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Notes -
The Proud Boy sentences being quite severe is on my mind today. 22 years for Tarrio who was not there on Jan 6. He does have text saying it was them who did it. A few others got in the high teens sentences who were there.
I will admit I respect the Proud Boys and agree with a lot of their statements. I do believe the 2020 election was stolen. The lack of a secret ballot thru mass mail-in voting violates every principle of Democracy. Without violating the secret ballot Trump would have easily won in my opinion. The Proud Boys official position from memory was a desire for a new election following Democratic principles. Seems fair to me. So I feel they are directionally correct even if they took things too far.
The right won’t get equal treatment in the court. It seems like the key courts are in cities that are going to have unsympathetic juries and judges. If you flip these courts to rural areas then my guess antifa types are getting 20 years and Proud Boys 2 years. In rural areas they would have judges very sympathetic that the election wasn’t proper and their anger was justified in the same way BLM protestors get courts sympathetic that America is a racists nation.
I think the left is making a mistake with these massive sentences. If they gave them a couple years I would feel it was fair as they went too far. But now I want them pardoned. If Trump pardons them as he should then it’s a slap in the face of the court decision. Delegitimizes the court to have the court decide these are really bad people deserving long sentences for overturning Democracy but then have the next guy release them. It feels very third worldish to me. With other lawfare attempts it seems as though any future POTUS should do mass pardons. I’m not sure how balance of powers can survive this.
The punishment for Proud Boys seems to have some connection to the debates and Biden declaring them “white supremacists” and Trump telling them to “stand by and stand down” (which felt coded). It made it important these guys got long sentences to confirm that they are the bad guys because then a court confirmed what they told you. Same thing with Floyd officers and long sentences which confirmed that they were bad murderous cops. A jury convicted therefore we know it’s true.
It’s another example of punishment for exercising your right to a jury trial.
I agree with Garrett Jones books “10% Less Democracy” and America would be better with less activision and less voting. But America looks more and more like a third word spoils system. Win you get the spoils, lose you go to jail. Which makes elections far more important.
Links aren’t important just sometimes people asks for articles.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1172530436/proud-boys-jan-6-sedition-trial-verdict
https://apnews.com/article/enrique-tarrio-capitol-riot-seditious-conspiracy-sentencing-da60222b3e1e54902db2bbbb219dc3fb#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20(AP)%20—%20Former%20Proud,for%20the%20U.S.%20Capitol%20attack.
https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/1503603571
https://reason.com/2023/09/06/with-22-year-sentence-ex-proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-pays-hefty-trial-penalty/
Edit: Focus on the punishments and any results from the severity. I used a certain frame to put it in their view. We don’t need to discuss election legitimacy again.
The argument that the election was inherently flawed because mail-in voting somehow violated the principle of a secret ballot doesn't hold water and is made in bad faith by those who didn't like the outcome in 2020. Mail-in voting has existed in various states for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years, absentee voting has existed for longer, and no one I'm aware of made the argument that it was inherently flawed prior to 2020. Indeed, as late as the fall of 2019 PA's mail-in voting bill sailed through the state legislature with unanimous Republican support.
Claiming that mail-ins are suddenly unconstitutional to the point that we need a redo is a convenient argument to make if your guy loses the election and you're grasping at straws for some excuse undo the result, but let's not pretend that this is an argument based on principle. Would you be making this argument if Trump won?
It's also telling that 2020 is apparently the only election they care about. No one was protesting the 2021 off year elections for local judges and clerks, no one was protesting the midterms, no one was protesting the various special elections that have been held over the past few years, and I doubt anyone will protest this year's elections. Hell, there doesn't even seem to be much of a legislative push in red states to completely do away with mail voting, or any serious court challenges raising the secret ballot issue. It all comes back to Trump—shit only matters when he's involved. The entire system is rigged against him and him alone. I've always thought he was a narcissist but at this point I can't really blame him giving the number of people who do act like the world revolves around him.
This is pretty bold. I cataloged some history here with citations to quite a few international civil society organizations. The most difficult statement for your position came from OSCE in 2010, which is clearly both before the timeframe that you discovered this issue and from a European organization which couldn't give a shit about Republicans or especially Trump back in 2010:
People care about this. People across the political spectrum used to care about this. People across the political spectrum used to care about this all in agreement in basically all liberal democracies. There simply wasn't a controversy before, because we all agreed.
Ruining the secret ballot is bad. It also happens that ruining the secret ballot hurt Trump the one time. Trumpists are going to jump in because of the latter. We should all continue to agree on the former and not let reversed stupidity cause us to be also stupid.
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I believe changing the rules of the game while the game is in progress, very much to the benefit of one party, constitutes cheating. I don’t much care if the cheating was sanctioned by Democratic dominated state courts and federal courts refused to weigh in because of standing.
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Many dems believe 2016 was stolen; for the right, it's 2020. The problem is , recent elections have become too close and too high stakes. no one talks about irregularities or inconsistencies of the 1984, 1980, 1996, 2008, or 2012 elections, which were more overtly lopsided. Instead of either side occasionally running duds like Mondale, Dole, Romney, etc. the process of selecting candidates has become much more optimized and the nation more divided, overall, leading to closer elections in which refereeing and counting plays a more important role. This is going to get worse and people will continue to lose faith in the process, for both sides.
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What is 'bad faith'? Maybe, when someone uses poor arguments or selectively chooses facts to further a personal goal that isn't 'truth-seeking'. But does that require them to intentionally do so, or does it merely require them to fall into a pattern of doing so? The ... "election denier" ... operate in functional bad faith, not conscious bad faith. And they share that with most participants in political discussions. When someone reads an accusation of bad faith, they imagine they're accused of conscious bad faith, and then get upset that their genuine attempts to discuss aren't taken seriously.
Say you're arguing with a Christian about whether God exists. They make the usual arguments, that 'something caused the universe, so that thing must be God', 'humans are simply too complicated for evolution to create', 'the historical case for Jesus's miracles is undeniable', 'all logic needs axioms and thus has no grounding, so it must be grounded in something, which is God'. Yeah, these are all fallacious, some trivially so - 'thing that caused the universe' doesn't have to be spiritual or sentient, fossil and DNA evidence for evolution is overwhelming, history is replete with other strongly attested miracles that didn't happen. And, if you're approaching the question from a position of genuine intellectual inquiry, how is it possible to - not to make so many mistakes, everyone is mistaken about everything - but to make so many mistakes in the same direction? But if they're saying things that are superficially convincing and support their claim, whether or not they're accurate, it all makes sense.
Okay, but ... some of us have been fundamentalist christians or progressives in the past, and that's not what it feels like. You genuinely believe in what you're saying. You, initially, see your interlocutor as someone who's misguided but could be persuaded. Your mistakes come from lack of knowledge and cleverness, bad sources of information, a lack of discipline and carefulness in thinking, and all sorts of social and moral constraints. But if that's "bad faith", then most discussions people have are bad faith.
Okay, to you it's obvious that most vote fraud arguments are terrible, obvious enough to dismiss those making it as bad faith. I agree that the arguments are terrible, seemingly obviously so. But it's also obvious that the spirits of our ancestors don't inhabit their graves, that praying doesn't help people with medical problems, that freudian psychoanalysis is bunk, and that neither democrats nor republicans are evil moral mutants. Yet man, very intelligent people of the past or present whole-heartedly believed all of those, and made all sorts of tortured arguments for them. The fact is, understanding the complicated world and society we live in is just hard. Even in areas with better-than-average truth-seeking institutions and incentives, like corporations or universities, people end up with a lot of false beliefs. Take away the institutions and incentives, like in casual news/politics discussion, and people end up blabbing nonsense even in areas with no partisan divides. Then add Trump, who many Rs saw as the only guy on their side in Washington, losing an election, and they saw the usual weird events that happen in any large-scale social system as proof of election subversion.
Most of them would not be. But they don't know that, in the same way that a preindustrial Muslim doesn't know they'd be Christian if they were born in Europe instead of the Middle East. And some of them still would, because mistakes don't go away if there's no tribal motive, they're just not amplified as much.
I'm not arguing that most of the fraud arguments are made in bad faith, regardless of how terrible I think they are; I'm arguing that this particular argument is made in bad faith. Republicans had no particular opposition to mail voting until Trump decided he could get some kind of advantage by making a big deal about it. This isn't some long-held Republican principle, it's a convenient argument to a self-serving end. That's where your Christianity analogy fails; I'm Catholic myself, and if a sincere Protestant wanted to have a conversation about faith with me I'd be happy to discuss it with them, even if their aim was obviously evangelical. But I'd be less happy if I found out they had recently converted because there was some personal advantage to them doing so that was wholly unrelated to their spiritual needs. I think people like Joel Osteen get a little too much flac from irreligious types because he seems like an obvious huckster. But I'm reluctant to join in on the dogpile because, despite his wealth, there's nothing in his past that suggests he isn't sincere. That, and I've actually listened to his sermons and it's obvious that his critics haven't because nothing he says is remotely objectionable. But I'd probably feel different if he were a twice-divorced advertising executive with a conviction for writing bad checks who became a self-ordained minister at the age of 40 after realizing that a combination of Billy Graham and Tony Robbins was a license to print money. And who also was a frequent visitor to tit bars and had been kicked out of every country club in the Houston area because he was too much of an asshole for the members to want to deal with.
Citation very much needed.
Maybe I'm just old but my recollection is that Republican opposition to mail-in ballots and demands for voter ID go back at least as far as the Clinton years.
In PA, Republicans passed the mail in voting law in 2019 (thus nothing to do with COVID) because they thought it would help their rural voters or because they wanted to get rid of straight ticket voting in exchange (depending on the representative in question).
This is what they said then:
"In late October 2019, the Pennsylvania General Assembly was preparing to pass a comprehensive voting reform package that included no-excuse mail-in voting. Republicans, who controlled both chambers of the Legislature, were happy that they had managed to eliminate straight-ticket voting as part of the legislation. Some Democrats, including state Rep. Mike Sturla of Lancaster, were miffed by this and so voted against what would become Act 77. But the Lancaster County Republican delegation to Harrisburg voted overwhelmingly in favor of the legislation (state Reps. Steven Mentzer and David Zimmerman voted against it). The legislation passed in the state House in a 138-61 vote (note 59 of the votes against were Democrats) , and was approved by the Senate in a 35-14 vote. (note the 14 votes against were all Democrats) The state House Republican Caucus website was almost giddy in its characterization of this “Historic Election Reform,” the “most comprehensive effort to modernize and improve Pennsylvania’s elections since the 1930s.” State House Majority Leader — now Speaker — Bryan Cutler, of Drumore Township, discussed the legislation in glowing terms. “This bill was not written to benefit one party or the other, or any one candidate or single election,” Cutler maintained. “It was developed over a multi-year period, with input from people of different backgrounds and regions of Pennsylvania. It serves to preserve the integrity of every election and lift the voice of every voter in the Commonwealth.” What was not to like? Reporting on the new law, CNN noted that it eliminated a “requirement that applicants for absentee ballots provide an excuse as to why they can’t make it to the polls.” “We never checked anyway,” said state Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, who’s now the Senate president pro tempore and is seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination. As Spotlight PA reported, Corman hailed Act 77 as the “most significant modernization of our elections code in decades.”"
and
In a column published in May 2020 in LNP | LancasterOnline, Kirk Radanovic, chairman of the Republican Committee of Lancaster County, wrote that “this new mail-in voting option in Pennsylvania will be a crucial tool for the Republican Party and candidates to succeed.” “Anyone can apply to vote by mail, without a reason or excuse needed,” Radanovic wrote, encouragingly. “If you think COVID-19 or the prospect of long lines will keep you from wanting to go to the polls on Election Day, then vote by mail. “Our state senators and representatives have worked to ensure the integrity of this process, including safeguards to protect your vote.” He pointed out that every “mail-in ballot includes a unique bar code that is used to match you and your ballot, a security safeguard.”
PA only expanded mail in voting because the GOP wanted it done, they had majorities in both House and Senate. Mostly it was Democrats who voted against it because they feared the loss of straight ticket voting would hurt them. The fact that barely a year later they were now saying the very law passed by Republicans was unconstitutional and left things open to fraud is you have to admit a little laughable.
There is shooting yourself in the foot and then there is shooting yourself in the foot and then saying:
"Act 77 also had the support of almost all of the Republican state representatives in the Pennsylvania House, including state Rep. Dan Moul, a Republican from Adams County who joined the lawsuit over the mail-in voting law in 2021 "So my bad. I should've checked the constitutionality of that big bill," Moul says."
It's either staggering incompetence or a scapegoat for the loss, but at least in PA, The Republican party were all for mail in voting..until they weren't.
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This is not what I remember. Historically, the majority of mail-in ballots have been from military personnel, which heavily favor Republicans.
You're thinking overseas absentee ballots which before universal mail-in was a very different thing. Sometimes not even meaningful and not reported in pre-SOS verified vote totals since the total number of those ballots was often less than the margin of victory.
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And yeah, structurally and functionally, "republicans" acts in bad faith. But "republicans" aren't a single entity that acts. For almost all individuals involved, what it feels like is: In 2016, mail-in voting is something you just haven't thought about much. Maybe you've done it, maybe you haven't, but you don't have a strong opinion on 'is it secure or not'. It's reasonable to not oppose something you don't know much about. Then, post election, you start noticing that the Deep State and Mainstream Media really have it out for trump, they'll say anything so long as it makes him look bad, and they'll even break procedure and law to go after him. In 2020, you notice democratic organizations are trying to help orchestrate and "fortify" elections, a lot of laws are changing, and suddenly there's 10x more mail-in voting than there was last year - so you interpret that as action against trump. Now post-election, and there are so many reports of dead people voting, ballot harvesting ... And when you google 'mail-in voting concerns', there are all sorts of pre-2020 articles from mainstream media that are suspicious of mail-ins! And when you compare that to today's rhetoric, the "same people" are suddenly claiming that mail-in voting is safe and secure. The most secure election ever! It just adds up. How is it my fault I didn't oppose mail-ins before when they just weren't as important?
All that exposition is to emphasize that it doesn't take conscious bad faith to get into a position that reasons in an obviously motivated way. It just takes careless and motivated reasoning, something all sides have in spades. When there are bad-faith actors involved, they're mostly people like Trump or media figures who'll advance an argument that gets views even if they know it's bullshit - all of the individuals who consume news and debate it online believe it. But I think those people aren't necessary ingredients, and what happens is more like - someone who's a bit manic and mad that the dems lost trump does some bad statistics with voting numbers, a twitter user reads a bunch of old news articles and posts screenshots of their headlines, leading to rumble videos and substack post about the awful thing the democrats did this time. And then credulous intermediaries excitedly consume those, believe them, and repost them to their followers. You could argue the intermediaries are being dishonest by not checking what they repost for accuracy ... but a more parsimonious explanation is they believe it as much as their followers do.
So the convenient changes in position come more from poor reasoning distributed across social networks than it does intentional bad faith.
I could buy that argument if it actually comported with the facts on the ground, but it doesn't. I live in Pennsylvania. In October 2019 the state passed a law authorizing mail-in voting. How many Republicans voted against it? Not a single one. Not Doug Mastriano, not all the other MAGA wannabes of whom there was no shortage of at that time. And the law was fairly big news at the time, and it was controversial. But the controversy came from a few urban Democrats who didn't like that it did away with straight ticket voting. Even in 2020, when the pandemic first hit and states were changing their laws, there was no clear partisan angle. The idea that the 2020 election was somehow affected by last-minute changes is one of the most pervasive pieces of misinformation out there, because it has enough of a grain of truth in it to make people accept it uncritically without considering the full implications. Yes, some states made last-minute changes to their laws. But the states that were at issue in the presidential election had already passed mail-in voting laws prior to the pandemic, and, other than Pennsylvania, had already conducted elections by mail. Some states changed the rules in 2020, but several of them did so through legislative action, which is no different than how laws are ordinarily passed. That leaves the states where mail voting was expanded by executive action, whether by the governor or the state board of elections. What states were these? Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, New Hampshire, and West Virginia. The only one of those that is close to being a swing state is New Hampshire, and it has a Republican governor. Kentucky has a Democratic governor, but no one is confusing it for a blue state. The rest are all as deep red as you can get. The point is that, as late as the spring of 2020, a lot of Republicans though expanding mail voting on short notice was a good idea. Then as soon as Trump starts running his mouth in the summer, every Republican who matters falls in line and talks about how this is suddenly a great security risk, as though The Donald was the only one wise enough to notice these problems. Sorry if I don't buy it.
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I didn't vote for trump and was happy with the 2020 outcome...
This was the first time such a system was used. There was good reason for doing so (covid) but I can understand people being critical of it. Immediately labeling it bad faith is unhelpful. Doing things like censoring statement comparisons from the 2016 and 2020 elections, makes me think they might have a point.
This kind of hubris is going to cost us another election.
I wonder if there is anyone who voted for Biden but thinks the election was stolen against trump
What would this prove aside from the existence of echo chambers?
How about actually engaging with the points someone is trying to make?
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There have been multiple polls by Rasmussen (and others) who identify something like 30%+ of registered Democrats who answered "It's likely" to the statement "How likely is it that cheating by corrupt public officials prevented Trump from winning the Georgia election in 2020?" over the last few years (geez, it's already been almost 3 years since the 2020 election).
So, there are likely lots of people who voted for Biden who think the election was "stolen," i.e., that corruption/fraud/illegal ballots affected the outcome of the Presidential election in 2020.
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I voted Biden, and while I don’t think the election was necessarily stolen, I do think the methods used in 2020 in particular make it insecure and therefore making fraud almost impossible to detect. And no democracy can survive if you have a method of voting where you cannot be sure that the results are real. I’m not going to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist.
A method that doesn’t allow for cross checking and auditing is simply not one that the public can trust completely.
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Statistically, that person is present among every noticeably large gathering of minorities.
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Actual neo-nazis probably fit the bill weirdly enough. Like that one guy recently interviewed that fought for Azov and voted Biden to support Ukraine.
Come to think of it, a lot of hardcore Marxists probably qualify as well.
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I voted for Biden, but it was a close decision and one I now regret (even though I live in a state where my vote wouldn't have made a difference). I think it's more likely than not that the election wasn't stolen, but I'm not willing to dismiss the possibility out of hand, especially because Democrats consistently oppose efforts to make elections more secure, such as requiring ID or forbidding others from mailing in your mail-in ballot.
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I don't have strong feelings about the result of the election (I'm not even American and I detest Trump) and I have long been a strong opponent of mail-in ballots, going back before Trump got into politics. The whole design of the voting system, from the rules against campaigning near where people are voting to the fact that you fill in the ballot out of others' view and you're prohibited from photographing your ballot, is to ensure that you can't prove to anyone who you voted for so that your vote cannot be bought or coerced. This is all thrown away by mail-in ballots.
This is a widely held position. My parents, who hate Trump and think he's a fascist who is trying to become a dictator and that January 6 was an attempted coup, strongly feel the same way.
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Thankfully, this is not the argument. The argument is that mail-in voting plus ballot harvesting makes it possible to engineer votes on a mass scale, after which there is no possible way to determine legitimate from illegitimate.
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This is so comically wrong that I do not think you have an accurate understanding of Trump or the resentment that he rode to the white house. A large portion of his base supported him because of his policies and they had legitimate reasons to do so. They continued to support him despite many of those policies not being implemented because they (correctly) saw that his efforts were being stymied by the GOP establishment, bureaucratic inertia and the machinations/conspiracies of the deep state (this is not actually controvertible given the text messages and statements that have been made public). Mass illegal immigration, lack of enforcement or punishment for gross financial crimes, encouragement of outsourcing - one of the huge predictors of Trump support is if you belong to the demographics that were actually harmed by these things which he swore black and blue to fight against.
If you're interested in an article on this, I highly recommend https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/
It wasn't a shared delusion - Trump, if he wasn't hindered, would absolutely have made things substantially worse for the people who were in power. The policies him and his base wanted to enact would have been substantially better for the country as a whole (at least in my opinion), but substantially worse for the people who were in power. There was a lot of money to be made selling influence and favourable policies to the uber-rich, and Trump would have destroyed huge swathes of that system if he was successful. The people working so hard to defeat Trump were only doing so to preserve "democracy" in the sense that they understood democracy to be rule (and of course a constant flow of money and luxuries to them personally) by the PMC.
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I have no doubt that democrats would have done something unseemly had trump won in 2020, and I’m open to arguments that they won by cheating, but the fact of the matter is that there is no evidence of democrats having tried anything like changing the actual vote totals or storming the capitol building, and that 2020 faithless electors were all protest votes anyways(nobody thought ‘faith spotted eagle’ would be the next president of the USA).
Look, the breakdown in civil norms and loss of public neutrality and inferno-like culture wars are like 85-90% the fault of the democrats, let’s not blame them for things they didn’t do(and which didn’t happen either).
Why should storming the capital building be any different than when rioters stormed the White House?
People constantly try to paint the Jan 6 protest as something extraordinary, when it was just the right wing seeing what the left had been doing for the past four years and deciding to use a tool that apparently works.
Don't blame the protestors for assuming good faith and not realizing that left-wing protests were being sponsored and applauded by the various institutions kicking around.
I agree that rioters in general (and those rioters in particular) should be punished much more harshly than they have been, but there is a distinction to be made with Jan 6. In the case of Tarrio in particular, he didn't even storm the capital! But he did engage in a seditious conspiracy to overturn the election, and that's what he copped the 22 year sentence for.
The BLM riots, bad though they were, were not the exact same flavour of bad.
I await with bated breath the Russia-gaters and 2016 faithless electors getting 22+ year sentences then.
‘Lying about your political enemies’ and ‘casting foreseeably meaningless protest votes in a way that is specifically foreseen by the constitution’ are not the same thing as interrupting official proceedings while making terroristic threats(which the J6er’s did, they were chanting ‘hang Mike pence’).
Yes, there’s too much focus on J6 and ‘our democracy’. But dissimilar things are dissimilar.
Yes, I should stop getting into specific comparisons because we have many resident lawyers who will gish gallop around with liberal § characters proving that case A is never exactly like case B. And they’re probably right but I simply don’t care. I have eyes that can see that the law is applied unequally and in one direction more often than not. So whatever § says is irrelevant to me because I view it as illegitimate.
There’s no correcting this within the bounds of “the law” because anything approaching effective dissent is functionally illegal, so I won’t pretend to care about the minutiae of “the law”.
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I'm afraid "hang Mike Pence" is simply shorthand for "put Mike Pence on trial for a capital crime and execute him by hanging", so it's not a terroristic threat? Ridiculous? Sure. But no more ridiculous than claiming ordinary hyperbolic political chants are "terroristic threats". BLM protestors famously chanted "Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon", referring to police and not S. domesticus, and while distasteful that clearly wasn't a terroristic threat either.
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There you go again - focusing exclusively on elements of an offence and acting like that's the offence in its entirety.
Let's get into the detail. Tarrio was found guilty of seditious conspiracy, 18 USC 2384, which says:
So let's apply this to the 2016 faithless electors. Can we convict them of the same crime?
Two or more persons conspire? Yep, that threshold was met. They agreed on the scheme, and committed overt acts in the furtherance thereof.
In any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States? Definitely.
Conspire to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the Government of the United States? Nope.
By force prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States? Nope.
By force seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof? Nope.
Similarly, the Russiagaters do not fall foul of this statute.
So, whatever crimes they may have committed, they were not the same ones as Tarrio, and there is no reason to expect them to attract the same sentence - leaving aside that there are many reasons why two people convicted of the same offence may be subject to different sentences anyway.
They will not attract any sentence. That’s the whole point.
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Protest votes that would foreseeably do nothing except draw attention to some Native American activist and telling political lies are not the same thing.
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(1) Lying to create "Russia-gate," including lying to FISA courts in order to ensure that Trump campaign officials' phones were being tapped.
(2) Impeaching Trump over his attempt to investigate what we now know was actual quid-pro-quo corruption in which Ukranian oligarchs paid Joe Biden's son to have Joe Biden leverage U.S. foreign policy to prevent their prosecution.
(3) Rioting outside the White House including setting the next-door church on fire.
(4) Organizing 51 intelligence officials to falsely claim that the Hunter Biden laptop - which the FBI had possessed for over a year previously and knew to be genuine - "bore all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation" in a successful attempt to interfere in the 2020 election.
(5) Organizing social media censorship of stories connected to the Hunter Biden laptop.
and, actually most importantly for the 2020 election:
(6) funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars in ostensible "COVID-relief funds" through private donors to election officials in Democratic-controlled swing-counties, who then proceeded to use almost none of the funds for COVID-relief purposes, and instead used it to hire Democratic activists to run partisan get-out-the-vote operations, and in some cases effectively privatize the actual conduct of the elections themselves:
Hemingway, "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections," Ch. 7
The quote from Hemingway is referring to work done by the FGA (link to all their "Zuckerbucks" pieces here, which if you look at the website, appears to be one of those dime-a-dozen orgs that just spits out low quality research, infographics, and political talking points (thinly disguised if not actual PACs).
And let me tell you, that quoted conclusion of yours insinuating a causal or even a loose mere correlation in Georgia between Zuckerbucks and Democratic vote counts is an absolutely atrocious case of statistical malpractice. Any real statistician looking at the data (if they even felt this approach was even capable of yielding a real/practical/trustworthy answer, which they likely wouldn't) would say that those kind of margins don't even begin to approach statistical significance. The original source is here, and maybe if I'm feeling spicy I will analyze it tomorrow properly to check, but right now my alarm bells are ringing. I'm pretty tired atm, so I might be wrong, but I think 41 counties getting money vs 118 not is going to have a detectable difference required that's much more than 2.3 points with any sort of decent statistical power.
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The suppression of the Hunter Biden story and the plans outlined in in the TIME Magazine article show that the blob doesn't need to stuff ballots or change totals; they have (had?) enough power over the inputs to the voting system that such crass measures were unnecessary.
I recall reading a study which claimed that the (knowingly deceptive!) suppression of the Biden laptop story changed the outcome of the election. I don't think many people who say the election was rigged are talking about that specifically, but it absolutely was a relevant factor. At the same time, I think the accusations of rigged are going to come back in force given the blatantly political prosecutions with dates chosen specifically to interfere with his election campaign.
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So like Barack Obama in 2008? Or 2012? (when Democrats worried absentee voting would drive old-people votes which harmed them). Or Trump whining about it for months before the election as the scheme was being ramped up by executive fiat in explicit contravention to election laws across dozens of states? There are dozens of high profile examples over the last 2 decades and sooner who have discussed the inherent flaws in mail-in voting and how they're prone to fraud and coercion, part of the reason being the lack of secrecy which makes buying votes more feasible because the person can pay you as they take your ballot, verify what it says, and then give you your $50 target gift-card.
Each time mail-in or absentee voting legislation has been passed, this was discussed repeatedly with additional security requirements and conditions because of those concerns. 2020 saw mail-in voting explode in usage while at the same time most anti-fraud checks were ignored.
It's honestly pretty puzzling you're unaware of any of this.
No one is arguing mail-in voting is inherently "unconstitutional." What people are arguing is the fraud which was enabled by illegal election law changes (which is unconstitutional) and simply ignoring anti-fraud requirements, including the mail-in scheme, made it so the election outcome was legitimately in doubt, the only practical available remedy being a redo. The way elections are conducted in the US make them not meaningfully auditable even if all players didn't fight tooth-and-nail to restrict transparency.
We're not talking about millions of votes needing to swap, but ~40,000 in any of 5 different states, any of which would change the outcome if a single one did something as simple as requiring canvassing hundreds of thousands of votes which had no signed chain of custody receipts (and no election officials have yet been charged despite this being a crime in multiple states like AZ).
If two people raced bikes all over France and then the loser tested positive for PEDs, do you think they should both get a do-over race or otherwise we're not talking about "principles"?
edit: you added the entire last paragraph and maybe some other changes after others had responded
So the protests in Arizona over that "election" and large ongoing legal battle over it just don't count?
The Federal Government is currently abusing laws made 150 years ago in response to the Civil War as well as stretching interpretation of other laws way past their breaking point in front of laughably biased "judges" and juries, to find and throw people in jail for a protest in DC in Jan 2021 in response to the election of 2020, and your response is because they don't come out in large numbers again after all of these people are having their lives destroyed and made examples of, is because they just don't care? Well, that's certainly something.
Do you follow election disputes/protests over "local judges and clerks," closely?
Well, at least you got in your jab to make this about trump and how he's just the worst or whatever.
To take your arguments one by one:
I don't remember this. I do remember some kerfuffle where the Obama campaign sued Ohio because they passed a law giving the military three extra early voting days, and the conservative media tried to spin it as him trying to restrict military votes when the lawsuit sought to give the rest of the population the same early voting window as the military. Obama's been pretty consistent about "more voting, not less".
I clearly limited my argument to before 2020. And the states that ramped up mail-in voting by executive fiat weren't ones that were at issue in the 2020 election. Only 5 states changed absentee voting requirements through executive action—less than half a dozen, not dozens—and among them, three are clearly red states controlled by Republicans (Alabama, Arkansas, and West Virginia), one (Kentucky) is a red state with a Democratic governor, and one (New Hampshire) is left-leaning with a Republican governor. There was no clear liberal pattern here.
I don't know about dozens, but I'll admit there are a few. But I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove. Everything involves tradeoffs. Suppose, for the sake of argument, it were conclusively proven that voter fraud could be eliminated entirely if we limited voting to polling places in major cities. The ultimate effect of this, of course, would be that the rural vote would be rendered entirely irrelevant and elections would have a decidedly partisan lean, probably to the point that our politics would realign entirely. If these now disenfranchised voters complained, I'd respond that people who find it too inconvenient to drive a couple hours to vote obviously aren't motivated enough to deserve any say in government, and people who can't afford the trip obviously don't have enough "skin in the game" to deserve a say in government. If the primary goal is the elimination of fraud, why wouldn't this be an ideal solution? We both know the answer to this question. The question isn't whether fraud exists, it's whether it has enough of a practical effect to make additional restrictions worthwhile.
No, it wasn't. I live in Pennsylvania. When mail-in voting passed in 2019 the biggest issue about the bill was that it also eliminated the straight ticket option, which led to some Democrats voting against it in protest. It otherwise passed unanimously, and was quickly signed by the governor. Every single Republican voted for it, including arch-election truthers like Doug Mastriano. I'm sure you can find some concerns if you look hard enough, but as someone who lived in the state, I don't recall it coming up once, and this is a politically diverse state with the largest legislature in the country. Similarly, in Michigan, the biggest criticism of Prop 3 wasn't that it expanded mail-in voting but that it was making something that should have been a legislative item into a constitutional one.
I was writing this on my phone at work so I apologize. The OP said that it "violates every principle of Democracy", which I misinterpreted. Feel free to substitute the correct language.
Well, no. Flipping one state wouldn't have been enough to turn the election in favor of Trump. At best he would have needed to flip two, provided they were Michigan and Pennsylvania. Realistically he needs to flip three. And if he goes the flip 2 route then he needs about 80,000 votes in PA and over 100,000 in MI, at least double the 40,000 you mentioned. What's the largest mail vote fraud scheme you can find? How about the average? Remember what I said about tradeoffs?
Ah, yes, the old "the previous five audits we requested didn't find anything, but if we do a sixth one we're pretty sure the whole edifice will come crashing down because a televangelist saw something in a viral video that PROVES that Biden and the Democrats committed MASSIVE FRAUD by forging hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots under the cover of night but being too dumb to think of forging chain of custody receipts along with them". I'm sure the Kraken will finally be unleashed.
Are the PEDs supposed to be a stand-in for fraud, or for mail-in ballots generally? If they're a stand-in for mail-ins generally, then they aren't a banned substance and there's no problem; you can't claim a race was unfair just because you don't like the rules. If they're a stand-in for fraud, then you do get to win the race, but I don't see what this has to do with the election—in one case you found actual evidence of cheating, and in the other you didn't, you just argued that the rules made it easier to cheat. What you're suggesting is more analogous to a race where PEDs are banned and your opponent never tested positive, but you want to rerun the race because you're pretty sure he cheated but can't actually prove it.
Well, what do you think a more appropriate charge would have been. If organizing a plot to take over the Capitol building in order to prevent the lawful transfer of power of a democratically elected president so that it will remain in the hands of the guy who lost isn't seditious conspiracy, what is exactly? What line do you think he needs to cross? And how is the jury biased? Unless you're arguing that he didn't actually do what the government said he did, there's no room for bias here. Jury nullification isn't something you can expect from any jury, and isn't something you should expect in this case unless you seriously think attempts to overthrow the government should be legal.
lol, I'm a lawyer. I deal with these people all the time, and yes, it makes a difference. I not only follow them closely, I follow them closely in counties and even states where I don't live and can't vote. If you want I can fill you in on the drama in West Virginia's First Circuit judicial retention election, or tell you about the recurring pissing match between the current and former Recorders of Deeds in Westmoreland County, PA.
others have linked plenty evidence disproving your claim that few cared about mail-in voting and how it's prone to fraud and coercion (secret ballot being part of it) before 2020
it's supposed to prove that people, including GOP, cared about this topic before Trump lost in 2020, the implication and claim of your comment
then this is a weird comment because your implication is Trump/supporters care because he lost, but Trump didn't lose in April of 2020 so bringing up examples of people caring before Trump lost would be pertinent to that implication
are you using "mail-in" and "absentee" interchangeably here? various states do not use this interchangeably, but in any case this is simply wrong with an easy example being WI changed the interpretation of who could register and vote absentee based on a claim of "indefinite confinement" with the WI SOS giving illegal guidance about that topic
there are more examples but this isn't really my argument anyway; my comment isn't that Trump complained about "mail-in" only was ramped up, but about the "scheme," i.e., who could apply for ballots, how they would be sent out, how requests would be sent out, how they could be collected, who could collect them, how those requirements would be used, how they would be filtered, how signatures would be compared, etc.
You have lots of opinions and assertions about what PA is like given you live there, but when I spend effort looking at those assertions, what I find disputes your claim which makes me hesitant to bother again. Others have provided many examples of people, GOP included, complaining about how mail-in ballots are prone to fraud, coercion, and manipulation before 2020, so whether or not "every" time it's brought up it leads to a loud enough complaint for you to hear about it doesn't particularly affect that belief.
Given the clown-show that is election procedures in various parts of PA, I would agree maybe the increased fraud caused by mail-in ballots doesn't particularly matter and eliminating the straight ticket could affect more.
Yes, that's a good point. If Trump had flipped one state, I believe the other 1 or 2 would have followed which is why there was such a mobilization to prevent even one from flipping. Perhaps that's not the case.
the "fraud," i.e., illegal ballots which were counted, in AZ, GA, WI, NV, were all larger than the difference in votes with PA being likely and MI being arguable but probably not; um, 10 illegal ballots on average, now what?; I did read and reply to your paragraph about tradeoffs
funny enough, the fraud scheme KRAKEN you think is so ridiculous also wouldn't be found by any of the "five audits" which you apparently think show no fraud occurred
or did you just not know how the "audits" were conducted? ballot recounts wouldn't catch your KRAKEN scenario
what I'm suggesting is the argument of the people you're accusing of not caring about principles; those people believe they did find fraud
claiming there wasn't fraud/cheating/peds is fine, but then you're arguing over facts and not principles
me too
I must be missing something, what part of being a lawyer means you necessarily follow election disputes over "local judges and clerks" around the country? This requirement was probably on that one day I missed in 1L Civ Pro.
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Hold on. I grew up in Oregon, they have had mail in ballots for a very long time, and nothing yet has surfaced as a problem despite this worry of yours that vote-buying is possible.
I’m of the school of thought that the system is responsive enough that we can actually wait, yes actually wait until we start to see hints of an actual problem before taking action. Otherwise just let things take their normal course, that has a long history of decently functioning checks and balances.
That system, which involves judges sometimes making calls in cases that don’t allow for the full regular process to play out, due to time constraints and the nature of a national emergency, is a fine way to resolve things. Sometimes I think a few judges overstepped. That’s not okay to be upset about, but it’s also normal. Nothing was diabolical about it. And in fact despite the so-called massive weaknesses of how things played out, practically zero evidence of fraud showed up to court. Due process after the fact was followed, and that due process determined that most every allegation was either worthless or unsubstantiated.
Moreover, guess what? People in every state are still armed with democracy even now. Many but not all states have reverted parts of their covid changes. And in all states, if voters want to “tighten” (quote marks because it’s a misnomer, IMO) voting laws, they are perfectly free to vote to that effect and elect representatives who share their views to make or revert changes moving forward.
Classic example is Raffensburger in Georgia. Voters re-elected him with a significant margin. In other words, The People we’re perfectly happy with how the process went.
I didn't write this was only a "worry" about "vote-buying." The "worry" of others I described was how mail-in ballots are far more prone to various types of fraud and other concerns, one of which was "vote buying" tying the comment into the above about the importance of secret ballots in "democracy"; whether or not this is done through "vote-buying," isn't necessary, but there are more than enough "hints" of this happening with the target gift-card description not being something I made up but something which was alleged to have happened in Las Vegas, Nevada. The affidavit of which was collected as part of a filed election lawsuit.
How would you know whether or not these "checks and balances," are decently functioning? What do you think are the current "checks and balances"? Could you describe to us the apparatus which investigates this in Oregon? Could you detail for us some of the investigations they've done in Oregon? Do you know which, if any, of these "decently functioning checks and balances," were discarded or ignored in Oregon in the last few elections?
What is your level of knowledge about how the election system, i.e., registering, printing, sending, collecting, counting, canvassing, etc., for the state of Oregon?
dozens of binders of sworn affidavits showed up to court in many states, but those affidavits and lawsuits weren't heard on the merits
and the "process," wasn't followed either, with an easy example being the district court responsible for expedited process in the Trump's filed election contest simply refusing to start the process, an appeals court dragging their feet and refusing to make the district court do the process, and then that lower court declaring the whole thing was moot because of Jan 6
Did you know that?
You keep using this word "due process," but what does it mean to you? "Due process" doesn't necessarily determine something on the merits, so making a statement about evidence which exists and was determined by a court to be "worthless or unsubstantiated" is simply wrong and evidences a lack of knowledge about this topic.
In the above example, the explicit process wasn't followed. So was that the "due" process? Or does it just not matter because Raffensberger was elected a year later anyway?
First, your specific reference to a Las Vegas lawsuit, as near I can tell, does not exist. There was this story? If that's it, the fact you are misremembering specifics that do not exist is concerning. If you mean that story, it was about a GOTV effort that offered a raffle entry to Native Americans for voting (only illegal if proof of voting is required to enter the raffle, something the news story doesn't really address) and perhaps gave gas cards to voters who were in remote locations (apparently, legal if the gas cards are used to go to the polls, so that one might be a question mark).
If vote buying actually occurred, much less if it occurred on a scale needed to actually tip an election, we would know about it. Conspiracies are easy to hide for a few people, for a few isolated cases. Conspiracies that are capable of actually tipping an election? Practically zero chance they are undiscovered.
As to the history of how the balances work: a simple google will lead you to the Oregon SoS page which will tell you:
So clearly they are on the lookout but consistently don't find much. Going farther back? "[T]he Division obtained 38 criminal convictions for voter fraud out of the 60.9 million ballots in Oregon elections cast over a 19-year period". Oregon has an extensive and well-tested system of voting by mail with very little history of issues of nearly any kind and nothing I have ever seen gives me any reason to think otherwise.
As to the legal process. Maybe you don't know how courts work? I am starting to genuinely wonder. Sometimes, a lawsuit is filed, and it's so obviously false, unsupported, or has such a disproportionate ask (or of course lack of standing/wrong jurisdiction) that a court declines to even consider it. This is not a random gut decision but a process involving often multiple hearings and submissions from lawyers. In these cases, even though nothing is publicly examined and goes through some sort of trial-like process, the judges certainly look at and study the submissions they receive. They then evaluate the submission on its merits. News organizations as well as citizens kept a close eye on these and virtually none of them panned out -- and huge majorities of people actually in the know and experts on election processes, when they actually examined these affidavits, almost always found them to be poorly researched, based on hearsay only, misunderstandings of legitimate vote counting processes, etc. All this to say, it's certainly due diligence (due process, if you want to get real technical, is a more specific term about individual rights, but I'm using it in the broadly acceptable and widely used sense of "to fully and fairly traverse the full normal procedures").
There's basically a mountain of reasons to believe that by and large the voting system works pretty darn well, and by that token I refuse to be drawn in to some off-topic epistemic debate. The whole thing just frankly reeks of cognitive distortion and confirmation bias on a massive national scale. That's why Trump never actually settles on a single list of reasons why the election was "rigged", because it wasn't evidence -> conclusion, it was "I feel like I won" -> "let's seize and publicly endorse any and all claims that match but the specifics don't matter because I am so sure I won"
No. You get a target gift-card if you allow your ballot to be collected.
If only this were true, but it's not "hidden" you just didn't know about it.
Does this webpage constitute your understanding of all the questions I asked? If so, this doesn't inspire confidence you have any granular knowledge about these topics at all; In the few states I've worked politics in (not Oregon), the SoS/AG and other parts of the government do not have a good apparatus to catch voter fraud; they essentially just rely on local election officials to report things and they sometimes look into a few of them to make a show of it. Local election officials are not equipped to catch voter fraud; they rely on the legal requirements as to what constitutes a "legal ballot" to fight fraud. If those requirements are removed or simply ignored (as happened en mass in 2020), then you have destroyed the "checks and balances" you claim work well because they were ignored and not enforced.
Courts didn't throw these lawsuits and contests out because they entirely lacked merit, but for lack of standing, mootness, etc. Lack of standing doesn't have to do merits of any particular substantive case, it's something which was dreamed up 100 years ago to enable courts to simply refuse to get involved. Mootness has to do with the wanted remedy being now impossible or the underlying conflict not mattering anymore. In some election cases such as the election contest in Georgia, it's because the lower court flat out refused to schedule a hearing despite it being required, by law, for them to do just that, and then once Jan6-20 rolled around they simply declared the contest moot anyway and discarded the case.
Judges and clerks do regularly look at the "merit" part of cases even when they dispose of them for the reasons I described above, however, that doesn't mean they "found" them to be lacking or however else you characterized it. In normal cases, this typically does influence judges into massaging or overlooking procedural errors. In a case like the election lawsuits and contests for an institutionally disliked President to "overturn an election," the strength of the merits has an inverse effect because Courts were desperate to simply not be involved. Again, Trump's GA election contest is a good example.
Given a situation where a litigant shows up to court with a lawsuit, the court tells them they're not the proper party to file the lawsuit, and doesn't allow them to present any substantive evidence in court, implying the underlying evidence is garbage because it "practically zero evidence showed up in court" is simply dishonest. There was a ton of "hints," and a ton of evidence, but the fact none of it "showed up in court" is a condemnation of the legal system and not a defense of it.
that's not what "due process" means, especially "substantive" due process, and again, I specifically cited a case which didn't "fully and fairly traverse the full normal procedures"
when you use statements like these in direct connection to legal arguments, using a vernacular or general definition of "due" "process" is going to confuse who expect the word to be used in the legal definition (whose implication you're using to give more weight to your assertion)
"huge majorities" huh? How would you know? Have you looked at a single one?
even if one were to believe this is true, and it is sadly not if you understand how elections happen and votes are counted in the real world in districts all over the country, the voting system "working pretty darn well" and still having enough failure modes to sway the results of very close elections, e.g., when the highest office in the land is decided on tens of thousands of votes across 5 states
refereeing in a football game can be pretty good generally, but one wrong call can decide the outcome of a game
your comments avoid specifics and want to talk about generalities and imply because of those generalities that the specifics don't particularly matter on net
and I think it's because you don't really know any of the specifics about the vote process, the vote counting, the fraud allegations, the filed election contests, the filed lawsuits, etc., you just sort of have a good feeling about it therefore people are wrong or something and I do not think proving any particular specific thing is going to dislodge this belief in you
is that accurate? What type and amount of evidence do you think would change your mind from "everythingisfine" to "maybe I don't know if it is"?
I looked at a non random but still what seemed to be adequate sampling of the actual court cases within a month or two or the election and in pretty much every case, saw nothing at all to indicate extensive fraud. This includes not just the allegations but also looking into the actual comments and rulings by judges in some of these cases. I did see a lot of fraud claims simultaneously disproved. Based on that sampling I concluded that the process seemed to be working just fine. Obviously it’s been a while and I feel little need to revisit that, especially given that every specific brought up in this site so far over the past few months when it’s come up has turned out to be hogwash. Classic example: this supposed target gift card scam. I can’t find anything at all about it on Google. Zero. And the fact that you still declined to provide a source is absolutely screaming at me.
Also, precedent beats speculation. We do have a great precedent for a disputed election! Bush vs Gore. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. I know people have mixed feelings about the results, but the very fact that a legitimate grievance went through the full process, strongly implies that the same will happen again to future legitimate cases. And that was escalated from a state, Florida, that was horrifically unprepared for a recount and had poor procedures in place. So not only have we a demonstrated court escalation even when local government process is poor, we have a lot of other states that took lessons and tightened things up in terms of more and better written and followed procedures and many other improvements.
Meanwhile a lot of the 2020 lawsuits had trouble finding lawyers to pursue them, much less expert witnesses who declined to participate in droves once they saw the “evidence”.
You looked at Trump's GA election contest, which I specifically mentioned 4 times now and you've seen no evidence of any fraud? It was filed "within a month or two" of the election, but you decided to avoid the election contests filed by the Trump campaign by lawyers representing Trump and the campaign? Gosh, if only I specifically linked this case, the one I've talked about 4 or 5 times, you'll read it then, huh?
Let's say I give you a link to the exact sworn affidavit where a person describes offering people at their apartment complex target gift-cards for unenveloped ballots, what will that change? If you're honest with yourself, it will change nothing and you'll have the same opinion as before just perhaps a slight admission of "okay there was vote-buying/fraud, but not enough to change the outcome and it's just this one incident" which is the motte and bailey game which is normally played here.
I've found people who write comments like yours who are unwilling to do the legwork and want to pick out one example, demand it be spoonfed linked to them, ignore other examples they could also easily find, and in the end they don't really care about the specific incident anyway. Again, there are thousands of affidavits attesting to "fraud" across the country. Have you read a single one?
yeah? could you go ahead and describe the context of the lawsuit, who sued whom, what it was specifically over, what they sued for, what was done at the lower court level, and the issue which went up and down and up again?was it an election contest or not?
did the lower Florida court simply refuse to schedule the first hearing to start the process, i.e., specifically denying the process to the party filing?
the truth is you simply do not have granular knowledge about these topics or lawsuits
You can go watch the disbarment hearing going on right now, live, for one of Trump's attorneys John Eastmen to maybe understand part of the reason why this is the case; you can even watch his first witness, retired Supreme Court of Wisconsin judge, Michael Gableman give you a detailed account of what he found in his independent investigation authorized by the Wisconsin legislature into the 2020 election.
Enjoy!
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I'd like to call this the "Just Democracy Fallacy": if politicians win an election, whatever they do must be what the people wanted.
A guy with the job to count votes comes under national scrutiny for if he counted them well or not. He's very publicly accused of counting them badly. He is up for reelection, now a known quantity to voters, and they can ditch him for someone who also claims he counted votes badly. He is chosen by a significant margin. The assumption is, therefore, that voters must agree that he actually counted just fine. That's a fair conclusion, given how public the whole process was and the wide news coverage.
In other words, I'm claiming the opposite: if a politician does something very public and very controversial, and then afterwards is reelected, then YES, the people either agree with the controversial thing or think it wasn't that big of a deal.
Don't forget that Brian Kemp's daughter's fiance died in a car bomb. Anyways, under the Just Democracy Fallacy, because Brian Kemp beat his primary and general opponents, this must mean voters agreed with everything he ever did.
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Being fair to the argument though, we’ve never ever come close to this scale of mail-in ballots, many of them actually turned in by third parties, many of them from people who had just signed up to vote that year. There was little if any vetting of who was voting, whether they’d already voted in person, whether this person lived at the address in question (some states simply mass sent ballots to addresses of known voters and there are numerous reports of people receiving an official ballot for people who no longer lived at that address) whether this person was legally able to vote, was of sound mind, and so on. Even if those ballots happened to just go to eligible voters, there was little done in most areas to confirm that the person who filled out the ballot was actually the person it was sent to.
With that level of not caring, the optimal move is to collect the ballots sent to hospitals and nursing homes where you can get hundreds of “valid” ballots sent to people who are incapable of voting. Nobody will check to see if the person should be voting, nor that the signature matches the handwriting of a 90 year old woman. Or you could offer to send on missent ballots to the right addresses (and then simply vote yourself.
In most other elections, the process for mail in voting was extremely limited. You had to apply at least 90 days before the election, you had to provide a reason why you can’t vote in person, and provide proof that you are who you say you are. And once the ballot was sent in, it was matched to your signature. If it didn’t match, the vote didn’t count.
I think the issue needs to be addressed simply because it’s a way to game the system. It can be used but it needs to be secure enough that both the government and the public can be sure that those votes came from the people who’s name is on the ballot, that the person is actually eligible to vote, and those people only voted one time.
Moving forward, yes I think it’s great to make some adjustments.
But looking backward, it is grossly insufficient to just point out theoretical or principle based concerns. You need at least some actual evidence. To my knowledge, very little if any evidence suggests that the theoretical vulnerabilities you list actually were abused.
Plus let’s assume maybe not a worst case but a bad case: that a lot of old people had people vote for them because of mail ballots. Of course that’s bad in general terms and in principle. Statistically, talking about the effect, that’s still not much of an issue though because non-coordinated fraud tends to average out, quite frankly, and it’s hard to conceive of reasonable mathematical margins that would plausibly have swung the national vote using that kind of casual fraud alone.
The issue is that once you remove the security around the process, catching a cheat becomes very difficult. If I’m not allowed to insist that the signature on the ballot match the one on file, proving that this ballot isn’t cast by the person in question is very difficult. The only evidence available is the signature on the ballot and maybe the return address (which is stupidly easy to fake since it’s public record). Unless this person happens to turn up at a polling station unaware that there’s been a ballot cast in his name, what kind of evidence is there? To my mind this is like having a store that doesn’t track inventory, have cameras, or lock doors — then insisting that I provide proof of theft. But all the things that could be used to prove theft don’t exist. The doors are unlocked, so there won’t be evidence of a break-in. There are no cameras or staff to see someone taking things. And because there’s no inventory record, we can’t check to see whether anything is missing. Once you remove all the security, proving fraud is impossible.
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How does it make you feel that, on election night 2020, several swing states simultaneously stopped counting ballots? How does it make you feel that Stacey Abrams and Georgia Relublicans signed a "consent decree" so that they literally would not collect the kind of evidence we might consider? How do you feel about ballot chain of custody?
Election night is long and pauses in the pace of reporting those results isn't that odd. AFAIK, pretty much all the states counted continuously after starting the process, and did not takes breaks (example). In other words, that's a false claim.
The consent decree didn't lead to any substantive change in policies other than notification about signature matching, and I'm not concerned overmuch about chain of custody in the sense that people can often look and see if their ballot was accepted, plus any deliberate vote-changing associated with those concerns sound wildly implausible. In terms of ballot harvesting, etc. I definitely think there's some good room for stricter laws, though I don't necessarily think for example we need to be too worried about family or close friends agreeing to physically drop off sealed ballots at drop spots as a convenience thing. Campaign affiliated people doing it as some sort of service? Bad. Generic GOTV for example making it easier for seniors to vote? I think that's fine but could use a bit of supervision or auditing or something to avoid abuse, but possibly fine.
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