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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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Judicial power trumps state power, and left-aligned judges have been prolific at stopping Republican attempts at legislating electoral security; why would they be any more cooperative in investigations obstructed by hyperblue municipal bureaucracies? Beyond that, while fraud has been something generally talked about, it was not a matter du jour of the 2016 electoral cycle or the 2020 electoral cycle, its prominence today is novel to post-9/11 American political discourse.

Republicans would still likely take the matter to court if they believed fraud existed. Also, Bush v Gore was famously decided in Bush's favor. Kerry supported a lawsuit by Green and Libertarian candidates. There was an interesting result in that one in that the random recount was found to be rigged but beyond that didn't seem to go anywhere.

I would note a correlation between its recent prominence and a candidate who makes a lot of wild claims.

Money is an incentive for defection, but there must be an interested purchasing party and goods to deliver. Daniels is a porn star who had evidence of having had sex with the President, of course she was going to be handsomely compensated for the story. A poll worker would have no story merely saying "This many ballots were fraudulently filed," even an interested party would not likely pay them, because that testimony is worth nothing.

I covered the interested party aspect already - Fox News. Or how abut the Heritage Foundation? Or Donald Trump himself? Hell, even without any evidence, claim to be a poll worker who found fraud and Trump will organize a parade for you.

9,999 hearings to go, because every single ballot must be individually proved as fraudulent, else a legal ballot be illegally struck. See the scope of the problem?

I won't claim to be a legal expert, but this doesn't seem right. And even if it were, again the news itself would be something Trump would never ignore.

You also assume this as a complex process requiring many people be aware. We don't know how many people are required to flip elections because the process is closed to audit. It could take dozens, it could take hundreds, it could take a handful of people placed at the exact link in the chain where boxes of fake ballots can be introduced and laundered with boxes of legal ballots. We don't know, and this by the way is and has been my entire point throughout my time talking about fraud on this site. When I say "We have no way of knowing" I am describing the act of criminal fraud. It is tax fraud for a corporation to have numbers closed to audit and it is electoral fraud for a government to have ballot numbers closed to audit.

Yes, I do think it would lean on the complex side. Even a precision strike requires getting said people into that exact position. I don't think election fraud is 100% impossible, but I think this is a Russell's Teapot situation. I don't think that equal skepticism is being applied to claims of fraud being true as is applied to claims supposedly disproving said claims.

I can't say I strongly oppose more auditing, outside of that I suspect the only result of it would be that the people predisposed to believe in election fraud will latch on some innocuous detail and/or create a new appeal to missing information. I don't agree that Democrats have as much of a stranglehold on the gears of politics that their opponents can't and/or won't stop them. If they did Trump would be kept nowhere near power.