The biggest reason to doubt the "voter fraud" theories this time around is because of who is making the complaints, not because the voting companies (or the laws surrounding e-voting) are beyond reproach.
Not the same kind of paper trail that exists when a voter fills out a paper ballot.
If I fill out a paper ballot, that ballot is independent evidence of the votes I intended to cast, because I filled it out directly, with no machine in the middle. So that paper ballot is a useful auditing mechanism for checking on machine-generated vote counts.
If I electronically cast votes on a machine, and the machine prints out a paper record of my ballot, unless I, the voter, leave some record that I inspected that piece of paper and agree that it reflects the votes I intended to cast, it's useless as an auditing mechanism. As far as I can tell, no such voter inspection record is made with electronic voting machines.
- get ID validated & ability to vote
- get an initialized smart card
- insert in polling machine, fill out stuff
- submit, get printout from printer
- scan printout into a machine
- return smart card
At the polling places I was at (we had a runoff), the staff + signage was emphasizing to check results on printout.
The printing and the scanning felt terribly wasteful but as it turned out, it became a precious way to audit. The bonus is that the printout is normalized, not some person's handwriting that could be subject to misinterpretation.
Were these Dominion voting machines?
Poll worker validates proper ID, get ballot code for your precinct, walk to voting system, poll worker enters the precinct, voter validates info on screen, voter votes on the touch screen, system prints out choices, walk to scanner system, vote gets scanned, scanner stores those ballots in it's tray in case need for audit.
How so? How many eligible voters don't already have government issued IDs?
The statistics I've seen for people who lack valid voter ID is somewhere in the region of 10-15%. Unsurprisingly, this tends to be concentrated among groups that tend to be more reliably Democratic than Republican (something like 25% of African Americans lack valid ID), which is why voter ID is often a dog whistle for disenfranchising certain voters.
As far as I know every state will issue a picture ID, similar to a driver's license but which doesn't confer driving privileges. to someone who doesn't drive.
If the argument is that people who can't drive will find it more difficult to make it to the office that gives out government issued IDs, the obvious solutions are (1) put more of those offices in places like inner cities, convenient to public transportation, and (2) have the political activists who spend so much time complaining about disenfranchisement do some actual work instead and provide people transportation to and from the offices.
> the state might not consider a tribal ID sufficient to vote
The solution to that is obvious too: either fix the state law or fix the tribal ID requirements so they meet existing state law.
When you're done, the machine prints a paper ballot and asks you to inspect it. You then click OK on the machine, take the ballot from your booth over to a separate counting machine, and deposit it there.
It's really quite pleasant, there is a strong audit trail, and the machines afford a wide variety of assistive options (large font, headphone jack for audio, different languages, etc)
Also I had the option to get a printed ballot and fill it out witih a pen if I wanted to.
Mail-in ballots work the same way they have since 1864. You fill out a paper ballot and mail it back.
> Biden only won 16% of counties. Only a few key counties need to be targeted to flip a national election.
16% of counties - when more than half the US population lives in just 4.6% of the counties. Remember that many counties are nearly empty and have few voters. Due to the rural/urban political divide, sparsely populated rural counties typically vote for the GOP in recent elections while densely populated suburbs and cities lean more towards the Democrats.
Biden’s numbers in general were similar to Hillary’s in 2016, but he gained ground in the suburbs due to white educated voters fleeing from Trump after the last 4 years. There is no indication that a “few key counties” were targeted - the shift was seen in all 50 states. Compare Texas suburban county votes in 2016 to 2020.
Mail-in ballots get counted by machines.
Read the interview I posted with Philip Stark, Berkeley Math Dean who is probably the leading expert on election auditing having designed the procedures for conducting risk-limiting audits in many states. He explains this in detail.
What would you have people do? Maybe have the volunteers just scan the ballot by hand and then write down on paper the vote totals?
The argument just boils down to “machines are scary to me” and that isn’t a good enough reason to abandon progress that is routinely shown to work just fine.
Creating accounts to do that with will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
These rules apply regardless of which ideology an account is battling for or against. Our goal is not to have this site burn to a crisp of a particular color, but rather to have it not burn to a crisp at all.
If the voter can easily see that the ballot reflects their choices, then it's not useless as an auditing mechanism. That's hyperbole.
Remember, if there is massive/systematic fraud going on, then every instance doesn't have to be caught to uncover it.
I was curious who makes the voting machines that are used here. It's apparently a company called ES&S:
"Election Systems and Software (ES&S) 11208 John Galt Blvd, Omaha NE"
Someone has a sense of humor, at least.
The reality is, there are always ballots that fall in a grey area. That's being exploited to sow doubt in the uncertainty of an entire election.
Hell, same thing happened during Brexit:
> The first stage will see all ballot papers - though not actual votes - counted, a process known as verification.
> Any ballots which are later rejected are included in these verified ballots.
I submit it COULD happen there, too. Votes being counted by local authorities, making judgement calls, and the plan being to announce the preliminary results if the election is "clear" that night.
Since there is only a single question there is tons of whitespace between options and you can't accidentally mark selections for one question in the space asking a different one.
I've never had to vote in a referendum like brexit, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn the ballot was more complex that the usual parliamentary election one. Looking at images of the brexit ballot it appears pretty similar to what I'm used to, but with far less white space between options.
I didn't say any such thing. Of course there are disputed and spoiled ballots, and these are resolved quickly by the volunteers and local observers from the parties taking part in the election. Unless the number of disputed ballots exceeds the difference it's not really a problem. Recounts happen, especially where there's only a few hundred votes in it.
Spoiled ballots (where the voters are actively protesting by scrawling "I hate them all!", or some other message across the paper) are tallied separately, but are otherwise ignored when calculating the election outcome.
There’s also the fact that the ballot is white text on black with a white circle to fill in. This design decision is ingenious in how it eliminates doubts about voting.
So I don't think the UK evidence shows what you claim it does. The smallest UK spoilt ballot error I can find is larger than the winning margins in many US places.
Finally, here's [4] one analysis of voting tech versus ballot spoilage rates that seems to reach similar conclusions of all the papers I scanned over. Hand edited paper is about the worst way to get valid ballots of any method in this study.
[1] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html
[2] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/19/spoilt-ballots-pc...
[4] https://www.hamilton.edu/news/florida/Klinkner%20Analysis.pd...
Or maybe you didn't read the study....
On the Florida study. Perhaps I've misunderstood, but it read to me like the punchcard system was worst, followed by ballots scanned by a computer at the precinct, then "other", which is the two counties using other system that sound quite different to each other. It wasn't clear to me at all that they had any sort of rating of how many inadvertently spoiled ballots came from hand written, hand counted systems vs others. I'll readily admit that I'm not any kind of statistics expert though, so the study wasn't straightforward for me to follow.
In parliamentary systems, you elect people so they can vote on those matters for you.
Same in America too. Hence, representative democracy. It’s why we have Congress: to vote for us. The problem is that the citizens feel left out in certain issues, so instead of replacing the politician, they make propositions a thing. Boom! Now you have 5+ more things to vote for. Add in county and local governments, and it gets to be 20+ things long.
This is how it is done in many US jurisdictions as well (including all the ones I have voted in).
What I'm not sure about is whether that is actually the way it is done for all electronic voting machines.
Well, there's also the fact that the folks advancing these theories are insisting that they're being "kept from gathering the evidence", when in reality much of what they're saying is contradicted by evidence.
For example, the instances cited in the lawsuit where Giuliani and others continued to insist that Dominion voting machines had changed the Georgia election outcome by flipping votes, even after the original results had been confirmed by a full hand recount.
Too many arguments boil down to people, and motives, not facts. It is a bad idea to put the short term desire to see a foe vanquished over the long term cost of bad laws and policy.
Laws are not perfect, and I'm not convinced we want the basis of democracy to be closed source voting machines, or that even if we do, the checks and balances as they stand are currently 100% correct.
That's a valid concern when you're dealing with a good-faith actor. But if voting machines are open-source (which I heartily support), they'll move on to baselessly discrediting something else to shape public perception. The problem isn't the technology per se. The problem is we're not dealing with a good-faith actor.
Voting is a system that needs to be simple, transparent, and auditable. The technical solutions are 0/3 and an example of “over engineering” leading to a poor quality solution.
Our current voting system is well below international standards — and it’s because of the technology.
Second, considering who we're dealing with, it fundamentally doesn't matter. They aren't actually arguing for more secure elections, they're looking for any reason to throw out the results because they lost. If systems were up to "international standards" (I don't know what those are, can you be more specific?) they'll just say they're "liberal commie standards that you can't trust, and we need American standards" or some nonsense like that.
By all means have more secure elections. Just know that it won't do anything in a scenario where the loser claims any result other than their victory is "rigged".
There needs to be a very high tolerance of criticism towards voting machines and the companies that make them. Ordinary standards of transparency are not enough, for example.
There is. It's called the 1st Amendment.
If the company is suing for defamation, that is also their right. Giuliani isn't some small fish being silenced by a defamation suit.
https://statescoop.com/georgia-buys-new-voting-machines-with...
Edit: grammar.
So, I think the dissenters at least got the skepticism part right. The problem, of course, is that a healthy level of skepticism should only inform the investigation of facts, and then perhaps new legislation and oversight. Without the investigation, oversight or legislation... the skepticism is pointless.
For example, it's unfortunate that gaming machines in Las Vegas have more oversight and regulations than voting machines. That doesn't necessarily there is a problem with voting machines, but it does mean we could do more to ensure there isn't a problem with them now or in the future. Dominion has not done anything to lose my trust, but when it comes our elections, we should have proper oversight over these machines (no matter who makes them since there are multiple suppliers for voting machines).
So many "skeptics" are actually incredibly trusting patsies, they're just trusting con-men instead of mainstream discourse.
Which is the tell that Trump didn’t believe his own claims of vote fraud. Bear in mind he pulled exactly the same stunt in 2016 claiming massive vote fraud but when he won never mentioned it again until 2020.
If he’d actually believed there was vote fraud or a chance of it, he would have done something about it. Investigations, hearings, technical audits, best practices and standards. Statistical analysis to identify issues (as against the analyses that do happen that show insignificant fraud). He had 4 years to sort this out. You’d think it would be one if his top priorities.
Of course none of that happened because the whole show is entirely performative. In fact doing anything about it would take his excuse away, because if he addressed vote security he couldn’t blame vote security issues on anyone else.
There was even a voter-fraud commission set up to investigate the claims. They quietly disbanded.
A class case of "we refuse to look for evidence, therefore there is no evidence"
Also why pick on Padilla, why not Jon Husted (Rep, Ohio). What about all the Republican lead states where massive fraud was supposed to have happened? Trump expended no political capital or effort whatsoever on doing anything meaningful about supposed voter fraud, and couldn't even persuade any Republican state administrations he had any credible evidence or reason for alleging it. He just gave up immediately at the first hurdle of being asked what he wanted to do and why. In fact he didn't even pursue this personally, he just delegated it to some flunkies and walked away from the issue until the next election.
How to explain this? It's almost as if he had no credible reason for making the claims and the whole thing was just for show.
Voting machines didn’t steal the election. But they’re a terrible technology. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-mac...
And worst of all is ES&S' threats against folks who point out those legitimate flaws, e.g. SMART Elections, a journalism and advocacy group in NY.
ESS voting machine company sends threats https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2021/01/11/ess-voting-machine-...
What we need is evidence-based elections:
Evidence-Based Elections: Create a Meaningful Paper Trail, then Audit Andrew W. Appel* & Philip B. Stark* Georgetown Law Technology Review 2020 https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
And though we have improving evidence for correct tabulations in the recent elections, many states still aren't doing a good job providing evidence for ballot eligibility or chain-of-custody.
The best way to promote confidence in our democracy is to calmly stick to facts, not be swayed by politics, and work to make things better. For more on how we've done that in Colorado and elsewhere, see my page at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/corla/
We've already seen this happen–when YouTube started putting labels on all COVID-19-related content, deniers were unsatisfied by the sources presented because they have been indoctrinated to believe nothing mainstream can be trusted.
The correct answer is to prevent them from saying things.
They'll use any excuse to delude themselves that they're correct, because to admit otherwise is to admit that they were dumb enough to have been conned by a terrible conman. When they saw the morons attacking congress, they convinced themselves "people wearing helmets are Antifa, and all the attackers are Antifa plants...".
For the same reason it's (probably) baseless for a coworker of yours to claim you've been embezzling millions from your employer for years. It's basically a false accusation.
It's not baseless to claim voter fraud when you have proof. It's baseless when you claim voter fraud without any actual proof.
>If anything this will chill future concerns and people will not speak up. It sounds like you don’t want anyone to ever question a vote.
It sounds like he expects the President of the United States to act with the integrity the office commands. Not ask/condone/allow his lawyer to lie on television (where he can make up any lie he wants) while admitting there was no fraud in court (where he's actually held legally accountable for his statements).
https://www.salon.com/2020/11/18/judge-cancels-fraud-evidenc...
I took GP meaning that they want corporations to shut down anything they don’t like. That’s typically what’s meant by chilling speech.
If Dominion can prove those things to the satisfaction of a judge and jury, they should win. Our justice system is supposed to deter people from breaking the law.
In case someone thinks this is splitting hairs, I fully support Dominion suing Giuliani for his alleged defamation. I would be somewhat horrified at the Attorney General attempting to put him in jail for it, ceteris paribus.
This is a tort that he actually committed, not a crime, but otherwise that’s what is happening. Not every violation of law is a “crime”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/world/asia/thailand-revie...
This century is very young for laws that were never frequently invoked, but, yes, at least one in Kansas in 2002:
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/941/criminal-li...
Defamatory statements draw lawsuits. Nothing terribly new or worrying about that.
> It’s a bit worrying that total lies about a conspiracy between Dominion and (very much dead) Hugo Chavez to rig an election for Joe Biden is what gets classified as “dissent” these days.
I'm not sure if you can really even call this a "classification." It's more of a false equivalency, either made in bad faith or through some sloppy bit of emotional reasoning.
I'm seeing a lot of this kind of thing now (another similar example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25898393). It's like some people are experiencing certain generalized feelings, then applying charged words to what triggered those feelings without understanding either the words they used or the thing they're commenting on.
Probably not, I'm mostly responding snarkily to how deeply conspiracy theories have embedded themselves into the body politic.
More important is the idea that a well formed[0] defamation lawsuit is something that requires public attention and redress. Attempting to call this defamation lawsuit something that is suppressing dissent smacks of a hamfisted attempt to make this lawsuit into something bigger than it actually is. Giuliani and his ideological cohort made a bunch of defamatory statements about a company, and predictably that company is suing for defamation. There's nothing terribly surprising or concerning about that.
0 - Defamation lawsuits can be used to suppress speech, of course. This is exactly why many states now have anti-SLAPP laws on the books. That however does not seem to be an issue in this case, as this lawsuit is at least well formed.
Are you claiming that you're more informed than Robert Mueller?
Trump colluded with Russia
In his own words: https://www.businessinsider.com/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-...
Why would anyone waste their time tracking down the original videos when they already know, out of the gate, that he's taken things out of context? That's a waste of everyone's time, and EXACTLY why he's doing what he's doing. He knows most people won't bother to fact check his lies.
The correct course of action is to tell everyone what he does, and until he proves he's changed his stripes and starts acting in good faith, to ignore him.
I believe my comment is relevant to the one I replied to: I do not trust Scott Adams to present his content with any integrity at all, and so sending me a video he clipped together to make a point is not what I'd consider "good evidence". He does not act in good faith, he works backwards from a conclusion. If Steven Miller made a similar video about immigration I wouldn't trust it either without an in-depth review of the sources he relied on. I do not mean for this to be some ad hominen policy, I am not saying Adams and Miller are by default wrong because of who they are, but they don't deserve anyone's trust.
If I have missed some nuance because I couldn't watch the Adams video for myself then you have my apologies for this misunderstanding.
To anyone else clicking this, it has been disproven repeatedly, Adams doesn't care that he's spreading lies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNM3K0cH2tc
A simple fact check: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/10/fac...
"All black people know each other"
"Everyone I disagree with is the same person"
A number of the clips though look like they're from the Detroit counting at the TMC Center where some Republican observers weren't allowed back in after they left because the room was at capacity because they'd been replaced by other Republican observers. At no point were there only Democratic observers or a significant imbalance, both parties had observers that weren't able to reenter!
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/10/fac...
2) and other witnesses wildly embellished their credibility, Joshua Merritt, aka "Spider" aka "Spyder" was listed as a military intelligence expert, while what is able to be verified is that he enlisted in the training program but failed to complete the entry level material.
The arguments have been made, the evidence has been examined, to say /no/ investigation has occurred is willfully misinformed at this point.
1)https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/politics/2020/12/04/evid...
2)https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/sidney-powell-...
I see no reason why all of them can’t be wrong (not necessarily intentionally lying).
It is curious that of all his public allegations against Dominion, he never asserted those in court. He is a lawyer and is aware of the consequences of asserting false accusations or frivolous suits in court. No doubt he will point to Sidney Powell and claim he was in good faith.
Most of the claims he made were pretty outlandish, and IMO he (especially as a lawyer) should now better. This is going to be interesting.
He publicly claimed that the Dominion machines "switched votes" even after the hand-count in Georgia confirmed that the machine count had indeed been accurate.
Proper investigations were conducted, and no serious issues found. The lawsuits were laughed out of court, even by Republican judges.
Its surely possible that all those "sworn affidavits" can be wrong in some way: AFAIK, they were either bogus, irrelevant, or from people who didn't understand what they were seeing because they hadn't bothered to familiarize themselves with the vote counting process before they became election observers.
The more pertinent question is: how could anyone still believe those lawsuits could have merit at this point? The sad answer is: disinformation works.
At least in terms of convincing "everyone" of anything, it's turtles all the way down.
This lawsuit will be an investigation of sorts. If they aren't baseless, dominion can't win.
Why not?
It's like when you hear a muffled audio recording but it's incomprehensible, and then you're told by a headline, "Can you believe Mr. X just said Y?". Then you listen again, and voila, you interpret the audio as Y. You've been primed to hear Y, so your brain hears it.
When you've been primed by all your anti-establishment media sources to see fraud, then you think back to that time 3 weeks ago when you thought you overheard two coworkers at the mail-sorting center talking about "post-dating the ballots". Well, maybe they didn't say "ballots" exactly... But it was "post-date the fourth", and surely they meant "November 4th", right? I mean election day was the 3rd, and they weren't trying to count late ballots, were they? But what else could they have meant? And they sure looked suspicious when I came over and interrupted them. I mean they didn't mention ballots again that whole conversation because I guess they were worried I would tell someone.
Reading through some of the affidavits and watching the interviews gives the impression that these are well-intentioned folks who just wanted to report something without understanding the context, and they've been primed for fraud. Unfortunately, they get picked up by politicians and media figures who have a clear pro vote-rigging agenda, and get made a martyr for the cause by plastering their face all over OANN, Project VERITAS, etc. It's depressing to watch.
Edit: For fun, here's a tweet demonstrating the audio-priming example you can try for yourself! https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1086436669413183488
I think what you say is true of most people, but it seems very clear that we have a group which doesn't behave like most people.
Are you asserting that some of the same people who filed affidavits also entered the capitol own jan 6th? Is there any evidence for this?
> I think what you say is true of most people, but it seems very clear that we have a group which doesn't behave like most people.
I think we as a society are moving past the whole "judge some people by the actions of some different people" thing.
For what it's worth I imagine many of them think they're telling the truth, or at least are honestly putting their name to something they've been told and believe. That also doesn't mean they're right though.
They could also just be wrong.
There's a reason why eye-witness testimony is one of the weakest forms of evidence there is.
Which is more damaging to US political institutions, having an illegitimate president or admitting that the election was stolen?
I'd wager an admission of election changing fraud would make it almost impossible to recover any trust in political institutions. What would be the next steps from admitting that the election was fraudulent?
Given the above, I'm not sure it matters. Of course that scenario is still possible, if evidence is produced. The institutional incentives align towards keeping the results as is. Proceeding from there, what can be done to restore trust?
*Disclaimer, please do not misread this as an assertion of evidence existing, not existing or the validity of it.
given the foregoing, are you sure you want people to trust the government?
Distrusting government would still make sense for me personally. It would be idyllic if people looked towards decentralization, localism and private solutions. Trust in their local institutions or community, while drastically reducing the purview of the federal government. That's just my personal preference. I'm not sure it is applicable in the widespread, pragmatic sense.
Some kind of political figure reaching across the aisle, recognizing the concerns of those who feel disenfranchised looks like the pragmatic solution that isn't happening. Instead I see actions and accusations that are predictably creating more division.
Well I don’t know, in 2017 a professor asked us if democracy was in crisis and I thought “its never been healthier”. For the first time I can remember, people were actually trying to hold the President accountable for something. Now it is true that most of that was driven by the fact that they didn’t like who the President happened to be at the time, so maybe we can get that to work in our favor again.
> More specifically, it would be nice if establishment media and political figures didn't respond to this distrust with castigation.
Well on the one hand I agree with that, but on the other hand this is the result of some complicated interactions (no matter how you view the facts on the ground). If their distrust is actually motivated and harmful then I’m sure its not an act for those establishment types to castigate it. On the other hand such activity is sure to increase distrust. So we’re stuck again.
> Distrusting government would still make sense for me personally. It would be idyllic if people looked towards decentralization, localism and private solutions. Trust in their local institutions or community, while drastically reducing the purview of the federal government. That's just my personal preference. I'm not sure it is applicable in the widespread, pragmatic sense.
I agree generally
> Some kind of political figure reaching across the aisle, recognizing the concerns of those who feel disenfranchised looks like the pragmatic solution that isn't happening. Instead I see actions and accusations that are predictably creating more division.
I agree
Biden, his cabinet, and tons of both Dem and Republican senators and other officials were arrested. Proof of their vast crimes was shown. They were court martialed and found guilty.
However, it was decided this was too much for the American people to accept. Overturning the election and showing the crimes of these politicians could lead to Civil War.
So an agreement was reached: Biden and other deep state elements wI'll be allowed to move freely and serve their terms. President Trump would "concede" and leave office. But this is all for appearances.
Behind the scenes, Donald J. Trump is still President. This plan, known as SHADOWPREZ, was seen as a last resort. But it worked.
Anything that happens in the next 4 years is actually President Trumps doing.
What steps can practically be taken to restore trust for the average person, who might not be as cynical as myself?
Nixon killed any real trust in the 70s generation that raised the 90s kids, and Bush v. Gore, the war in Iraq, and Obama era drone strikes on US citizens without trial have killed any real trust in the 90s kids who raised the current generation. The current adult generation is having that killed by what is going on right now.
There's been three generations of general distrust (if not outright cynical belief that the government is _always_ lying), and that's not going to come back any time soon. I'm not sure there is anything that you can do beyond radical transparency and time.
We're at this intermediate stage because the previous solution was to just give all the power to a bunch of people, likely the ones that killed more people.
Using elections instead of military power is an improvement over middle age, but you still have a bunch of people with a lot of power.
There's absolutely zero trust possible.
Maybe after western social democracies wreck the economy for the umpteenth time, people will try to remove power from governments until they disappear.
If either side is genuine about their beliefs, a first step is probably enforcing single-issue bills in Congress.
“Christianity” isn’t a unifying philosophy; even more recently than 50 years ago, the most dedicated evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant Christians were campaigning against the single largest Christian denomination in the country (Catholicism) as vigorously as against non-Christians, and many of our key religious freedom rulings were a result of Christian or Christian-adjacent groups (Jehovah’s Witnesses figure particularly prominently here) resisting impositions by more dominant Christian groups. Kennedy got much the same kind of attacks for being an (actual) Catholic as were directed at Obama for being (supposedly) a Muslim.
And if the short history in America were not enough, look at the troubled history of Christian-Christian relations in Europe and the Near East.
The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.
> It wasn't always this vicious, or this pervasive in its viciousness, in my lifetime.
In our & our parents lifetimes, we had the "even stronger shared opposition to external forces" of Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union to keep these divisions in check.
America's divides have been terribly vicious in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War), and some of the current things that divide us even have their roots in that era.
And even then, the Civil Rights and Anti-War and other internal conflicts of the 1950s-1970s weren't insignificant.
https://www.citizensvoice.com/news/crime-emergencies/forty-f...
https://www.phillyvoice.com/voter-fraud-pennsylvania-trump-e...
https://www.dailylocal.com/news/chester-county-man-facing-tr...
Which makes sense, when you hear from your news sources that the other party is committing massive fraud, that gives some people an excuse to do so too.
If anything it’s surprising that Pennsylvania only caught 3 Trump supporters trying to do it (see links in ancestor comment).
> During the tour's stop Friday in Seattle, Clinton pointed to FBI Director Christopher Wray's warning last month that Russia continues to pose a "very significant counterintelligence threat" and that efforts to influence U.S. elections with "social media, fake news" and "propaganda" has "continued pretty much unabated."
I think there is a reasonable distinction between that statement and the specific claims of fraud we have been seeing for the last few months.
After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?
> After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?
The accusations of there being no voter fraud in the 2020 US election fraud aren't baseless: all the verification checks have passed, and for that to happen and fraud to have occurred would require a conspiracy of unbelievable scale and secrecy. Also, the claims that there is fraud are not just baseless, they're incoherent.
While Russia may make baseless claims their elections are fair, there's more than enough evidence to disbelieve them (like how they disqualify and murder their political opponents).
Dominion Voting Systems must prove that Rudy Giuliani was making up information to succeed in this court case. Unfortunately, defamation is surprisingly hard to win in the USA (which is why the US's Tabloid media can get so far with so many claims).
Dominion Voting Systems is not a public figure however, its a company. That... probably makes it easier to win this case.
Still, if Dominion's lawyers think that this case is worth pursuing (despite the difficulty of defamation / libel / slander), that doesn't bode well for Rudy.
See the leaked memos from Diebold here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~matth/lists/
In the case of Georgia, a full recount (by hand) was done on the paper ballots.
Do you know where the Dominion validation process is clearly documented so it is easy to see whether it is easily subverted? I will bet the answer is no, and the software and hardware are all trade secrets and impossible for voters to verify :D. Sounds like a totally trustworthy system to me.
The verification process in Georgia involved physically counting all of the paper ballots. The Dominion machines were totally uninvolved in the hand-recount (and, unsurprisingly, the hand-recount found that the original machine tally was extremely accurate)
Again, I think it's pretty clear you don't understand what role the machines actually play in the voting process.
Your claim seems to be that the Georgia Secretary of State (a staunch Republican and Trump supporter) along with the governor managed to pull off a huge operation to secretly change the results of the election (which would have involved hundreds of people and require that none of them speak out). That's a really outlandish claim, and requires supporting evidence, of which you have none.
I would prefer not to believe the election was stolen. I wanted Trump out, and Biden seems a reasonable replacement. I also debunked a number of the fallacious statistical 'proofs' the election was stolen. Believe me I would like nothing better than to believe everything is fine. But especially Navarro's report makes me unable to dismiss the allegations off hand with a clean conscience. I've also looked into the PA court's reasons for dismissing Trump's lawsuit from back in Sept, and the reasoning is all based on technicalities and does not address the substance of the concern that the loosening of the rules has opened the door to major fraud. The fact all the coverage of the lawsuits is frivolous dismissal or even in some cases the courts rule in favor does nothing to set my mind at ease.
Are there other, more credible, sources that are influencing your thinking? There is zero evidence supporting the claim of widespread fraud. Unless you have some evidence of some kind, it really seems like you would prefer to believe there is some vast conspiracy and you are writing off all the evidence to the contrary.
When I look for articles explaining why the lawsuits are rejected en mass, every article I have found is very hand wavy, stating the judges are appointed by Trump so we should expect them to be unbiased. However, no one actually dogs into the opinions or takes the reason why the election seems highly suspicious seriously.
To pick out one specific piece of evidence, in PA they found 200k more votes than voters, which is more than enough to change the result for that state. The counts are all from state government databases.
http://www.repdiamond.com/News/18754/Latest-News/PA-Lawmaker...
Navarro has over 50 such claims linked in his report, totalling over 3M potentially fraudulent votes. Regardless of what you think of the man, the evidence itself I find hard to set aside, even though I am like you and would tend towards dismissing Navarro as a partisan hack. But when he has laid out the claimed evidence like this in detail I must at least give it a spot check and the spot checks hold up so far.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-afs:Content:9887147...
You claim that the "spot checks hold up", but the one example you chose to cite (presumably one of the ones you believe holds up) falls apart with just a tiny bit of research.
Incorrect. Voter rolls have information about who voted, and this information is public record. You can simply call up a random sample of recorded 2020 voters in Georgia and ask them to confirm that they voted in the election.
There is no way to undetectably insert additional fake paper ballots (“vote dumps”) unless you are alleging a vast conspiracy that removed the real paper ballots from storage after the election and replaced them with new fake ones, without any whistleblowers on the (Republican-run and Trump-supporting) elections staff speaking out.
UPDATE: I just checked the GA website, and all it gives me is voter IDs and whom they voted for. No way I can verify vote fraud did not occur from that information. No addresses or names.
I would suggest that if you weren’t able to find this information using google, you should think about what that means for your research skills and the skills/knowledge of those who create and propagate the voter fraud lies. Some humility might be in order as to why experts don’t think there was fraud, but others who don’t understand how elections work do....
https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/voter_history_files
“ You will need a voter file in order to associate a voter with his or her voter history. The voter and history files both contain the voter registration number and can be linked on this field.
For more information on voter lists, please send an email to [email protected] with the subject “Voter List Files.””
https://www.11alive.com/article/news/verify/verify-can-your-...
“ So is it true your neighbors or friends can find out if you voted? 11Alive verified with the Secretary of State’s website that under Georgia law, “voter registration lists are available to the public and contain the following information: voter name, residential address, mailing address if different, race, gender, registration date, and last voting date.” The information is available by order for a fee on the Secretary of State’s Office website, though is not to be used for commercial purposes.”
However, I would still need a second list of valid addresses for each person to create a true validation.
You cannot simply add ballots to the election as the totals would then be incorrect. (There would be more votes than people recorded as voting)
What is “Vote Dumping”? Do you mean inserting fraudulent paper ballots into the stored ballots to be counted?
The election was recorded on physical paper ballots. Are you alleging a vast conspiracy of bipartisan election workers and Republican Secretary of State monitors to replace the legitimate physical ballots with fake ones?
All ballots were hand counted and the initial Dominion machine count was confirmed accurate, so the allegation would be a conspiracy where Dominion scanners inaccurately counted the original paper ballots, then the paper ballots were secretly replaced with fakes to match the inaccurate Dominion counts? And this would have had to been done state-wide without a single whistleblower. It’s a ridiculous conspiracy theory if you try to write it out.
No, its not.
Either a single actor with appropriate access or multiple independent actors not acting in coordination could effect the theft of an election without any conspiracy.
Conspiracy requires an agreement to work together; that might help with an election theft but it is not “by definition” necessary for election theft.
Dominion acquired all of the material assets of Premier, which was a renamed Diebold, from ES&S due to an anti-trust lawsuit.
Now, ES&S has issues, but you're not going to hear anything about that. Because ES&S machines are used in places like Kentucky, South Carolina, and Florida.
And just because they purchased the assets doesn't mean they just used them without checking them.