A significant number of the claims made in support of the efforts to prove fraud in the U.S. presidential election are incorrect, and easily falsifiable, sometimes astonishingly so. Are such claims deliberately planted to discredit the efforts to ensure transparent and fair elections?
A few recent examples:
Rudy Giuliani claimed, at Gettysburg, that while two and a half million mail-in ballots were returned in Pennsylvania, only 1,823,148 had been requested. A simple search of data from Pennsylvania reveals that these 1.8 million ballots were requested for the primary election, not the general election. Over 3 million had been requested for the general election. This apples-to-oranges comparison was tweeted and repeated on interviews given by Sen. Doug Mastriano, a leader of the legislative efforts in Pennsylvania to decertify the election and change the manner of appointing electors there.
Shockingly incompetent analysis of time-series voting result data scraped from the New York Times election results page has been used to support claims of fractional voting (included by Sidney Powell in her Georgia and Michigan suits) and of votes being stolen from Trump (tweeted by Sidney Powell). Fractional voting is indeed a feature of the voting systems, and votes could have been stolen, but most use of this data to support those conclusions is faulty. It frankly seems hard to fathom how anyone competent enough to write Python code to scrape the data could make the amateurish blunder of ignoring the three-digit precision of the vote ratios.
