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PaperclipPerfector  11hr ago (text post)   1457 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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It is not conducive to good mental health to simultaneously believe "The [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) American presidential election was secure and legitimate, but the [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) election was rigged and manipulated".

I unironically believe all these statements are true. It doesn't take schizophrenia.

US elections are not a monolith. They require every single voting district to behave well and consistently across the entire country. Some districts are going to be very competently run, and some are going to fail real badly. In a close enough election it is possible that incompetent or corrupt districts are enough to sway the election.

This is something that the electoral college protects against, since one state's messed up votes will just impact the outcome of that state, rather than the entire popular vote.

You're being reasonable, cjet79. What I want is to laugh at the people online who were staunchly swearing up, down and sideways that the 2020 election was the bestest, most secure, safest, most honest election ever and that there wasn't even the teeniest-weeniest possibility of fraud, hacking, or error and who then swung to the opposite side about 2024 with evidence that the same voting machines which were impregnable in 2020 were leaking like colanders in 2024.

I went to the trouble of looking up the Maricopa county results in 2020 which seemed, on the face of it, to be suspicious. No need for fraud, just a tiny swing in votes was enough to flip from red to blue.

So there could be several such instances, as well as common error and yes, even perhaps some scattered fraud here and there. But nobody wants to hear that. When Our Guy won, it was the best election ever. When Their Guy won, it was fraud and foreign influence.

I saw what happened in Broward County in Florida during the 2018 election, and the aftermath.

That was a close enough election that one County could have flipped most of the races. Probably did, in one case.

Since then, I refuse to discount the possibility of wanton fraud as a factor nationally anymore.

It is arguably a glaring, Death Star-esque weak spot in our National Democracy that the actual sanctity of vote counts is reliant totally on local officials who are not beholden to some larger national standard/oversight. We'd hope that with enough voter participation all the fraud will end up being a wash, but the challenge is that one party has control of the districts in large cities where larger scale fraud is easier to hide, while the other has a coalition based in less populous but overall more numerous localities.

Reading the link, most of what happened in Broward County in 2018 is standard-issue incompetence causing waste and delay, but not affecting the ballots. The only irregularity which goes to the correctness of the results is the discrepancy in precinct ballot tallies, with about 800 (0.1%) more votes in the boxes than there should have been.

Incompetence which is almost certainly non-fraudulent but which opens a 0.1% margin of fraud in an unusually bad county doesn't point to a possibility of wanton fraud on a nationally (or even statewide) significant scale.

That does not, of course, make it acceptable and everyone involved with adminstering that election should have been (and, as far as I can see, was) fired.

Reading the link, most of what happened in Broward County in 2018 is standard-issue incompetence causing waste and delay, but not affecting the ballots.

Yes.

And if the incompetence is significant enough, that's precisely where someone would hide the fraud.

The money quote literally says:

"we are unable to provide assurance over the accuracy of the November 2018 election results as reported.”

Add that to the issue:

"Half of Broward County’s election precincts reported more ballots cast than the number of voters."

And that's precisely the place you'd want to look for fraudsters. But oh so luckily the process was so badly done that we can't really determine what the numbers should be.

If you're trying to swing elections, you WANT there to be enough plausible deniability that the numbers can't be directly challenged. Can't do that if things are well-run and accurate.

But its REALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLYY convenient that the places where the 'incompetence' is actually so serious all tend to trend the same way on election night.

For 2018, if you add Palm Beach and Broward together (they are adjacent counties, BTW) there's about 1.3 million votes recorded between the two of them. It would be feasible if not likely to hide 10k-30k false votes in there if spread around enough, which as mentioned would be enough to swing the Senate race and several of the state-level executive races.

Since then, I refuse to discount the possibility of wanton fraud as a factor nationally anymore.

I mean, seeing what happened in Minnesota, holding your hand over your heart and swearing that no political operatives or voting bloc were ever involved ever at all in anything remotely dodgy is going to leave you with egg on your face.

I expect a certain level of mild corruption in any election in any country. Right now we've got both Texas and California competing as to who can be "most partisan gerrymandering in the history of the state". So all we can really expect is that most elections will be mostly honest, with any manipulating within small and manageable levels.

Minnesota providing an ongoing, real time example of most of the bad things that righties say happen when Democrats are in charge has been interesting to me.

Then you remember that they used Tim Walz as their answer to the Trump problem. Very odd they'd want to hold his state out as an example like that?

Kamala Harris just had no luck, or maybe no political instincts. She picked ol' Tim there mainly (what I've gathered from reading various reports) because he was willing to play second fiddle to her, while the likes of Shapiro were judged too ambitious (read: too much of a threat to her by comparison).

They wanted "redneck lite" and they got it, and now here he is: the much-touted successful smart governor with impeccable liberal instincts now shown to be presiding over multi-million dollar scamming where either he didn't know about it (doesn't look good) or it was known about but there was pressure to keep it covered up (looks even worse).

Doesn't look good for her if she's really going to run for governor of California. Then you have Gavin Newsom's social media putting out the likes of this which honestly makes my brain hurt trying to work out what the heck is going on (he was at some NYT bunfight? and there was criticism of how he crossed his legs? so this is meant to be a joke referencing that?)

That tracks.

Harris seems like the type who 'knew' she needed an old White dude on the ticket... but was ABSOLUTELY unwilling to accept someone who might overshadow her, like Newsom. She had to put up with being under Biden, after all.

When in reality, being in someone's shadow was the main thing that kept her viable.

I'm also willing to entertain the hypothesis that he was chosen in part so that when Kamala won, they could use FedGov power to cover up the problem/immunize him from consequences.

I'm also willing to entertain the hypothesis that he was chosen in part so that when Kamala won, they could use FedGov power to cover up the problem/immunize him from consequences.

I wish they were that efficient. That the scandal came out seems to have taken Walz etc. by surprise, so I don't think there was that much forward planning around "when I am elected, as of course I shall be, then we fix your little problem Tim, now hold my handbag for me while I speechify at this bunch of white liberal women".

I still haven't managed to finish reading her "107 Days" book, but searching through it on Kindle here's pretty much why she picked Walz:

He said he had no ambition to be president, that his aim as vice president would be doing meaningful work to improve people’s lives. It’s no bad thing for a vice president to want to be president, unless that ambition plays a corrosive role in the relationship and causes disloyalty. That wouldn’t be an issue with Tim. He had no fixed ideas about what the role of vice president should be, saying he would do whatever I found was most useful for him to do.

...To get a young person’s opinion, I called my godson, Alexander Hudlin, seventeen years old and very much a creature of the zeitgeist. He was for Walz. “Auntie, I like him.” [As an aside, I am very doubtful about any 17 year old who is interested in some old white guy governor of some state in flyover country. This little anecdote is a bit too pat for me to believe.]

My senior staff, to a person, strongly favored Tim.

...Maya and Tony were staying with us. They both liked Walz. Maya especially liked the fact that he was not trying to be anything but the best VP for her sister: “He’s loyal, he’ll have your back on the trail, and it’s clear that you like him,” she said.

...Our first encounter [Kamala meeting Walz' wife] was in the locker room of the Temple University gym, appropriate enough for Coach Walz. It was my idea for the campaign to lean into Tim’s brand as coach, a role that conveys both strength and caring. Tim was a relative unknown nationally, but there was so much about him that would be familiar to people’s everyday relationships and experiences. Not many people have met an astronaut, and they might not love politicians, but most people can relate to a high school coach. And with early voting starting in forty-five days, that immediate connection was important. Knowing that, I’d asked the team to print up COACH signs that people could hold up at rallies.

...My first job that night was to introduce Tim Walz to the country. This was not hard: the man has a biography that could provide scripts for several Hallmark movies. I led with how he’d coached a perennially losing high school football team—they hadn’t scored a single touchdown in the first six weeks of the season before he became coach—to winning the state championship.

I went on to tell the story of how a student who wanted to start the first gay-straight alliance at the school had gone to this storied football coach to ask for his support. Walz immediately agreed to become the group’s faculty adviser. Tim said he thought it would send a message of inclusion if the adviser was a football coach, a soldier, straight, and married.

...A local farmer introduced Tim as “a lifelong Midwesterner” who “understands rural America.” Tim proved it as he spoke, connecting to the enthusiastic crowd and finding a Midwestern cadence in which to talk about reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ issues, and how Trump’s Republicans infringed on basic freedoms.

And once again, why the flip did they not listen to Bill? The guy has bucketloads of charisma, also navigated successfully the image of being a hick from the sticks, and knows how to win elections:

Bill Clinton, speaking for the twelfth time at a Democratic convention, delivered firm words. Like the cop who arrives at the door of a rowdy party, he wanted the music turned down a little. We were getting euphoric too soon, he warned. “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen,” he said, clearly referring to Hillary’s 2016 loss to Trump. Don’t get “distracted by phony issues,” he admonished. “Never underestimate your adversary.”

Bill Clinton knows how to weave a tale. He’s one of the best storytellers in modern politics. And why was I surprised that this night, instead of his allotted twelve minutes, he would speak for twenty-nine? He wasn’t the only speaker who went long. Once again, the keynote speaker, Tim Walz, was pushed partially out of prime time in the East.

Which was too bad, because Tim gave a great speech, introducing himself to the country, making the case for me, attacking Trump on abortion and on Project 2025, presenting the values of our campaign by calling on specific examples from his own life.

Also she is really salty about J.D. Vance being the rival redneck and campaigning successfully by - get this for wicked underhand tricks - being moderate in the debate with Walz! Oh, the effrontery! How could poor, decent, honest, aw-shucks Tim ever compete with some slick Yale graduate pal of Silicon Valley billionaires?

It was not a comfortable role for him. He had fretted from the outset that he wasn’t a good debater. I’d discounted his concerns. He was so quick and pithy in front of the crowds at our rallies, I thought he’d bring those qualities to the podium. He’d prepared with Pete Buttigieg, a consummate debater, and I thought his big heart and his good humor would counter J. D. Vance’s malice and pessimism.

But J. D. Vance is a shape-shifter. And a shifty guy. He understood that his default meanness wouldn’t play against Tim Walz’s sunny disposition and patent decency. Throughout the debate, he toned the anger and the insults way down. As Van Jones later remarked, he sane-washed the crazy. There were no cat ladies, no pet-eating Haitians, no personal insults. Just a mild-mannered, aw-shucks Appalachian pretending he had a lot of common ground with that nice Midwestern coach.

When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at J.D.’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug, “What is happening?”

I told the television screen: “You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.”

She doesn't like J.D. because he correctly forecast the election result 🤣

I got into my motorcade, but we weren’t pulling out. I asked Max why we weren’t leaving. That was when I learned we were being held up by J. D. Vance. He was out of his car and walking toward Air Force Two, in violation of every rule of security and protocol.

I later learned that he told reporters he was there because “I just wanted to check out my future plane.”

I later learned that he told reporters he was there because “I just wanted to check out my future plane.”

She (and/or the ghostwriter) is so good at making her enemies sound awesome.

But wouldn't any kind of centralizing solution merely compound the problem? It's not like national level institutions have a strong track record of nonpartisanship. We definitely need more transparency and accountability, but the local (and therefore compartmentalized) nature of American elections is a Chesterton's Fence I do not want to tear down.

Oh, I would never suggest that voting counts need to be centralized.

My proposed solution was death penalty if you get caught fabricating more than, say, 100 votes.

Don't even have to re-do the election, just let the voters see that those who undermine it are punished.

The behaviour of the current President demonstrates that you would need to amend the Constitution to make it non-pardonable, of course - otherwise you get away with it if your candidate (for President or Governor, at least) wins.

It is a good idea in principle, but the problem is that the decline in public confidence in US elections is not driven by actual fraud, and definitely not by fraud that could be proven to the criminal standard but is currently being under-punished. It is driven by widespread sloppiness, corner-cutting, incompetence, and insecurity that means losing candidates can spam plausible fraud allegations and election officials can't refute them.

Announcing that you are going to start hanging the people doing the election fraud and then not finding any of them will further reduce confidence in the system. This is a general problem with making highly-visible solutions to non-existent problems a key part of your politics.

It is driven by widespread sloppiness, corner-cutting, incompetence, and insecurity that means losing candidates can spam plausible fraud allegations and election officials can't refute them.

The one thing I don't think that the architects of our Democratic processes realized was that literal Trillions of Dollars would become tied up in the outcomes that can swing with <100,000 votes.

And yet, I've lived in Florida long enough to see it go from being THE SINGULAR EXAMPLE of sloppy election processes (2000 was the year of 'hanging chads') to running effectively flawless elections that report on time and accurately. The state has only gotten more populous since then, too.

Its like so many complaints about social problems are disproven with a straightforward counterexamples.

"Oh man violent crime is complex and multi-factorial, you can't just arrest your way to safety." Why'd it work for El Salvador?

"Bureaucratic waste is inevitable, and achieving real cuts to government spending is futile because all the incentives run the other way." Why'd it work for Argentina?

"Elections are complicated and chaotic, and counting millions of votes quickly AND accurately isn't viable in many places. Incompetence will always seep in." Why'd it work for Florida?

So maybe the solution is to just send Desantis on a tour to every single state with fucked up elections and he can show them precisely what to fix.

This is a general problem with making highly-visible solutions to non-existent problems a key part of your politics.

Its clearly not non-existent. And if merely announcing the penalty is sufficient to scare people from doing it, so much the better.

That was actually the argument I made back when Desantis put together his election fraud task force or what-have-you.

Merely being aware that there's people out looking for it is a disincentive.

I really like this death penalty proposal even though I would normally be against the death penalty in the US. The main difference, as I see it, is that working an election is an entirely voluntary endeavor, and I like the idea that the oath's people take have some sort of real legal meaning behind them.

Of course, there's lots of problems with the idea. The most obvious I see are that the number of volunteers would plummet and that foreign intellignece services would certainly try to plant evidence of voter fraud (and I'm sure they'd be able to do it very convincingly) and they could use the death penalty as leverage to have agents in the voting system.

Yes, False positives are an issue, but our Justice system is pretty decent at dealing with/avoiding those.

Hence why I'd put the threshold somewhere around 100 votes so we don't catch, say, some grandma who accidentally voted twice or something. High enough that a volunteer is exceptionally unlikely to 'accidentally' breach it.

I strongly suspect that after one (1) person is unambiguously convicted for election fraud and publicly executed (you KNOW that every single network would cover such an event) that EVERYONE would be aware of the consequence and so it'd be much harder to recruit them unknowingly.

And for people who knowingly collaborate with a foreign party to undermine an election... we already treat Treason as a capital offense.

If faith in election integrity is a critical piece of successful Democracy, better treat it with sufficient weight.

Yes, we treat treason as a capital offense and execute people for it. Nevertheless, the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc very explicitly design their procedures so that foreign powers cannot get leverage over people. If we design a procedure that makes it trivial to give foreign powers leverage over people, then we should expect them to use it.

For example, I suspect the vast majority of citizens to be honest citizens. But I also suspect the vast majority of citizens to turn into traitors and sell information about the election to Russia if a Russian agent provides a credible threat of presenting falsified evidence that the honest citizen committed execution-worthy fraud. This is a textbook case of when falsified blackmail is an effective leverage.

If we design a procedure that makes it trivial to give foreign powers leverage over people, then we should expect them to use it.

Well, there was a whole whole thing about Russia allegedly recruiting Trump with a pee tape or something.

The only thing that makes controlling people involved in elections valuable is the aforementioned trillions of dollars tied up in the outcomes, and of course Diplomatic/military consequences.

All the more reason to take the 'extreme' measures to secure them.

I suspect the vast majority of citizens to be honest citizens.

If you'd asked me this 10 years ago I might agree.

Nowadays, I'm not willing to say even a bare majority are.

But I do believe they respond to incentives! Be those incentives from malicious actors, foreign powers, or their own government.

I simply note that a lot of Election Officials don't have strong incentives for good behavior, and its probably insufficient to 'reward' good behavior on their part.

Which leaves...

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