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Notes -
A massive electoral fraud scandal in Puerto Rico has been revealed in Propublica today.
The TL;DR is that a gang was sneaking drugs into a prison, and exchanging those drugs with addicts in return for votes for the governor (Puerto Rico being one of the few places that lets current jailed felons vote). Federal investigators were planning an indictment against the gang, prison guards involved, and the prisoners who took the deal before orders from above in the upper echelons of government shut it down.
But there's a twist you might not expect, the votes were for the Republican governor and the higher ups who shut it down was the Trump admin. This might be the biggest this you style story yet. Trump is constantly claiming about stolen elections and voter fraud, and yet little evidence has ever shown up. We finally found a massive scheme, and it was a MAGA related plan. There is no direct connection with this plot to Trump or the governor, but the gang leaders did have some personal connections to the governor.
The scheme probably wasn't enough to secure the election (at least not with the inmates alone) as the numbers aren't, but it was closer than you might guess. Thus even with a relatively massive scandal, it probably didn't have a direct impact then but it's interesting how the investigation was spiked.
Erick Erickson (conservative radio host/podcaster) posted something interesting earlier that seems applicable here.
Perhaps Trump's focus on electoral fraud is not motivated by being against fraud, but instead just because he lost in 2020 and can't accept that hit to his ego, the shattering mythology of his victimhood, and that's why they won't push this Puerto Rico case further?
Mostly because the only evidence leftists will ever accept is these bizarre reverse style "gotcha!" stories where they can be safe horny for election integrity. As soon as I read the words "there's a twist you might not expect" I can predict it's Republicans who will be doing the fraud, because that's the only context in which it is ever permissible to admit that election fraud ever happens. As long as we simultaneously arrive at the correct conclusion that, well, it can't have mattered anyways.
It's interesting, right? Criminal conspiracy to buy votes that, apparently, can only ever have maxed out at 5,000 votes in an election where the margin is way above that. You know it's futile, I know it's futile, but apparently the gangs organizing it didn't know it was futile? Weird that everyone involved thought this was worth doing when some back of the napkin math "proves" it can never have been worth doing. Why did they do it then? Well, they must have been irrational somehow, thankfully we don't have to examine our priors about whether election fraud is real or not.
Note that this isn't even an argument against the SAVE act, this is just an argument that Erick Erickson is wise and his enemies are silly, while he sits in the corner watching. It might not even be true: this Wapo op-ed argues that the SAVE Act would turn Nevada and New Mexico into solid red states just by changing the voter pool. It doesn't even require us to believe in election fraud; The GOP simply chooses to play by rules that cause them to lose when they have a popular mandate and the power to change the rules. That's at least the decision Erick Erickson would make, as he looks down on me from his superior moral pedestal while pressing the "Keep Losing" button over and over again.
The lesbian ex-mayor of Hamtramck, MI was willing to say it was Muslim Democrats committing voter fraud locally, until it got reported by Project Veritas and she complained about being quoted by a bad source.
But that's a pretty limited example.
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