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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28007 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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How can one justify it with non-enthusiasm?

Take out a factor for population, and you’re still left with millions of excess votes. The number of citizens grew by around 7.5M, but there were over 17M more votes. That’s not the kind of gap that hides in a couple of stuffed mailboxes. It should be obvious, incontrovertible, a smoking gun.

But that’s not what we see. Existing mechanisms like poll watchers haven’t caught such fraud. Surprise audits by experts and partisans haven’t found anything close. States with wide variety in procedures and political incentives keep turning up the same lack of evidence.

Forget the Republicans. There’s a huge incentive for Democrat muckrakers to look for just one abuse in a red state. That kind of “gotcha” would be plastered all over social media. But we don’t see that, because there’s nothing to be found. Trump didn’t have to fake it to get 11M more votes.

If he managed that compared to his 2016 bid, surely Biden could manage it compared to Hillary Clinton. People stopped voting Green, stopped voting Libertarian, stopped sitting it out. It was just that polarizing.

While I am and have been generally skeptical for the strong version of the 2020 vote fraud argument:

There’s a huge incentive for Democrat muckrakers to look for just one abuse in a red state. That kind of “gotcha” would be plastered all over social media.

McCrae Dowless was.

Exactly. That’s the best they could come up with.

I think of cases like these as the motte for election interference. If we can’t find equivalents for the 2020 election, which was more charged, more vulnerable, and more closely scrutinized, I think that suggests an extremely low rate of fraud.

Existing mechanisms like poll watchers haven’t caught such fraud.

Funny you would say that, since one of the big 'smoking guns' was poll watchers in battleground states being effectively prevented from watching -- whether under the pretense of anti-covid measures, or counting continuing outside of their presence.

It’s not funny I’d say that. Poll watchers are doing an important job. If you’re talking about the Detroit or Fulton cases, I found them unconvincing.

Do you have more info on the COVID topic? I’m curious about the actual changes in policy. All I find with Google is scaremongering about amateur poll watchers.

I was more talking about Philly, it's well documented due to being one of the few successful R court challenges:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pennsylvania-judge-permits-campaign-observers-close-view-ballot/story?id=74040279

OFC the 'success' was in the form of a court order allowing them to approach counters within six feet instead of being roped off at 20+ -- and came after the counting was largely complete.

I'd have to dig through old reddit materials to get you policies in other places, but six feet was widely enforced, which I'd argue is still too far away to reasonably see what a counter is doing; watchers also complained of being dismissed for improper mask wearing, which Republicans claimed was disproportionately targeted at them in locations with disproportionately fat black female Democrat-leaning counting officials. Of course they would say that, but it doesn't seem like an outrageous scenario even without fraudulent intent -- dealing with challenges is obviously more work for the counters than not, so I can well believe that they'd be looking for any excuse to get rid of people who were bugging them all the time about their procedures. Covid provided that excuse, and people took advantage -- whether they also took advantage in the form of actually biased counting procedures and/or full-on fraud is an open question, and it really really shouldn't be.

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