1. They made sure investigations happened to determine the validity of any claims. Investigations from trusted intelligence officials and even from the Republican-controlled senate confirmed the same thing. 2. They impeached trump based on the evidence provided by the investigations. 3. When the republicans didn’t vote to remove him, they focused a lot on the election and driving voter turnout.
Correctly, people note that a sure marker of a conspiracy theory is that the absence of evidence supports the claim. (ie, there must have been a cover-up!)
This is definitely true, but another aspect which doesn't get enough attention is an argument which relies totally on psychoanalysis. "Group X would surely want to do x, and therefore they probably did!"
The truth is that you generally don't understand people's incentives as well as you might guess. Further, simply because there is an incentive does not mean there is a capability.
But, most importantly, claims require evidence. Reading incentives is pretty flawed regardless. At best, it must be backstopped by real, hard evidence. This total lack of evidence is why these cases are being unceremoniously tossed out of court.
The rationalistic question is something along the lines of "how do you adjust your priors of voter fraud based on the rhetoric of the party alleged of committing the fraud." The lazy answer is "your voter fraud prior should always be zero." Is that the right answer? There's are interesting discussions to be had here. They likely cannot be had on Hacker News.
Many people have beliefs about Trump where, IF I had the same beliefs I'd totally be on board with voter fraud to get him out of office.
I wouldn't, but this is because of the game theory sort of nature of democracy. If I can do it, so can my opponents. Suppose Trump is evil, and defeated, and next election my side has a truly wonderful and excellent candidate. (again, I'm just being theoretical.) I don't want the other side to be able to beat my candidate using voter fraud. Ideally, no one can beat anyone using voter fraud.
>The rationalistic question is something along the lines of "how do you adjust your priors of voter
I'm not sure what you mean, but I'm guessing you mean "this party has previously had issues with voter fraud, and therefore it's not stretch to be concerned about it again." If I have you correct, I'd again say that this is a fine suspicion, but then evidence must be produced. If evidence cannot be produced, then the priors alone are not enough. To use a very flimsy metaphor, suppose in a small town there is a kid who has robbed a convenience store. Later, when another convenience store is robbed it might make sense to suspect the kid. But, you had better not charge or convict him unless you can produce some real evidence. (and to be clear, I am not comparing either party to a common criminal, I just wanted a simple metaphor which I thought best explained the argument.)
I'm hard pressed to believe that someone who believes these are going on AND that the current president is a Russian asset (for example) would not support voter fraud.
Democrats are not trying to fight fire with fire, they're just trying to make it easy to vote for anyone who is entitled to vote. It just happens that there are more of those people than there are people supporting Republicans. Quite a bit more.
You just can't imagine someone wouldn't stoop that low when you would.
#1 - Could there be anyone, anywhere, who believes that voter fraud is warranted because they believe the situation is so dire?
Sure, I'll bet there are some people who feel this way.
#2 - Does the possibility that some people, somewhere feel this way suggest that there is real possibility of fraud?
Without evidence, no. Remember that "some democrats" feeling this way is actually not very useful. Instead, various and multiple people with different levels of the election oversight process would need to 1) feel this way, and 2) be willing to risk a federal crime despite all other incentives, and 3) have the actual capability of carrying this out. Each step in the process here carries further inter-dependencies.
For example, the people who really feel this way must be multiple election officials in multiple locations. Recall that there are no "state" elections, but rather multiple districts, which are then collected for the state elections. And so there has to be fraud in multiple locations, and it must be coordinated. Before we go any further, it's important to understand that when we're supposing that we know "how people would feel," we suddenly mean "I know the motivations and incentives of multiple strangers, whose jobs and lives I know nothing about." This is where our ability to judge a person's incentives really falls apart. If we're considering scenario #1, where an imagined other might feel some way, that's probably fine. By the time we're in scenario #2, we already do not know enough information to determine all the incentives involved. One pole worker may be a republican, another a democrat. One pole worker may have a strict credo they live by (in other words, they wouldn't break the law no matter what) while others may be much more open to malicious actions. Some might be risk averse, so might be risk addicted. The point is we don't have factual information about all these different competing incentives.
Even if we could establish the various incentives, there's further information we don't have: What is the structure of the various election boards? Which individuals would be required to coordinate malicious to reach the desired outcome? And, which of those individuals do we think have the "wrong" incentives? In other words, were enough bad actors in the right place?
Lastly, (and shortly since I'm getting too wordy) supposing we could work out the first two problems, do we think such a group could escape the nigh-historical oversight which has been playing out after this election?
Have you been following the news at all in the past year or so?
But you can't claim that they weren't trying to use legitimate means to remove him from office. That is just absurd.
You're acting like a jilted lover, not a participant in democracy.
Because they believe in the process, the integrity of our country and our Constitution, the voice of the people and the validity of the election. (That doesn't mean Democrats are knights in shining armor, but with many politicians following the President's lead on fighting the integrity of our own country, many find it preferable that Democratic politicians refrain from taking that same low road. Sometimes the high road works. Often it doesn't.)
They're rule-followers. That doesn't mean they're smart.
Out of curiosity, did you mean: partisanism?
I accepted that President Donald Trump won the electoral college in 2016, and that he lost it in 2020. I don't think Democrats trying to get a few million people in on an election fraud conspiracy would have been good for the country, and I don't think Democratic politicians believed that was a good idea either.
It's a bit funny both sides proclaim that only the other side is in a bubble.
Also, I will try to say this in the nicest way possible, but you are repeating, nearly verbatim, talking points that the President has been using for months in various rallies. The idea that the democrats needed to turn to voter fraud to ensure Biden won a Trump talking point - not something born out of any sort of rumor or leak. What is particularly nefarious about this talking point is it's not something he crafted out of the blue, but it is one that he has been forming since at least July. He has carefully planned to use pandemic and the growth in mail in ballots to throw chaos into the electoral process. In other words, I'm asking you take a step back and consider if voter fraud is a credible rumor or if its something that has been manufactured by the right wing media machine.
You forgot a few steps. First, they claimed there was fraud (w/o evidence). Then they 'leaked' the Steele dossier and other nonsense documents. Then, there was 24/7 wall to wall coverage for months and months of it (including insane stuff like the pee tape) to manufacture consent. High profile Democrats happily went on TV expressing fake concern and repeated unproven allegations. They happily were the 'inside source' to NYTimes, rollingstone, nymag, etc, etc for more ridiculous stories. Then, they wasted tax payer money knowing full well that it was bogus.
Respectfully, I would invite you to do the same as you ask others. Take a step back, and consider (even if you aren't convinced) whether you've been had by the Dems on the most ridiculous story (if not on all of them) about Trump.
I think there are two fundamentally different worlds here. Many of the people in this thread, and in big tech, still trust CNN/FOX/MSNBC/NYTimes. But if you look at the past four years, they've constantly given us bad information, or used misleading headlines (most people don't read past the headlines), and often the content of the post itself contradicts the headline.
That's why this YouTube thing is so important. People like Shapiro, Megan Kelly, Tim Pool, Viva Frei, No Agenda .. they actually dig through this stuff and expose how corrurpt the media really is .. and they are insanely corrurpt.
We've had months of "mostly peaceful protestors" and I've watched people all around me on the left defend the burning and looting. "It's just property." The media is corrurpt and this shows YouTube/Google is just as corrurpt, trying to use their massive influence to control a narrative; making something absolute that should be brought deeply into question.
We are not in 1984. We've been in 1984 for decades. It's just now the Internet has allowed people to see that for themselves, and Big Tech wants to take that away and tell people what to think again.
We might be screwed in the short-term, and if people out of choice/ignorance no longer care about certain democratic ideals, then it is impossible to force it upon them. Having said that, I trust people more than I trust systems. So it might take time, but I believe we're going to get past this eventually.
I will say this nicely as well, you should re-read my argument to see where the depth lies. I take caution to ask a simple "IF/THEN" question that's really just a latent criticism of media including social media. The idea that "voter fraud" is some "Trump concocted nefarious scheme" is also rather ridiculous. Voter fraud gets claimed after every election.
I hope our new censorship overlords are fair and honest in their censorship.
I sincerely applaud your paying for news, but a person who gets all their news via the free AP News and Reuters newsfeeds, cspan, PBS, VOA, Propublica, NPR, and so on can be very well informed and avoid a fair amount of nonsense.
One is substantially more terrible than the other, and seems to be perpetually stuck in lala land.
> Voter fraud gets claimed after every election.
Not at this scale.
I just want to be sure here. Is he a huge national security threat? If so, is he big enough of a threat to justify voter fraud?
No one is required to respond to this in earnest, just like there is no requirement for Google to publish materials just because they were uploaded to their servers.