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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28009 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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I think if elections were rigged then we wouldn’t see different parties win in different years. Also, if it was rigged against Trump, wouldn’t one expect him to underperform the polls? In reality, he overperformed the polls in both of his elections. (You can try to account for this by supposing that pollsters are in on the game, but now we’re just adding epicycles.)

As a partisan Democrat, if we can rig things so easily, I've always wondered why we didn't say, rig things in the very close Wisconsin Senate race in 2022 if we obviously rigged it for Biden in 2020 or why didn't we keep rigging things for Gillum and Nelson. Or did the rigging only start after 2016? Because if so, even then, it might've been smart to rig a few more Senate races so we likely weren't going to lose the Senate even if Kamala wins.

Rigging != Winning. If you are, like the Chicago machine that was caught 1 time out of decades (likely still ongoing) voter fraud you can manufacture 100k fake votes reliably, but you still sometimes lose. Such manufacturing was clearly at its easiest in 2020 due to the mail in, harvesting, and dropbox changes so you'd expect it to be at its greatest raw numbers of the modern era. Cheaters often still lose. See Tim Donaghy's book.

The obvious answer would be that if you rig too hard or too often, it becomes more and more difficult to deny. Then you have a much worse problem on your hands than merely losing a senate race here or there. Better to keep the illusion of fairness by taking an L once in a while.

This strains credulity when the party controlling the presidency has shifted back-and-forth across US history with a nearly metronomic frequency. Also, if Dems only need to take an L "once in a while", why don't they win, say, 2/3rds of House + Senate seats?

It's like a YEC claiming God specifically buried dinosaur skeletons in the ground to mislead scientists.

This strains credulity when the party controlling the presidency has shifted back-and-forth across US history with a nearly metronomic frequency.

So you think the argument is that elections have been rigged for decades? That’s the weaker straw man that’s easy to dismiss. I thought we were talking about 2020.

On the gripping hand, I think it would be even more worrisome if nobody cared about election integrity. Aggressively punishing complaints there is something totalitarian states like Russia and Venezuela do.

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