Spin Control: Wild conspiracies about election fraud are hard to kill

Some “revelations” about supposed election conspiracies are like the serial killer in a slasher movie: No matter what the teens try to do to stamp him out, the killer never dies but returns in a sequel.

As someone who may have spent too much time during my teens watching such movies – and, to be honest, cheering for the slasher – that was my reaction when getting a link from a regular reader to yet another “bombshell report” about the way election results are manipulated by the federal government.

It claims that a national cellular network connects all voting equipment and allows the feds to manipulate election data down to the precinct level.

The report might be making the rounds among circles of folks who that believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election or that Republican Loren Culp was the actual winner of that year’s Washington gubernatorial race. But for people intent on grasping at straws, it might be wise to find a longer, stronger straw.

The report postulates that “an incestuous collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security, the Election Assistance Commission, leftist/globalist funding, foreign companies, and their private partners” used a system known as FirstNet to reach down into precinct polling stations and county data centers to change votes.

Under this theory, FirstNet seems to be almost as powerful as SkyNet, the system in the “Terminator” movies that controls the machines trying to wipe out the humans, but that’s a whole different movie genre.

The problem with that theory, for Washington at least, is that there are no precinct polling stations because everyone votes by mail or drop box. Strangely enough, some of the biggest skeptics of recent election results want to return to polling-place voting. But let’s leave that aside under the axiom that a slavish devotion to consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind and some election deniers have big imaginations.

Instead, let’s address the question the election skeptic posed: Could Spokane County’s vote tabulating system be somehow connected to FirstNet and its “voter count control” system.

No. Nope. Negatory. Nein. Nyet. Uh-uh.

That’s because like other counties in Washington, Spokane County’s vote tabulating system isn’t connected to anything, either by the internet or wi-fi, County Auditor Vicky Dalton said. After ballot envelopes have been received and the signatures verified, the ballots are separated and counted in a secure room on tabulators that are part of a closed system of computers and servers. The computers are specially made, not off-the-shelf models from Best Buy, with special software, and don’t connect to the internet or wi-fi. The lines that connect everything in the system are all inside that single room.

“The only line that comes into that room is the electricity,” Dalton said.

But wait, you might be saying. Something is connected to the internet because we can see the results online less than a half-hour after the 8 p.m. deadline for dropping off ballots.

“The results (from the tabulators) are loaded onto a thumb drive – an encrypted, secure thumb drive – and taken to the main office where computers are connected to the internet,” Dalton said. They’re sent to the Secretary of State’s office and posted on the County Elections website. That thumb drive doesn’t go back into the secure room and subsequent tabulations in the coming days are downloaded onto other encrypted thumb drives.

The suggestion of manipulating results by wi-fi or internet might be more plausible if Washington voters didn’t use paper ballots, which the county keeps long after the election is over. The results from the tabulators are checked in audits, and in recounts for close elections when the outcome is in doubt.

Sometimes the results vary slightly, like when a computerized tabulator can’t recognize a poorly marked circle, but people counting ballots by hand do. But most of the time the hand recounts confirm the machine counts, which would seem impossible if FirstNet was making the tabulators take the vote you cast at home for one candidate and switch it to their opponent. It would need someone with the stealth of a Ninja to sneak into the secured storage facility, find the exact number of ballots from each precinct to switch from Candidate A to Candidate B, put them back into their proper storage space and sneak back out undetected.

While this information may satisfy some people who have doubts about a particular election outcome, it’s unlikely to convince those who believe all elections are rigged, except for the ones in which the candidates they support won.

They’ll just look for another “bombshell report” that explains how the elections were manipulated by foreign satellites, one-world government cabals, secret societies or the Knights Templar.

That’s because convincing a true believer there’s nothing to his conspiracy can be as hard as convincing the homicidal maniac in a slasher movie to put down the butcher knife.