The Great Living Room Ballot Caper

In which Trump's stories of electoral fraud fail the most basic test: they aren't true

We’re so used to Trump’s unhinged utterances that we discount their details. His recent harangue about soup as projectile is an example. Imagine a leader in any other context — a junior high assistant principal; a manager of a Burger King — on such a weird tangent as this story of flung soup. That leader would be quietly removed from the room. Not Trump. Trump babbles about chucked chowder, gazpacho grenades, and mulligatawny missiles, and 40 percent of the citizenry thinks “four more years!”

Trump cranks up his weirdness when he rages about that cornerstone of our democracy: the vote. He describes rooms, pantomimes actions, peppers his bumpy, bumbling bluster with suspicions about things that aren’t suspicious at all. “Who is signing them? Who's signing them? What, are they signed on the kitchen table and sent in!?,” he ranted recently, when in fact completing a ballot on a kitchen table and sending it in is the most anodyne way a vote might be cast.

I think we should hold him to his own words. Let’s not let him denigrate democracy’s distinguishing feature. If he wants to impugn our vote, let’s make him — and his supporters — back up the accusation with evidence.

A good start: this statement, from earlier this year.

“And you get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place… You look at what they do, where they grab thousands of mail-in ballots and they dump it.  I’ll tell you what — and I don’t have to tell; you can look at the statistics — there’s a lot of dishonesty going along with mail-in voting — mail-in ballots.”

-Trump, April 7, 2020

Inspect this utterance, fellow voters. Just read it. Four words in and it’s already ridiculous. A throng of thousands (and thousands!) in someone’s living room? The biggest living room in the nation couldn’t hold thousands. Are they taking shifts? Where did these people park? Did this “somebody” chap, the owner of the living room, provide snacks? Imagine the line for the restroom!

“You look at what they do…

Who is “they”? The thousands and thousands of voters? And note “what they do,” as if he’s describing a pattern, a practiced system. Elections aren’t that common. How did living room-based ballot fraud become a thing they do? He doesn’t say when this living room party happened. But he apparently thinks it happens on the regular. When is this what they do? Where is this what they do?

“…where they grab thousands of mail-in ballots and they dump it.”

I’m not sure what to make of the fact that both the people (“thousands and thousands of people”) and the ballots (“they grab thousands of mail-in ballots”) number in the “thousands” in Trump’s tale of the living room electoral fraud. Of course, if one thousand people fill out one thousand ballots in one thousand living rooms, that’s no problem at all. That’s just one vote for one person. That’s how voting is supposed to work. I learned simple division, and simple civics, in 3rd grade. I bet I’m better than Trump at both.

“I’ll tell you what — and I don’t have to tell; you can look at the statistics — there’s a lot of dishonesty going along with mail-in voting — mail-in ballots.”

Wait, why don’t you “have to tell”? You’re the President of the United States, and you’re accusing “thousands and thousands” of American voters of living-room-based electoral fraud, now with quick-dump action. What do you mean you don’t have to tell? Of course you have to tell!

And what statistics can I look at? Cite them, please! Time and time again, election experts have reported that ballot fraud is extremely rare. That’s what “the statistics” say. For example: “Loyola Law School’s Justin Levitt found just 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014 out of more than 1 billion ballots cast.” What are the statistics are you citing, Trump? What is your own evidence for this?

What do the Baffling Forty Percent think?

Trump’s support is remarkably durable; his vaunted base is roughly forty percent strong. I’d like to to understand what they think about these details of somebody’s giant living room and the thousands of fraudsters gathered therein.

If you’re among that forty percent, do you believe that Trump knows about thousands of ballots completed by thousands and thousands of people in a living room? What’s his evidence? Where did he get it? With whom has he shared this evidence? Is the FBI working on this? Elections are administered by states; no state secretaries of state or state election commissions have suggested they know anything about this living room ballot dumping scheme. No one — not even in the reddest of states — is even investigating the Great Living Room Ballot caper.

Why not? Why doesn’t Trump tell us the address of the living room, the names of a few of these multiple thousands of people who filled it? If the story of the thousands of people in the living room is true, then it’s a massive story, and as the head of our democracy, Trump should be doing everything he can to make sure the details are known. (He also should be supporting bi-partisan legislation to protect election integrity, but it’s languished on McConnell’s desk for months.)

Instead, his evidence remains shrouded in secrecy. “I don’t have to tell,” he says.

Could he be lying? I think he’s lying

Fact-checkers have examined this tale, and they’ve rated it false. They’ve rated a similar claim as pants on fire-level false.

He seems to have fabricated these stories to achieve a personal political aim. And by the way, a synonym for fabricating a story to achieve a personal political aim is “lying.”

My fellow Americans, do you understand how consequential this is? The president of the United States lies to the voters about electoral fraud.

And so again I ask: why are we debating the merits of this man as president? This isn’t a reasonable difference on policy preferences. A man who would lie about having evidence of voter fraud is a man who wants to destroy and disrupt the very features that distinguish our democracy. Which is another way of saying “Trump wants to destroy America.”

We knew this was his aim back in 2016. 63M voters chose him anyway. Let’s not do it again.

59 days until election day, friends. (But vote as soon as you reasonably can.)

The Banquet Hall of the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. This is the largest room in the largest home in America. It’s an impressive room, but could it fit “thousands and thousands” of electoral fraudsters?

Image credit: Warren LeMay from Cincinnati, OH, United States / CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Banquet_Hall,_Biltmore_House,_Biltmore_Estate,_Asheville,_NC_(46675235692).jpg