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2020 stolen election time! There's been some rather big developments with my favorite cute little hobby horse. I haven't had the time to make a deep-dive write-up, but it's has already been extensively reported on elsewhere (e.g. this post by Jacob Sullum). To summarize, Dominion voting systems sued Fox News (and Newsmax, and OAN) for defamation. Dominion has been past the discovery stage for more than a year now but their filings only recently became public and, no way to say this lightly, it's been extremely humiliating for Fox. Tons of text messages from the big names (Carlson, Hannity, etc.) either talking shit about how crazy Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani are, or (especially for Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo) credulously accepting and repeating the stolen election theories.
One especially funny example involved Sidney Powell credulously forwarding an email to Bartiromo from a complete rando claiming they had "Election Fraud Info". In that same email, the anonymous rando claimed that they got their information from their dreams, that the wind tells them they're a ghost, and that Justice Scalia was murdered during a human hunting expedition. As evidenced by the filings she submitted to court, Powell's skepticism faculties appear to be basically non-existent, and the fact that so many people took her seriously at first is a good illustration of the pitfalls of siloed reasoning.
Maybe the most damning revelation of how Fox was operating (from both a legal liability as well as a journalistic ethics perspective) is how they treated their fact-checking process. When Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted on November 12 that "there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised" Carlson texted Hannity "Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke." If Dominion needed to prove the actual malice (and it's not yet clear if they would need to) in a defamation case, they couldn't have asked for better evidence.
There isn't much for me to say that I haven't said before. My operating theory has long been that some people seemed to earnestly believe the crazy theories they were spouting about Hugo Chavez or whatever (e.g. Powell, Giuliani, maybe Dobbs) while many others were just pretending to entertain it because it was in their best financial interests (e.g. Carlson, Hannity, Murdoch, etc.) and the text messages confirm this. To Carlson's credit though, he endured a lot of negative pushback from his criticism of Powell.
I've already done my hand-wringing on how the media seems to love shooting itself in the foot, except it was framed in context of how liberal outlets fucked up the Covington debacle from four years ago. The Dominion lawsuit demonstrates the problem behind audience capture; Fox pundits and reporters had to deal with a credible financial pressure to cater to the crazy fringes of their audience for fear of losing them to their less scrupulous competitors. If so, it would be a demand-side problem. I'm not sure if the problem with liberal media fuck-ups follows the same framework, but I'm open to arguments. My general impression there is that the call is coming from inside the house: liberal journalists too afraid of their fellow cohort to break ranks. I suppose a good test-case scenario would be to see how NYT's current "trans youth reporting controversy" plays out. They obviously already got a severe amount of criticism from the activist fringe, but would a significant portion of their audience care? And if so, where would they go?
One last question: has anyone here changed their opinion on the 2020 stolen election theories?
The election was 100% rigged. It’s a real shame that we’re even talking about dominion machines changing votes and I don’t even know who to blame.
It was rigged because of widespread voting rules being changed unilaterally immediately prior to the election to facilitate mail in voting. I have no doubt that votes were harvested and the spirit of the law behind how voting works was violated in mass.
It was rigged because the media “fortified the election” with a deluge of lies and messaging about trump, as per the Time Magazine article.
It was rigged because intelligence community and deep state spent years lying about Russiagate and using every lever they have to oust trump.
It was rigged because Twitter and Facebook and nearly every other tech company used all of their institutional power to actively influence voters minds and hide relevant information such as the Biden laptop. They don’t even have plausible deniability on this. They actively mislead and lied to people.
Maybe there is no proof that election administrators in deep blue territory like Atlanta and Philadelphai were changing or finding votes at the last minute. And that’s a big maybe because I do believe that these administrators are both curruport and capable of actively rigging the results in their counties. These are true believer Democrats that have been told Trump is an existential threat to democracy and the free world. They have the means, motive, and incentive.
The fact that we’re talking about the dominion machines is a shame.
While I suspected for a long time, the Trump fisa documents and the Twitter files laid bare that deep state actors broke norms and in some cases the law to “get Trump.” It is really a stretch to believe the deep state was willing to cross certain lines but not others?
Moreover, it is clear there was an unholy alliance between media, NGOs, and the government to facilitate these transgressions.
So we have a new election scheme supplemented heavily ran by last second NGOs that the media stated was 100% above board.
Then we had some weird shit on election night that still hasn’t been fully explained (eg the water main break that wasn’t).
Is any of this proof? Of course not. Should the election have been overturned? Of course not. But given these facts, how many people would be truly surprised if solid evidence turned up? I wouldn’t.
What attempts have you made to research this issue, and what evidence would you accept that it was investigated satisfactorily?
I read a lot in the months following the election. The attempt to refute the water main break story never passed mustered.
Which one are you referring to and why didn't it pass muster? What do you wish was done differently?
Well, there was a Georgia official who attempted to refute the story. However, there was clear documented statements made at the time that directly contradicted the later story.
I don't understand why you are being so vague. The uncharitable explanation is that you wish to avoid having your opinion scrutinized. So:
"Don't restart counting after telling the scrutineers you were stopping, and don't lie/hairplit/gaslight the public about that afterwards"?
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I think this sentiment is universal amongst trump voters that are paying attention. I wonder if it will significantly demoralize and hurt turnout in 2024. I was significantly engaged with electoral politics till the 2020 election. Now I couldn’t care less about the latest Washington drama. I wonder if they will suck me back in once the presidential season commences.
To be clear, I’m not really a Trump supporter. I was very disappointed in his response to Covid (especially compared to DeSantis). It seems he had the right instincts but was too afraid of the political repercussions of telling Fauci et al to fuck off and fire them.
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I agree and disagree that it was just normal games elections games in 2020 (excluding discussions on mail-in ballots). I feel like the information environment in 2020 still has my head in a blender.
Trump isn’t great at this either but it just felt like no one even cared about telling the truth anymore. It was all narrative building all the time. I remember reading articles of lab leak proponent doctors/researchers being afraid to publish because their career would be destroyed and then after the election coming out. All of mainstream media joining into “peaceful protests”. COVID being a don’t go to Church and then a week later gather downtown and protests with a million people is ok. And I thought we always had a real in America that the CIA doesn’t propagandize the American people on domestic politics and then we had 50 former CIA agents saying Hunters laptop was Russian (with small print that they had no evidence but the media never mentioned the small print). I thought some of the left biased media like the NYT still mostly tried to get to the truth. I thought the msm would call out Joe Biden on the Charlottesville hoax and his claims being inaccurate. That ABC reporters or the supposedly little biased big cable news would asks Joe a few hard questions about Hunters laptops contents.
Something just feels different in that election. Politicians misinform and tell white lies etc. But it felt like trusted institutions began to play sides in politics and went full narrative regardless of facts. If a Harvard researcher discovered good evidence that COVID was a lab leak and even though the politics might help Trump I would have assumed they would tell us the evidence. And the CIA wouldn’t propagandize Americans. And NYT and WaPo would tilt to their side but mostly tell the truth. Twitter might be all leftist but they wouldn’t get in the way of factual information.
I felt these things were the rules before 2020. After 2020 every and any American institution is a spook pretending their the CIA working some colored revolution in South America except now their doing it to Americans. And that colored revolution was the removal of Donald Trump from office at any costs.
That being said if the Dems just played 2020 normal like say 2008 I think they win in a landslide. Every thing in 2020 that put my mind in a blender made me want to vote Trump instead of being a non-voter. Should have just been like 2008 when losing side accepts defeat because something bad happened on their watch. I think a lot of Americans felt information games were played all around them in 2020 and a lot of those people would have been non-voters or voted Dem just because of COVID existing.
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i think the thing is, for every election the losing side can find reasons why it was rigged or stolen. But no one is talking about how the '84, '80, or '96 elections were rigged or stolen or fraud. Closer, higher stakes elections means that refereeing becomes more important, so foul play is blamed for losing, not the candidate or positions being unpopular.
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I say rigged quite specifically. A game can be rigged without secretly changing the score.
Suggesting that the massive changes to mail in voting is just par for the course is intellectually dishonest. The total vote increasing something like 20 million is evidence that something significant changed in how elections were operated. The fact these were pushed through so quickly is another major problem even if in principle the concept is sound (in opinion, it is not sound).
I strongly disagree that all of my points are just a continuation the same old gaming of the system. But perhaps you are right and I am wrong. If that’s the case, perhaps democracy has always and will always be total bullshit.
Either way, they may have gotten rid of trump, but at what cost. This is not an ingediant for a stable political system.
The idea that massive changes to mail voting that were pushed through quickly had anything to do with the election outcome is a myth that election deniers have been pushing without even looking at the actual facts. While some states did loosen absentee ballot requirements due to COVID, none of this happened in any of the states that were contested. The closest you'll come to finding it is in Pennsylvania, which held its first-ever general election with non-excuse mail voting in 2020. However, the law that allowed that had been passed in 2019 with unanimous Republican support, and the changes would have taken place in 2020 regardless of COVID. In every other contested state, mail voting had been permitted in prior elections without incident. It's certainly true that a lot more people voted by mail in 2020 than in prior elections due to pandemic concerns (except in Arizona and Nevada, which were pretty much all mail by that point anyway), but I don't hear anyone making the argument that legislatures should have rushed back to the statehouses to require in-person voting on the grounds that too many people were going to take advantage of a duly enacted provision of the law.
Wisconsin? Didn't the number of remote votes coming from the "indefinitely confined" (which the state explicitly said they would not check up on) increase by like 5x?
Wisconsin has had no excuse mail-in voting since 2001. The "indefinitely confined" qualification only comes into play if you're requesting a permanent absentee ballot, meaning the ballot will be automatically mailed every election without your requesting it. The only caveat with this is that if you don't return every ballot you're sent you'll be taken off the voter rolls, so it doesn't make sense unless you actually intend to vote in every election, and most people simply don't vote in off-year elections, especially primaries and special elections, so it's a double-edged sword if you apply for one on the assumption you'll always be sent one and don't get one for an election you intend to vote in.
Fair enough -- still sounds like something that should be looked into though, as if voters are claiming to be indefinitely confined when they are not, the rules are not being followed.
Also it looks like the dropboxes widely deployed in 2020 were against state law: (and a potential fraud vector)
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1100696685/wisconsin-supreme-court-ballot-drop-boxes-disability-assistance
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I mean you could Google that and provide a source for it instead of asserting it. Throwing a bunch of half remembered claims out there and expecting others to provide counter evidence is basically gish gallop.
Don't tell me what to do.
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Not at all -- most of the plausible "machine politics" rigging theories are strictly manual fraudulent ballot schemes. (Which, granted, have been happening in the US off and on since ~1776 -- but I don't think that makes them not count as "rigging"?)
Except all the "machine politics" theories I've heard wrt the 2020 election simply think that stating "machine politics" is sufficient to allege fraud. Most of these people who talk about machines in Detroit, or Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia have no idea what they're talking about insofar as they have no idea what the politics of these cities actually look like, and couldn't name a single person who would have even been involved, let alone a mechanism of action.
I'm not sure why you would think anybody would be able to name people in these machines -- the whole point of these is that the functionaries are faceless and anonymous.
The mechanism is the same as always: sneak some fraudulent ballots into the system via machine aligned poll workers, who simply neglect to perform the usual checks that make this more difficult.
It's more "machine politics plus extremely suspicious behaviour" -- excluding scrutineers at critical moments, etc.
While I think it's quite possible that these people were acting suspicious mostly because they'd been so mindkilled that they thought that being physically close to Republicans would result in a covid death sentence, either way the procedures that result in both sides trusting the system were not followed -- so it serves them right if people don't trust the system now, whether they were actively rigging the election or not.
I mean, ironically, in most super blue districts you're talking about, they actually shifted a couple of points to the right (from like 95-5 to 92-8) because of the shift in the non-college educated minority vote.
This doesn't really indicate anything about the prevalence of fraud one way or the other though -- Trump's assertion is that it would have been 85-15 (or some other yuge number) if it weren't for the rigging.
? Of course it is evidence against fraud in those districts. It isn't proof, but it is evidence.
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Yes, it's true that many stolen election advocates engaged in motte-and-bailey acrobatics* [see edit], oscillating between "Italian satellites changed the voting tally" baileys and then retreating into "All we meant was that the rules were unfair" motte. Obviously this wasn't helped by Trump's credulity and proclivity towards surrounding himself with Yes Men who would just repeat whatever flattering theories he preferred. Who else would you blame for the confusion you're criticizing?
Edit: As @Supah_Schmendrick points out below, this was an erroneous application of the motte-and-bailey fallacy. Repost:
I framed the motte/bailey in an erroneous way. It is not true that anyone who had a negative opinion of the 2020 election necessarily wants to believe in Italian satellites. Although inadvertent on my part, it was wrong of me to frame the argument with that insinuation. Some version of what @orthoxerox wrote below is what I should've said:
I don't think "Italian satellites changed the voting tally" is actually the bailey - it's not terrain that everyone wants to occupy; it's not the goal in and of itself. From the stolen-election perspective, the end goal (thus the bailey) is "the election results do not represent a fair vote or a small-d democratic mandate."
The "Italian satellites" and "unfair rules/elite lies" are the various types of argument-soldiers sent out to secure the bailey. If the "Italian satellites" thing were true, it would be extremely good evidence for the bailey position - actually fiddling with vote totals is a very good reason to declare an election void. Unfortunately, the audacity and putative strength of the claim is betrayed by its falsity.
The "unfair rules/elite lites" arguments are much weaker evidence for the bailey position, precisely because they can be pattern-matched to other dirty tricks in American political history that we've just learned to shrug and accept. However, they have much stronger basis, and are harder to dismiss as groundless.
The reason I make this distinction is because the way you phrased it suggests to me that you think anyone who has a negative opinion of the 2020 election would like to or perhaps wants to accept the "Italian satellites"-style arguments, but falls back on the true "election fortification/information suppression/media manipulation/weaponized intelligence community" arguments when they're forced to. This is not true. There are people who believe in the wild conspiracy theories, and there are people who have digested true reportage. That both may arrive at similar conclusions about the election, the media, the Democratic party, or politics more generally, is beside the point.
If that's the bailey for "stolen elections" then every US presidental election ever has been stolen due to the electoral college.
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You are correct, I framed the motte/bailey in an erroneous way. It is not true that anyone who had a negative opinion of the 2020 election necessarily wants to believe in Italian satellites. Although inadvertent on my part, it was wrong of me to frame the argument with that insinuation. Some version of what @orthoxerox wrote below is what I should've said:
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That's the motte. The bailey is "the election results have been tampered with in a felonious way, and if these crimes were successfully prosecuted that would change the winner of the election". That's the territory you want to occupy, to make people think Biden won illegally.
When pressured, you can retreat to the "we have no countermeasures against the cathedral influencing the voters to vote for Biden and influencing the election officials to interpret the legislation in a way that is biased toward helping more Dem voters vote" motte.
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