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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13587 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Is there any reason why people think slow first counts are Bayesian evidence of fraud rather than incompetence? Countries with actually-rigged elections like PRI Mexico or Chavez' Venezuela count their elections overnight just as fast as countries with free and fair elections.

Slow-counting is one of the hallmarks of election fraud because it is evidence of an irregular system. An irregular system is ripe for fraud. These irregularities are not supposed to exist, because there is no reason for them to exist except to facilitate fraud.

This was understood by everybody, e.g. was even used in State Department training materials, until about 2020.

In a secure election system, you register valid voters, receive a basically-known quantity of ballots, and you count them. In California, nobody even knows how many ballots there are because they’re all floating in the ether somewhere. They don’t purge voter rolls, because that’s an evil Republican trick. They don’t require you to show identification, because that’s an evil Republican trick. There’s not even a real deadline. There are no systems for securing anything. Millions of ballots are sent out totally unsecured, and as long as someone fills them out and sends them back they have to be counted.

This is a system designed to produce election fraud. It’s basically legal. There is a limitless supply of ballots, all you need is a political machine to collect them. Voters aren’t even needed.

That other regimes have used other systems is basically a non-sequitur.

There's two different kinds of fraud. You have a fake election: there are no votes you just make it up. That can be done quickly. Then there's a real election where you insert enough fake votes to make up the difference at the end, that has to be done slowly.

Yeah that’s a good way to put it. America’s two-party nature means that there are a lot of “contested” elections in what would normally be one-party states.

It's not just the slow counting. It's the composition of the later votes. In this case the early votes put Spencer in second, and matched polling results pretty well, and the late votes are much more heavily Democratic -- enough to knock him out if trends continue. Further, the number of uncounted votes has at times gone UP, substantially.

Right I agree. Countries with un-debatably fake elections usually announce things very quickly, you don’t want the tension of an unclear result creating even the faintest oxygen for your opponents.

Clearly California disagrees!

"Fraud elections" is not a sliding scale you linearly turn up or down, but description for several different phenomena. It's quite different thing to cheat in partially fradulent but contested elections where you have not a total control of the overall system than fully fake elections where you control most of steps in the process. Because the fraud modes are very different, it makes sense that some fraud is associated with long waits while other more fradulent are not.

Example of fraud in contested elections: suppose you have well-positioned partisans who can add fake votes in the name of people who did not vote in some precincts, but not in all, and furthermore, the other party may contest the result for a recount. Examples of near full control, most people who ostensibly count votes are fully in your pocket, so they only play smoke and mirrors to confound outsiders, and you can make announcements of the tallies as you wish quite quickly. Finally, in totalitarian countries of yore, you can pressure people to vote for single available candidate, these were also very quick to count.

Those are some nice theories, but is there any evidence of a proven (or at least widely-considered) rigged election where the vote counting was slow?

I thought "results are withheld because people counting realize they need to stuff ballot boxes" was such a widely known trope of failed state elections in 3rd world, but I had to search for some examples and i was surprisingly difficult because google results are polluted by trumpbbrained US politics. Here is some example of dubious delays in final results or "amended" results I could find by scourging Wikipedia: Afghanistan 2014 and 2019, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Nigerian, early 20th century US and later.

In contrast, I don't think "long time to count votes" is a Bayesian evidence bit of fair process either: most European states have announced election results (considered fairly counted) quite quickly as long as I can remember.

You can filter google results from before a certain year. Add before:2019 or before:xxxx date to your search query and it will return results that have not been updated since that date.

This article seems relevant: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34641418

You're probably reaching back to something like LBJ's Texas Senate race, where the candidates and their machines would hold counties in reserve to play against each other like trap cards, with each county having the margin needed to counter your opponent's reveal until they ran out.

Political lore is that this was SOP in statewide elections in Illinois, with the Daley machine in greater Chicago and the Republican machine in the rural south trying to delay releasing results until they knew how many votes they needed to steal. But that doesn't describe how the most famous rigged election in Illinois history (the 1960 Presidential election) went down - Kennedy was ahead of Nixon throughout the "count", and Cook County on average reported faster than the rest of the state.

What do you mean "rather than"? The incompetence enables fraud.

It's not necessarily "the incompetence was deliberately cultivated to create a pathway for fraud", but it still counts.

I'm saying that competence and riggedness are orthogonal. You can rig elections competently or incompetently, you can count honest elections competently or incompetently. An incompetently run election is more vulnerable to external fraud, but the claim OP is making about California is about insider fraud.

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