincere about wanting to win future elections, we’d advise them to doff their tinfoil hats.
