Electronic Fraud in the 2020 Election: More Likely than Not

Cheating in elections is as old as–well, as old as elections. Cheating in elections using paper is as old as the use of paper in elections.  Are we supposed to just assume that cheating in elections using computers is going to be much younger than the use of computers in elections?

I have now come to believe that it is more likely than not that there was electronic cheating in the 2020 election, but this is a defeasible conclusion — meaning that my reasons for thinking this could easily be refuted.

Despite its eventual inevitability, it still comes as a jarring paradigm shift for me merely to entertain the idea that such a thing might be true.  I knew America had problems, but I didn’t think one of them was that our elections are so bad as all that. But there is an argument that it is true.

A very simple argument, but also, once again, defeasible: The electronic side of America’s elections is so terribly insecure that it’s difficult to say concerning a close election whether electronic cheating didn’t nudge the winner over the finish line; in this terrible state, it only takes a little evidence to render it more likely than not that this is just what happened; and, unfortunately, we do have a little evidence.

Before Going into Detail, Let’s Outline that Argument Again

The place to begin is not a pleasant one: We have to recognize that we know next to nothing about our elections.  It’s not that we know there was electronic cheating. The tragedy is that we don’t know that there wasn’t.

Ockham’s Razor does not apply here. There’s no default setting here that says, “It didn’t happen.” The default setting is: We’re blind and in the dark with little or nothing to go on. Odds start at about 50/50. And in this situation, even a little bit of comparatively weak evidence nudges things one way or the other.

We may only have a little evidence. But we do have it. So it’s more likely than not that it happened.

So Why Do We Know Nothing?

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