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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   29583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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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.

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

Burkett confessed that “there were meetings at which several people explicitly agreed to forge these petitions” and that his job was to “forge petitions for candidate Barack Obama.” Furthermore, Board of Voter Registration worker Beverly Shelton “was assigned to forge petitions for candidate Hillary Clinton,” while former County Board of Voter Registration worker Dustin Blythe “was assigned to forge petitions for candidate John Edwards.”

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.)

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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