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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18885 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

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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Fraud Subthread Mosh Pit

I will listen to allegations of fraud, dismissal of potential fraud, and attempted refutation of fraud here. Show receipts to add spice.

New York Times is on the beat.

The Maricopa County shitshow: the alt-right and conspiracy boards were lighting up about Dominion vote tabulators not accepting ballots in a big Republican section of Arizona.

Detroit voters were stunned to be told they’d already voted absentee.

Some Pennsylvania voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected for errors were notified in time to cast an in-person ballot, some weren’t notified, and some were told they couldn’t cast a provisional ballot to replace it.

All in all, “red wave barely a ripple, Trumpism refuted, cope and seethe more” will once again be met with “y’all cheated, just give us a year to figure out how.”

Maricopa county still has to count hundreds of thousands of ballots and as the article notes this is already being regarded by many republicans as likely fraud.

Maricopa leans red (34% Republican vs 30% Democrat) and was predicted to break strongly for Lake, but Lake's opponent in the election is Katie Hobb who is the current AZ Secretary of State and thus in charge of supervising the election. The oddly localized breakdown of election infrastructure in a county that is simultaneously AZ's most populous, and one where her opponent was expected to do well, has a lot people speculating about intentional sabotage.

It's not a good look.

The problem with “fraud” is that there is no individual guilty of a crime.

Take Arizona: is it fraud that the printers just happen to malfunction on the day where most republicans are actually casting their votes? And is it “fraud” when nobody knows what to do about this for a few hours? This very clearly benefitted Katie Hobbs (who conveniently is also the person in charge of elections in the state), but…she wasn’t running around messing with printers.

Who is the guilty person here?

If someone tampered with the machines, telling them via wifi, USB, modem, or floppy disk to screw up Republican ballots, or just telling the ones in high-R areas to screw up, that would be a crime.

Similarly a crime if the choice to use Sharpies instead of ballpoints was made by people who knew some of the ballots in Maricopa would be made of lesser-quality paper through which Sharpie ink soaks.

If one person did these, it’s a crime. If a cohort of people enacted distributed parts of a plan, it’s a criminal conspiracy.

Even if it was negligence rather than intent, the Secy of State has a lot to answer for. Specifically, if the machines weren’t tested, if the high-quality ballot paper supplies were under-ordered, and so on.

Even if it was negligence rather than intent, the Secy of State has a lot to answer for.

Funny story there. The current Secretary of State just so happens to be running for Governor, and Maricopa county is where the bulk of her opponent's supporters reside.

Not fraud per see, but in the bag of (dirty?) tricks, I'll throw in 'supporting the primary candidates you plan to call a threat to democracy.'

This is pure strategy, though, and not election-day fraud. I view it as highly troublesome, as any sort of managed opposition strategy by incumbants is by definition state-meddling in opposition parties, but this is a broader tension between political parties in zero-sum competition than what you're referring to.

Washington Examiner article on Democratic influence in Republican primaries-

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/democratic-meddling-republican-primaries-effective

Adding to this- Harris county in Texas delayed opening the polls due to incompetence, decided to keep them open late to make up for it, and then had the state Supreme Court toss out all the ballots cast after 7 pm local time.

With this being the only county where democrats outperformed their polls in the state, republicans are calling this evidence of fishy elections and I would expect another voter integrity bill giving more power to the attorney general and Secretary of State.

Yeah can easily count the ballot boxes from democrat voting areas first and then whoopsie, no time to count ballot boxes from republican areas.

All in all, “red wave barely a ripple, Trumpism refuted, cope and seethe more” will once again be met with “y’all cheated, just give us a year to figure out how.”

I expect more of the usual retarded 2000 Mules stuff and more forwarded emails from my boomer parents about how THOUSANDS of people born BEFORE 1850 participated. This stuff tends to be so stupid that it seems like it must be a deliberate distraction, but a lot of people keep falling for it. I don't discount the possibility of hard cheating (certainly the security measures aren't very strong) and I basically agree across the board with Darryl Cooper's take on stolen elections, but I am indeed not looking forward to the coping and seething.

Isn't the problem that you can't check because of the way things are set up? Combined with a massive tradition of voter fraud in urban areas (for which, there is no real reason it should have ended) it makes the case very easily for the fraud side. The presumption appears to favor fraud, not select against it.

I don’t see how ballot harvesting isn’t a concern. Not in the “fake ballots” but in a “kind of quid pro quo not really secret ballot old times machine” way

Well, this is embarrassing. I didn't realize 2000 Mules was more about harvesting than fake ballots or similar. I personally regard ballot harvesting as a form of corruption that obviously shouldn't be allowed.

Ballot harvesting is legal in most states but subject to different rules (except in Alabama where it's unconditionally a felony). I think the idea is that ballot harvesting can be used as a way to introduce fraudulent ballots, but isn't necessarily per se fraudulent by itself.

Oh, I'm aware that it's legal, I just don't think it should be. I find nothing redeeming about the process and see no valid reason for it to exist at all.

That's not really fraud though. Same as concerns over last minute COVID-related election law changes. It's just complaining about rules you don't like, which is fine, but every election is going to have rules some group of people doesn't like. It's basically the Stacy Abrams model.

Likewise, well aware, hence why I said that I expect more boomers going around complaining about dead people voting and stolen ballots and a bunch of other stuff that the evidence for is non-existent or super thin. I think arguing about rules is a worthwhile thing to do and I think ballot harvesting is a great example of the sort of thing that should be reigned in, but focusing on things like that requires letting the more aggressive claims of "mass fraud" go.

I would say in some states (family member voting isn’t what most have in mind). Also I believe that some states that allow harvesting require hoops that limit the general usefulness.

With that said, my objection (and many others objection) isn’t necessarily that ballot harvesting is introducing false ballots, but instead that ballot harvesting permits a kind of quid pro quo that the secret ballot was intended to prevent. I’m not saying people are obvious about it but you have activists target areas you know vote X; those activists help people in the community, then come election time they go to the people they help (probably with the candidates name on their person) and ask “hey have you voted — I’d be happy to help you vote and to make it easier I can drop of the ballot myself.”

Now is that fraud? No. Is it even quid pro quo? Not necessarily. But is it highly questionable? I think so.

But is it highly questionable? I think so.

To me it seems virtually indistinguishable from just campaigning or GOTV efforts. What are the minimum changes you'd want to see for the practice to no longer be questionable to you?

Minimum changes is to make that illegal. The reason why it is different is that it changes (1) the ease of which someone can cast a ballot (I might not be willing to go to the precinct but if I don’t really have to do anything) and (2) the activist actually sees who you vote for which puts more pressure into the quid pro quo.

In short, I think it is a terrible process that should only be legal for immediate family members.

the activist actually sees who you vote for which puts more pressure into the quid pro quo.

If there's anyone watching strangers' ballots be marked and taking them to ballot boxes, that's massively illegal and they should be serving jail time, excepting maybe some cases where people legitimately need help filling out their ballot (mainly thinking some elderly/blind people here), which should be handled very carefully.

My understanding of "ballot harvesting" claims is merely that activists were delivering the ballots, with similar GOTV concerns that activists can selectively give rides to the polls to only people they expect to vote the way they want.

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It seems obviously different to me, because the interlocutor can confirm that you have in fact voted, and even who you voted for. If a door-to-door GOTV person comes by, I can simply lie to them that I really do plan to vote and go about my day. Or even take their offer for a ride to the polls, then get a guaranteed secret vote.

If they are harvesting, I can't lie to them and tell them I will vote. They can pester me and use social pressure until I actually vote for they person they want me to. They can track that information unless I rudely try to conceal what I am doing, which is itself suspicious. They can report this information back to their bosses. Or to my boss for that matter.

ETA: Minimum change I would want would be for any such harvesting to be noticed at least 48 hours in advance and required to allow partisan witnesses.

the interlocutor can confirm that you have in fact voted, and even who you voted for.

Do you think these people are opening the ballot envelopes and resealing them? Or do you think there's a lot of people going door-to-door insisting on committing a felony (violating the secret ballot) with witnesses?

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If they are harvesting, I can't lie to them and tell them I will vote.

I'm obviously not aware of the specifics of your jurisdiction, but could you not claim that your ballot was already postmarked and in the mail or an official drop box? At least for the mail, proof-of-receipt wouldn't be expected to show up immediately.

That said, I'm generally against ballot harvesting except maybe households making a single trip to the neighborhood post box. In addition to the already-mentioned concerns, partisan harvesting operations present lots of chain-of-custody concerns and the possibility of a badgering and/or "accidentally" losing ballots.

i watched 2000 mules when it came out, IIRC the best evidence they had was video of a grandpa dropping off 10-20 votes for his family, which is a lot of votes but not quite the type of proof one would hope for when the crime in question is supposedly systematic and widespread.

They also had some phone telemetry stuff showing that some people came and went from the area of a polling station repeatedly, but i don't think they have any way to know the difference between a door dasher and a secret squirrel.

Would it be reasonable to be suspicious when two thousand cell phones have a pattern of pings along paths from nonprofits to three or four different dropboxes at 2am?

I literally don't know. In a vacuum that sounds like a lot of cell phones but i have absolutely no context for whose phone or what these paths look like. Can you show that these cell phones aren't cars that simply pass the geofence closest to the nonprofit, then pass a fence near the poll, all while never getting out of their car?

You certainly could -- I don't think the "Mules" people did that work though. (Or if they did they didn't show it)

Would it be reasonable to be suspicious when two thousand cell phones have a pattern of pings along paths from nonprofits to three or four different dropboxes at 2am?

If the movie showed that actually happening, yes. But they only speculate that it's happening and fail to follow-up that speculation with confirming evidence, which should've been trivially easy given the amount of video footage they boasted of having.

They don’t “speculate” in the sense of disclosing uncertainty, they outright state they have the data. The book actually lays out that data.

They don’t “speculate” in the sense of disclosing uncertainty, they outright state they have the data. The book actually lays out that data.

They speculate that their data reflects a conspiracy of vote fraud. What they never show is a single actual person going to multiple ballot dropoffs. Not just in one night, but ever. Their "4 million minutes" or whatever of video either fails to corroborate their claim or they decided not to show that it does, which is very weird.

I didn't know that there was a book, too. I doubt that it proves anything more than the movie did, beyond possibly doubling their profits on their uncorroborated speculation.

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Well maybe don’t be too embarrassed. 2000 mules combined harvesting with fake ballots. That seems silly to me.

All in all, “red wave barely a ripple, Trumpism refuted, cope and seethe more” will once again be met with “y’all cheated, just give us a year to figure out how.”

Browsing red-leaning spaces I'm already seeing demands for an inquest, and suggestions that Florida just so happened to see significant GOP gains around the same time they started to crack down on election integrity as evidence that "Yes, the Dems have been cheating" and that the vehemence of their opposition to similar measures elsewhere and attempts to tar anyone who questions observed irregularities as an "election denier" as evidence that this is not an isolated incident but explicit policy at the national committee level.

If nothing else, the alacrity of the count in Florida should call other states methodology into question. Even granting partisanship, it seems hard to make a serious argument that taking a long time to count votes is good, actually.

That's a lost cause in some places, though. All the election deniers in 2020 pointed to Florida and wondered why Pennsylvania couldn't have their counts done as fast. The state responded that Florida allows precanvassing and Democrats tried to get a precanvassing bill passed but Republicans in the state legislature were more interested in trying to get the mail-in vote law that they unanimously supported in 2019 repealed than in trying to make Pennsylvania's laws more in line with Florida's. This is pretty much a lost cause now with Shapiro winning the election, and with Democrats making gains in the state legislature there may be some movement on a precanvassing law in the future.

I won't be surprised if Republican states and legislatures start pushing more and more similar measures through in the next two years.

Neither would I.

The Maricopa County shitshow: the alt-right and conspiracy boards were lighting up about Dominion vote tabulators not accepting ballots in a big Republican section of Arizona.

Detroit voters were stunned to be told they’d already voted absentee.

Some Pennsylvania voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected for errors were notified in time to cast an in-person ballot, some weren’t notified, and some were told they couldn’t cast a provisional ballot to replace it.

All in all, “red wave barely a ripple, Trumpism refuted, cope and seethe more” will once again be met with “y’all cheated, just give us a year to figure out how.”

Would any of these be conceded as voter fraud even if they are proven true?

Over the last couple of years, there was more than one appeal to semantics on what was / was not fraud, to dismiss irregularities/concerns as not fraud, and thus accusations of fraud baseless.

Fraud implies malicious intent, not mere incompetence or bad luck.

Yes, but we have a system where they are, in most states indistinguishable. If Maricopa county had actually generated a 100k swing, how would you know it happened? How would you know if it was incompetence or malice?

A swing of that many votes in one jurisdiction produces tons of impossible-to-hide statistical anomalies.

Why was Chicago able to keep its fraud undetected for the better part of a century until they fucked a co conspirator who flipped? There were multiple such anamolies detected in PA in 2020, they were all thrown out in court and are considered by the MSM to constitute "no evidence of fraud."

Coordinating mass secret criminal action is virtually impossible.

Except it has been done in the US in this exact field forever, and it was almost never detected until everyone was dead.

For election fraud. I'd like you to explain why its stopped happening, what year exactly for each major political machine, and why the FBI doesn't conduct sting operations like NYS did back when they found that they had a 98(ish)% success rate in impersonating voters.

Fraud implies malicious intent, not mere incompetence or bad luck.

The thing about this framing, however, is that malicious fraud would always try to present itself as incompetence if caught, while only incompetent fraud would fail to do so, thus demonstrating it's incompetence.

From a systemic rigging perspective, incompetence itself can be the method by which a malicious actor might operate. If you are politically biased human resource allocator, sending your most competent, capable, and credible vote-facilitators to your partisan base to gather and protect the votes, but sending the lazy, the incompetent, and all-round worst mailman who leaves the back of the truck unlocked to go collect from the enemy neighborhood is... well, not fraud, by definition, but it's a definition that proves too much. 'I'm not facilitating fraud, I'm just bad at election security' is a distinction without a difference.

Now, there's no clear line that covers the premise of election shinanigans that fraud overlaps with- or at least, I don't have one that's broadly agreed upon- but that's what makes it such a useful (or hated) motte-and-bailey. Fraud is whatever the person making the argument needs it to mean at the time, from both directions.

Incompetence is a way better cover story than an attack vector. Actual incompetence is unpredictable, so for something as important as a hypothetical election rigging scheme why would you risk sending a bunch of gomer pyles when you could send a bunch of super cool spies who just pretend to be retarded.

The motte here is that conspiracies require some number of agents to facilitate them and there have been 0 vote switchers discovered, idunno what the bailey even is. From my limited perspective the rightists, especially the trump aligned, are the ones constantly building up fantastical narratives about the vote and then retreating towards reality when questioned.

"Voter fraud" typically seems to refer to people voting who shouldn't be allowed to vote, including most felons, noncitizens, children, or the dead. Also, people voting more than once, or intentionally counting ballots incorrectly.

Liberals will often levy accusations of "voter suppression" which tends to run in the opposite direction: People not being allowed to vote who should, making it unreasonably difficult for them to vote, or failing to count their votes. Examples include not having voting places where certain groups can access them (particularly the poor, who may not have reliable transportation), undersupplying voting locations (so that lines are very long, which again can be a larger burden on the poor who can't take time off work), the fiasco around Florida's felons from last election, discarding ballots for minor errors and not giving voters the chance to correct them (as alleged in PA, mostly around missing a date) or being told they can cast a provisional ballot (I think this was alleged in Detroit; voters had to know to request one).

I would say that "fraud" definitely does not refer to accidents and misunderstandings, or to things that have a completely benign and likely explanation just because someone who lost claimed fraud.

Will any of them be conceded as legitimate, if proven false?

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