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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?
We were talking about just Philadelphia.
not going to Obama. They all went to Obama. These few went with 100%. I mean, does Lizardman constant not work in blacks ?
I allow that this isn't the most outrageous thing, which is your election procedures, and that maybe urban blacks really are such a hivemind that a 99.5% voting for the smooth black guy rate was random.
But US has a track record of known voting and election fraud, running back centuries. You don't have a robust ID system required for voting. You have weird ass mail-in voting procedures.
You don't have a rigorous way of ensuring poll and election workers are diverse politically.
I agree, but I think it is worth taking a step back and asking at the meta level why we were talking about just Philadelphia.
A newspaper report saying, "Some people think it's suspicious that 59 voting divisions in Philadelphia went 100% to Obama" doesn't just come from nowhere.
If I imagine Joe the Reporter, trying to craft a story of this kind (perhaps even for noble reasons!), I have to wonder about adjacently possible worlds. Imagine the counterfactual world where the 2012 presidential election as a whole was a sufficiently fair election on the whole, with whatever meaning you assign to that idea. However, even in a fair election, just by random chance, we would expect there to be voting patterns that were "suspicious" for one reason or another.
Assuming Joe the Reporter's methodology isn't far off from:
Then I just think that if we weren't talking about Philadelphia having 59 voting divisions going 100% to Obama, we'd be talking about some other state or city or whatever that had "odd" voting patterns of some kind, even if it could well be completely innocent, and we just happened to end up in the world where a very unlikely happened by chance, because something had to happen.
I think a very similar thing happened with 2020, and the people who claim it's strange that some states were counting ballots and Republicans were in the lead as they counted the in person votes, but at some point in the night they counted the mail in votes and suddenly Democrats jumped to a decisive lead when all the votes were tallied. I admit this could be suspicious, but you have to realize that nobody pre-registered the opinion that Democrats would stuff the ballot on the back end by faking a bunch of mail in votes in the specific counties where that was the reporting pattern. I just have the intuition that if things had gone slightly differently and the mail in votes in those counties had somehow been counted before the in person ballots, then people wanting to call the election fake would have found some equally hard to explain thing halfway across the country that might have any number of innocent explanations.
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