I mean, your thoughts are a rational way of thinking about this. Rationally, you might think that if you are concerned about a vote tally machine, you could do a hand recount, and if it matched, then clearly the proposed fraud couldn't be taking place at the vote tally level. That's a very normal way of thinking through things. And I don't actually blame anyone who has concerns about election security or vote tallying, it's a natural and important thing to worry about.

But let me suggest this: The modal person who has "concerns" about the election right now is a Republican who was told by the Republican president and Republican senators and congressmen that evil Democrats stole the election and that's why they won. It is mostly about retroactive justification of a feeling like Republicans -- or Trump, in specific -- should have won but didn't. This comes after a year long campaign of saying the news was fake, the polling was fake, Joe Biden is low energy, Hunter Biden did something horrible, 90% of OANN respondents say Trump won the debate, etc etc etc.

And here I'm talking about reasonable, regular Republicans out there in the world. The modal person you hear yelling ONLINE about this stuff literally believes that the Democratic Party is an international child sex and murder ring run by Hillary Clinton and Barry Soetero (a Muslim Atheist who was born in Kenya) who gain superpowers by chemically extracting hormones from the dead kids they murder in the basement of a pizza place in DC.

The legal partner of the lawyer being sued here believes that the vice president should be executed for refusing to overturn the election, that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is a pedophile and a child murderer, and that Jeffrey Epstein is still alive. The lady who got shot to death the other day is an avid follower and retweeter of this person: she died for the cause she loved, foolishly believing internet grifters who claim everything is a communist plot. The Viking guy who stormed the house floor believes he is a spiritual interpreter for a movement that says JFK Jr. is secretly alive and a middle-aged dude in a bowler hat who teamed up with Trump to execute all the Democrats who killed his father. I wish I was joking, all of this accurately reflects what we're talking about here. These are the people whose position we're trying to understand.

They don't think Dominion is an election company that changed some votes or whatever, they think Dominion is a communist front run by Cuba and China and the dead former president of Venezuela and Canada (which is just China, they both start with "C", suspicious???) and Hunter Biden. Dominion's entire reason for existing is electing communists like Joe Biden. They believe that not a single Democrat won anywhere in the country, that majority-black areas of the south and majority-Latino areas of LA that vote 85% Democratic are actually Trump strongholds if not for the fraud. Don't pay any mind for why they didn't sue in the other 43 states or why they didn't try to overturn any house elections.

This is like understanding why John Hinckley shot Reagan. Literally, he did it because he believed Jodie Foster was sending him psychic messages that she wanted to be with him if only he'd make a grand gesture. But I don't think we can do much if our objective is to try to convince him that he was wrong about that, because he wasn't engaging in a rational analysis of the evidence to begin with.