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naraburns  nihil supernum  1d ago (text post)   14343 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

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Everyone wants to look at this as a black and white issue. I think that's a mistake.

Elections can be more or less legitimate. The most legitimate elections are victories that are "too big to steal". I'm pretty sure the 1984 election was 100% legitimate, for example.

But U.S. election security is a joke. There's almost certainly a low level of fraud and incompetence in every election, although it's hard to measure by design. Many razor thin victories have fallen well within the margin of error for fraud and incompetence. For example, it's possible (even likely) that Nixon was the rightful victor of the 1960 election, but was defeated by fraud engineered by Democrat machines in Texas and Illinois.

More recently, it's almost certain that Gore would have defeated Bush in 2000 if not for poorly designed "butterfly ballots" in Florida.

So unless one candidate or another wins by a convincing margin, I'd withhold any judgment on full legitimacy.

In terms of things to watch this election, I'd look at Trump's relative performance in states that have adequate election security (Virginia, Florida) vs. those that don't (Minnesota, Pennsylvania).

although it's hard to measure by design

I've been wondering recently if there is a term for the science/art/engineering of organizational structures for a specific goal. I know it very peripherally in how IT security engineering starts overlapping with physical security (two factor, physical access control, social engineering attacks), but I haven't seen a collected book or corpus of "how to design your organization to align incentives and ensure people can be kept honest". Does such a thing exist? Or is it too broad and disorganized of a topic? On the gripping hand, would I even trust something based on psychology and human factors research given the replication crisis?

Unsure, but interested in reading more.

Institutional Design?

Would like to know this as well

VA going red would be a dream come true. But Northern VA is TDS ground zero, and very populous. I still see people, alone in their car on 66 wearing their stupid little covid mask. Although less this year than last, finally.

I've seen a lot of trump signs, it's hard to tell if it's trolls enjoying a layup or some real groundswell of support.

The road I live on in a rural exurb has a pretty solid mix of Harris/Trump signs along the 20 miles I take to drop my daughter off at school. I wouldn't take anything for granted.

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