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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   19551 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.”

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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