Conspiracy theories surrounding elections have a way of sounding crazy everywhere.
In the Philippines, in election after election since 2010, the phrases “statistical anomalies,” “hidden servers,” “malicious algorithms,” and “seven-hour glitches,” and countless other allegations have been bandied about. Curiously enough, the same thing is happening in the United States—“the land of the free, and home of the brave”—in the aftermath of their November 3 presidential election.
Donald J. Trump’s legal team, led by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, has taken their electoral protests a notch fancier. However, some political and legal experts have lambasted the team for “setting a precedent in lowering the bar.” Their accusations involve an international conspiracy that lassos in everything from Iran to Venezuela, and Castro to the Chinese Communist Party, all the way to Trump votes that supposedly traveled to Frankfurt and Barcelona only to return flipped for President-elect Joseph R. Biden. Manual recounts in Georgia and in counties of other states have junked these conspiracy theories of electronic-vote flipping.
Trump’s lawyers have filed lawsuits alleging election fraud or other irregularities in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Thus far, different federal and district court judges have remained unpersuaded. All of Trump’s legal recourses have been dismissed, even in conservative-led courts. Democrat election lawyer Marc Elias has tallied Trump’s win-loss record in court cases to date at 2 to 32. Grasping at straws, and with a runaway imagination, pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell even went as far as alleging fraud in Edison County, Michigan, a county you won’t be able to easily find on a map.
A few weeks ago, Chris Krebs, a lifelong Republican appointed by Trump as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s CISA, declared that there was no evidence of fraud in the last elections. Days later, during an interview in the CBS TV news magazine 60 Minutes, he called Trump’s claims of fraud “farcical,” “dangerous,” and “nonsense,” and that Americans should have “100% confidence” in the security of the election. “The recounts are consistent with the initial count,” Krebs said, “and to me that’s further evidence, that’s confirmation that the systems used in the 2020 election performed as expected.”
More recently, Attorney General Bill Barr, another Trump appointee, told the AP that US attorneys and FBI agents had been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
If Trump were indeed cheated, then all those Republicans who won the election would have cheated as well, owing to the nature of the automated election process.
I don’t really have a full grasp of how the automated elections went in the US, but I presume it is basically the same way we did it in the 2016 presidential elections where Bongbong Marcos claimed to have been cheated of the vice presidency.
This is why I believe Leni Robredo won the election fair and square, and Marcos is clutching at straws:
While the vote-counting machines are not perfectly tamper-proof, any form of cheating presents an insoluble task, given the enormity of resources, manpower, and precise timing required. For one, every vote is logged and stored into the SEALED machine at precinct level. This means that there is foundation for verification. Yes, the final results are ultimately taken from the information transmitted to the Consolidated Canvassing System (CCS), but if any erroneous or anomalous transmissions were detected, such a comparison can easily be done with the results stored in the transmission chain, from the National Board of Canvassers, Provincial Board of Canvassers and Municipal Board of Canvassers, all the way down to the information stored at the precinct-level VCMs.
Speaking of “erroneous or anomalous transmissions,” a time-delayed firewall prevents any other transmissions that are not sent within a set time interval. It would be extremely difficult to synchronize any unauthorized or altered transmissions because the system will only take specific transmissions from specific VCMs at specific times. Any mismatch among these would be immediately reported by the CCS.
In the case of failed transmissions, the system protocol is to have the results manually transmitted. While these may seem like a window of opportunity for cheating, the results must still be transmitted by transporting the entire VCM itself via a computer that has been authorized by the system and is also under the care of the Municipal Board of Canvassers.
In the US, Trump has gained the notoriety of weaving untruths and “alternative facts.” He flirted with 9/11 and Syrian refugees’ conspiracy theories, and insulted Mexico by accusing it of “bringing drugs, crime and rapists” across the US borders. His main claim to fame, however, was pushing in 2011 and again during this year’s election the so-called Birther Theory, questioning the eligibility of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris to assume public office. In the face of overwhelming evidence that Biden has decisively won to become the 46th US president, Trump has refused to concede, and still insists that this was “the most corrupt election in American history.”
Despite being denounced for being a “threat to the Constitution,” and sowing divisiveness, Trump continues to spin tall tales, applying Nazi Joseph Goebbels’ law of propaganda that “a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth.” Unfortunately for him, this time around, American democratic institutions are standing their ground and popping Trump’s illusion of truth.
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