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Really? I've been among mainstream lefties my entire life and I've never once heard anyone say that elections should be stolen if necessary, whether from personal acquaintances or any mainstream media or political figures. Of course, you never claimed that they said as much, only that they gave indications that they believe it, which is whatever you subjectively interpret that to mean. Anyway the sum total of your case is as follows: 1. Leftists gave "indications" that they were willing to steal an election. 2. Democratic politicians had fraud machines in major cities 60+ years ago. 3. They couldn't overshoot their fraud or they'd get caught, 4. Big coordinated secret campaigns have happened before.
What you haven't presented is any real allegation, let alone real evidence. Give me a name or names and describe something specific that they did and how it affected the vote totals. Then provide some kind of evidence, whether documentary or testimonial. If Trump were to have won the 2020 election I'm sure I could have come up with just as many broad, vague, unprovable allegations as to why the Republicans rigged the election, were I so inclined. Give me something like "The Bubb County Judge of Elections commandeered 1500 mail-in ballots that the postal service returned to his office as undeliverable and marked them for Biden. As evidence of this we have copies of the ballots themselves, which all have signatures which an expert concludes are from the same pen, and email from the judge to his secretary telling her to hold onto any returned ballots, the testimony of the secretary stating that the judge instructed her to put the ballots into the office safe, and testimony from the assistant judge saying that he wanted to consult with the county solicitor on the matter of what to do with the ballots but the judge told him not to worry about it. This would create a strong, though not dispositive, case of fraud.
One thing all those have in common is thousands upon thousands of pages of documentary evidence. There's no way you're running a complex fraud operation across five states involving hundreds of local boards of election and doing it all with in-person meetings that wouldn't arouse anyone's suspicion. What makes you think the people counting the ballots are all ideologically motivated to the point where they'd be willing to commit felonies? Seriously, if your employer asked you to commit a felony for ideological reasons and promised that you'd totally get away with it, would you do it? I know people who actually counted ballots in Allegheny County. They're county employees who don't make a lot of money. They also hate doing it and look for any excuse to do their regular jobs on election day (one supervisor described the tedium of testing thousands of voting machines as they moved them out of storage). Even if you assume they were all paid off, that amount pales in comparison with how much money they'd make if they were able to present a credible case of electoral fraud. It wouldn't even be that hard to prove either since you'd have to hold huge training sessions with handouts and Power Point slides. I know you're going to come back at me with some supposition on how they destroyed the evidence and how every employee in Allegheny County is a Democrat and whatever but unless you can actually prove any of this, I don't want to hear it. Just show some real evidence or quit making the allegation.
How do we have a discussion when you ignore the evidence staring you in the face? The evidence of fraud is the inability to audit results. If a corporation's books have unauditable numbers year after year, people will go to jail. Why is this not the standard for American elections? You repeatedly present the tautological "They wouldn't cheat; they aren't criminals." You don't get to claim this, one you could know every single elections department worker and poll worker and poll volunteer in Alleghany County and it still wouldn't be an argument, and two, it is insultingly untrue to present the institutional American left as having a moral compulsion against breaking the law, most definitely including "felonies." (Also, Pennsylvania was won in 2020 by Philadelphia, no matter how great your familiarity with the mechanics of Pittsburgh politics, it says nothing about the notoriously corrupt Illadelph.)
Maybe 100 years ago a guy could make it through court by taking the stand and saying "I'm just not the type of guy to have done this." Today, that guy would go to prison. I see the retort, "If there's no evidence" -- there may be no murder weapon, but there's means, motive, and opportunity. Circumstantial evidence yes, people do to go prison over circumstantial evidence, but I only make this comparison for the lack of investigation when any one of these meets criteria. A system closed to audit is means; the transferal of executive power is motive; a dominant ideology among poll workers is opportunity. There should be investigations in every state at a minimum every 4 years. I'd support it in my blood red state, as would almost if not universally the voters in this country who could characterize themselves as if nothing else "not left." Yes, when Trump wins in November, voice your doubts, clamor for investigation, I agree. We should audit every election, in every state. Prove it, everywhere, every time. Behind you 100%.
As for paper trails, we still don't know the depths of MKUltra because Helms had so many records destroyed. We know very little about the CIA's drug smuggling because they learned to keep looser books. They don't need records, they would need conversations, those surely happened, but if nobody's recording, nobody goes to jail. Also keep in mind MKUltra included mid-20th century-cultured-American university personnel giving highly psychoactive substances to individuals who did not consent. Stopping the next Hitler from getting to power? C'mon man. It's also feasible for disparate and especially mostly unwitting actors to converge on one goal. Atlanta is individually corrupt, Detroit is individually corrupt, Philadelphia is individually corrupt. Not hard to see their local corruption being incidentally congruous with a separate national objective. But to be clear, I do take somewhat more to the former, I would argue for some level of national conspiracy, insofar as on election night in 2020, the knowledge Trump was to win was received by a central source and propagated to those separate necessary parties who oversaw the injection of fraudulent ballots. There are also assumptions of numbers, we don't know the process, it is closed to audit, we have no idea if, were we able to examine the system, we would find a glaring "at this step it'd be trivial for a handful of actors to introduce significant numbers of fake votes."
And here we return to the inability of audit as proof of fraud. If an electoral system cannot prove itself to be free of fraudulent activity, like the mass injection of fraudulent ballots, that is itself an act of fraud. I describe a criminal act when saying of the system "It can't be audited," that is itself a crime. Though, even without this, you remain wholly mistaken on where the burden of proof lies, and on this I put most vital emphasis: I owe you nothing, the people owe you nothing, because myself and more than a hundred million of my fellow Americans are under no obligation to prove ourselves when we fear the government as having become criminal. The government however is obligated not only by the intrinsic bindings of our nation, but by the very essence of the social contract to prove, whenever demanded, that they aren't criminal. If they can't, they are.
Before when go any further, what do you mean by "inability to audit"? The last I checked all but 6 states had audit provisions. If you want to make that argument, fine, but you have to apply it to all states equally, so unless you can tell me what it is in particular about Texas's audit procedures that make it better than Pennsylvania, I'll have to assume that Trump only won Texas due to fraud, no? I'd like to respond to your other points as well but I need this cleared up first.
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