The Dispatch Podcast - Let's Talk About Facts

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

Does a video show someone burning ballots with votes for Trump? No. Did Michigan ‘magically’ find 138,339 votes for Joe Biden? Nope. What about Wisconsin? Did voter turnout exceed the number of registered voters in the state? A thousand times no. But tight vote counts in battleground states have laid the perfect groundwork for election disinformation to explode online over the past few days. As Steve points out, some bad actors on social media and cable news simply “don’t care whether what they’re saying is actually true.” But not to worry, Dispatch fact checkers Alec Dent and Khaya Himmelman—along with staff writer Andrew Egger—join the podcast today to debunk conspiracy theories surrounding election fraud so you don’t have to. Show Notes: -Join The Dispatch for a post-election gathering featuring congressional leadership and top policy experts November 9-10: Sign up here! -Click here for all of our latest fact checks. -“Biden Had No Election Coattails,” by Karl Rove. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our special Friday Dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes. And today we have a very special Friday dispatch podcast indeed because it's fact check election edition. So we've got joining us Andrew Eger, Alec Dent, and Kaya Himmelman, all from our dispatch fact checking team to tell us what's what, what's not, and why all these people are saying crazy stuff online. Before we get to that, make sure to check out our post-election conference Monday and Tuesday. You can see it at what's next event.com. The tickets are $100 and include a new complimentary subscription to the dispatch. We're announcing new people every day, but we've got Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Senator Ben Sass, Senator Tim Scott, panels on the future of conservatism, evangelical turnout, everything that your heart could desire in a post-election dispatch conference. But without further ado, it's fact-checking time. Let's dive right in. Alec, I'm coming to you first on Sharpie Gate in Arizona.

Explain the problem, explain the facts. Yeah, so on election night, this video started going viral. of a woman explaining that she had just voted in Maricopa County, Arizona, and that the poll workers there had been forcing people to vote using Sharpies. She claimed that she witnessed then some of these Sharpie filled out ballots being rejected by the machine. And somehow this began being spun out as Trump voters

being forced to use Sharpies to invalidate their votes. How poll workers identified Trump voters before they voted is really unclear in this conspiracy. But long story short, it is entirely probable that Maricopa County poll workers were asking people to use Sharpies because that is the preferred form of filling out a ballot in Maricopa County. They say the ink dries faster. The machines can pick it up just fine. And even if they couldn't, there are processes in place to make sure that votes that are rejected by the machine but still legible are counted.

So, yeah, that's a long and short of it. That's a fun one. All right. Kaya, coming to you about Michigan's magic 138,339 votes that all went for Joe Biden. Yeah, so this started as a Facebook post and a lot of tweets about this. People were claiming that 138,000 plus votes were magically discovered and magically all went to Biden. Um, people were representing this giant boost for Biden with graphics from, uh, Decision Desi Um, and then some savvy, you know, people on Twitter soon discovered that, um, it was actually due to

it, uh, data error from Decision Desk HQ. There was, um, uh, a county was counted with an extra zero. So it was supposed to be, you know, it was supposed to be 15,000 votes. And it was shown, there was a zero added. So this jump was represented on the graphic, and it turned out that once the graphics were corrected, the Biden vote went down to its regular number. And people were sort of misconstrained this data. It started as, you know, looked like Biden went from 1.9 million votes to 2.1 million votes. So let me just ask a clarifying question. So rather than reflecting the actual 50, 15,000 votes and change, when it was ingested at Decision Desc HQ, it came out as 150,000 votes and

change. So it was basically literally just a typo, a data entry error of some kind. And it was only up for about 15 minutes before someone realized it. And Decision Desk issued a statement to a few news publications. explaining that was just a clear. Now, Steve, I've also seen... Sorry, Sarah, go ahead. I've also seen people say that but for all of these, you know, number eagles online, they

were trying to get away with something. They just didn't get away with it. And what I would point out is that I think a lot of folks assume we go from counting these ballots and then it's just sort of a done deal or you have a recount when, in fact, this would have been caught in the canvas, even if they hadn't caught it in real time, even if there hadn't been anyone pointing out the problem on Decision HQ, for instance, and it actually was in the real problem

in the Secretary of State database. The canvas is where you just go back through and redo the math on all of these things. And you will be stunned by the number of typos and mathematical errors that there are. Numbers are transposed within, like we just saw with this, a zero was added, or instead of 81,

it's reported as 18, for instance. they will even flip the results so that the Biden numbers are reported as the Trump numbers and vice versa. The good news is that because of federalism and even more so precinct by precinct control over these elections, each of these typos tend to result in, you know, a flip of 60 votes at a time or in this case where a zero was added about a thousand votes. It tends not to flip votes that are really outside of a moment. margin of let's call it. You know, if an election is decided by 20,000 votes or more, the

canvas is not going to change the outcome of that. Can I jump in on that real quick, Sarah? Because in addition to what you're saying right now, this notion that, like you say, but for the brave posters and tweeters who noticed this thing and shared it really widely as evidence of voter fraud, but for those people, you know, they would have gotten away with it or they wouldn't have corrected the error. That's additionally very silly because the discrepancy that was noticed, the discrepancy that got people tweeting about this in the first place anyway, was actually not the error, but the correction of the error. It was the decision desk HQ totals suddenly taking a bunch of Biden votes off the board. Because when this

data was first uploaded to decision desk HQ, it just came in with a bunch of other county data, right? So Biden got some votes and, or sorry, Trump got some votes and Biden got way too many votes, right? And then later on, they edited out the error without any new votes coming in. So Biden hopped, you know, lost 150,000 votes in the count while everybody else stayed the same. And it was that jump where Biden moves a lot and nobody else moves at all that is like the germ of the whole conspiracy theory about the thing. You see what I'm saying? Well, let's keep going. Alec, back to you. 40,000 absentee ballots were rejected in one county in Georgia.

That sure sounds like a lot. Yeah, so this one was popular with left-leaning online personalities. I'm not actually sure how it started, but just all of a sudden people were saying that 40,000 absentee ballots were rejected in DeKat County, Georgia, but could still be salvaged because the errors on them were minor. So they were encouraging people to reach out, make sure the ballots have been counted and make sure that these ballots were able to be cured by the deadline on Friday.

This was quickly corrected. The DeKalb County Board of Registration and Elections said that $40,000 is way more ballots than they had that could be cured. The actual number was 200 ballots. I don't think that stopped a lot of people online from still reaching out with this number. It still persists even after the public announcement had been made. it's not in fact the correct number fun okay kaya this is my this one like sent me flying off handles and roofs the other night which is did wisconsin turnout exceed the number of registered boaters i'm going to let you explain it and then i'm going to try to keep my head from exploding

yeah this was a pretty simple one um that was corrected quickly so there was a post going around saying that Wisconsin had greater number of votes than registered voters with what looked like real data suggesting that there was actually around 3.1 million votes and somewhere between like 3.2 votes cast. So the Wisconsin Elections Commission quickly corrected this and gave us the correct number of registered voters, which is a little over 3.6 million. So that 3.1 million number actually came from the November 2018 midterm elections. So it did look sort of credible in the social post, but the Wisconsin Elections Commission quickly, you know, deep on that.

And that's because Wisconsin has same-day voter registration. So they really can't give you the number of registered voters the day before the election. That would be a really useless number because basically when you go in to vote, it's all a single transaction. You go in, you register, and you vote. And so the number of registered voters all. always in Wisconsin, Steve's home state jumps a lot the day after election day. What I saw then after this, though, really drove me crazy, which was folks saying that there

was an 89% turnout in Wisconsin, and that was, quote, not feasible, that it was not possible for the percentage turnout to jump from 61% in 2016 or 2018 to then 89% in 2020. The R&C's national press secretary tweeted this. A Wall Street Journal columnist tweeted about this. Kaya, should you break the news to them or shall I? I think you should go ahead. It seems like you are passionate about it. Taya knows me well.

So there's a difference, dear listeners, between eligible voters. That's everyone in their state who meets the state criteria for voting. You're over 18 years old. You're a U.S. citizen. you're not friends with Steve Hayes, whatever those criteria are, you're an eligible voter. That number is obviously much larger. It is the largest number that we have. So in the United States, generally our voter turnout is measured as a percentage of eligible

voters, and it tends to be between 60 and 65%. However, a more useful turnout number for folks like me who work on campaigns is the turnout among registered voters, because that shows whether your turnout operation was able to do its job. And that number in 2016, for instance, was 88% nationwide. So folks are shocked to find out that our turnout among people who are able to vote, meaning they registered in advance or in Wisconsin, you can just show up, is so high. But actually, yeah, about 9 out of 10 people who registered to vote do vote. It was 138 million people who voted in 2016 out of roughly 157 million registered voters.

And my data comes from census.gov, not Twitter. And just to, you mentioned this, Sarah, but what was really amazing to me about, you know, the national press secretary of the RNC, you know, using these numbers, is that she was alleging, you know, essentially voter fraud based on this extremely amateurish category error in mathematics, and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on that fact, you know, because she's saying, you know, looking at total eligible voters for the first year and then comparing that to registered voters the second year and just sort of barreling forward through it, really, really just kind of owning

the owning the error in a sort of admirable way, I think, for posters online. It's incredibly frustrating because you're the Republican National Committee. Like, that is a campaign committee and everyone there has presumably worked on campaigns before and certainly knows the difference between registered voters and eligible voters. I found it disheartening to see how difficult it was to convince people who were posting about this who should go better. But I have to tell you, Alec, and maybe I'm being naive, I kind of thought it was a, I kind of thought they were being sincere. Like, I really don't think they knew the difference. I don't know. Depressing. All right.

Yes, it is. Back to Alec. Did Philadelphia really report 23,277 votes all for Biden in a single update? Yes, but that's not the whole story. So this one started with a 538 tweet in which they said just that that in a recent batch of votes out of Philadelphia, they reported 23,2707 votes, all for Joe Biden. This particular number quickly went viral, figures like the Gorka or Ingram sharing it and suggesting that it was statistically improbable, if not impossible, for for a batch to contain only votes for one candidate, which on the surface is perfectly reasonable. The odds of that happening just in one geographical area

are pretty much nonexistent. So I reached out to the 538 analyst who was paying attention to this race, who had written the live blog posts that led to this tweet. And he said that it's actually not as unusual as people are making it out to me, that occasionally election officials and vote tabulators, actually in the process of counting these votes up, issue an update that only contains votes for one candidate. And then in a later

update, they issue all of the, or they report all of the votes for the other candidate that would have been included out of that district. And that's exactly what this 538 analyst, Aaron Bikoff, saw occur in Philadelphia. He said that the next update contains considerably more Trump-leaning votes than others from around that time, suggesting that the votes contained in that update were the ones that were paired, so to speak, with the 23,000 for Biden. And Steve, this goes to maybe a more fundamental problem that I've had this week, which is we have a whole lot of people commenting on a platform, namely Twitter, who have never actually done election day operations and really covered the intricacies of how our election system works. And

on the one hand, I totally understand it, and it actually is weird and fun in its variances. But on the other hand, these people are stating with such certainty how they think it should work or would work. I don't know how you fix that. Yeah, I mean, I think there are basically two problems, and we've alluded to both of them. One, in this context, it's just people not understanding the process and reporting things that they think are problematic without actual context or without depth of knowledge or understanding. And the second is negative polarization, which we've talked about a thousand times. Some of these people don't care whether what they're saying is actually true, right? They know that they're going to get mad retweets if they tweet something that can get picked up by, you know, DJT Jr. and retweeted or Gateway Pundit takes it and blows it up.

And if, you know, particularly with the websites that do this and Gateway Pundit would be one of these fake news websites that are plenty of others, there, if your game is to monetize eyeballs, all you care about is getting the eyeballs. I mean, Gateway Pundit has over the years published so many things that are just totally bogus that are demonstrably false that people can point to and have pointed to as erroneous. They don't care. Like, they're, obviously their readers, the people who go to their website are going to their website to have their views affirmed to be told that what they already believe is true is in fact true. And no amount of reasoning in all likelihood is going to move them off of their position.

So they'll double and triple down. on wrong. And I think we're seeing a lot of that. I will say, just as a broad comment about the work that we've done here and some of the things that we've discussed, you know, it is also very clear that the kind of work that we're doing on these things, particularly when we're able to look at a claim and Alec and Kayak go and immediately go to the sort, either the sources of the claim or the authoritative sources of information and can then provide not quite in real, time, but on, you know, in pretty close proximity to the original false or misleading claims, the actual story, you read our fact checks on the stuff, and it's easy to see what

happened, right? I mean, like this one, oh, well, yeah, of course, you can imagine somebody who's doing data entry for on the voter rolls would say, oh, yeah, okay, I've got 23,000 Biden votes. Let me just plug that in. and then I've got, you know, 14,000 Trump votes, let me plug that in. And to the untrained eye or the naive, and I don't mean that in a necessarily pejorative way, although I'm not sure naive can be used in a positive way. The untrained, the unknowing eye, that can look suspicious.

And to the partisan eye, it's evidence of vote rigging. But, you know, when we can come in and say, actually, here's what happened. This, you know, we're told, we approach all of these fact checks and I think, you know, this, Alec and Kai would say the same thing with the possibility that some of the stuff that we're seeing that feels maybe crazy or misleading or at least worthy of being fact check might be true, right? I mean, it could be true theoretically that some poll worker somewhere decides I'm going to plug in 23,000 votes. I mean, there's a logical problem there because who would think to do that and think that they wouldn't get caught that in the canvas that you were talking about earlier, Sarah, this wouldn't somehow show up. I mean, there's a logical problem to a lot of the conspiracies that we're seeing, but we have to approach these things as if we're open to that. Like, maybe it is the case that some of the crazy stuff that we're fact-checking ends up being true. But as has been the case, you know, in all of our fact-checking, but I would say particularly,

Throughout this week, we look at these claims and almost always there's a very clear and obvious explanation for what's happened. And we provide that explanation. And it's, I mean, just in conversations that I've had with people who have come to rely on, on the fact checking that we've done particularly this week. And, you know, in looking at how widely circulated our fact checks have gotten, it's clearly having an impact, even in this sort of stream of back. that information and this kind of crazy information environment of the past week, it's having an effect, which is great. Can I make a point real quick about that information stream specifically?

Because the thing that's been so interesting to me, obviously these kind of false claims crop up on the internet every day that the internet exists, you know, there's always things for you, Alec, and Yukaya to be, you know, playing whackamol with and everything. But just because we've been following the election data in such a granular way, I'm like seeing the genesis of these false claims in a way that's a lot, you know, it's, you see them when they start to happen, and then you see them as they develop, and then, you know, 12 hours later or whatever, your friends and neighbors are, like, messaging you about, like, oh, did you hear about this thing, you know? And it's been so interesting to me to see the sort of path of development because you mentioned, say, the Gateway Pundit as just a website that sort of vacuums up these false claims and, you know, gives them a huge audience. But that's only like one step because after that happens, the next thing that happens is you have a whole lot of like ostensibly more mainstream and, you know, respectable conservative pundits who then amplify the claims with just sort of like a, oh, wow, big if true. sort of, sort of approach. Or with a, can you believe that Twitter is, you know, deleting these, deleting these things, you know, regardless of whether or not they're true, that's wrong.

And so that, and then, and then really that, that just puts rocket boosters on these things that then, you know, they spread all over the, all over the country, basically. Yeah, I would say, or, or in addition, they do these sort of just asking questions pose. Like, you know, the number of times I've seen people repeat these bogus charges, even after they've been shown to have been bogus, and introduce them with the, I don't know if this is true, but, you know, if you don't know that this is true, why are you out there saying it? I mean, particularly, Andrew, as you suggest, the people who are in a position of authority to do this stuff, we, I was watching Fox News last night and saw on the special report panel, Bill Bennett was on. And, you know, in sort of a very short period of time, he uncorked two or three of these and said, you know, this is outrageous, this is terrible. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but there's this, this, and this. And, you know, I think we're in a position to point back to the fact checks that we've done and say, hey, no, actually, there's an easy explanation here, and here it is.

So I do think it's been, you know, just again this week on the work that we've done, it's been really solid and helpful for people. All right, Kaya, I know it's getting a little chillier out there, but are people burning ballots with votes for Trump to stay warm? No, they are not. So this started, or maybe started a different time, but on Wednesday, Eric Trump tweeted, a link to a video where he claimed that someone was burning 80 Trump ballots in Virginia

Beach. And Virginia Beach quickly debunk this and issued a statement. They were able to capture a still image of the video showing the ballot, which they say is just a sample ballot. And they show us why. And the sample ballot is missing a barcode marking, which is an indication that it would be an official ballot. So these were not real ballots, and this did not happen. Good to know. Andrew, I want to talk now about things that we haven't fact-checked yet, but are just sort of out there in the wilderness. What is on your list? Let's start with that. Yeah. So the sort of superstructure of all of these election-related fact-checks, right, is that, you know, these are all taking place in an environment where President Trump and his allies are asserting that the election is being meddled with on a scale where it's, you know, enough to invalidate the results, where it's essentially a fraud being perpetrated on the American people. And we've, I think what's been useful about the fact checks that we've already talked about is that a lot of these are. the ones that are, you know, potential huge swings. Like the 138,000 in Michigan is like the

one I think of most is, you know, if that were true, that's an enormous number of completely invented fraudulent ballots. Now, obviously, as you go down the line, there's claims that involve fewer and fewer and fewer sorts of things like that, that even if they were true, would be, you know, kind of smaller scale operations. And, and, and, and which are being bandied around, you know, as the Trump campaign starts to bring lawsuits in a lot of these places, in order basically just to give a sense that fraud is cropping up everywhere you look, right? That, you know, there's another hundred ballots here, another 80 ballots there, that sort of thing. And so as you get down closer to some of these, these a little less

completely outlandish on their face claims, you start getting into the territory of stuff that's like, well, we're going to have to wait and see what the actual evidence is that the Trump campaign brings forward for some of these websites. So I'm looking at things like in, you've seen Rui Giuliani and people like Newt Gingrich mentioned over the past day or so that they are bringing challenges to the voter roles in places like Nevada and Michigan, where they're alleging that people who are dead or who have moved away from the state have filed ballots. you know, several thousand ballots, maybe. I think the number that that's usually been being thrown around in Michigan. Or there's, you know, also little forms of disinformation that just,

you know, are an anecdote from a polling place that are supposed to sort of cast dispersion on the election workers there in order to raise the possibility that there's fraud going on. So, for instance, going back to Michigan, there was a viral video. of people inside of an election office covering up the windows to the outside where there was a crowd of Trump supporters out there who said they were there to observe the counting, covering up the walls with cardboard and things like that. Why would you ever want to cover the glass around counting and not let those people just observe from outside?

Well, so the kind of human reason, which is compelling to me, is that those people outside are being very loud and kind of cranky and disagreeable and probably interfering with the process. But in terms of the actual- But cardboard doesn't stop that. Well, okay. So I'm not saying it was a good decision. I'm not getting in the mind of the poll worker who did this. And obviously, it did look bad. I mean, if I'd been, you know, making the call there, I'd be like, do we really want, like, footage of this going up on the internet? But the salient point from that moment was that the people outside were not the

official Trump campaign election watchers, right? Those people were inside. They were on the the money side of the cardboard boxes going up in the windows, right? I mean, their access to the ballots was not disturbed at all. And that's a fact that is completely lost in sort of like the outrage churn about this. Newt Gingrich on Fox just earlier today repeatedly made the point that by putting up that cardboard or whatever, the poll workers were illegally restricting the Trump campaign's access, you know, to observe the count in that way. which is just completely factually wrong in that way.

Well, we have seen some lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign where they say that their observers were not allowed to watch the ballot. So I think the two are getting conflated. As I've looked into those cases, they get interesting because on the one hand, the top line talking point that the Trump campaign has been using publicly and pushing to its surrogates is not accurate, that there were no observers allowed in.

Their observers were allowed in. their lawyer in front of the judge, when the judge admonished him that he was an officer of the court and asked him to answer the question again, acknowledged that the Trump observers had been allowed to watch it. The question is whether they were given a reasonable opportunity to be able to see the ballots that they were supposed to be there watching. And the answer to that appears to be no, that they were too far away to be able to see what was going on. And look, that's not a frivolous point because here's what happens. These absentee ballots come in with their envelopes and their secrecy envelopes and in the ballot inside. And on the outside is all of the

information that needs to be contained to ensure that the absentee ballot meets all of the requirements. You know, did it have a signature? Is it postmarked? You know, is it a person who is registered to vote. Once that envelope has been separated from the ballot, the ballot, of course, has no identifying information on it and looks the same as any ballot that you would cast in the polling place. Once the envelope has been separated from the ballot, you cannot marry them back together. And so when an observer can't see the outside of the envelope to say, like, hey, that person's name didn't match on any voter registration rules, or, hey, there's no signature on that ballot, envelope for that ballot, that whole envelope and ballot need to be rejected and set aside.

Once that opportunity has been missed, it is gone. And so the Trump campaign had a real point, and they should have gone into court if they couldn't work it out with the poll observers, which, sorry, polling officials at the precincts. I have been the lawyer on the ground before who has to work with the election officials and make sure that my poll watchers have a reasonable opportunity to observe absentee ballots as they're taken out of the envelope. I have not needed to go court before. Normally, they understand that your guys need to be close enough. So I think perhaps they weren't trying in good faith or perhaps things have gotten so contentious that that was not able to be matched. So can I just cut in? Because I totally agree

with what you're saying and I don't want what I was saying to be misconstrued. And I think we should clarify for the people listening that we're actually talking about like two completely different stories with with with these things because the the story of the cardboard boxes and all that stuff happening that was in Detroit and the story of the the lawsuit about um you know whether or not the Trump campaign poll watchers were close enough to observe which it appears that they were not that was in Philadelphia. So, so. Good point.

Like really good to make that distinction. I think at the talking point level, it's more like, hey, the Trump people are not getting the opportunity to walk these absentee ballots and see, look, they don't want transparency in these states that are controlled by Democrats, quote unquote, and they're putting up cardboard. Like, I think it's all one talking point. 100%. But I think that the fact that it all gets collapsed into one talking point is what makes

is also messy because if we are actually going to have like a conversation about like, okay, which specific instances was there an actual harm perpetrated on the Trump campaign, that's the sort of thing where, you know, if we are going into a period of litigation over all of these things where each of these individual things is going to be litigated at the, you know, state level, we all need to go into that with expectations of, okay, how much, how much potential ballot, if the Trump campaign is correct with this specific allegation, how much specific ballot would they potentially be able to pull back here? How much specific ballot are they going to be able to pull back here?

But when those specifics are lost, when it, like you say, when it all just sort of merges into this meta-narrative that the fix is in and the Trump campaign isn't being treated correctly, then you can see why people don't understand necessarily that, you know, this decision in Philadelphia is not going to end up even in the best sort of wildest dream scenario for the Trump campaign, not going to end up throwing out hundreds of thousands of ballots. It's going to be very much more small in particular

and on a case-by-case basis than that. Yeah, and it also is worth noting that while you can't rematch the ballot to the envelope, they don't throw out the envelopes. So you can still go through the envelopes and prove that the ones you were not able to see, for instance, contained you know, X number of ballots that should have been tossed out. And of course, if that number

is able to change the outcome of a race, then the fix for that is to call a new election. It would be incredibly unlikely that if you went through those envelopes, you would find, in this case, 10,000, 20,000 that don't have signatures or weren't from registered voters to be able to toss then the whole election into question. But nevertheless, having observers is important because it builds confidence in the system. And part of the problem we have right now is a lack of confidence in the system, Steve. Yeah, I think anything that we can do to build confidence and be more transparent about how these votes are counted while protecting the privacy that people who are casting the votes is important and should be done. And it is the case, as we've said

repeatedly, you know, it may be that the Trump campaign has valid points to make, valid arguments to make, valid objections to raise, I would say that their public presentation, the press conferences, the tweets, what, whatnot have been, have trended to, tended to be more sort of hysterical and evidence-free than they have actually laying out specific cases of, you know, tampering or vote fraud or irregularities that check out once they're reported out. They seem to be taking, you know, wild claims and accusations from people and amplifying them without doing that kind of due diligence. But to bolster the point that you were making, Sarah, Carl Rove had a post at Rove.com, former George W. Bush advisor, who has been talking to the Trump campaign,

I think, informally advising the Trump campaign, Donald Trump, on re-election strategy. He had a post that I thought put this all in perspective and makes a point that compliments the one you were making. He wrote, there are suspicious partisans across the spectrum who believe widespread election fraud is possible. Some hanky-panky always goes on, and there are already reports of poll watchers in Philadelphia not being allowed to do their jobs. But stealing hundreds of thousands of votes would require a conspiracy on the scale of a James Bond movie. That isn't going to happen. And I think that's the kind of broader context for all of these. I mean, obviously, we believe seriously in looking at the facts of each of these individual

claims, testing them out, doing the additional reporting, putting in the time and effort. But the kinds of fraud that it now appears with Joe Biden continuing to gain vote show with the counting of these absentee and early votes. or mail-in votes, it's just, it's not going to be possible to do that kind of, of fraud or to steal the election, which is the, you know, that's the cry that you're getting from, you know, people who you'd expect to get it from, the kind of hardcore, intellectually dishonest click brokers, but also the people who should know better, you know, who are claiming that the election is being stolen, stop the steel and things like that. I think what Rove said is a very important context

to look at all of this. And we talked about this a little on AO. I have, you know, done two presidential cycles where my only job was Election Day operations and preparing for exactly what has ended up happening this cycle, but did not happen in 2008 or 2012. And so I'm pretty aware of how vote shenanigans happen. And the type of vote shenanigans that do happen, and, you know, it's just funny per so many things, Steve, both sides insist on the extreme that elections are stolen, that all these ballots are fraudulent, that there's, you know, 25,000 fraudulent votes going on, or that there's absolutely never voter fraud and the voter fraud has never happened. Right. And per usual.

here at the dispatch, we're here to tell you that like, well, neither side's exactly right. Voter fraud absolutely happens in the case of, you know, for instance, it's why all these states have anti-ballot harvesting laws. It's not because taking someone's ballot for them and sending it out either in the mail or dropping it off to a official box is in itself, there's nothing morally wrong with that. The problem comes that that is the part where we see the most mischief, where people are coerced into voting a certain way, where they hand their ballot to someone and that person then scratches out their vote

and revotes for them. Or they harvest, quote, unquote, a bunch of ballots from a precinct that they know is going for their opponent, pretend to be in favor of that opponent, and then toss those ballots. All of those things absolutely can happen. They are wrong.

They are voter fraud and they are illegal. you can't do it with 50,000 votes. You can't do it with 20,000 votes. You're talking about the number of votes that absolutely could sway a local race, and that's why we saw a new election in North Carolina for that congressional district in 2019, because there was illegal ballot harvesting

from the Republicans, by the way, that was enough to throw the whole contest into question. So we'll see what some of the margins are in these states. But right now, for instance, in Michigan, this is not a particularly close race. And it looks like, in some of them, it'll be outside the margin for even a requested recount by the candidates. So that'll be sort of then it. Once the canvas is done, they will certify those results and there won't be a recount in some of these states. Okay. Anyone have any last things? What about the dead voters?

What, yeah, I mean, like the, I, I think this is one of those things where there's just no way of, like, pre-judging it before this specific, you know, before each of these specific claims goes to court, right? I mean, they'll get to the bottom of it. They'll check whether there are actually ballots that have been cast and counted. That matters, because just because it was cast doesn't mean it was counted already. It could already have hit a wall with not matching a voter roll or whatever. And we'll know then. But I mean, like, there's, at this point, maybe it's, well, I won't even say that. At this point, I am purely confident saying that questions of dirty voter rolls will be

individually litigated and we'll know when it's over. Steve, quick question to you. How do we pick which of all of the crazy internet rumors out there to fact check? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. We have a fact-checking team that is sort of. of cut off, despite doing this podcast together, we're otherwise pretty separate from the rest of the editorial operation of the dispatch. So it's Alec, Kyah, me, and Rachel Laramore. And we, you know, sort of keep track of anything and everything that we see coming across on Twitter,

claims that we see politicians make, things that are fed up through our partners at Facebook with whom we've been partnering on their fact check operation. We try to survey the waterfront and do as many, you know, take on as many things that we think are important to look at. And, you know, look, just because we do a fact check doesn't always mean that the thing we fact check is wrong. Sometimes we do fact checks and say, yeah, you know what? That may have seemed like an implausible claim, but it's actually true.

So Alec and Kaya do most of the excavation. on their own and make those determinations. And sometimes we supplement what they come up with. Alec or Kaya, anything surprising about being a fact-checker that people wouldn't think about your day-to-day jobs, lives? I think the most surprising thing is just we look into a lot of things that end up being true. So for every story that we write,

there are probably a number of other ones. that we investigated and just didn't end up being worth writing about or were there, there's not enough information for us to provide any clarity on the situation. We're a third-party fact-checking partner with Facebook, and through that we get shown all of their most viral posts the day and significant portions of them we might look into decide there's not enough merit to writing about them, or they may just not even be something that's actually contested. So, yeah, a lot of our day is not fact-checking,

but just looking into whether or not something is worth fact-checking in the first place. And we invite, we should say we invite people, if people see stuff that they think is worth a fact-check, send it to us. Send it our way. We're eager to hear from. We get a lot of really great feedback from readers as well who see things on social media and they're curious whether or not it's accurate or not. So all of that is also very helpful.

in determining what we decide to write about. And yet, y'all have never fact-checked David French's terrible pop culture takes. How weird. We don't fact-check opinions, Sarah. We stay away from fact-checking opinions. But there are some that border on just... I mean, David French says... Objective wrongness.

That Michael Jordan is not the greatest of all time. He states that as a fact. And clearly... I have gone on the record at saying that he is wrong about that. Rachel has threatened to fire me a few times. but I'm standing fat. Well, I mean, we won't really know that you're putting your money where your mouth is until you start limiting the reach of his social media post to that effect.

But I have one question for the fact checkers, which is that, you know, given that you spend this much time, you know, out of any given day, just staring into the maw of like all of the worst claims on the internet in a given day, do you ever feel like, I mean, does that get you down? Do you ever like, you know, have to clock off and, like, do like, do like a juice cleans by like reading the encyclopedia or something like that? I mean like what's what's that like like to just spend so much time interacting with misinformation? Not that we all don't I guess just like on Twitter or whatever but what was that like? I find it sort of interesting actually

to trace the origins of some of these claims that seem so outrageous. It's less I mean it's disturbing how these things get started but I think it's kind of interesting. I think tracing the origin is somehow like you know puts me at ease a little like there's a reason why these things get so popular and how they spread. And it's, you know, misinformation gets spread really quickly. But I like being able to trace it to one source and sometimes the source and the reason why it's spreading is like kind of believable. Like the case of, you know, the Eric Trump video and the ballots burning, like kind of looked real. And if you don't know the little marker that you're supposed to look for, it's like, okay, this kind of makes sense. I guess that's kind of like a different

a rosier perspective, being able to be like, okay, let me put my, people aren't so crazy. There's sometimes reasons why people kind of believe the things that they do. So I guess it doesn't really get me down. I'm sort of interested in it, being able to see the other side. I love that. And I love ending this on such an optimistic note. Thank you, Kaya. Okay, we do ask our guests the most important question at the end.

Um, Thanksgiving is coming up. What is the most important side dish to you that without it would not be Thanksgiving? And Andrew, I'm going to start with you. Uh, I'm trying to understand the question. The most important dish without which, uh, okay, okay, without which it would not be Thanksgiving. I'm sorry. It's, but we haven't really been sleeping. Um, it's, uh, it's a sweet potato casserole, is it for me? Marshallows on top or no? I was, uh, I don't know if I've had with marshmallows on. I guess, I guess maybe at restaurants. You're from the Midwest. What? You haven't? No, uh, crushed pecans, right? Like a, like a pecan, uh, like brown sugar topping sort of thing. I think that's the, I was going to say, I was going to come out and be like, that's the,

the, you know, the canonical way to, to do the dessert. And now Steve is, you know, pecan versus pecan. You're a pecan person rather than, it's actually one of those words. that I guess I've just learned that I'm pecan because I didn't do it this time, but almost every time I go to say it, I have a little internal battle. Where do you work? No, that one I know. We're the dispatch. Come on.

Alec, side dish. Pumpkin pie. It is the best form of pie. And to be frank, I can do it without anything else at Thanksgiving. Just made a pie. That's a dessert. Side dish. Come on.

Now, is the pumpkin pie? Is it the consistency of the filling or is it the crust? What makes your family's pumpkin pie the pumpkin pie that you know and love above all others? I don't really have a good answer to that. It's just your basic pumpkin pie. Who makes this pumpkin pie in your family? My mother does. She's going to be horrified to hear that you just called it a basic pumpkin pie after her tears.

I hope you have other plans for Thanksgiving. I don't want to cast dispersions on my mother's pumpkin pie. It's great pie. But I have had just as good pumpkin pie over. I can't believe you just said that. Brutal. It's hard to do a bad pumpkin pie is the point I am very poor. Digging.

That's the word of it. Okay. Well, Alec, we're just for the sake. Alec, if you are not welcome home for Thanksgiving, you can join the Hayes family. I'm not sure I would invite him, Steve. I'm not sure I will encourage him. encourage my mom to listen to this podcast now. Kaya, all important.

I'm coming to you last because of the faith that I have in you. Oh, my God. I wish you wouldn't. I mean, I hate to say this and, you know, create more controversy. But I'm not, like, I'm not obsessed with the Thanksgiving menu. Although I will say, oh, my goodness, it's not a good answer. I like the idea of, like, being able to eat a loaf of bread in, a different form like I like a stuffing just kind of it's so crazy it's such a nutty thing um so

I like that more so just the novelty of it but I'm not like I don't know I also agree pumpkin pie's a dessert I'm so sorry Alex wow fact check from within the fact checking team the call is coming from inside the house uh Steve over to you yes so there are two right answers here One is cream spinach. It's just a must. My mom's cream spinach is the greatest cream spinach you can ever have. Wait, no joke, Steve. Can you send me that recipe?

Because my cream spinach, it's my favorite when I go to like restaurants, but mine has just always turned out as a yucky, messy, drippy disaster. Could you send it over? No, hers is unbelievable. Yes, I love cream spinach. And then squash is great. And it's funny, I am not a huge Thanksgiving. sort of partisan, I can just as easily make a case that a Christmas, you know, a Christmas

ham, a Christmas dinner is, is just as good. I love July 4th for the sort of cookout food that you get to have on those days. So I'm not a, you know, sort of a Thanksgiving partisan. But both of those are just absolutely crucial to any Thanksgiving meal. And I've liked them since I was a kid. This is a true story. I wish I could consult my mom for the actual year. 1947. Please continue. No, I was not. I was not born. But early in my life, like five or six or seven, like one of the big highlights at the Hayes household growing up on your birthday was that you got to choose the meal. And you could have whatever you wanted. Didn't matter. If you wanted it, my family did, we ate out like once a year. If I

wanted to go to the organ grinder pizza place that had like, we could go out to eat, we could do whatever. So I chose the menu one year. I think I was like five or six. And, you know, we had 10 little kids who are five and six who were over for the birthday dinner. And I had pizza, creamed spinach, and squash. And I think I was the only one who ate the cream spinach and slosh. But my mom was a heck of a cook. So in my family, we do a big extended family Thanksgiving, and the roles are not just the highlight. It's like why people travel across the country to this family Thanksgiving. And as you can guess, the problem this year is that we can't have extended family Thanksgiving. It's normally,

you know, about 30 of us. And my great aunt is now quite old, as you can imagine. And we can't do it. So this is the problem. The roles have never been replicated outside the kitchen. in which they were created. I have tried here in my home, like since March, when the pandemic hit, I knew this could be an issue. And so I've been practicing making the roles every month or so.

And I have yet to get it. I have even FaceTimed the chef. I've had them look over what I'm doing wrong. I think they're sabotaging my recipe. It's my cousin who did this. So if any of y'all are listening, Winnegrad clan. I know that you've sabotaged the roll recipe, but nevertheless, I will not be deterred. I'm going to figure out what you've done. I've got a couple weeks left to make this work,

and I'm going to do it. And with that, listeners, thank you so much for joining us for this special fact check edition of the Dispatch podcast. We hope that by the time you hear from us again, we will have the results of the election and join us on Monday, What's Next Event.com, as I said at the beginning of the program, we have our post-election conference. It's going to be amazing. And our fact-checkers, I'm sure, will be listening to everything we say in real time and fact-checking us in the worst way. I'm going to be able to be.