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Notes -
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/worried-meta-decision-allowing-2020-election-denial-ads/story?id=104985165
So Meta the parent company of Facebook and instagram is now allowing users and advertisers to post claims about election fraud in the last election but not the soon to be held 2024 elections. I’ll lay my cards out here and say I’m personally a skeptic of the claims that the 2020 elections were stolen. I don’t see why that should prevent other people from making such arguments.
But my question for you guys is whether these claims are going to really erode trust in future elections. To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened and instead opted for the COVID style full court press of “nobody should bother to take it seriously, and if you do it’s clear that you’re falling for misinformation.” To me nothing erodes trust faster than an official response of “nothing to see here.”
There’s a kind of incoherence to ‘stolen election’ claims that I dislike, in that they’re almost always made by people who assume that the permanent bureaucracy / deep state / powers that be / white supremacist patriarchy / Russia / etc means that Our Guy can win but still lose anyway.
If the deep state can have its way even when /ourguy/ wins, then why does it also need to rig elections? Either elections don’t matter because the President has no power, or they do matter because the President actually has a lot of power, but Trump just failed to do anything with it.
I’m convinced the stolen election narrative was profoundly damaging to the Trumpist right and GOP more generally in the US. What is more demoralizing than suggesting that ‘they’ will win even if you come out to vote? Or even, if you take the theory further, that they ‘allowed’ Trump to win in 2016 knowing, presumably, that they could control him or prevent him from doing anything they didn’t want him to?
The stolen election narrative was strategically moronic. It exists solely to assuage Trump-the-man’s ego, and spread because the modern US right is in large part a Trump personality cult, so various operatives, media figures etc wanted to do their best to remain on his good side. A single shout out or mockery from the oracle of Mar a Lago can make or break a career, so playing to his ego was so important they forgot strategy to claim that Donald actually did win for real.
(I think all US elections involve some low-level corruption, rigging and machine politics, but that broadly the most popular candidate in the majority of the country - pursuant to minor discrepancies in popular vote subject to the unique dynamics of the EC system obviously - wins).
It seems as though you've constructed two strawmen so that you can comtrast them against each other, find both theories wanting, and come to a middle "reasonable" position. There can't be a deep state, because then it wouldn't make sense for them to rig an election. -- Well, what are you implying? That there is not an unelected bureaucracy that resisted all of Trump's signature policies while he was president?
If you concede that machine politics and corruption already exists, you're basically making the 2020 fraud argument, except assuming, magically, that it doesn't happen at a presidential level, because, I guess, that would be uncomfortable to think about.
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Isn’t there something between omnipotent and feckless? The deep state has some power and can influence outcomes on the margin. The president has some power and can influence things on the margin.
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I think you have a bad model of the American conservative view of electron fraud, or how long it's been a concern. "Margin of fraud" and "margin of cheating" were recognizable slogans in 2002-2006, and they weren't new then. Regardless of the merits of those arguments either then or now, they were successfully used at length as an voter motivation tool before 2021.
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If the deep state is really as powerful and good at working in shadows as some people think, why is Trump even still alive? Couldn't such a powerful organization manage to kill him in some way that looks like a plausible sudden health failure of some kind? More kinetic means such as arranging a car accident would be too likely to draw outrage from his supporters, but what if he just suddenly had a heart attack or something? I don't know how possible this is to achieve medically, though.
Absolutely possible. The 1975 Church Committee hearings revealed the CIA made a heart attack gun that worked by silently firing a small frozen needle of concentrated shellfish toxins at the victim. It would melt upon piercing the skin, leaving no trace, and cause an immediate heart attack.
The KGB had a similar heart attack triggering weapon that worked by spraying a puff of cyanide gas into the victim's face.
Didn’t they test this on mythbusters?
The gun is definitely real, the director of the CIA brought one of the guns into the congressional hearing.
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/17/archives/colby-describes-cia-poison-work-he-tells-senate-panel-of-secret.html
At the four minute mark in the video below they pull it out and start examining it. It's built along the lines of a 1911 handgun and has an electric powered mechanism instead of using gunpowder, with what looks like a some kind of pneumatic system chamber where the hammer would go and a compact scope, according to the director firing almost silently and hitting targets with a variety of dart types at 100 yards or meters. They had both shellfish toxin and cobra venom derived compounds.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4703553/user-clip-cia-director-william-colby-church-committee-shellfish-toxin-dartgun
This story doesn't pass the sniff test- hitting targets at 100 yd with a handgun? Come on.
From what I can find, tranq pistols can have an effective range up to 40 meters. That's firing an entire syringe. I wouldn't be surprised at being able to achieve 100 meters with a much, much smaller dart.
Also worth considering that range would likely be an engineering goal for a CIA heart attack gun. They aren't really focused on achieving range in typical dart pistols, because that would never be needed.
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They tested if you could shoot bullets made out of ice (and meat, and a few other exotic materials) from a normal gun and they didn't work. I don't know if they tested any sort of purpose built ice dart gun (potentially pneumatic?) so it's hard to say if the concept as a whole is "busted."
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And of course the Bulgarian ricin umbrella used to assassinate a Bulgarian dissident in London.
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I don’t think the ‘deep state’ such as it is cares that much about Trump. The media class does, because Trump sells papers, gets views, and because they don’t really understand how things work. But is the average Treasury Dept official terrified of a second Trump term? I doubt it, they probably don’t want it to happen but I don’t think they expect whatever some The Atlantic columnist predicts to occur.
Average FBI agents were reduced to tears during the first one, if you believe their text messages.
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Because he's worth more to them alive than dead.
How so?
By preventing the emergence of a Republican candidate who might be better able to challenge them.
Was the GOP about to challenge the deep state before the rise of Trump?
No, but now that Trump has shown that's a viable path to electoral victory, there are others who would take up the challenge. But Trump occupies that niche now.
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That's like asking "if you have a password, why do you also need any other security measures?".
Security is multilayered, because each level is not perfect on its own. So is corruption.
My point was that the 'motte' of 'they can rig elections' is pretty absolute. Putin doesn't need a 'back up' plan 'in case' the vote totals come out wrong, because the vote totals won't come out wrong, it isn't even a question.
And yet he still needs to have elections. Surely simply suspending elections would be the true motte?
But even then, why suspend elections when one could simply cancel them, or not offer them in the first place? would that be the true motte?
I think that many of the methods used to secure Trump's defeat in 2024, a number of which preceded the actual race, were both efficacious and illegitimate. Do you disagree?
I think it’s likely that some low level corruption / rigging occurred on both sides as is the norm in American politics, but it’s unlikely it’s impact can be fully quantified and there’s limited evidence it secured Biden’s victory. And I think there was a major effort by the majority of the American ruling class to (as various things about ‘securing (or fortifying) the election’ suggest) strongly discourage Trump support, encourage Biden support, and establish favourable conditions on the ground for Biden in terms of covid rules, voting by mail etc. I also think Trump was almost uniquely unpopular as President and would most likely have lost even without any illegal actions, as far they occurred.
Do you think such actions are legitimate, as distinct from legal? That is, do you think that people on the other side should accept outcomes secured through such methods?
Do you likewise think his unpopularity was arrived at by legitimate means?
No, I think it likely a result of his longstanding poor character and reputation coupled with a failure to accomplish most of what he promised his voters once in office.
I am yet to be convinced the other side don’t do the same thing themselves.
You are unconvinced that there is no effort by a majority of the ruling class to strongly discourage support for Blue candidates, encourage support for Red candidates, and establish favorable conditions on the ground for blue candidates in terms of impactful process mechanisms? That the security services illegally spy on Blue candidates, or pushing or suppressing rape accusations against blue and red candidates as partisan inclination requires? Or encouraging and selectively prosecuting widespread political violence? Can you give some examples of equivalent illegitimacy?
And again, I emphasize that I'm not claiming any of this is even illegal, much less prosecutable. I'm asking you your assessment of the sum total of the political game: Do you think the other side is well-advised to play a game that operates, in aggregate, in the way we observe?
Would it be fair to say that you consider "legitimacy" as the output of a process? If so, to the extent that this process can be observed or understood, what percentage of control would you say Blues have, roughly speaking?
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I don't see this being a frequent claim or model for people to hold, other than the most blackpilled. My own mental model is that the bureaucracy has a strong preference in elections and will do what it can to stall executive action if those elections don't go their way, but that these are not effects with infinite explanatory power.
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Because it's easier to promote their agenda with a compliant figurehead than not? Because it expends less resources to get your way without a fight than with one? Because whatever the odds that you'll be able to roll a defiant president, they aren't 100%? Because rigging the election is the first line of defense, followed by bureaucratic defense in depth? Because making sure your ideological enemies appear to be defeated publicly by popular vote is an important aspect in demoralizing them? Because winning is nice, but lapping your opponent is even better?
I've never seen such an incurious or thought terminated argument here before in my life.
So why did they let Trump win in 2016, when a moral victory was much more powerful than simply re-electing him in 2020? If your response is ‘they tried with Comey/Russiagate/leaked tapes, but they failed’, then that invalidates a substantial part of your own argument, since it suggests that their methods do not extend to actual rigging, or that their own internal evaluation of the projected result was so poor that they’re likely too incompetent to do so.
Again, the excuses don’t make sense. Rigging isn’t the first line of defense, it’s the absolute defense. If you can rig, you rig, and you win by default. There need be no backup plan for rigging because if you can manipulate the actual votes themselves all of that stuff is unnecessarily upstream. Putin doesn’t have a backup plan “in case he loses the election” because by definition he has ensured this is an impossibility because that is what ‘rigging’ means. You might reply saying ‘well, even Putin / Sisi / etc still wants to remain popular, so propaganda and ‘campaigning’ is important, even if just to maintain kayfabe’. And sure, that’s true. But they don’t do it ‘to win’.
So the same question for US presidential rigging allegations must always be levied. Do you believe that [faction] has actual control over vote counts? That is what rigging means. Can you declare yourself or your man victor or not on an absolute basis? If you can, you can rig an election; if you can’t, you’re merely capable of playing the kind of dirty tricks that are the norm in the politics of every nation.
They simply didn't take him seriously and left the election insufficiently fortified due to hubris. This was not a mistake they repeated in 2020, which is why you see much more heavy-handed manipulation, right up to the phantom pipe burst in Atlanta and restarting counting at 4am in major Democrat cities just in time for their majority Democrat poll workers to start counting without their supposed opposition observers present.
I believe that they can stall the counting until they find enough votes, if they're prepared ahead of time. There's a limit to the scale of fraud, and so the scale needs to be determined ahead of time.
This is just splitting hairs over wordplay. If you'd like to use the euphemism instead of the pejorative, then so be it, but there isn't the distinction you're trying to make.
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I agree with you broadly but you are overstating your case. It is perfectly consistent to state that factions have a limited ability to steal elections.
One dynamic you see in historical studies of stolen elections is that there are typically both honest and stolen locales, and the stolen locales vary in their willingness to lie.
In the famous and well studied cases of LBJ in Texas, rotten boroughs varied. From precincts where voters were handed $5 and a shot of tequila before voting in person, to places where voters were marched in by shotgun wielding ranch foremen and instructed who to vote for, to precincts where the ranch owners dropped off the identical filled ballots of all their employees, to precincts where no one seemed to show up to vote but all the registered voters were recorded as voting, to precincts where votes were filled out in alphabetical order for people who didn't live there or had died years ago.
In LBJ's first Senate campaign, he made use of all these methods as did his opponent, but LBJ announced his results first, and his opponent was able to steal enough extra votes to win. In his second, LBJ did not make that mistake again, and stole more aggressively and at the last minute, but still one by a tiny margin after tapping all his resources.
It's perfectly possible to say that faction can rig an election between a set margin, but not outside it.
The problem is that this isn't claimed by most election truthers, and certainly not consistently.
For sure, and I actually say as much in my reply to WalterOdim here.
It’s very likely (and of course historically proven) that low-level functionaries involved in the political process in various counties across the US engage in forms of corruption up to and including Actual Rigging (meaning actually manipulating vote totals). And it is true that, in an incredibly close election, this could serve (and has served) to elect one candidate over the other. I’m very sceptical that the ‘deep state’ or indeed any DC bureaucrat is involved in that kind of action, I think it’s ground-up and low level, and I think supporters of both parties engage in it. But it happens, and I think it’s important to acknowledge it.
But this isn’t the typical claim. The narrative from hardcore Trumpist rigging claimants isn’t typically that Trump almost legitimately lost but that he actually won a tiny number of additional ballots (or local Democrats added extra Biden votes) on a tiny scale in one Georgia county. It’s that a huge conspiracy prevented their candidate, who was supposedly vastly more popular, from winning nationwide by a huge margin. The question ‘do you concede that, even if you’re correct about those ballots, Trump could very easily (and almost did) fully legitimately lose the 2020 election, and if he did actually win, he won by a tiny amount?’ is the telling one here. As is (and this is even more important) ‘did something beyond the low-level hum of corruption that has been a feature of American democracy since 1776 occur specifically to prevent Trump from being re-elected?’.
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Rigging makes much less sense as a model than nudging. These are close elections, coming up with ways to move the needle by a few thousand votes in swing states makes a big difference. Methods for doing so don't even need to be that obviously corrupt, simply taking actions that increase voting propensity for the least competent voters through things like ballot harvesting and pushing those either right up to or slightly over the boundaries of legalities make a difference. The people doing this aren't going to feel like they're doing something awful, they're just helping people vote to try to stop fascism. Sure, my uncle is no longer mentally competent to vote, but I know he would have voted for Biden, so I'll just help out a bit and get that ballot sent out for him.
I pretty much completely agree with you here. But this kind of (actual) rigging, which is essentially pushing your guy over the edge in a neck-and-neck race by adding 10,000 votes in a critical county is a different assertion to the idea that the deep state or whoever can decide they want their guy to win no matter what. That’s a poor explanation of what I’m trying to say, so forgive me, but I guess the idea is that there’s pretty clearly a scale of ‘actual’ rigging.
So at the far end there’s obviously the fact that even Putin could theoretically be so unpopular that he couldn’t fake ‘win’ an election, and this is presumably very near to (or really the same thing as) the point at which he’s overthrown. And then there’s the most limited kind of ‘real’ rigging, where two candidates are neck and neck and a tiny number of votes in the right places can shift things while staying fully plausible. So can the deep state have prevented Bush from winning? Could they have prevented Reagan from winning? What’s the threshold, is it only if their guy almost won but for a few rurals in a swing county somewhere?
This is important because in the latter case the defeated party accusing the opposition of rigging is acknowledging that even if their allegation is true they were very, very, almost vanishingly close to legitimately losing the election. I don’t think this is an academic distinction at all, it’s very important. There’s a huge difference between saying that you won by a huge amount but the enemy rigged the whole thing, and saying ‘well yeah we actually only very nearly almost lost, and really it was a coin toss in a tiny county in Georgia but it actually landed on heads and they lied and said it landed on tails’.
This isn’t to trivialize it, or even to say that the Georgia accusation in particular wouldn’t count as ‘rigging’ were it true. But I do think there’s a Motte and Bailey here, or even a Motte and Bailey within a Motte and Bailey about the power of the deep state.
There's a half-decent case that Gore's attempted recounts were an attempt to do this. In practice, asking the friendly partisan leadership of the most friendly partisan voting precincts to make sure they didn't miss any ballots sounds a lot like "find me some votes" with a veneer of respectability to it, which is effectively what the (partisan) ruling on Bush v. Gore found, specifically that different recount standards in different counties violated Equal Protection.
I think the fundamental problem with Florida 2000 was that the election was so close (on the final official result, a 537 vote margin out of 6 million votes cast), the punch card voting machines were so bad (1000-2000 difference in the final margin depending on how you adjudicated the chad), and there was so little experience of adjudicating close elections, that there was no "true winner". Given that handling ballot papers in order to recount them can affect the status of the chad, it is entirely possible that it was physically impossible to identify the true winner (based on the state of the chad at close of polls) even if there had been a generally-accepted set of rules for chad adjudication.
The rationale of Bush vs Gore was that the SCOTUS ruled, correctly, that Florida in 2000 was technically incapable of counting a close election in a constitutionally sound way in the time available between close of polls and the Electoral College deadline. The media-funded recount would go on to determine that Florida in 2000 was technically incapable of counting a close election at all. The remedy in Bush vs Gore was for the justices to decide, on a partisan party-line vote, to throw out one unconstitutional vote tally (the partial hand recount requested by Gore and granted by the Florida Supreme Court) and replace it with another (the machine recount from 3 days after the election, plus some initially rejected military postal votes that were probably-legally cured). This was ugly, but it wasn't "stealing an election" because there was no effective election to steal. The election held on polling day had failed to reach a result and given the timetable the Presidency was necessarily going to be decided otherwise than by an election.
If Florida 2000 had been a close Senate election, it could have been re-run. (As a famous UK example, the Parliamentary election in Winchester in 1997 was re-run because the final tally after multiple recounts was a margin of 2 votes out of about 60,000, and there was a margin of error of about 10 votes due to a faulty punch used to stamp ballot papers). But you can't do that in a Presidential election.
There was a similar problem in 2020. Some of the allegations Trump made were straightforwardly silly (like the Dominion voting machines conspiracy theory), and some could be debunked relatively quickly (like the suitcases of ballots in Fulton County, which turned out to have been storage boxes of correctly-handled ballots which had been on CCTV throughout the process), but some (like the "pristine ballots" which came up elsewhere in this thread) could not have been adjudicated to the standards required to convince sceptics in the time available. An honest attempt to adjudicate the 2020 election in State courts in the time available would have required the Trump campaign to focus on a small number of key issues with the best evidence of malpractice and sufficiently high numbers of votes involved to affect the outcome, the Secretaries of State to provide detailed responses on those points, a trial courts to review the results quickly, and an appeals court to slap down any time-wasting and just tell the parties to get on with it. But the Trump campaign didn't want that and it doesn't look like anyone else, with the possible exception of Raffensberger, did either. If Sidney Powell had been trying to get the Kraken lawsuits tossed on technicalities in order to set up a political argument, she could hardly have done better. And if Trump had trying to get his prima facie serious allegations of fraud lost in the middle of a Gish Gallop of crap, he definitely couldn't have done better than he did. And even if that serious, disciplined adjudication had happened (for the avoidance of doubt, it should have done, and didn't), there would still have been thousands of right-wing "citizen journalists" complaining that their pet allegation had not been adjudicated, as long as they had a ready audience.
One of the straightforwardly good things the revised Election Count Act post-2020 does is that it extends the deadlines for States to adjudicate their own elections by removing the schedule padding originally needed for messages to get between the State Capitols and Congress on horseback.
Thinking about this, I think I am ready to bite this bullet.
On the balance of the publicly-available evidence, the Trump team in the aftermath of the 2020 election was not trying to get the election adjudicated in their favour - unsurprisingly, because after PA turned out to be beyond the plausible margin of fraud, getting the election adjudicated in their favour required them to flip all three of GA, AZ and WI, which was a very long shot. The tactics the Trump team were using were designed to throw enough shade on the integrity of the election that some other pro-Trump actor in the system (State legislatures in purple states with gerrymandered Republican majorities, the Republican majority on SCOTUS, Mike Pence, a pro-coup faction in the military, or an armed mob of conservative citizens) would toss out the election results and "who is inaugurated on 20th January 2021" would be decided otherwise than by an election.
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Likewise, I agree entirely with this. One additional distinction I want to draw that I personally adhere to, but that doesn't seem to be the position of most election "deniers" is that I don't think the cheating is mostly the proverbial deep state conspiracy, I think it's about dispersed efforts to push, bend, and break rules among people that don't need some grand organizer to tell them which way they should go. One important result of this position is recognizing that this is not a one-sided grand conspiracy and that Republican officials and individual actors likely engage in a great deal of cheating as well. To the extent that the permanent bureaucracy in DC interferes, I think they do so via media and social media manipulation rather than direct cheating.
One analogy that I often think of for these things is officiating in sports. If you lose, even if the officiating was objectively bad, it's almost always because you weren't good enough and didn't put it out of reach of your opponent. You can say you got screwed by a call, but ultimately, you just gotta do better. You can think the rules are stupid and that underthrown passes resulting in interference calls (or mass mail-in voting with no meaningful ID requirement) is ridiculous, but those were the known rules of the game. Change them next time, try to get them right, but it's still going to come down to how you play rather than just being completely robbed. That said, if you definitely got screwed and your opponent keeps insisting that everything was completely fair, and in fact was the best officiated game that's ever happened, it's entirely reasonable to feel some animosity towards them.
The "deep state conspiracy" part of it is the general unwillingness of the actual upper-level state and federal officials to seriously do anything to prevent the low-level rigging that advances their party interests. If rigging happens and investigators slow-walk inquiries, evidence is "accidentally" disposed of, and prosecutors sit on their hands, what recourse actually exists?
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Because it's not as simple, theoretically, as having national control of how the votes are counted. It would be a series of compartmentalized prospiracies limited by their preparation. Take, for example, the ongoing litigation in Fulton County Georgia. The allegation is that 150,000 unfolded, machine marked, "mail in" test ballots, all for Biden, were inappropriately counted. Presumably these were manufactured to test the machines, and then set aside. It's been stuck in courts for years at this point, and as progress is finally being made to unseal the ballots, which the state was ordering to preserve, it's lawyers are quitting and it appears the ballots may have been "lost".
The margin if victory for Biden in Georgia was about 12,000 votes. And here in lies the logistical conundrum, if this was a fraudulent election. 150,000 fake ballots allowed for too many witnesses during the recount efforts. People noticed. It's been kept in the courts for 3 years, and now it looks like the state destroyed the evidence, so they win in the end. But every time you pull a stunt like that, there is the risk of it not working. Of it not being enough. Of there just being too many people seeing it. You cannot reduce the risk of failure to 0%. At least in our system.
Because, in counties where paper trails of machine counted ballots are supposed to still exist, you would be limited to what extent you can rig the vote by logistics like that. In counties without a paper trail, then all bets are off. Thankfully those days are almost over.
A quick check of the right wing alt-media site you link to shows that even they are not claiming that there were 150,000 test ballots improperly included in the count. 150,000 was the total number of postal votes in Fulton County - we can reasonably assume that most of these were legitimate, particularly given that the overall percentage of postal votes in Fulton was close to the statewide average. Nor does the article say that the ballots were lost - it says that Fulton County explicitly says they are not lost, but that one specific right-wing citizen-journalist doesn't believe them.
The actual lawsuit filed by Favorito, a conservative activist and 9-11 conspiracy theorist (the lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign didn't run on this point) is based on an affidavit by Susan Voyles, who saw one batch of 107 "pristine" postal ballots in a box of 8 batches. If you assume that Voyles only looked at one box of ballots to find this batch and therefore that roughly 1/8 of the postal ballots were dodgy, then you get the "possibly 10-20,000 fraudulent votes" alleged by Favorito. And the specific box of votes identified by Voyles was reviewed, and there were no irregularities. So the premise of the Favorito lawsuit is that Voyles misremembered the box number, and that a bunch of randos should be able to go through 150,000 votes to find the needle in the haystack. FWIW, the reason why it has come up again is that the standing issue has finally been adjudicated in favour of Favorito after two trips up and down the appeals hierarchy.
But the important point here is how easy it is to create a Gish Gallop of hinkiness. We have one poll worker claiming (under oath, admittedly) to have seen 107 votes that looked a bit wrong (an argument so frivolous that Trump's lawyers wouldn't touch it), being blown up to 150,000 fraudulently counted test ballots alleged on this forum. And apart from Voyles, who (being under oath) was careful not to allege any specific irregularity, all the amplification was done by randos. There are hundreds of more or less frivolous complaints about the election being exaggerated in thousands of places, and because they get vaguer as well as bigger online, it can take hours to find out what the allegation even is, let alone to rebut it.
I'm so tired of this oxymoron. The new right is not "conservative" in any meaningful sense. Conspiracy theorists are not, essentially, "conservative" in either ideological predilection or demeanor. Trump is not and has never been "conservative." Maybe I'm just being pedantic over a term that has specific meaning to me, but while it is true that a lot a previously self-identified "conservatives" have become something else, what that is can hardly be called "conservative." Maybe the same applies to "liberals," to some extent.
I mean it's only America that uses the label "liberal" to mean "left-leaning." Elsewhere in the world it means something right-leaning. "Classic liberal" is an attempt to reclaim the term, and I personally say "center-left" and "progressive" when I'm referring to what are commonly referred to as liberals.
Theoretically, there can be right- and left-liberals, who disagree about say the level of traditionalism and government involvement in the economy. "Conservative" in a US context used to refer to right-liberals, but now on both the Right and Left there are powerful illiberal/post-liberal strains.
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And here is a good example of how flippant and lazy people can be when dismissing fact patterns too damaging to the world view they've bought into.
It wasn't one poll worker, is was several. Going off the filing, Judy Aube, Robin Hall, Susan Voyles, Barbara Hartman all noticed these suspicious ballots. Bridget Thorne testifies that the test ballots were not generated according to procedure and were not quarantined correctly.
But you know what, one of us is going to be right or the other in the fullness of time on this one. Hopefully. Either people will be allowed to view the ballots, or they'll get "lost" at this point. At least that's how it's looking. And once the ballots are looked at, putting aside however it's judged, because I doubt a judge at this point is going to invalidate the 2020 Georgia results, we should see if these uncreased, machine printed, test ballots were in those lots of ballots. At least, I'm hoping so. There could still be ambiguities where we just get the state investigating itself and declaring they did nothing wrong, not allowing any 3rd party to view the ballots, and not using a methodology that would address the specific concerns raised. For example, just counting them again as is and getting the same count. Or going through them again and verifying that yup, they were properly filled out ballots.
But I am, perhaps naively, hopeful we get a definitive answer on this one.
I'm skeptical. Favorito has had access to (low-quality) scans for some time even before the case was first mooted and not been able to present any convincing evidence that direction that could persuade me, and on the other side I don't think there's much he could present that would persuade the typical public.
Well I can see why these low quality images would make it impossible to present convincing evidence. Doesn't look like they pick up creases, nor display the marks in sufficient resolution to determine if they were by hand or by machine with any confidence. Jesus, the first digital camera I got in 2004 had a better resolution than those scans. I know it's the government, but how did they even find technology that terrible?
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