Election Rigging

When I first heard the accusations of election rigging last year, I interpreted "rigging" as something akin to widespread election fraud, election commissioners suborned, voting machines hacked, paper ballots stolen, dead people voting, people voting multiple times, and dismissed the possibility that Secretary Clinton (who was the one who most often was alleged to have rigged the election) had that much power. There is no nation-wide body that oversees elections, but the rules are set by the states and administered locally.  But soon it became apparent that the word "rigged" was used in a much broader sense, making the word effectively meaningless. Sanders supporters threw the word around in the primaries, and it's obvious now if it wasn't obvious then, that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) preferred Clinton, despite their internal rules to remain neutral until a candidate received the party's nomination. But the fact remains that all candidates knew the rules for getting delegates beforehand, and fair or not, Clinton, playing by the rules that were in place, received more delegates than Sanders. (More on that later). During the general election campaign, Candidate Trump began throwing the allegation of rigging around, especially in late September and early October as polls seemed to show that Clinton had the upper hand. Without evidence, he claimed that all the polls were wrong (at least those that showed him behind) and that the election was rigged against him.  Never one to provide specifics when vague generalities will do, he even suggested that it was the media who was doing the rigging. It looked like he was preparing the excuses that he'd use after his election day loss.

But then he won, and you didn't hear anything more from him about election rigging.

Then came Donna Brazile's book where she claims that she had evidence that the Clinton campaign rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders. I read the excerpts from her book that was published by Politico, and despite the fundraising agreement raising numerous red flags, it didn't appear that the information that she was giving supported her conclusion that the primaries were rigged in Clinton's favor. Once again, the word "rigged" being used of any bias, favoritism, or just plain hard-nosed campaigning. It didn't take long for more details to come out casting doubt on Brazile's conclusions, including her statement this morning that the primaries were "a fair fight".

Of course Brazile's book was used by Trump to distract from his own problems with allegations of election rigging; his go-to stratagem is to accuse Clinton of whatever he's being accused of!

In my opinion, Trump's campaign, with Russian assistance, didn't rig the election either. Did Russians spread disinformation? I don't think that's in doubt any longer. Did Russians steal emails from the DNC? Our intelligence agencies believe so. Did the Trump campaign meet with and cooperate with Russians? More and more evidence is pointing that way, and more of them are being caught in lies. But did the Russians, with or without the cooperation of the Trump campaign actually hack into voting machines or cause any votes to be changed? I see no evidence of that either.

So when I hear or see the word "rigged", I tend to ignore it, because it's become a word without real meaning in popular usage.