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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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This all seems to hinge on whether you believe Trump genuinely thought there was outcome-determinative fraud or not.

So you're telling me all of the outrage over "democracy being under threat" is caused by people not being able to believe that Trump could genuinely believe things he says? This whole thing is just the biggest case of typical mind fallacy and projection?!?

I swear to god this country is going to give me an aneurysm.

So you're telling me all of the outrage over "democracy being under threat" is caused by people not being able to believe that Trump could genuinely believe things he says?

Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.

I swear to god this country is going to give me an aneurysm.

Ditto. At least we can agree on that.

Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.

Not really. None of the issues in PA and WI happened in Florida. Florida is another state that used to have large Democrat machines that were routinely accused of fraud, but you could never quite prove it. Then Desantis came in, cleaned up the dirty voter rolls, streamlined the counting process, tightened up the vote by mail process (particularly post date rules and signature rules), got rid of insecure drop box, and then actually enforced all of that.

And magically no shenanigans. No more Miami-Dade reporting after the rest of the state had been done for hours. No more pallets of ballots magically being found at 3am. Etc etc. It turns out there is great evidence for fraud happening, because why you engage in active election security, all these suspicious activities disappear.

That’s not evidence of fraud happening. It could well be evidence that Florida cleaned up their act enough that irregularities from regular organizational incompetence no longer occur. But I suppose that depends a lot on your priors here.

That being said, I do strongly agree with enforcing electoral security the way that you say Florida has done. If the main point was a pre-emptive “Improve election security or else we’re not going to trust the results of this next election,” I would be on board with that. But instead, it sounds a lot more like a post-hoc “Nuh uh, we didn’t lose even though we have no hard evidence!”

Well, sure. My priors is we have known about machine fraud for centuries and nothing has changed so why would it stop?

Is there evidence of it happening repeatedly in American presidential elections to a large enough degree to have affected the results? If so, that would cause me to update my priors by a lot.

Of course, IL in 1960 was a battle of voter fraud wherein the DNC machine in Cook outworked the RNC machine in southern IL.

Most states now acknowledge the existence of ancient (aka 60 year old) voter fraud machines that would routinely manufacture 100k or so votes (see IL in 1982, the sole one contemporaneously caught). But no one has any explanation as to why this magically stopped when procedures in those areas remain the same. Few of the grand jury recommendations from the 1982 case are currently in effect in Illinois, for example.

Almost all of those recommendations are fully opposed by a major American political party for reasons that seem obvious to the curious.

What was the 1982 case? I don’t see anything that pops up for Illinois in 1982.

And why would a seemingly isolated case be evidence of consistent fraud throughout the decades? It seems unlikely for widespread electoral fraud to be uncaught for so long; someone else in the discussion even mentioned how faked petition signatures for Obama were caught

Straight from the wiki

There were "62 indictments and 58 convictions, many involving precinct captains and election officials. The grand jury concluded that 100,000 fraudulent votes had been cast in the city ... Authorities found massive fraud involving vote buying and ballots cast by others in the names of registered voters. In one case, a ballot punched for the Democratic slate had been tabulated 198 times."[6] The case was prosecuted in November 1982 by US Attorney Dan K. Webb.[7][8][9]

That system had been ongoing from the New Deal era. It was only found out because they jobbed a single co-conspirator who blew the whistle.

This is despite there being significant investigations by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Now those people wouldnt investigate fraud if it punched them in the face. Feds consider such allegations low class. Much better to prosecute a guy who prayed too close to an abortion clinic.

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