All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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Hey guys, on the line, I've got Jacob Sullivan from Reason Magazine.
Thanks for coming back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing all right.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
I guess I should have said back on the show.
Anyway.
Hey, listen, man, I'm trying not to keep up with all this election stuff, but I saw where you'd written a thing or two about it, and I was wondering if you could tell me what is the reality of the vote here with the thing with the Biden and the Trump and the president's refusal to concede, and maybe there was massive fraud or maybe there totally wasn't.
Fill me in.
Well, I mean, there's a huge difference between the ordinary sort of errors that you see in every election, the ordinary sort of fraud that you see here and there in every election, and what Trump is talking about.
So what he's talking about is a massive conspiracy involving, sometimes he says hundreds of thousands, sometimes he says millions of votes that were either votes for him that were somehow destroyed or switched to Biden or votes for Biden that were manufactured.
That's what he's claiming.
There's no evidence to support that, and if you look at the complaints that are brought up in the lawsuits Republicans have filed, you will see that there are some legitimate sounding complaints there, and there are some things that may not pan out.
In other words, somebody might complain about poll watchers, for example, being mistreated, not being allowed close enough for the vote count, and that may or may not be true.
Some people may claim that election workers acted improperly by not asking for ID, by giving instructions to voters about how to vote a straight ticket.
These are specific allegations that have come up.
By not properly checking signatures, right?
So each of these allegations may or may not be true, and that'll work its way through the courts.
But the main takeaway is that even if all of this is true, in other words, all the specific allegations are true, there's no way that he won the election.
I don't know how else to put it, because there's a huge gap between the kind of massive conspiracy that would be required to swing the election and this sort of thing.
But some of these things are real screw-ups, and I'll give you just a couple of examples.
In Georgia, where they're recounting the vote, it turned out that in one county, they had overlooked 2,600 votes.
Well, that's a pretty big deal, and the guy who was in charge there got fired.
That's a huge screw-up, but even that screw-up, which is pretty sizable, did not affect the outcome in Georgia.
So Biden is still headed by about 13,000 votes in Georgia.
Now, if that sort of thing happened in every county in Georgia, then you'd be talking, but still only talking about one state, which would not be enough to swing the election.
So the sort of thing you would have to find is that multiplied over and over again, or some kind of massive conspiracy where Democrats, election officials in many different states all carried out systematic fraud.
We're not talking about the occasional person voting who shouldn't be voting.
One other example, which just came up yesterday, is in Michigan, in Wayne County, they had discrepancies between the number of absentee ballots cast, or the number of ballots cast, and the number of voters who were recorded in their log.
But these are not big differences.
These are typically a handful of votes, or a difference of a few people who either votes were cast and it didn't correspond, it was more votes were cast than the number of people who signed up, or the other way around.
That sort of thing happens all the time, but the impact is not by any means decisive.
In other words, even once you correct for that, it's still very clear that Biden won in Michigan.
He won in Michigan by 146,000 votes at last count.
In order to make up that difference, well, just to give an example in Wayne County, which is where they've been focusing, you would have to assume that something like 17% of the votes cast in Wayne County were fraudulent.
Now, that is an enormous rate of fraud, much, much higher than what we've seen historically.
Historically, this is some small fraction of 1%, a tiny fraction of 1% of votes where fraud is involved.
And these are not coordinated schemes.
These are people here and there doing that sort of thing.
So you need to separate out the sort of rare kind of fraud that you are going to see in any election, the probably more frequent mistakes that you will see, of which the Georgia, I mean, the Georgia one is the most glaring one that I've seen, because that involved a substantial number of votes, but still not decisive.
And what Trump is talking about, which is in a whole other universe from the one that I live in, and probably the one that you live in as well, although I am amazed that a lot of his supporters seem to be buying this, I mean, a bunch of them came into Washington over the weekend to protest because they've been told that Trump actually won the election and Biden stole it.
So let me ask you, Jacob, like on the poll watchers thing, that's a big one in Pennsylvania.
And the idea is that the Republicans weren't allowed to see and that what they were doing was they were switching all the votes or something obvious like that.
Otherwise, why wouldn't they let the poll watchers watch?
And then apparently from, I guess, the right wing media, I was sent in the email this morning, the court said that, no, you don't have to be able to really see what they're doing.
You just have to be able to see that they're standing there doing their job and that's all.
So observation doesn't mean observation, really.
And so what a great talking point.
You're saying it's not decisive, but is that really a big deal or what's going on there?
Well, there are a couple of rulings, at least a couple of rulings in Pennsylvania, one of which sided with the Republicans, which is a state court ruling that said that they had to be allowed within six feet, right?
So following COVID-19 protocols, wearing masks, they had to be close up as opposed to at more of a distance.
So that was their complaint was that they were not close enough to see what was going on and that may be a valid complaint.
It's not hard to see that there's a lot of tension between election workers and poll watchers, especially when they're from different parties.
And so there may be rude treatment, there may be inappropriate treatment, but the initial Republican claim, the one that Trump continues to make, is that the poll watchers were not allowed in at all, which is not true.
And that's from another case, a federal case in Pennsylvania, where the Republicans filed their lawsuit.
They complained that their poll watchers were excluded from the count room.
And the judge said, is that true?
And the lawyer for the Trump campaign said, well, there was a non-zero number of people there.
And the judge said, well, were there people there or not?
And the lawyer conceded that there were.
And the judge said, in so many words, well, what's your problem then?
Now, that particular case was resolved with an agreement to allow, and I believe it was up to 60 representatives from each party in the count room.
So it was resolved by agreement.
But the main point is that the allegation that you hear initially and the one that continues to be echoed by Trump, which is our poll watchers were excluded completely, is clearly not true.
Now, whether they were allowed close enough, that's a different issue.
I wasn't there.
And this stuff will make its way through the courts, and I can absolutely understand why Republicans who think they have a legitimate grievance want to make sure that in the future, or even while that count was going on, that they'd be allowed closer if they think that that's appropriate.
But once again, even if they have a legitimate grievance about that, that does not demonstrate the kind of massive fraud that would be necessary to swing the election.
And let me just give you a few examples.
I mean, I mentioned Michigan, right?
Just a few of these battleground states.
Let me throw in here, too, is one of the accusations is that all across the country, in the middle of the night, they mysteriously stopped counting.
And then they started again, and all of a sudden Biden was ahead.
Yeah.
Well, what's the evidence of that?
I mean, people can say whatever they want, but when you actually go to court, you have to have specific allegations and you have to have some evidence to back them up.
And so far, the Republican track record is not very good.
They have won a couple of victories.
I mentioned one of them, but none that would have anything like a decisive impact.
But I mean, are you seeing- And for the most part, when they go to court and the judge says, well, what's your evidence of this?
They don't have the evidence to support it.
So this is what I heard, or I heard that election workers were told not to check out.
Yeah, but let me ask you this, though, because I mean, you could argue that, look, Trump's team is run by Rudy Giuliani, the most incompetent boob this side of Donald Trump himself.
But what about, have you seen any good journalism that says that maybe there's really something going on here or anything like that?
Well, I think it depends what you mean by something on it.
Like I said- Well, as far as them shutting down at night and then something nefarious going on there.
No, I don't think any of that's true.
I think that Trump started out with this initial impression based on what happened on election night, which is what happens like every election night, which is the results change as more votes are counted, right?
And in particular, if you have votes coming in from a particular source that is skewed toward one party rather than the other, the tally, you may be ahead initially, and then suddenly your lead is gone, and then you're behind.
That happens all the time in elections.
Trump sees this, and he assumes there must be some kind of criminal conspiracy at work.
I really don't think he put any more thought into it than that.
He saw he was ahead in certain places, and then he wasn't ahead, so obviously something wrong happened.
Now, if you look at what actually happened in Pennsylvania, for example, Trump's lead was erased, and then Biden pulled ahead.
And Trump thought it was suspicious that these late counted votes favored Biden, but it's not at all suspicious when you see that they're coming from big cities that are heavily Democratic, and when you see that they're counting these absentee ballots, which had a strong partisan skew this year, largely because of what Trump was saying about mail-in voting.
He discouraged his supporters from using that.
He said it was inherently fraudulent, right?
So unlike in previous years, I mean, previous years in many elections, Republicans were more likely to vote by mail, but Trump made this a partisan thing, so that said the people voting by mail were overwhelmingly Democrats, therefore they favored Biden, therefore the votes switched, the numbers switched in Pennsylvania, and ultimately he lost by about, what, 82,400 votes at last count.
And that is not the kind of difference that you can easily make up by saying, here's an error here, here's an error there, and that maybe this guy voted and he wasn't legally allowed to.
You really have to have some kind of systematic massive fraud to account for this, and it's not just that one state.
I mean, you've got Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, all of these were close as these things go, but not nearly as close as some other elections.
I mean, look at the difference.
In these states, you're talking about between 10,000 and like 150,000 vote difference, right?
And look back at the 2000 election, and it came down to 537 votes in Florida, right?
That's the sort of situation where it's just Florida, it's a very small number of votes.
You can absolutely see how some screw-ups here and there, if there was one county in Florida that missed a few hundred ballots, that would have been enough, right?
But that is not the case now because you're talking about multiple states.
You're talking about differences of at least 10,000 and as many as nearly 150,000 votes, and it's just impossible to see how they can possibly turn that around without proving a big criminal conspiracy that they haven't come close to proving.
Yeah.
Hey, listen, I think you hit the key, and for people leaning Trump and suspicious about all of this, I think you really hit the nail on the head there when you say that Trump suppressed his own vote.
He had this plan that was no plan at all.
Step one, I'm going to just smear mail-in voting as somehow bad.
And then step two, I don't know, but somehow maybe they won't count or something if I just talk bad about them a lot?
I think he had the notion that mail-in voting favored Democrats, and it was not at all clear that that was true.
If you look at the history of this, like I said, in some cases Republicans are more likely, some places- More likely to vote by mail.
Even if you got that wrong, the answer to that is, so get out there and vote by mail, especially if you ...
But he ceded the entire ground to his enemies.
The one exception he made was Florida.
Not surprisingly, and he won Florida, and he said, unlike all the other states, Florida's mail-in voting system is secure, and you should feel confident about that.
Of course, there are a lot of old people in Florida who skew Republican, and so it was sound for him to make that exception, but it wasn't really ...
There was no sense behind it except for a partisan advantage.
I think that was a mistake, and he probably ...
It's not just that he discouraged Republicans from voting by mail.
You have especially older Republicans who don't want to go in person to the voting booth in the middle of a pandemic, and they may not have voted at all.
How he could not have anticipated that, how it would work into his disadvantage, I don't know.
Seriously, just throw a dart at a board and guess.
It's got to be two or three percent across the board in all 50 states that he suppressed his own vote.
I don't know what the ultimate impact was.
They did have a big turnout.
I mean, everybody ...
There was a big turnout across the board, historically high, not seen since I think 1900 or so.
Reagan supposedly had a record turnout, but it might have been bigger if he hadn't discouraged people from voting by mail.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Hey, so this is one more major talking point of people on the right, and it's not just Trump and his team saying it.
As you mentioned, American right-wingers are believing this stuff, for real.
One of them is that, look, Trump's total went up so much that that just proves that the American people rejected all this criticism of him.
They loved his success.
They wanted four more years, and somehow the Democrats just must have rigged it, because otherwise what could explain that his numbers went up so much, but the Democrats went up so much more even?
Well, it's certainly not impossible and not at all implausible.
The turnout was up across the board, both parties.
People were highly motivated this year on both sides.
I guess I should make it clear, I don't know if it matters to the people listening to this, but I am not at all a Biden fan.
In fact, I wrote the case against Biden for a reason.
Right.
Yeah, I was going to mention that at the beginning.
The last time I talked to you, it was you wrote the case against Joe Biden here.
It wasn't like I was rooting for the guy, but I don't know.
How do I put this in a way that's not insulting?
It's important to live in reality and acknowledge what is actually going on in the world.
I don't have any ax to grind in terms of Biden versus Trump.
I don't like either of them.
I definitely wasn't rooting for Biden, but it is nevertheless quite apparent to me that Biden won the election.
And it troubles me not only that Trump seems to believe that's not true, assuming he really believes that, but that so many of his supporters are prepared to uncritically accept that story without evidence to back it up.
I mean, that's a pretty big example of misrepresentation.
I mean, in the last time around, he claimed he would have won the popular vote if it weren't for the millions of people who voted illegally, which means there is no evidence of that.
And he claimed he had the biggest audience at an inauguration ever.
It wasn't true.
It wasn't even close to true.
And now he's saying over a million of his supporters came to Washington over the weekend.
Again, we don't have a precise crowd count for that, but it's not close to being true.
He also estimated the crowd at hundreds of thousands and tens of thousands.
Now, all of those things cannot possibly be true, right?
But it's as if reality doesn't matter.
It's more a matter of like the sentiment underlying the numbers as opposed to the numbers themselves.
But in an election, the numbers do matter.
They're crucial, right?
So the difference between a few hundred votes that might have been erroneously tabulated — and by the way, they do find this stuff out, and they find out what happened, what went wrong, what kind of error was involved — the difference between a few hundred votes and hundreds of thousands or millions like he's talking about is huge.
Well, you know, I think I'm for his lies in this case because the Democrats deserve to have half the country think that this presidency is completely stolen and illegitimate, and they deserve to have a three-year special counsel investigation falsely accusing Biden of treason and the worst that they did to Trump.
So screw them.
And really, I should say, he deserved it for what he did to Barack Obama when he was the number one leading birther in America, pushing the idea that he had somehow usurped John McCain's rightful throne due to his Islamic Kenyan-ness or whatever absolute nonsense that he pushed all during the Obama years.
So all these guys deserve each other, I think, and their illegitimacy.
As with the mail-in voting thing, I think Republicans may regret this because, I mean, look right now.
What's happening in Georgia?
They have these two runoff elections.
It's going to decide control of the Senate.
And by the way, I really hope the Republicans have control of the Senate with Joe Biden as president.
I would prefer that, right?
But if the message is, with the Trump ascending, is that you cannot trust elections, they're systematically corrupt, specifically in Georgia, among other places, even though the system there is run by a Republican, what is that going to do to turnout in those runoffs?
I mean, if you're being told your vote doesn't really matter because it's all arranged behind the scenes through a criminal conspiracy, how motivated are you going to be to vote?
So it's not very farsighted to encourage that view of the election system.
You reminded me of another good question, though, because I think we skipped past this now.
This was a big deal.
I remember I interviewed a guy back in 2004.
He was from Rice University, a computer scientist guy, and him and his guys proved how these debold voting machines were totally not to be trusted.
Their numbers could be flipped.
And after all, if you ask it for a recount, all you can do is just hit enter and it's going to give you the same number again.
And how, you know, I think I remember he talked about then in Brazil, you fill it out by computer, but then it prints out your ballot and drops it in a box right in front of you.
And so they have the instantaneous result by computer, but they also have real paper ballots that you can go back and recount.
It seems like it's a good no, no, it's definitely it's important to have a paper trail as opposed to purely electronic system.
And so in America, is there I guess.
OK, so when I voted, I filled it out on a computer and it did print out a receipt, basically, that then I handed over to the guys.
But then they just entered it into another computer.
So I don't know if it went in the trash after that or if it was safe for recountable purposes later or what.
But do you know how that works in most of the country?
Because I think there's a real question why we should trust any of these numbers in the first place.
You know, I think the systems have gotten notably better over during in recent years.
They recognize the problem that you're talking about.
I don't know that they have a back paper backup in every state, but I think that is the rule.
I don't know if you remember the the old voting machines with the levers that were like these booths.
Yes, I guess.
And then you put in a scantron, which is also a computer reader.
I don't know what I don't know what they actually did in the end, but it would mechanically count out votes, you know, with with these levers was a mechanical system.
And then they would physically take each one of those booths to a place to be counted.
That was the old I actually voted in booths like that.
So I didn't know what the hell was going on.
I mean, you just have to trust the integrity of the people who are, you know, gathering up the booths and adding up the totals.
But yeah, so there's there's definitely there are legitimate concerns about the integrity of election systems, according to the people who were in charge of this in the Trump administration.
This was the most secure election ever.
And and there was no basis.
This got the guy who said this got canned just just now.
There was no basis for, you know, these allegations of widespread fraud.
Well, and Trump fired the guy who was in charge of cybersecurity over the election.
Right.
Yes.
Right.
And so and and he by according to people in both parties until recently, he did a very good job and the improve helped improve election security.
And you know, there were all these worries about Russian hacking and so forth.
And they tried to address that issue.
And they also wanted to make sure that you can do recounts in a reliable way.
So I think things have gotten substantially better recently.
Not perfect by any means.
But you have to you have to have something more than just wild accusations.
Right.
Unless you're Donald Trump.
And that's just fine.
And everybody is expected to toe the line.
And you see all these Republicans.
I mean, the ones who have a little bit more integrity will just sort of mouth platitudes about let's make sure all the legal votes are counted.
And once it all works its way through the courts, we'll know for sure.
They don't want to say Biden won because it's pretty damn clear he did, because that will offend Trump and it will offend Trump supporters.
But you have others.
I mean, like Lindsey Graham.
I mean, I remember Lindsey Graham used to hate Donald Trump.
Right.
He's become the biggest toady ever.
And he is he is, you know, insinuating that Trump is either is correct or might be correct that the election was stolen through massive fraud.
And so I don't know how you come back from that, by the way.
I mean, I mean, politicians always seem seem to come back from from just endorsing these these crazy ideas.
But how do you ever trust a person who endorses these wild accusations without any evidence in the future?
Well, you know what?
That's one thing where Lindsey Graham has us trained, where we expect him to lie about everything all the time and don't take him seriously.
He keeps getting reelected, though, and he still has that power.
Yeah.
But so.
So like I said, he almost has a pass some somehow politicians seem to come back from that.
But I mean, I think in my view, all of these these Republicans, some of whom I kind of admired in some respects until Trump was elected president, just who were rightly critical of him when he was running and just totally turned around and now think he's the greatest, you know, politician ever, greatest president ever.
And it's just disgraceful.
Yeah.
Well, they'll be over it by January the 21st.
Watch.
I don't know.
I mean, I hope so, except that, you know, Trump imagines himself as a kingmaker and he's got a lot of very passionate supporters.
He's talking about running, you know, the next election, which will be as old as Biden is now.
But people are afraid of him, you know, and he doesn't stand for anything except himself.
So I mean, I just don't honestly I sort of get the broad appeal of electing somebody who's going to disrupt the system and drain the swamp and all that.
I get that.
But how.
You can look at a guy like this who has no coherent philosophy, only believes in what's good for him and and openly says it, by the way, it's not like it's not like he's hiding this.
Right.
I just don't understand how people can support him so passionately as opposed to thinking maybe he's the lesser of two evils, which is a different thing.
Yeah.
I mean, the appeal obviously is just that he's not really one of them.
He's rich, but he's not really part of the establishment.
He's just a guy from real estate and TV.
And so.
And he's not a Bush or a Clinton, which is nice since they announced I think this was the real thing.
Right.
Jacob was they told us back in 2012 that even before Obama was reelected that.
Yep.
And in 2016, it's going to be Bill Clinton's wife versus George Bush's brother.
And you're going to have to choose.
It's already a preordained thing.
Like these are our, you know, royal dueling families here.
I think that Trump and especially Roger Stone just saw opening there that, you know what?
I think people will be willing to choose somebody other than a Clinton or a Bush if we could give them a choice, you know, and be mean enough to elbow their way in there the way they did.
You know?
Yeah.
I would say I mean, I think I did say at the time that the best thing about Trump's election was Hillary's defeat.
Right.
I really believe that.
And Jim's.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that made me feel good.
The fact that wasn't the fact that he won, but the fact that she lost.
Right.
And then my other hope, my other main hope for the Trump administration is that having somebody like that as president would undermine respect for the presidency and sort of make people realize not only are these human beings, which I guess they sort of knew all along, but it can be a total buffoon who is elected from the point of view of a lot of Americans, a total buffoon elected to that office with a tremendous amount of power that Congress over the years and decades has ceded to the president.
And do you want to imagine someone like that?
And so for Republicans, imagine, I don't know, the Democratic equivalent of Trump, whatever the hell that would be, right?
Imagine that.
And that's the person you're entrusting with this power.
And you know, they're not miracle workers.
They're not prophets.
They're not superhuman.
They are at best, fallible human beings.
And they can also be like horrible, horrible human beings.
And we've had more than, you know, people say a lot of Democrats say, oh, he's the worst president ever.
It's like, you really need to study his dream.
Exactly.
You think in terms of the consequences, right, the worst ever.
My hope was that that example of just like constant, can I say bullshit?
Yeah, go ahead.
Constant bullshit emanating.
I mean, just like, we say, oh, of course, politicians always lie, but they don't always lie.
Yeah.
And I'm not going to say Trump literally always lies, but he can barely open up his mouth without saying something that's not true.
My hope was that that experience would make people more skeptical of politicians, of the presidency, of giving so much power to one person and sort of undermine respect for the office and also get people to lower their expectations about what the person they elect to be president can accomplish.
Right.
He's not going to save the country.
He's not going to make America great again.
He's not, you know, they're not in control of the economy.
They're not, they don't, you know, not everything that happens on their watch is attributable to them, as people tend to assume, right.
All these sort of unrealistic expectations that go with presidential elections.
My hope was that we would let go of some of those, but I'm not sure that's how it's working out.
Instead, we see just people bitterly divided by this person.
And some of them, like I said, very enthusiastically supporting him, which I honestly cannot fathom.
I guess I get the appeal in broad terms, but to like passionately support him, I do not get that at all.
Yeah.
Except maybe just to express your hatred for the other side, which, you know, that I sort of get.
Well, yeah, exactly.
Vicarious power lust that now we're going to stick it to those people who have had the power up until now.
And then back and forth, they switch, making things worse each time.
So you know, so Biden will come in and he will be awful in mostly predictable ways.
Right.
And, you know, so that we have to start talking about that now.
Yep.
It won't be as funny.
I'll tell you that.
I know.
That's the thing.
I'm just picturing gray skies, man.
At least Trump was funny.
Yeah.
Even if not on purpose.
But right.
Yeah.
It was almost never on purpose.
But yeah.
So.
So, yeah.
And and and also, you know, Biden can drop dead in a couple could drop dead in a couple of years.
And then Harris is the president.
And I'm not too excited about that either.
The most humorless person in all of D.C.
Yes.
Hey, listen.
So in case anybody was wondering, my only vote was against my local sheriff.
I did not vote for anybody for president.
But my local sheriff is an accessory to murder.
So you've got to take a stand.
And he lost two to one, by the way.
And then I wanted to add one more thing here, too, which is we did mention this, but you guys really ought to read Jacob's piece at Reason magazine, the case against Joe Biden, the new president.
Man, is that thing the brief and, you know, Bronco March teach wrote a whole book about what a horrible person Joe Biden is.
And it's good.
But this piece at Reason has even more than is in that whole book about what a horrible person Joe Biden is.
So check that out at Reason magazine, the case against Joe Biden, the new president elect.
Thanks very much, Jacob.
Appreciate it.
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