It figures that Trump’s political appointees would ignore any norms about involving themselves in rank partisan skulduggery while they collect taxpayers money. Of course it does:
The federal government’s chief information security officer is participating in an effort backed by supporters of President Trump to hunt for evidence of voter fraud in the battleground states where President-elect Joe Biden secured his election victory.
Camilo Sandoval said in an interview that he has taken a break from his government duties to work for the Voter Integrity Fund, a newly formed Virginia-based group that is analyzing ballot data and cold-calling voters in an attempt to substantiate the president’s outlandish claims about illicit voting.
Sandoval is one of several Trump appointees in the federal government — some in senior roles — who are harnessing their expertise for the project, according to the group’s leader.
The participation of administration officials in the project shows the extent of the efforts by the president’s allies to justify his unfounded allegations of widespread ballot fraud.
They claim this is done all the time and maybe it is. But look at what they’re doing:
Sandoval is part of a hastily convened team led by Matthew Braynard, a data specialist who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Another participant is Thomas Baptiste, an adviser to the deputy secretary of the Interior Department, who also took a leave to work on the project.AD
Braynard said in an interview that several other government officials on leave are also assisting the effort, but he declined to identify them.
The group is analyzing voter rolls and other databases in search of signs that ballots may have been cast illegally, information that Braynard said is being shared with Trump’s campaign. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The group appears to be attempting a makeshift version of an effort already conducted by a nonprofit consortium of states, which uses sophisticated data analysis to root out duplicate voter registrations and registrations of people who have moved or died. A Washington Post analysis of vote-by-mail data from three of the states in the 2016 and 2018 elections found that officials identified 372 possible fraud cases among 14.6 million votes — 0.0025 percent of ballots.
Braynard maintained that his project was pathbreaking, saying they had found that many states do not update their voter rolls “very aggressively or frequently.”
“Nobody’s ever done this before,” he said. “These things have to be done to find potential problems.”
David Becker, who led the creation of the interstate consortium, said it had taken more than three years to develop and relied on sophisticated software and proprietary state data that is unavailable to analysts like Braynard and Sandoval.
Becker said the Voter Integrity Fund appeared to be the latest in a series of “shoddy, fly-by-night” efforts to replicate the project and would inevitably flag numerous false positives based on inadequate data.
“I would put absolutely no stock in their analysis,” said Becker, who is now the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
They do not care if their analysis is flawed. The point is to make half the country believe the election was stolen so Trump can call himself the “rightful president” once he does whatever he’s going to do after January, most likely declare his intention to stage a presidential rematch.
The incredible richness of these people insisting for four years that the intelligence community, dozens of other countries and the Democrats were all wet in saying that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election, even though they never suggested that it changed the vote count. And here they are scouring the voting rolls in Republicans states frantically looking for non-existent evidence of systematic voter fraud and persuading their voters that they were robbed despite no evidence of it.
And, by the way, they are obviously total morons who just discovered that the voter rolls in most states are inaccurate — and are checked when people actually vote. This stuff is always the case in a country in which the elections are all local and where people move around and, you know, die. It’s been investigated and investigated and there is no evidence of any widespread, coordinated fraud that could have affected the result of an election.
There are ways someone could rig an election. This isn’t one of them and there is no evidence that anything else did either. It’s pathetic whining from a group of sycophants for the worst sore loser in history.