mdurak
10mo ago
Ok, if you truly need better election security to be convinced to accept the results, then make that a core part of your platform. Don’t focus on a whole bunch of other things with election integrity only a marginal footnote, and then afterwards come out with “Heads I win, tails the election was rigged because you can’t prove it wasn’t!”
If that’s truly your biggest concern with democracy, then make it an issue front and center and make the Democrats pay when they try to avoid it, just like how the Democrats have done that this election by focusing on Trump’s disregard for the electoral process. Instead, the revealed preferences of the MAGA constituency don’t appear to be anywhere close to emphasizing election security as one of their foremost issues.
mdurak
10mo ago
Thanks for the sources, that is really helpful.
At this point, my remaining gripes are that Trump’s complaints about 2020 being rigged still come across as highly ad hoc. Again, if there was such massive fraud, why didn’t the rest of the Republican establishment side with Trump? If there was any evidence for fraud, surely some of the court cases in some of the states would have advanced and federal investigations would’ve come up with something, because the Democrats don’t control every part of government like that. Instead, it was pretty much unanimous consent from establishment candidates across the aisle which way the election went.
And if there’s really no way for the current level of evidence to satisfy you, then make that a core political issue. Instead, all the noise has been about how 2020 was stolen, instead of how 2024 onwards will be made more secure.
mdurak
11mo ago
Ah, fair enough, you’ve shifted my priors on this.
That system had been ongoing from the New Deal era. It was only found out because they jobbed a single co-conspirator who blew the whistle.
Where did you get this specific detail from? I’d like to read up on the source.
Now those people wouldnt investigate fraud if it punched them in the face. Feds consider such allegations low class.
Likewise, source on this? Because it seems the 2020 election certainly was scrutinized plenty. Why would Republicans and even Trump’s own advisers be okay with conceding the election if there was actually such widespread fraud?
mdurak
11mo ago
What was the 1982 case? I don’t see anything that pops up for Illinois in 1982.
And why would a seemingly isolated case be evidence of consistent fraud throughout the decades? It seems unlikely for widespread electoral fraud to be uncaught for so long; someone else in the discussion even mentioned how faked petition signatures for Obama were caught
I just stumbled on this thread. It has been a year. I too am interested in your responses to the other questions. The combination of pedophilia and fascism is something I’ve never ever seen before on the internet.
mdurak
11mo ago
Is there evidence of it happening repeatedly in American presidential elections to a large enough degree to have affected the results? If so, that would cause me to update my priors by a lot.
mdurak
11mo ago
That’s not evidence of fraud happening. It could well be evidence that Florida cleaned up their act enough that irregularities from regular organizational incompetence no longer occur. But I suppose that depends a lot on your priors here.
That being said, I do strongly agree with enforcing electoral security the way that you say Florida has done. If the main point was a pre-emptive “Improve election security or else we’re not going to trust the results of this next election,” I would be on board with that. But instead, it sounds a lot more like a post-hoc “Nuh uh, we didn’t lose even though we have no hard evidence!”
mdurak
11mo ago
Democracy in America is already dead and dying then, because it seems to me there’s simply no practical way to convince one side of losers because they’ll nitpick any evidence to the contrary to death. Maybe this is to be expected, as a symptom of the larger decline of democracy across the world in recent years.
mdurak
11mo ago
For an example of such views online
Sure, those views are there. But where’s the actual proof from unbiased third party sources? Last time I participated in such a discussion on TheMotte, the answer was that it does not and cannot exist because there are no unbiased sources, which I suppose is a valid viewpoint to hold, but means that any further discussion is moot.
mdurak
11mo ago
So you're telling me all of the outrage over "democracy being under threat" is caused by people not being able to believe that Trump could genuinely believe things he says?
Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.
I swear to god this country is going to give me an aneurysm.
Ditto. At least we can agree on that.
mdurak
11mo ago
That does not imply a peer review process that can’t outperform laymen, because laypeople are only acting on the outputs of the peer review process. Moreover, a prediction performance of 67% may be much higher than chance, but there’s clearly a lot of signal still that laypeople cannot discern. You’d expect something different if they’re not trying at all.
mdurak
11mo ago
I haven’t read up on this case as much, but if it’s anything like the employment stats revision, are you implying that official stats shouldn’t be revised in the face of new information?
mdurak
11mo ago
He says to the extent that the figures weren't made up, they hsve basically no basis to reality. The numbers they report just reflect the process of the people creating them, which is bureaucratic and dull.
Isn’t boring and dull bureaucratic number crunching the opposite of “made up”? I wouldn’t want these numbers influenced by someone putting their finger on the scale because they know better than the data. I’m sure it happens anyways, but I don’t see how your argument justifies what you’re claiming.
mdurak
11mo ago
Right, but that doesn’t mean the pollsters aren’t trying to correct for it all the same.
mdurak
11mo ago
According to some polling at least, Israel/Palestine ranks rather low on voter priorities: https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/eba2f5ad-57c0-4c7b-b546-296a1e273e06_1456x1241.png
If the point was just to see who might win, why publish the results?
Depending on the motivations of the pollster, I can imagine various reasons why they’d publicize accurate results (eg to advertise their polling outfit in case you want to hire them to poll on other issues of note). But I haven’t actually been able to find much about how public polls are funded and why. You?
mdurak
11mo ago
How do you explain the pollster debate over polling methodologies if they’re not trying to correct for biases? Perhaps sometimes the biases are hard to correct for https://archive.is/6tjvT
mdurak
11mo ago
How did CU allow for increased federal spending on elections? I thought it only barred the government from restricting private organizations from exercising free speech.
mdurak
11mo ago
This is why cases like Citizens United were always straining at gnats and swallowing camels.
What do you mean by this? What camels did it swallow?
mdurak
11mo ago
You make it sound as if pollster bias is just a simple matter of them deciding not to correct for them, rather than them trying repeatedly to correct for it but reality being surprising in various ways.
What does this mean? What constitutional rights does Kamala not understand?
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