Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
In a comment below @DradisPing made the confident assertion that "Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed" but when I asked for evidence they couldn't provide anything except their "recollection". This is quite a curious phenomenon for many reasons.
For those not in the know, Sharpiegate was one of the very first entries in the very long list of 2020 election fraud claims. This theory appears to have originated with an unnamed woman outside an AZ polling place claiming to have seen tabulation machines reject ballots where sharpie markers were used. She hypothesized that poll workers were handing out sharpies to voters with the express purpose of invalidating ballots. This claim was quickly repeated by others and went viral, with some additional details glommed on (e.g. ink bleeding through paper, voters finding their ballots were 'canceled', etc.). The Maricopa board of supervisors quickly issued a statement the next day on Nov 4 2020:
As far as I can tell, Maricopa's statement was the last word on this topic, despite the amount of election integrity scrutiny that was subsequently focused on Arizona. Sharpiegate was an election fraud theory with an unusually short lifespan.
So back to @DradisPing, their confident assertion had more than just one piece:
Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed
Some votes were lost because of Sharpiegate
The votes that were lost were primarily/entirely Trump votes
All three parts appear to be false. DradisPing was aware enough of Sharpiegate's history to know that it was putatively debunked (hence "ultimately confirmed"), so where did the other parts come from? DradisPing's claim was up for at least 5 hours and generated multiple comments before I took the unusual step of using Google (or Bing for the freaks out there, you know who you are) to see the assertions had any merit. If the only evidence they can muster is their "recollection", and if nothing on the internet corroborates this recollection, it's fair to conclude DradisPing was mistaken. If so, I will preemptively praise them for editing their post and admitting their error.
While it's not unusual for humans to err, it is unusual for errors to fall in the same direction as this one did. Assuming that DradisPing was earnestly mistaken, I would be very curious to know exactly how they came to believe multiple fictitious claims. We're all just fish doing our best to swim in this ether, and sometimes we inadvertently absorb false information just through osmosis. For example recently I was out drinking with a friend and we ended up talking about the nutritional value of organ meats and I made the confident assertion that "beef heart has a ton of creatine" but my friend gave me a skeptical "you sure about that?" look. Sure enough, a quick google search (or Ask Jeeves for all you good girls out there) made me realize I was talking out of my ass. My best guess is that I read a random bodybuilding forum post years ago, uncritically accepted it as true for whatever reason, and then carried it undisturbed since then.
[Edit1: a few people reasonably interpreted my story as me trying to downplay my errors by offering up something banal. That was not the intent. I've made other mistakes bigger than the example I used, but that was meant to be an illustration. Working backwards in time, one mistake I made was how I had previously heavily insinuated that Colin Wright was intentionally refusing to have his PayPal account restored as a way to grift more donations. I reached this belief based on how often he was shilling for donations and how he ignored my emails. After speaking to him further, I realized he had perfectly innocent reasons for having ignored me. I publicly stated that my suspicion was off-base.
Prior to that, I admitted error here: "I was wrong when I said @anti_dan 's claim about J6 defendants "held without bail for wandering in" was fictitious. At least three different people reasonably fit this qualification: Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli, Karl Dresch, Michael Curzio, and possibly others."]
Hopefully DradisPing will do the right thing here, but perhaps it's again worth revisiting why some people are apparently so reluctant to admit error? Question for everyone: Have you ever found yourself making errors in a uniform direction? If so, what steps did you take to prevent that from happening again? To the extent that your media diet, social bubble, whatever are the source of your errors, what heuristics do you follow to avoid falling into motivated reasoning and confirmation bias? And lastly, how can we make people less terrified of using search engines?
[Edit2: DradisPing now claims their source for this claim is remembering someone prominent on Twitter saying it. No other evidence has been presented besides that]
So topic closed? You wrote all of this on an election thread to say someone else is wrong?
In my opinion, you're being very biased with your analysis.
What is your goal here?
This is a discussion forum. Writing something large and detailed to disagree with someone else is our bread and butter.
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I made an effort to check DradisPing's claims on my own and only then did I ask multiple clarifying questions:
what is your source that Sharpiegate v2.0 was confirmed?
What is your evidence that bleed through caused votes to be lost? How many votes exactly?
Do you have a source besides your recollection?
what is the evidence that ballots were invalidated?
Has anything come up since to contradict [Maricopa's] claims?
Except for DradisPing citing their "recollection" as the source, none of the questions were answered. So on what basis do you claim that my analysis is "very biased"? What would you suggest I do differently? I'm listening.
As for my goal, it mirrors the site's banner text:
So when I see people make mistakes, and those mistakes fall along a predictable line, I'm curious to know why that happens. I would assume others would share my curiosity, isn't that why we're all here? I aim to please, and hopefully I can help someone discover why they keep falling into the same trap. If you disagree with my efforts, what would you suggest I do differently? Still listening.
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