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The incredible thing here is that the report you cite from WILL concluded there was no widespread fraud, despite the documented issues being real problems.
Multiple cases and investigations did not find sufficient evidence to overturn the result.
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-wisconsin-lawsuits-presidential-16d90c311d35d28b9b5a4024e6fb880c
So my priors are entirely reinforced here by evidence you presented: that while certain states were shitshows, there was no “rigged” or “stolen” election.
My claim isn't that it was rigged or stolen (and I think this reply goes for @drmanhattan16 as well), it's that hundreds of thousands (or at least tens of thousands) of votes were cast illegally in a fashion that subverts election security. The result is not an obviously rigged election, but an election where there are votes of questionable legality that make up more than the margin of error. Additionally, as covered in this post the issues were substantially concentrated in deep blue counties and likely made it systemically easier to vote in an illegal fashion.
I want to be very clear - I am not trying to skirt the core point or handwave my way from this to mass fraud. I don't believe that happened. My model isn't that there are groups concocting totally fake ballots. What I do believe is true:
Dane and Milwaukee counties encouraged voting illegally in a way that would increase the vote counts in those counties relative to legal procedures.
This is not a result of a conspiracy, it's a result of their actual preferences with regard to maximizing ballot access and being the kind of people that wanted to take Covid very seriously.
Election security measures are poor enough that people vote illegally on a regular basis (see the mentally adjudicated portion above), which plausibly enables ballot theft by family members. I have no hypothesis on the directionality of this outcome, but it creates doubt about electoral legitimacy, which is very bad for obvious reasons.
The poor electoral security that was the hallmark of 2020 likely did enable at least some bad actors to cast fraudulent or knowingly illegal ballots. I expect that this is a small number, I have no good way of putting a good number on it, but it is (again) very bad that poor electoral security even makes this a possibility.
Taken as a whole, I cannot overstate how damaging to institutional trust it is to have counties and states just making up new rules on the fly that violate black letter law. When leadership elects to behave this way, they're shredding goodwill and trust in an unsustainable fashion. I can (and do!) have a poor opinion of groups like TTV, I don't agree with the people that call the election rigged or stolen, but I find brushing past just how bad 2020 was with nothing further, "well, you can't prove those votes were fraudulent" to be really frustrating. I'm not going off the conspiracy deep-end about Soros county clerks or something, I am entirely sincere that I actually want to improve the quality of elections because I think it will help prevent the dangerous destabilization of my country.
I will also chime in to say, as someone who has felt frustrated by many the election fraud claims, these are all reasonable and important concerns and I absolutely agree with the overall need to have high quality election processes.
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I can acknowledge every point you made and it doesn’t excuse the motivated reasoning, grifting, and conspiratorial thinking whatsoever.
We can and should do better.
We also can and should directly rebut unjustified claims trying to overstate and concoct problems.
We should not carry water for those who want to delegitimize any election where they don’t like the result.
I can acknowledge every point you made and it doesn’t excuse your moralizing, consensus building, and generalizations whatsoever.
We can and should do better.
We also can and should address arguments directly, rather than lumping them in with all other arguments nominally on the same side.
We should not baselessly accuse others of carrying water for extremists with no supporting evidence, and plenty of contradictory evidence.
When I said:
I was referring to the likes of TTV, not the commenters here who stated agreement TTV and similar are dumb, or called them extremists as you have. (I wouldn’t call them “extremists” myself, in that these views are extremely common.)
I’m not sure how many comments you’ve read here or in the past, but several posters have said things like “I can’t blame those who believe the plot” or “even if the voting plot wasn’t real, it was still rigged.” Some of those stances have been more reasonable than others.
@Walterodim gave you many disclaimers and was quite clear that he wasn't speaking for those people. You ignored the substance of his comment entirely, choosing instead to essentially frame it as one of many questing tendrils of the election denial kraken.
When someone says "I don't agree with X but here are my beliefs," and your only response is to discuss how their own beliefs contribute to X (or the discussion around X), you're engaging with the comment on the meta-level rather than the object level, which is really only valid and useful if the commenter seems to be operating in bad faith.
It's like if I said "I'm no vegetarian but there was a year where I couldn't afford meat, and my health did fine" and you, a carnivore, respond with a list of bad arguments vegetarians use. It's neither here nor there. Walter isn't the representative of all election deniers, and doesn't seem to be the election denial equivalent of a secret vegetarian looking for converts.
Keep in mind he said:
Which is a little annoying when myself and others have not done that here.
Both he and I made some general remarks about what we don’t like, in addition to addressing the specific points made here.
@Walterodim presents his concerns well and I believe I commended him off the bat for that.
I’ll also note my points in the comment you don’t like apply to both sides of the aisle, since it’s not like the left hasn’t had its issues with imprecise language and unjustified claims of election illegitimacy.
He said that as a contrast to his beliefs about the election--namely that it wasn't stolen. It was describing his own stance on the issue, not accusing anyone else of that behavior.
But you didn't address his specific points. That's the issue. If you had, then after that point it would be much more permissible to discuss the meta level. Jumping straight to the meta is counterproductive and just a couple steps away from accusing someone of bad faith.
Not really. When you reply to someone with "we should do better" you're implicitly accusing them of being part of the problem. If you had said anything at all that actually acknowledged his point, that would be something, but the way you worded it:
you're basically saying, "What you're saying may be correct, but it's meaningless, because your side is still wrong." If you think he's intentionally covering for his side, make that case. If not, just directly address the argument, which already had plenty of disclaimers against the extremists.
The “we should do better” bit was attempting to agree with his overall point that we should do elections better, not telling him to do better.
I could have made that clearer, but perhaps consider you’re misreading me worse than you think I’m misreading him.
Let’s also not accuse me of “jumping to the meta” in a convo that was already a couple of rounds deep. I agree with the substance of his points on the object level. Where we seem to disagree is on the meta issue of framing, and perhaps attributing how much distrust even came from real vs. imagined issues.
And, for the record, I don’t actually place him on the “other side” in that he and I agree far more than we disagree and he seems highly reasonable.
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We are on the same page.
Cheers, and concurrence. Please keep on keeping on.
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You’re falling for one of the oldest tricks in the book. Who cares what the conclusion says? What does the actual evidence imply? @gattsuru had a post just last month that discussed an academic’s open, unpunished admission that he lied in the conclusion of one of his papers in order to hide an inconvenient result. This report is just more of the same. The authors put all of the inconvenient evidence in the body, said whatever they wanted in the conclusion, and trusted that most people would simply take the conclusion at face value, as you’re doing here.
You’re conflating academic impropriety with election issues that were investigated by multiple parties and the legal system.
You’re falling for the old trick where you can’t accept suggestive evidence didn’t lead to a well-established conclusion you favor.
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