Radical-left actor Tim Robbins is channeling the spirit of Gore-Lieberman 2000 and alleging the “election is being stolen” from Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. There’s a giant conspiracy and the “machines are rigged.”
The big difference this time is the media hate this complaint. “This is a very bad tweet,” lamented Philip Bump at The Washington Post. His headline? "You need to chill out, Tim Robbins." The actor chided the media in his tweet.
Hey NYTimes, CNN. Are you saying that 2+2=5? Are you really OK supporting a candidate with these numbers?#VoterFraud pic.twitter.com/LrxqLTaKbC
— Tim Robbins (@TimRobbins1) April 25, 2016
Bump even said “thinking exit poll results trump actual voting results (‘in reality, Bernie has won four more states’) is idiotic. And it's bad because thinking that "the machines are rigged" in 19 states to Clinton's advantage (including a variety of different types of "machines") without anyone knowing suggests a conspiracy of truly impressive scale.”
I mean, voting machines are not dropped off by DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz from the back of a U-Haul. They're operated by cities and counties all over the place. The suggestion is, I guess, that there's a common software system that was somehow edited? That someone snuck into the warehouses where all of these things were stored and tweaked something? Or is it that boards of elections in a dozen states agreed to lie about the results?
The irony of theories like Robbins' is that it's actually far more naive to assume a giant conspiracy that goes undetected than it is to understand that these are complex systems that simply by virtue of scale resist the sort of tampering he alleges. (Voting machine fraud is the Democratic version of the voter ID fraud lamented by Republicans: Responsible for all problems but lacking in any widespread examples.)
Bump wrapped up by noting that Robbins valiantly kept fighting the Vast Voting-Machine Conspiracy on Twitter instead of obeying the media and folding up the tinfoil hat. But Gore and 2000 just never came up.
Bump sneered at Robbins: "Tim. I get it, man. You're mad. You want Sanders to win and you don't get why he isn't. It's hard for you to believe that people would vote for Clinton over Sanders, so you assume that there was somehow widespread fraud, and you're willing to assume a huge conspiracy and misunderstand how polling works to reinforce that belief....Not the script you wanted. But it's the movie that's playing."
