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Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.
Ditto. At least we can agree on that.
Not really. None of the issues in PA and WI happened in Florida. Florida is another state that used to have large Democrat machines that were routinely accused of fraud, but you could never quite prove it. Then Desantis came in, cleaned up the dirty voter rolls, streamlined the counting process, tightened up the vote by mail process (particularly post date rules and signature rules), got rid of insecure drop box, and then actually enforced all of that.
And magically no shenanigans. No more Miami-Dade reporting after the rest of the state had been done for hours. No more pallets of ballots magically being found at 3am. Etc etc. It turns out there is great evidence for fraud happening, because why you engage in active election security, all these suspicious activities disappear.
That’s not evidence of fraud happening. It could well be evidence that Florida cleaned up their act enough that irregularities from regular organizational incompetence no longer occur. But I suppose that depends a lot on your priors here.
That being said, I do strongly agree with enforcing electoral security the way that you say Florida has done. If the main point was a pre-emptive “Improve election security or else we’re not going to trust the results of this next election,” I would be on board with that. But instead, it sounds a lot more like a post-hoc “Nuh uh, we didn’t lose even though we have no hard evidence!”
Well, sure. My priors is we have known about machine fraud for centuries and nothing has changed so why would it stop?
Is there evidence of it happening repeatedly in American presidential elections to a large enough degree to have affected the results? If so, that would cause me to update my priors by a lot.
Of course, IL in 1960 was a battle of voter fraud wherein the DNC machine in Cook outworked the RNC machine in southern IL.
Most states now acknowledge the existence of ancient (aka 60 year old) voter fraud machines that would routinely manufacture 100k or so votes (see IL in 1982, the sole one contemporaneously caught). But no one has any explanation as to why this magically stopped when procedures in those areas remain the same. Few of the grand jury recommendations from the 1982 case are currently in effect in Illinois, for example.
Almost all of those recommendations are fully opposed by a major American political party for reasons that seem obvious to the curious.
That’s exactly the point. Trump’s defeat likely didn’t involve “above average” amounts of voter fraud, merely the moderate level that has been ongoing for at least a century in this form and in various other forms since the founding of the republic, under both major parties.
The conditions of 2020 made additional fraud easier, as seen by, for example, the extremely low rejection rates of noncompliant signatures on mail in ballots.
But yes, most elections won by a particular party who's base is urban have been historically stolen.
Why did they let Trump win in 2016? And why is there minimal voter fraud in red counties?
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What was the 1982 case? I don’t see anything that pops up for Illinois in 1982.
And why would a seemingly isolated case be evidence of consistent fraud throughout the decades? It seems unlikely for widespread electoral fraud to be uncaught for so long; someone else in the discussion even mentioned how faked petition signatures for Obama were caught
Straight from the wiki
That system had been ongoing from the New Deal era. It was only found out because they jobbed a single co-conspirator who blew the whistle.
This is despite there being significant investigations by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Now those people wouldnt investigate fraud if it punched them in the face. Feds consider such allegations low class. Much better to prosecute a guy who prayed too close to an abortion clinic.
Ah, fair enough, you’ve shifted my priors on this.
Where did you get this specific detail from? I’d like to read up on the source.
Likewise, source on this? Because it seems the 2020 election certainly was scrutinized plenty. Why would Republicans and even Trump’s own advisers be okay with conceding the election if there was actually such widespread fraud?
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No. Just because Bill Barr said “we found no evidence of fraud” doesn’t make it a fact there is no fraud. It was fucking weird how all swing states just happened to stop counting at the same time. It was fucking weird how Biden received a vote dump in the middle of the night. If this happened in a foreign country after years of the IC actively plotting against the executive, we’d presume shenanigans.
I do think Trump genuinely believed he was cheated and there was real reasons to believe it. Now I don’t think belief was enough without hard evidence but I do think it is really shitty how unwilling the system was to analyze in detail prior to J6 what the evidence actually was.
Nah. It was so non-weird you could see it coming months in advance. It's reasonable to wonder whether the protections on mail-in ballots were sufficient, or whether other election rules like "Wisconsin law requires that the results of those absentee votes be reported all at once" were a bad idea, but when absentee ballots are reported all at once, in large heavily blue cities in a year when a majority of blue voters went absentee and a supermajority of red voters didn't, it would only be weird if the large vote dump wasn't massively blue.
See my other comment. In short the innocent and fraudulent answer looks similar meaning there is an easy ability to do fraud. Especially when you know what the bogey is.
If you'd said "This fucking looks weird", I would have absolutely agreed. The rules for how ballots were counted in Wisconsin were a bad idea. Democracy derives less of its value from "the median voter is super smart and should be in charge of everything" than it does from "there are a lot of people similar to the median voter who ought to be able to trust they're not being screwed over", so predictably reducing voter trust, even if the new suspicion is unfounded, is a horribly anti-democratic mistake. The Democrats used to know this, e.g. back when opposition to voting machines was left-coded, and it's shameful that they're forgetting it when they no longer expect to be the ones who might need to be distrustful.
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Weird that this effect only occurred in certain states though -- it's been a while since I dug in, but as I recall the breakdown for mail-in vs in-person ballots is available for most states. If I'm remembering right, Florida is an example of a battleground state in which:
a. the votes were counted in a prompt manner
and
b. the difference in Dem/Rep turnout for the two methods was not very large.
A lot of states didn't let mail-in ballots be processed until after election day polling closed. Reasonable if you don't want to risk preliminary count data leaking and influencing later voters, but not great if your priority is "prompt". Florida seems to have figured out how to thread the needle on that by allowing all the tricky work to be done ahead of time:
I'd still worry about possibilities of low-level fraud, since maintaining a proper chain of custody for weeks has to be a lot harder than doing so for hours, but it seems to have done wonders against possibilities of delays.
No? The first data I found claims that early voting by mail was from voters registered 31% R to 45% D (24% minor or no affiliation), versus early in-person votes from voters registered 45% R to 32% D. That's not as large as the "how could you go out in public during a pandemic" vs "are you going to be a shut-in the rest of your life" bluster to pollsters before the election would have suggested, but it's still pretty large, and that's for the state as a whole; I wouldn't be surprised if the less moderate Democrats and more moderate Republicans were disproportionately in the larger cities.
I may not have been thinking of Florida, and was definitely thinking of actual vote tallies rather than "registered as" -- but regardless, 45-32 is nothing like the 90%+ D in the late-nite Biden drops seen in other places.
Isn't "other places" apples-to-oranges, though? The city of Milwaukee was at 19.3% for Trump in 2016. If the mail-in voting included around 40% of those voters plus 60% of anti-Trump voters just like in Florida as a whole, you'd expect 14% for Trump among mail-in ballots. They saw 14% for Trump in the big "drop" of mail-in ballots, part of 19.6% for Trump on the whole. The math here really does check out.
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