Speaker 1: All right. Let's start today with sort of an audience question. I think it's a good one.
This is exactly the type of question I love to answer. A viewer who I guess goes by the name
Smash wrote to me about the 2020 election and said, Dear David, you believe the 2020 election
was not stolen and there is no evidence to the contrary? What would you accept as evidence?
What would it take to convince you it was stolen? Hope you can answer these questions. Thanks. This
is a fair question because I would be a hypocrite and I don't want to be a hypocrite in front of all
of you fine folks. If I demanded that sort of consideration from others, what evidence would
change your mind and then refuse to answer or explain it myself? And remember very often if
the answer is there is no evidence, that would change my mind. You're not really thinking,
so what evidence would change my mind? The first thing, whenever you have a conversation
like this and maybe this will be useful to some to some people. When we say evidence,
what are we even talking about? And so to be very clear. For me to be convinced that there was
an orchestrated voter fraud or election fraud wherein Donald Trump was the real winner, but Joe
Biden stole it. I would need evidence of some kind of systematic voter fraud. So the fact that we
found a bunch of Republicans, you know, a dozen or so who either voted twice, there's the guy who's a
junior and he voted for himself and for his dad, senior, who is no longer alive. Or we find, you
know, a Democrat that voted illegally via absentee ballot and then died by Election Day. Like none
of those things are proof of systematic fraud. And not only do they not rise mathematically to
the theft of an election from Donald Trump, it's also just like a random person. Okay,
so that's the first important thing we are looking for evidence of systematic voter fraud here. And I
would even go further and say systematic voter fraud that would have materially changed the
results in at least one state, not even the entire thing, but at least one state. Okay,
there are two types of claims that the proponents of these conspiracy theories often make.
The first type of claim is that sometimes the big lie people will make a claim that something
happened and that thing did happen. But it just isn't actually voter fraud even at the individual
level, never mind some kind of systematic voter or election fraud. So I'll give you an example.
They say hundreds of thousands of people were registered in two places or usually it's like at
the state level, they'll say tens of thousands of people were registered at two different addresses.
That's not evidence of any kind of fraud. It's not a crime. It's really common that when people move,
they remain registered at the old place. If they showed up and try to vote at the old place,
they would be allowed to. But they also might be registered at the new place. As long as you
don't vote twice, there's no issue and there's no crime. So all of the allegations from the right
about things that are true but aren't actually a problem, those I don't consider evidence of voter
fraud because they're quite literally not fraud. Another example is they say state legislatures
changed voting rules without altering the state constitution. Well, that's true,
but that's legal. You might not like it. You might disagree. But under the public health
emergency of COVID in 2020, there were state legislatures that voted without altering the
state constitution to expand absentee ballot or whatever. It's not a crime. It's not illegal, and
it's not evidence of voter fraud. So that's one bucket things that happened but aren't actually
evidence of voter fraud. Those don't change my mind. All right. Then we get to the claims of
anomalies. Anomalies? Anomalies. Your preference. Okay. Like, for example,
hundreds of thousands of people didn't really vote, but there they show up as having voted.
There has been no proof of those claims. There's just no proof of that. So if you can bring to me
proof of some kind of a systematic requesting and submitting of absentee ballots by someone,
and you've got to tell me who the someone is without the knowledge of the actual voter
in more than this minute number of cases where it seems to be a paperwork error, then that I
would consider that substantial. If you were an and it can't be, we don't know who did it
and we don't know who the people are. But here's three people who say, I got an absentee ballot,
but I didn't ask for it. Okay. There were places that just sent them out. That's not
fraud either. Okay. So if you can come to me with evidence that, listen, we have found an
IP address from which 100,000 absentee ballots, 10,000, 20,000, something were requested and mass
sent somewhere, intercepted by someone who filled them all out and sent them all in. Oh, now we're
talking about something. We do not have that proof of people voting in multiple locations that I
would be interested in. Not just you're registered in two places, not illegal. Trump's Tiffany Trump
that applied to Tiffany Trump it applied to Mark Meadows. That's not actually against the law. If
you had actual forensic digital evidence of voting machines being used in a nefarious way, you know,
you've got Mike Pillow talking about the machines and you've got all these claims about Dominion did
this. No proof Smartmatic did that. No proof. Okay. If you present actual evidence that we
can subject to a digital forensic specialist who can say, hey, you know what? Here's proof. Here
is proof of the manipulation. Here's 10,000 people who tried to vote for Trump and their votes were
counted for Biden. That has not been presented. Okay. Felons voting in large numbers on purpose,
mobilized by someone, right. Like five felons voting illegally because they either didn't know
they weren't allowed to vote or even deliberately. Right. That's not actually evidence of fraud at
any real scale. It wouldn't make a difference in even a single state. And there's no evidence that
it's coordinated by anybody in the election fraud sort of mode that these Republicans claim. The
other thing is you have to explain to me how the relationship between the population of a state.
The known number of registered voters, the number of people that turned out. And very importantly,
remember the people that voted presidential and down ballot. There is complete coherence
between the presidential vote counts and the votes for Senate or House,
etc. If there were some coordinated voter fraud of this kind, you would expect that if they just
messed with the presidential voting alone, there would be this completely out of sync,
these out of sync results between presidential and Senate or House or whatever. The margins
are completely reasonable in all of these, and the Republicans never like to explain, Well,
I won my election legally on the same ballot in which it was stolen from Trump. Oh,
okay. So the ballots, only some of the votes were fraudulent, but the down ballot stuff,
it's completely incoherent. One of the important themes or ideas I think that's worth mentioning
here is something that Dr. Steven Novella writes about in his I forget the name of the book. It's
like skeptic's guide or something like that. It's called Anomaly Hunting. And very often
you will hear actually the perfect example is the umbrella man from the JFK assassination.
And Doctor Novella talks about this in his book After the Assassination of JFK.
Pictures turned up with a guy holding an umbrella on the grassy knoll or, you know, on the side of
the parade route at which John F Kennedy was killed. And you had people who started to say
it was a sunny day. There's no reason someone would have an umbrella. And so they start to
build up a picture that goes something like, what are the odds that we have a presidential parade
and the president is assassinated? And we're told this story of a lone gunman up in the window. And
there's a guy with a huge umbrella on a sunny day right alongside where JFK was killed. He must be
involved because that's so anomalous. But as Dr. Steven Novella explains, the question should be
a different one. The question should be because that does make it sound nefarious in some way.
But what if you reframe the question and you said, what are the odds that at a presidential parade?
With so many attendees, you find someone who looks out of place for no particularly nefarious
reason. When you ask it like that, a guy with an umbrella doesn't sound so sinister. And of course,
we later found out that the guy with the umbrella, the umbrella was a political protest. I believe
it was a political protest against maybe Robert Kennedy. I don't remember exactly. So
you have to also understand that, you know, if I said to you, look at this thing that happened,
that's a one in an 8 million chance you would say, oh, my God, that's got to be something is
going on there. Something is acting on that. One in 8 million things are so rare. New York City
has 8 million people. That means every single day there could be a one in 8 million occurrence and
it would be mathematically expected. And so a lot of this stuff that these people look for is
sifting through data to find something that sounds unlikely. But the reality is that when you have
however many million votes, we had 170 million hundred and 80 million more, less something
you can find seeming anomalies and they don't really mean anything. Okay. So hopefully that
gives a sense of what I would accept as proof that the 2020 election was stolen.