Rampant! Voter! Fraud! and Other Stories

• Yes!  Rampant voter fraud!  My smelling salts!  My pearls!  My fainting -- wait, 4?

  We combed through the news-aggregation system Nexis to find demonstrated cases of absentee or in-person voter fraud — which is to say, examples of people getting caught casting a ballot that they shouldn't have cast — during this election. This excludes examples of voter registration fraud — the filing of fraudulent information. Those aren't votes cast — and given that organizations often provide incentives for employees to register as many people as possible, registration fraud cases (while still rare) are more common.
  
  Here's what we found: [examples]
  
  [...]
  
  There is simply no evidence that fraudulent ballots played any significant role in the 2016 presidential election whatsoever.

  That's four actual cases and three maybes. Somebody is using an eggbeater on that teapot, trying to create a tempest.
  
• Remember when we used to joke "It's a Russian plot" about seemingly-conspiratorial weirdness? It seems it's not a joke anymore.  Furthermore: 
  • Southern Beale,

    While this is the current headline, let me be blunt: this is not news. I wrote about this over the summer, here. I’m just a dumb housewife in Tennessee but even I can read a damn newspaper. When you read that the Russians hacked everyone, but only the DNC’s emails got sent to WikiLeaks, it’s pretty obvious that they were trying to help one team, and it sure wasn’t Hillary’s. As I wrote then:
    

    […] it’s far more worrisome that Putin is trying to help get Donald Trump elected than that Debbie Wasserman Schultz tried to help elect Hillary Clinton.

    But did we have that conversation? Noooo. We had to get all emo over Debbie Wasserman Schultz. That was super-fun.

    There's more.
  • Zandar

    The White House wanted to make sure everyone was on board with this, but Mitch McConnell said no, as he has for eight years. More importantly this [has] seriously thrown the legitimacy of Trump's win into doubt and Republicans like McConnell would have rather won with Russian help than a fair election.  Remember that.

    and
  • Driftglass

    Our country has been hit by a massive sneak attack by a hostile foreign power: a sneak attack whose very existence was covered up by leaders of the Republican Party.
    
    [...]
    
    The word you are looking for is "treason".

• Joining Anthony Weiner's therapy group: Jefferson Parish's president (Louisiana Republican) Mike Yenni.

  Fox 8’s Lee Zurik asked Yenni what his intent was in exchanging erotic texts with a teen.
  
  “I can’t…I really can’t answer it,” said Yenni. “I mean, it was just…it was a stupid action. It was a stupid action to even get into this form of text messaging. It was something…something that I can’t explain why I did it.”

  via skippy.
• Not the song or the musical group:  New theory about the Bermuda Triangle, with ominous music.