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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.”
Of course they are, because many of them are verifiably true. For example, my progressive County Clerk says that tons of voters that are adjudicated incompetent are voting illegally. This is, presumably, a product of a poor system and genuine mistakes being made, at least in most cases, rather than a marker of stolen elections and open corruption. Nonetheless, the fact that it's trivially true and everyone knows it completely undermines the official position that 2020 was the "most secure election ever". Tons of illegal and slipshod methods were used, black-letter law was violated in the name of Covid safety, and the election was generally a mess. That doesn't mean it was stolen, but it does mean that the people who say that it was actually a beautiful and perfect election are either lying or completely incompetent. If they said, "wow, that was pretty bad, but there were extenuating circumstances and we'll do better next time", that would be believable, but the promise instead is increasing "voting rights" by further liberalizing rules around mail-in ballots. The fact that people don't say that this was bad and we should return to normal election rules greatly shifts me in the direction believing claims of stolen elections.
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.
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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