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I am not pretending it wasn't at least a little suspicious the way the vote counts jumped as we all went to sleep that night (the blue line jumping over the red line me was funny). I'm just saying the innocent explanation of partisan difference in mail in votes is the far, far more likely explanation than widespread, outcome-determinative fraud. That is a high, high bar to clear and needs a lot of very strong evidence.
So, yes, in your third world country hypothetical I would probably say it was fishy and there's a good chance of outcome-determinative fraud. But, if I later learned there were innocent explanations of this that outweighed the probability of outcome-determinative fraud, I would believe those innocent explanations. A big difference with third world countries is that my priors for outcome-determinative fraud are way higher. If you tell me a random country in Africa had outcome-determinative fraud, I would probably believe you without even looking it up. And if I did, I'd probably just look at headlines or check if that country has a history of election fraud. However, if you told me the French or British or US elections had outcome-determinative fraud, I would need much stronger evidence since that is a much more surprising conclusion.
The problem is the fraudulent explanations and the innocence explanations look similar AND thr lack of security means it would be hard to tell the difference coupled with the obvious incentive.
Maybe there would be a red mirage or just maybe Biden got truly 60k of votes when he needed 75k and they added 15k. So the red mirage was in part true and in part false. They would look the same.
We judge it based on our priors. If we have two alternative explanations to explain the same set of facts, we choose the explanation that is more likely based on our prior belief. If it's wet outside, it could be that it rained, or it could be that a forest fighting helicopter dropped their bucket of water by mistake. Both explanations fit the facts, but the rain explanation is more likely cause our priors of rain occurring are much higher than a forest fighting helicopter dropped their bucket of water by mistake.
Yeah, but in that analogy the firefighting department predicted rain, said it'd look as if one of their helicopters dropped its bucket but it'll be rain. 5 minutes before it was wet outside, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and completely cloudless. All weather stations in the areas in question stopped reporting the weather at the same time, then deleted the records of the raw instrument data as fast as they could after the event, so any and all subsequent attempts to reconstruct the weather are done with already processed and edited data, and there's even a video of firefighting helicopters flying erratically over Atlanta.
Now none of this is actual proof, but I would not blame anyone for believing shenanigans happened.
This seems to be boiling down a disagreement on our priors on election fraud likelihood, like with many other people replying. I do not agree with that analogy of what it was like before the election. Adjusting the analogy, I would say it would be like the weather man saying "Firefighting helicopters are continuing to fly over area A to get to the forest fire, but lucky for us in area B, we won't have to deal with them flying over us (analogous to there being fraud, but not significant fraud). Expect scattered sun showers (analogous to setting expectations for the 'red mirage') and low visibility from all the ash in the air (analogous to the info environment making it hard to tell what it true or not in the moment and afterwards).
responding to this specifically since I see it brought up a lot. I can't interpret this fact without also knowing how normal it is to do such a thing. Is it a normal practice? What is the reason for not storing it? Maybe there's a good reason, maybe not. Maybe it's best practice and storing data has been tried but they changed it for a good reason. Who knows. Without context, I can't really interact with that info. It's like if you told me "Bob doesn't save his receipts when he goes the grocery store! Something fishy is happening", then we obviously know that it is no big deal. But, the only reason we know that is that we have the context of it being extremely common for people to not save their receipts, so Bob not saving them as well isn't notable.
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