Election fraud? Sure. Systemic election fraud that stole the election from Donald Trump? Probably not.

 Let's start with the fact that there is plenty of evidence of outright election fraud. People who have been dead for close to 20 years do not send mail in ballots to election officials, and whoever "did" send them in actually committed fraud. One person is only allowed to vote once. Voting in two locations is fraud. An election official that counts a ballot that they know to be illegal is actually fraud. Many people are convicted of election fraud in almost every election, and there will likely be a few in this one as well.

But at this point there is no firm evidence of the sort of systemic fraud that would allow complete states to be stolen. Certainly not when we are talking about thousands, if not tens of thousands of votes. Sure, there are some oddities that seem to require some explanation, but nothing glaring that will likely be found. 

As a person who troubleshoots and looks for the "root cause" of issues, my brain works in a manner that sort of points out anomalies for me. I am quite literally trained to see things that look unusual or might be a problem. I am also quite literally trained to look for patterns of behavior that might point to something that can be a root cause of a problem. 

While I see some anomalies and some patterns from state to state that seems a little fishy, one has to believe that our system is set up as such to not allow serious widespread fraud. I have enough faith in the system to believe that between a natural anomaly and a conspiracy that I am going to tend to believe that it was the former, unless the latter can be proven. 

What I do see is several states where Donald Trump appeared to overperform in the vast majority of the counties, but saw massive issues with one or two counties that showed incredible results for Joe Biden that simply was not seen anywhere else in that state. Results that all by themselves delivered the entire state for Joe Biden (eg: Dane County in Wisconsin).  If a particular demographic shows a drastic difference in one county, you would expect to see that same drastic difference across the board. But in these cases the drastic difference seemed limited to happening within a particular county line. 

Most of the explanations for these anomalies are the classics. It was easier to vote because of mail in ballots. More Democrats took advantage. There was more motivation. But none of those explanations are able to define why it only happened in one or two counties.

While these are the sorts of things that conspiracy theories are made of, you have to believe in the checks and balances of the reporting, accounting, security, and transparency of the counting and results. That being said, it doesn't provide anyone with a sense of security when some of those same counties were having to be sued to allow the required transparency, and spend much of the time counting without supervision (or in some cases literally behind doors). 

The second portion of all of this is that sometimes things look fishy, we get something in our heads, and we can't let go of it. It seems like the most reasonable explanation to us at the time, so instead of investigating with an open mind, we decide to go into the situation attempting to prove our theory correct. Trust me when I say that I have wasted hours on clients who come to me with an issue that they are "sure" that they have the root cause, when they are completely off track. Getting them to step away from their assumptions can be more difficult than actually solving the problem. But you have to do so because you can also never solve a problem if you spend all your time beating your dead horse assumption. 

In terms of this sort of election type situation, emotions run high. The more emotional we are about something, the less logical we are (just watch an emotional liberal try to argue logically). So when something happens where we are emotionally attached such as an important election, we will tend to get more emotional (thus less logical). We have often times take a step back and force some logic to the forefront or we can get caught up on the emotional arguments which lead to the exact beating of dead horse assumptions that we have not been able to prove.

All that being said, while I find it unlikely...  I wouldn't be completely shocked if there was some systemic fraud at some level eventually uncovered, given the intensity of the situation and the opportunities allowed by the multiple manners of people voting this year. Mail in voting is quite obviously more prone to fraud than in person voting will be. My mail in ballot has to be physically checked by another person and I am trusting a third party will then scan it for me without any manipulation. But my in person ballot is in my possession until I physically put it in the ballot scanner and it is then counted by the machine. 

Now if something were to be found, I wouldn't expect it to be something nefarious like people manufacturing ballots and scanning them (although anything is possible). More likely it would be a situation where certain "rules" were not followed that allowed certain votes to be counted that were not legal. If enough rules were ignored with enough ballots, then that could certainly make up for some of these difference we have seen. It might even turn a state like Georgia (where we are looking at a few hundred or maybe a couple of thousand ballots). But unless we are running up against the biggest election conspiracy the world has ever known, there is no fraudulent conspiracy that will allow us to explain away tens of thousands of votes.