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Notes -
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.
Speaking of which- the really incredibly blue counties in Atlanta illegally extending early voting hours, what’s going on with that? Is there any way to stop the illegal votes from counting? Of course not.
In 2020, I was on my cousin’s deer lease for the election, watching TV during the day and he said- this was before Trump got up and claimed the election was stolen, mind you- ‘they’re counting them(ballots) just as fast as they can fill em out’. I don’t know if he was referring to Pennsylvania or Arizona or what. But 2020 was weird, the establishment had trashed its trust, and it was apparent that democrats were willing to do things normally beyond the pale out of TDS.
This kind of reaction to the base’s sentiment is natural even if it doesn’t do anything.
Catholic doctrine distinguishes between a sacrament which is illicit, and one which is invalid. An invalid sacrament is null and void, whereas one which is simply illicit is meerly wrong or sinful, while still retaining its essential function.
I wonder if a similar distinction is appropriate here. Its hard for me to see why votes cast in violation of minor provisions of state election code (such as early voting hours) should be voided. Voters can't be expected to understand the entireity of the state election code. A proper remedy would target the election officials responsible for the violation.
Of course, things like ballots cast by inelligible voters or in the name of others should be tossed out and rendered invalid.
Let’s say you have Area A and Area B. A votes R and B votes D.
A and B are supposed to be open 9-9. But B decides it will remain open an extra 2 hours.
B making the decision to stay open is unfair unless A also gets to stay open longer.
Except this is already the case because different states have different rules and in some cases so do different muncipalities within states.
Which isn't to say whatever the rules are shouldn't be followed, but your example would suggest there is already built in unfairness due to the fragmented nature of your electoral law and procedures.
That’s one reason why the electoral college still makes sense. If votes are pooled nationally but elections are run locally then you’re incentivizing states to be as lax as possible to pile on the votes, trading validity for volume.
About a decade ago in Washington, which is fully by mail, we had some conservative counties start offering free postage for ballots. Very quickly the state moved to make free postage universal.
Doesn't that just switch the incentives to swing states? Indeed PA has mail in voting because Republicans passed it in 2019 prior to Covid, because they thought it would help rural turn out, to make the state more Red. Obviously that is not what came to pass, but that was the intent.
With the electoral college a legislature has incentive to help their preferred candidate win, but they only need 50% + 1 to do that.
Without it a legislature has incentive to put as many votes on the board as possible. So if your state leans hard in one direction, it helps your candidate to do maximize number of votes cast, so you have incentive to be lax on election security excepting coordinated attacks by the other side.
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