Beadles’ reward wasn’t real. Nor was his purported evidence. But this stunt, and especially its use of irrelevant statistics to appear authoritative and smear elections, is common in Trump circles. A working paper by two Stanford University scholars, the Hoover Institution’s Justin Grimmer and the Democracy and Polarization Lab’s Abhinav Ramaswamy, underscores just how widespread these fabrications are. They are not just cooked up for propagandizing in the press. These bundles of bogus claims, erroneous assumptions, and alleged evidence — especially statistics like those cited by Beadles — were also centerpieces in scores of lawsuits to push judges to overturn the last presidential election. It was all hype, smoke and mirrors.
“Regardless of the reason why, every claim we analyze fails to provide evidence of illegality or fraud,” the scholars wrote near the start of their comprehensive 85-page paper. “We document that the supposed evidence of fraud that Trump relies upon is riddled with basic statistical misunderstandings and errors, confusion about how to use voter files or absentee voter history to analyze turnout and registration, and invented statistical techniques based on the impressions of what happens in a ‘normal’ election from ‘experts’ who never previously analyzed election data and provide no argument to justify their procedures. At no point did Trump or his allies present even remotely plausible evidence of consequential fraud or illegality.”