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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!
Dude. LMGTFY link... I can't find anything. I'm like 5 pages in. I LITERALLY CANNOT find the claim, and suspect you can't either, or else you would have given me a link. Instead you perform a CLASSIC gish-gallop, throwing out a ton of detailed questions and zero actual answers nor any actual claims. I decide to call you out on one specific piece of bullshit and you dodge the question.
You know what I DO see? Articles like this that cite some of these affidavits. They are poor quality. Misunderstandings of proper procedures, claims that poll workers were grumpy with observers, even one that talks about how he just can't believe so many military members voted Biden. Seriously? What else do I see? Oh yes, an example of a judge who looked at evidence directly in Michigan and called it "generalized speculation" and "simply not credible". You have a great article here that also mentions some of these allegations. And this is only one example of many. For example:
This is not only NOT evidence ("I heard someone else say...") but this claim is literally impossible and has been proven false. These are the kinds of allegations we are talking about. There were dozens of lawsuits and rather than instantly suspect some sort of conspiracy among both GOP and DNC nominated judges alike, doesn't it sound much more likely that there's just nothing there? I strongly suspect that this likely nonexistent Target gift card buying falls under this category: "I was talking with my neighbor and HE said that someone offered him a gift card to vote" is very different than "I had a man knock on my door and offer me a gift card for my ballot, which I reported to the police and there is a paper trail proving it". Organized door canvassing is very obvious and that kind of vote-buying is very blatant. I find it extremely unlikely that such an effort occurred on any sort of scale undetected beyond a single affidavit.
You accuse "commenters like me" of moving goalposts or playing a motte-and-bailey game, but I could just as easily (and supported by evidence galore) say that the theories of how fraud happened are far worse offenders. What exact fraud occurred? Was it coordinated? Was it widespread? Please answer clearly. Bonus points for having the same opinion back in 2020, unchanged.
You want a specific claim? I claim, and practically everything seems to back this up, that 1) no deliberate county or larger scale coordinated efforts exist to fraudulently manipulate either vote totals or ballots, 2) that any fraud that did occur was both sporadic and unfocused in nature, and 3) occurred in roughly comparable scales to decades long precedent for electoral fraud, perhaps with a very modest allowance for Covid complications independent of the actual people on the ballot. I think that captures at least the gist of it. Notice the scale component. It matters. It's not just some motte-and-bailey, it's literally the criteria for determining how much we should care both as individuals, societies, and government bodies about fraud!! I of course support prosecuting individuals if it has any material deterrent effect, and increasing election funding and transparency, but otherwise why bother fighting a problem that doesn't really matter?
I do love that you provided a lone example, the Gableman report. I assume it's this one?. The one that recommends decertification of the results, which is both meaningless grandstanding from a practical standpoint and agreed by virtually everyone to be specifically illegal and unconstitutional? That aside, of course there are some good suggestions and some bad ones too that I do hope the legislature discusses, but most of them are process-oriented. In terms of content the report appears to focus on some Zuckerberg money that was sent to some counties to improve their election processes and help with extra covid costs. Which... well you might feel that it was bad, but the so-called statistical reasoning that appeared elsewhere in the thread about its supposed impact on vote turnout looks highly suspect to me. And more importantly a Bush-nominated judge explicitly allowed the money, which was upheld on appeal. So basically the process was followed just fine. Yes, I do read primary sources where practical and needed, thank you very much. And it's also... not even a fraud allegation, no vote counts nor ballots were changed. I can't emphasize this enough.
It's helpful here to separate the whole "voter disenfranchisement" (or "voter suppression" or whatever term is in vogue) debate on some level from the "fraud" one, as they are in many ways different cans of worms, and we've been talking about fraud. I think the former is beyond our scope... but notably, it is an absolutely massive paradigm shift to move AWAY from fraud/vote-buying/hacking/etc. and into the realm of, for lack of a better phrase, regular but high-stakes political maneuvering that's part of the normal lower-d democratic process (for better or worse). They are two different worlds.
I say that but I just can't help myself but to mention: Gableman's report also contains hilarious statements such as the following, where he - and I kid you not - forgot to include a citation, instead leaving in a "(CITE)" placeholder instead, like I did way back in high school once:
And, I assume, the reason no citation could be found easily is that the statement is... well, literally and objectively wrong. The phrase is old and has been used in both partisan and nonpartisan contexts. Just one example here from 1976 (of many possible) I plucked out of a google search that explicitly refers to "nonpartisan get-out-the-vote activities". It's the cumulative impact of things just like that which make the whole effort seem amateurish and further reduces my trust in the source.
How do you think we could make this a productive dialogue? You're demanding a specific links to an incident which you've already admitted in your own comment you don't really care about and wouldn't affect your thinking. We've moved from "hints" of vote-buying to now implicitly demanding a bullet-proof criminal conviction with enough scope to affect the outcome of the election in Nevada or else it doesn't really matter.
Gish gallop? When you make a variety of general assertions about topics you have little knowledge about, my string of questions are trying to get you to recognize what you don't really know. The truth is you don't know much with respect to Bush v. Gore or how that compares to Trump's election contests or other lawsuits about the election. I didn't skip along from refusing to spoonfeed you a link to an affidavit you don't care about to spam a bunch of other examples or topics. You're the person who brought Bush v. Gore up. I've specifically talked about 2 specific examples total, the gift-card incident and the Trump election contest in GA (which you've entirely ignored).
This is what a gish-gallop looks like:
can't find specific case I described which you don't really care about anyway? Okay, let's spam a bunch of derpy articles from journalists who have curated examples which you think shows those examples and allegations are nonsense, and therefore use that set in order to make claims and implications to reinforce your belief generally about the affidavits, the lawsuits, the contests, and the election
this is what you rely on regularly; spam responses to google searches which you read the titles of and convince you something is the majority or even near universal belief when it simply is not
this is the classic gish-gallop and the classic fallacy which it's used with
Don't you find it slightly interesting that when you search "example of X fraud" on google, it feeds you a bunch of articles which reinforce your belief that there wasn't any fraud, really, and basically everyone agrees with you about that?
That's not the lone example. I've specifically and repeatedly mentioned the Georgia election contest for both evidence of fraud as well as an example of how "due" "process" wasn't followed. You've ignored this for 3 comments now. I also mentioned the John Eastman disbarment hearing in response to you claiming Trump had trouble finding lawyers implying it's because his cases were so bad (as an aside, there were many lawsuits not connected with Trump which he had no control or involvement with whatsoever. IIRC, he was only directly involved with <5). In it, Eastman gives an excellent breakdown of a flurry of election lawsuits all over the country as the bar attorney attempts to trip him up in a CLASSIC gish-gallop similar to the one you've attempted here. Gableman, his first witness , was something mentioned in the context of that hearing. Also, I didn't mention the report at all and was referring to his testimony.
and even if I did mention the interim report (I didn't), alleging sending investigators out and finding people who voted who aren't legally allowed to vote is, in fact, alleging fraud and changing vote totals; I cannot emphasize this enough
frankly, I don't think continuing this is productive or that you're genuinely interested in this topic so forgive me if this is my last response
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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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