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 -
Fraud
SubthreadMosh PitI 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.”
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.
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.
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