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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9135 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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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.

One of the imprisoned gang leaders had bragged on Facebook about his connection to González-Colón, posting a picture of him talking with her on WhatsApp while the primary campaign for governor was underway, two sources said.

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.

She won the primary by fewer than 30,000 votes, according to the State Elections Commission. Local news reports said that an estimated 5,000 prisoners voted territorywide

Erick Erickson (conservative radio host/podcaster) posted something interesting earlier that seems applicable here.

Remember kids, though the GOP won in 2024 with Trump getting the popular vote, the grifters will tell you the losses this year are because the SAVE Act didn’t pass. Why actually assess the problems when we mythologize our way to victimhood for the profit of a few.

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?

massive

MASSIVE. You know what else is massive?

four people with knowledge of the case told ProPublica. They requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

Oh, look, it's the red flag for bullshit reporting.

But as federal prosecutors prepared an indictment against the inmates and staff in November 2024 — just days after Trump won the election and González-Colón clinched the governorship — they received a surprising directive. Their bosses in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico instructed them to exclude the voting-related counts against the inmates and all charges against the prison staff, an investigation by ProPublica found.

Trump getting up to shenanigans with his time machine again.

Inmate votes were especially key in the 2024 gubernatorial primary as González-Colón, a longtime New Progressive Party member, was challenging the incumbent governor of the same party.

She won the primary by fewer than 30,000 votes, according to the State Elections Commission. Local news reports said that an estimated 5,000 prisoners voted territorywide.

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.

Inmates have been aligned with the party ever since, political analysts said. Political parties in Puerto Rico differ dramatically from those on the mainland. They don’t adhere to a straight divide among Democrats and Republicans. Instead, the two main parties center much of their focus on whether Puerto Rico should become a state and so have Republicans and Democrats within each.

It’s not unheard of for politicians of all parties to court the inmate vote, but the New Progressive Party has made it a “stronghold,” said Fernando Tormos-Aponte, a political scientist with expertise on Puerto Rico and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

“It’s been a huge advantage for them particularly as elections in Puerto Rico have been decided by small margins,” Tormos-Aponte said of the New Progressive Party. In the 2024 general election for governor, the party won 83% of the inmate vote, according to a ProPublica tally of voter returns on the State Elections Commission’s website.

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 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?

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:

  1. There's a new recidivism predictor. Tech is bad and courts are racist, therefore this will make racist decisions in the courts.
  2. It shows some predictive power, and is well-calibrated (recidivism rate is approximately (20 + 5 * risk score)%, with almost-entirely-overlapping error bars between races). Maybe there's something about what it's replacing as well.
  3. Here are some outliers, some stories about racism, and a few charts and tables showing a complex measure nobody has ever cared about before or since. Voila, point 1 stands.

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).

  1. I need food. I am writer. So I write the (badly sourced) article
  2. Trump is bad so even writing false thing is a good
  3. Somehow true believer.

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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