I'd really like to hear from anyone who believes this, to present a cogent argument. I promise not to attack. I want to hear the argument from the other side. I also beseech the rest of HN to please refrain from attacking anyone who is doing so.
If there were evidence of a stolen election, then Trump would have won a number of court cases from one of the MANY judges, mostly ... well, conservative, to use a label ... that he placed his cases in front of.
Anyone can look at these cases and have an understanding of the actual evidence presented, and see, objectively, that there was not significant election or voter tampering, and definitely not significant enough to change the election.
I'm far more concerned about attempts to make it harder to vote before the election - the one drop box per county in TX, for example, then I am that any election was stolen.
But I will say: it's almost impossible to prove an election has been stolen after the fact with mail-in ballots. Once the outer envelope is removed and destroyed, the ballot is irreversibly anonymous. It's impossible to tell if an anonymous ballot is fraudulent or not -- there's no ability to audit it by contacting the voter.
Mail-in ballots are particularly vulnerable to fraud, something the New York Times correctly worried about back before Trump.[1]. And we just had more mail-in ballots than ever before thanks to Covid.
HN has long been suspicious of voting systems; we all know how often systems are hacked by bad actors. I don't think it's a stretch to think that election tampering is possible, particularly in close elections.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
This is mischaracterization of the article.
1. The title that shows up in the browser bar (the HTML <title>) is: "As More Vote by Mail, Faulty Ballots Could Impact Elections".
2. The title as shown on the page is "Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises". So, clearly, the article speaks about both fraudulent and faulty ballots. In my view, the article is not well organized. The two ideas are too fluidly mixed.
So, with this context in mind, let's discuss two paragraphs from the article:
In 2008, 18 percent of the votes in the nine states likely to decide this
year’s presidential election were cast by mail. That number will almost
certainly rise this year, and voters in two-thirds of the states have already
begun casting absentee ballots. In four Western states, voting by mail is the
exclusive or dominant way to cast a ballot.
The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the
potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than
innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud
that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say.
* Except, of course, in extremely close races.
No identification requirements, same-day registration, no signature verification, no chain of custody requirements, completely irreversible and unauditable ballots... Partisans have created a system designed for abuse and now are incredulous that anyone question the results.
You’ve effectively deleted the server logs, claimed your system is perfect and impenetrable, and are now asking anyone with questions to prove otherwise.
I'm all for auditable, verifiable processes, paper trails and all of that. Thankfully election security officials do work on that! But the people standing up to claim massive fraud are not claiming that because they have evidence, it's because they lost and they are pissed off about it. What they are proposing for remedies is to just throw the whole process out and declare Donald Trump won. Interestingly, they are not challenging any Senate results (Georgia TBD), House results, or even local results.
People are claiming massive fraud because of complete lies. They aren't claiming "something might be fishy here, let's check, recount, etc." Because we did that. All of the swing states recounted their votes, some twice, by hand. They went into the signature verification, observation process, the whole show. No, instead, the crazies go right to the rails and the people who yell the loudest are out there right now showing us exactly what they think of the US Constitution, the law, and this whole process.
This gives you a rough estimate of voter fraud of having an impact of <0.01% of the election results. The tightest race this year was 0.25% margin--that's a full 20× a reasonable upper bound on the incidence of voter fraud. Fraud doesn't change election results.
On the flip side, some of what you claim about--particularly ID rules--has a real disenfranchising effect on people. Having valid ID isn't an issue if you're someone who drives, but if you're someone who is physically incapable of driving and can't get a driver's license, well, obtaining that ID can be quite difficult. (Even getting a driver's license in my state requires going to a particular building in the hours of 9-5 M-F--sucks if you have an hourly job you can't get time off to get an ID!)
A lot of the rest of what you complain about... [citation needed]. The complaints I've seen about signature verification aren't about requiring a signature on the ballot, it's about requiring a second signature (IIRC, unrelated to you!) to "witness" you doing the ballot yourself. In all the states I'm aware of, the voter is still required to sign the ballot themselves.
What State has you personally sign your ballot?
Every state that does mail-in voting at all requires a signature. Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Missouri also require a witness -- Missisipi requires a notary.
How many people actually exist in this country that have no form of ID? You need it for even getting various utilities in some areas (maybe all?)
Further, why can’t we fix this issue? If it takes 3 hours to get the ID then compensate hourly workers to get it and pass a law requiring jobs to allow time for such a thing. Why because it’s difficult for some we give up on the entire idea of requiring IDs?
I don't have hard statistics, but for the photo ID usually advocated for, that number is going to be something like 5-10%.
> Further, why can’t we fix this issue? If it takes 3 hours to get the ID then compensate hourly workers to get it and pass a law requiring jobs to allow time for such a thing. Why because it’s difficult for some we give up on the entire idea of requiring IDs?
I would have no problem supporting voter ID laws if the issue of the difficulty of obtaining voter ID were addressed. However, my experience is that nearly every politician who advocates for voter ID laws is unwilling to address these measures, because their real goal is usually to disenfranchise voters who will vote for the opponent.
This is the crux of the issue. I think there should be a constitutional amendment not only guaranteeing every citizen (felony convinction, in jail, or not!) not only the right to vote, but also requires them to vote. There should be a federal department in charge of finding you and collecting your vote. Too much politics is about getting people alternately mad, apathetic, or lazy, and we need to stop that.
Don't assume people in power want to fix the issue. After the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013, states began shutting down DMV locations where IDs are issued. In Alabama, 31 of 67 locations were shut down, primarily in Black parts of the state. This was done specifically to disenfranchise voters, and was done in conjunction with pushes for Voter ID laws.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/politics/voting-rights...
https://www.aclu.org/blog/voting-rights/voting-rights-act/al...
†I did have a photo provincial health card, but oddly enough, it's legally not considered a valid government ID in many contexts. I also had a passport but I had let it expire and didn't renew it for a while. Even when I did renew it, I would not carry my passport around with me, so it would not count as day-to-day photo ID. I have since acquired a provincial photo ID card, which looks like a license, but is a different colour and doesn't permit you to drive (Duh!) These weren't available til a few years ago.
What was the final delta in GA? 11k votes or so? Are you sure it is impossible to move the needle when there are these razor thin margins?
I don’t know so I’m asking.
So now you have to move the goalposts to saying that there was massive voter fraud in every battleground state.
Let's be clear, every state certified their votes. This includes states with republican leadership. And every court case brought against the election results has failed.
Even if you accept the idea that in many ways it is difficult or impossible to audit the results (I don't agree), the only evidence that has been presented against the result are absurd conspiracy theories and patent falsehoods as well as testimony from people with an axe to grind.
In other cases we have seen (Gore) there was an actually agreed upon issue. Hanging chads on the ballots were real and verifiable. This is not the case today.
Also let us be clear that this has not happened before. It is not before the current administration that "massive voter fraud" has entered the conversation. It was presented in 2016 despite Trumps win (amusing). It is presented now for no other reason than to distract, raise money, and serve the fragile ego of the President.
To there could have been fraud but not enough to win a state
To, ok, maybe one state but not enough states
No dude. No amount of potential fraud is acceptable.
My point is quite clearly that not only are the allegations being made about the election results being invalid are absurd but that even if you accept parts of it unless you accept all of it it doesn’t even have an impact on the outcome.
I'm still on the lack of evidence fence but I'm seriously leaning toward the side of "Thou dost protest too much" when the response isn't the most gruelingly painful enumeration of every detail of the process to the rest of the country.
You can throw all your numerical arguments about why it shouldn't matter at me that you want. I'm not buying it.
This is the simplest god blessed process to automate. It's literally a counter. There should not be anywhere near as much opportunity for controversy or hell, even something to hide!
The tech behind it should be absolutely boring, and yet, no reckoning. No public release of auditable source code, or machine images.
I don't give a damn who won. I give a damn that someone questioned it, and heaven and hell were not moved in an attempt to answer the question.
Not trying to Gish Gallop mind, I just think the integrity of the system is important enough to warrant keeping the process transparent and dirt simple enough, your State should be able to account for it to the rest of the nation. Voting is not a joke, and I don't even like entertaining the possibility that some irregularities could even exist to explain.
The appearance of impropriety is assumed to be impropriety by half the viewers. Unless proven otherwise.
Isn't it the case that when votes are hand counted they match pretty darn close the "machine without auditable source code" results? As someone from outside the US the entire US election process seems like a sad joke but I guess those machines were bought under some sort of commercial contract from some sort of private company and presumably as part of that deal the source code isn't available to the public. But it seems that when the machine says X won and you like X then it's great and when it says Y won and you don't like Y then it's a faulty/irregular process? Is "someone questioned it" really a bar? Isn't there always someone who will question everything?
I'm sure the tech behind the machines that count the votes is actually quite boring. Next time you vote for someone I guess make sure you vote for someone who is going to stipulate in the contract that the source code is available to the public? Is that gonna shut up the people yelling conspiracy?
This must mean that no in person votes should count at all!
Fewer (and similarly with Bush’s — both filed a number of lawsuits in the 2000 election), but then, the legal basis of the cases was different.
Its not really anyone outside of the Trump campaign’s (and their legal team’s) fault that the Trump campaign filed an unusually large number of lawsuits making claims that were not justiciable, independently of whether the claimed facts were true.
The Trump campaign filed several lawsuits prior to the election challenging various election procedures--which is how it's supposed to be done--and found mixed success, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. After an election, there is very little legal recourse--even Bush v Gore made it clear that challenging election procedures should be done before an election without very good reason. In the case of 2000, those challenges were largely about various recount provisions, and even then, these were filed very quickly. But in 2020, a lot of the cases weren't filed until previous ones had failed (laches! laches!), and even tried the novel legal theory of arguing the entire election should be thrown out because of a challenge to long-enacted laws (laches! laches!). The lawyers involved changed too--the competent conservative lawyers didn't want to sign on to Trump's crazy legal theories, but Trump apparently decided to not listen to anyone who told him he had no remaining viable recourse.
It is worth pointing out that the defendants in one of the suits have filed a motion to impose sanctions on Trump's lawyers. Amusingly, they ask for a fine of all the money raised for the legal suits, although they are unlikely to get it.
There are. One sent me to this [1] resource earlier. I do not endorse this source, and have not manually verified their claims myself.
If anyone else would like to check the source, that would be good, I intend to manually check their claims myself later, but don't have time now.
[1] https://hereistheevidence.com/
Edit: I would ask anyone checking the source to not use the tool that the source provides, for obvious reasons.
Also, we should probably see if the datasets provided are available elsewhere.
At work currently, so haven't really looked at it. Probably will tonight, maybe make a post refuting it.
I may or may not get around to it, but I could see it being worthwhile.
People are reading a website like this because they are looking for confirmation of what they already feel must be true.
I partially just want something to link to if I happen to see it linked in the wild again, it rubs me the wrong way to see it uncontested in a conversation.
I figure that at least that way new people aren't getting sucked in when they click thinking "Well, I should check the other sides view."
Like the possibility of a truth is all they need to believe in it. And then shifting goal posts.
Also consider that 45 is not the typical poor defendant, who cannot afford adequate representation in court. He is (theoretically) a billionaire, and can afford $1K/hour constitutional law experts.
The fact that 45 and his crack team of lawyers (more like, "on crack", right?) have failed so completely tells you there just is no actual evidence there.
The difference between parties was not insignificant. In other election cycles you had much lower differences but the other party conceded to the process ( looking at 2000).
So this whole thing is, IMO, predicated on one side simply refusing to admit defeat.
A man who tried to run for mayor in Hawthorne is among two people charged in a voter fraud case in which thousands of fraudulent voter registration applications were allegedly submitted on behalf of homeless people, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office announced Tuesday.
It doesn't even allege that any votes were submitted, the article was published Nov 17 so the investigation must have been going on for months.
Clicked on #237: Posted confidential voter information on website - https://www.washoecounty.us/voters/elections/20_gen_ab_ev_re...
That's the official website for Washoe County and the page is a voter turnout report so yeah obviously it's evidence of fraud (/sarcasm).
#356: Count the fraudalent [sic] ballots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eH3FpIy3TE&feature=youtu.be
It's just a youtube video of voting officials talking at a desk or something.
That website is evidence of nothing more than someone with too much time on their hands and ideology to push.
I'm kinda regretting wasting everyone's time now.
I should point out there is a substantial amount of evidence that there is no notable voter fraud. This evidence helps justify not wasting more time and giving oxygen to this conspiracy.
"It's just a youtube video of voting officials talking at a desk or something."
The discussion they're having at the desk is about fraud. It's a vote counting operation. The counting volunteers say they found a pile of ballots with identical signatures and the woman running the vote is telling them to ignore it because it's not their role to flag this or investigate it. In a vote audit.
The video description text has a transcript of what's going on.
The female counter asks, “So when we’re done with the audit, there’s still the opportunity to challenge the fact that we have multiple ballots with the very same signature?” she asks. “I don’t know if ‘challenge’ is the right word,” the SOS official says ... “And again, we know that you have a concern with this precinct,” she tells them, explaining, “That’s not your role at this very moment,”
A video of counting volunteers discussing fraud they detected and being explicitly told to drop it is very far from "just talking at a desk or something".
unfortunately, like i suspect many here, i'm not particularly inclined to spend time going thru them, particular the ~30% of those that link to youtube and twitter accounts.
Brandolini's law, aka the bullshit asymmetry principle comes to mind - "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
The fact is that you should never let electronic voting machines ever in the first place. I went crazy the first time I saw them in the US long time ago and said: "this is the end of democracy"
You should only count physical ballots in front of someone that represents all the parties.
As an engineer I can not trust them. There are 20 different ways I can cheat using those machines, from network hacks to software that self modifies.
The US election system is a joke, with no national ID card.
The worst thing is that they are trying to import those defective systems into Europe.
We find ourselves in a situation where the processes have been constructed in such a way that there is suspicion about the outcome and logistical difficulties at disproving what should be by design trivially disprovable, this just creates a terrible feedback loop of mistrust. The argument that we don't need better controls until actual widespread fraud can be proved in a court of law seems mistaken to me. We need the controls to keep us from getting to the point where a forensic analysis is needed to discern what happened during an election.
I realize that there are legitimate concerns that better voting controls can result in "voter suppression" but our haphazard approach to voting controls and process transparency has left us in a place where large numbers of people are suspicious and there doesn't seem to be any effective way to counter those suspicions in part due to the haphazard controls.
Stupid example: What if only Republicans were allowed to count ballots, and the only result you got was a number of votes that they told you, and they threw away all of the records. It would be impossible to get evidence, but you wouldn't need any evidence to rightfully distrust the result.
Purely electronic voting systems are analogous, though it differs in the details and degrees of things.
I believe they all print out a ballot or receipt that records the vote and those are what are counted/scanned and or can be in verifications/recounts
(maybe i can't think of an example let me know if so i would also agree that not having a paper record is bad but i dont think it exists).
In 2020, in the same city, I voted by marking a paper ballot and inserting it into a machine which scanned it and output it into a sealed box.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voting...
I don’t buy a lot of the claims going on here, but what does a receipt do if you don’t trust the machine? Or more importantly the operator?
Here are the list of states that have at least some electronic voting withOUT a paper trail:
Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas
7 of those states were won by Trump, 1 by Biden, and none of those states were even within 15 percentage point margin except for Texas, which Trump won by 5 and a half percent.
I don't "believe" but I do understand why people would. Every time someone questions the result, their questioning is seen as motivated and the premise that there has already been a satisfactory investigation is assumed. This is awkward because it would be a lot easier to talk people down if there was in fact an investigation that resolved concerns to show them.
> I'd really like to hear from anyone who believes this, to present a cogent argument.
As I said, I don't "believe." But I'd certainly like an explanation of the two videos (one in Georgia and one of a thumb drive handoff) and perhaps some reasonable handling of the claims by observers that they weren't effectively permitted to do their jobs (asked to leave, prevented from seeing the ballots, challenging ballots that were ignored, etc.)
[0] https://apelbaum.wordpress.com/2020/12/03/the-georgia-ballot...
[1] https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2020/12/04/that-is-some-handof...
Just saying fraud doesn't exist doesn't help calm the outrage of those who believe it was stolen. Also based on how partisan the impeachment was it is likely people don't trust the government to have any sense of accuracy and merely attribute it to partisan lines.
The strategy of acknowledging what someone says and then responding to it often calms down difficult interpersonal conflicts. I think the same applies here.
We understand you believe "A", we do not believe that because of proof "B".
Instead the approach taken is largely ad hominem's which only escalate things further.
1) You can't reason yourself out of a position that you didn't reason yourself into. They don't care that the data is bad, they care that it supports their worldview.
2) The folowing remains true now as it did more than 70 years ago: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
I went through three or four of the statistical analyses that purported to show the election results were practically impossible.
They were trivially junk. E.g. one compared the voting rate in 2020 and 2016 but used votes to registered voters in 2020 but votes to eligible voters in 2016.
The others were similarly laughable, but no body cared when I posted this.
Others says it better than I can, but the people who believe this stuff believe it because they want to, not because it makes sense. Facts and reason didn’t get them to this point and facts and reason isn’t going to pull them back.
Heck, it's difficult to even find the original court documentation for many cases. I find news articles, but I want the source material, so that I can talk about it to others without any reporters coloring the court cases, especially as I talk about these court cases with other people who think there is loads of legitimate evidence.
So... if you can help me search for it, or find it, I would really appreciate it.
I vote in every election. There are problems with many elections, especially ones for US President. Those problems are baked into the system we've established as a nation. States run their own elections. States elect US Presidents and not citizens.
I don't think states could coordinate a conspiracy to change citizen votes to steer elections one way or another. Too many moving parts, too many people. It is fair one state has one set of rules that differ from another? Yes. It is the way the USA is built.
It frustrates me to no end that a group of people say, "The election had no issues" just as it frustrates me when someone says, "The election was stolen." Those thoughts are always perpetuated by those who lead political parties.
tactical AND strategic.
I think this is a strawman. Can you find me a source of a prominent* Democrat that said that this election had no issues? Most of the time, people who support the election's outcome mean that there was no fraud significant enough to change the outcome, or that this election had less fraud/was more secure than a previous election.
On the other hand, when Trump says the election was stolen [1] (along with some Congressional Republicans), he means that the outcome should have been him winning.
*Prominent being: US Senator, US Representative, Secretary of State, state election official, state governor, DNC leadership.
[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13469288825958850...
I don't think the election had no issues, and few would claim so. Let's start with: Where the hell is my federal election holiday? And it just goes downhill from there.
All of it has been on a scale that wouldn't affect the outcome of elections. For example in Georgia 2 ballots were submitted in the names of dead people. In Colorado they are investigating non-matching signatures on a few hundred ballots.
This kind of stuff is routine, and happens in every election. Of course it isn't perfect, but its a decent enough system that has worked well in 100s of countries across centuries
I've seen countless videos of people taking the analysis done by some charlatan on Youtube, then applying the exact same calculation to a bunch of other Republican counties and getting the exact same anomalies.
I see people saying there isn’t evidence of wide-spread fraud sufficient to overturn the results of the election.
There do seem to be a lot of people making the mistake of trying to cast this as black and white, totally fraudulent or totally perfect. But that never made sense.
(Edit: typo)
That way the listener doesn't automatically correctly categorized their point of view as nuttery, but is drawn into listening longer out of decorum. And the speaker doesn't suffer a loss of reasonableness for "wanting the truth".
Are you saying you agree or disagree with my statement?
For example: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/76278182654903091...
Not that it matters, but if you're going to try to call someone out or discredit them, try not to in the same stroke do the same thing.
concern trolling: the action or practice of disingenuously
expressing concern about an issue in order to undermine or
derail genuine discussion. (from Oxford Languages via Google)You used quotes, but what you quoted is not a quote from me, nor anyone earlier in the thread.
Also, I didn't write "wise".
Yes. This rhetoric can be used for all kinds of purposes, whether well-intentioned, altruistic, noble or selfish, corrupt, deceitful and so on.
It seems to me this phrase fits the bill for a "thought-terminating cliché". [1] Do you agree?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché
I don't follow your logic.
Here's the context. x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
> Coming out and saying that you think the election stolen gets you labeled a conservative nutter. So wise commenters won't say that, instead they will do what you've noted. Imply that folks are saying the election was perfect, and then say that they think there might have been some "imperfections" going on. > > That way the listener doesn't automatically correctly categorized their point of view as nuttery, but is drawn into listening longer out of decorum. And the speaker doesn't suffer a loss of reasonableness for "wanting the truth".
In response, I wrote:
> Yes, this is part of a known playbook for people who want to seem credible while stoking fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
In doing so, I pointed out a pattern that involves a rhetorical technique.
With this context, perhaps you can explain what you mean by "try not to in the same stroke do the same thing?"
With the kebashed context in mind, I think I was in a sense pointing out the perceived (on my part) dehumanization of the hypothetical speaker who could just genuinely be someone with concerns who simply desires additional scrutiny or scrutiny, closer to the topic at hand.
I apologize for the misunderstanding. Teaches me to post from the hip.
The closest thing to a widespread problem is voter suppression, where states administer elections in regionally uneven ways to suppress one party's turnout. This is predominately against black citizens in the south after Shelby v Holder.
>The closest thing to a widespread problem is voter suppression, where states administer elections in regionally uneven ways to suppress one party's turnout. This is predominately against black citizens in the south after Shelby v Holder.
I agree with you 100% but that just means every election is illegitimate.
> We don't identify voters and we removed chain of custody on ballots.
Source? Voters are identified by signature (and in some places voter ID). Re: chain of custody, as far as I'm aware, states generally require representatives from both major parties (plus independents) to be present when ballots are moved or opened. Since states generally have the power to conduct their elections as they deem appropriate, finding a national source is impossible, but I invite you to find me an example where such a chain of custody was violated.
Mail-in-ballots do not subvert this chain of custody [1].
> Instead we put unsecured boxes on street corners to collect ballots and put them in the mail.
Drop boxes are locked with keys and are monitored with video surveillance. Sometimes, people set fire to ballot boxes, but when this happens security is tightened [2] [3]. In any case, the small number of ballots damaged by arson would not change the outcome of an election.
> We eliminated signature validation.
This is not true. Give us a source. The closest thing to "eliminating signature validation" is giving voters the chance to fix signatures [4]. "Eliminating signature validation" is a false claim that Trump has spread [5].
> I have no idea who got the most legitimate votes, but neither does anyone else.
The fact is Biden got the most legitimate votes. End of story. Any other claim is refusing to accept the overwhelming evidence that there was no significant fraud. That's not to say that the vote count is accurate, but all evidence shows that any inaccuracies would not have changed the outcome of the election.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/fact-checking-mail-in-voting...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/us/elections/in-boston-so...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/20/us/trump-biden-elect...
[4] https://apnews.com/article/pennsylvania-election-2020-pittsb...
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/11/trumps-la...
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/pennsylvania-court-...
Your link about mail in ballots says they are secure because of measures like signature validation, except we got rid of that.
Not that it should matter, but I'm not a Trump supporter. He is a war criminal as far as I'm concerned.
I was not accurate, but you were also not accurate. Pennsylvania did not "get rid" of signature verification for absentee voting; it never had signature validation in the first place. States have the power to hold elections in the manner of their choosing, and of the last 28 years, Republicans had trifecta control of the legislature for twelve [1]. They had the full power to amend the election code as they saw fit, but they chose not to.
In any case, the absence of signature validation still does not prove fraud. The purpose of signature validation is to "prove" is the person who cast the ballot is the person who registered to vote. To take advantage of a lack of signature validation, an attacker would have to:
1. Find people who are registered to vote, but who don't intend to vote -- even in person.
2. Acquire their ballot by either:
2-a. Re-register them under a new address controlled by the adversary (which notifies the voter).
2-b. Steal their ballot from their mailbox (and the voter may become suspicious if they don't get a ballot).
3. Fill out their ballot and mail it in.
Steps 1 and 2 each very difficult to do without raising suspicion. Step 3 is nearly impossible to do by a single person for a large number of votes. The vote difference in Pennsylvania was 81660 votes. So if Biden had 81661 fraudulent votes, then Trump should be the winner.
Let's assume that if more than a hundred people notice that their ballots were missing/voter registration changed, then there would be an investigation and the attacker would be exposed. In other words, the attacker must flip ~80,000 votes, while only alerting suspicion 100 times. Their success rate per ballot must be therefore greater than (1 - 81661 / 100) = 99.878%. A thousand? That would still require a success rate of 98.775% per ballot.
How many reports are there of missing ballots in Pennsylvania? I can't even find one person claiming such a thing, much less a hundred or a thousand.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Party_control_of_Pennsylvania_state_...
Two simple examples: If I were a ballot harvester I could fill in any blanks that someone left on their ballot. If I were a postal worker I could just lose some mail if someone had the wrong sign in their yard.
So given the above, do you believe that 50 people each independently decided to create 1,600 votes for Biden? Or 100 people each independently created 800 votes? A thousand people each created 80? 80,000 each created one?
Remember again that all of these people have near zero incentive to commit voter fraud. Each person would also have to keep their secret and not brag -- something very hard for most humans to do.
> If I were a ballot harvester I could fill in any blanks that someone left on their ballot.
Ballot harvesting is illegal in PA [1]. Also, ballots envelopes are generally sealed by the voter and election workers would notice if a seal is broken and not count the vote [2].
[1] https://www.publicsource.org/what-is-ballot-harvesting-and-w...
[2] https://6abc.com/naked-ballots-pennsylvania-pa-voting-in/696...
> If I were a postal worker I could just lose some mail if someone had the wrong sign in their yard.
Ballots are tracked, and then the postal worker would rely on the voter not checking the status of their ballot. If there is a pattern, then the postal worker would likely be arrested or fined, so in all likelihood each postal worker could only "lose" one or two ballots.
>Remember again that all of these people have near zero incentive to commit voter fraud.
The stakes are control over the most powerful government in the history of the planet being on your team vs the other team. And literally Hitler Putin puppet/Communist dementia man was on the ballot. The stakes couldn't be higher.
>Ballots are tracked, and then the postal worker would rely on the voter not checking the status of their ballot. If there is a pattern, then the postal worker would likely be arrested or fined, so in all likelihood each postal worker could only "lose" one or two ballots.
Your understanding of average human behavior is very different than mine.
I promise you postal workers are well aware of the implications of losing mail, and especially losing ballots. Postal workers have been prosecuted for dumping mail and ballots in the past, and I'm sure the USPS reinforces the severity of such a crime in their trainings.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdny/pr/postal-worker-arrested-...
Just because they're legal doesn't make them less bad.
One difference here is that everything I need to know to vote for someone is public record. Your name, address, political affiliation, whether or not you have voted in recent elections, etc. are all public record. Your credit card information is not.
2. You only get to vote once. Unlike credit cards.
The comparison is such an insane false analogy as to render the rest of your comment meaningless.
You clearly have no clue how the system actually works if you think that comparison is reasonable at all. Go read up on why voting is secure instead of Googling more doggrel that fits your confirmation bias.
I agree there is a risk that bad actors could exploit this vulnerability, but there is also a risk purging voters prevents legitimate voters. That is especially concerning when the purges come from a government controlled by one party in an area heavily populated by voters of another party.
So it is not cut and dried. There are reasonable arguments on both sides, but my personally calculation is it is less likely someone gets away with finding people who have moved and casting votes on their behalf. It is more likely that a bunch of politicians purge voting rolls in districts that lean the other direction. Especially as we have 150 years of evidence of the latter but few examples of the former.
I think that may have been after just a few years of not being able to purge voters due to lawsuits from the ACLU, so there is definitely a big enough pool of registered voters who are likely no longer living in that state to potentially swing elections at least some of the time. If I remember rightly, some recent key swing states have a lot of outward migration compared to the victory margins.
No, that definitely is fraud.
I mean, just think about it: this is completely impractical. To "steal" any one election you need to swing thousands of ballots. Each box holds a few dozen ballots at a time at most. You'd be talking about a huge crime spree to manage to collect and resubmit all those ballots.
And yet... we've never seen it happen. The simple truth is that stealing elections doesn't happen because it's too expensive vs. just winning elections with more persuasive arguments.
Everyone, every state, every side, every ideologue should be jumping up and down for 100% transparency. and if anyone saying we really have that they are a liar.
So when you say "transparency", in the absence of any proof of real fraud, is what other people hear as "suppression". We don't think you care about voter fraud at all, we think you just want more republican votes.
Is that not true? Then come to the table in good faith and find a compromise. There are many (e.g. voting day holidays, guarded drop boxes, etc...). Republicans have blocked them every time they come up.
I know of at least 2 people in my friend group who voted in their "home states" that they haven't lived in for 4+ years. I don't know if this is considered voter fraud, but if it is, it certainly undermines integrity of this claim.
In any case, at the macro level, there isn't reason to believe one party participates in this more than the other.
in a popular vote elections even a hundred thousand votes would be just a rounding error. In US electoral system just a few counties going wrong way could turn the elections, ie. theoretically "some bad actors, mistakes, fraud, etc." would be enough to do it. Add to that the facts like Dominion Voting Systems (whose machines were used in some of those key states and counties if i remember correctly) being a client of SolarWinds ... and one can have more than enough for a good conspiracy theory. At least i have :)
We need to restore trust in the system. An idiot needs to be able to understand and audit it. Until that happens, there will always be people who think it's rigged, and politicians will always exploit that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
> About 19,000 ballots were spoiled because of overvotes (two votes in the same race), compared to 3000 in 1996.[18]:215–221 According to a 2001 study in the American Political Science Review, the voting errors caused by the butterfly ballot cost Gore the election: "Had PBC used a ballot format in the presidential race that did not lead to systematic biased voting errors, our findings suggest that, other things equal, Al Gore would have won a majority of the officially certified votes in Florida."
And yet the protests then were level-headed, largely peaceful, and fully justifiable.
I don't think this election was stolen, but in 2004, I did think there were oddities which were swept under the rug.
This is mostly not true. See https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat... . Almost every state produces a voter-readable paper trail for all votes.
The voting machines produce a paper ballot, which can be recounted and audited.
The elections were fine.
100% of the issue is derived from Trump's attempt to sow doubt, and of course, his enablers.
[1] https://votepatternanalysis.substack.com/p/voting-anomalies-...
edit: I'm looking for folks to give their take on this analysis since I nowhere qualified. A good summary is the final two sections of the article.
I also want to say that the sources of reported votes isn't a mystery, and the author could easily have found out that they were early votes if they had wanted to. Either they didn't check, or didn't want to inform people of those very relevant facts.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wi-pa-mi-vote-s...
My comment and some discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25031443
I think we should be able to see how our vote was recorded.
The whole system is based on trust. Right now that trust is being threatened (eroded?). Since there isn't a way to individually inspect the system, we have to rely on the word of others to validate it.
The government doesn't always act in the best interest of the populace and often outright lies to it. This begs the question, should we take their word for it?
The tried and tested way to hold free and fair elections are paper ballots, simple boxes with obvious seals, and observers from all parties as well as international ones.
And this year many counts were filmed and streamed live because some Republicans complained that 6 feet was too far away with COVID - that challenge got thrown out in court.
the key point is that the media was extremely supportive of Biden and not of Trump. the margin of victory was small in key states. so if the media was presenting an even-handed position and not doommongering the whole time, it seems quite probable that Trump would have won.
so the argument is that the media elite has manipulated the population into doing something the population would not have done by itself. this is not certain of course, but it is a reasonable hypothesis.
hence the US is not a democracy but a country controlled by a tiny media elite which has cohered around its preferred candidate.
There simply is no reality based reason to believe that the election was stolen, certainly not in any consistently logical belief system (e.g. the 2016 Electoral College results were almost exactly the same in the opposite direction).
Oh, right, because they weren't.
Yes, Dems, barely managed to flip the Senate. That that was just a +3 / +1 affair. But...
Look at all the House races. Repubs won all the red-leaning districts, nearly all the purple ones, and even some light-blue ones. They did better than expected in all states including the ones where 45 lost in the Presidential race.
If you're going to steal the election of the President via a comprehensive, super-sneaky, multi-state conspiracy, why the fuck would you also not also steal House and Senate seats? That makes no goddamn sense. You're going to alter ballots, inject fake ballots, etc., etc., etc., and not bother with the Congress and local elections too?
Moronic. Totally moronic. How fucking stupid do you have to be to believe that only the Presidential race was stolen, but everything else was fine.
Who out there is a supporter of 45, that believes the Dems don't hate Moscow Mitch nearly as much as 45 himself? Or Louie Gomert, Devin Nunes, Matt Gates, or the other lackeys? "Yeah, let's steal the election for Biden, but then leave in place all the other assholes. Great idea! That will work out perfectly!"
Morons.
For the sake of intellectual honesty, I'll post this on my main account. Strong odds it doesn't go well, but transparency is worth striving for.
I have seen [3,4,5]quite a bit of evidence that there was at least some fraud taking place, and that the evidence of that fraud has been suppressed. Whether the fraud was enough to change results, no clue. I have also seen people attacking the character of everyone presenting or talking about said evidence, rather than addressing the actual content of the claims.
The above is concerning, but it doesn't lead me to believe an election was stolen. However, the narrative that's being played out is that Joe Biden, a 78 year old segregationist who was crucified publicly by his now running mate Kamala Harris for those policies, and who basically didn't campaign or hold rallies, and who has [0]received most of his money from the 'upper class', won nearly 12 Million more votes than Barack Obama in 2008. He did this while [1]winning in substantially fewer counties than Barack Obama.
However, most importantly, the majority of the lawsuits have [2]not been addressed based on their merits but have instead been dismissed based for procedural reasons (e.g. legal standing, injury). As a result, there has not been a transparent process through which the evidence that has been presented has been addressed.
One would expect that these dismissals, and the evidence presented would have become major news. That has not happened, and that leaves people who have seen some of the evidence or who have heard about it feeling concerned.
Now, I'm hesitant to bring up the Hunter Biden story because the media narratives on it are hyper-polarizing. But, many of the claims about the contents are true and some (many?) of the videos and emails have been leaked. This story was smothered by social media, just like the election-related concerns. This has led to a complete eradication of trust in the media as a whole by a huge portion of the population.
- PERSONAL OPINION -
The issue is not what happened, the issue is that we have become divided. Until we have more transparency we will not see people coming back together. There is no way to fix the division until the concerns of both sides can be addressed publicly, transparently, and without media (including social media) interference. Seeing videos of raw footage being marked as misinformation by twitter eradicates whatever trust people had in them.
This election cycle, and the way the media is operating, reminds me of the way we found ourselves in the middle east. Everyone knew([6,7]except our allies) there were WMD's until there weren't.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-election-trump-biden...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/09/fac...
[2] https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/dec/10/donald-trump-... (CTRL+F "lawsuits been disposed")
[3] https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/Home/ShowDocument?id=1...
[4] DISCLAIMER I am aware of the bias of the individual presenting, but the content is what is important here. https://youtu.be/XH9ihoLi1NA
[5] https://www.youtube.com/user/veritasvisuals
[6] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/who-lied-to-wh...
Well let's look at once recent example that I mentioned.
[0] CNN completely discredited the Hunter Biden story when it was released. They called it 'Russian Disinformation' and in their articles repeatedly used charged language such as "dubious" to refer to the information presented.
This was done on an ongoing basis by the majority of news organizations at the time. EDIT - [3] And supported by social media giants (Famously Twitter, but Google/Youtube did the same thing)
Fast forward past the election and the narrative has changed rather sharply. [1] They no longer call the story Russian Disinformation, and instead publish that the FBI is actively investigating Hunter Biden.
[2] As I mentioned, the same thing happened after 2001. The largest news institutions eagerly promoted that the US was under extreme threat. CNN in 2002 was publishing quotes like "we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” and "Saddam is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.”
Then when it became clear that there was no WMD's to be found they started giving room to the opposing narrative such as: Joe Wilson “I think it’s safe to say that the US government should have or did know that [the Niger documents were] fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the UN yesterday.”
Just to be clear, I'm not saying 'everything is a lie and the election was stolen and Trump is telling the truth'
What I am saying is that the sources of information have proven themselves to be incredibly untrustworthy to the point where many people automatically believe the inverse of what they claim.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/18/media/new-york-post-hunter-bi...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-inv...
[2] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war...
I think it's perfectly fine for them to add commentary by pundits. If they believe the president to be lying, they have to do their best to give a competing narrative. But they can't be sticking their narrative into the objective part of the story. Trump said this. Election Official XYZ said this was incorrect because of that. That's it. If they claim something is objectively incorrect they'd better have a very solid basis for it.
I don't know if left-of-center people just don't notice it anymore, but anyone right-of-center feels like they're reading Pravda all the time these days.
So it seems this dude is a wrestler, and here's a random Twitter quote: "If the CHURCh understood the Laws of God which govern our relationship with Him, our neighbor, and those whom he has given authority to we wouldn’t be in this situation. The Church has failed to represent the lawful nature character and heart of God. Lawlessness is rampant." Anyhow, look him up on Twitter.
If you Google this story you'll see this dude got a fair bit of media exposure. I'd say more than I'd expect. So much for "the media doesn't report on this".
We also have some mystery Arizona law firm involved here. So what's the story exactly in how this specific person got involved with this specific law firm? I'd follow that lead but I sort of got an idea about who is involved here.
Just because we have a signed affidavit doesn't mean its true...
This guy (or rather these lawyers) did have their day in court: https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/records/election-2020/... and the Justice offers a lengthy and educated opinion on the issue as a whole (basically while there might have been some irregularities there is no way they would have changed the outcome of the elections). And man, there is a lot of minutes/paperwork here.
Is this your best evidence of fraud? I think it's pretty thin.
Also please vote in your elections, it impacts all of us.
You picked the one high-profile case where an individual who did not vote in a specific state somehow had a signature verified ballot cast in their name. Because of who he is, and because of his beliefs, it made headlines (in conservative media).
If you google "Nahshon Garrett CNN" you see the following results: https://pasteboard.co/JIuN3X9.jpg
You can swap CNN for almost every major media outlet(NBC, MSNBC, etc) and see the same results. So, compared to the amount of articles posted that call allegations of fraud baseless, or claim there is no evidence, the coverage this well-documented counterexample is extremely minimal. It's noteworthy that an independent channel (Tim Pool) has such a presence in the results.
> Also please vote in your elections, it impacts all of us.
There hasn't been a President in 40 years (until Trump, ironically) that has not started a new war. As someone who strongly believes that violence should only be tolerated as a defensive measure of last resort, I cannot in good conscience vote for anyone who does not believe the same.
Where exactly is that "well-documented" documentation? It's not in the affidavit. For all we know this guy voted in Arizona just so he could cry foul, or nobody really voted in Arizona using his name. Even if we say that one of his friends or acquaintances (clearly a Biden supporter) knew that he moved and took advantage to fake a vote where does that exactly leave us? How many people are in this situation? Would it change the results? Was this somehow systematically exploited? And how exactly?
Why should I assign any credibility to what some seem to call "Pro-Trump ‘voter integrity’ group that is calling Pennsylvania voters has ties to White House"? Does this group have any credibility? Now I need to watch a video? But sure, let's see what they're saying and I'll get back to you.
We have plenty of credible sources, including from the current administration, who tell us that the elections was generally fair.
Not voting has an impact, so if the president that won starts a war, and you didn't vote for the other guy (hypothetically) then you did actually effectively vote for the president. You don't get to walk away from democracy like that.
EDIT: So I went to the video. I gotta say "Trump Pence" in the background inspires confidence in the message. I'm not gonna spend an hour of my time listening to this so I jumped to the "dead voters" segment because that seemed interesting. "blah blah blah", "no records", "duplicate names make this difficult", "very small numbers", "small numbers", "I can not say there was an effort to vote in the name of the deceased"... "Its very difficult to determine who is dead and who is not". So great, it's all good then?
You seem to have a strongly held position on the subject, and I have no interest in trying to change your position. However, it would be beneficial for democracy if you would take the time to understand the position of those with different views than yourself. It helps a lot if you don't actively admit (and condescendingly phrase) that you won't spend your time to understand their concerns.
> Not voting has an impact, so if the president that won starts a war, and you didn't vote for the other guy (hypothetically) then you did actually effectively vote for the president. You don't get to walk away from democracy like that.
Actually, not voting very specifically does not have an impact and reduces the thresholds required for recalls for elected officials. I'll vote in every election once we have a voting system that doesn't perpetuate the powers of the two most corrupt institutions in America.
Why is this a question of "view"? Isn't the picture pretty clear? I don't really have a view here other than "someone is wrong on the Internet" ( https://xkcd.com/386/ ). And that someone just happens to be you ;) (oops, condescending again). My political views don't really align with much of what's going on in the US on both major parties.
If President X won by 1 vote, and you didn't vote for President Y (oops, ignore that's not how "democracy" works in the US, doesn't matter how many people vote for X), then I'm sorry but your not voting is what made X president. You can spin that anyway you want but it seems like a pretty universal fact. Can US presidents be recalled?
Anyhow, I will agree with one point I think you're making, democracy in the USA is really screwed up. Keep in mind there's other ways of participating in the democratic process, you can run to office yourself or get involved in the campaign of someone who resonates with you.
"condescendingly phrase" - I'm sorry. I probably am being condescending. It's age and my annoyance and disappointment with the USA. Really, what the heck is wrong with you people? Try and tune that out and listen to the core of my position. I.e. there's no credible evidence that the result of the elections is due to some massive fraud or conspiracy.
EDIT: I also want to add that I'm not shutting you out. I'm just asking for some sort of evidence that I can go look at and is going to be compelling/convincing and pointing out that asking someone to watch a one hour video (I watched a portion, randomly, and it had nothing) or to follow some random links (I followed one, randomly, and found nothing) isn't really the way to go about asking someone form an opinion or change an opinion. I don't think (in my biased opinion) that this is a situation where I'm clearly holding a wrong view, there's a mountain of good evidence to that extent, and I'm just ignoring it and sticking with my views. But hey, maybe I'm wrong.
EDIT2: I should know better than arguing with random people on the Internet. But like I said, this is actually important stuff that impact everyone on this planet. If you guys can't get your act together, who can?
EDIT3: Let's use my edit window fully. So you're saying the election was not stolen except there's no way Biden really received all these votes? Or am I misreading your original commentary? So it was stolen? Or it wasn't stolen?
Did Obama also start a war? I honestly can't keep track any more.
Not me, but plenty of friends and family have such views. Every argument voiced to me so far from those sources has been some variant of the following two arguments:
1) <ludicrous thing> happened, therefore the election was rigged
2) <ludicrous thing> happened, therefore <verifiably false thing> happened, therefore the election was rigged
Elaborating slightly, <ludicrous thing> is defined here to be something designed to appeal to your common sense -- something that without close inspection would be plainly incompatible with a non-rigged election to any reasonable person. That's probably ordinarily a fine enough chain of reasoning, but all the instances I bothered to examine had the property that reality directly contradicted one's gut reaction; they seemed cherry-picked to be easy to believe and repeat while also being false (not to assume malice, I think that's exactly the kind of reasoning you'd expect if you went fishing for evidence to support a theory you believe to be true).
As a specific example, one argument was that the exact vote tallies for Biden and Trump were the same across many voting locations, therefore a computer program must have generated the result. This sounds reasonable on the surface because it seems unlikely that if you drew vote counts out of a hat they would coincide, and most people aren't equipped to be able to analyze such a statement further -- it's "ludicrous" to imagine that in a fair election that kind of anomaly would happen by accident. In practice though, combining the facts that most combinations of votes are comparatively unlikely (few locales would have a 0/N split for example) with the large number of voting locations and a healthy dose of the birthday paradox, many repeated vote tallies are _exactly_ what one would expect from a fair election. Their absence would in fact be a suspicious property indicating some kind of large-scale fraud.
Anywho, I didn't investigate every theory (there were a lot), but I did check out the first 10 or so which came my way and a randomly selected 5 or so (till I grew tired or bored) from each subsequent batch. There might be a valid argument in there somewhere (and independently of their ability to come up with a valid argument there _might_ have been some kind of massive fraud), but the best evidence I've seen is pretty shoddy.
Further, very few information sources are truly factual, and without bias?
This statement presents a false dichotomy. I could also say that no measurement of the temperature in Phoenix, AZ is "truly" accurate. However, they are accurate enough for our purposes.
To take it a step further, we can combine sources. We can use reasoning about the sources in how we combine them. These sort of study and technique is meta-analysis.
I don’t disagree that human communication is often an oxymoron, simply because of how bodies work. Until we get perfect brain-to-brain data transfer, we’ll always have to go through this messy mismatch between my perceptions and your perceptions.
And "this is where our model breaks down, maybe {big bang singularity, big bounce, etc} happened before it"
The big Bang (fast inflationary persiod in the early universe) is not one of those things? To my knowledge its well measured?
The engineering mindset tends not to care about the provenance of a model, only whether it's useful for a goal. We don't care about the why,unless the why is required for something we're trying to do
For example, in PA, a judge ordered the election officials to allow republican watchers to view the counting, and struck down the distance requirements set by the governor due to COVID. However, election officials refused to do so, violating a court order. The GOP sued the officials, but the court dismissed it due to standing. They didn't even consider the complaint. Then a voter group tried to sue. They dismissed that for standing. Then trump sued, they dismissed that too. So if neither the political party, the voters, nor the candidate purportedly affected has standing to force the state to allow the vote to be examined and cannot bring a case against an official violating a court order -- then who exactly has that right? Can any election official simply do what they want?
Or in the TX v PA case, the Supreme Court really displayed major cowardice. They ought to have taken the case, examined the merits, and said yes or no. They dismissed it due to lack of standing. The case asked a very important question -- the Constitution says only the legislature sets the election rules, but in PA, the governor and SoS made up rules. Additionally, the PA supreme court simply extended a deadline set by the legislature. If indeed the legislature is the only one who can make electoin rules, then these moves are clearly illegal. The Court should have said if it's okay or not. They could have not granted the relief requested, which I do admit is a major ask. But they should have ruled on whether or not the PA Supreme Court or the governor's actions were legal.
To many republicans, it seems as if there were bad actors who got away with not following the law. It now seems that governors, courts, etc can simply set whatever election rules they want and get away with it. Even if it wouldn't have changed the outcome, I'd like to see a court penalize those officials in PA who disobeyed a court order, or explain in clear legal detail after hearing a case as to why those officials were right to do so.
I also want explanations into why the counting stopped. It is quite clear now that the supposed water leak in Atlanta was a simple toilet overflow that should not have caused anything to stop. Why did they do that, and why did they report it as a leak? Why did we see major drops for Biden with zero votes for Trump? Again, I am ready to concede that Biden won. In fact, I think it likely. However, it is crazy to me that so far not a single body has been willing to investigate these seeming discrepancies and instead told the groups interested in seeking resolution that they have no standing to question it.
Telling people that they do not deserve an answer is what leads to the behavior we're seeing now.
The courts made a huge mistake by simply dismissing on standing. Rumor has it that John Roberts didn't want to take the case due to fear of a mob... Well he got his mob, just not the one he expected.
Downvoters: please engage in good faith. Someone asked if there was anyone who believed the election was 'stolen'. I have given my good faith answer as to what I would have liked to have seen in order for me to fully trust our elections. You may disagree with me, but I'm simply giving my solicited opinion.
I'm not sure you can argue they're bad actors when the clear and obvious reasoning for those measures across the country are to limit the spread of a deadly pandemic.
It seems to me like the poll watcher is the person with standing? They could bring the exact same case a second time, that they were not able to watch. that comes against another legal doctrine now that the elections have been certified -- it's a moot point
The lack of standing is pretty obvious for the supreme Court isn't it? Texas has no say in how Pennsylvania votes. There's other things that are ridiculous about that case, like wanting throw out unrelated Texan votes.
I find it strange that that they weren't also suing to Wisconsin for the same thing and want to throw out Texan republican votes equal to the number of Wisconsin votes counted in this manner they don't like?
No it's not though. Texas is asking the Supreme Court to answer the question of whether the constitution allows the governor to make up election rules or whether it's just the state legislature. The Supreme Court has ruled that how other states conduct their elections affects other states. By precedent, they should have answered it.
Moreover, similar challenges to PA law by PA voters, PA candidates, and Trump himself were dismissed also for standing. Perhaps you can argue Texas has no standing to tell PA what to do. But shouldn't a PA voter have standing to question whether his governor can make up rules? How come absolutely no one has standing?
> I'm not sure you can argue they're bad actors when the clear and obvious reasoning for those measures across the country are to limit the spread of a deadly pandemic.
But they violated a court order. Sure, it's to stop a pandemic. But a judge ordered that order to be violated. Court orders supersede gubernatorial edicts.
> The governor's in charge of enforcement
I'm sorry... that's not good enough for an election. Can a governor allow votes to be made up even though it's against the law, because the governor is 'in charge of enforcement'. Can Trump use the national guard to stop the Biden electors from meeting because he's 'in charge of enforcement'.
At some point, the government needs to be held responsible for lack of enforcement of basic civil rights -- election integrity is a governmental duty. You can't just choose not to enforce it.
It has not. If you disagree, please cite the exact standing.
> Moreover, similar challenges to PA law by PA voters, PA candidates, and Trump himself were dismissed also for standing.
The cases along this line that were dismissed for standing were on the basis of challenging the state constitutionality of state laws (or actions of state officials) in federal courts. You're supposed to challenge them in state courts, which did hear some of the complaints and ultimately disagreed with those cases on the merits. You don't get to run off to federal court just because you don't like the state answers, especially since federal precedent is overwhelmingly along the lines of "we cannot question state courts' interpretation of state laws/state constitutions"--this deference is the very definition of federalism.
In a nutshell: Yes, state legislatures are responsible for deciding the "Manner" used to appoint Presidential electors. And in most states, the "Manner" set forth by the state legislature is "general ballot at the general election."
And as long as that process occurs, stuff like disputes over deadlines, drop box locations, signature verifications, etc stay squarely in the realm of election administration. As Judge Brett Ludwig (a Trump appointee) put it:
> But issues of mere administration of a general election do not mean there has not been a “general ballot” at a “general election.” Plaintiff’s conflation of these potential nonconformities with Constitutional violations is contrary to the plain meaning of the Electors Clause. If plaintiff’s reading of “Manner” was correct, any disappointed loser in a Presidential election, able to hire a team of clever lawyers, could flag claimed deviations from the election rules and cast doubt on the election results. This would risk turning every Presidential election into a federal court lawsuit over the Electors Clause. (Internal citations omitted.)
(Source: https://www.scribd.com/document/487916351/12-12-20-Trump-v-W...)
They said they would have taken the case but, even if they found pa to be wrong, they would not give the resolution asked for. That's eminently reasonable to me. This ensures that if they ruledagainst pa, then what happened there won't happen again while ensuring that thousands who voted in good faith are not disenfranchised
Just to illustrate, take greenwashing as an example. Companies market their products as being good for the environment because that drives sales, and you can find that message on every shelf in the grocery store. There are many alternative views, very convincing ones in my opinion, that choosing the bottle of water that uses a thinner plastic is still harmful to the environment, and supporting greenwashing by purchasing it actually results in net harm to the environment because it reduces adoption of better options (reusable bottles, tap water) and distracts consumers from issues that could actually have a meaningful impact on climate change (innovation in direct air capture, greener steel production or air travel, a carbon tax, etc).
But how would that message ever reach consumers? It doesn’t make them spend more, so people never hear any of this.
The result is a populace that believes they are saving the world by not asking for a straw at Starbucks.
This is happening at an ideological level. Major brands either declare no political stance, or they declare a pro-left stance. Every celebrity either declares no political opinion, or declares a pro-left political opinion. (Or declares any pro-right opinion, even vaguely or accidentally, and has their brand harmed or destroyed for it.)
I’m something like a Clinton-era liberal, I guess, but the media environment is concerning to me. I would choose Biden over Trump, but the fact that the election was this close even with every major media source being so aggressively and overtly anti-Trump and pro-Biden does concern me. I can’t ignore the fact that if the media environment was more balanced and less ad-driven, it probably would have been an easy victory for Trump. And I do think all of the above is material to the subject of election integrity and the health of our democracy.
At best you could say there wasn't enough fraud to tip the balance, but this "no fraud," "most secure election ever" nonsense is ridiculous. People like you probably also would have claimed dependent tax credit fraud was incredibly rare (from Snopes, a "FACT CHECK" site, no less):
> https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/declaration-of-non-depende...
Stop being obtuse, all you are doing is eroding trust for the sake of eroding trust.
It's also hilarious how much of the fraud that does happen is perpetuated by Republicans because their party tells them that Democrats commit fraud.
To be fair to the person your replying to I think that percentage you wrote is the crux of the whole thing. Quite large segments of the american population believe fraud >>0.0001% whereas other quite large segments share your view that it is ~0.0001%. And perhaps there is a segment that truly believes it is <<0.0001%.
Though I am unsure what the null hypothesis should be in this case it does seem that the probability of the reality being >>0.0001% is above zero.
Stop with the conspiracy theorizing. There are literal billions spent on elections every year, and if there was fraud being perpetuated by one of the parties, it would be in the interest of the other party to spend massive amounts of money to uncover said fraud, and they do, and they have found nothing of substance.
In addition to private study, there have been countless academic studies that state the same.
Stop giving breath to ideas that are without evidence and which are corrosive to our democracy.
Stop just regurgitating conspiracy theories. Seriously, go volunteer to be a trained poll watcher and go watch an election and then tell me how our elections don't happen under incredible scrutiny.
How exactly would any party put a thumb on the scale?
There is a watcher from each party and an election worker.
The ballots are watched the entire way from opening an envelope/voting booth, counting, moving sealed and secured boxes of ballots, counting, to the end.
It's my understanding Trump supporters are mad their concerns aren't taken seriously. Most court cases were dismissed on technicalities, without looking at the provided evidence or testimonies.
This is supposed to be the evidence: https://got-freedom.org/evidence/
One example, the Georgia video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ0xDWhWUxk And the comments about that video: https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/07/no-the-georgia-vote-cou...
Then there's this: https://twitter.com/MArepublican18/status/134659696972941721... https://twitter.com/Maximus_4EVR/status/1346582356899991552
PA & AZ Republicans wanting to decertify Biden after the election fraud hearings in their states. Not sure how serious those attempts are.
I'm European so I don't have a horse in this race.
"We are told that Biden won more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history. But he won a record low of 17 percent of counties; he only won 524 counties, as opposed to the 873 counties Obama won in 2008. Yet, Biden somehow outdid Obama in total votes."
>>Yet, Biden somehow outdid Obama in total votes.
If you look at the populations of these various counties it isn't puzzling at all.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-votes-counties-...
The question is, where is the evidence of fraud?
The people pursuing these issues need to go beyond tweeting or holding press conferences and bring evidence to court.
So far, that hasn’t happened.
At this point there’s been plenty of opportunity, so it doesn’t seem there’s evidence to substantiate this stuff.
If fraud is happening, and the people doing it don't want to get caught, then you won't find any blatant evidence unless they're sloppy. And even if they're sloppy, at most you'll find hints of what occurred. We have plenty of those.
But somehow in this whole back and forth mess, various facts/stories/details/testimony with various levels of validity/credibility that seem to question the integrity or hint at fraud occurring, are being dismissed with constant repetitive calls of "where is the evidence"?
God damn, maybe I should just say I have this box full of bitcoin wallets in USB disks, someone want to give me a billion dollars for them? And yes, it's enough that you believe me without looking inside the box. Or checking the validity of those wallets.
My techie friends 2020: "The FBI is our savior. What the mainstream media says is true and anyone that otherwise is a conspiracy theorist. This was the most secure election in history."