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Even if we assume total corruption in a given county, there’s a limit to how far the plotters could run up the numbers without it being blatantly obvious.
And it has to be done in a swing state to really matter.
In an election with high scrutiny, it’s pretty challenging to cheat enough to make a difference, but not so much to get caught.
And if the plot extends to multiple counties and states, the coordination would be incredibly difficult to conceal.
Look at Watergate, a far simpler plot than changing election tallies, and how it went off the rails.
My point was mostly that @ymeskhout’s first point was not necessarily correct—that I would expect the background level of fraud to favor Democrats in any given election due to ease of opportunity.
As for a grand, national conspiracy to change election results, while I do think that is a threat due to most states’ remarkably poor election security practices, I don’t think it’s the only, or even primary, threat model to be worried about. Instead, I would think a distributed conspiracy would be far more likely, with low-level participants each working independently and without any direction from on high, but all from the same motive.
Take sex abuse conspiracies by way of analogy. The Catholic sex abuse scandal was a grand international conspiracy, with almost all members of the hierarchy implicated in some way or another in moving priests around and preventing them from being prosecuted. The conspiracy naturally eventually leaked, and it caused a huge scandal. By contrast, every time some Baptist minister abused a girl in his church in the past 50 years, the elders just quietly removed him, sent him away to counseling, and didn’t say anything when they learned he was serving another church a year later. You had pretty much the same actions in both cases, but for the Catholics, the conspiracy was (naturally) a top-down one, while for the Baptists, it was (naturally) bottom-up, without any coordination from congregation to congregation. A bottom-up conspiracy of people individually choosing to fill out absentee ballots for their mentally incompetent relatives, poll workers in safe areas slightly inflating their numbers, and the like, would be very difficult to prove, since there would be essentially no coordination among participants or even knowledge that anyone else is doing anything similar. Just about the only thing they’d have in common would be opposition to rules that make voting more secure, which is a position that’s remarkably more common in one party than the other.
Covering up sex abuse is way, way easier than trying to rig an election. You can do it case by case, it’s not a public event, there’s no particular timeline, there’s no adversarial party keeping watch, and you’re a church, which most believers put a lot of trust in.
The place where it really matters to affect election outcomes is swing states, which basically by definition tend to have a mix of partisan power (even if some counties swing all blue/red, state officials are going to have some variety). The partisan competition keeps things in check. And not coincidently, these swing states are the places with the most scrutiny. Decentralized or not, running any ~county-level plot is nearly impossible to pull off without attracting an investigation.
Having a bunch of little independent groups/individuals doing small-scale fraud is very unlikely to affect an outcome, and also you can’t presume only one side does it.
(Ironically, at this point Dems have a solid lead with regular voters (a significant advantage in boring mid-terms) and so efforts to expand the vote are more likely to hurt Dem chances.)
Overall, if you’re able to analyze why sex abuse by religious officials could be covered up you, should be able to understand why significant voting fraud can’t be covered up the same way.
You’re nitpicking the analogy without really addressing my point. Your previous comment pointed out that it would be extremely difficult for a coordinated group of national conspirators to fraudulently alter the election results in enough swing states to change the election. I’m saying there wouldn’t need to be a grand conspiracy. Recent elections have hinged on only a few tens of thousands of votes in the right places. With such small margins, all it would take to tip the scales is one side having either more motive or more opportunity to cheat than the other. I’m not even saying that necessarily happened in 2020. Thanks to insecure vote by mail procedures coupled with the secret ballot, it would be almost impossible to tell one way or the other. (For the record, I support the secret ballot, but I’m opposed to vote by mail except perhaps with the narrowest of exceptions.)
I’m not nitpicking, I’m trying to explain why this other model is aLao unlikely to either work or remain undetected, because it’s not trivial to add the right amount of fake votes.
You do realize mail in ballots can be audited right? Fraud at any meaningful scale is still very hard to pull off because things have to align with voter registration.
Voting by mail is excellent and I’m glad my state has long had it.
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All of that bottom-up effort facilitated by media, politicians and intelligence agencies that keeps pushing lies over lies. How much harder is it to convince the average poll-worker to look the other way when somebody dumps a bunch of ballots against a candidate without a multi-year campaign to persuade them that he's a fascist who works for the Russians?
How would the poll worker know what is happening? Are they warned beforehand they will be part of a crime? Who is telling them? How many instances of this are there?
How are the observers avoided?
How are the ballots filled out so as not to arouse suspicion and match real names?
(You’re not putting forth a realistic scenario that could possibly scale without something being detected.)
My understanding is that there are entire organizations dedicated to gather votes, some of these people essentially go door-to-door to target people that would otherwise not vote, perhaps because they don't speak enough English, are too old or too cognitively-impaired to direct themselves to a polling place. Then they perform the same kind of art on these people as the door-to-door salesmen or phone scammers (2.4 millions fraud last year, a $8B business), and they make these people input their customer's information on the ballot, which they collect and then go on to drop at a ballot drop box.
Is this illegal? It may be in some places. But it should look pretty suspicious to have one person deliver hundreds or thousands of votes at once in a ballot drop-off box.
Observers are avoided through various tricks depending on the area, sometimes more obvious than others.
There is a lot of variation on how absentee votes should be processed and counted and how that process is tracked, and there were a lot of last minute changes to these rules across the country ostensibly 'due to covid'. Here is an example :
Should a poll worker discard or not discard a ballot lacking a secrecy envelope? Perhaps if it's a ballot for evil orange dictator it's okay?
None of that is new for 2020.
Pointing out smoke or dry tinder is not the same as showing there was a fire.
The trouble is saying there was a really big fire and then when asked to show evidence for it only being able to point to tinder or puffs of smoke or a tiny flame. The level of evidence needs to match the level of claim.
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If you like to defend this theory I would be eager to talk about it with you. You can email me your sources at ymeskhout[a]gmail.com
No, I don't have that inclination at this time.
I don't know if there any definitive evidence of conclusive fraud that would definitely convince an open-minded person out there.
I find 'vibes' are sufficient enough for me. After all, conspiracy theorists have proven themselves to be much more trustworthy than Western government officials in the past 3 years.
Here are a few observable coincidences:
the people who are currently claiming that there were little to no fraud in the 2020 elections won by their side spent several years litigating the 2016 elections claiming among other things that foreign governments intervened, using the power of intelligence agencies to investigate these claims, create evidence and prosecute people over it
one of the least exciting candidate of all time beat one of the most exciting candidates of all times by 10 million votes. Idk what the population growth was in between, but that's still significant.
he did that by losing most bellweather counties
the people in charge of providing accurate election results in the areas that delivered the critical votes for Biden (big cities of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia...) made a bunch of changes in the election rules right before the elections, most of these changes to make it easier to have non-secret ballots (mail-in-ballots)
these same people went on to brag in the media about their great effort to 'fortify' the elections
I don't think it's necessary to have either definitive proof or definitive claims. If you ever change your mind about wanting to sketch out your overall vibes theory or the coincidences you cite as relevant, I would be very eager to talk to you.
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