YouTube will stop removing false presidential election fraud claims
theverge.com
theverge.com
I think it's just easier.
Doing nothing lets you sell ads, keep some percentage of users who might leave in disgust, and congratulate yourself for a principled position.
I think everyone already has had enough of these nonsensical narratives on both sides like the 2016 calls still screaming in denial of 'our election was hijacked' or 'he knows he is an illegitimate president' and in 2020 about the tired 'rigged elections' and 'dead people still voting' and the like.
You should understand that the media is once again placing in distractions like this to light more outrage as the election year is around the corner.
Almost everyone fell for it in 2016. Then again in 2020. Don't fall for it again and don't listen to the media biases. They want even more outrage next year.
1. "Throwing eligible voters off the rolls, reducing polling places in left-leaning districts, and increasing polling places in right-leaning districts hijacked the election."
2. "Millions of fraudulent ballots manufactured in China (identifiable from the bamboo threads), 2,000 voter fraud mules (gathered from cell tower connections anywhere in the same square mile of a ballot drop box), and illegal immigrants in polling places stole the election."
The first are verifiable facts though the conclusion remains speculative. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-locations/so...
The second is 100% pure made up BS, making the conclusion a summation of BS. You know the second is nonsense when even internal emails at Fox News and Trump's own attorney general all loudly dismiss 2020 election steal conspiracy theories as pure cow manure. Even most of Trump's attorneys were VERY careful not to assert voter fraud in court due to their lack of evidence, even in front of Trump-appointed conservative judges. Those that went ahead were sanctioned by the court for lack of evidence. Rudy Giuliani kept saying in front of cameras there was evidence of widespread voter fraud EXCEPT in court in front of a judge, where he explicitly said, "This is not a fraud case." https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fox-news-hosts-allegedly-pri... https://youtu.be/esS-6bHijjM?t=40 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/03/donald-trump... https://youtu.be/Wuwl2p9TIDE
So yeah, I'd distinguish between the two. The first is speculative based on verifiable evidence while the second is demonstrably misinformation precisely because it lacks any evidence for its far more incendiary claims.
> There is a Grand Canyon of difference between these two that goes well beyond simply "anything one doesn't like":
> 1. " Eliminating ID requirements in left-leaning cities, and extending early voting to before the debates affected the election."
> 2. "Direct high-level collusion between one of the candidates and the Russian Federation, as part of a treasonous plot to overthrow American democracy and cover up the Pee Tape (they'll release it any day now!), stole the election."
> The first are verifiable facts though the conclusion remains speculative. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/wisconsin-voters-protection... https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/a-big-deal-for-voting-... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-or-bide...
> The second is 100% pure made up BS, making the conclusion a summation of BS. You know the second is nonsense when even surreptitious recordings of CNN producers all loudly dismiss 2016 Russia collusion conspiracy theories as pure cow manure. Even Robert Mueller was VERY careful not to assert treason in his report due to the lack of evidence, even in front of a Democratic House of Representatives. Adam Schiff kept saying in front of cameras that there was evidence of widespread collusion. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/339632-new-okeefe-video-s... https://thehill.com/homenews/media/339867-okeefe-video-shows... https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/21/adam-schiff-collus... https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/12/10/adam-schiff-r...
> So yeah, I'd distinguish between the two. The first is speculative based on verifiable evidence while the second is demonstrably misinformation precisely because it lacks any evidence for its far more incendiary claims.
The 2016 election taught me that the institutions I once believed to be respectable and honorable were actually completely dishonest and totally off their rocker. The 2020 election taught me that "my side" was capable of just as much insanity. To fix our problems, we must go beyond blind loyalty to our respective "teams."
The heightened ID requirements don't increase election security because fraud is already very rare. They do however disproportionately affect communities where folks were born at home rather than a hospital (a whole racist history in that nugget) and other folks where the name on their birth certificate doesn't match their current name—which affected many married women. Getting that ID also typically cost money and time getting the necessary documentation, bus fare, and lost wages. So without reducing fraud, folks with less money, people of color, and women are statistically less likely to be able to vote in the election: all demographics that are less likely to vote Republican. Quelle surprise!
As for the Mueller Report, tell me you've never read the report without telling me you've never read the report. If you had, you would know it was clearly and forcefully stated that the ONLY reason no charges were recommended on the Executive Branch was because it was DOJ policy not to and that the gathered evidence should be taken up by Congress. That's it. The evidence was there; it was merely DOJ policy to not prosecute a sitting president. (Why yes, I have in fact read the entire report.)
This information was then passed to Congress, where the House voted to impeach (the first time). The Republicans in the Senate, however, refused to allow witnesses in the impeachment trial and voted largely on party lines regardless of evidence.
> On January 31, after a planned debate session, the Senate voted against allowing subpoenas to call witnesses, including former national security advisor John Bolton (who wrote in his forthcoming book mentioning Ukraine aid freezing) or documents with a 51–49 vote. 51 Republican senators voted against calling witnesses, while 45 Democratic senators, two independents who typically voted Democratic, and two Republicans (Mitt Romney and Susan Collins) voted for witnesses. https://archive.today/20200201193640/https://www.nytimes.com...
So yeah, "Grand Canyon".
Don't know about you, but my deep-blue US county has never asked me for squat any time I've gone to vote. (In contrast, when I vote in French elections, my photo ID is checked three times by three different people. As far as I know this requirement has never caused any political controversy whatsoever.)
> The heightened ID requirements don't increase election security because fraud is already very rare.
"The conclusion is speculative." I'm not saying it definitely made a difference, just that it's reasonable to argue it might have (for example, maybe fraud only appears rare because lack of ID ensures it goes uncaught.) Personally, I highly doubt it affected national results.
> This information was then passed to Congress, where the House voted to impeach (the first time).
The first impeachment alleged improper behavior regarding Trump's communication with the Ukrainian government. Russian collusion didn't even come into it.
Nevertheless this is aside from the fact that after I arrived, my name was crossed off. If I returned later or someone else arrived to claim my ballot, it would clearly be detected.
And that's the point, right? In-person voter fraud—the only kind of voter fraud that stricter ID requirements would address—is already profoundly difficult to do undetected.
So it's not really speculative. Unlike common right-wing claims over the last decade, two million+ extra ballots would not just go unnoticed. Undocumented immigrants can't just show up en masse at random polling places and expect to submit a ballot.
It's not enough to just assert widespread voter fraud exists but is somehow currently undetectable. Show us your evidence. I and others have absolutely no argument against election security and the prevention of misconduct. Speaking for myself, I simply take exception to decreasing access to suffrage due to specious claims of malfeasance.
Isn't the best case scenario to have as many citizens taking part in the electoral process as possible? Voter fraud detracts from that goal just as much as overzealous restrictions.
Republican. Democrat. Independent. I don't care. I want every citizen's vote tallied.
For sure. The people spreading these baseless lies (Trump, Giuliani, Lindell, etc) should be loudly condemned. But half a dozen fraudulent votes, in a very close city council race, is not totally unimaginable. Or even a few hundred, like in the 2008 Minnesota Senate race (that gave Democrats the critical 60th vote needed to pass Obamacare): https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/york-when-1-099-felons-vo...
> And so far, Fund and von Spakovsky report, 177 people have been convicted -- not just accused, but convicted -- of voting fraudulently in the Senate race. Another 66 are awaiting trial. "The numbers aren't greater," the authors say, "because the standard for convicting someone of voter fraud in Minnesota is that they must have been both ineligible, and 'knowingly' voted unlawfully." The accused can get off by claiming not to have known they did anything wrong. > > Still, that's a total of 243 people either convicted of voter fraud or awaiting trial in an election that was decided by 312 votes.
These folks were found to have voted when they shouldn't have, whether intentional or not. (And I do think intent should definitely come into play here, as it does in most areas of law.) But you and the Washington Examiner blithely skip over the part where the illegitimate votes were found out and dealt with.
I NEVER said folks would never attempt to commit voter fraud. I asserted that the kinds of voter fraud associated with in-person voting were never successful even without stricter ID requirements. I asserted that large scale in-precinct ballot stuffing simply would not work.
There is one area where someone could vote multiple times—or at least they could more than ten years ago. That was across state lines, where one casts their votes in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, etc. This however was solved ten years ago with the ERIC program, which allowed states to compare their voter rolls to detect federal voter fraud.
So when a deeply red state like Louisiana declares their intent to dump ERIC while also championing stricter voter ID requirements, I think it appears clear to an objective observer that the primary concern isn't extra voters but rather who they're voting for.
And that feels deeply un-American to me.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008/eric-investigation...
But I could be wrong. It's always important to examine where we're wrong, where our assumptions lead us astray. Here's where it went off the rails.
> In the '08 campaign, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman was running for re-election against Democrat Al Franken. It was impossibly close; on the morning after the election, after 2.9 million people had voted, Coleman led Franken by 725 votes.
> Franken and his Democratic allies dispatched an army of lawyers to challenge the results. After the first canvass, Coleman's lead was down to 206 votes. That was followed by months of wrangling and litigation. In the end, Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn into office in July 2009, eight months after the election.
Would it surprise you to learn that the recount did not occur due to "Franken's army of lawyers" but instead because ALL ELECTIONS in Minnesota by Minnesota law MUST have a recount if the margin of victory is less than 0.5%? I certainly didn't get that important but if info from the Examiner or the passage quoted from the book.
So where did Franken's extra votes come from? Thin air? The cemeteries? No. 953 absentee ballots had been mistakenly rejected. Not all of the absentee votes went to Franken of course, but enough did where the lead shifted.
Was it a close race? Yes. Was it a contentious race? An eight-month saga to be sure. Did the election go through a far greater amount of scrutiny that most elections? Most definitely!
Now ask yourself this question honestly: do you think the Washington Examiner and the book would have been this inflammatory in their description of events had Coleman won by 0.01%? Would they have called any legislation narrowly passed/rejected with Coleman's senate votes suspect or illegitimate?
Answer: no. The Washington Examiner continues to be a partisan mouthpiece created solely because conservatives didn't like The Washington Post calling them out all the time. Same by the way for The New York Post regarding The New York Times. The names chosen were conspicuously close to the papers of record precisely because they wanted to muddy the waters.
Just partisan wrangling? I think not. The WaPo and NYT both regularly issue corrections to their news reporting. Any news outlet will make mistakes, and any honest news outlet will issue corrections/retractions without having been legally required to do so, even if it materially subverts the original news report.
If you can find three prominently-displayed and substantive corrections/retractions by The Washington Examiner that were not court-ordered, I will publicly apologize here and concede the point.
For point of reference, public substantive corrections look like this:
https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2021/troubling-correctio...
> The WaPo and NYT both regularly issue corrections to their news reporting.
You may want to do a web search for "NYT stealth edit".
On the subject of media bias more broadly, I recommend this blog post (author is a liberal): https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-...
Extremism in support of any ideology is extremism. If you can't define and delineate what makes something what it is, then do as you would to the Buddha if you meet him on the road - "kill it".