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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.
My whacko conspiracy theory is that he did it to sow chaos. It's obviously very easy for non-citizens in Michigan to vote. So easy, in fact, that the only way they'd ever get caught is if they turn themselves in. This is pretty obvious, but people insist it isn't so. Some Chinese guy saying, "yeah, I voted, can I get my vote back?" exacerbates the obviousness.
That's the wild part. Our entire election system is apparently governed by the honor system where nobody would ever lie so we never need to check. And then people have the gall to state that voter fraud is rare. If this were any other institution arguing about why they should never be audited or have any oversight what so ever, we'd all be calling bullshit.
If republicans ever wanted to fight fire with fire (probably the only way we ever get meaningful reform) what noncitizens would they need to import who could be counted on to vote red? Russians? Hungarians?
They didn't poll Russia, but among the 34 countries Pew did poll, only the Tunisians and Hungarians prefer Trump to Biden, at least when the only question is whether they "have confidence in ____ to do the right thing regarding world affairs".
Globally (at least in these countries, which are a somewhat diverse sampling), Biden had 43% confidence and Trump had 28%.
I feel like the interpretation of that could be a hell of a scissor statement. Democrats: "Everybody else everywhere in the world knows the right choices to make; why don't you?!?" Republicans: "Hundreds of countries are run the way you want, and for some reason you can't understand why everybody wants to live here instead!"
This includes a poll of various Euro countries on Trump/Harris. The countries preferring Trump to Harris are Slovenia, Slovakia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Hungary, Georgia, Serbia and - at 78 to 22 % - Russia.
Of course such polls have a limited value in telling how the citizens in those countries would vote if they actually were American citizens. Insofar as someone living in Finland is concerned, what exactly would there be for us to gain in Trump becoming a president over Harris? The two most important ways US politics affects Finland are trade and security, and in both cases Trump causes at least some level of danger of those things going south, i.e. there being tariffs and a trade war or an US withdrawal - partial or full - from NATO.
Sure, at least the latter one didn't happen during the first term, but both are actually things, i.e. a change in trade policy and withdrawal from Europe that many Trump supporters, including prominent ones, actually want Trump to do, so they still exist as possibilities. Putting America first is what Trump would be specifically elected to do! OTOH, if one actually lived in the US, the priorities would undergo at least some revision.
I rather suspect that for most of these countries the poll mainly indicates opinion on Russia/Ukraine conflict - there's a rather amusing poll from Czech Republic on how the voters of various Czech parties would vote, and while the most Harris-voting segments are TOP-09, a center-right party, and the Christian Democrats, the most pro-Trump party is KSČM - the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia.
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