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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29579 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Cheating in what sense of the word? Influence campaigns? Those have been run by everyone. Intelligence agencies, state actors, private companies, etc. Anyone who has something to gain by one administration winning can try and convince people. That's how the system runs.

But if by cheating you mean what Trump keeps claiming, which is that large numbers of fake ballots are being added to the count, then no, I do not believe it. I would need to see pretty strong evidence to substantiate this claim.

The reason I'm skeptical is because cheating in such a way would require a huge number of people keeping silent. Given that any one of them would stand to gain a lot by defecting, it really seems unlikely that all would keep silent. Contrast this with something like Epstein being killed. Do I think that was a conspiracy? Quite possibly. The number of people involved was small. That would have been much easier to keep under wraps.

Chain of custody was destroyed for tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots across swing states. Conveniently after counting stopped simultaneously across several swing states, and started finding massive returns for Biden. The evidencr you would use to prove that these votes were all legitimate doesn't exist, because it was destroyed.

But if by cheating you mean what Trump keeps claiming, which is that large numbers of fake ballots are being added to the count, then no, I do not believe it. I would need to see pretty strong evidence to substantiate this claim.

This isn't quite what you're asking for, but I believe there was some recent news that the immigrant communities in Michigan (in, for example, Hamtramck) have been shown to have substantial amounts of vote-buying going on, wherein empty absentee ballots are collected. Claims of this go back well before voter fraud was made a partisan issue with the 2020 election, in, for example, this story. Sure, I get that those are biased sources, but are they wrong? (Of course, it is unsurprising that a D-leaning political machine would be more likely to be investigated by R-leaning people.)

I don't know that that was enough to sway the election, but if he was aware that stuff like this was going on, suddenly his actions seem a bit less crazy.

You ask how a conspiracy would be kept under wraps. Well, in this case, first, it wasn't as if it wasn't talked about beforehand, as I pointed to. But second, the fact that it's an immigrant community would substantially help, as they'd be more isolated, and not as likely to speak English. I'm also not seeing what gains from defecting you are pointing to.

Sure, there are some dirty tactics used with absentee ballots. I'm actually all for election security reform. I have no problem with voter ID requirements.

My problem is that the more grandiose claims of election interference are a lot harder to believe. Claims that the election was stolen by fake ballots being added to the count. Claims that dead people were voting in sufficient numbers to swing the election. I've never seen anything that supports these claims with sufficient evidence to be convincing.

As for the "gains", well, if you had evidence of a conspiracy to overturn a US Presidential election, that evidence could be used to get you almost anything you could want. Huge amounts of money, either from the right or from foreign powers. National fame. Or maybe just assuaging your own guilt. If you had thousands of people involved in something like this, you don't think a single one of them would defect?

I think I agree on both points, at least for something at scale large enough to have overturned the 2020 election.

As for the "gains", well, if you had evidence of a conspiracy to overturn a US Presidential election, that evidence could be used to get you almost anything you could want. Huge amounts of money, either from the right or from foreign powers. National fame. Or maybe just assuaging your own guilt. If you had thousands of people involved in something like this, you don't think a single one of them would defect?

You don't need thousands of people, and even if you did all that's necessary for none of them to speak out is for them all to think that owning the White House is more important than any of those other things. If you have that you don't even need them to explicitly collaborate, a distributed prospiracy would accomplish the goal perfectly well.

If you controlled the media, you could maybe start a campaign to convince your audience that the opposing candidate is a Threat to Democracy and his supporters are very likely to infect you with a Deadly Pandemic or something?

Can you give a single example where our intelligence agencies knew there was a damaging story coming to hit one candidate in a domestic election and sprung into existence to ensure the media would believe the true story was false? This to my understanding is unprecedented (albeit it is possible it happens and we don’t find out)

Cheating in what sense of the word? Influence campaigns? Those have been run by everyone. Intelligence agencies, state actors, private companies, etc. Anyone who has something to gain by one administration winning can try and convince people. That's how the system runs.

This is absurd. If soldiers can have their First Amendment rights suspended for the duration of their service, then clandestine, not-democratically-accountable state agencies can (or rather should, because apparently they cannot) be told to keep their hands off elections. The idea that public service should remain politically neutral is not particularly novel.

"Should" in what sense of the word? In an ideal world? Sure. In actuality, organizations act in their own interest. This is true for state agencies, private organizations, sovereign states, etc.

If the police decided strategically blocked streets to hinder access to majority polling stations with majority-Democratic populations, would you be saying the same thing?

If violence is being used to prevent voting, I really doubt anything we are saying matters. At that point we are inches away from armed civil conflict.

Who said anything about violence? I'm just talking about the police exercising their competences to direct traffic.

Violence in the "state's monopoly on violence" sense of the word. If the state is physically preventing you from doing something you are otherwise physically capable of doing, that is the state exercising said monopoly. Were the state to do that, we would likely see real violence afterwards.

If the state is merely making it harder to get to polling stations, well, they already do that. Here's a sensationalized news story about how the right is making it harder for minorities to vote by selectively closing polling stations. In actuality, I'm quite sure that both sides do this when they have control over where to place polling stations. That's the nature of politics. Anything that hasn't specifically been banned is in play.

This seems like an exception that swallows the rule. Suppose that instead of the police blocking the streets, it was conservative protestors riled up over reports of voting irregarities. The police arrest people getting violent but otherwise do nothing. Is this still just the nature of politics?

That's the nature of politics. Anything that hasn't specifically been banned is in play.

If that was the case, these tactics would be announced loudly and proudly, not done under the veil of plausible deniability.

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