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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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Look at you, escalating by claiming there's no evidence. There was that Georgia water main break. And the Pennsylvania election law changes.

Note the leak had nothing to do with the counting pause 14 hours later (as can be verified by watching the unedited footage released) and that the PA mail in laws were passed prior to Covid by Republicans with the stated aim to help their turn out in rural areas. The fact this shot them in the foot a few months later because they didn't predict Covid and that using mail in ballots would become a partisan issue is unfortunate for them, but can't really be held to be evidence of rigging the election against Trump. They were trying to change the laws to HELP their candidates.

The Georgia incident wasn't a water main break, it was a leaking toilet. Nobody was instructed to leave the ballot counting area. No ballots were impacted. This has been documented already.

Nobody was instructed to leave the ballot counting area.

NEW: The election department sent the ballot counters at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta home at 10:30 p.m., Regina Waller, the Fulton County public affairs manager for elections, tells ABC News.

Alright, you and @Ben___Garrison are getting two things confused. The water leak was earlier in the morning and had nothing to do with anyone leaving. At around 10 pm the Fulton County people decided to call it for the evening and began packing up. They finished around 10:30 and people started to leave, including the media and observers. When they told the Secretary of State's office they were told that they were to continue counting through the night, at which point they went back in and began counting. The water main break only ogt into this story through journalistic sloppiness, I'm guessing because someone with a news outlet Tweeted a rumor they overheard and it got reported as news. Either way, I don't see what this has to do with any evidence of fraud. I'm guessing the argument is that they wanted to get the observers out of there so they could pull all those fake Biden ballots they had hidden under the table and count them, but there's no evidence of this. It's pretty clear from CCTV footage that the ballot boxes they pulled out from under the table at 11 pm were the same ones they pushed under the table at 10:30. I don't know how the observers present would have been able to tell a fake ballot from a real one. I don't know how you can convince dozens of election workers (who are usually county employees and generally don't want to be there) to commit blatant fraud without any of them giving up the whole thing. I don't know how you could convince a Republican state government to go along with the fraud and the subsequent coverup. I don't know the mechanism for how fake ballots are supposedly generated. This entire theory makes no sense. Even if the accusations of the county phonying up a water main break to get observers out of there were true, you still have to prove the fraud.

I'm guessing because someone with a news outlet Tweeted a rumor they overheard and it got reported as news.

One might further guess that the rumour got started because that's what the observers were told, if we're guessing here -- I think some of them have said so publically. This would still fit with facts on the ground -- certainly it was reported on various traditional media live on the night of.

At around 10 pm the Fulton County people decided to call it for the evening and began packing up. They finished around 10:30 and people started to leave, including the media and observers. When they told the Secretary of State's office they were told that they were to continue counting through the night, at which point they went back in and began counting.

The facts as you present them, regardless of the water leak claim, is that vote counting continued after the observers, having been told that counting was finished for the night, left. That's substantively identical to the complaint that counting which dramatically flipped the result continued without bipartisan observation, no?

Interesting. Somehow I follow this place pretty closely, skim the headlines most days and was nevertheless completely unaware of the full facts of this story.

Did you read my original source? It covers this:

"The Secretary of State's Office opened an investigation into the incident at State Farm Arena. Our investigation revealed that the incident initially reported as a water leak late in the evening of November 3rd was actually a urinal that had overflowed early in the morning of November 3rd, and did not affect the counting of votes by Fulton County later that evening."

The affidavit also states, in part, that "observers and media were not asked to leave. They simply left on their own when they saw one group of workers, whose job was only to open envelopes and who had completed that task, also leave," the affidavit said.

Yes, yes, the crooked officials investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong.

That's a pitifully weak argument that you could advance anywhere, anytime. You need to establish a larger pattern for your sentence to be anything other than hot air. And obviously, history shows us the larger pattern is that self-investigations in democracies actually do usually turn up the truth, especially when it comes to historically robust institutions like the election mechanisms in the US.

Since you seem allergic to actual evidence, I'll provide some even though I don't need to. North Carolina's board of elections investigated themselves and found an actual (rare) absentee ballot scheme. Indiana's secretary of state office investigated themselves and found they had purged a lot of voters when they shouldn't have. Kansas investigated themselves and found they did in fact mislead people about provisional ballots and threw out a few more than they should have. In that same drama, back in 2018 so pre-2020 stuff, in Kansas the Secretary of State himself was convinced that tons of noncitizens were voting and fraud was widespread, sound familiar? He was absolutely demolished in court and by the facts. Let's look:

But things didn’t go well for him in the Kansas City courtroom, as Robinson’s opinion made clear. Kobach’s strongest evidence of non-citizen registration was anemic at best: Over a 20-year period, fewer than 40 non-citizens had attempted to register in one Kansas county that had 130,000 voters. Most of those 40 improper registrations were the result of mistakes or confusion rather than intentional attempts to mislead, and only five of the 40 managed to cast a vote.

So yeah. Election officials are safely assumed to be regular, mostly competent people who do their job and don't lie unless you have strong, strong evidence otherwise.

This response is functionally unfalsifiable. It's like saying "If I'm right, I'm right; If I'm wrong, there's a coverup".

It's saying "this is bad evidence". In the case of bad evidence it's inherently true that if it does exist, it's bad evidence, and if it doesn't exist, it's no evidence. By your reasoning, all claims that something is bad evidence are unfalsifiable.

It is not unfalsifiable, because you can dispute whether the evidence is bad. It's just that in this case, disputing that the evidence is bad would make you look foolish.

If you think I'm presenting bad evidence, the solution is to present better evidence, then we can make a comparative evaluation.

If you're presenting bad evidence, the solution is for you to present better evidence. Not for you to demand that someone else present better evidence. Bad evidence is not something you get to use in the absence of something better.

Mollie Hemingway actually wrote pretty strongly about this. Two republicans under oath dispute the claims by the Georgia official argument. The republicans stories align with the reports the day of.

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