I'm not above believing a stolen-election conspiracy theory, I just need to see actual evidence first

And I don't think I'm gonna get it from Mike Lindell

Mike Lindell has had maybe the most improbable career in the history of American business, going from crack addict to founder of an infomercial-based polyfoam pillow company to arguably the face of modern American conspiracy theorizing. Perhaps the greatest evidence of his transformation in that regard is that his public sobriquet has gone from the patronizing “MyPillow guy” to just Mike Lindell—he is now known less for the pillow thing and more for the fact that he’s always showing up at weird, sweaty events across the midwest and making wild, unsupported claims about the 2020 election. Just lately he’s doing the same thing regarding 2022:

Lindell’s concerns about election fraud, he claimed, extend beyond just races in which Democrats win. He said he is reapportioning some of his resources to investigate how Ron DeSantis won Dade County in Florida.

“Because it’s a deviation,” Lindell said. “A Republican hasn’t won Dade County like DeSantis did. I just want to find out why that’s a deviation. Find out why it happened and if it happened, if there was problems with the election, things with the machine or whatever. If something happened, I want to know it happened.”

Uh huh. Spoiler alert: This is pretty dumb. Yes, DeSantis’s win in Miami-Dade was pretty notable. It was also rather predictable. One look at the last few statewide elections show that voters in Miami-Dade have been edging toward a critical mass of Republican support for the last few years. Trump lost the county very handily in 2016; he lost it by a much narrower margin in 2020; DeSantis won it by a narrow margin in 2022. This was a pretty standard political shift. DeSantis is a broadly popular governor, charismatic, highly intelligent, a brilliant messenger with a massive war chest; he’s willing to touch hot-button, live-wire culture issues in ways few other politicians of the last 50 years have been willing to do, and he appeals to a broad base of voters with disparate interests, incomes and political affiliations. Boom, there’s your Dade victory. You could get all of this from the Simple English Wikipedia; you don’t need to deploy your MyPillow fortune to launch some sort of investigation about it.

All that being said, there’s actually nothing wrong with questioning the results of an election, at least if something sufficiently weird and suspicious happens or appears to happen. The mainstream narrative over the last few years has coalesced around this assumption that it’s reckless, irresponsible, deranged and evil to express any skepticism about the legitimacy of an American election. That’s weird, since nearly all national Democrats and nearly 100% of media for several years pushed an aggressive evidence-free conspiracy theory about Donald Trump having “stolen” the 2016 election with Russia’s help. And also Stacey Abrams spent years insisting without evidence that the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was “stolen” by Republicans, and everyone seems to still likes her. And also Hillary Clinton is already warning that Republicans might “literally steal” the next presidential election, and nobody seems to care about that. So it’s kind of interesting to see the standards shift and reformulate depending on who’s talking. But, you know, whatever.

In any case, yes, I am perfectly willing to believe that a U.S. election could be stolen or systemically undermined in some way. Like, are we supposed to think that’s outside the realm of possibility now? Is that the new standard? I have trouble figuring out why we’re all suddenly expected to believe that. Here’s a pretty basic set of propositions: There are a large number of pretty powerful people in the United States who would be capable of rigging an election and would have no moral compunctions about doing so, and there are enough security flaws in the U.S. election system that it would be relatively easy enough to pull this off. It is not at all inconceivable that these factors could combine to create election malfeasance widespread enough to affect an election one way or the other.

What’s the counter-argument? “No way. That could never happen. Our election system is unimpeachably secure, the most secure in human history, nothing could ever go wrong with it. And regardless, there aren’t any very powerful people in this country that would happily exploit any election weaknesses in some way in order to steal an election. Not a chance that could ever happen.” I am just at a loss to respond to people who insist that this is the case. The world is not perfect. This is not a Disney movie. Our institutions are flawed, sometimes deeply so, and there are rich, well-connected and determined people willing to do bad things with their money and their power. That’s always been the case and it’s probably even more so now. Denying it so vociferously makes you look naive at best and insidious at worst.

The variable, of course, is the quality of evidence. If you have good evidence that an election was stolen, people will believe it, and justifiably so. But the evidence has to be very good, because it’s a huge thing to claim an election was stolen so you need outsize proof to justify such a potentially destabilizing allegation. Nobody ever produced a sufficient level of evidence to substantiate the claims of Trump and Russia stealing the 2016 election; similarly nobody has produced sufficient evidence to demonstrate Democrats stole 2020 via mail-in ballots or whatever; Stacey Abrams never appeared to even try to substantiate her own wild claims about her 2018 loss; I am not certain that Mike Lindell even knows where Dade County is. You don’t really have to pay attention to any of these conspiracy theories; the people who are spreading them don’t even respect your intelligence enough to try and convince you.

Ultimately, as I’ve written before, there is less danger in the threat of genuinely “stolen” elections and more danger in simply running your elections in a way that’s completely inept and suspicious-looking. The U.S. seems to be alone among all advanced countries of the world in how we run our elections, where many major authorities—officials with some of the most well-funded and heavily staffed urban municipalities in human history—are incapable of counting up all the votes for days or even weeks afterwards. This is nuts. Did you know that in France, virtually everyone in the country casts their election ballots on paper, in person, on the same day, then workers count them by hand, and the results are still regularly posted on the same night? This is what competency and efficiency look like, it can be done using literally ancient technology, so the fact that our country can’t do this is bizarre and highly suspicious. That kind of ineptitude will absolutely and understandably make people think something fishy is going on, even if everything is on the up-and-up.

But overall it’s perfectly fine to leave open the possibility that an election might be stolen. The people who are trying to convince you otherwise right now were just a few years ago absolutely convinced that a major presidential election had been stolen through treason and international sabotage. This is a politics of convenience. Don’t be like that; make your own assessments. Follow Jefferson’s advice to “neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it;” follow also Whitman’s maxim to “surrender ideas when the evidence is against them.” Don’t be a weirdo about stuff like elections, don’t be a Mike Lindell or a Stacey Abrams. But also don’t be weirdly naive about it, either. Just, you know, look at stuff with your own eyes, and make reasonable assessments and sensible decisions, and you’ll be fine. That’s true about elections and about everything else.