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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.
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.
These comparisons are laughable. One off comments, random local issues, and material complaints about voting access are being compared to a top-down campaign by the Republican Party's elite.
One off comments that lead to an impeachment?
That seems like an extremely tendentious interpretation of that article. Trump associates with a bunch of Russian assets -> gets accused of collaborating with Russia -> Trump becomes obsessed with a Ukrainian conspiracy -> tries to extort Zelenskyy -> gets impeached for acting corruptly.
"Why would Hillary Clinton do this?" Donald Trump is a grown man with agency.
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