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I’m never moved by people like Raffensperger. If there was fraud, it means he failed! There is an incentive for him to not look closely. And quite frankly, some of the denials that came from his office (at least live — haven’t looked retrospectively) were inconsistent with the truth.
I don’t know there was fraud. My belief is it was impossible to know and unless you had proof Biden needed to become president.
But it was “weird” and we shouldn’t be encouraging “weird” elections. We used to count elections within hours of the polls closing. Why can’t we do that again?
He did have the President—and half the country—telling him it was his job to find the fraud. But of course, it was their job to tell him to find it, so clearly they must have been sandbagging, or they would have convinced him to flip! It’s perverse incentives all the way down.
I think when the hypothesis is tried over and over again, both in and out of court, and no one manages to present a smoking gun, that’s evidence against. Reasoning that one of the suspects had incentives not to cooperate isn’t enough.
But holding him up as proof (ie the guy who oversaw the election is a Republican and therefore it was on the up and up) isn’t the convincing argument people think it is.
It ought to be convincing in that generally Republicans want Republicans to win, and so allowing a plot against Republicans to succeed in a GOO-controlled state is not what we would expect.
Trying to counter that baseline assumption with “but if it happened they’d want to cover it up to avoid blame for the failure” is cope. There was intense scrutiny and if evidence existed it was going to come out in all likelihood, so risking being blamed for a cover up was a bigger danger than uncovering the devious plot by the outgroup.
Only if you consider Trump a neocon, when in reality he is more outsider to the whole political scene than anything.
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Your comment is a pretty good example of why I've mostly stopped trying to debate people who claim election fraud. It goes something like this
Them: "There was widespread fraud in this election! "
Me: "There's not really any compelling evidence to that effect..."
Them: "Well, OK, but do you really trust them not to commit fraud in some other way? As proof, here's a laundry list of sins my outgroup has committed to prove how biased they are..."
Your comment isn't a perfect analog but it's pretty close. Most specific claims crumble into a generalized disdain of the outgroup upon deeper scrutiny.
Part of this was terrible mail-in voting rules where they only started counting long after the votes had come in, and part of it was an illusion since individual states have dragged their counting in almost every election, it just didn't matter since the elections weren't that close in the first place, so nobody really cared if Obama won Indiana in 2008 on election night since it wouldn't have made a difference.
But I generally agree that elections should be counted a lot faster. It was clear that many on the right fringe saw the delayed count as dead-to-rights evidence that the Deep State (or whoever) was rigging things and were just playing for time. States should do everything in their power to ensure the election can be confidently called within a day.
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because the results need to be "fortified" to "save" democracy from itself.
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