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Popping the Filter Bubble
Part 1 of what may become an ongoing series
Before @seething_spendcel published their post on the Henry Nowak I had actually started writing a post of my own as it had been easily rank in the top-5 if not top-3 of culture war stories for over a week based on the amount of coverage it was getting yet there had been literally Zero discussion of it here. Now I see @Quantumfreakonomics talking about this being a "Slow news week" and how "The current thing is still Graham Platner" and I am suddenly motivated to bring up another top-3 culture war story that does not appear to have been discussed here.
So let's talk about Spencer Pratt and the Unburning of Pacific Palisades.
For those just joining us Spencer Pratt is an MTV Entertainment executive who got his start in reality TV. He lost his home in the 2025 Palisades fire, and he is currently running for Mayor of Los Angeles. His platform is simple, Karen Bass (the Incumbent) is both corrupt and incompetent. He claims that she has been redirecting funds intended to rebuild the burnt-out neighborhoods to her friends while championing policies that make life worse for ordinary Californians.
Those who pay attention to Right-Wing Twitter are no doubt familiar with the proliferation of AI generated ads like this, and the meme about Spencer Pratt contributing money to his opponent's campaigns so they could run more ads like this.
Anyway the important thing that you need to know is that over the last 6 weeks Pratt has gone from being a complete outsider with a snowball's chance in hell to being neck-and-neck with the incumbent, and then last week just days before the polls officially opened, a miracle occurred Google "Unburned" the Pacific Palisades restoring the Google Maps and Street View to their pre-fire state, now Google claims this is all a mistake but many, myself included, would like to know how imagery that was clearly pre-fire came to be labeled as having been taken in May of 2026. I might have believed a story about having to restore the servers from an old back-up even if the timing was a bit suspicious, but clearly pre-fire imagery being labeled as having been taken in 2026 would seem to go a step further than just "a glitch".
Speaking of "glitches". Californians are famously incompetent when it comes to anything involving voting be it Elections or the Academy Awards, polls in person voting was this Tuesday but with the majority of votes being cast by mail it's unlikely we will have an official result till next week and right-wing tweeters have noticed something interesting...
39.3% vote in…
Karen Bass: 117,579
Spencer Pratt: 86,323
42.4% vote in…
Karen Bass: 130,429
Spencer Pratt: 86,323
0 out off 13,000 votes for Pratt would seem to stretch credulity and Gov. DeSantis is calling Shenanigans
I honesty didn't believe any of the previous election fraud theories until now, but this one is really pushing it. They can seriously only get about half of the votes reporting on election night? And somehow it takes one night to count half, and weeks to count the other half? I can't see any sane or innocent explanation for this.
I don't agree with universal mail voting, but other states that do it don't have this BS.
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.
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.
"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
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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.
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