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Why are you so concerned about “controlling the conversation” instead of engaging on the object level or simply blowing the OP out of the water with great evidence from some other source.
I don't have a strong opinion on the specifics of what election fraud may or may not have occurred in 2020, but I think substantial security and transparency improvements need to be made in the future or else this whole mess will happen again.
People shaping the discussion as though they are conducting a cross-examination is not helpful in this regard, nor for the general discourse in this place -- why shouldn't I push back?
On the contrary, more people rigorously examining claims and evidence would solve this mess quite rapidly, given the clear lack of actual evidence for the claims made of any significant fraud.
You can never have enough security and transparency to keep people who don’t sufficiently care about evidence and careful reasoning from believing what they want.
Maybe so, but last I saw surveys indicate that a large-ish majority of Republicans and a substantial minority of Democrats believe that some amount of fraud probably occurred in 2020 -- even if no fraud whatsoever in fact occurred, changes to procedures (and the extent to which existing ones are followed) are required to reverse this trend. Note that this has nothing to do with 'claims' nor 'evidence' -- even if no fraud occurred, there's a widespread perception that it could have -- which is not something that is compatible with a functioning democracy.
My own opinion is that there is a tiny amount of deliberate fraud in every election everywhere, and a larger amount of dubious, if honestly mistaken, decisions, e.g. a returning officer in one area may only accept ballots with clear postmark, another one elsewhere may take blurry postmarks, and a third may say even if there's no postmark that's fine. Which of these, if any, is fraud? Are the blurry ballots in the first district being deliberately vote restricted? Are the no-postmarks in the third fraud?
The polarisation around Trump just makes the problem even worse.
If the sloppiness and leniency between districts systemically differs by local political tendencies, it has potential to cause an issue of stochastically favoring a given candidate without there being any deliberate fraud or conspiracy. I know I'm a broken record with the emphasis on Wisconsin, but it's a great example because of the heavy county-level polarization. In 2020, most of the geographic state broke for Trump, but the population is heavily concentrated in Milwaukee and Dane counties, which also happened to be the counties where election officials encouraged people to use the "indefinitely confined at home" status to avoid needing to go to polls or provide the typically required identification for absentee ballots. I am entirely willing to take it as given that the decision-makers in those counties were very into Covid policies (stay home, stay safe!) and just wanted to encourage that, but in doing so, they implemented policies that would likely systemically increase the number of voters in their very blue counties with policies that were not taken by counties that simply encouraged their residents to follow the plain meaning of the law.
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Trust in institutions is down generally and with elections certain forces are trying to hurry that along when they don’t like the results.
I used to work in one aspect of election security and I agree with you here overall, I’m just trying to be realistic about how much perception can be improved when strongly motivated reasoning is in play.
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Lots of people thinking vaccines are dangerous means we should let Bill Maher dictate childhood vaccination schedules to doctors, because it would make people feel safer?
After loudly asserting falsehoods and assembling a critical mass of believers of said falsehoods, the purveyors of fantasy demand in the interest of social cohesion, that we coddle them.
No.
If you red-team something and find that there are security holes, you need to plug them irrespective of whether or not they've actually been exploited yet.
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