Curious about where you see an institutionalized support on the left for election tampering claims, if you have any sources.
— South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D), in remarks in Bow, N.H., Oct. 25, 2019
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/30/did-racia...
Also don't forget about Bush v. Gore. It's apparently a "historic" moment when Gore finally conceded the election to Bush.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/al-gore-concedes...
Those are legitimate political arguments about voter suppression laws.
No one on the left claimed Kemp and Republicans stuffed ballot boxes or China hacked whatever.
The argument is based in facts. Many Republican controlled states, especially in the south, have historic issues with suppressing the votes of black and brown Americans.
You can argue over the extent to which this suppression still exists and how much it affects election outcomes.
But it is not even close to the same as arguing that the election was completely fraudulent because of real voter fraud, that the SOS or whatever bureaucrats should overstep their authority to throw it out.
Others talk about stopped counts, regions not reporting until seeing the results of other regions, and then ballot harvesting to make up numbers.
There are many such examples.
- Abrams defends lack of concession after 2018 gubernatorial loss (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/03/politics/stacey-abrams-conces...
- Stacey Abrams is running for Georgia governor in 2022 (AJC.com) "Abrams lost to Kemp by less than 1.4 percentage points in 2018, the closest Georgia gubernatorial election in decades, and her refusal to concede defeat because of what she called an “erosion” of voting rights" https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-blog/breaking-stacey-a...
Her whole platform for her new gubernatorial race is predicated on the "fact" that she was cheated out of her last election.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/huge-georgia-ballot...
and videos coupled cell phone data show many other traffickers going in between democrat NGOs and drop boxes. Abrams run some of these NGOs.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/new-video-voterga-r...
This is an example of us living under Marcusas repressive tolerance where people with the correct ideology can make claims with no evidence, while the other side is censored and persecuted even when coming with concrete evidence. It’s a Mao style cultural revolution. For Bernie, orange man and many other candidates we have proof of rampant cheating.
I was watching the latter seasons of X-Files and Fox Mulder made a comment on 2000 elections, something like “that sounds about as reliable as our elections.”
Plenty of folks, Howard Dean comes to mind, said they were straight up illegitimate.
Even now many on the left insist it was a tie or something.
This thing of “if you don’t win the elections, question the results” started then.
The press had no problem allowing baseless speculation and outright dishonesty in 2000. But when it was a Democratic cadidate, suddenly the truth matters.
To make matters worse, so many journalists are Democrats … it’s insane. Not just Democrats, but urban, college educated Democrats. Not exactly a cross section of the country.
It was very close. Close enough to reveal the messiness that extremely close elections can create.
But not enough to change the outcome.
Bush won. He probably won by double digits in Florida. But he still won.
As late as 2008, Howard Dean was falsely claiming SCOTUS had “snatched” the election from the Dems, which was demonstrably untrue at this point.
https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/05/howard-d...
Read that article. Nowhere do you see the “this is a lie” disclaimers. Yes, Trump is spreading disinformation, as Howard Dean did (and probably still does.)
Here’s another good example: by the end of the Democratic Primary in 2020, Biden had more than enough votes for the nomination. He had won, plain and simple.
But he and Sanders kept campaigning, because they knew an active campaign would turn out Democratic votes in downstream elections.
The press went along with this facade. At no point did they “declare a winner” even though Biden had effectively won.
They allowed the charade of a campaign to go on, allowing Democrats a heavy advantage in elections like the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
Again, the election was already over, and a winner should have been declared. But it wasn’t.
The press is very selective. And study after study after shows journalists are almost exclusively Democrats.
President Trump. What was Howard Dean? The distinction really matters.
> They allowed the charade of a campaign to go on, allowing Democrats a heavy advantage in elections like the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
Primaries are not elections, though, and there is no reason a political party has to call them off just because someone believes the game has already been effectively won. I.e. it ain't over until it's over. It's bad enough that voters in later primaries basically believe their vote doesn't matter, but you're suggesting that we should formalize that? The parties are private organizations, so who do you propose gets to decide when to call the whole thing off?
I’m criticizing the press for not calling the winner.
In most elections, the press takes their duty of calling the winner very, very seriously. Almost like it’s a constitutional role.
And yet when it would have mattered, they decided not to.
It doesn’t help that the US system can have a winner who didn’t get the majority of the vote.
There are a number of aspects of the US voting system which are less than perfect, and that’s just one.
This is incorrect.
You require a majority of votes in the USA in the presidential election. What you seem to be missing is that people do not vote for the President but vote to direct how their state votes.
States vote for President. People vote for states.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13920444/...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-ele...
> “There’s just a lot that I think will be revealed. History will discover,” the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee continued. “But you don’t win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, ‘Whoa, something’s not right here.’ That was a deep sense of unease.”
[1]: https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi...
Hilary Clinton again in 2020 (which is the same election that Trump complains about, by the way) [2]:
> The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee predicted that among several scenarios, Republicans are going to try to “mess up absentee balloting” so that they could get a potentially narrow advantage in the Electoral College.
> “We've got to have a massive legal operation, I know the Biden campaign is working on that,” she said. “We have to have poll workers, and I urge people, who are able, to be a poll worker. We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places. This is a big organizational challenge, but at least we know more about what they're going to do.”
[2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clint...
I also remember well the "Selected not elected" days after Bush v. Gore. That went on the entire time that Bush was president and went to sleep for a couple of terms when Obama won.
Just to be clear, I'm not making a judgement on who is right here. I think the truth is a lot more nuanced than "right or wrong." I;m just pointing out that we have a long history of politicians/parties questioning election results, but until now we've never had widespread attempts to silence it.
The republican party just literally spent months on questioning the election in places like Arizona with no evidence of any fraud, and there's plenty of documentation on how (almost always republican) politicians use lies to get people to not vote: https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Dece...
Basically, if you want to argue that its a "he said, she said" thing, you're going to need to come to the table with receipts about it, and trump is just completely full of shit on a level that's untenable and weirdly turned into this January thing where we almost had lawmakers killed.
I am not happy with either, but I don't really compare them in the same sentence.
Had there been statewide recounts, according to that page, things may have been different.
... actually conceded the night of the election. Bitched about it later, for sure. But conceded the election immediately. Something that hasn't happened yet for Mr. Trump.