Negatory
2yr ago
I’m sorry I gotta laugh at “the average person like me who just wants to be financially independent in his 40s” since that’s such a rare slice of the population.
I do share the intuition that either the robots will deliver us from scarcity or eradicate us, and so either way I should spend more in the moment. CoastFIRE is good enough.
Negatory
2yr ago
In financial fraud, the perpetrators are trying to make a buck.
In voting fraud, the point is to change an election outcome.
These are extremely different kinds of fraud and the former is far easier to do than the latter.
Election fraud happens. Some cases get caught every year. Some undoubtedly don’t. But if it’s not large-scale then it isn’t affecting election outcomes.
Negatory
2yr ago
Iran also really hates Trump and the GOP has more hardliners on Iran than the Dems.
Negatory
2yr ago
I think you’re way overestimating how much it matters that @ymeskhout is a lawyer relative to him simply being very sharp and, it seems, having the facts on his side.
Skill issue.
Negatory
2yr ago
Trump claimed Pence could unilaterally decide to decertify the entire election.
I decided nothing a priori about presented evidence.
Looking back on this thread, I’m not seeing where you presented evidence of specific cases of voter fraud or the like; I’m seeing you describe how it might have happened.
Those are not the same thing and the particular demand is for concrete evidence; we have an oversupply of theories here.
Negatory
2yr ago
None of that is new for 2020.
Pointing out smoke or dry tinder is not the same as showing there was a fire.
The trouble is saying there was a really big fire and then when asked to show evidence for it only being able to point to tinder or puffs of smoke or a tiny flame. The level of evidence needs to match the level of claim.
Negatory
2yr ago
When I said:
motivated reasoning, grifting, and conspiratorial thinking whatsoever
I was referring to the likes of TTV, not the commenters here who stated agreement TTV and similar are dumb, or called them extremists as you have. (I wouldn’t call them “extremists” myself, in that these views are extremely common.)
I’m not sure how many comments you’ve read here or in the past, but several posters have said things like “I can’t blame those who believe the plot” or “even if the voting plot wasn’t real, it was still rigged.” Some of those stances have been more reasonable than others.
Negatory
2yr ago
At least with the border he tried.
But yeah either massive incompetency or simple outright dishonesty.
Negatory
2yr ago
I’m not nitpicking, I’m trying to explain why this other model is aLao unlikely to either work or remain undetected, because it’s not trivial to add the right amount of fake votes.
You do realize mail in ballots can be audited right? Fraud at any meaningful scale is still very hard to pull off because things have to align with voter registration.
Voting by mail is excellent and I’m glad my state has long had it.
Negatory
2yr ago
I’m using the same epistemology wherever I go, but different standards of evidence for different kinds of questions.
Asking for laboratory studies for phenomena where controlled conditions are impossible is simply inappropriate. (And of course we know a huge portion of studies with controlled conditions are BS.)
You accuse me of doing different approaches for things I like, but that’s unfounded. It’s not that I like the police. What I like is low crime, and I’ve read enough on the topic and have some lived experience to know having more rather than fewer officers tends to help reduce crime. Similarly, I’d actually prefer a fair bit less democracy than we have now, and I’d prefer a different system if I thought it could do better along various lines.
If you read some of my comments you’ll see more than once where I acknowledge the existence of various anomalies and suspicious happenings, as well as overall unfairness regarding one thing or another. It’s easy to concede what seems to be real (smoke), while maintaining that the idea that significant fraud or anything else (fire) justifying claims of a rigged/stolen election are baseless, given any presented evidence.
With claims of fraud, it’s not natural experiments we want, it’s evidence it happened. It’s a criminal investigation situation. You can actually read about cases where people have been convicted of election fraud. It’s not a new thing. It does take solid evidence though.
Negatory
2yr ago
How would the poll worker know what is happening? Are they warned beforehand they will be part of a crime? Who is telling them? How many instances of this are there?
How are the observers avoided?
How are the ballots filled out so as not to arouse suspicion and match real names?
(You’re not putting forth a realistic scenario that could possibly scale without something being detected.)
Negatory
2yr ago
Given how many comments I’ve seen where people have expressed the “big lie” stolen/rigged plots are so obviously dumb and almost no one here believes them, I don’t think you’re identifying a real problem.
If it’s a position this hypothetical person has not advanced and presumably they don’t believe it then I fail to see a problem. Nobody is being compelled to do anything since it’s a voluntary debate with ongoing negotiations as to what would even happen.
Somebody here should be theoretically able to meet the stated requirement.
Negatory
2yr ago
Covering up sex abuse is way, way easier than trying to rig an election. You can do it case by case, it’s not a public event, there’s no particular timeline, there’s no adversarial party keeping watch, and you’re a church, which most believers put a lot of trust in.
The place where it really matters to affect election outcomes is swing states, which basically by definition tend to have a mix of partisan power (even if some counties swing all blue/red, state officials are going to have some variety). The partisan competition keeps things in check. And not coincidently, these swing states are the places with the most scrutiny. Decentralized or not, running any ~county-level plot is nearly impossible to pull off without attracting an investigation.
Having a bunch of little independent groups/individuals doing small-scale fraud is very unlikely to affect an outcome, and also you can’t presume only one side does it.
(Ironically, at this point Dems have a solid lead with regular voters (a significant advantage in boring mid-terms) and so efforts to expand the vote are more likely to hurt Dem chances.)
Overall, if you’re able to analyze why sex abuse by religious officials could be covered up you, should be able to understand why significant voting fraud can’t be covered up the same way.
Negatory
2yr ago
Consider then that the fact those stats came from older elections, not 2020, and that 2020 had higher rates of black votes for Trump would indicate a decreased chance of skullduggery.
If you read the article, the fact that those precincts have almost no registered Republicans and no white people goes a long way towards explaining the 100% votes for the black candidate.
Frankly, if one was manufacturing an election outcome, one would hopefully not be stupid enough to just put 100% of the votes for the one guy. One would also have to watch that they don’t overshoot the number of registered voters or anything else too blatant.
If it were that obvious there’s no way for it to remain undetected. Any meaningful fraud has to be big enough to swing things and subtle enough to avoid detection. That’s a tall order as plots go.
Negatory
2yr ago
It could only work if there was a consensus and an orderly process that led to a competitive candidate.
That is a high-risk plan, but sometimes a Hail Mary is the best option. Biden does not look good in the polls and seems incapable of running a good campaign. Holding on and hoping Trump implodes might be riskier.
Klein is an interesting person to be advocating such a strategy. His advocacy for Harris does not lend credibility to his proposal even among his own followers on the sub.
Negatory
2yr ago
The winning candidate in 2016 alleged mass voting fraud.
Upon taking office, he did not take action to investigate and rectify the issue.
In 2016, many Democrats claimed the outcome did not reflect the will of the people because in pure terms it did not: Trump lost the popular vote. So the system was “rigged” in the sense of the electoral college helping Trump. But them’s the rules.
I do not recall a bunch of Democrats claiming widespread fraud, and claims of Russians perhaps actually hacking the vote tally were not widely endorsed or sustained.
There’s a giant Trump-sized asymmetry between the two sides.
Negatory
2yr ago
Trump alleged, in an election he won while slightly losing the popular vote, that millions of fraudulent votes were cast, but 0 of those were for him.
That is an insane claim. It has no relation to reality. This is par for the Trump course, where he will simply say things like his crowd was the largest or exaggerate the value of his property or any number of documented falsehoods, large and small.
No evidence of this mass voting fraud was ever produced and I don’t recall President Trump or anyone else taking action to investigate or rectify this massive, critical issue threatening our democracy, such that it could not be repeated (out of self interest if nothing else).
So that’s the baseline to consider when evaluating future claims.
The isolated demand for rigor here is you focusing on the true meaning of the word “stolen” instead of acknowledging that the entire “election was stolen” theory is originated by a man with a long history of making fact-free assertions about elections and many other things. Another isolated demand for rigor being made by others is something like “prove to me no fraud happened” in a sad attempt to shift the burden of proof.
An insane man believes even elections he wins are massively rigged. A cohort of buffoons generated baseless theories and tried to generate evidence that the 2020 election was in fact stolen, as proclaimed by their dear leader. All of those claims, to my knowledge, did not survive contact with basic scrutiny, and TTV refused to produce evidence it claims to have.
And when our resident lawyer @ymeskhout brings up a prominent case of obvious grift and buffoonery to examine in detail, just in case anyone here sympathetic to the claim of a rigged election can defend it, he gets dragged for his approach, the obsession, his lack of character, an inability to engage with the “true” issues, and for posing an isolated demand for rigor.
It’s a basic demand for rigor that apparently cannot be met.
Negatory
2yr ago
Even if we assume total corruption in a given county, there’s a limit to how far the plotters could run up the numbers without it being blatantly obvious.
And it has to be done in a swing state to really matter.
In an election with high scrutiny, it’s pretty challenging to cheat enough to make a difference, but not so much to get caught.
And if the plot extends to multiple counties and states, the coordination would be incredibly difficult to conceal.
Look at Watergate, a far simpler plot than changing election tallies, and how it went off the rails.
Negatory
2yr ago
It’s incredible to me that you assert here that we do not have sufficient evidence regarding policing or democracy to make reasonably confident assertions, at a broad level at least…
…but that there’s room to believe there was significant fraud in the 2020 election.
Whatever system of epistemology you’re using is alien to me.
“Controlled conditions” is a red herring because it’s a laughably impossible standard for say the type and level of policing and its effect on crime. The best we can do is observe natural experiments and adjust accordingly. We can also use available evidence and a bit of extrapolation to judge the proposals to defund the police to be a very bad idea for improving crime rates.
Also, I have directly engaged with several arguments against the lawyerly approach. You might think I’m wrong, but please don’t accuse me of not engaging them.
Negatory
2yr ago
Nor recounts?
Investigations?
Observers?
Do our elections have any checks and barriers to fraud?
Negatory
2yr ago
The legal theory that the constitution empowers the VP to unilaterally determine election outcomes is an utterly ridiculous one and Trump’s own VP refused to go along with it.
The VP’s constitutionally defined role in the election process is a distinct issue from whether there was significant fraud in the 2020 election.
This week’s thread is full of requests for evidence by me and others that the 2020 election was stolen, rigged, or otherwise plagued with widespread fraud.
None has been provided; mostly there is whining over the request and lawyerly approach by everyone’s favorite public defender.
You are welcome to step up and make the case.
Negatory
2yr ago
Are you asserting that audits and other checks don’t happen or that fraud is not ever detected under our present system?
Moreover, the best check on election fraud at any scale is that people of various ideologies and parties make up the officials and volunteers in any given area, and all it takes is one witness to expose something.
Negatory
2yr ago
Isolated demand for rigor indeed.
Does he not have any influence among Dems and progressives? In those elite and worker bee circles?
I assumed he did but it’s a bit hard to measure.
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