But this is not necessarily true. In the extreme case, a bettor could be one of nine Supreme Court justices. Or a participant in some sort of fantasy vote-rigging conspiracy. Or even a political insider tanking their candidate's own chances and betting against themselves. There's a pretty wide range of people who could plausibly (or not-so-plausibly in the conspiracy example) have more than a one-vote influence over the result of the election.
This is even more relevant outside of the US. In the US vote rigging conspiracies are impossible for some inexplicable reason, perhaps related to magical soil, but outside of the US they are a real concern.
No, they aren't, which is why our most recent ex-President (who also was notorious for inventing fantastical vote-rigging conspiracies out of no evidence in the same election) is currently at the center of a criminal investigation for one based on fairly hard evidence, and his political party is trying to change the Georgia State Constitution to derail the investigation.
There's a difference between “That vote-rigging conspiracy is an unsubstantiated fantasy” and “Vote-rigging conspiracies are impossible.” Pretty much no one in the US has ever argued the latter.
Have I been mislead? If it is possible to carry out election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried out by people that viciously hate the former president? Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries, and there is no magical means of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get away with it here as well. They have courts and investigations and evidence in other countries as well, and that has seemingly not prevented election rigging there.
It’s not Impossible I’ve murdered someone, doesn’t mean I should be presumed a murderer.
1. https://voterprotectionprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...
"Furthermore, in an election conducted in the midst of a pandemic, each of the 159 counties was required to balance the close presence of poll watchers to election workers against the requirements for social distancing essential for the protection of public health."
"As Trump-appointed federal district court Judge Grimberg found, there is no legal “authority providing for a right to unrestrained observation or monitoring of vote counting, recounting, or auditing.”
"Second, there is no right under federal or state law for observers to stand at a particular distance or have a particular view of ballots. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the Third Circuit have rejected such claims. As the Third Circuit noted: “The Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that the Election Code requires only that poll watchers be in the room, not that they be within any specific distance of the ballots.” Id. (citing In re Canvassing Observation, No. 30 EAP 2020, 2020 WL 6737895, at *8-9 (Pa. Nov. 17, 2020)). Similarly, there is no federal right protecting the location or view of observers. Id. (noting that the Campaign “cites no federal authority regulating poll watchers or notice and cure.”). As long as observers were allowed in the room, which they were, complaints about minor deviations in the location and view of observers are legally insufficient.66"
In other words, the restrictions that were placed on observers were consistent with the law, and that is what the courts have ruled. I am willing to accept for the sake of argument that the restrictions were legal, but that's not the point. The point is that no one disputes that there were such restrictions. Nor do I see anyone disputing that the restrictions would have made it harder or impossible for election observers to detect fraud. The defense they put up is just that no fraud was detected, and that the restrictions were legal.
See: "The Trump Campaign and its surrogates have tried, unsuccessfully, to equate an alleged lack of observer access with fraudulent results. There has been no credible evidence of significant voter fraud presented in any form. The suggestion that the Trump Campaign and its surrogates were prevented from detecting fraud, and that is tantamount to evidence that there must have been fraud, is absurd."
I don't think that suggestion is absurd at all, and neither do tens of millions of other Americans. Members of the Democrat party viciously, bitterly hate Trump, and everyone knows it. Why would we not suspect them of cheating, if they made it difficult or impossible for anyone to tell?
Because they've been propagandized to think that way by a president with a conflicted interest. The number of people who hold an opinion has no bearing on whether it is factual.
Again, all you've done is to reiterate the same conspiracy theory without any evidence.
That's their claim (which is already suspicious considering their obvious motivations), but it's not the objective truth. And even if it were, it's certainly not actually evidence of fraud.
I'm genuinely surprised to hear someone claim this. The election centers handed out papers to observers telling them what the restrictions were. There were livestreams from various facilities during the process where workers were clearly seen handling election materials far away from where the observers were. There are pictures where observers are sitting impotently behind a line, watching 5+ election workers each from far enough away that they would never be able to read what's written on the materials that the workers are handling. The claims that restrictions were placed on observers which did not exist in past cycles and which would make it more difficult or impossible for observers to detect fraud were never denied in court. Instead, the defendants claimed that those restrictions did not prevent observers from being anywhere or seeing anything that they had a legal right to be or see.
>it's certainly not actually evidence of fraud
In combination with the undisputed hatred of democrats for Trump, it provides good reason for a person to believe that there was election fraud in those areas. Therefore it is evidence of fraud. It is not conclusive evidence, of course, but it is evidence.
I'm not convinced that it is. Sure, election rigging happens, but that's not the “getting away with it” that would be at issue. Either people who get away with it undetected in the very short term are so good that they manage to suppress all evidence completely and it never comes out (which seems an implausible binodality in outcomes), or it usually is quite evident in even the very short-term, and either fails to do enough to change results, does enough to change results but is corrected by institutional processes, or it does enough to change results and is allowed to stand by corrupt institutions despite being widely decried.
There's not a whole lot of modern cases where election fraud is discovered only long-after the event rather than virtually in real-time.
Is vote rigging and conspiracy to rig votes possible in the modern world? Yes. Is it ever both significant and not immediately evident? It's not impossible, but it doesn't seem to be the case. If it were, you'd expect there to be examples of cases undetectable in the short-run but later discovered.
Why do you think that's implausible? What evidence of election fraud would you expect to be left behind that would be difficult to dispose of?
>is allowed to stand by corrupt institutions despite being widely decried.
By whom?
>If it were, you'd expect there to be examples of cases undetectable in the short-run but later discovered.
Why would that be expected? Many crimes are much harder to prove if the perpetrator is not caught in the act. Why would you not expect election fraud to be among them?
It involves thousands of people directly and an extreme amount of information collecting and statistics analysis.
Happens only in the ghettos tbh
This is about the likelihood of something occurring with no evidence left behind.
Some motivated people have spent a lot of time and money trying to find proof of those creatures, and come up with nothing but some blurry pictures (including some known to be intentional fakes) and conjecture. So there's not much reason to take them seriously.
And also kinda like how Kim Jong Un might be the preferred candidate of 100% of North Koreans, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that he is almost certainly not.
As usual these arguments never really end, but thanks to prediction markets, this time the people who believed the possible-but-highly-unlikely outcome, "Trump actually won", ended up donating lots of their money to the people who believed the much more simple and plausible scenario: "No, he didn't".
No, that's not what happened. People who believed the odds of the courts ruling in favor of Trump made the payout worth it gave their money to people who believed the odds of that not happening made the payout for that scenario worth it.
Of course, courts only have access to the evidence which is given to them by either side, so really we only know that the evidence Trump's legal team was able to get its hands on on short notice was not sufficient to convince the court to take the very significant step of overturning election results. We do not know who "actually" got more legitimate votes.
But if the evidence is not available, then there is no good reason to believe it. You have to explain why people claiming it have enough evidence to believe it, but the courts don’t have enough evidence for it to be even claimed in the courts, if you want to claim that the reason is that courts don’t have access to the evidence.
Based on this statement, I am guessing you are an American, and are therefore accustomed to all relevant hard evidence always being available. What you may not know is that in the rest of the world, sometimes some hard evidence is not available, so those people have adapted other mechanisms for forming beliefs about what is true. One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw inferences from other relevant facts.
For instance, in those countries, if a man who has professed a strong desire for wealth is tasked with guarding a large pile of money, and the money disappears, people in those countries will infer that the man likely took the money, even if no one saw him take it and the money is not later found in his possession.
The “other relevant facts” are called “evidence”. An observation is evidence for a proposition when the posterior probability for the proposition, after updating on the observation, is greater than the prior probability of the proposition, before the observation.
Ok, so I guess you are saying that the evidence is not __legally considered__ evidence, or isn’t “evidence” in the legal sense of the term, and that that is why it wasn’t presented it court?
I have to admit that I’m not particularly clear on what kinds of evidence are and aren’t considered “evidence” in the legal sense admissible in court. Are you familiar with the criteria that make the distinction?
I was talking about hard evidence specifically -- think a smoking gun with the suspect's fingerprints on it. According to what I have been lead to believe, if election fraud happened in the US, sufficient evidence of said fraud would be discovered and presented to American courts, though that is not the case in other countries.
Therefore if I have not been mislead, when a person considers whether there was election fraud in the US, they should only consider whether sufficient evidence has been presented to courts or to the media, not whether there exist other lesser forms of evidence.
Ah, that makes sense. They would require evidence to believe something. So for example, in an election where there was no evidence of fraud, they would not believe there was fraud. Such as the one which occurred in 2020 in the U.S.
If players in the market have ways outside the market to significantly affect the outcome that the market is betting on, then it isn't a prediction market. The whole point of a prediction market is that there is no such feedback mechanism.
For example, the article discusses prediction market bets on Trump winning the election. The underlying assumption of such markets is that no player has more than one vote in the actual election, out of some 150 million or so votes, so each individual player's ability to affect the outcome is negligible.