LARRY ELDER WEBSITE: WE DON'T WANT TO SHOOT ANYONE IF WE DON'T LIKE THE RECALL RESULTS, BUT WE MIGHT HAVE TO

Today is Election Day in California, and polls show that Governor Gavin Newsom is unlikely to be recalled. But the candidate who's expected to be the top vote-getter among the replacement candidates, Republican talk-show host Larry Elder, has preemptively declared that his near-inevitable loss will be the result of fraud. He's put up a website, StopCaFraud.com, that offers the kind of pseudoscientific bushwa the right is inordinately fond of these days. Ed Kilgore writes:

The site ... avers that with respect to the fraud claims, its “primary analytical tool used was Benford’s Law.” This, as aficionados of the Big Lie probably know, is a statistical theorem involving the likelihood of certain numerals in random displays of numbers. Experts on Benford’s Law have repeatedly and heatedly and redundantly objected to its use to “prove” fraud in election returns.

But you have to scroll down a bit before you get to the part about Benford's Law. First, there's this:

They say that in America, there are four boxes of liberty. The soapbox, the ballot box, the jury box, and the ammo box. When we vote we exercise our rights as Californians and as Americans to make our voices heard via the ballot box, having listened to others make theirs heard through the soapbox. We trust in our elected officials to safeguard that ballot box, such that its results will truly reflect our will as Californian’s. However, when those officials, either through laziness or incompetence, allow thieves to steal amidst the dead of night and cheat our ballot box, we can no longer rely on its contents. Will we now have to fight the California jury box, in the hope that the final box — the one most akin to Pandora’s – remains closed?

In other words: I'd better be declared the winner, either immediately after the votes are counted or after I sue to overturn Newsom's victory, because you really don't want my supporters to have to shoot anyone to give me my rightful win, do you? It would be very unfortunate if they felt compelled to do that.

But the pro-Elder forces might do something besides sue in order to prevent the violent insurrection they say they're so worried about.

If the recall election advances to an audit, we must not permit county officials who may or may not have contributed to these discrepancies to conduct the recount themselves instead of allowing independent groups under state control to conduct the recount. Allowing this is tantamount to allowing an alleged criminal to examine the crime scene, or negligent workers at the site of an industrial accident. It is nonsensical.

They want an independent audit, like the endless one that's taking place in neighboring Arizona, and like the ones they're demanding in every state Joe Biden won by less than a landslide. They want their crackpots to come in and re-count the votes, while searching for evidence of bamboo paper in the ballots and remote vote-switching by defense contractors in Italy.

But California's legislature is Democratic, so they won't get an audit approved. I guess that means that after the lawsuits fail, we go straight to the shooting -- or at least to a widespread belief among Republicans in California and elsewhere that shooting would certainly be justified.