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How much fraud is there?
During the Republican Primaries, Vivek called out the GOP Chairwoman for being utterly useless, and leading the GOP to loss after loss after loss, and called for her resignation. In the wake of this, the Trump takeover of the GOP was complete, with Lara Trump taking the top spot. One of their top priorities? Voter fraud. Largely because Trump has never abandoned his fraud claims. Reactions from political pundits was that this was generally a bad idea. Polling supposedly showed the continued sour grapes over losing in 2020 turned voters off. All the same, the organization clearly staffed up to proactively fight potential voter fraud.
They successfully took noncitizens off the voter roles in Virginia.. They've been wining court cases in PA and GA to prevent mail in votes from being counted if they arrive after election day. In Arizona they won a lawsuit once again trying to purge non citizens from the voter roles. And many more.
Now, winning court cases is all fine and dandy, but if the people counting the votes choose to just blatantly ignore it, you still have a problem. To illustrate my point, there was a Chinese national in Michigan that voted because LOL apparently? And when he went out of his way to report that he shouldn't have been allowed to vote... well he's in trouble but the vote is still going to count. And that's basically the rub. Without police in the room enforcing these court orders, once a fraudulent or illegal vote is counted it's fiat accompli. Laws are meaningless with a process designed to ignore them.
Regardless of my black pilled skepticism about whether all these legal victories will amount to anything, what if they do?
My understanding of a lot of polls is they weight their demographics by turnout from the last election, plus maybe some secret sauce to try to guesswork around shifting coalitions. But, what if their starting point, the 2020 election, was rife with fraud that is now being proactively stamped out? Or at least reduced significantly due to the GOP's new diligence? Well garbage in, garbage out. If the polls get their weighting from fraudulent elections, they won't be accurate for an election that has had the fraud cracked down on.
So I propose that if Trump wins, and the polls are significantly wrong, it could constitute some circumstantial evidence that there was significant fraud in 2020. Alternately, it's possible that if the polls are bang on and Trump loses, perhaps it constitutes equally weak circumstantial evidence that they were not. Assuming places like PA and GA don't count undated or late dated ballots anyways because fuck you, once it's counted it's fiat accompli.
Polls are always off to some degree, and it's often explainable to their weighting factors, e.g. in 2016 they didn't take educational polarization into account sufficiently. It's also pretty clear that many polls are herding this year, and the fact they're weighting on previous elections (which AFAIK wasn't standard practice before 2024) is another potential avenue for a bigger-than-average miss. Much of the industry is just really, really worried about underestimating Trump for a third time in a row, and as such they might be overcorrecting.
The initiatives against voter fraud won't amount to much because there's never been much evidence for widespread voter fraud despite countless fishing expeditions trying to find some. It does exist in isolated cases, e.g. an old black women voting once for herself, and once for her dead father whose house she's now living in. But beyond individual incidents like these, there's not much else.
There is no good indication that any of the major polls underestimated Trump in any previous elections.
If you estimate that Trump has a 30% chance to win, and he wins, you weren't wrong. You'd have been wrong if Harrison Ford, estimated as having a 0% chance of winning, had won.
There haven't been enough elections in which Trump was eligible in order to say much about whether his chance of winning was underestimated.
I was talking about polls here, not modelers like Nate Silver. Polls don't estimate win chances, they estimate win margins. They had a lot of egg on their face for stuff like Wisconsin in 2016.. Polls underestimated his support in most swing states in both 2016 and 2020.
I agree that Nate Silver didn't get it "wrong" in 2016 as popularly perceived, as they're doing something different.
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