In an interesting attempt to root out voter fraud in this year's presidential election, Texas Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick offered a $1 million reward for any info about legitimate voter fraud. Many found the offer odd since Republican President Donald Trump, the Attorney General of Texas and numerous other members of the GOP repeatedly claimed fraud occurred.
Their lack of proof and Patrick's million dollar bounty left many to conclude all of the GOP claims were completely unsubstantiated. Why offer $1 million for proof you already have?
This offer doesn't seem to be working out quite as Patrick planned in more than one way.
In response to this attempt to uncover mass voter fraud that doesn't exist, Pennsylvania Democratic Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman put forward the cases of real voter fraud uncovered in his state. All of the cases involved Republicans attempting to commit voter fraud in support of Trump.
One of these cases involved a Pennsylvania Republican who not only voted in his dead mother's name after casting his own vote for Trump, but also registered his deceased mother-in-law to vote so he could attempt to illegally cast a ballot for her too.
The system flagged her as likely deceased, but he then submitted documents to "prove" she was still among the living. Despite these rather extreme measures, he was never able to actually cast his mother-in-law's ballot.
The problem with paying the reward, as far as Republican politico Patrick is concerned? All the cases Fetterman's state found thus far cast their fraudulent votes for Donald Trump, not Joe Biden.
When he received no check from Lt. Gov. Patrick, Lt. Gov. Fetterman took the matter to Twitter–much to the delight of the internet.
Fetterman continued the thread of trolling tweets throughout the day.
He managed to work in several Family Guy references.
Twitter users were quite tickled by the whole situation.
In an interview with The Houston Chronicle, Fetterman said the trolling was largely intended to help people see how absurd it is to think the election was rigged. The resulting hilarity is just a fortunate bonus.
The fact all the cases involved fraudulent votes for Trump was just the ultimate icing on the cake.
"While it's undoubtedly and undeniably hilarious these cases involved Trump voters and their dead mothers, it's irrelevant because it documents how truly rare voter fraud is and how impossible it is to truly pull it off."
In response to Fetterman's messages, Lt. Gov. Patrick's spokesperson had a gaslighting comment for MSNBC.com:
"It is not clear why Lt. Gov. Fetterman continues on this topic since Democrats don't believe in voter fraud—unless it's the Russians."
In reality, everyone acknowledges isolated individual cases of voter fraud are attempted in every election. However no proof of widespread voter or election fraud has ever been found or presented.
No modern election with a margin of over 7 million votes was decided or "stolen" via voter fraud.