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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.”
I think it's very defensible to say that the coof was used as an excuse to institute measures around the election that overwhelmingly benefited one side over the other. That in a year without the coof, the election might well have gone differently. Does this constitute stealing an election? Possibly, possibly not. I think it does at the very least constitute putting a thumb on the scales, though.
Insofar as anything else happened, it was most likely locally coordinated by activist types, not actual party apparatus, and is therefore probably difficult to prove. It also probably happens all the time.
But the only reason why easy postal voting benefitted the Democrats was because fear of COVID-19 had become a partisan issue. Pre 2020, both parties said, and acted as if they meant it, that easy postal voting benefitted Republicans (Raffensperger's letter to Congress defending the integrity of the Georgia elections pointed out that the Georgia legislature originally adopted postal voting on demand on a Republican party-line vote).
Had there been no pandemic, the large number of Democrats who voted postally because they were afraid of catching the virus at a polling station would have voted in person, the postal vote would have skewed slightly Republican the way it always does (because of military votes), and "the election is invalid because not enough Democratic postal votes were tossed on technicalities" would not have figured in the Gish Gallop.
"We deserved to win the election because Democrats were too afraid of the coof to go out and vote" was an argument that might have worked in front of the right GOP-appointed judge, but it wasn't going to work with the American people, and the Trump campaign didn't run with it.
This is news to me. I assumed that because the only two states where Democrats win among white men also practiced universal vote-by-mail that the opposite was true.
What was the example of large-scale vote-by-mail being beneficial to republicans? And does your assertion also mean that Oregon and Washington would be more Democrat dominated in the absence of universal vote-by-mail?
I maintain that universal vote-by-mail has been and will always be beneficial to Democrats over Republicans.
Republicans in PA in 2019 opened up mail in ballot access because it would help turn out in rural voters who had to travel long distances to a polling place. They did this in 2019, before Covid.
If they thought it would always be a benefit to Democrats then they would probably have not done that. Once it did, some of the very same Republicans who passed it, lobbied for it to be declared unconstitutional.
For whats its worth, your opinion is the conventional wisdom, that it helps Democrats over Republicans. Whether that would have been the case in PA absent Covid and it becoming a direct partisan issue, I guess we will never know.
Could see it being kind of an odd catch 22 where Republicans are more likely to get legitimate mail-in votes where people are either too old, too remote or overseas in order to vote whilst the mail-in voting demographic amongst the Democrats would be more about people who simply can't be bothered participating in the typical voting process.
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