I think there's a certain amount of what you might call "maintenance" type investigations that are useful in assuring the public that there's nothing to the allegations. Not that it will ever be 100% effective, either. As the old saying goes, you can't reason someone out of something that he didn't reason himself into.
The people shouting the loudest about election fraud are, of course, not thinking at all. They're just saying that if their guy lost, it much be fraud. Those people cannot be reached at all. Beyond that, though, there's another group who hears the allegations, and can't come up with any explanation for the sketchy evidence, and sees the allegations dismissed, and begins to think maybe there's something to it.
People who come here are more likely to have investigated some sort of conspiracy theories before, and see all of the tell-tale signs of a CT in the "evidence" of election fraud today. However, most people have never done that. A little bit of official word demonstrating why the apparently suspicious activity has a perfectly innocent explanation, or that the effect is so tiny the suspicious ballots could not have changed anything, would go a long way toward convincing the ones on the fence about whether they think there might be election fraud.
For example, I just saw a video of a group of yahoos in our state capital of Lansing, Michigan, chanting "Dead People Voted!" So, they are sure that lots of dead people voted and they probably think Michigan was stolen, or at least that the evil Democrats did the same thing in Georgia and stole that one. Maybe they saw the video, posted on this forum from a tweet, showing what appeared to be evidence that a vote was received from a 120 year old woman in Jackson County. Well, I saw that video, and I cannot come up with a convincing explanation of how that came to pass. I'm sure lots of other people saw that video, too, and some, failing to come up with a non-fraudulent explanation, are sure that means it proves vote fraud.
So, I would like someone to look into what happened there. I don't mean a million dollar investigation. I just mean that I think it would be worth the effort if someone in the Jackson County Clerk's office checked out whether the video is really legitimate, whether the woman in question really represents a woman, long since passed away, but who is still on the voter rolls, but who nevertheless recorded a vote. I'm guessing not, but I don't know the explanation of how that might have come to pass any other way.
It just helps to reassure people. If you can show them that one or two of the "proof of voter fraud" videos that they have seen on youtube are not legitimate, they might think that there's probably good explanations for the others, too. If you ignore all of them, and just say, "There's no evidence.", the people might think that you are just ignoring the evidence.
ETA: Newt Gingrich is running around talking about vote fraud, and citing an example from the Franken-Coleman recount about an envelope full of ballots that magically appeared to put the Democrat, Franken, over the top. Well, I know exactly the envelope he's talking about, and why the overwhelming evidence is that it was a perfectly legitimate envelope full of real votes, that should have been, and was, counted. However, I follow this sort of thing a lot more closely than most. If you can find the most widespread allegations you can find, and put together a report detailing the reasons why this is almost certainly not voter fraud, it could make a difference in the mind of some of the protestors. Not all, of course. Some are hopeless, but some are reachable.
