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Why wasn't the 2022 Wisconsin Senate race rigged? Why weren't more House races in close districts rigged when the GOP only won by 4 seats? Hell, why didn't they rig the 2018 Florida Governor race? It's weird how we're only successful at rigging some of the time, when in other countries, with actual governments that rig elections (that many of the people who are very worried about rigging in American elections prefer to the American govenrment) are always successful.
There was an attempt. Its magnitude was insufficient. It has been so in every election of my lifetime IMO. The margins of vote rigging is approximately 100k for an urban machine going to the early 80s, that has likely been increased by half or so by mail in and harvesting.
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It's not weird at all, once you understand checks and balances, enumerated powers, and the structure of the Constitution generally. It's hard to rig American elections successfully. And yet for example "gerrymandering" is widely agreed to be a (frequently successful!) form of election rigging, even though it does not necessarily guarantee the desired outcome.
A totalitarian or even just an excessively powerful executive can afford to be hamfisted in their rigging of elections; to successfully rig an American election usually calls for greater subtlety, and even then there remains a greater likelihood of failure.
It feels like you're playing motte for the bailey above you. Nobody really denies that gerrymandering happens; we can all see it on the map. So yes, if you define gerrymandering as "rigging" (a word I personally wouldn't use to describe it) then technically US elections can be rigged to some extent. But that's very different from the claims Trump and friends are making, and indeed what many in this thread are making. Such claims involve fabricating votes wholesale up to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or even tens of millions. In such scenarios, why not just fabricate X number of votes (whatever is needed) to win every even vaguely competitive election?
Where did someone in this thread claim “fabricating [tens of millions of] votes wholesale?”
That seems like quite an extraordinary claim and I’d love to see the evidence they presented for it.
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In the past, my understanding is that vote-rigging was done by partisan machines in certain jurisdictions. I have the vague intuition that there could be quid-pro-quo deals involved (e.g. the machine agrees to stuff ballots in exchange for getting city contracts, or whatever.)
If I somehow knew that there was industrial-scale voter fraud (say, via a mathematical analysis, or it came to me in a dream) but I wasn't sure exactly how, I would presume something similar was occurring, which would be (part of) why one party wasn't in power constantly - the power of the machine(s) to commit fraud was limited and territorial, and their willingness to do so was contingent on other factors that might not always be in place (e.g. kickbacks, connections, etc.)
I should add that my historical knowledge is sketchy here, and the question of modern fraud isn't something I've really researched or have strong opinions on. It just seems like, based on what I know of how fraud worked in the United States in the past, we should expect it to work differently than top-down ballot-rigging. For instance, last year there was a (judicially recognized) stolen primary election that apparently worked via absentee ballot box stuffing. That's very different than the local political party just counting the votes however they want, which is what I presume happens in at least some "democratic" states abroad (although I'm sure it's possible that bottom-up voter fraud happens in places like e.g. Russia as well/instead of top-down finger-on-the-count type fraud).
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