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I agree, but I think it is worth taking a step back and asking at the meta level why we were talking about just Philadelphia.
A newspaper report saying, "Some people think it's suspicious that 59 voting divisions in Philadelphia went 100% to Obama" doesn't just come from nowhere.
If I imagine Joe the Reporter, trying to craft a story of this kind (perhaps even for noble reasons!), I have to wonder about adjacently possible worlds. Imagine the counterfactual world where the 2012 presidential election as a whole was a sufficiently fair election on the whole, with whatever meaning you assign to that idea. However, even in a fair election, just by random chance, we would expect there to be voting patterns that were "suspicious" for one reason or another.
Assuming Joe the Reporter's methodology isn't far off from:
Then I just think that if we weren't talking about Philadelphia having 59 voting divisions going 100% to Obama, we'd be talking about some other state or city or whatever that had "odd" voting patterns of some kind, even if it could well be completely innocent, and we just happened to end up in the world where a very unlikely happened by chance, because something had to happen.
I think a very similar thing happened with 2020, and the people who claim it's strange that some states were counting ballots and Republicans were in the lead as they counted the in person votes, but at some point in the night they counted the mail in votes and suddenly Democrats jumped to a decisive lead when all the votes were tallied. I admit this could be suspicious, but you have to realize that nobody pre-registered the opinion that Democrats would stuff the ballot on the back end by faking a bunch of mail in votes in the specific counties where that was the reporting pattern. I just have the intuition that if things had gone slightly differently and the mail in votes in those counties had somehow been counted before the in person ballots, then people wanting to call the election fake would have found some equally hard to explain thing halfway across the country that might have any number of innocent explanations.
Wait till other counties have reported and then stuff the ballot box is the go-to method of election fraud. 100% this was predicted by someone who's been paying attention.
In his 1960 book on the Kennedy campaign, T.H.White did not include this:
But it was in his 1978 autobiography In Search of History.
So we need to reframe the plot to kill Kennedy as the Deep State taking action against the Kennedy machine rigging election.
Actually it was complex-
and probably a few more. Check out this podcast for some intersting info by a long-time CIA analyst who actually knew some of the guys involved as they were his bosses.
https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/ray-mcgovern-cia-jfk-deep-state-and-ukraine-crisis-54
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But this is exactly it. I think the difference between Trumpist election deniers and more impartial observers of American political history is that the latter acknowledge that
It’s entirely likely that both blue and red counties engage in low level vote count manipulation when results are close, to the tune of that 1-2% figure
None of this is (as your quote indicates) remotely unusual in American political history. This was no special or unique project to stop Trump but rather the same shenanigans that have gone on in every election since 1776. 2020 wasn’t even the most corrupt election in the last fifty years, let alone in American history.
Biden had a ‘plausible’ case for winning and Trump’s defeat wasn’t a case of an implausibly unpopular candidate beating a popular incumbent. The vote was close and could have gone either way, Trump really was historically unpopular for an incumbent at the time, Biden won the popular vote by some margin (this obviously doesn’t make for an EC victory but is illustrative of an at least not-extremely-unpopular-relative-to-their-opponent) and had broad appeal to the Dem base.
Based on the above, nothing that happened in 2020 was unusual in American politics and Trump was not the victim of an ‘unprecedented’ level of election interference to ensure his defeat.
As the 1960 quote reveals, even the most corrupt states can’t make a hugely unpopular candidate popular or vice versa. Thus Trump’s claims that he actually won bigly are false. He got played to a minor extent but he was probably not screwed more than the average presidential loser electorally.
Granting #1 as written is not justified.
Manipulating the vote count 1-2% at the county level takes a political machine to pull off and protect. Doing so consistently without detection is a tall order, and even if you think you have the local/county/state politics figured out, the Feds can get you.
Furthermore, the place where the incentives are strong (swing states) tend to (by definition) have a mix of partisan power, making it harder to coordinate and conceal such activity. Being in a blue county in a red state would make it a very risky proposition to piss off the majority party’s state prosecutor. And there’s no incentive to run up the vote where it is single-party rule so why risk it?
You can’t look at Tammany Hall and extrapolate to the present.
Plots to manipulate the vote at any scale are very hard and rare, but mistakes and small cases of fraud do happen. 2020, Covid, and mail in ballots were a particularly ripe situation for strange things and mistakes, and for people to be hyper-concerned about it.
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What was Russiagate if not a special project to stop Trump ? What was the election fortification nonsense ?
The rhetoric around Trump was unprecedented. Why'd you expect election interference to be constant if hysteria is being whipped up and the talk is apocalyptic on mainstream media? I remember the elections before that - it was all far milder. Apocalyptic talk about Bush was pretty much a fringe left thing.
And why wouldn't stealing 1-2% of the vote matter? In a close state can handily ensure victory.
I'd say given the levels of fraud by blacks vs whites, it's far more likely electoral fraud happens in very corrupt places rather than suburban ones where someone who is not onboard with the existential fight might to object to it.
Just like with mail-in voting mobilization (going around bugging non-voters to vote and helping them fill out ballots)being easier to do in urban districts, so is fraud.
E.g.: see picture.
/images/17086436476571107.webp
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