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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34976 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Not at all -- most of the plausible "machine politics" rigging theories are strictly manual fraudulent ballot schemes. (Which, granted, have been happening in the US off and on since ~1776 -- but I don't think that makes them not count as "rigging"?)

Except all the "machine politics" theories I've heard wrt the 2020 election simply think that stating "machine politics" is sufficient to allege fraud. Most of these people who talk about machines in Detroit, or Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia have no idea what they're talking about insofar as they have no idea what the politics of these cities actually look like, and couldn't name a single person who would have even been involved, let alone a mechanism of action.

I'm not sure why you would think anybody would be able to name people in these machines -- the whole point of these is that the functionaries are faceless and anonymous.

The mechanism is the same as always: sneak some fraudulent ballots into the system via machine aligned poll workers, who simply neglect to perform the usual checks that make this more difficult.

all the "machine politics" theories I've heard wrt the 2020 election simply think that stating "machine politics" is sufficient to allege fraud.

It's more "machine politics plus extremely suspicious behaviour" -- excluding scrutineers at critical moments, etc.

While I think it's quite possible that these people were acting suspicious mostly because they'd been so mindkilled that they thought that being physically close to Republicans would result in a covid death sentence, either way the procedures that result in both sides trusting the system were not followed -- so it serves them right if people don't trust the system now, whether they were actively rigging the election or not.

I mean, ironically, in most super blue districts you're talking about, they actually shifted a couple of points to the right (from like 95-5 to 92-8) because of the shift in the non-college educated minority vote.

This doesn't really indicate anything about the prevalence of fraud one way or the other though -- Trump's assertion is that it would have been 85-15 (or some other yuge number) if it weren't for the rigging.

? Of course it is evidence against fraud in those districts. It isn't proof, but it is evidence.

How is it evidence, given that we would not know what is the baseline support for Trump 2020 in these districts in the case that fraud was occurring?

Because 2016 gives us evidence of a baseline. Again, not proof, but evidence.

You don't think that voter preference can change over four years?

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