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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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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.

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?

"Let" is not a thing. Reagan won IL in 1980, a year we know the Chicago machine was still in operation, because the very next cycle it was caught (solely due to a single whistleblower over almost a half century+ of operation). So he overcame what we know to be approximately 100k fraudulent votes. Sometimes you simply win too hard for the fraudsters to steal.

There is minimal fraud in red counties because of historical and on the ground differences. Machines were, largely, only ever erected in urban areas, and thats where they persist. It largely was, and still is unprofitable when it comes to individual/familial wealth and power to erect machines in a town of 5000 people. Those areas that have machines are currently blue, and have been for most of their existence. The other differences currently is that the bluest areas are far bluer than the reddest areas are red. This gives you an effect of near total lack of oversight. In addition, urban areas see clustering of ethnic groups which deter whistleblowing, snitches get stitches works best in these ethnic areas. Lastly, until very recently red areas were mostly all high conscientiousness suburbs whos politics were dominated by people's whos lives can easily be ruined by police, and who have overstaffed, underworked, police itching to find a jaywalker, let alone a fraudster.

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

There were "62 indictments and 58 convictions, many involving precinct captains and election officials. The grand jury concluded that 100,000 fraudulent votes had been cast in the city ... Authorities found massive fraud involving vote buying and ballots cast by others in the names of registered voters. In one case, a ballot punched for the Democratic slate had been tabulated 198 times."[6] The case was prosecuted in November 1982 by US Attorney Dan K. Webb.[7][8][9]

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.

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.

Where did you get this specific detail from? I’d like to read up on the source.

Now those people wouldnt investigate fraud if it punched them in the face. Feds consider such allegations low class.

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?

Where did you get this specific detail from? I’d like to read up on the source.

I know him as "party worker from the 39th ward, 44th precinct"

https://sites.duke.edu/pjms364s_01_s2016_jaydelancy/files/2016/04/Report-of-the-Special-Grand-Jury-US-District-Court-NE-Illinois-.pdf

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?

2020 was scrutinized by people without investigative power. Particularly preventative investigative power, which is basically only the FBI.

The last time I am aware of a state level organization investigating fraud in a preventative measure stance is NY, where they obtained ballots under false pretenses in all but 2 out of 63 attempts. This would have been 1/63 because they tried voting using the name of a felon who's father was working the polls.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/report-new-york-investigators-obtain-fraudulent-ballots-97-percent-time-john-fund/

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