Back to episode — Episode 1197 Scott Adams - Odds of Rigging an Election and Getting Away With it? Whiteboard Time!
Context —
st. Don't think past the sale. Let's talk about whether election cheating is possible. Okay, here's the big payoff for this live stream. How many of you think that it's possible to do enough cheating that you would change the result of a national election and not be spotted? How many think that's a thing that could be done? Change a national election so it's got to be enough fraud to do that but…
← Previous segment →ou only need enough of them to be willing to break the law for the law to get broken. You don't need everybody to break the law. You just need enough.
And if you have millions of people who believe that orange Hitler might be taking a second term, are there enough people who would be willing to break the law? Yes. Clearly and unambiguously yes. So there would be enough people willing. But willingness is not enough to get it done, right? Just be willing to do it. Did they think it was an existential threat and did they believe the hoaxes? Did they believe the fine people hoax? Did they believe the drinking bleach hoax? If you believe this stuff because you believe the fake news does that create a situation in which the motivation for massive fraud involving potentially lots of people, is the motivation there? Yes, right?
Is there anybody watching this who would disagree with the statement that the motivation to cheat was higher than it has ever been by far, not even close? Because we've never had this situation where people had actually been brainwashed to think that Hitler was maybe taking office for a second term. That's unprecedented. So I think everybody would agree no matter what kind of expert you are. And hey wait a minute am I an expert? Am I an expert on let's say human motivation within a large organization? I kind of am in my own way. If you're the author of the Dilbert comic you are kind of an expert on human motivation in large organizations. But I don't have a degree in anything like that so I won't make that claim.
All right. Now let's talk about the question of is it possible? Because I think this is a really important question. If you have the highest motivation in the world to cheat and I would argue it is literally the highest motivation in the world to cheat and that does exist, is it possible? That's the only other question. Because if both of those exist, the highest motivation and it's practical to do it, would you not say it's guaranteed to happen? I think it would be, right?
So if it happened could you detect it and how would you detect it? For example could you observe it directly? Well the complaint is that the observers were not allowed to observe and in a number of cases there are no observers. So could direct observation be enough to guarantee that there are no places that there could be fraud? I think the answer is obviously that's not enough. Direct observation can be good for plugging specific holes. For example the things that are happening within the room where you're counting probably give some direct observation, probably have some cameras. But I don't think there's anybody who believes that these alone, the cameras and the direct observation given how limited that is for the entire chain of custody, is there anybody who drives around behind the vans carrying the ballots? Does anybody drive behind those vans to make sure that they don't stop and unload anything? There must be massive parts of the process that are not witnessed by two witnesses, wouldn't you say?
How about the recount? Will the recount find fraud? No because if the ballots are fraudulent you would just count them a second time. So there's nobody who believes that a recount finds fraud. A recount can only find a specific kind of fraud. Can you hear that? My dog is going crazy downstairs and so I either have an intruder or something. I don't know what's going on down there. But so a recount won't detect fraud. It would only detect a very specific kind.
How about an audit? So an audit is more than a recount. We don't do audits. Could an audit find problems in the system? I think it could but we don't do them. We do an audit in a very small way similar to the IRS. If the IRS calls you and says we're going to audit you do they audit everything that your tax returns claim? No. No. Even an auditor from the IRS only looks at a certain question. They might say ah there's a red flag on your return. We're going to look at that question. But they're not going to open up your entire return. I suppose they might if they saw some major fraud but that's not the intention. They're looking at just the question.
Likewise an audit of an election process at most is going to look at a specific question. Is there anybody who's going to be double checking the software line by line in the election system? No. No. Nobody's going to check the code. That's not happening. Have you heard that happening? If they don't check the software have they really done an audit? Not really. So I would say that anybody who tells you there's something like an election audit happening that's more untrue than true. It might be that they've audited some specific questions. Doesn't mean they're auditing everything.
How about lawsuits? You file a lawsuit then you've got discovery and you can really dig into the details. Could a lawsuit find irregularities? Well it turns out there's a problem because you can't file the lawsuit unless you have evidence and you can't get evidence with a recount. You can't get it with an audit and you can't necessarily get it with direct observation or cameras. So how can you file a lawsuit if you don't have any evidence and you don't have any way to get it because the system is not designed to present it. It's just not there.
So you can do things around the margins but you would expect to have a situation like the Trump legal team. You'd expect 26 out of 27 lawsuits to be tossed out because the court says where's your evidence? I can't get it. I can't get the evidence so I can't even get the process started because they can't get the evidence.
But what about data irregularities? Do you think you could prove election fraud with data irregularities? Well maybe. And I've been telling you for some time now that you would see evidence that would convince you that there was fraud. The evidence that I think would be the convincing stuff is the data irregularities. But as we saw with the Wisconsin tweet that I talked about, do you trust anybody's data yet? Nope you don't. Almost every claim we've seen about the election, pretty much every claim has turned out to be false. And it doesn't even matter who's making it, Democrat, Republican. It feels like just about every claim about the election has turned out to be false.
So eventually given time I think the data irregularities can be found. So this is probably the only place you could find fraud. Now if you found it here that might give you cause for a lawsuit which might allow you to dig into things and you know maybe find something. But the data irregularities we probably will not find or at least will not be confident of until the whole Biden process is done.
So here's where I think we're going to be at some point in the future. And I got in trouble for saying I think it would be in two weeks so I'm going to take the deadline away from it because I got myself in trouble with a deadline because I'd just be guessing on deadline. Eventually the data irregularities will make the case as convincingly as I think the Kennedy-Nixon election. And then what do you do? Then what do you do?
Now there's one other phenomenon I haven't seen anybody talk about that I'm going to add to the conversation and it's going to make you mad and you're going to realize it's true. Let's say there was some evidence. We got 220 sworn statements right? So that suggests that maybe the direct observation and the witnesses worked to some degree. So let's say if those 220 they can put together a dozen good lawsuits and let's say that they're all pretty valid. You've got a witness. Maybe after that you could get some documentation to demonstrate it's true. Maybe the cameras show it too. Then you take this to a judge and you say I got it now. Now we found this source of a problem.
Let's say we found that a nursing home had sent in a hundred ballots but none of the actual residents are aware that they voted. So you say haha gotcha. We found that you use this senior center to harvest votes. You just took them out of the mailbox, you filled them out yourself and you sent them in. So I'm going to make a lawsuit about that. I'm going to take it to court. Gotcha. What does the judge say? Does the judge say show me your evidence? Nope. Because the judge doesn't care. Because the judge first asks you how many votes are we talking about and you say well I got a hundred votes. There were a hundred people who will swear they didn't vote and yet their vote was registered. And the judge says uh so what? If I overturn 100 votes it doesn't change the election. Get out of here.
So if you don't find it all you can't do anything about it. So you could find a lot of it but if you only find chunks of it, here's a chunk, here's a chunk, here's a chunk, the chunks are worthless because each chunk doesn't add up enough to change the outcome. And so the judge says there's nothing to work on here. Yeah I could prove that these hundred votes don't count but it's just this little chunk. It doesn't change anything so I'm not even going to hear it.
So it's sort of a perfect situation. Somebody says that's appealable. Yeah I suppose anything's appealable. Somebody says who here wants to start a civil war? You know the thing that I appreciate about this country is that we're not going to have a civil war. This is not going to happen. And the reason is so simple. You know why we won't have a civil war? Don't want one. That's it. That's the whole reason. You have to have somebody want one, right? Nobody wants one. Even the militias they're not looking to start one. I mean they may independently want to overthrow the country or something but not over the election necessarily. I just don't think anybody wants one and you would have to have a lot of people wanting one. It just doesn't happen on its own.
All right. And I would like to say to my Democrat friends who believe that orange Hitler was a real thing and believe that the presiden
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t is a real racist and suggests drinking bleach, if you could stop that and you didn't, you are cowards. You're cowards. Because if you didn't cheat in this election you've got a lot of explaining to do. You should be able to tell me you threw the election and you're happy about it because you saved the country in your opinion, saved us from orange Hitler. Wouldn't you be proud of that? Well I wou…
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