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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4807 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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Trump appears to be embracing his role as the late Republic's Gracchus.

I missed this announcement the first time around buried as it was under all the talk about Iran but it looks like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act may be moving to a vote and Trump has "tweeted" that he will refuse to sign other bills until it pases. The SAVE act is a measure that would require individuals to furnish proof of citizen when registering to vote, and significantly curtail the circumstances under which absentee and mail-in voting are allowed. Strictly speaking these rules would only be binding for federal elections but as the majority of precincts bundle their, federal, state, and municipal ballots together for cost reasons it's going to effect all elections except those in states that spend the extra time and resources to run federal and local in parallel rather than together. Naturally the GOP has framed this in terms of election integrity, while the Democrats frame it as an attempt to disenfranchise the under privileged, and (a bit ironically) usurp state authority.

This is happening in context of a recent FBI report suggesting that Fulton County Georgia had tabulated approximately 20,000 more absentee votes than they had recorded sending out. This is the same Fulton County that was the subject of a "conspiracy theory" alleging that after a broken water main had supposedly forced counting to be suspended for the night only for the poll workers to resume counting after the candidates' representatives had left. It's probably just a coincidence but it feels noteworthy that Biden won the State of Georgia by a little under 12k, IE just over half the number of allegedly dubious ballots.

For those who didn't recognize the historical allusion in the opening line, in latter part of the second century BCE the Roman republic was wracked with civil and economic unrest prompted in part by the importation of cheap foreign (slave) labor undercutting local wages and the ability of smaller family-owned farms to compete with large commercially owned estates. Tiberius Gracchus was a scion of wealth and privilege, the grandson of Scipio Africanus, he ran for the position of Tribune of the Plebes on a platform of Land Reform. The Senate used every procedural trick in the book the could to thwart him only for Gracchus to retaliate by famously(infamously?) using his veto powers to gridlock the senate until they acquiesced.

This is happening in context of a recent FBI report suggesting that Fulton County Georgia had tabulated approximately 20,000 more absentee votes than they had recorded sending out.

Ah... nothing like a good flashback to all the "no evidence of voter fraud" discussions we had here to start the day.

The story was they sent the poll watchers home for the night because of a false claim of a broken water main. Then once the poll watchers were gone they pulled boxes of ballots out from under a table and started counting. This, of course, was widely derided as a conspiracy theory that never happened. Once every element was shown to be substantially true, they started saying stuff like "well we didn't REALLY tell the poll watchers to go home" and "It's perfectly normal to do this". At which point there's clearly no basis for discussion.

The story was they sent the poll watchers home for the night because of a false claim of a broken water main.

Would have been a risky lie, any of the watchers could have questioned it and exposed it then and there if it wasn't true! They also weren't "sent home", there's no one who will testify they were ordered or directed to leave.

I even double checked this with ChatGPT

Have any of the poll watchers who left during the Fulton county water leak attested to being told to leave?

Short answer: No—there’s no credible evidence that poll watchers attested to being told to leave because of the Fulton County “water leak.” Investigations and sworn testimony generally found the opposite.

Some people left cause they thought the leak being handled meant proceedings were done, but that was their mistake.

Then once the poll watchers were gone they pulled boxes of ballots out from under a table and started counting.

We also know what this was, some of the workers were also confused and started packing up (the "boxes of ballots") until they were informed they needed to continue scanning the already prepared ones.

They already tried this claim, and the Georgia supreme court dismissed the case.

And just think about it for a second, we have to believe that there's some grand election fraud conspiracy where they fake a water leak planning for everyone to leave and no one to question it and then pull out ballots from under the table (that none of the observers noticed while there???) all while forgetting the cameras in the room. It's not technically impossible, but that's a pretty shaky plan.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

"people correcting me about a nuanced situation really proves the point about how people correct me" isn't a particularly great argument.

Do you have an actual explanation for why none of the poll watchers have actually claimed they were told to leave? How about why this elaborate ruse didn't account for the cameras in the room?

This is what I genuinely despise about the discourse on this matter (and many matters like it).

The standard of proof for every single element of the claim of election fraud gets escalated to an unreasonable level, and every time you 'prove' some particular element of it, they insist on strict proof of some even more granular point of fact. Plus motte and baileying from "oh there's no proof of voter fraud" to "Well you can't show that the outcome was effected!"

"Okay sure they pulled ballots from under a table... prove those weren't legitimate ballots that were just... unconventionally stored." "Okay, this ballot can't be traced to an actual voter... but you can't show that it was intentionally filled in by a third party."

Or whatever.

When the meta point is we really need to make sure important elections don't have the scent of fraud, even accidentally.

Yes! The point is, more than the Lizardman Constant truly believes that there was fraud, when our system only works when we all agree that voting is fair and honest. Both sides need to bend over backwards to make sure that everyone has faith in our elections because that is the only way we keep the ship running.

This assumes that it's a both-sides problem, when the root issue is that Republican (and even more specifically Trumpist) political elites have found it useful to raise bad-faith claims of vote fraud. This renders attempts to satisfy their concerns largely pointless: the only way to convince their followers will be to convince their leaders, and their leaders know what they are saying isn't true.

Democrats also reject the legitimacy of elections, though with less concrete explanations of what would make them more comfortable with them.

For Trump, it was Russian Collusion. Bush was "Selected, not Elected.". In smaller elections there are complaints about voter suppression. Locally there was a big kerfuffle that State funding got pulled to send out extra busses to bring people to poll locations on Election Day.

As if democrats don’t make bad faith claims about elections all day long.

Yep. And maybe the SAVE act isn't the right solution.

But its the one that's actually being offered.

I've said that I would actually be okay with the death penalty for anyone caught fabricating some large number of votes.

The system is THAT important to maintain faith in it.

And I also suggest sanctions for trying to overturn an election based on spurious claims of fraud, since that also undermines faith in the system.

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