Electoral fraud happens on a small basis

The argument

This argument rests on a distinction between the existence of electoral fraud and its scale. Proponents of this view accept that electoral fraud does happen occasionally in the United States: there are agents who attempt to rig the election, and their efforts are real rather than imaginary. In that narrow sense, they hold, claims that the US election is rigged are not fabricated out of nothing — they point to something that genuinely occurs. But the argument's second and decisive step concerns frequency and distribution. The incidents in question, on this view, are highly isolated and rare, involving only a few people. The agents attempting to rig the election are not many, and their actions do not amount to a coordinated or widespread effort capable of determining outcomes across the system as a whole. The inference follows from putting these two observations together. If fraud were entirely absent, claims of a rigged election would be wholly false; if fraud were pervasive and organised, such claims would be wholly true. Because the reality described here sits between those poles — fraud exists, but only on a small basis — the accurate assessment is a partial one. Sweeping assertions that the election is rigged overstate what the isolated incidents can support, while blanket denials that any fraud occurs understate what actually happens. This is why the argument supports the position that claims of a rigged US election are only partially accurate. On this reasoning, the honest description of the evidence is proportionate: it acknowledges the occasional, small-scale attempts at fraud that do occur, while denying that these scattered and rare cases justify the much stronger conclusion that the election as a whole is rigged. The claim contains a kernel of truth, advocates hold, but only a kernel.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Electoral fraud is a very real issue and incidences of it are not isolated, particularly in light of the US 2020 elections. Agents are using various techniques involving the voter suppression to target certain groups of the population and intimidate them into not showing up to vote.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise asserts attempted rigging without saying by whom or on what evidence, and it slides between two different things: an individual casting an improper ballot, which is what prosecutions find, and an organised effort to determine an outcome, which is what claims of a rigged election allege. [Rejecting P2] Rarity tells against the conclusion rather than for it. Fraud that is isolated, detected and prosecuted is evidence of safeguards working, which supports the position that rigging claims are not accurate rather than that they are partly accurate. The counter's substantive point is a different one — obstruction and intimidation of voters — and that concerns access to the ballot rather than fraudulent ballots, so it does not show fraud to be widespread either.