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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.
I'm curious as to what makes you so passionate about this issue. I have to admit it's just not that interesting to me. It just feels like Daily Show level dunking on the proles.
The equivalent might be multiple effort posts trying to argue against flat earthers, Nation of Islam, Bush did 9/11, or astrology.
I just don't feel a strong need to make arguments for or against low status belief systems.
I don't know if that's his motivation, but come on, it's just fun to plant a flag and defend a spot against superior numbers, when you feel confident enough you can pull it off.
I think planting a flag is enemy territory is a noble project. But... is this the right spot for that? Almost no one here believes in the strong stolen election hypothesis.
This feels like going into a Christian church and yelling "it's okay to eat bacon - fight me". Like, yeah, everyone agrees with you, and you are fundamentally misunderstanding your audience.
If you want to debate something more interesting, maybe debate the weak stolen election hypothesis, which I'll define thusly: An election run under 2016 rules would have led to a Trump victory.
I don't know how long you've been around, but in the immediate aftermath of the election there was an entire gaggle of posters who would jump on practically any allegation of fraud as being dispositive, from people claiming that the specific numbers were "Statistically impossible" because they violated some kind of theory, to every video that was purportedly of some guy with a suitcase full of fake ballots. When 2000 Mules came out there were a lot of people who thought this was pretty strong evidence. This is what @Corvos means when he talks about a motte and bailey argument; someone was accusing Yassine of weakmanning a few days ago because nobody really took the 200 Mules arguments seriously. WEll, I remember getting into several heated arguments with people who were insisting that, previous claims aside, this was the strongest evidence available showing that Biden fraudulently won the 2020 election. I was mostly focused on the ridiculous mechanics involved in actually running such a scheme, but now that it's clear that the factual claims were likely fabricated out of whole cloth, that argument is suddenly no longer in vogue.
As far as the Biden v. Missouri stuff is concerned, at a certain point, the alleged misconduct becomes so vague and collateral to the central argument that it should no longer be persuasive to anybody. In baseball, the Mendoza Line is a sort of minimum statistical performance standard. Mario Mendoza was a player from the 1970s who embodied the true spirit of a "replacement level" player, someone who was of similar ability to a fringe major leaguer or minor league call-up. The idea is that players should be evaluated based on how much better they are than the kind of player who a team can get on a moment's notice for practically nothing. Usually the term is used pejoratively, as in "he's batting below the Mendoza Line".
For election fraud claims, I present the Abrams Line. Stacy Abrams famously refused to concede the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election to winner Brian Kemp, because she thought that Georgia election policies were rigged in such a way to discourage likely Democratic voters, particularly minority voters. Almost all Republicans waved away these claims as horseshit. I agree that they were, but at least they ostensibly had something to do with the election itself. The idea that "Trump lost because social media companies cracked down on supposed COVID-19 'misinformation'" makes Abrams look like she has them dead to rights by comparison. OR the corollary "Trump lost because social media companies censored the Hunter Biden story", which leaves out the fact that this censorship was only in effect for, at most, a few days, and that the story itself was national news about a day after it broke. These theories also rely on the supposition that social media is so powerful that no one can avoid the grip of the information it conveys... except of course, for the people making these arguments, who are obviously immune to any forms of persuasion. The other side's propaganda is always leading the country down the tubes, be it social media ads or talk radio or whatever, but whenever, for instance, a lefty is asked how much conservative talk radio they'd have to listen to before voting Republican, the obvious answer is that they'd never vote Republican but other people would. I'd like to meet these people some day.
Do you mean me in particular?
I'm quite proud of that. The New York Times posted two data points from ongoing vote tallies, based on their direct access to the data. I said that those two couldn't be consistent with each other, based on nothing more than a priori mathematics. It turned out that I was right and the New York Times was wrong, because one of the updates in their data source was just a typo and a later update reverted it. The conspiracy theorists' explanation for the discrepancy was also wrong, but the final score in that particular round was still New York Times 0, Specific Numbers 0, Conspiracy Theorists 0, TheMotte Statistics 1.
I don't remember who it was, exactly, but what you posted wasn't the kind of thing I was referring to. I'm too lazy to research the specifics here, but there was some kind of law used in auditing that says certain numbers are evidence of fraud because of how the digits are distributed or something along those lines, and they were using that alone as evidence that vote totals from certain counties were fabricated.
Ah, Benford's Law. Great in other contexts, but here that one didn't pass the smell test for me; the "law" only applies if you're sampling from distributions spread over orders of magnitude, not voting districts drawn to be nearly equally sized multiplied by vote percentages centered around .5. I later learned there's a clever trick where you can look at later digits' distributions instead of the first digit's, but all the skeptics I saw in 2020 were just misapplying the basic version of the law.
I've seen final vote tallies that were obvious fakes from the numbers alone, but for elections like Saddam's or Putin's, not Trump's or Biden's.
I still heartily approve of trying to check, though. An election isn't just about getting the right result, it's also supposed to be about getting the right result in a transparently trustworthy way.
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