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There's a pretty substantial motte-and-bailey here; the motte is "local elections officials in a few blue counties, most of which are controlled by political machines, routinely ignore the actual letter of the law in administering elections, by enough of a margin to swing close statewide elections". As far as I can tell, this is pretty much true. It's at least potentially true, although unproven, that this was behind Trump's 2020 Georgia loss, and certain 2022 contests(Harris county judge is one I'm like 80% sure of).
The bailey is "the 2020 election was rigged like Russian elections and Trump actually won by large margins". As far as I can tell, to the extent that this statement is falsifiable, it's falsified.
This is true everywhere, including red counties. It's far less likely to be due to any nefarious action than because we have a decentralized election administration mostly run by amateurs. Personal anecdote: in my home county (which leans quite red) in 2020, there was a precinct that had zero provisional ballots cast (extremely unusual, threw up red flags). When this was investigated, it was not due to any intent to defraud but because the staff there (all Republicans) didn't understand the procedures for provisional ballots.
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Yeah, but I can't do anything about other people's bailey and it's not one that I really ever stake out. Meanwhile, people insist that the motte is also wrong and that believing that there's quite a bit of shenanigans is a conspiracy theory that should be silenced (see, for example, the OP story for this thread). If I could get people to just admit that there's a lot of shady shit going on, but that we can't know the exact amount because the procedures are poor, we could at least talk about the best approach going forward. Instead, I can show someone that our own clerk here says that a bunch of people voted illegally and then we'll basically just do the SpongeBob Patrick meme when it comes to whether we should improve election security.
Yeah, it’s frustrating that most discussion of voter fraud gets drowned out in Trump’s gigantic exaggerations of a narrative that isn’t true to begin with.
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