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True The Vote, the group behind the wildly popular "2000 Mules" film that purported to document extensive election fraud in Georgia, has admitted to a judge that it doesn't have evidence to back its claims.
Y'all know I love my hobby horse, even if it's beaten into an absolute paste, and I admit at having ongoing puzzlement as to why 2020 stolen election claims retain so much cachet among republican voters and officials. TTV has a pattern of making explosive allegations of election fraud only to then do whatever it takes to resist providing supporting evidence. TTV has lied about working with the FBI and also refused to hand over the evidence they claimed to have to Arizona authorities. In Georgia, TTV went as far as filing formal complaints with the state, only to then try to withdraw their complaints when the state asked for evidence.
The founder of TTV was also briefly jailed for contempt in 2022 because of her refusal to hand over information in a defamation lawsuit where TTV claimed an election software provider was using unsecured servers in China.Edit: @Walterodim looked into this below and I agree the circumstances are too bizarre to draw any conclusions about the founder's intentions.I have a theory I'm eager to have challenged, and it's a theory I believe precisely explains TTV's behavior: TTV is lying. My operating assumption is that if someone uncovers extensive evidence of election fraud, they would do whatever they can to assist law enforcement and other interested parties in fixing this fraud. TTV does not do this, and the reason they engage in obstinate behavior when asked to provide evidence is because they're lying about having found evidence of election fraud. It's true that they file formal complaints with authorities, but their goal is to add a patina of legitimacy to their overall allegations. TTV's overriding motivation is grifting: there is significant demand within the conservative media ecosystem for stolen election affirmations, and anyone who supplies it stands to profit both financially as well as politically. We don't have direct financial statements but we can glean the potential profitability from how 2000 Mules initially cost $29.99 to watch online, and the millions in fundraising directed towards TTV (including a donor who sued to get his $2.5 million back). There's also a political gain because Trump remains the de facto leader of the conservative movement, and affirming his 2020 stolen election claims is a practical requirement for remaining within the sphere.
I know this topic instigates a lot of ire and downvotes, but I would be very interested to hear substantive reasons for why my theory is faulty or unreasonable! I believe I transparently outlined my premises and the connective logic in the above paragraph, so the best way to challenge my conclusion could be either to dispute a premise, or to rebut any logical deduction I relied on. You could also do this by pointing out anything that is inconsistent with my theory. So for example if we were talking about how "John murdered Jane", something inconsistent with that claim could be "John was giving a speech at the time of Jane's murder". I would also request that you first check if any of your rebuttals are an example of 'belief in belief' or otherwise replaying the 'dragon in my garage' unfalsifiability cocoon. The best way to guard against this trap would be to explain why your preferred explanation fits the facts better than mine, and also to proactively provide a threshold for when you'd agree that TTV is indeed just lying.
I'm excited for the responses!
Edit: I forgot I should've mentioned this, but it would be really helpful if responses avoided motte-and-bailey diversions. This post is about TTV and their efforts specifically, and though I believe stolen election claims are very poor quality in general, I'm not making the argument that "TTV is lying, ergo other stolen election claims are also bullshit". I think there are some related questions worth contemplating (namely why TTV got so much attention and credulity from broader conservative movement if TTV were indeed lying) but changing the subject isn't responsive to a topic about TTV. If anyone insists on wanting to talk about something else, it would be helpful if there's an acknowledgement about TTV's claims specifically. For example, it can take the format of "Yes, it does appear that TTV is indeed lying but..."
As I've tried to explain in some of your earlier 2020 election threads I feel like you are either misrepresenting or fundamentally misunderstanding the nature opposition's objections.
Elections are by their nature a contested environment not just between the individual candidates, but as Tom Scott touches upon in this video on electronic voting, between the candidates, their respective voters, and those administering the election. You seem to be approaching this issue as though it were a criminal trial where the election must be presumed legitimate unless proved otherwise in a court of law, but that's not how this works. You need to understand that the purpose of an election isnot to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and thier voters) can accept as legitimate, including the ones who lost. This is why we use paper ballots with documented chains of custody, this is why we have laws requiring that the counting be witnessed by representative of each candidate/party. Defendants may be constitutionally entitled to a presumption of innocence, but there's nothing in the constitution about presuming that election officials are impartial or even competent for that matter. As such I would suggest that in the event that the above safeguards are broken/removed or other irregularities appear (and I don't think you can deny that there were irregularities) it is only fair, dare I say it rational, to ask "what gives?". Likewise the more stridently partisans of the winning candidate insist that "there's nothing to see here" while simultaneously denying access to recourse, the more reasonable it becomes for the losing candidates and their voters to suspect foul play.
The simple thing that after 4 years of this conversation you still don't seem to grasp is that you aren't going to convince anyone the election was legitimate by arguing the niggling technical details of individual cases and motions. You need to actually address the elephant in the room.
What gave, of course, was COVID-19. It was responsible for the unusually high proportion of mail-in voting, which is certainly less secure due to chain-of-custody issues. Elections being a contested environment, this gave rise to a slew of legal challenges both before and after election day about exactly under which circumstances mail-in ballots are counted, implicating election statutes and the vagaries of interpreting them that had previously been uninteresting. Many jurisdictions also had inefficient processes for counting mail-in ballots; this was not a problem in prior years, but in 2020 it sometimes incurred multi-day delays in the tabulation process.
This all made the election less crisp and well-executed than before, which does decrease confidence in its legitimacy. However, none of these events themselves are suggestive of votes being systematically over- or under-counted in favor of a particular candidate. If irregularities only contributed noise and not signal, and they're unlikely to happen again now that the pandemic has passed, then it's only fair and rational to ask "who cares?" We could have run a tighter, more confidence-inspiring election, but what we got was serviceable given the unique circumstances of 2020,
Only in pattern matching the irregularities to a specific conspiratorial frame do they gain enough significance to be talking about them in 2024. The electorate is due basic assurances that elections are fair and accurate, but conspiracies theorists are not due overwhelming evidence before their claims can be dismissed on ordinary epistemic grounds.
So everywhere has rolled back the mail in votes? Because I was told they were the way of the future. If 2016 had been run like 2020 there would have been at least the same amount of drama. The only reason there wasn't is because it was considered too ridiculous. Mail in voting tipped the scales (along with, obviously, the candidate who campaigned on being ridiculous losing) from "voting is probably a useless scam" to "voting is definitely a ridiculous scam" for a significant chunk of the population.
Also the idea that irregularities won't happen again is lunacy. Irregularities happen every single election. The only difference is that now everyone on both sides is certain the other side will do it.
No-excuse mail-in voting has been available in many states for a long time, it just wasn't as broadly adopted before the pandemic. About a quarter of all ballots cast in the 2016 election were mail-in, compared to about half in 2020. This dropped down to about 30% in 2022. Eight states have made mail-in the default going forward, but generally not swing states. Overall, the voting landscape has changed somewhat, but 2020 remains an outlier in terms of poorly-prepared swing states dealing with a flood of mail ballots under duress.
Obviously all elections have irregularities, we just won't be experiencing the ones that made the 2020 election messier than usual. It's true that increasing political polarization and paranoia means that future elections might get picked apart even if they're run to ordinary standards, but this is an indictment of our political culture and not our ability to accurately count ballots.
Do you remember the 2016 election? Were you politically active for it? My gut says no, since you mention the mid terms like they tell us anything, but I also get the impression you were just trying to be patronising so I thought I'd ask. How do you think the fact that democrats need more voters and republicans need less voters plays into the situation?
Yes, I was.
Midterm voting behavior is different over all, but the percentage of mail voting has been roughly similar to major election years (e.g. ~25% in 2018).
If more people participating in democracy is bad for Republicans, so much the worse for Republicans. They can and will adjust.
So you remember that the election came very close to being declared fraudulent by Hillary Clinton, the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the universe.
Still no source, and no explanation of why the percentage of mail in votes means anything over different demographics (which the midterms and pe have always had).
Let me guess, you don't care because go blue team! Blue team good! Red team bad! Democracy good! Don't think about it, democracy good! Full stop! Conversations bad! Talking points good!
Hey turnabout is fair play right? Alternatively you could stop the partisan shit and engage with the actual arguments. You don't have any reason to believe that future elections will be any more secure, you just have faith they will be. But the entire fucking problem hlynka brought up is that a third of the country doesn't. You just don't give a shit.
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