There’s another point to be made about what may well happen if the ongoing election audits or any new ones come up with credible evidence of fraud or impropriety. What about the elections prior to 2020? Is our current understanding of the demographics of the political landscape correct?

Before you roll your eyes and go back to bed, hear me out. A heck of a lot of our political assumptions about who will vote how and and where they live revolve around elections results. Polls are quick and easy to do – because they sample only a very few people, probably contacting less than 2000 total to get the 1000 + needed for the sample. But those tiny samples are also their Achilles’ heel – they absolutely must be weighted in order to get good results. Which is fine to a point but the numbers used to guide the weighting process come from the latest election results.

Tiny sample sizes are vulnerable to a variety of problems. But the worst of all is a volatile electorate – when the voters aren’t behaving as expected. There’s no way for a tiny poll to account for a sudden shift in voter inclination – in fact, they are likely to assume that the sample itself is insufficiently random when they see large unexpected shifts. And how do you correct for insufficiently randomized samples? You weight them – which compounds the problem instead of correcting it when the voters are just being contrary.

Pry open your eyelids – the boring stuff is usually the part you need.

So, if the 2020 election was rigged sufficiently to alter the outcome, what does that mean for pollsters? Well, they’re going to need much bigger sample sizes or new jobs. The election is a giant poll – but it’s a poll with 100% of the population (people who actually vote) being measured. This means that a fair election is as dang near perfect as polls get – which is why the election is used to calibrate for all those tiny sample sizes used in the hundreds of polls you see each year. If the election is messed up then so are ALL the following polls.

Okay, okay, so what? Most people are skeptical of polling anyway, right? Er, probably not as skeptical as they should be. It’s normal for us to accept results we expect – so when the polls agree with our view of the matter, we tend to accept it even when the poll is badly done. It’s a product of the nature assumption that we’re part of the normal people – and it colors our perceptions more than we often realize.

Then there’s the tendency to assume that what we hear repeated often is probably correct – and you can see where this is going. There are hundreds of polls done each year and many are reported with a ‘spin’ even when the poll is well done and fair. We hear these kinds of results constantly – and begin to accept them as true when they aren’t countered meaningfully. So if polls start reporting incorrect information – and most of them follow a similar line – we end up believing things that simply aren’t true to begin with. And this isn’t limited to the public – the pollsters themselves have to be on guard against their personal biases being reflected in their work because they have begun to believe the stuff they keep hearing.

And this is where the 2020 results could bring down an entire castle of cards: if there was fraud of sufficient quantity and coordination to generate a false presidential election result in this case then it is EXTREMELY likely that the problem is endemic. If that’s true, then polls are all useless garbage starting decades ago.

Humans aren’t nearly as bright as we think we are. And giant, effective conspiracies are pretty much the stuff of movies because even the corrupt work with imperfect information – and they make idiotic mistakes even when they have good information. Corrupt smart human is still human.

We overcome our limitations with practice. In a sophisticated modern election system, cheating isn’t easy. So to manage to overturn a presidential election and do so without making it obvious from the outset – that is almost certain proof of practice. In other words, it’s not their first rodeo. In fact, it’s something they have done enough times to be good at it.

I said good, not great – this wasn’t their finest hour IF indeed it was a rigged election. But that’s probably just a matter of scope. The best way to not get caught is to not make it obvious – getting an unexpected result makes people suspicious. Getting an unrealistic result makes EVERYONE suspicious. So a well practiced cheat will alter only contested elections where no one will question a close result.

But altering as many as six in ways that were highly alarming at the time? Yeah, that’s because you are dumb enough to think you’re way of thinking is everyone else’s and stupid enough to forget the reason why you weren’t pulling these kinds of stunts to begin with – because they get you caught.

Still, managing that kind of coordinated election fraud in highly contested states is indicative of some level of know how. Where might they be getting all this practice?

Strongholds. By pushing the numbers up each cycle, it makes your party appear stronger in an area than they actually are – and if you are trying to keep power and inclined to cheat, this is a way to make it easy down the line. Once people get used to a district being blue – or red – they aren’t surprised by higher and higher margins of victory. Why spend all the time and effort in keeping the constituents happy when you can slowly convince them that your side will always win anyway – and then cheat to make it so.

So the BIG problem isn’t the idiotically small poll sample sizes – it’s the very real possibility that election fraud is actually endemic in parts of the United States. That does more than throw off some pollsters – that deceives the American people themselves.

So IF the 2020 election was indeed fraudulent – then we have just opened the floodgates on election fraud investigations. Because we most likely can’t trust a huge number of districts any longer – and we have to find out which ones they are.

Just how blue are some of the blue states, anyway?