Election Deniers' Extraordinary Claims
with Carol Swain
My guest in this week’s episode, Carol Swain, believes the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. It’s a view she shares with a good many people in this country. I happen to believe that Carol is wrong, but that doesn’t mean I think she should be prevented from airing her thoughts on the matter. Open debate is just as important to democracy as fair elections. The latter is virtually meaningless without the former.
For the record, once again, I do not believe the election was stolen. The objections Carol raises in this episode do nothing to dissuade me from that view. I think Joe Biden won it fair and square. Donald Trump ought to have conceded gracefully. Courts and juries will decide whether his post-election behavior and his involvement in the January 6 riot rise to the level of illegality. In the meantime, those who want to see Trump restored to what they view as his rightful place at the head of government can vote for him in the primaries next year. If the polls are any indication, there’s a good chance they’ll be able to vote for him in the general election as well.
The peaceful transition of power is one of the most important features of our system of government. It separates the United States from the many putative democracies around the world where election fraud, contested results, power grabs, and military coups are a way of life. True, our system is not infallible. But neither is it so robust that it can withstand repeated attempts to undermine it and to undo its outcomes. Take a look at what goes on in nations like Zimbabwe, Chad, and Kenya. It’s unlikely that our elections will fall into such a state of chaos anytime soon, but it’s not impossible. If we’re going to risk disrupting our democratic traditions, we better have a damn good reason for doing so.
I recognize that I’m walking a thin line here. Am I saying that, if an election could be definitively proven to have been stolen, we should abide by the fraudulent result anyway, for the sake of political stability? No. Rather, I’m following a famous dictum from the cosmologist Carl Sagan: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” A stolen presidential election would indeed be an extraordinary thing, but extraordinary evidence has yet to appear.
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GLENN LOURY: I'm going to ask you one of these debate moderator questions. Do you think that Joe Biden won the election in 2020?
CAROL SWAIN: No, I think there were election irregularities. I believe that there were legitimate concerns. I believe that Bill Barr and many of the people that were around Trump were placed there to keep him in check.
And Bill Barr responded that there was no election fraud, or whatever his response was, without even looking at the kind of election irregularities and things that took place in the various states. You cannot get that data in two weeks. It has taken months of investigations for people that have uncovered what actually took place. And those cases that were dismissed, those cases were dismissed because they said the groups didn't have standing. In most cases, no one even looked at the forensic data.
So I do believe that the Democrats stole the election. And the fact that they have criminalized saying that they stole the election, and Facebook and Twitter and all of those social media platforms would kick you off if you publicly say it, that the election was stolen.
Including the platform that we're on. So watch yourself.
Well, you didn't say it. I say it.
Seriously, I'm just kidding. If they're gonna take us down, take us down. All we're doing is talking here. It's okay to talk. People have different opinions about what happened in 2020. It's okay to have different opinions. She says, if you're going to lock her up, lock her up. And I say, if you're going to take me down, take me down.
How'd they steal the election, Carol, in your opinion?
There were many different ways. It was not just one way. COVID, you know, was a godsend because they relaxed all the standards. When you have mail ballots and you have people doing ballot harvesting. And I can tell you, Glenn, from personal experience with my relatives in Virginia. I had some relatives lived in the projects, never voted. They had people come to that door, knock on that door, several people knocking on the door with ballots, asking them to fill out the ballots and standing there while they filled out the ballots. And so the ballot harvesting was just ripe for fraud.
And then the Zuckerberg boxes where you did not always have a chain of command. You had people picking up the ballots and taking them. I remember election night, I'm watching, and Donald Trump is doing well, and I'm so excited, because Glenn, I almost always get it right. I was asked before the election if I thought he was gonna win, and I said yeah. And so I'm all excited. All of a sudden, there's a report that a pipe was burst in Georgia. My heart sank. And then they said they were gonna stop counting. When they said that, I knew that that was fishy. And then the next thing I knew, it was reports that they were gonna stop counting for the night. I never ever heard that happen during an election.
And then the next morning, I get up and everything's flipped. That was suspicious. And then there was so many reports of trucks pulling in, there were some postal workers that said that they were told to backdate ballots that came in. There were so many reports and there were so many ways that they could have influenced the election. So it wasn't like one particular way. Oh, and I kept getting phone calls from Georgia telling me to vote in the Georgia election. I live in Nashville. I've never lived in Georgia, but I was getting these robocalls telling me to come vote.
So yeah, I definitely think the election was stolen and I think that they will do it again if they can. Now I'm getting on dangerous territory—this is me saying this—and I believe it's been documented that some of those voting machines were hooked up to the internet. And I can remember as a political scientist reading years ago about how easy it is to when you're doing electronic voting, depending on who's programming, to be able to weight a ballot in a way that it flips in a certain way. So it all depends on who has access. If Republicans wanted to cheat in the same way with the electronic voting, they could if they had access.
I can also tell you that when I ran for mayor of Nashville, first time I came in number two. And then I ran in the general election, I came in number three. But when I went to vote, I went to vote for myself. And they had changed the voting machines. They had switched over, and I could not find my name. And I had to go to the second page and scroll all the way down to the bottom to find "Swain." When I voted the first time, all the mayoral candidates were on the first screen, and you could easily find [my name]. Swain was up there with everyone else. They had changed it. And then I voted recently and I put in my my information and the screen, it didn't do what it was supposed to do. I had to get someone to come over and help with the voting machine. So there's so many ways to cheat.
Okay, now I'm not endorsing your argument that the election was stolen. But I am noticing that a very experienced, very accomplished, well-educated, well-trained political scientist who happens to be of color and a woman thinks that the election was stolen. And if you think that a lot of other people also think it. I think that's a very significant thing.
I have to tell you, Carol, the case that you just made sounded circumstantial. Yes, there was a pandemic. Yes, there was a lot of mail-in balloting. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg did finance nonprofits to go around and knock on people's doors. Yes, ballot harvesting does allow for the possibility of the kind of persuasion at the front door that you were just talking about. But we have courts. There's due process. The president was free to bring his case.
Glenn, no. There's not due process any longer.
And he didn't prevail in any of those court proceedings.
The cases were dismissed. And I think one of the most serious things that took place is that if an election is stolen, it takes so long to actually do the investigations. You're gonna hold up the country? Are you going to hold up the process while you investigate it? And so I think that whether it's a Democrat or whether they say Republicans stole an election, in the past people have known, okay, let's just go away quietly. And Donald Trump did not go away quietly. And that's the problem. That's why he has to be punished. And everyone that agrees with him, they have to be punished because they did not follow the tradition of, okay, you need to go away quietly and try again next time. Maybe next time, you know, you'll get away with it.
What do you say to this? And I've made this argument for the sake of the country. Whatever the merits of his claims, once he exhausted the remedies available to him through the courts, he should have gone away quietly, notwithstanding the fact that he believed the election was stolen, for him for the sake of the country. That would have been the right thing to do.
I don't think so, because I think that that's what you expect it to do. That incentivizes it. And what I have come to believe is that there is no remedy at law for stolen elections, because the process doesn't allow for it. The process allows for “Democrats and Republicans, okay, you got it. Just go away quietly.” He didn't go away quietly. That's why he's been hounded and arrested. And that's why those nineteen co-defendants ... I'm sure the charges against them will be dismissed. But in the meantime, the money that they have to spend defending themselves. Like Harrison [Floyd], he has a defense fund. I think yesterday he was up to $28,000. He's trying to raise $100,000. But people have had to mortgage their homes and put themselves at risk—risk of bankruptcy—all because they either worked in an election or they served a particular candidate. And I think that is unfortunate.
Say Donald Trump were to get elected again in 2024. Who's going to follow him into office, knowing that the Democrats are going to sue you? They're going to sue everyone they can sue. That's how they use the law. The law means nothing today. And I hate to say this, and I've always loved my country and I've always believed that America was something that, today, I would tell you that I'm not so sure that the America that I've loved all my life ever existed.
Oh, how can you say that, given how good that country has been to you?
It has been good to me. But I'm just telling you that when I see what has happened to America, I don't recognize my nation. I don't recognize my country. And when I look at young people, as well as my own great grandchildren, I'm not optimistic at all about their future.
Glenn, I'm curious if you believe that the entire brouhaha over the 2020 election being stolen is a deeper reflection of a deficiency in our national character. Whether in the domestic or international realms, Americans seem to possess a sore loser mentality. We're very good at gloating about being number one and feeling good when we're on top, but we frequently cast scorn and vitriol towards others when they outcompete us, denouncing them as frauds or cheats. I feel like other countries don't embody this sort of mentality to nearly the same extent. Maybe there's something radically individualistic and dog-eat-dog about American society that encourages this, but I'm skeptical that the kind of polarization that we've seen in recent years is sustainable long term.
What's been really fascinating about the fight over the 2020 election is how little legitimacy many Americans place in their own democratic system. Americans might not be generally aware of this, but in China, democracy in the form of one person one vote is fairly common at the village level. As political scientist Daniel Bell points out, Chinese governance becomes less democratic and more meritocratic the higher up one goes, from the village level to the national level where ultimately the CCP rules with an iron fist. Bell argues that interestingly enough, the level of confidence towards government increases the higher up one goes. For instance, many newsworthy instances of corruption in recent years in China have been at the local level, such as allegations of corruption by local officials in the construction of schools in Sichuan in the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake. By contrast, most Chinese tend to view the central government as highly competent, a few recent hiccups over zero Covid aside.
One gets the feeling that in America the opposite is true and that American views of government tend to decline as one goes from the local to the national, as evidenced by the generally angry and conspiratorial nature of American political discourse, with its frequent claims of the deep state and elections being stolen by the opposition. Anyway, I'm sure this contrast reveals something interesting about the shibboleths that we as Americans have based our philosophical worldview on, but alas I digress.
Joe Biden won it "fair and square?" That is manifestly wrong and the only thing I need say is, "Hunter's laptop story was suppressed."
Let's distinguish "rigged" from "stolen." The 2020 election was indisputably "rigged" by the media, the FBI-coordinated censorship apparatus revealed in The Twitter Files and recent disclosures in the Louisiana-Missouri case, the abuse-ridden absentee voting schemes put in place in 2020, and other things. That was not a "fair" election by any rational definition. When such things go on in Russia we claim that is not a functioning democracy. But it's all OK here?
Was it "stolen" through illegal acts directly involving votes? Plenty of suspicious things but nothing proven in a court of law.
Rigged but not (necessarily) stolen. But "fair and square" is not right.