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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31282 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I don't really understand your point. I've said many many times that voter fraud exists, and anyone who claims it doesn't exist is lying. I've also never claimed that the people who get caught for voter fraud constitute the entire universe of voter fraud. It's damn-near certain that plenty of people have engaged in voter fraud and gotten away with it, but how many exactly? Because there's a slight gap between a claim like A) "19 foreign nationals were caught illegally voting in North Carolina" and something like B) "vans are pulling up to polling places delivering suitcases full of tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots". You can't just point to A, add an unspecified "uncaught fraud" variable, and claim to have proven B. I can't just accept B as a leap of faith, and it's reasonable to discount B if the evidence presented in its support is consistently shoddy.

You can't just point to A, add an unspecified "uncaught fraud" variable, and claim to have proven B.

Your error is italicized. The claim is not that B is proven, the claim is that B is alleged, and that A provides enough evidence that measures should be taken to investigate or attempt to prevent cases up to and including B.

This feels like shadow boxing because I'm not opposed to investigating claims of fraud. If I had any pushback it would be not wanting to see resources wasted chasing after patently delusional claims (e.g. Italian satellites) but hey, it's not really my money anyways, and the report could make for some entertaining reading.

It's not just "investigating claims of fraud" post facto. It's also about increased security measures that provide one or both benefits: deterring fraud from happening in the first place, and/or generating more evidence such that future investigations may be more successful. The secret ballot has a great many reasons to exist as good policy, but as a starting point, it makes fraud investigations difficult.

Without more security measures, too many fraud investigations will end with "we did not find enough evidence to prove fraud." This leads immediately to the metaphorical response, "did you turn on the lights when you were looking?" I can generate a "no fraud detected" response by sitting on my ass and doing nothing. I can only be confident in the results of fraud investigations if the answer to "if there was fraud, would we have detected it?" is sufficiently high-probability.

Ok, which part of that do you think I disagree with? What position of mine do you take issue with?

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