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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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