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]
... or DuckDuckGo, for us nerds!
I appreciate that you are taking the time to fact-check both yours and others' assertions. I recommend not using time between responses as an indication of indecision; some of us deliberately restrict our internet usage.
I can't speak to SharpieGate, but I can recall when I was relatively certain (say, 95%) that there were people in US government / political elite who knew that 9/11 would likely happen and benefited from it. I wouldn't say that I was deeply into 9/11-Truth conspiracies (though I did come across them, and I do own a copy of the 9/11 Commission Report, so maybe I need to re-evaluate that).
My certainty was based not on corroborated facts, but rather on my mental model for how elite social world works. If I were to try to summarize:
Politically involved elites tend to be interconnected (politically involved elite people know lots of other elite people).
These interconnections cross international boundaries (e.g., they or their kids go to the same prestigious colleges).
People pass information (or at least tips) along their network of friends / acquaintances.
Large well-funded conspiracies leak, and 9/11 was a large well-funded conspiracy.
It's been two decades. I am far less certain now (more like 20%) about my original assertion, because I haven't come across any well-publicized scandal that so-and-so did some insider trading based on their advanced knowledge on the matter. My suspicion did not disappear entirely though, because my mental model for how elite social world works hasn't changed.
Us true nerds have moved on to Kagi.
I've been playing with https://search.marginalia.nu/ but it's not something I'd use as a primary because of scaling issues. Still refreshing to use an engine that acts like the old days and actually finds niche pages based on text and content instead of one that wants me to talk to it in sentences like a three year old and still not show me things I know exist on the lesser trafficked parts of the web.
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I agree with this and did not intend to imply otherwise. When I mentioned the 5 hour response gap, it was in reference to how no one else who responded bothered to do something as perfunctory as using a search engine.
How you broke down your belief system is an interesting exercise and I wish I saw that more often, so thank you for sharing it.
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