Although I’d say that the math involved in the election fraud theory isn’t as big as it may seem; appears to be only a relatively small number of precincts that happen to be in counties and states controlled by Democrats. Could be wrong, 80% sure. Too disgusted to dive into the details and numbers again.
The problem is nobody knew how the vote was going to break, so if they did try to run fraud they'd have had to shoot higher than absolutely necessary. I'll migrate this one over to substack pretty soon:
I feel, with zero proof, they did. Thats the only explanation I can come up with for the absolute worst candidates in modern history having far and away the highest turnout. There is no way the orange buffoon or dementia boy drive a 66% turnout without some fuckery going on.
I just can't fathom enough premeditated fuckery to swing it as far as it swung without someone singing. Ballot fraud could not have decided this. The numbers are too big. Voting machine fraud would be the only way.
Incorrect. Fraud occurs in every election. Significant fraud happens where one group fully controls the levers of power- say Philadelphia. The amount of fraud that occurs is the exact amount the various actors inclined to commit fraud think they can get away with. In this election, many means of tracking fraud were eliminated through the use of mail-in voting. A reasonable person would assume that the amount of fraud people thought they could get away with would increase under such circumstances. Which candidate received the net benefit from fraud and the net total is impossible to determine. How many old people in nursing homes had "help" filling out their ballot in Philly? Yours is a failure of imagination. Fraud does not have to be centrally directed and controlled. How many people convinced that Trump=Hitler were independently willing to bend the rules and "help" fill out a ballot for a parent, grandparent or patient at a nursing home? After all, if dad still had his wits about him, he would vote against Hitler. It's not even a bad thing to do. The motivation to do the same against Biden isn't the same. Perceived incompetence doesn't fire people up like perceived evil.
For numbers, there were 75,000 nursing home patients in PA in 2020. How many nursing homes are in the rural, red districts? Virtually none. Not everyone in a nursing home is incompetent, nor are all incompetent people in nursing homes. I am fairly sure that it is possible to generate 43,000+ illegitimate votes. Georgia had almost 33,000 people in nursing homes. Arizona did not have enough in nursing homes, but I'm fairly confident there are other ways of generating illegitimate votes.
You may be blinded because you correctly believe that individual elections make little difference.
If the Ds had a magic crystal ball that they could predict exactly which areas to flip it's possible they might have coordinated enough fraud to be able to flip the election. They didn't have a magic crystal ball. They didn't know exactly which areas to flip. So if there was such an effort that did in fact change this particular election, they would have had to commit five or ten times as much fraud as necessary to ensure that the localized fraud was enough in the critical areas to flip a few critical states.
You are misreading my comment and making unwarranted assumptions about required knowledge in order to act. My assertion is that individuals and small coordinated groups cheat as much as the situation allows at all times. Sometimes this is relevant, sometimes not. The motivation to cheat was at an all-time high and the full capacity of available modes of cheating was enough to flip this particular election. Did it? Can't know. Does it look like having a Democrat in office for the 4 years after trashing the economy for a virus will increase the odds of a non-Democrat win in 2024? Yes. Do I find that funny? Yes.
I already used your article for the summary of vote totals. I believe #2, because the safeguards for tracking illegal voting were removed in advance and that the cheating was not unusual in concept, just in scale due to changing the format of the election and the level of motivation (hate and fear pursuant to DJT=Hitler). Additionally, no one looking on behalf of Government wanted to find evidence of cheating to get rid of the first semi-outsider since Eisenhower to bumble into some semblance of power. People who have continued to support DJT, find themselves in prison at an unusually high rate. The people that turn on him get book deals and high-paying jobs in media and universities. If I could concoct a personal tie to Trump, I'd write a book saying he's a scumbag. Why no whistleblowers? Ideologically motivated people don't feel shame for having participated in illegal activity for the sake of a cause they believe in. In this case, even if they change their mind, their is no benefit to admitting they filled out 100 ballots to keep Hitler out of the White House. A reasonable analysis of the numbers assures them that their individual efforts did not affect the outcome (the equivalent of a conscience round).
My contention is that thousands of people had the opportunity to engage in outsized levels of cheating with no reasonable way to be detected. Yours is a failure of imagination. Fraud does not have to be centrally directed and controlled. The perfect environment for stochastic cheating was created by effectively labeling one candidate Hitler and then decreasing the supervision of the process.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it did, or it has. I don't know. But the situation doesn't pass the eye test for me. There were too many irregularities in key friendly areas in Michigan, Wisconsin, PA and GA that magically stopped and started counting in the middle of the night. It may have been voting machine fraud, or maybe there was no fraud at all. I have no horse in the race, I'm an anarchist. But the buffoon and dementia pulling off the highest voter turnout in modern history doesn't add up. To me. Further, they have silicone valley in their back pocket. There are also instances like al capone who go years without getting caught by keeping things close to the vest and limiting things to a small groups in friendly districts. Like those mentioned above. And for all the AL capones, there are dozens of others that didn't get caught. Lastly, the system has been gamed before, so it's not out of the realm of possibility. I get what you are saying about large numbers, but it's not as far fetched as it seems.
Well on the Trump side you had an insane number of rallies weekly, even daily, and a highly energized base. Biden? He seemed to barely make an effort. But somehow outperformed even Obama in many key/swing precincts, and often by huge margins. All that solely from TDS?
And being familiar with things in NJ, that article linked is a perfect example of the lack of trustworthiness and doubling down on it.
The article says voter fraud is rare. Let's just accept that as true. IT says that that rare thing is not something to be concerned about and Trump had no rational for being concerned about it because even though it just happened it is rare. And even if it does happen, it is easily spotted.
Except it's an article about just that thing happening. And then after concerns being raised about just such a thing happening. That thing that made it easily detectable was removed from the process. To commit mail fraud you have to make a run around the USPS. Mail in ballots can't if you actually mail them in. Which means you need to produce them out of thin air at the other end, or you need to infiltrate the USPS's cadre of long term employees many years before needing to steal an election, or you need to intimidate them without things leaking.
Odds are not good.
But hey it's NJ. We produced a pile of ballot drop boxes that don't use the USPS. Put a ballot in them and it's magically legit unless you get two ballots from the same person.
In the face of criticism for a process that ACTUALLY happened, they figured the right response was to provide a work around for the USPS spotting people being dishonest.
And then they expect people to not be suspicious of this clown shoe grade argument that everything is in fact fine and not falling apart at the seams. But could you sneak a 7.4% margin through that newly manufactured hole in the system? The answer isn't no, it's probably not. Probably not might keep people happy when you are doing things the same way you have forever, but right after you change all the rules, and do so in a manner which makes cheating the system easier?
I will give my $0.02 on why you feel that way, and why you are not wrong, but you are wrong.
You feel that way because although you can't prove the election was rigged, you see a lot of evidence that the process is sloppy and inaccurate. The way we count normal elections sucks. The way we ran voting for this election plays to the absolute weakest part of that process. In my state, mail in ballots are normally treated as provisional. If the margins are to great for them to impact the result, they just toss them in the trash. This means that the process for mail in ballots is perhaps the least tested part of the vote tabulating process. A process so accurate my state puts a paywall in front of a recount that is non refundable unless the results are reversed or the change is 10% or more. THAT's their objective reference point on how accurate they think the whole process is, and they then turn around an act like it is infallible when faced with margins of much less than that.
Our voting process is garbage, and it being trustworthy is reliant on the margins being significant. In many places the statutes themselves compared to the results and the polls tell us with certainty that we have crept under that threshold.
Then the actual facts of the recount tell us we have crept under that margin. Take Georgia where they fed the ballots to the machines repeatedly, got differing answers, and then went to a manual count. The presumption being that THAT is somehow less flawed. Because humans are great at counting little circles on a scantron sheet.
Then you take the fact that there were a BUNCH of locations with very slim margins and some of them didn't even do that thorough of a job.
THEN if you lived through the hanging chads of 2000, you know what both parties being properly represented for a ludicrously careful count looks like, and you know this isn't that.
THEN you have the media declaring themselves the arbiter of truth and calling the election and announcing a winner based on polling. Which isn't how it works, and once again if you lived through the hanging chads, you saw how that was handled when the media was treating news like news instead of acting as a political pawn for their side. They told us that it looked like X had won, and once they got over the shock of that being not clearly the case, the status of the counts, and how far we were from the counts being finalized. So you have a media that campaigned for one candidate rather than report news objectively telling you authoritatively they are telling you facts when they have failed to wait for the closest thing to a fact we will get, AND after they clearly got it wrong previously and should stop telling people they have a handle on this.
So yeah, that would make you feel like you don't trust the results. But the results being untrustworthy doesn't mean that the election was rigged. As HWFO suggests, the margins are way too small for it to be a sure thing, and you don't do something like that unless it is a sure thing.
That doesn't mean that some garbage numbers were generated and with the help of the media and covid restrictions they put in place that one side didn't just yell stop when they numbers worked for them and then stonewalled and tried to gaslight you into believing that this has been the most secure and accurate vote in history when you can clearly see the opportunity for exploiting the process and how recounts were faster, sloppier, and less properly observed than past recounts.
My main contention is that the Ds wouldn't have known they were going to lose by a single vote, so the amount of "vote stealing" they'd have to do is not just the margin of victory, but a larger number than the margin of victory, perhaps by a lot, and probably in a lot of states. And if you back-figure what sort of operation would look like to produce the results of this election (as done in the link above) the vote stealing operation would have had to been simply phenomenally massive. Couldn't have been done with mail in fraud. Would had to have been done by machine hacking. And the GA hand recount basically proved there was no machine hacking here, which means there probably wasn't any anywhere else, given how GA was one of the most important swings. I'm 100% positive there was vote fraud, but I'm at least 95% sure there wasn't enough to flip the outcome.
If Republicans want to win, they need to make sure they don't have a candidate that literally triggers anger and anxiety responses from every suburban white woman. That is not how you win an election.
Further, though, I'm solidly in the camp that elections don't matter, and the whole idea of democracy to begin with was just a way to suppress armed rebellion.
I'm with you. The core of my argument is that there probably wasn't meaningful voter fraud, but there is plenty of reason for things to look untrustworthy, and that is because our process of voting isn't held to a remotely good standard. But we are so evenly polarized in the US that unless they improve the process and recognize its flaws, we will be constantly eroding confidence in the process.
A process that counts more votes then there are registered voters and can't yield a consistent count within a very small fraction of one percent isn't going to sound like "nobody cheated". "They would have needed to cheat a lot more" isn't an answer that instills much confidence. Even if the purpose of democracy is to keep people from taking up arms and killing the idiots in charge rather than give them much of a say over the political class, they are failing at that because it looks like a bunch of dishonest clowns saying there is nothing to see here the way it is being presented. If it is an illusion more or less, they need to step up and do their job of making it reasonably convincing.
Incorrect. You do not have to know how many votes the other side will have in order to try to cheat. You cheat to the maximum extent you think you can get away with. I agree that it is unlikely that the the fraud turned the election, but I am 100 percent certain that it turned a few races by collateral damage. They found at least one. (https://www.newsweek.com/louisiana-sheriff-election-voter-fraud-1849952) Sure it was turned by a handful of votes. I doubt it was the only race affected by fraud.
Your view is blinded by the truth that individual elections don't generally matter much. The people that believe Trump=Hitler, or Trump=Savior are certainly willing to act on their own to nudge elections in their preferred direction. In short, your math is right, but you failed to set up the problem correctly. Do you think all the Floyd Protests had an organizer call up or text each participant? By your election analysis process, the Floyd Protests couldn't have happened because that would be too many text messages and phone calls to make and central organization of 20,000,000 people can't happen. Your ongoing contention that the organization of the fraud was too complex is negated by an approach that requires only setting the stage for fraud by motivating actors and eliminating safeguards that protect against fraud.
I would love to see an article from you after watching "2000 Mules" on this topic, and whether you still feel the same way.
I found it a compelling narrative, but it's possible that it was just a compelling narrative. And more to the point, one I'm more inclined than not to believe, mostly because I don't trust any politicians. If the movie had been produced by Team Blue in the wake of a Trump victory in 2020, and was claiming the same things, I'd probably be inclined to believe them too.
Great to see you on Substack, BJ. I'm one of those Patreon supporters who flip you a bit of beer money every month. I'm also someone who Medium shadow banned for a few years, so I'm happy to see you leave that platform. Well done!
AnonymousJan 8, 2021Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Very glad to see you on Substack, BJ! Spot on analysis, IMO. My Canadian family is wondering whats in the water down here. We're all so accustomed to it now, thanks to the media, that this is just business as usual.
Your initial premise is incorrect. I did not read further. “During a coup, a government's executive authority is displaced or removed suddenly and by illegal means, according to the Coup D'état Project (CDP) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Cline Center for Advanced Social Research.
Coups are not always violent, and they typically originate with small, elite groups already within the government. However, a coup can also be triggered by military actions, the involvement of operators representing foreign governments, or popular revolts "manifested by high levels of civil unrest," the CDP says.”
This is exactly the kind of mental masturbation masquerading as "critical thought" that has led our country to the brink. Millions of blowhard bloggers trying to find some angle to feel smart have muddied the reality playing out before our eyes. The “statistics" angle is wearying. For example, does your “black folks are more likely to be involved in crime” statistic (so breezily referenced, so broad, yet your main arguments against BLM are built upon it) take into account that Black people are disproportionately policed? Disproportionately pulled over, disproportionately searched for little to no reason? Does it take into account that a Black middle-schooler caught with cigarette lighter at a Black public school (yes, we still have those!) is arrested and charged, while a white middle-schooler with a lighter in a white school in the same city is just sent to the principal’s office? What we can accurately measure in statistics are simpler phenomenon that can be simply measured, which eludes more complex systems and certainly a charge as broad as being “involved in crime.” Racism of course is a complex web—a hellbrew of injustices that routinely traps Black people in a punitive death spiral in every aspect of their lives, from employment to housing to education to healthcare to social services to incarceration—the cumulative effect cannot be captured by statistics. Yet, the cumulative effect determines what we call crime and where and who we police. Where did your “statistic” that Black people are more likely to be involved in crime come from? Are they from the FBI financial crimes unit? College disciplinary boards? Are they police statistics? I suspect the latter. If so, when BLM complains that Black people are consistently and unfairly targeted by the police, you then quote a police statistic that may very well reflect that grievance to prove that they’re deserving of such treatment? The logic is mind-boggling and reveals perfectly the ways in which statistics have been used for such a long time to perpetuate racism. I’m tired of white vultures mansplaining Black “statistics” from their panic bunkers in the suburbs. Also, sex is biological. Gender is a social construct. No one’s arguing to have 37 boxes to mark on birth certificates. And maybe in comparing the “similarities” between the anti-science preoccupations of the right and the left, you should also compare the consequences of denying climate change to the horrific consequences that befall our world when people can choose what bathroom stall to take a dump in. Even more fundamental to your “anti-science” argument, do you care to distinguish between hard science (gasses, elements, etc. and the laws that govern climate science) vs. the social sciences (like statistics, IQ tests, etc.) that are incredibly elastic, always changing, and have a long, long dark history of discrimination? Yes, perhaps you should look into the history of your beloved statistics, on which heap all your faith. They can be useful, sure, but to rely on them to interpret absolutely everything narrow and broad is the tactic of a lazy mind. Good God, I could go on, but I feel like I’ve put more thought into this comment than you did in your post. But I will close in addressing perhaps your most astoundingly naïve assertation: that the Capitol rioters were buffoons not to be taken seriously. You know, everyone said that the orange-hued, raging, racist gameshow clown that was 2016 candidate Trump was a buffoon. Few people took him seriously—including people I know who voted for him—until he’d already won the election and was bragging to hostile nations that his nuclear button was “bigger.” If we have learned one goddamned thing over these four disastrous years, is it not to take buffoons seriously?? After all, that is the only reason I wasted ten minutes of my life reading your blog. It’s easy to “think a lot” when you’re thinking in a vacuum…
"For example, does your “black folks are more likely to be involved in crime” statistic (so breezily referenced, so broad, yet your main arguments against BLM are built upon it) take into account that Black people are disproportionately policed? [etc]"
I can't speak for the author, but I'd assume that it is likely that the statistic *does* take that sort of stuff into account. Did you ever read the Slate Star Codex deep dive on the subject? ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ if you haven't). The important part being that the racial breakdown of people arrested for violent crimes matches up reasonably well with the racial breakdown of assailants reported by crime victims in surveys.
If it were true that the (population-adjusted) rates of violent crime were equal between racial groups, and the disproportionate black arrest rate were *entirely* the result of police prejudice, we would expect the victim surveys to report a racial breakdown that was roughly the same as the background population racial breakdown, but if instead the victim surveys (entirely independently of the police) show black people committing a disproportionate amount of violent crime, then it's reasonable to conclude that *at least some* of the disparity in policy encounter rate is a result of a disparity in the real crime rate between the two populations.
(Unless, I suppose, a large fraction of the people surveyed are so filled with irrational hatred that they are willing to lie about the race of their attacker just to poison the well, but if they were a high enough number of people to skew the survey results that much, you'd be looking at a society so fanatically devoted to racism that the BLM movement couldn't have ever got off the ground in the first place, let alone won the allegiance of the huge swathe of business and political leaders that it did.)
None of this is to say that the factors you listed don't make *some* difference - for instance, one of the odd findings as noted in that Slate Star Codex article is that, although the police do not kill a disproportionate number of black people when adjusted for our best estimate of the difference in crime rates, they *do* commit a disproportionate amount of non-lethal violence against black people after the same adjustment. Just that if you are going to assert the claim, which I think you are making, that there *is no difference* in underlying crime rates between blacks and other groups, that the difference in arrest rates is *entirely* accounted for by the behaviour of the police, then that is a fairly radical claim that one ought to make a reasoned argument for.
Although I’d say that the math involved in the election fraud theory isn’t as big as it may seem; appears to be only a relatively small number of precincts that happen to be in counties and states controlled by Democrats. Could be wrong, 80% sure. Too disgusted to dive into the details and numbers again.
The problem is nobody knew how the vote was going to break, so if they did try to run fraud they'd have had to shoot higher than absolutely necessary. I'll migrate this one over to substack pretty soon:
https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/an-outside-look-at-election-fraud-87bdba723e73
It’s almost like you’d need a voting software system used by the key states that was capable of changing votes.
I feel, with zero proof, they did. Thats the only explanation I can come up with for the absolute worst candidates in modern history having far and away the highest turnout. There is no way the orange buffoon or dementia boy drive a 66% turnout without some fuckery going on.
I just can't fathom enough premeditated fuckery to swing it as far as it swung without someone singing. Ballot fraud could not have decided this. The numbers are too big. Voting machine fraud would be the only way.
Incorrect. Fraud occurs in every election. Significant fraud happens where one group fully controls the levers of power- say Philadelphia. The amount of fraud that occurs is the exact amount the various actors inclined to commit fraud think they can get away with. In this election, many means of tracking fraud were eliminated through the use of mail-in voting. A reasonable person would assume that the amount of fraud people thought they could get away with would increase under such circumstances. Which candidate received the net benefit from fraud and the net total is impossible to determine. How many old people in nursing homes had "help" filling out their ballot in Philly? Yours is a failure of imagination. Fraud does not have to be centrally directed and controlled. How many people convinced that Trump=Hitler were independently willing to bend the rules and "help" fill out a ballot for a parent, grandparent or patient at a nursing home? After all, if dad still had his wits about him, he would vote against Hitler. It's not even a bad thing to do. The motivation to do the same against Biden isn't the same. Perceived incompetence doesn't fire people up like perceived evil.
For numbers, there were 75,000 nursing home patients in PA in 2020. How many nursing homes are in the rural, red districts? Virtually none. Not everyone in a nursing home is incompetent, nor are all incompetent people in nursing homes. I am fairly sure that it is possible to generate 43,000+ illegitimate votes. Georgia had almost 33,000 people in nursing homes. Arizona did not have enough in nursing homes, but I'm fairly confident there are other ways of generating illegitimate votes.
You may be blinded because you correctly believe that individual elections make little difference.
The math really doesn't work, see prior link:
https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/an-outside-look-at-election-fraud-87bdba723e73
If the Ds had a magic crystal ball that they could predict exactly which areas to flip it's possible they might have coordinated enough fraud to be able to flip the election. They didn't have a magic crystal ball. They didn't know exactly which areas to flip. So if there was such an effort that did in fact change this particular election, they would have had to commit five or ten times as much fraud as necessary to ensure that the localized fraud was enough in the critical areas to flip a few critical states.
You are misreading my comment and making unwarranted assumptions about required knowledge in order to act. My assertion is that individuals and small coordinated groups cheat as much as the situation allows at all times. Sometimes this is relevant, sometimes not. The motivation to cheat was at an all-time high and the full capacity of available modes of cheating was enough to flip this particular election. Did it? Can't know. Does it look like having a Democrat in office for the 4 years after trashing the economy for a virus will increase the odds of a non-Democrat win in 2024? Yes. Do I find that funny? Yes.
I already used your article for the summary of vote totals. I believe #2, because the safeguards for tracking illegal voting were removed in advance and that the cheating was not unusual in concept, just in scale due to changing the format of the election and the level of motivation (hate and fear pursuant to DJT=Hitler). Additionally, no one looking on behalf of Government wanted to find evidence of cheating to get rid of the first semi-outsider since Eisenhower to bumble into some semblance of power. People who have continued to support DJT, find themselves in prison at an unusually high rate. The people that turn on him get book deals and high-paying jobs in media and universities. If I could concoct a personal tie to Trump, I'd write a book saying he's a scumbag. Why no whistleblowers? Ideologically motivated people don't feel shame for having participated in illegal activity for the sake of a cause they believe in. In this case, even if they change their mind, their is no benefit to admitting they filled out 100 ballots to keep Hitler out of the White House. A reasonable analysis of the numbers assures them that their individual efforts did not affect the outcome (the equivalent of a conscience round).
My contention is that thousands of people had the opportunity to engage in outsized levels of cheating with no reasonable way to be detected. Yours is a failure of imagination. Fraud does not have to be centrally directed and controlled. The perfect environment for stochastic cheating was created by effectively labeling one candidate Hitler and then decreasing the supervision of the process.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it did, or it has. I don't know. But the situation doesn't pass the eye test for me. There were too many irregularities in key friendly areas in Michigan, Wisconsin, PA and GA that magically stopped and started counting in the middle of the night. It may have been voting machine fraud, or maybe there was no fraud at all. I have no horse in the race, I'm an anarchist. But the buffoon and dementia pulling off the highest voter turnout in modern history doesn't add up. To me. Further, they have silicone valley in their back pocket. There are also instances like al capone who go years without getting caught by keeping things close to the vest and limiting things to a small groups in friendly districts. Like those mentioned above. And for all the AL capones, there are dozens of others that didn't get caught. Lastly, the system has been gamed before, so it's not out of the realm of possibility. I get what you are saying about large numbers, but it's not as far fetched as it seems.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/nyregion/nj-election-mail-voting-fraud.html
Well on the Trump side you had an insane number of rallies weekly, even daily, and a highly energized base. Biden? He seemed to barely make an effort. But somehow outperformed even Obama in many key/swing precincts, and often by huge margins. All that solely from TDS?
And being familiar with things in NJ, that article linked is a perfect example of the lack of trustworthiness and doubling down on it.
The article says voter fraud is rare. Let's just accept that as true. IT says that that rare thing is not something to be concerned about and Trump had no rational for being concerned about it because even though it just happened it is rare. And even if it does happen, it is easily spotted.
Except it's an article about just that thing happening. And then after concerns being raised about just such a thing happening. That thing that made it easily detectable was removed from the process. To commit mail fraud you have to make a run around the USPS. Mail in ballots can't if you actually mail them in. Which means you need to produce them out of thin air at the other end, or you need to infiltrate the USPS's cadre of long term employees many years before needing to steal an election, or you need to intimidate them without things leaking.
Odds are not good.
But hey it's NJ. We produced a pile of ballot drop boxes that don't use the USPS. Put a ballot in them and it's magically legit unless you get two ballots from the same person.
In the face of criticism for a process that ACTUALLY happened, they figured the right response was to provide a work around for the USPS spotting people being dishonest.
And then they expect people to not be suspicious of this clown shoe grade argument that everything is in fact fine and not falling apart at the seams. But could you sneak a 7.4% margin through that newly manufactured hole in the system? The answer isn't no, it's probably not. Probably not might keep people happy when you are doing things the same way you have forever, but right after you change all the rules, and do so in a manner which makes cheating the system easier?
I will give my $0.02 on why you feel that way, and why you are not wrong, but you are wrong.
You feel that way because although you can't prove the election was rigged, you see a lot of evidence that the process is sloppy and inaccurate. The way we count normal elections sucks. The way we ran voting for this election plays to the absolute weakest part of that process. In my state, mail in ballots are normally treated as provisional. If the margins are to great for them to impact the result, they just toss them in the trash. This means that the process for mail in ballots is perhaps the least tested part of the vote tabulating process. A process so accurate my state puts a paywall in front of a recount that is non refundable unless the results are reversed or the change is 10% or more. THAT's their objective reference point on how accurate they think the whole process is, and they then turn around an act like it is infallible when faced with margins of much less than that.
Our voting process is garbage, and it being trustworthy is reliant on the margins being significant. In many places the statutes themselves compared to the results and the polls tell us with certainty that we have crept under that threshold.
Then the actual facts of the recount tell us we have crept under that margin. Take Georgia where they fed the ballots to the machines repeatedly, got differing answers, and then went to a manual count. The presumption being that THAT is somehow less flawed. Because humans are great at counting little circles on a scantron sheet.
Then you take the fact that there were a BUNCH of locations with very slim margins and some of them didn't even do that thorough of a job.
THEN if you lived through the hanging chads of 2000, you know what both parties being properly represented for a ludicrously careful count looks like, and you know this isn't that.
THEN you have the media declaring themselves the arbiter of truth and calling the election and announcing a winner based on polling. Which isn't how it works, and once again if you lived through the hanging chads, you saw how that was handled when the media was treating news like news instead of acting as a political pawn for their side. They told us that it looked like X had won, and once they got over the shock of that being not clearly the case, the status of the counts, and how far we were from the counts being finalized. So you have a media that campaigned for one candidate rather than report news objectively telling you authoritatively they are telling you facts when they have failed to wait for the closest thing to a fact we will get, AND after they clearly got it wrong previously and should stop telling people they have a handle on this.
So yeah, that would make you feel like you don't trust the results. But the results being untrustworthy doesn't mean that the election was rigged. As HWFO suggests, the margins are way too small for it to be a sure thing, and you don't do something like that unless it is a sure thing.
That doesn't mean that some garbage numbers were generated and with the help of the media and covid restrictions they put in place that one side didn't just yell stop when they numbers worked for them and then stonewalled and tried to gaslight you into believing that this has been the most secure and accurate vote in history when you can clearly see the opportunity for exploiting the process and how recounts were faster, sloppier, and less properly observed than past recounts.
My main contention is that the Ds wouldn't have known they were going to lose by a single vote, so the amount of "vote stealing" they'd have to do is not just the margin of victory, but a larger number than the margin of victory, perhaps by a lot, and probably in a lot of states. And if you back-figure what sort of operation would look like to produce the results of this election (as done in the link above) the vote stealing operation would have had to been simply phenomenally massive. Couldn't have been done with mail in fraud. Would had to have been done by machine hacking. And the GA hand recount basically proved there was no machine hacking here, which means there probably wasn't any anywhere else, given how GA was one of the most important swings. I'm 100% positive there was vote fraud, but I'm at least 95% sure there wasn't enough to flip the outcome.
If Republicans want to win, they need to make sure they don't have a candidate that literally triggers anger and anxiety responses from every suburban white woman. That is not how you win an election.
Further, though, I'm solidly in the camp that elections don't matter, and the whole idea of democracy to begin with was just a way to suppress armed rebellion.
I'm with you. The core of my argument is that there probably wasn't meaningful voter fraud, but there is plenty of reason for things to look untrustworthy, and that is because our process of voting isn't held to a remotely good standard. But we are so evenly polarized in the US that unless they improve the process and recognize its flaws, we will be constantly eroding confidence in the process.
A process that counts more votes then there are registered voters and can't yield a consistent count within a very small fraction of one percent isn't going to sound like "nobody cheated". "They would have needed to cheat a lot more" isn't an answer that instills much confidence. Even if the purpose of democracy is to keep people from taking up arms and killing the idiots in charge rather than give them much of a say over the political class, they are failing at that because it looks like a bunch of dishonest clowns saying there is nothing to see here the way it is being presented. If it is an illusion more or less, they need to step up and do their job of making it reasonably convincing.
Incorrect. You do not have to know how many votes the other side will have in order to try to cheat. You cheat to the maximum extent you think you can get away with. I agree that it is unlikely that the the fraud turned the election, but I am 100 percent certain that it turned a few races by collateral damage. They found at least one. (https://www.newsweek.com/louisiana-sheriff-election-voter-fraud-1849952) Sure it was turned by a handful of votes. I doubt it was the only race affected by fraud.
Your view is blinded by the truth that individual elections don't generally matter much. The people that believe Trump=Hitler, or Trump=Savior are certainly willing to act on their own to nudge elections in their preferred direction. In short, your math is right, but you failed to set up the problem correctly. Do you think all the Floyd Protests had an organizer call up or text each participant? By your election analysis process, the Floyd Protests couldn't have happened because that would be too many text messages and phone calls to make and central organization of 20,000,000 people can't happen. Your ongoing contention that the organization of the fraud was too complex is negated by an approach that requires only setting the stage for fraud by motivating actors and eliminating safeguards that protect against fraud.
I would love to see an article from you after watching "2000 Mules" on this topic, and whether you still feel the same way.
I found it a compelling narrative, but it's possible that it was just a compelling narrative. And more to the point, one I'm more inclined than not to believe, mostly because I don't trust any politicians. If the movie had been produced by Team Blue in the wake of a Trump victory in 2020, and was claiming the same things, I'd probably be inclined to believe them too.
So maybe I'm just a dupe, who knows.
It would have to be compelling enough to argue against this mathematical analysis.
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-outside-look-at-election-fraud
Great to see you on Substack, BJ. I'm one of those Patreon supporters who flip you a bit of beer money every month. I'm also someone who Medium shadow banned for a few years, so I'm happy to see you leave that platform. Well done!
Did you see the invite to the Slack? Check the Patreon page.
Very glad to see you on Substack, BJ! Spot on analysis, IMO. My Canadian family is wondering whats in the water down here. We're all so accustomed to it now, thanks to the media, that this is just business as usual.
Wow. Very well done overall.
Your initial premise is incorrect. I did not read further. “During a coup, a government's executive authority is displaced or removed suddenly and by illegal means, according to the Coup D'état Project (CDP) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Cline Center for Advanced Social Research.
Coups are not always violent, and they typically originate with small, elite groups already within the government. However, a coup can also be triggered by military actions, the involvement of operators representing foreign governments, or popular revolts "manifested by high levels of civil unrest," the CDP says.”
So a couple hundred LARPers with buffalo costumes doesn't make the list, right?
This is exactly the kind of mental masturbation masquerading as "critical thought" that has led our country to the brink. Millions of blowhard bloggers trying to find some angle to feel smart have muddied the reality playing out before our eyes. The “statistics" angle is wearying. For example, does your “black folks are more likely to be involved in crime” statistic (so breezily referenced, so broad, yet your main arguments against BLM are built upon it) take into account that Black people are disproportionately policed? Disproportionately pulled over, disproportionately searched for little to no reason? Does it take into account that a Black middle-schooler caught with cigarette lighter at a Black public school (yes, we still have those!) is arrested and charged, while a white middle-schooler with a lighter in a white school in the same city is just sent to the principal’s office? What we can accurately measure in statistics are simpler phenomenon that can be simply measured, which eludes more complex systems and certainly a charge as broad as being “involved in crime.” Racism of course is a complex web—a hellbrew of injustices that routinely traps Black people in a punitive death spiral in every aspect of their lives, from employment to housing to education to healthcare to social services to incarceration—the cumulative effect cannot be captured by statistics. Yet, the cumulative effect determines what we call crime and where and who we police. Where did your “statistic” that Black people are more likely to be involved in crime come from? Are they from the FBI financial crimes unit? College disciplinary boards? Are they police statistics? I suspect the latter. If so, when BLM complains that Black people are consistently and unfairly targeted by the police, you then quote a police statistic that may very well reflect that grievance to prove that they’re deserving of such treatment? The logic is mind-boggling and reveals perfectly the ways in which statistics have been used for such a long time to perpetuate racism. I’m tired of white vultures mansplaining Black “statistics” from their panic bunkers in the suburbs. Also, sex is biological. Gender is a social construct. No one’s arguing to have 37 boxes to mark on birth certificates. And maybe in comparing the “similarities” between the anti-science preoccupations of the right and the left, you should also compare the consequences of denying climate change to the horrific consequences that befall our world when people can choose what bathroom stall to take a dump in. Even more fundamental to your “anti-science” argument, do you care to distinguish between hard science (gasses, elements, etc. and the laws that govern climate science) vs. the social sciences (like statistics, IQ tests, etc.) that are incredibly elastic, always changing, and have a long, long dark history of discrimination? Yes, perhaps you should look into the history of your beloved statistics, on which heap all your faith. They can be useful, sure, but to rely on them to interpret absolutely everything narrow and broad is the tactic of a lazy mind. Good God, I could go on, but I feel like I’ve put more thought into this comment than you did in your post. But I will close in addressing perhaps your most astoundingly naïve assertation: that the Capitol rioters were buffoons not to be taken seriously. You know, everyone said that the orange-hued, raging, racist gameshow clown that was 2016 candidate Trump was a buffoon. Few people took him seriously—including people I know who voted for him—until he’d already won the election and was bragging to hostile nations that his nuclear button was “bigger.” If we have learned one goddamned thing over these four disastrous years, is it not to take buffoons seriously?? After all, that is the only reason I wasted ten minutes of my life reading your blog. It’s easy to “think a lot” when you’re thinking in a vacuum…
On the racial crime statistics, go here, read it, and come back:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
It's unbaised, nonpartisan, and comprehensive.
On the general topic of racism and the police, I'd ask you to read this, think about it a bit, and come back:
https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/conversations-with-black-folks-about-cops-2ff92afdcad6
I'll tell you a neat secret about J's story that I didn't include in the article because it didn't cross his mind to mention it until later.
"For example, does your “black folks are more likely to be involved in crime” statistic (so breezily referenced, so broad, yet your main arguments against BLM are built upon it) take into account that Black people are disproportionately policed? [etc]"
I can't speak for the author, but I'd assume that it is likely that the statistic *does* take that sort of stuff into account. Did you ever read the Slate Star Codex deep dive on the subject? ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ if you haven't). The important part being that the racial breakdown of people arrested for violent crimes matches up reasonably well with the racial breakdown of assailants reported by crime victims in surveys.
If it were true that the (population-adjusted) rates of violent crime were equal between racial groups, and the disproportionate black arrest rate were *entirely* the result of police prejudice, we would expect the victim surveys to report a racial breakdown that was roughly the same as the background population racial breakdown, but if instead the victim surveys (entirely independently of the police) show black people committing a disproportionate amount of violent crime, then it's reasonable to conclude that *at least some* of the disparity in policy encounter rate is a result of a disparity in the real crime rate between the two populations.
(Unless, I suppose, a large fraction of the people surveyed are so filled with irrational hatred that they are willing to lie about the race of their attacker just to poison the well, but if they were a high enough number of people to skew the survey results that much, you'd be looking at a society so fanatically devoted to racism that the BLM movement couldn't have ever got off the ground in the first place, let alone won the allegiance of the huge swathe of business and political leaders that it did.)
None of this is to say that the factors you listed don't make *some* difference - for instance, one of the odd findings as noted in that Slate Star Codex article is that, although the police do not kill a disproportionate number of black people when adjusted for our best estimate of the difference in crime rates, they *do* commit a disproportionate amount of non-lethal violence against black people after the same adjustment. Just that if you are going to assert the claim, which I think you are making, that there *is no difference* in underlying crime rates between blacks and other groups, that the difference in arrest rates is *entirely* accounted for by the behaviour of the police, then that is a fairly radical claim that one ought to make a reasoned argument for.
Does it bother you that I read your first two sentences and still couldn't tell which tribe you were on?
As a proud homosexual I'm offended by this article
good deep dive on comment functionality sir