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A massive electoral fraud scandal in Puerto Rico has been revealed in Propublica today.
The TL;DR is that a gang was sneaking drugs into a prison, and exchanging those drugs with addicts in return for votes for the governor (Puerto Rico being one of the few places that lets current jailed felons vote). Federal investigators were planning an indictment against the gang, prison guards involved, and the prisoners who took the deal before orders from above in the upper echelons of government shut it down.
But there's a twist you might not expect, the votes were for the Republican governor and the higher ups who shut it down was the Trump admin. This might be the biggest this you style story yet. Trump is constantly claiming about stolen elections and voter fraud, and yet little evidence has ever shown up. We finally found a massive scheme, and it was a MAGA related plan. There is no direct connection with this plot to Trump or the governor, but the gang leaders did have some personal connections to the governor.
The scheme probably wasn't enough to secure the election (at least not with the inmates alone) as the numbers aren't, but it was closer than you might guess. Thus even with a relatively massive scandal, it probably didn't have a direct impact then but it's interesting how the investigation was spiked.
Erick Erickson (conservative radio host/podcaster) posted something interesting earlier that seems applicable here.
Perhaps Trump's focus on electoral fraud is not motivated by being against fraud, but instead just because he lost in 2020 and can't accept that hit to his ego, the shattering mythology of his victimhood, and that's why they won't push this Puerto Rico case further?
Puerto Rico is corrupt, news at 11. That's why nobody cares about this story. Not because of the partisan valences, because 'Bribes paid in Puerto Rico' is a page five story, and this one didn't even manage to actually swing the election.
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Mostly because the only evidence leftists will ever accept is these bizarre reverse style "gotcha!" stories where they can be safe horny for election integrity. As soon as I read the words "there's a twist you might not expect" I can predict it's Republicans who will be doing the fraud, because that's the only context in which it is ever permissible to admit that election fraud ever happens. As long as we simultaneously arrive at the correct conclusion that, well, it can't have mattered anyways.
It's interesting, right? Criminal conspiracy to buy votes that, apparently, can only ever have maxed out at 5,000 votes in an election where the margin is way above that. You know it's futile, I know it's futile, but apparently the gangs organizing it didn't know it was futile? Weird that everyone involved thought this was worth doing when some back of the napkin math "proves" it can never have been worth doing. Why did they do it then? Well, they must have been irrational somehow, thankfully we don't have to examine our priors about whether election fraud is real or not.
Note that this isn't even an argument against the SAVE act, this is just an argument that Erick Erickson is wise and his enemies are silly, while he sits in the corner watching. It might not even be true: this Wapo op-ed argues that the SAVE Act would turn Nevada and New Mexico into solid red states just by changing the voter pool. It doesn't even require us to believe in election fraud; The GOP simply chooses to play by rules that cause them to lose when they have a popular mandate and the power to change the rules. That's at least the decision Erick Erickson would make, as he looks down on me from his superior moral pedestal while pressing the "Keep Losing" button over and over again.
The lesbian ex-mayor of Hamtramck, MI was willing to say it was Muslim Democrats committing voter fraud locally, until it got reported by Project Veritas and she complained about being quoted by a bad source.
But that's a pretty limited example.
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Conservatives and conservative aligned people control the biggest media in the country! If there's a major story of Dem favored election fraud, even if the left wanted to cover it up it'd be on Fox News and CBS, very mainstream outlets. It wouldn't be censored on X.
If you have the largest and most viewed messaging apparatus and you can't get them to communicate a story then either you're idiots who fail at using the tools provided or it's so false that even your own partisans won't put their name to it.
The point is just to tip the scales in their favor. The gang leaders have connections to the governor and stood to benefit from her winning, thus they used the power they had to tilt things more in her favor.
Yes, Erickson is generally much smarter than the grifters. He is a more principled conservative with strong Christian values, instead of appealing to populist victimhood fantasies.
Clearly and visibly not true, given that the GOP can not get the congressional votes to make it happen. If they had the mandate they would have done it. They don't have the votes.
And given how the midterms are looking, doesn't seem like "popular" applies as well anymore. Maybe if the Trump admin bothered to appeal to what the American people wanted instead of starting a war, driving up prices, harassing legal immigrant workers, and stalling business investment with tariffs, they could have kept the good faith that voters had going into 2025. No, instead they did all that, made independent and swing voters upset to the point some even admit regret and decided it must be because they, the most powerful people in the world, are just poor victims instead.
Maybe when voters say they want a good economy with low prices, you should do that instead of making everything more expensive and scarce. And maybe when they turn on you for it, it's your fault for not listening. That is how we went from the Senate being basically unwinnable for Dems to now being favored towards them.
The company that just produced a 60 Minutes special about how eeeevil white supremacists helped rebuild and brought food and supplies to the area after Hurricane Helene, and that's terrible? That CBS?
I get Bari Weiss is theoretically in charge over there now but evidence is pretty thin on the ground that it has changed their reporting or the insane bias.
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We are ten years into the Trump era now, which was inaugurated in 2015 with a primary waged on dissatisfaction with the GOP establishment. That the base has been dissatisfied with Republican leadership is one of the central facts of American politics. It's why we have Trump. It's why half a dozen Indiana state senators got primaried yesterday after they refused to redistrict. It's why Erick Erickson got pushed out of mainstream Republican politics. It's why the Republican Party was happy to dump Trump throughout the 2020 election crisis. It's also a very simple explanation for why the Republican party is unable to pass Voter ID even though a supermajority of the American public consistently polls in favor of it. I don't know what else to add here. I think you are misunderstanding one of the basic facts of American politics and are now trying to invent alternate explanations for things trivially understood in my worldview.
Erick Erickson is an extremely stupid man filling out the D Tier of conservative talking head punditry whose big claim to fame is saying stupid things on the radio while having a funny name. One day he calls Trump a fascist and says he'll never vote for him, the next day he's endorsing him for President, one day he's calling Supreme Court Justices "goat fuckers" and debating whether Michelle will cut off Barack's penis, the next day he's policing Trump's tone. No consistent principles. Erick Erickson is not smarter than the grifters, he is a grifter. Please, please spare me this delusional fat imbecile's self-serving fantasies about his high-minded Christian principles. (It must be nice to be principled when you can make a lot of money advertising how principled you are. I'm pretty sure Jesus says not to do this somewhere. Maybe Erick Erickson can spend some time contemplating the Christian principle of fasting and lose some weight?)
I consider this argument won because instead of confronting head-on anything I said you have pivoted to a non-sequitur about Republicans' prospects in the midterms. Although I don't see why Republicans would lose the midterms when we apparently have the power to commit election fraud without being punished. Seems simple. Republicans nationalize the Puerto Rico model and Democrats can't do anything about it because they don't know how to commit election fraud.
Maybe I'm getting too snarky. But I don't really understand why I'm being treated as the stupid one when your position seems to be that Republicans are too moral for politics.
Perhaps part of it is that married women who changed their name want to vote too.
One of the actual basic facts of American politics is that voters views will change. Trump had a moment of popularity, absolutely. He lost it by destroying everyone's wallets and starting wars. That there is a base who will always suck him off is irrelevant if you can't get the moderates and swing voters to stay on board.
This is the exact same mistake that Biden did. He won 2020 and they took it as a mandate to do everything they wanted, instead of trying to aim for the moderate centrist voters who decide elections.
Win the argument in your mind if you want, you clearly aren't winning the swing voters and moderates right now so you'll need something to claim as victory.
Holy strawman batman. A small time election fraud with inmates (massive relative to the basically nonexistent amounts of election fraud that otherwise occurs) is not something they can widen.
Biden did not do this. His admin was full of radicals who believed in arc of history triumphalist nonsense thought themselves to have a mandate to do whatever current progressive doctrine wanted, sure, but they believed this regardless of election results and also this wasn't sleepy Joe himself, it was staffers.
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As someone whose wife came from a foreign location where women don't tend to change their names, and can thus attest to a significantly higher-than-normal level of grief over the wife changing her name, getting US documentation that would be sufficient for voting is probably the easiest part of a married woman changing her name.
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Sounds like there's plenty of election fraud to go around, the fact that both parties have not colluded yet to make ID mandatory for voting and outlawed mail-in-ballots tells you everything you need to know.
Also there exist unfalsifiable yet anonymous algorithms for digital vote counting where you could be sure your vote was part of the count via a hash, but your own vote preference can't be revealed. The fact these "democratic" systems are still relying on pen and paper and corruptible people counting ballots by hand tells you everything you need to know about "democracy", it's a scam.
I will note that although the parties nationally can't get their shit together well enough to pass voter ID laws, states with strict voter ID and no mail in ballots are all red.
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Unfalsifiable in theory, but with the tech illiterate masses, incompetent state officials, and messy reality, my understanding is that in-person voting, paper ballots, and manual counting with lots of redundancy is still the most reliable method. Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key.
If mail-in ballots are outlawed, there should be an alternative for sick citizens, and citizens abroad like soldiers.
I see no issues with free and easy-to-get mandatory ID. I believe it's common in Europe and almost nobody complains.
Sometimes I wonder if we would be able to use the mathematics to make it easily verifiable without a computer somehow. Even if it takes you a day of filling up some puzzle paperwork.
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I don't think any of these systems have solved the last-mile "assigning digital IDs to people" in a practical way. We've had enough trouble getting RealID drivers licenses for things like flying that I doubt we could enforce smart cards for voting any time soon, and I bet both sides would oppose it today for different reasons.
ETA: and that's all before you get the fun chance to explain the cryptography to the median voter.
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My cynical take on this is (1) in agreement that I don't believe anything in the popular press until solid facts are produced (2) but I was assured, firmly and frequently assured, that voter fraud never happened in any election ever and that it was depriving felons of their natural human rights to strip them of the right to vote while incarcerated!
If there is any truth in this story, it's probably somewhere between (a) yeah, drugs get smuggled into prison, this is a problem everywhere (except maybe Singapore, I couldn't tell you about that) (b) gosh, gangs on the outside have contact with their members inside? you startle me gravely with this information! (c) corruption in Puerto Rican politics? again, I don't know anything so I can't comment there.
It will be funny to watch all the "no corruption nowhere, safest ever elections" set scrambling to prove that this is indeed a case of electoral fraud and the "stolen elections" set claiming it's a nothingburger.
This isn't really the principal argument why felons should have the vote. It's a pragmatic one about perverse incentive. If the government can deprive people of the vote by convicting them of a particular crime, oopsie, you've created an incentive for the government to drum up those exact kinds of charges against political opponents.
I think the far more important part of imprisoning political opponents would be removing them from the political battlefield rather than get rid of their 1 vote among millions. In order to get an appreciable effect on the vote counts, you'd have to imprison so many opposition members there's no one left to vote for anyway.
As I said in another prong of this thread, I do agree that this is mostly symbolic in either direction - but I care about the government going the extra mile to avoid the appearance of impropriety w. regards to the franchise. In any case I didn't necessarily mean to die on the hill of this particular argument, merely to point out that in my experience that is the principal argument in favor of letting felons have the vote, as opposed to concern about their inalienable human rights yada yada.
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I think if we're getting into taking out political opponents, drumming up charges is already well established. Think of all the TRUMP IS A FELON! 39 FELONIES! stuff and tell me at least some of those weren't politically motivated? And I'm sure there are cases for Democrats getting stalked as well.
Gosh, we're going to let the prisoners vote, we're sure a bunch of druggies, thieves, and gangsters will respect the electoral process and nobody will be motivated to intervene, bribe, buy or sell votes, etc. Yeah, unless you let them all out of jail for the day to visit the polling booths, I don't see how you can guarantee the integrity of the voting process. And letting a bunch of convicts out on day release to vote is likely to end up with "scarpered" rather than "placed my ballot in the box".
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Sure but there is also the pragmatic argument of “criminals have proven themselves to be asocial and thus shouldn’t vote.”
We have very little evidence the government is trying to put people in jail for your concern. We have a lot of evidence the vast majority of criminals are in fact asocial scum. So this is a slope I’m not particularly worried about being slippery.
Yeah, I almost added a parenthetical about how it obviously wasn't a live concern in today's America, particularly. But I think it's one of those things where the government ought to avoid the appearance of a perverse incentive, as one of the many nested redundancies keeping us from a slide into tyranny. Caesar's wife must be above approach, etc. etc. (Indeed, this is especially persuasive to me on this issue because convicted felons represent a largely symbolic percentage of the vote in any case, so it can't do much harm to go the extra mile to prove the government's commitment to democracy.)
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ProPublica has zero credibility, and I will bang this drum every time someone cites them favorably. They damaged my faith in journalism more than anything else has or will. Also a perfect example of what we discussed last week: They are members in good standing of the Journalism Club, which tells me what their standards are and how they deal with deceptive and manipulative content. It's even "notable reporting".
1, 2, 3 are my posts I could find easily, but there are more out there.
With that out of the way, let's look at the article.
Alright, cool.
"Just days after Trump won the election" is well before any real actions were taken to transition power from the Biden administration to Trump. Why did W. Stephen Muldrow (appointed under Trump I, dropped and immediately reappointed under Biden, and maintained in Trump II) do that? It's possible that Biden appointed someone disloyal, but it's also possible that it's completely mundane.
That's it?? I know that the election fraud offenders don't have to be a subset of the drug offenders, but it certainly suggests that it's a smalltime operation.
"Involving" and "Of" are two different words.
Wow. Such news.
Raquel Rutledge (the author) has not been charged in the disappearance of Jack and Lilly Sullivan. This is 100% factual and you can check the public records if you doubt me.
How is that even tangentially connected to this scheme? All a voting machine can do is properly and accurately (or improperly and inaccurately) record what is entered into it. The machines don't have mind-reading equipment that can distinguish a coerced vote from a free one.
I couldn't find any evidence that Los Tiburones "evolved", as it appears to have always been a criminal group. The Netas started as a legit advocacy group, and still use it as propaganda.
No evidence of what the within-party split was in the primary: Extrapolating to 6000 prisoners total, 5000 support the Progressives, and of those 5000 an unknown number supported Colon with the remainder supporting her opponent(s) within the party primary.
(Fake edit: Later in the article has "...being pressured to vote in the primary — some for González-Colón and others for her opponent, Pedro Pierluisi.". Why wasn't that in the Primary section of the article? Oh wait, they moved from "Colon is benefiting" to "Prisoners are compelled" and expected that you couldn't cast this point back in time to where it would undermine their argument.)
...of something else, not what was mentioned in the previous paragraph. They're just "deep into investigating a potential..." for that part of it.
God fucking damn it. There's a second breach of election security happening? Fix that, and vote buying becomes a pure game of trust. Given how trustworthy I find the prison population, I'd guess it would immediately kneecap any election influence operation.
Or both admins just appointed a careerist, like most US lawyers tend to be. Finding people who are competent and willing to give their careers so they can rock the boat is really hard. It got dropped because the careerist lawyers (rightfully!) predicted that the Trump admin upon assuming power would have no interest in further investigation here, and they being careerists don't want to bite the hands that feed them.
They aren't about loyalty either way. We know that, because the admin can't get the US attorneys to sign onto most of their blatant political prosecutions either.
Correct but also wrong! Relatively it's huge, electoral fraud schemes are incredibly rare and way smaller than this. Election fraud of course is just so much not an issue that even the big cases look smalltime.
Well yes, you don't typically charge people who haven't done anything. It seems to have been done in favor of the governor by gang leaders with connections to her, but it doesn't seem to have been orchestrated by her. Presumably the gang leaders just wanted her to win for their own personal gain.
If you're finding foul play, it is reasonable to suspect other forms might be taking place too and you would double check everything.
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MASSIVE. You know what else is massive?
Oh, look, it's the red flag for bullshit reporting.
Trump getting up to shenanigans with his time machine again.
Seems worth mentioning that the election being referenced was a primary. She went on to win the general by 130k votes, with a 10% lead in the popular.
And they were being bribed to vote for the same party that always wins the prisoner vote?
Wow, that is a lot of effort to daisy-chain tie this to Trump, in spite of not having any evidence.
Fun fact: the walking stereotype author of this piece was a Pulitzer Prize winner for investigating child care scams in Wisconsin, but all of the wiki citations about it go to dead pages.
So this author is an even worse person than I first imagined. Vapes are banned in a lot of places because of a morally panic on popcorn lung. Twitter is telling me they are banned in 60 countries. Let’s just say she contributed a part to causing a ton of lung cancer deaths.
Also a lot of people generally still believe vaping is bad for lung health. It might be worse than no smoker but it’s almost certainly less than 10% as bad as cigarettes.
I would also be curious what gets journalist to write things like these articles. You can read the article and by her own language realize she is writing in a specific style that she knows she doesn’t have the goods. But still rights the article anyway. Is it just needing a paycheck?
I don't accept this reasoning. It implies that every imperfect politician with any authority beyond a city, and certainly every politician with policies you don't like, is the equivalent of a mass murderer.
Normally, doing things which lead to unnecessary loss of life is bad because that's only possible through malice or negligence. If you're dealing with millions of people, though, that's no longer true and everything you do contributes to deaths. Our intuitions don't scale up to situations where ordinary decisions cause loss of life.
She wrote an article that vaping is poison. If she wrote the article with the same journalistic integrity as this article then I believe it’s fair some of the deaths fall on her.
If you shit on the commons then when the commons are bad you have some responsibility for the commons being bad. Her culpability though would depend in my view significantly on her intent. Did she write the article wanting click-baity outrage porn that was poorly sourced or did she write the article believing she was informing the public.
I would put writing an article that has direct correlation to people smoking more cigarettes as a very shitty thing to do if the article on vaping was poorly sourced. It would have a very logical path to people die more of lung cancer.
Writing an anti-vaping article only leads to lots of people dying because the article is seen by lots of people and the small chance of each one dying adds up. Adding this sort of thing up is exactly the problem--it turns a minor issue into a major one simply because it is being done on a large scale. And if we allow that into our morals, it becomes impossible for any human to do things on a large scale because everything has a tiny chance of death that can add up.
(Also, I am skeptical that she's causing many deaths anyway. People would decide to stop vaping not by reading one article, but by a cumulative set of experiences of which the article is a tiny part, and her contribution to those deaths has to be divided by the total number of anti-vaping things the person saw, weighted by their influence.)
In this case Vaping is illegal in a lot of places. Chicago they are fairly hard to buy and when I’ve bought one I believe it was illegally.
I have no problem with people doing things in good faith but being wrong. That will happen. Judging by the article shared today I do not believe she is a good faith writer.
Small things definitely need to count for morality. The commons depend on a lot of people doing small things morally. Like not littering. Not stealing $5 items at Whole Foods. Small theft adds up to a percentage of shrinkage which then makes everyone else pay more.
The issue is small things that have huge effects because a lot of people are involved. A $5 theft is small. A $1000 theft is a lot bigger. A "$1000 theft" which causes 100000 people to lose 1 cent worth of their time each should not be counted the same as stealing $1000 in a lump sum.
On a normal scale, "I did something which cost a thousand lives, but it was a mistake made in good faith" is not considered to be a valid excuse (especially if you knew in advance that a mistake would be lethal, and especially if you've made such mistakes often). If you really think that causing a loss of a statistical thousand lives is like causing that loss directly, you can't justify adding an exception for good faith.
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My take is that they get the idea for an article, research it, then write out their idea (regardless of their findings). That's very different from finding an interesting topic, researching it, then writing out their findings (regardless of their initial idea).
For example, Machine Bias could've come about like:
I am more referencing how do they sleep at night. To write an article that misinforms to this extent (unless she really does have quality off-record research).
This article on Puerto Rico seemed written by a lawyer to say bad things about Trump without crossing a line that would be defamation
No bad tactics, only bad targets, maybe? That's pretty much #2
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Personally I don't take the stance that we can only trust the official word of the state, tons of important stories come out precisely because people are willing to leak things but don't want to immediately destroy their careers.
Careerists not wanting to upset their upcoming boss spike indictments that they worry would upset him. And accordingly they were right, when the Trump admin took place they did exactly that and forced the story down.
The average government worker cares for their job first and foremost obviously. It's the same way that the Trump admin can't get many of the careerist lawyers to sign onto political prosecutions, because they care about their future careers. They're perfectly happy to sit back and do nothing.
Taking a group that votes you and bribing even more people in the group to.vote for you is actually still bad.
Considering the careerist lawyers rightfully predicted the investigation would be stalled and decided to drop the case early to prevent further backlash, it doesn't seem like Trump is excited to latch onto this example of election fraud.
Damn she's got a really experienced career exposing all sorts of corruption and issues! Lead battery factories in Africa, tabocca industry influence in South America, benefit fraud, fuck ups during undercover law stings, a wet wipe company in Wisconsin selling tainted products, tainted alcohol products in Mexico.
Quite an impressive resume.
On the other hand, such things are literally impossible for anyone other than the author of the piece to interrogate. Even if they, personally are telling the truth, there’s the issue of how many people actually agree with that statement, whether or not the information is first hand or just rumor, whether or not the person was knowledgeable about the phenomenon to really understand what they saw or thought they saw. All of that is acting upon the rather charitable assumption that these people are just concerned about the truth, when it could be all kids of things: not liking their job or boss, seeking notoriety, Believing that the wrong political party gained from this, etc. We literally cannot check; we have no answers to any of those questions.
By contrast, even though the official statements of the government are biased, we at least have some idea of what they know, where it comes from, what they are like, and what biases they have. The AG of Puerto Rico is known, he has a party affiliation that we know about, ambitions we know about, a past history we know about. It’s not something we have to guess at, he or she is a public figure whose name and history we have in front of us.
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Granted, it's a Wikipedia article so probably needs a hell of a lot more depth to the bare statement, but the Mexican alcohol one made me laugh. Good God, young adult goes on sun holiday and overdoes it on the boozing and happy fun times, leading to tragic death? I mean, it is sad, but it happens all the time (even without tainted alcohol). We'll be coming up to summer sun foreign holidays time soon over here and in a few more months post-exam time (in Ireland), and I guarantee you there will be stories in the media about 18-20s year olds dying or getting into serious accidents in mass-market holiday resorts abroad, often involving drink (over-consumption of). Sadly, there is little or nothing "mysterious" about that death.
If there is a need to write a story about "clubs trying to entice you in with 'drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence' promotions can afford this because they sell paint stripper as alcohol" then it's a public service, but it's hardly Watergate-level investigative journalism.
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It’s possible all the “anonymous” sources are being done in good faith……..but it’s also how we spent 10 years in the Iraq War. It was the exact strategy he would do go on the MSM selling the WMD for war. It’s still essentially toilet paper because liers user this tactic too.
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No, that's the story journalists tell about themselves. More commonly, it's the method used to launder libel so as to protect the journalist from lawsuits.
This is pure speculation.
This is the sort of weasel-wording you have to learn to parse when reading the news. Was told by "a supervisor" (Why not name the supervisor?). "To take the case no further". Further than what? The vote fraud stuff had already been dropped. A normal phrasing there would have been to "not go back to the old stuff" or something. And why? There's no discussion of the actual evidence that the vote buying even happened. Choosing to prioritize resources on easily provable drug offenses is very common. That's the case for most people in federal prison for "drug" charges.
Also worth noting, because it's much more pertinent, but this was soon after González-Colón took office, and she has much more direct relevant and influence over an unimportant province like PR. But "territorial governor possibly implicated in vote buying scheme" wouldn't have this article doing rounds like tying it to Trump does.
This is unbearably naive, and just embarrassing to say about PR.
Sure. But right off the bat, it seems more probable that it would have been an inducement to vote in the first place, again, if indeed this even happened.
Again, this is pure speculation. Do you honestly believe that Donald Trump is particularly invested in the local primary politics of a territory? I know the guy gets autistically fixated on random shit, but I can't recall him ever caring much about PR. And while the governor loves him, the article itself mentions it's a very one-sided obsession.
There are much simpler explanations for this, again, assuming it even happened. I suppose we'll see if he says anything about it. I give high odds that if he does, it's something bombastic and vague in support of the governor just because she says nice things about him.
There was that entire arc involving a branded garbage truck, but I'm not sure that is indicative of deep political ties to the local leadership, or just riffing on the news cycle.
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Ok this alone makes me think you're disconnected from the world. The average government worker, like the average worker, doesn't give a shit about "the mission". They want to go in, do their job, get paid, go home. They aren't there for pleasure and passion, they're there to make money. Some people may find joy in their job, but it is a job at the end of the day
Most people will not rock the boat in order to "do what is right".
Trump seems to care a lot about election integrity! He's constantly talking about fraud, and yes while it is Puerto Rico this would be one of the largest cases of election fraud in the US in modern times. This would be a great way for him to push for his SAVE act and try to limit mail in voting.
Well like yeah, let's be honest. Everyone knows, even many of his strongest conservative supporters like EW Erickson, that Trump is just salty over losing. He doesn't care about election fraud, he probably doesn't even truly believe it that much. He would use this case as a tool if it benefited him, but acknowledging that election fraud is being used for Republicans doesn't.
I'd broadly agree, but I would also say it applies to the post-2024 Democrat voters who couldn't believe Harris lost and spun up their own stolen election conspiracy theories, complete with "voting machines hacked" (after years post-2020 declaring the machines were super-secure and couldn't be hacked) and the same general run of complaints Trump had used. So Trump saying 2020 was stolen because (A, B, C) was all lies, but 2024 being stolen because (A, B, C) was the solid truth. These and these aren't even the true nutjobs holding that view.
Everyone is salty about losing. Even the 'official' explanation that Hillary and Kamala lost because Sexism Misogyny Racism White Supremacy Christian Nationalism is being salty that "no, your candidate there wasn't good enough" is the real explanation.
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I think I may have completely misinterpreted you there as "care first and foremost about the ostensible purpose of their jobs". My bad.
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Trump honestly believing in clean elections and that he won in 2020, and being willing to enforce it even against his own party also fits your facts. I don't think Puerto Rico is a central example of "MAGA", and if it is, that's a whole separate interesting thing.
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What’s the case here? I don’t see any source in the entire article. And “massive”? I’m seeing 5k prison votes total which apparently the margin was 30k votes?
The drugs are probably just an easier case.
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One benefit of an anonymous ballot is that the gang can never be sure that the voters are holding up their end of the bargain.
Admittedly, mail-in ballots do complicate this; perhaps it would be wise to consider alternate methods of accommodation for those citizens unable to attend polling places in their area of residence.
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That's a pretty bold claim. The evidence is common enough that it has its own Wikipedia page, organized by decade.
Ok fair, bad phrasing. I meant it that little has shown up for his specific claims about 2020 and 2024.
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