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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31238 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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The problem is that just because an event is rare, it can still be high-impact when it does occur.

I tend to hate that the Blue Tribe talking point states that "WIDESPREAD" voter fraud is a myth.

Because it doesn't have to be 'widespread' to have a significant effect on outcomes. Even accounting for how ambiguous that term is. If 50,000 fraudulent votes are cast in one precinct, that might not count since it wasn't taking place elsewhere?

And the rarity of it occurring in the past is not sufficient evidence that it won't be widespread in the future, if conditions change.

Of course, the Dems spent years alleging Russian 'interference' with the 2016 election despite no direct evidence, so I also don't think they've demonstrated good faith on the issue anyway.

  1. Surely "widespread" here means "significant"

  2. Of course there is evidence of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election.

How many votes were flipped, added, or otherwise how was the actual outcome impacted by Russian interference?

No clue. Perhaps not at all, though of course some states were so close that even a small change might have been significant. But I did say only that there is evidence of attempts to influence the election. That seems pretty clear.

So was it or was it not appropriate for Democrats to claim Russia helped Trump win the election?

Especially one year+ after the fact?

Was that backed by the evidence or not?

If you are asking whether it is appropriate for anyone to intimate that the election was not legitimate: No. Absent something like hacked software or massive ballot box stuffing which is so extreme that it is reasonable to conclude that the vote count did not reflect how actual voters actually voted, it is not appropriate for anyone to claim that an election is not legitimate. So, eg, it is inappropriate to claim that the 2000 Bush victory was illegitimate (it is also unreasonable to make that claim, but that is a topic for another post).

If you are asking whether is it is reasonable to claim that Clinton would have won, absent the Russian efforts, let’s do the math. The closest states that Trump won were Michigan (0.3% margin); Wisconsin (1% margin); and Pennsylvania (1.2% margin). Had Clinton won all three, she would have won the election. So, the question becomes: Is it reasonable to claim that the Russian efforts caused 0.6% +1 of voters to switch from Clinton to Trump (half the largest margin, plus 1)? Based on my understanding of the poli sci literature, I am personally skeptical that campaigning, etc, have much of an effect on voters. And, it is my understanding that the volume of Russian intervention was, in the grand scheme of things, not all that large. So, I, personally, would not make that claim. Nevertheless, there are a lot of unknowns in this area, and given that the margins were so small, it seems to me that reasonable minds might differ on this question, so, no, it is not completely unreasonable to claim that Clinton would have won, absent the Russian efforts.

Is it reasonable to intimate that the election's results are correct, but that Trump would have won had the processes around elections not illegally been changed in various states?

It is possibly reasonable, depending on data on who voted, where, whether those people would have voted if the processes had not been changed, etc.

However, per the first part of my previous response, it is not appropriate to intimate that Biden's election was illegitimate as a result.

From my perspective, the forced changes to how the elections were conducted, in violation of the laws governing those elections in states, is enough on its own to introduce intolerable ambiguity into the results.

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