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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.”
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).
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.
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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