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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   21700 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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It’s all dumb cases because every one falls apart upon close examination.

I want to focus on Wisconsin for a moment, because it's the state I'm most familiar with and I have never received a rebuttal from someone that disagrees with me about the quality of the election. This is a state with about 3 million votes, decided by about 20,000 votes, for reference. I think this report is a good summary of some of the known irregularities and mistakes.

This widespread adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes, not provided for under Wisconsin law, was correlated with an increase of about 20,000 votes for Joe Biden, while having no significant effect on the vote for Trump. WILL does not claim that the voters who used drop boxes were ineligible voters or should have had their votes rejected. But the ad hoc adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes without established rules, parameters, or security presents an election vulnerability and a challenge to state law.

More than 265,000 Wisconsin voters adopted the ‘indefinitely confined’ status, meaning they received an absentee ballot and were exempt from the statewide photo ID requirements. The number of indefinitely confined voters increased from 66,611 in 2016 to 265,979 in 2020. Given the substantial increase in the number of such voters, it is almost certain that many voters improperly claimed “indefinitely confined status".

Many of these votes were cast unlawfully. Additionally, clerks in Dane and Milwaukee counties used the presence of the pandemic to encourage voters to adopt an uncommon status called “indefinitely confined.” The Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously rebuked the Dane County clerk for encouraging voters to adopt this status in March 2020. In November, it confirmed that a person who did not wish to leave home due to the pandemic was not “indefinitely confined.”

The votes cast by ‘indefinitely confined’ voters raise a number of red flags. While we cannot infer any malignant intent on the part of these voters, this means that many votes were cast without the requirement of photo identification. 54,259 ballots were cast by individuals who have never shown a voter ID in any election. 3,718 were cast from addresses that were on the 2019 Mover’s List. 7,747 failed their DMV check when they registered.[/quote]

Another story I bumped into later was this one:

Wake is one of 95 people in Dane County who altogether cast more than 300 ballots in past elections despite being on the state’s list of people deemed incompetent to vote, according to a county clerk’s office review of more than 1,000 records from the state’s list. The state elections agency is reviewing all 22,733 entries to ensure the list is accurate, spokesperson Joel DeSpain said.[/quote]

“The system for identifying those voters and getting them out of the voter rolls is not working,” said Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, whose office conducted the review of that county’s ineligible voter list at Wisconsin Watch’s request. McDonell said he has informed local election clerks of any discrepancies.

Presumably the first 1,000 were selected basically at random and showed a 9.5% voting rate among people that had been deemed mentally incompetent and weren't allowed to vote. If that rate held, that would be over 2,000 votes from ineligible, mentally incompetent voters, just in Dane County. I don't know if other counties are suffering from similar errors; if they aren't, that would suggest something about the direction of bias, if they are, that would tell us something about the total number of illegally cast votes.

In any case, I don't think it's plausible to arrive at illegal ballot counts that are lower than these. Throw in various other irregularities, such as reported behaviors at nursing homes where standard election policies weren't followed due to Covid, illegal ballot-curing procedures by clerks filling in witness information, and other shenanigans, and we're going to keep going up. I would personally feel comfortable saying that hundreds of thousands of votes were plainly illegal, as these people were obviously not actually indefinitely confined, but I understand someone objecting and saying that's a weird one-shot deal that won't happen again. That over 50,000 of those ballots were cast by people who have never shown an ID in an election makes that my absolute lower-bound for illegal votes though, which would put us around ~2%.

I haven't thoroughly explored other states, but I would be surprised to find that they actually did a lot better in 2020. In some of them, it wouldn't make a material difference for national elections, but I would expect that to only result in even sloppier procedures because there isn't going to be anyone taking all that close of a look at whether California's vote count is garbage when they eventually get around to delivering sometime in December.

The incredible thing here is that the report you cite from WILL concluded there was no widespread fraud, despite the documented issues being real problems.

Multiple cases and investigations did not find sufficient evidence to overturn the result.

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-wisconsin-lawsuits-presidential-16d90c311d35d28b9b5a4024e6fb880c

So my priors are entirely reinforced here by evidence you presented: that while certain states were shitshows, there was no “rigged” or “stolen” election.

My claim isn't that it was rigged or stolen (and I think this reply goes for @drmanhattan16 as well), it's that hundreds of thousands (or at least tens of thousands) of votes were cast illegally in a fashion that subverts election security. The result is not an obviously rigged election, but an election where there are votes of questionable legality that make up more than the margin of error. Additionally, as covered in this post the issues were substantially concentrated in deep blue counties and likely made it systemically easier to vote in an illegal fashion.

I want to be very clear - I am not trying to skirt the core point or handwave my way from this to mass fraud. I don't believe that happened. My model isn't that there are groups concocting totally fake ballots. What I do believe is true:

  • Dane and Milwaukee counties encouraged voting illegally in a way that would increase the vote counts in those counties relative to legal procedures.

  • This is not a result of a conspiracy, it's a result of their actual preferences with regard to maximizing ballot access and being the kind of people that wanted to take Covid very seriously.

  • Election security measures are poor enough that people vote illegally on a regular basis (see the mentally adjudicated portion above), which plausibly enables ballot theft by family members. I have no hypothesis on the directionality of this outcome, but it creates doubt about electoral legitimacy, which is very bad for obvious reasons.

  • The poor electoral security that was the hallmark of 2020 likely did enable at least some bad actors to cast fraudulent or knowingly illegal ballots. I expect that this is a small number, I have no good way of putting a good number on it, but it is (again) very bad that poor electoral security even makes this a possibility.

Taken as a whole, I cannot overstate how damaging to institutional trust it is to have counties and states just making up new rules on the fly that violate black letter law. When leadership elects to behave this way, they're shredding goodwill and trust in an unsustainable fashion. I can (and do!) have a poor opinion of groups like TTV, I don't agree with the people that call the election rigged or stolen, but I find brushing past just how bad 2020 was with nothing further, "well, you can't prove those votes were fraudulent" to be really frustrating. I'm not going off the conspiracy deep-end about Soros county clerks or something, I am entirely sincere that I actually want to improve the quality of elections because I think it will help prevent the dangerous destabilization of my country.

I will also chime in to say, as someone who has felt frustrated by many the election fraud claims, these are all reasonable and important concerns and I absolutely agree with the overall need to have high quality election processes.

I can acknowledge every point you made and it doesn’t excuse the motivated reasoning, grifting, and conspiratorial thinking whatsoever.

We can and should do better.

We also can and should directly rebut unjustified claims trying to overstate and concoct problems.

We should not carry water for those who want to delegitimize any election where they don’t like the result.

  • -14

I can acknowledge every point you made and it doesn’t excuse your moralizing, consensus building, and generalizations whatsoever.

We can and should do better.

We also can and should address arguments directly, rather than lumping them in with all other arguments nominally on the same side.

We should not baselessly accuse others of carrying water for extremists with no supporting evidence, and plenty of contradictory evidence.

When I said:

motivated reasoning, grifting, and conspiratorial thinking whatsoever

I was referring to the likes of TTV, not the commenters here who stated agreement TTV and similar are dumb, or called them extremists as you have. (I wouldn’t call them “extremists” myself, in that these views are extremely common.)

I’m not sure how many comments you’ve read here or in the past, but several posters have said things like “I can’t blame those who believe the plot” or “even if the voting plot wasn’t real, it was still rigged.” Some of those stances have been more reasonable than others.

@Walterodim gave you many disclaimers and was quite clear that he wasn't speaking for those people. You ignored the substance of his comment entirely, choosing instead to essentially frame it as one of many questing tendrils of the election denial kraken.

When someone says "I don't agree with X but here are my beliefs," and your only response is to discuss how their own beliefs contribute to X (or the discussion around X), you're engaging with the comment on the meta-level rather than the object level, which is really only valid and useful if the commenter seems to be operating in bad faith.

It's like if I said "I'm no vegetarian but there was a year where I couldn't afford meat, and my health did fine" and you, a carnivore, respond with a list of bad arguments vegetarians use. It's neither here nor there. Walter isn't the representative of all election deniers, and doesn't seem to be the election denial equivalent of a secret vegetarian looking for converts.

Keep in mind he said:

but I find brushing past just how bad 2020 was with nothing further, "well, you can't prove those votes were fraudulent" to be really frustrating

Which is a little annoying when myself and others have not done that here.

Both he and I made some general remarks about what we don’t like, in addition to addressing the specific points made here.

@Walterodim presents his concerns well and I believe I commended him off the bat for that.

I’ll also note my points in the comment you don’t like apply to both sides of the aisle, since it’s not like the left hasn’t had its issues with imprecise language and unjustified claims of election illegitimacy.

He said that as a contrast to his beliefs about the election--namely that it wasn't stolen. It was describing his own stance on the issue, not accusing anyone else of that behavior.

Both he and I made some general remarks about what we don’t like, in addition to addressing the specific points made here.

But you didn't address his specific points. That's the issue. If you had, then after that point it would be much more permissible to discuss the meta level. Jumping straight to the meta is counterproductive and just a couple steps away from accusing someone of bad faith.

I’ll also note my points in the comment you don’t like apply to both sides of the aisle, since it’s not like the left hasn’t had its issues with imprecise language and unjustified claims of election illegitimacy.

Not really. When you reply to someone with "we should do better" you're implicitly accusing them of being part of the problem. If you had said anything at all that actually acknowledged his point, that would be something, but the way you worded it:

I can acknowledge every point you made and it doesn’t excuse the motivated reasoning, grifting, and conspiratorial thinking whatsoever.

you're basically saying, "What you're saying may be correct, but it's meaningless, because your side is still wrong." If you think he's intentionally covering for his side, make that case. If not, just directly address the argument, which already had plenty of disclaimers against the extremists.

More comments

We are on the same page.

Cheers, and concurrence. Please keep on keeping on.

You’re falling for one of the oldest tricks in the book. Who cares what the conclusion says? What does the actual evidence imply? @gattsuru had a post just last month that discussed an academic’s open, unpunished admission that he lied in the conclusion of one of his papers in order to hide an inconvenient result. This report is just more of the same. The authors put all of the inconvenient evidence in the body, said whatever they wanted in the conclusion, and trusted that most people would simply take the conclusion at face value, as you’re doing here.

You’re conflating academic impropriety with election issues that were investigated by multiple parties and the legal system.

You’re falling for the old trick where you can’t accept suggestive evidence didn’t lead to a well-established conclusion you favor.

Before I go looking at the murky details, I want to commend you for simply having presented a case that could actually matter.

The issue right off the bat though is if it’s an identified issue then why has no investigation not resolved whether there was, in fact, a plot?

Smoke, sure, was there a fire though?

Because the deep state/cathedral/whatever is preventing an investigation to get to the bottom of it.

Bold claim when several of the swing states are GOP-controlled and Trump was the incumbent.

The scale and amount of effort it would take to execute such a plot could not be concealed in a situation where all sides were on high alert for foul play.

Elections are besides the point if you believe dark forces can simply dictate outcomes without being caught. I wonder what they were up to in 2016.

From your report's summary:

There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. In all likelihood, more eligible voters cast ballots for Joe Biden than Donald Trump. We found little direct evidence of fraud, and for the most part, an analysis of the results and voting patterns does not give rise to an inference of fraud.

Seems like this is the key takeaway for anyone.

Is your ultimate point that elections have security issues, or that the 2020 election was actually stolen from Trump? People who want to argue the first are free to do so, I'm open to the idea that we can tighten election security, especially for state and local elections (where more serious claims appear to be made).

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