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You're assuming the conclusion. See marisuno's answer the last time american elections came up. As another non-american, I 100% agree with it; in my country there is also lots of grumbling about the obviously, hilariously biased way in which the right-wing is treated by state institutions & media, but almost nobody is alleging fraud. Why? Because we have at least basic voting protections.
I 100% agree that the there should be radically increased voter fraud protections, all paper ballots, require IDs, etc. I also 100% agree that perceptions of fairness are basically as important as actual fairness, so the voting system should be hardened to reflect that. However, that doesn't change the fact that, despite not having those protections, there hasn't been good evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in past US elections (at least in the modern era), and that no one before hand questioned the actual outcome of the election, even if there might have been a few gripes here and there.
An analogy: say you have an employee that manages the cash at a company. This position has existed for hundreds of years. Over the years, there have been cases of employees in that position swiping a few dollars here and there, but nothing major. A new CEO comes in and, after a bad quarter, says that the employee has been stealing money. He says they've stolen so much money that it is the reason the company is in the red this quarter. He might have evidence of small scale money stealing, but no good evidence of anything large scale. He wants to install a new system that tracks all the money to the dollar so that nothing goes missing. Every other CEO in the past, good quarter and bad, knew there was cash stealing here and there, but no CEO in the past blamed that minor cash stealing for a bad quarter.
My thoughts on this analogy:
I want to applaud you for choosing this example, since it perfectly encapsulates the democratic/insider framing. Variants of this dynamic are currently happening in several countries simultaneously, so it's critical to understand it in general.
Please imagine that, in your example, that what you wrote is the PoV of some employee. His outrage: Completely out of the blue, a new CEO claims what never has been claimed!
Now imagine another possible PoV: A shareholder. From his perspective the company has long enjoyed outstanding trust and had gotten a long leash for a long while. It has been allowed to do its thing and almost all higher positions, in particular every CEO, has been an insider who worked decades in the same company. But lately it has seemed increasingly fishy: There wasn't a distribution in a while, multiple employees have some minor scandals but they don't result in any actual consequences for them and even allegedly independent auditors turn out to be personal friends of the management.
This goes on for a while, each new CEO promising to change it around, but somehow everything seems to get worse at the same steady pace as before. It culminates in a truly new CEO being hired: The first outsider, obviously still some kind of elite, but he didn't work his way up on the inside like everybody else.
Now he starts working at the company, and literally every employer is openly hostile to him. There's multiple scandals, such as a department head secretly keeping a subdivision running that he was told to close and deliberately lying to the CEO about it, or his personal staff leaking infos outside, or the internal affairs dep publicly starting an investigation on spurious claims and then silently closing it when nothing turns up, the list is endless. He can't find out where the money is going and doesn't trust any report by anyone inside the company on the topic. Eventually, he concludes that he can't prove any malfeasance - not in the "currently not enough evidence" sense, but in the "fundamentally impossible without any trustworthy arbiters" sense. He loses his temper and alleges that the people managing the money have to do something that has to cause the current problems, and asks the shareholder to allow further, major restructuring to uncover what is happening.
Imagine also, if you need to, that this outsider CEO is crass, mean-spirited and impulsive, hell maybe even a bit incompetent.
As a shareholder, I wouldn't go "well technically you have no proof that there is malfeasance", I would go "holy fuck does this sound dysfunctional we need to restructure". Maybe I'd want to hire a different outsider CEO, but all things considered the current one is at least understandable and seems to actually work on my side for once, unlike the others.
I really really liked this reframing. This is probably the closest I've been to changing on my mind on this. I need to think about it more, but my initial thoughts are that Trump did have at least a few people that he picked and should've been on his side on the inside that also told him the claims of fraud weren't real. Yet, he always ignored them and followed the ones telling him there was fraud and he even repeated specific claims of fraud that his people on the inside debunked.
The counter to that counter is that those that didn't think there was fraud were just naive and trusted institutions too much. So, even though Trump picked them, they just ended up being unintentional mouth pieces of the institutions anyway. Anyway, I need to think about this more before I am sure this actually convinced me since this logic can apply to many other situations of institutional trust as well. To be clear, am I understanding this argument correctly where it doesn't actually matter if there was outcome-determinative fraud for the argument to work? Even the spurious reports now have gravity because you can't trust any of the debunking from those institutions, right?
I wouldn't say it doesn't matter, it's just you can't know but have good reasons to be suspicious.
I'll give you a similar example from my own life as a scientist. When I was still a student, I was told that women were preferentially hired as researchers only for the case of equal qualification and I mostly believed it. Then, as a scientific help, I started hearing third-hand talk about committees who would publicly claim this, but behind closed doors actually just decided beforehand they're going to hire a woman no matter what. As a PhD candidate, my (female) supervisor (frustratedly, since she was in favor of a man) flat-out told me that she has been part of such a committee, and that this is not even rare. Of course publicly she obviously would never admit this. Now as a researcher myself, I've been in on hiring decisions, and it's just obvious that you'd always take a woman if you can. You easily double your chances to get grants & publicity with her, you insulate yourself from claims of discrimination, it's just a complete no-brainer. A man needs to be MUCH more competent to make up for this.
But technically, I have no proof how wide-spread this is. Many people are still claiming that this would be some right-wing conspiracy theory, silly them, of course we only hire women for equal or higher qualifications, it says right here in the official regulations, and who would go against official regulations? If there is some public dispute of any particular hiring decision at some random university I will usually have no evidence whatsoever. But from personal experience I don't expect there to be evidence even conditional on the hiring decisions being biased. I also expect the hiring decision to be biased, also from experience, so even if I know literally nothing at all beyond that there is a controversy I'd say it was probably biased anyway.
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Little known fact - Obama would not have become the Democratic Presidential Nominee had four people in his campaign not cheated in the primaries.
Were they in Obama's campaign? The story calls them "local officials", and details
It's pretty damning that the three of them got away with this (only the "ringleader" Butch Morgan was convicted), and it might have ended up being a turning point that led to Obama's election (though the "momentum" theory here is a little shaky), but it doesn't seem like it was a conspiracy to elect Obama so much as it was a conspiracy to avoid excruciating embarrassment. Imagine having to drop one or more candidates from the ballot because of a county where the campaign failed or forgot to get the 500 requisite signatures.
You are correct, I misremembered because there was an attempt at suing the Obama campaign but it didn't go anywhere (probably because they weren't as involved.)
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I'm unsure if this would've played out as simply as you and the author of the link claim. I would guess that, clinton would have won nearly all of the delegates, Obama would've had a fairly big scandal, but he probably would have also survived and still been the nominee. Looking at the wikipedia page for the 2008 Dem Primary, Indiana looked to be one of the last primaries, so I wonder if Obama would've clinched anyway. I didn't do the math, but I'd suspect that even with a moderate drop in support, given there weren't many primaries left, Obama would still win. However, if the scandal really did blow up then super delegates might all switch to Clinton, so hard to say.
Regardless of all that, kudos for finding a good example.
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If a system exists that is hard to audit, is that lack of evidence of malfeasance evidence that malfeasance does not exist?
I would suggest that if a party doesn’t want to fix obvious weak points it suggests there a reason why.
So I conclude based on Dems’ actions they cheated.
The fact Dems always fight voting security measures certainly increases my priors that fraud occurred by Dems, but definitely nowhere near enough to make it the more likely explanation.
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