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Given the significant interest around the 2020 stolen election claims (definitely my favorite hobby horse topic), and the serious accusations that I have been weakmanning the overall category of election fraud claims, I would like to extend an open invitation to anyone interested in exposing the errors of my ways to a real-time discussion for a Bailey episode.
Here are the conditions I would suggest:
Are any of the above unreasonable or unfair? Do you have any suggested additions/changes?
I've been trying to set a conversation like this for years but haven't found any takers. @Dean, @jfk, @motteposting are the ones I know are sufficiently motivated and informed about the topic, and whom I'd most look forward to dissecting this topic with. Feel free to nominate anyone else you think would be good.
The best evidence that we have election fraud is that no one is using any of the many tools developed to detect and prevent financial fraud. We don't white hat test fraud prevention like we do in auditing, we don't audit votes verifying that people who are reported as voting filled out their ballots in compliance with the law. We don't do any of that, even though these tools widely known and used.
The prior should be that significant fraud exists until proven otherwise, by showing that the system catches frequent, thorough tests.
Assuming arguendo that voting fraud is possible because there aren't enough safeguards, I don't see how that gets us to 1) fraud did not cancel itself out and instead favored a particular candidate then to 2) the one-sided fraud was significant enough to affect results 3) the fraud remained undetected despite significant efforts to uncover it.
If someone just wants to argue that fraud is possible, I'll take whatever I can get, but I'm looking for the strongest possible claims.
I’m not knowledgeable enough about potential electoral fraud to get into much of a debate, but it does seem to me that any fraud should tend to favor Democrats over Republicans simply because it’s easier for Democrats to cheat.
As @SwordOfOccam pointed out, “the best check on election fraud at any scale is that people of various ideologies and parties make up the officials and volunteers in any given area, and all it takes is one witness to expose something.” The trouble is, that’s just not the case in all urban districts. In 2012, for example, 59 voting precincts in Philadelphia alone voted 100% for Obama. The linked article notes that precincts in Chicago and Atlanta did the same in 2008. It would be much easier to run up the tally in those areas, either via fraudulent votes or fraudulent tallies, than it would be in even the reddist of Republican precincts, since Republicans don’t cluster up in the same way that urban Democrats do, and there are always at least a few Democrats in the strongest Republican strongholds.
I'd definitely be suspicious of 100% vote for anybody, because people mess up ballot papers, make mistakes, and surely there was at least one voter for the other guy. Maybe they mean "after all the spoiled and invalid votes were discarded, out of the remaining valid votes there were 100% for X", but even then it seems extraordinary.
For fucks sake, you can’t rely on 100% of people to enjoy a delicious free meal that they pick out themselves, or sex with an extremely attractive and willing partner.
Unless these voting districts consist of approximately 25 voting people, any district reporting 100% one way voting is like Soviet level bullshit.
I actually think this passes a basic sniff test.
A quick search reveals that Philadelphia has 1703 voting divisions, and that Obama and Romney combined had 5,670,708 votes in Pennsylvania as a whole in 2012 with the resulting map looking like this. Philadelphia is the bright blue part in the lower right part of the image, and it is obvious just looking at it that Obama's support in Pennsylvania is concentrated in a few highly populous municipalities, including Philadelphia. The claimed oddity is that 59 of the 1703 voting divisions in Philadelphia amounting to 19,605 votes all went 100% to Obama. But why is this strange?
Each voting division in Philadelphia seems to have about 332 voters, so all that needed to happen was around 332 voters in a single voting division all decided to cast a ballot for Obama 59 times in a city where around 560,000 total people were casting their vote, and 80-90% of the votes were going to Obama. With voter clustering, does this seem that unlikely of an outcome?
It still seems a bit odd. Blacks voted to Obama at a rate like 95% Let's generously assume that urban poor blacks are 99%. But aren't odds of every single vote being for Obama in a 332 person district something like 0.99^332 which works out to 3.5% ? Without that generous assumption, if black vote for Obama was only 98% vote share, they'd be really low (e-6) ..
What was the amount of invalid votes in those districts?
I'm not sure you're thinking about it correctly.
First, the math you're doing implicitly assumes who any two people vote for is an independent event. But there might be social, political and economic reasons why the people in a single small subsection of a city all vote a particular way. If the type of people who live in a single neighborhood isn't completely random, and the type of political messaging that appeal to a person aren't randomly distributed throughout a state, then you might completely be wrong to treat the voting events as independent.
In addition, even if you assume that the events are independent, then the real comparison you're making is all of the votes cast in the entire United States. You might be right to say that there's a generous 3.5% chance of a single voting division of poor black people going for Obama. But the question really is, how many of this kind of black voting division are there in the entire United States? How many degrees of freedom did the people looking for claimed irregularities have? If they hadn't found 59 majority black voting divisions in Philadelphia going to Obama, are there similarly striking "irregularities" that might occur entirely by chance that they might have looked for instead?
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Consider then that the fact those stats came from older elections, not 2020, and that 2020 had higher rates of black votes for Trump would indicate a decreased chance of skullduggery.
If you read the article, the fact that those precincts have almost no registered Republicans and no white people goes a long way towards explaining the 100% votes for the black candidate.
Frankly, if one was manufacturing an election outcome, one would hopefully not be stupid enough to just put 100% of the votes for the one guy. One would also have to watch that they don’t overshoot the number of registered voters or anything else too blatant.
If it were that obvious there’s no way for it to remain undetected. Any meaningful fraud has to be big enough to swing things and subtle enough to avoid detection. That’s a tall order as plots go.
Back in 2012, I don't think they cared about being subtle. Remember all the "demographics are destiny" triumphalism? So a Show Vote of 100% Havel's Greengrocer is not implausible. I don't think that the result necessarily indicates fraud, but it's a bit too good for an ordinary election, especially for 2012. 2008, yes I could imagine a lot of never-voted-before black voters showing up for First Black President, but 2012 was for the second term when some of the shine had worn off.
On the other hand, maybe it was just business as usual for certain districts: you pay us the walking around money, we get the vote out (no questions asked).
Wonder why they gave it up in 2016.
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Even if we assume total corruption in a given county, there’s a limit to how far the plotters could run up the numbers without it being blatantly obvious.
And it has to be done in a swing state to really matter.
In an election with high scrutiny, it’s pretty challenging to cheat enough to make a difference, but not so much to get caught.
And if the plot extends to multiple counties and states, the coordination would be incredibly difficult to conceal.
Look at Watergate, a far simpler plot than changing election tallies, and how it went off the rails.
My point was mostly that @ymeskhout’s first point was not necessarily correct—that I would expect the background level of fraud to favor Democrats in any given election due to ease of opportunity.
As for a grand, national conspiracy to change election results, while I do think that is a threat due to most states’ remarkably poor election security practices, I don’t think it’s the only, or even primary, threat model to be worried about. Instead, I would think a distributed conspiracy would be far more likely, with low-level participants each working independently and without any direction from on high, but all from the same motive.
Take sex abuse conspiracies by way of analogy. The Catholic sex abuse scandal was a grand international conspiracy, with almost all members of the hierarchy implicated in some way or another in moving priests around and preventing them from being prosecuted. The conspiracy naturally eventually leaked, and it caused a huge scandal. By contrast, every time some Baptist minister abused a girl in his church in the past 50 years, the elders just quietly removed him, sent him away to counseling, and didn’t say anything when they learned he was serving another church a year later. You had pretty much the same actions in both cases, but for the Catholics, the conspiracy was (naturally) a top-down one, while for the Baptists, it was (naturally) bottom-up, without any coordination from congregation to congregation. A bottom-up conspiracy of people individually choosing to fill out absentee ballots for their mentally incompetent relatives, poll workers in safe areas slightly inflating their numbers, and the like, would be very difficult to prove, since there would be essentially no coordination among participants or even knowledge that anyone else is doing anything similar. Just about the only thing they’d have in common would be opposition to rules that make voting more secure, which is a position that’s remarkably more common in one party than the other.
Covering up sex abuse is way, way easier than trying to rig an election. You can do it case by case, it’s not a public event, there’s no particular timeline, there’s no adversarial party keeping watch, and you’re a church, which most believers put a lot of trust in.
The place where it really matters to affect election outcomes is swing states, which basically by definition tend to have a mix of partisan power (even if some counties swing all blue/red, state officials are going to have some variety). The partisan competition keeps things in check. And not coincidently, these swing states are the places with the most scrutiny. Decentralized or not, running any ~county-level plot is nearly impossible to pull off without attracting an investigation.
Having a bunch of little independent groups/individuals doing small-scale fraud is very unlikely to affect an outcome, and also you can’t presume only one side does it.
(Ironically, at this point Dems have a solid lead with regular voters (a significant advantage in boring mid-terms) and so efforts to expand the vote are more likely to hurt Dem chances.)
Overall, if you’re able to analyze why sex abuse by religious officials could be covered up you, should be able to understand why significant voting fraud can’t be covered up the same way.
You’re nitpicking the analogy without really addressing my point. Your previous comment pointed out that it would be extremely difficult for a coordinated group of national conspirators to fraudulently alter the election results in enough swing states to change the election. I’m saying there wouldn’t need to be a grand conspiracy. Recent elections have hinged on only a few tens of thousands of votes in the right places. With such small margins, all it would take to tip the scales is one side having either more motive or more opportunity to cheat than the other. I’m not even saying that necessarily happened in 2020. Thanks to insecure vote by mail procedures coupled with the secret ballot, it would be almost impossible to tell one way or the other. (For the record, I support the secret ballot, but I’m opposed to vote by mail except perhaps with the narrowest of exceptions.)
I’m not nitpicking, I’m trying to explain why this other model is aLao unlikely to either work or remain undetected, because it’s not trivial to add the right amount of fake votes.
You do realize mail in ballots can be audited right? Fraud at any meaningful scale is still very hard to pull off because things have to align with voter registration.
Voting by mail is excellent and I’m glad my state has long had it.
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All of that bottom-up effort facilitated by media, politicians and intelligence agencies that keeps pushing lies over lies. How much harder is it to convince the average poll-worker to look the other way when somebody dumps a bunch of ballots against a candidate without a multi-year campaign to persuade them that he's a fascist who works for the Russians?
How would the poll worker know what is happening? Are they warned beforehand they will be part of a crime? Who is telling them? How many instances of this are there?
How are the observers avoided?
How are the ballots filled out so as not to arouse suspicion and match real names?
(You’re not putting forth a realistic scenario that could possibly scale without something being detected.)
My understanding is that there are entire organizations dedicated to gather votes, some of these people essentially go door-to-door to target people that would otherwise not vote, perhaps because they don't speak enough English, are too old or too cognitively-impaired to direct themselves to a polling place. Then they perform the same kind of art on these people as the door-to-door salesmen or phone scammers (2.4 millions fraud last year, a $8B business), and they make these people input their customer's information on the ballot, which they collect and then go on to drop at a ballot drop box.
Is this illegal? It may be in some places. But it should look pretty suspicious to have one person deliver hundreds or thousands of votes at once in a ballot drop-off box.
Observers are avoided through various tricks depending on the area, sometimes more obvious than others.
There is a lot of variation on how absentee votes should be processed and counted and how that process is tracked, and there were a lot of last minute changes to these rules across the country ostensibly 'due to covid'. Here is an example :
Should a poll worker discard or not discard a ballot lacking a secrecy envelope? Perhaps if it's a ballot for evil orange dictator it's okay?
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This is a coherent and testable theory and I appreciate you raising it. If anyone wants to either build on this or argue that it's the strongest 2020 stolen election claim, I'm happy to talk to them.
You're talking to them now.
Lewis2 said they're not knowledgeable enough to get into a debate, so I'm asking if there are other people willing to herald this argument as the strongest 2020 stolen election claim.
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In financial fraud, the assumption is if fraud is possibile; fraud is happening. You design systems to make it difficult to hide evidence of fraud, and then constantly look for that evidencem, because you can't really prevent fraud.
In financial fraud, the perpetrators are trying to make a buck.
In voting fraud, the point is to change an election outcome.
These are extremely different kinds of fraud and the former is far easier to do than the latter.
Election fraud happens. Some cases get caught every year. Some undoubtedly don’t. But if it’s not large-scale then it isn’t affecting election outcomes.
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If the strongest claim from people who believe the election was stolen is that "some fraud is happening" then there's nothing for me to disagree with.
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