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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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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.

a conservative activist and 9-11 conspiracy theorist

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.

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?