On Saturday, the establishment media did something incredibly irresponsible. In the midst of the most contentious election in modern history, instead of acting as neutral observers of the political process, they decided to embrace the undemocratic role of kingmaker by prematurely calling the election for Joe Biden. Yes, in normal times it has been a time-honored tradition that the media act as the unofficial scorekeeper in presidential elections, but this role has no official standing, despite the desperate attempt by the media to usurp that role for itself.
These are not normal times and the media’s action amounts to an attempt to short circuit the official and legal process of selecting the president. The outcome of this election is still very much in doubt. The electoral margins are razor thin, votes are still being counted, recounts will be held in a number of states, and there are legal challenges that have yet to work their way through the courts. Regardless of the false claims of the media, the election process is not yet over.
The media is compounding its own malfeasance by making the false claim that there is no evidence of election fraud and by suppressing any reports of the many problems with the vote counting. Although it may be true that there is yet to be any proof of election fraud, this is not the same as there being no evidence of fraud. Evidence and proof are not the same things. And the proper bodies to judge any evidence are courts of law. In our constitutional system, neither the news media nor the laughably misnamed “independent fact checkers” of the social media have any place deciding the merits of the evidence of fraud taking place in this election.
Of the many actual pieces of evidence of election fraud surrounding the vote counting, the most damaging are the cases of GOP poll watchers, in violation of election laws, being kicked out of the vote counting rooms in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. It was in these very Democrat-controlled cities that partisan political machines in charge of the vote counting, now behind closed doors, somehow managed to find enough additional votes to flip the vote counts in their respective states from being in favor of Donald Trump to being in favor of Joe Biden. The media has become wilfully blind to this clear violation of the law.
Any ballots counted during the period when GOP observers were locked out of the counting rooms are now tainted and legally suspect. If the courts eventually do throw out these votes, as they should, the fault would not be on Donald Trump for bringing a legal challenge, but on the Democrats for attempting to use their partisan political machines to control the vote counting.
One final point. If Joe Biden wanted to ensure that any victory would be seen as legitimate by Trump’s supporters, he should have immediately joined the Trump campaign in demanding that GOP poll watchers be allowed to observe the vote counting, as they are entitled to by law. The fact that he remained silent, as did the entire Democrat establishment (including their media allies) makes him complicit in any illegal activities that occurred behind those closed doors and will forever taint any claim that he has on being legitimately elected as president.
– Nick Forte, re-posted from The Pelican Report
Prayers for our Honorable.
It is basically a coup
On terminology: I presume that Mr Biden becomes president elect only when the electors in the electoral college elect him… I admit that I had hoped for the fun of a Biden victory 270-268 and a faithless elector.
It is at this point that I note the superiority of the Confederacy and a one-off six year term – at least I got to see the excellent equestrian statues in Richmond (Va) before they were dismounted, and the very confusing historical message left by the statuary in and around the State Capitol. And, of course, West Virginia is not a legally/constitutionally constituted state.
That heart of it is that if the local Democrat officials in an electoral area kick the Republican observers out of the count, the natural inferences, in the absence of a legitimate reason for their explulsion, is that there was an intention to commit electoral fraud and that the fraud then took place. The fact that this happened in a series of cities in swing states goes to confirm these inferences.
On top of this all left leaning media then go on to announce that Joe Biden is the president-elect and demand that Donald Trump conceed. If it was as crystal clear as all that there wouldn’t be any need for Trump to conceed.
Frankly, kicking out the other sides observers from the count and then finding the votes necessary to win is the behaviour of the governing party in an effective dictatorship. And journalists chosing to omit to report this scandali suggests that they would rather live in such a dictatorship than in a democracy.
I don’t know if it is a coup, and FWIW if there was a Biden win of 270-268 and a faithless elector in Trump’s favor Biden would still win, since a draw goes to the HoR which is controlled by the democrats (though I think they vote by congressional delegation rather than congressional district, so I’m not sure what the balance there is.)
The thing I find most interesting though (perhaps because I am a computer guy) is this Dominion software thing. Information is extremely hard to come by because, I think it is fair to say, that the whole internet is biased right now (one way or the other.) But it seems that some alert GOP poll watcher noticed an extremely skewed vote count, so demanded a manual recount, and the manual recount indicated that the machine had allocated 6,000 votes to Biden that were for Trump. The explanation was very confusing (perhaps purposely so) about using statistical rates rather than just plain old 1, 2, 3 vote counting. But from what I understand it was a bug in the software, and the transfer of votes (amounting to a net change of 12,000 in Trump’s favor), was in a small county of maybe 70,000 votes total. That is a 15% swing which is MASSIVE, far larger than the majorities in nearly every state. And this software seems to be used in many, many places. And, coincidentally, the company is heavily involved with major democratic operatives.
So, from what I can see, this isn’t speculation, this is a definite, measured case or counting error on one of the most thin margin states in the country (though that county’s change is baked into the numbers as they stand.)
Any fair and just individual would at the very least demand a full manual recount in every county that used that machine (and we are talking 30 states, with maybe the majority of counties using it.) That is shocking. And it seems massively favorable to Trump, unless there was something particularly special about this particular county.
However, information about this is VERY hard to find (that isn’t dripping in bias, from one side or another.)
FWIW, it is one reason I think that by law all software used for counting votes and running voting machines should be open source and published well in advance of any election.
Does anyone know where I can find a more detailed, factual explanation of this? I’d particularly like to see a detailed technical analysis of what happened.
In the case of a 269-269 Donald Trump wins the election (assuming none of the Republicans vote for Biden). The GOP controls a majority of the state delegations to the House of Representatives. So a 270-268 win for Biden with 1 faithless elector for Trump would mean it goes to the House due to a tie and Trump wins.
Obviously, media calls have no formal impact, and the media pretending that they do is silly. There is not (officially) a President-Elect until the Electoral College votes on December 14th, or arguably even until Congress counts those ballots on January 6th. But because media calls have no official role in the process, they can declare it way earlier, once the results are clear. Similarly, a candidate’s concession speech plays no formal role (as Gore showed us in 2000, when he un-conceded). This is why most losing candidates concede on election night, once the results are clear. Clinton conceded in 2016 before Trump even hit 270, for example.
But yes, the media kind of dropped the ball here. Biden was the clear winner by Wednesday, but because of the votes got counted in an odd order, they held off on calling it for days, just to let everything catch up to where the serious observers knew it was going. When Biden tells his supporters to vote by mail and Trump tells his supporters not to, it’s no surprise that the mail-in ballots have a big pro-Biden swing. And because most states are less competent than Florida(who learned from the failures of 2000), these got counted days apart.
As for fraud, I’ve seen several allegations, but all the ones I’ve seen have fallen apart on closer examination. To pick the most widely discussed example, the people kept out of the Detroit count room were because Trump already had well over a hundred volunteers inside that same room, and were at the cap(which was the same for each party). Now, if there’s solid evidence of something and Trump can prove it in court, fair enough. Like I said, nothing is official until the EC votes are cast and counted. There’s still a month until any of the hard deadlines start hitting on that, and as 2000 showed us, that’s enough time for some legal battles.
But looking at the math, it’ll be a true miracle if Trump can show sufficient fraud to overturn the election. Biden is likely to win WI, MI, PA, AZ, and GA, for a total of 306 EV. All of them are outside the realm where recounts can make a real difference – a recount usually only moves a few hundred votes, and he’s down by over 10,000 in each. Basically, Trump needs to flip PA, AZ, *and* GA in order to win. That is a big, big task. And so far, his legal strategy seems to be pretty anemic. He’s making no solid case. He’s advancing evidence to get retweets, not to get the election victory.
If Trump comes out with something solid and worthy of a courtroom, fine – he has that right, and I’ll hear it out if he tries. But for now, he’s not even attempting to win. He’s just acting like a sore loser so that his fans think he fights. This isn’t a surprise from Trump, but I look back at GWB(who had a coherent and successful legal strategy twenty years ago), and remember when Republicans cared about winning, instead of merely being angry as they lost.
@Shlomo Maistre
In the case of a 269-269 Donald Trump wins the election (assuming none of the Republicans vote for Biden). The GOP controls a majority of the state delegations to the House of Representatives. So a 270-268 win for Biden with 1 faithless elector for Trump would mean it goes to the House due to a tie and Trump wins.
Right thanks for the correction. I vaguely remember that clause in the constitution. So it basically means CA gets one vote and WY gets one vote. Kind of like the Electoral college on sterioids. That’d send half the country apoplectic. One wonders what exactly Trump would be president of? A burning wasteland I think.
[Nope, deleted by the management]
https://www.theepochtimes.com/tens-of-thousands-of-unsealed-ballots-arrived-in-michigan-county-all-for-democrats-lawsuit_3571675.html
@Alsadius
But looking at the math, it’ll be a true miracle if Trump can show sufficient fraud to overturn the election. Biden is likely to win WI, MI, PA, AZ, and GA, for a total of 306 EV. All of them are outside the realm where recounts can make a real difference – a recount usually only moves a few hundred votes, and he’s down by over 10,000 in each.
I think it is unlikely that much will change, not because that would be a fair outcome, but because of the danger in doing so. But I don’t agree the math isn’t there. Recounts of a county move a few hundred votes, not a state, and there are very good reasons to think that a LOT of the mail in ballots are very dubious and subject to challenge. As you say, recounts are going to happen in GA and WI (and probably MI) plus there is a very good case to be made to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots in PA (since they came after the 8pm deadline — something that is very clear in law.) The fight will be identifying them and finding a remedy for the evident fraud and illegality of half a million votes, probably.
The other one to watch is the one I mentioned above. It is not at all unreasonable to think that a manual recount be ordered in every county that used that software, and that a MASSIVE number of votes, and based on the data we have they produced a 15% swing to Biden in one place for sure. I have no idea if that is the same everywhere, but that one order could swing the election by 50 electoral votes in itself, and the data seems to strongly favor Trump.
But what happens then? What happens if the states refuse to certify the votes? What happens if two sets of electors turn up in Washington for the same state. What happens if they do, but the democrats block the HoR chamber except to votes they consider acceptable? What happens if there are assassination attempts on electors who are voting “the wrong way”.
Like I say, the damage of turning the election to Trump will be horrifying, and there is good reason to believe that John Roberts will be too much of a bed wetter to do it. But a few USSC decisions could easily mine enough votes to swing it. With Amy Coney Barrett being the final necessary vote. Like I say, get read for the most destructive riots in American history if that happens.
Are you high?
What you mean is that the media has no legal power, and you are correct.
But perception – for most of us – is reality.
Most Biden supporters are blissfully unaware of any substantiated allegations of voter fraud, even though there are hundreds of them across the country. So if Trump actually does decide to go to court most of the country will think he is trying to “steal” the election from Biden. Why? Because the media has announced that Biden has already won.
Media calls obviously have immense formal impact.
Alsadius,
Listen, kid. You have no fucking idea what Trump is doing. No fucking clue.
Based on most of the rest of your comment, it is very clear that you do not even understand what is happening right now.
Of course it is a coup.
President Trump is not just being censored on Social Media – his speeches are beings censored on the television as well. President Trump is cut off, or the media propagandists talk-over-him.
The media demand “hard evidence” of ELECTION FRAUD – but when it is presented to them, they shut their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears.
For “The Great Reset” to occur, for the Western World to be destroyed – for liberty to be exterminated, President Trump most be removed – it is that brutally simple.
It is not even hidden – the slogans of the international totalitarians, such as “BUILD BACK BETTER” and “We are not an island – we are part of something so much bigger” (hello Banker totalitarians), are openly used. There is no “conspiracy” here – it is all being done in plain sight.
The question is – will the people fight for their freedom?
My guess is – NO THEY WILL NOT. The people of the United States, and other Western nations (including this one), are going to lose their freedom (or what little is left of it – for it has been in decline for a very long time). Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, “Sustainable Development” (“Green” totalitarianism), “Stakeholder Capitalism” – i.e. Corporate State Fascism, Big Business and Big Government coming together to crush free competition (especially from small business) and crush the general freedom of ordinary people.
People like myself are too cowardly to fight – I make pathetic little gestures, such as shopping in Aldi rather than Tesco so that I do not have to see the newspapers spitting lies in my face, but I do NOT fight.
Sadly I am the norm – no one is going to fight. We in the Western World are going to be slaves.
“As for fraud, I’ve seen several allegations, but all the ones I’ve seen have fallen apart on closer examination. To pick the most widely discussed example, the people kept out of the Detroit count room were because Trump already had well over a hundred volunteers inside that same room, and were at the cap(which was the same for each party).”
Maybe not?
In theory Republican State Legislatures could refuse to accept the massive ELECTION FRAUD – and, instead, send honest people to the Electoral Collage, where the real “President Elect” will be decided.
But they will not – they are too scared.
I hope I am WRONG – but that is what I believe.
The problem is that this has been happening slowly for decades. Very slowly over many decades.
This is about market forces. Market forces have been usurping the sovereignty of nations for decades if not longer. This has been happening to America too – in some obvious ways but also in some very subtle, invisible, insidious ways. Many of us are now noticing some of those insidious, invisible, subtle ways that we may not have fully noticed or thought of before. It is an awakening.
The key is that this is all about market forces. We have to respond with market forces. How much money do Trump supporters keep in banks and 401(ks)?
We have to insulate ourselves from the Left and the Globalists by building and owning our own private businesses that are protected by the rule of law. Private businesses of all types to be self-sufficient. Farms, banks, construction companies, mining, oil & gas, shipping, manufacturing, pharma, software engineering, everything.
Shlomo @7:00: That would be the sort of allegation that might flip a state. Two more of those, and all three holding up in court, and Trump will win. Just remeber that neither of those is a guarantee. These things are usually more complex than partisan sources make them look. At least the SCOTUS is heavily staffed by conservatives, so we can be confident that they won’t hand it to Biden out of bias. If it gets there and Biden wins, that means B iden won legitimately.
Fraser: To be clear, I mean a few hundred votes for a whole state, not for a county. Recounts are good for redundancy, but they only change things in extraordinarily close races. But yes, investigate that software too.
Shlomo @7:04: My point is that the media always calls races a month before it’s official. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Shlomo @7:05: I’m willing to be proven wrong. But the team that put a major press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping doesn’t seem like they have the necessary attention to detail to prevail in serious, urgent court cases.
Paul @7:10: Social media companies silencing people is bullshit, but it’s not a coup, any more than Flubber’s comment above being deleted is a coup. And again, the media have no actual role in this process. They like to pretend they matter, but they’re meaningless. The reason why hard evidence is needed is in order to convince *judges*, who actally have the power to determine who won. Also, seriously, totalitarianism? The slogans you reference are fuzzy-headed leftism, and I oppose them, but they’re all the sort of thing we’ve had in the free world for many decades without anyone going full Stasi.
Nullius: Interesting. So it was a mistake, but an honest one, and a mistake on the part of the Trump volunteers. That actually explains a lot.
Paul @7:15: As it happens, it seems that there’s a federal law about when states can appoint electors if they choose to do so directly. That date was November 3rd. At this point, they’re all locked into using the election results. That doesn’t mean Biden necessarily wins, but it does mean that you need to prove that Trump won the election in order to let Trump win the election. You can’t just do an end run with direct appointment. See https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/3/1 and https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/3/2 here.
Shlomo @7:21: That is some impressive horseshoe theory. If I saw that on Kos instead of Samizdata, I’d assume you were a regular there.
In case there is anyone out there who still does not know – this was never about a virus. For example, Klaus Schwab (of the World Economic Forum) has been at this for some 50 years – he is not a medical doctor and does not give a toss about Covid 19, other to use as an excuse for the tyranny he has always pushed.
One does not have Brigadier in full uniform appearing on British television if one is concerned about curing the sick. This is about making people OBEY – whether it is the United States, the United Kingdom, or anywhere else.
Build Back Better, Agenda 21 – Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development (“Green” totalitarianism), “Stakeholder Capitalism” – Corporate State Fascism, Big Business and Big Government coming together to destroy free competition (so it is NOT about “market forces” – for they are millions of ordinary HUMAN CHOICES, exactly what Klaus Schwab and co wish to GET RID OF) and wipe out the the freedom of ordinary people generally.
Mr Biden has always been a servant of the “gun control” forces, just as he has been a PAID (using his son as the “bagman”) servant of the People’s Republic of China for years, – it is easy to make unarmed people OBEY.
And there’s been very little commentary of the parrallel psyops going on – Critical Race Theory
If you’re in favour of the current system, which produces unequal outcomes, then you’re a white supremacist even if for example, like the leader of the far right racist Proud Boys, you’re a black Cuban.
Almost needless to say – the international establishment elite do NOT believe they are evil. They are taking away our freedom – for-our-own-good. For the sake of “the environment” and so on. Human freedom is “chaos” – society must be “planned”.
This is what unites the Big Business Corporate elite, the academic “experts”, the government bureaucrats, and the politicians. The belief that we must all be “planned” FOR OUR OWN GOOD.
They are “educated” people (in a sense that Plato would have understood – yes as far back as that), and they are quite sincere.
Re – Alsadius, there’s no evidence.
Well go look up the Networks livestreams of the election coverage on Youtube.
All deleted.
Why?
Because as various people have highlighted with video snippets, you can see Trump’s votes going down by an amount and exactly the same amount being added to Bidens numbers. This is the Hammer system in action.
Re: Paul Marks
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
CS Lewis
People who like control use crises as an excuse for control, I’ll agree. But I don’t expect this to last long once the vaccine is widely deployed. Pfizer alone can vaccinate about 1/6 of humanity in the next year with the new vaccine they announced this morning, so once other vaccines come online as well (or others start making this one, whichever), we’ll likely have enough vaccination for it to be gone by next summer. This could never be a permanent thing, by its nature – people would very much fight that.
As for the livestreams, here’s USA Today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1DEd0iKC8Q. Here’s CBS News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj7ELbw8FxM. Here’s PBS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WbNBp5mSqg. More are down than I’d expect, but I suspect that’s more to do with the business side of news stations, not some nefarious actor trying to take it all down.
And you expect the occasional screwup, because these are barely-trained people acting as election clerks, and government bureaucracies are bad at most things. The example of the county that reported 150k votes for Biden instead of 15k, because of a typo, comes to mind. But it got fixed almost immediately. This kind of thing is normal in all elections, and I’ve seen the same sort of little nonsense in every election I’ve ever watched, including ones that weren’t close at all. And all the errors do get fixed, generally. If one doesn’t, fine, bring that up. (Again, I have zero objection to a good-faith court case trying to overturn the preliminary results for whatever reason). But until you can show me an error that wasn’t fixed, I’m going to assume the results are as good as any election ever is. Not perfect, but as good as we can realistically do.
Quite correct Flubber – on both points.
As for market forces – if people actually believed in market forces, in the millions of choices of ordinary people (which is all “market forces” actually are), then there wouldn’t be need for a “World Economic Forum”, or an “IMF” or a “World Bank” or any of the other national or international bodies where government and big business try and “plan society”.
These organisations and groups should not exist at all. Politicians, bureaucrats, academic “experts”, media people (yes our dear friends the “mainstream media”) and Corporate managers, should NOT be meeting to “plan society”.
It is not that, as they suppose, we have a “plan” which we think better than their “plan” – WE DO NOT WANT A PLAN.
@Alsadius
People who like control use crises as an excuse for control, I’ll agree. But I don’t expect this to last long once the vaccine is widely deployed.
But our friends on the left have spent the last two months telling us that we shouldn’t take the Trump vaccine. So are we not to be extremely suspicious when they tell us to take the Biden vaccine instead, even though it is molecularly identical?
If one doesn’t, fine, bring that up. (Again, I have zero objection to a good-faith court case trying to overturn the preliminary results for whatever reason).
But I did already. A piece of software that seems to be used in about 1/3 of the counties in the USA has been irrefutably demonstrated in at least one county to show a systematic bias toward overcounting Biden, and not by a little but, in that county anyway, by a 15% swing in Biden’s favor. From the data I have seen this isn’t some specific thing in that county but a “bug” in the software itself, and so there is every reason to believe that bug manifests everywhere else. It is certainly noteworthy that top democrats from the party including Pelosi and Bluementhal have direct executive control over this company.
A 15% swing to Trump in 1/3 of the counties on the USA? Do you think that might change the results? I don’t know a whole lot about it because, as I said above, unbiased information is hard to find. But it seems to me that an undisputed bug in this software of substantial effect. The problem with many of these allegations of election fraud is there seems to be no reasonable remedy for the injured party. However in this case there is. A perfectly reasonable remedy would be to demand audited hand recounts in every county using this software. Nobody is disadvantaged by that, although it would take some time.
I might add that an equally doable remedy would be to have the FBI investigate how such a bug got into the software in the first place, possibly prosecuting some of the instigators for fraud, if such is merited. I know software, and it certainly would be pretty straightforward for some auditors to make that determination by looking for the genesis of the bug in their source code control system, and determining who commanded it be put in there.
BTW, I put the word “bug” in quotes there, because as we say in software, “it might not be a bug, it might be a feature.”
Paul: Some people just suck at economics, it’s true. But that doesn’t change much. It’s not like the World Bank is calling the election for Biden.
Fraser: The people who said not to take the Trump vaccine were engaged in crass political fearmongering. They deserve to find a boot firmly embedded in unexpected parts of their anatomy. But them being partisan fools doesn’t mean I need to become one.
As for the tech issues, “irrefutably” is a very strong word. But I’ll take a look, if you have a link with more info. I will say that a 15% swing to Biden in a third of the country is very hard to imagine, given that Trump outperformed the polls by a couple points – you’d have to assume a polling error of like 7-8% in order for that to square. You don’t see that often on a well-polled race like a national election. But again, if you have a credible claim to make, I’ll look at it, see what I think.
BTW, I put the word “bug” in quotes there, because as we say in software, “it might not be a bug, it might be a feature.”
Apparently a new patch was deployed in the couple of says before the election.
Hmmm.
“you’d have to assume a polling error of like 7-8% in order for that to square.”
Like in Florida. Or Wisconsin.
One could go on.
Mention of “the vaccine” is nicely timed to slot into the great plan, isn’t it? I was amused by their claim that it would kill 90% of viruses. This, to me, proves that those making the claim know nothing about viruses. 90% of 4call is still 4call.
“A piece of software that seems to be used in about 1/3 of the counties in the USA has been irrefutably demonstrated in at least one county to show a systematic bias toward overcounting Biden, and not by a little but, in that county anyway, by a 15% swing in Biden’s favor. From the data I have seen this isn’t some specific thing in that county but a “bug” in the software itself, and so there is every reason to believe that bug manifests everywhere else.”
As I understand it, the problem was that there was a late change to the list of races/candidates in two elections on the ballot, which required a change to the scanner template data telling the software where each result would appear on the page when they put the local results under the scanner, so they could be added up for the grand total. The election officials changed the template for the scanners at the precincts affected by the specific change, but forgot to change the templates on all the other scanners. As a result, the scanners read the numbers from the wrong location on the page in a subset of districts, and votes for one candidate were assigned to another.
The error was spotted straight away, and would in any case have been detected later in the normal process when they went back and checked that the local results matched the collated summaries for all districts.
That’s what the investigators say, anyway. As with all of this stuff, until all the evidence is in from both sides of the dispute and it’s been cross-examined in court, we can’t tell.
It’s dangerous to leap to judgement after hearing only one side of the story.
“I was amused by their claim that it would kill 90% of viruses.”
What they said was that of the 94 people on the trial that caught Covid-19, more than 90% of them had received the placebo. So assuming that those on the placebo are representative of the exposure to Covid-19 of the group as a whole (which given that the division was made at random and the people on the trial didn’t know, would be very hard to explain if they’re not), then it means that it prevented about 90% of the people who would have caught Covid-19 from getting it.
“This, to me, proves that those making the claim know nothing about viruses.”
There are lots of claims being made by people who nothing about viruses. So what’s new?
Paul,
I agree with you, but I think it’s bigger than that. I am on your side 100% but we do have slightly different positions within political philosophy, as you are well aware. I do not want to rehash it, but my broader point is simply this: USA is a leaky faucet. All of the west is.
Put it this way. I remember years ago I pointed out that the POTUS does not even have the authority of a CEO to fire employees of the government. Yes, he can fire the figureheads and maybe target a couple people here and there, but he cannot just vaporize entire departments or government agencies. The result, is not just mission creep and regulatory capture, but something much more insidious and bigger: the State is not being LED by a sovereign power.
The result is not a big grand conspiracy, it is just everyone acting in their own interests (market forces) without paying heed to any actually Sovereign Authority. In such a situation, everyone is just selfish, which is fine: they want to make profit. Okay, fine. That’s not a problem. It’s just market forces. What is a problem is when you combine that with these things:
1. Federal Reserve funny money
2. A globalized market economy sped up by the internet
3. The biggest market for corporations is in Asia
4. China’s companies are accountable to the Party, while (in contrast) American politicians are accountable to American corporations. So it’s the exact opposite.
In a globalized economy the biggest market of consumers that is also one of the most efficient, hard working people in the world becomes the Global Sovereign, especially given that corporations of China and the corporations of America are accountable to Chinese political authority.
We need a sovereign to say fuck off. Trump….for one surreal, terrifying, glorious moment in time is that Sovereign.
Because he owes them (the Federal Bureaucracy, the Deep State, the Corporations, Fake News Media, Wall Street, and Chinese Communist Party) nothing. And also because he has very large testicles.
Sure it is. It’s being led by me. (And several hundred million others.) (This current fraud environment doesn’t negate that basic scheme. That’s just mechanics.)
We don’t have a sovereign CEO president deliberately. Ultimately, all state agencies take their cue from the voters. If they do something politically unpalatable to too many of us, they’re out.
A sovereign power vested in Joe Biden in January 2021 would be . . . well, something worth avoiding. And we do get to avoid it, thankfully. It always seems to me that looking to the single-mindedness of a sole sovereign only works if you can guarantee a benign one.
I notice now that the Left-media and certain Left-politicians, in anticipation of victory, are starting to wipe the rhetorical blood off their hands and are sending out the calls for “civility” and “normalcy”.
Will the Right (and Libertarians) fall for this trick (*punch in the nose* – followed by “hey lets be nice”) once again, or will they now accept that the hard-Left, both media and politicians, are their mortal enemies? That there can be no reconciliation while the Left wants to impose their Stalinist agenda on free people?
I am not hopeful. I think they will indeed fall for the trick once again. I will NOT, however. No civility for Stalinists from me.
Please do not try to make me vomit.
Look, man, if you have not yet figured out that Republican politicians and conservative politicians are Controlled Opposition, then… G-d Bless You.
With all due respect, I do not think you really understand what is happening. Trump has pissed off all of the forces that have been ripping off the American People for decades because he owes the System, the Lobbyists, the Bureaucracy, Special Interests, Deep State, Wall Street, etc NOTHING. He owes them nothing so they are terrified of him because he is the first POTUS since Andrew Jackson to fight for the People (but Jackson didn’t have to contend with late-stage democracy and a globalized economy, which makes Trump’s fight far more impressive and incredible, but neither will change the general trajectory).
If you think these forces have been ABLE to rip off the American People and the Country of the United States because we just haven’t gotten the right guy into the Oval Office then you are… just really confused.
The system is fucking broken.
Do you understand that all Corporations (whether Danish or American or Chinese) that want to operate in China are accountable to the Chinese Communist Party? Do you understand that American politicians are accountable to American Corporations? Do you really not see any problem here? Are you blind?
Joe Biden being sovereign instead of fucking POTUS would change the incentives of everyone, INCLUDING JOE BIDEN so his policy preferences would change overnight and he could then tell AOC and the rest of the commies to fuck off.
Sovereignty is conserved. You should be terrified.
Flubber: Yes, I got what you meant by “bug”. But the errors weren’t nearly as bad as you suggest. Wisconsin was 6%, Florida was 4.5%. But of course you picked the states with the biggest errors – Michigan is at 1.5%, North Carolina is at 1%, Pennsylvania at negative 0.5%(i.e., Biden outperformed), Georgia at negative 1.2%, and so on. (Some of those should be expected to change a bit as the vote counting gets finished, of course)
Jannie: That’s reporters being incompetent. The actual claim seems to be that it has a 90% chance of preventing infection: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-announce-vaccine-candidate-against
Yeah Alsadius, cite the states with the rampant cheating as proof to your argument.
https://twitter.com/A_Blossom4USA/status/1325500457331138567
I picked NC (that Trump won) and GA (where I haven’t heard many complaints) as examples. But if that’s not good enough, here’s a longer list of errors: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1325918376569528321. An average polling error of Trump+3.3, with outliers as high as Trump+8 and as low as Biden+1. (He’s using a different baseline than I am for the polling averages – my above was RCP, not 538 – so some of the numbers won’t match)
I don’t see huge correlation with alleged cheating on this list. States nobody would bother to rig (CO, NM, VA) have fairly low errors, and some of the states where the most fraud is alleged (MI, PA) are higher on the list. That isn’t what you’d expect from pro-Biden fraud. It looks like the errors are mostly correlated with having a lot of white working class voters, who are a notably pro-Trump group, and likely quite hard to poll well. And given that there wasn’t much error in 2014 or 2018, but a fair bit in 2016 and 2020, this seems like it’s just a story about Trump doing better than his polls. Likely because of personal effects creating some kind of “shy Trump voter” phenomenon.
As for that video clip, there’s a few possible explanations. Most likely, someone put a number into the wrong column in a data entry field somewhere, and then corrected it. Again, these elections are run by half-trained people who do this for one day every four years. We shouldn’t expect Olympian competence here. I suspect the same thing happened in California and Utah too, but CNN didn’t bother to show those states on air, because everyone knew what the results would be.
And really, think this through. If you’re powerful enough to rig an election, how are you stupid enough to do it like that? This is what you’d do to rig an election if you really wanted to get caught.
Or if you were arrogant enough not to care that people knew, only that the machinery of justice would take no action against you.
Like Clinton deleting emails that had been subpoenaed by Congress – she didn’t care what the hoi polloi thought about it, just that she was immune from any consequences.
It’s how they think.
That mindset makes sense for Hillary Clinton, who’s notoriously smug and abrasive, in addition to being one of the most famous people in the world. But not for random poll clerks.
That said, let me zoom out a bit. Let’s say these allegations get taken to the Supreme Court, as seems fairly plausible. Is there any decision they could render that would make you believe the election was legitimate, even in principle? What would your reaction be if it’s 8-1 or 9-0, and even the Trump appointees say that Trump’s arguments are junk? (I don’t say this is guaranteed to happen, I just wonder how far you’re willing to go down this rabbit hole if it does.)
If the Supreme Court makes a decision about one of the state elections based on the evidence and not on a technicality (like claiming the appellant doesn’t have standing to bring the suit) then I will accept it. That’s how it goes.
But I won’t accept that there was no fraud in this election, no matter what gets played on CNN, because there WAS. And we knew it was going to be this way, as soon as the Left started demanding “no voter ID” and “vote-by-mail” at the same time.
Blatant, obvious fraud. They might get away with it. It might not have even made a difference. But there is no bullshit propaganda that could be played on the Left-media that would ever convince me to pretend that the voter fraud in this election wasn’t massive and deliberate.
One way to think about it would be: if there was voting fraud, what would it look like? What would be the numbers, at what time?
Even without considering the various witnesses, which could be dumped into the he said, she said category, the raw numbers and timing of announcement of poll numbers matches up very well with what we know voter fraud looks like.
The best way to commit electoral fraud, by far, is to have real people cast real ballots. Don’t mess with the counting process at all – there’s a lot more checks and balances there. And certainly not once the numbers are already being counted. Get fake IDs and have people go from polling location to polling location, casting ballots at each. Failing that, dump in a bunch of extra ballots, and have a friendly poll clerk cross off a bunch of extra names, so that the numbers match. Bribery of various sorts works too, to get more legal votes than you’d earn in a clean election, but it’s hard to keep that quiet.
Adjusting the numbers mid-count is just not a viable strategy. You can screw with the media to create false election-night narratives, but you can’t really change the final counts with that kind of tactic – each polling location reports its totals, and people cross-check that stuff. If there’s a discrepancy, it’ll get tracked down pretty quick. We saw a few of those last week, and they lasted mere minutes.
In 1972, maybe.
Today, if the actual count of votes doesn’t tally with a number in a computer, who is going to know? More importantly, who is going to prove it, and how?
I wonder what might happen if all the observers from one party were excluded from the process of counting (or recounting) a set of votes? Would that be a suspicious occurrence? Hmm …
though I think they vote by congressional delegation rather than congressional district, so I’m not sure what the balance there is.)
—–
Any vote in the House would likely go to Trump. Republicans have majorities in 26 state delegations.
Alsadius
November 10, 2020 at 2:44 am
That mindset makes sense for Hillary Clinton, who’s notoriously smug and abrasive, in addition to being one of the most famous people in the world. But not for random poll clerks.
That said, let me zoom out a bit. Let’s say these allegations get taken to the Supreme Court, as seems fairly plausible. Is there any decision they could render that would make you believe the election was legitimate, even in principle? What would your reaction be if it’s 8-1 or 9-0, and even the Trump appointees say that Trump’s arguments are junk? (I don’t say this is guaranteed to happen, I just wonder how far you’re willing to go down this rabbit hole if it does.)
—-
Part of this is already at the Supreme Court. The PA fraud and last minute, illegally ordered election law changes are being considered as we write. Trump’s team made filings that included evidence of fraud today.
Sundry trivial remarks on the long thread above.
1) Abstract discussion of state delegations and faithless electors is of abstract interest. The politically correct in the US begged for faithless electors in 2016. I remember what I thought about them and see no great value in even the abstract appearance of imitating them.
2) As regards the “Oh those stupid GoP poll-watchers forgot to sign out for lunch” rubbish
I really don’t think so. It sounds much more like the insolent prepared excuse for yet another example of intentional miscounting. Obviously, it would be an easy excuse to contrive (the sign-out list maybe happens to be elsewhere at lunchtime but “hey it doesn’t matter”), and conversely no-one could actually throw all the GoP observers out and believe they had only excluded extras. It would be effortless to correct the mistake. Nor does it explain the cheering counters.
There is also the obvious point that the alleged too-large list must have had all duplicate names and been qute short enough for this to be obvious – and an obvious joke about Dem counters not regarding duplicate names as evidence a count was wrong. 🙂
3) Justice Roberts has indeed given evidence of a desire to avoid hard decisions, and used his casting vote to do so, but the court now has 9 people on it again, not 8, so I do not see why the chief justice’s attitudes alone means probably “nothing will change”. I thought a 5-4 decision was still a decision.
4) I am impressed that people here evidently all so believe in the strict impartiality of originalist justices that no-one has even hinted that a desire not to be packed could affect their decisions or their will to make them. If I were Biden, I would not have given the justices such cause to assume they will be packed before they had ruled I was president – but maybe he had great faith they would rule without fear or favour (or that he was 10 points ahead and they wouldn’t get the chance to).
My wish is that justices rule honestly without favour to either side and also without fear. If the ruling is honest in law, I shall not quarrel with any motive that helps overcome any justice’s fear of making it.
If Joe Biden wanted to ensure that any victory would be seen as legitimate by Trump’s supporters, he should have immediately joined the Trump campaign in demanding that GOP poll watchers be allowed to observe the vote counting, as they are entitled to by law.
-It’s my speculation that he didn’t because he knew d@mn well it wasn’t; and yeah, my speculation would be pretty meaningless here except that virtually all the Trump voters feel that way too. And they’re beyond furious at the thought of Biden winning; as pointed-out on Zerohedge, a guy who couldn’t muster more than a dozen supporters at his rallies, defeated a guy who drew vast parade spectacles at all his campaign stops in a free-and-fair election? A right-wing colloquialism might well be “Don’t eat that, Wilbur.”
That’d send half the country apoplectic. One wonders what exactly Trump would be president of? A burning wasteland I think.
Precisely – and this is the news agencies’ true crime here. If Biden wins, the Right (a.k.a. ‘the ones with the guns’) are convinced he stole the election, and they will be furious – and if Trump pulls it out of a hat, the Left (a.k.a. ‘the ones who’ve been rioting all Summer’) will be convinced Trump stole the election, and they’ve been furious since May. Each side hates the other, and they’re both spoiling for a good old-fashioned knock-down-drag-out-style donnybrook. This may not end well.
But on the plus-side, Fox News is tanking – its subscribers are abandoning it in droves, convinced it’s now just another left-wing shill. Trump has rumbled that if he loses, he’s going to start his own right-wing news agency; and if Kamala becomes President, I predict it’ll quickly become popular.
Alsadius, not quite:
1) First, the vaccine is two-dose, so they can only vaccinate 1/12 of the world, in theory, by the end of 2021.
2) It needs to be stored at -80 Celsius, so it’s logistically impractical in large parts of the world.
3) It’s very much an open question how long the acquired immunity lasts – is Covid like measles, or like the flu?
4) This vaccine is different from all others being worked on, so I don’t know that companies other that Pfizer can make it. Longer version: all other vaccines are of the good old give-patients-a-weakened-pathogen kind. This one gives the patient a virus that has been edited in such a way that infected cells produce only its shell. This allows the immune system to learn it without the infection spreading. It’s really cutting edge stuff. It’s likely that at least some other companies can manufacture it too, but will the FDA and their counterparts stand down and let them do that in facilities that have not been approved (here is the full bureaucratic rigmarole)? They have not distinguished themselves so far.
5) Almost half of the people in the US will not get vaccinated even if a vaccine is available.
So, erm, I would hold back the optimism. Although maybe by next summer people will have accepted that the damn thing is now endemic, and unbundle their panties. It has always sucked to be old and have co-morbidities. Now it sucks a little more. Life is unfair, news at eleven.
The United States has been polled yearly by Gallup for decades now on whether people trust the media. There is a partisan breakdown of the answers and we have a disturbing situation. Republicans hava a 10% trust in the media, the lowest figure ever polled, Independents have a trust level of 36% and Democrats are at 73%, the second-highest on record. This is unsustainable and one of these figures is going to change drastically to reduce the gap.
The article is here . I would recommend close examination of the partisan chart, especially the 2005-2015 period which shows movement that is counterintuitive.
If Trump wins these judicial challenges and retains the presidency, the Democrats face a stark choice of total detachment from reality or a mass repudiation of one of their strongest allies and electoral immolation as their media top cover goes away. I would almost pity them but for the threats to me and mine from their more enthusiastic totalitarian faction.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying it is unsustainable for the partisan gap in trust of media to be so wide? I am not sure why that would be unsustainable. Depending on what happens in the future I could easily see the partisan gap in trust of the media even getting bigger overtime.
What the Fake News Media has done to my country is very sad and, unless Trump somehow disappears from both the public square and the public consciousness, I am not sure how the damage can ever be repaired.
In America there are currently two Separate Narratives about the Nov 3, 2020 election. One is a Narrative of the Fake News Media and the Establishment, which is a continuation of the Orange Man Bad Hysteria of the past four years. The other is a Narrative of Trump (and outlets like Breitbart, OAN, Daily Wire, RSBN etc).
I see a very low chance of genuine reconciliation in the future.
How we feel is that they (the Entire Establishment) considers all of us Trump supporters to be DEPLORABLE – something they never took back or apologized for and imbued their coverage of Trump and the Trump movement with a hateful tone.
Deplorables don’t unite or “come together as a country”. And they know that, which is why they aren’t even waiting for Trump to concede in order to begin their Fake pleas for reconciliation and unity.
According to Gallup:
2020 Republican trust in media
3% a great deal
7% a fair amount
31% not very much
58% none at all
2020 Democrat trust in media
16% a great deal
57% a fair amount
21% not very much
6% none at all
I cannot imagine that those 10% of Republicans who have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media did not mishear the question that Gallup asked them. Or maybe those 10% watch RSBN or OAN.
The American media have whitewashed communist mass murder since at least the 1930s.
Every story about rape on campus that gets wide coverage is fake news.
Every story about White cops killing a Black man that gets wide coverage, is fake news.
The American media have pushed the Russian conspiracy hoax for 4 years and now they claim that election fraud on a large scale is impossible in the US.
Anybody who thinks that the media can be trusted even a little bit, lives in a fantasy world.
TMLutas – I would be interested to know why it is you think that the partisan gap in trust of media might be unsustainable going forward? You may be right.
Shlomo Maistre – Total detachment from reality with the media screaming stolen election means civil war. Total detachment from reality means that the Democrats will lose that war because they would have miscounted how many would take the field both for and against them.
I don’t think that the majority of the left is that innumerate, self-destructive, and so full of itself that it will forget about counting strength of arms and delude itself that it can rebel with a prayer of success. They’ll be pissed at having come that close to the precipice.
I think they’re measuring love, not trust.
And it’s unsustainable just as any bubble is unsustainable in a market. If the news industry wasn’t crashing due to its current inability to find a way make a profit in a newly-internet age, we’d be seeing market solutions to the bubble already. There are a lot of consumers looking for new media orgs to love, obviously, but there’s currently no profit in harvesting those consumers. A loss-leader is only valuable if you have something profitable to lead people to.
But Trump’s already talking about starting one if he has time.
TMLutas – Oh, so you were referring to the short-term & the current situation. Fair enough. And you may be right about how the Dems might act in such a scenario. But even if you are correct and what you describe does end up happening.. why do you think that would this lead to the partisan gap in trust of media being lowered?
Well, what about the recent rise of alternative media like RSBN, OAN, Daily Wire, The Federalist, Just The News, American Greatness, Epoch Times, Breitbart? Are these not “market solutions to the bubble” that you refer to?
Quite so, Shlomo, that touches on what I wrote a few days ago.
Yes, definitely. The bubble starts to be re-absorbed. It’s slow because the profit model of news is so screwed up. In a more ordinary time – one not in the middle of the new-internet disruption – we’d likely have already seen new versions of NBC/ABC/FOX/PBS looking to grab this unserved market. As it is, we’re seeing disrupters on a smaller scale like the ones you list.
When my parents – when my non-internet-based friends – go home and turn on “the news”, what do they see? NBC/CBS/ABC/etc, not Breitbart, not RSBN, etc.
But it’s getting there.
Well, by “not in the middle of the new-internet disruption” do you mean in times before the internet was invented?
Or do you mean to refer to future times after the internet disruption will have already largely “finished” impacting the media business?
I mean both. The former was when a CBS could make money through advertising time. The latter will be when someone figures out a new way of filling in number 2 in the gnomish “1. Report news – 2. ??? – 3. Profits!” meme.
We’re still mostly in the middle of the internet redefinition of how we interact. Presumably, someone figures out how to make money by going out and discovering facts and sharing them with a paying public.
If we were at either of your scenarios, that “trust” disparity would be gone, because we’d all have a news option we loved. Some big news org would be happy to make money off of me. Right now, my news-love dollars are simply sitting there looking for a taker. That’s not a natural condition.
@bobby b
But Trump’s already talking about starting one if he has time.
I am reminded of Lady Jane Grey. She claimed a right to the throne of England due to a hand written codicil to her cousin King Edward VI’s will. However Edward’s sister Mary (later known as Bloody Mary) had the forces of the establishment of the Catholic church behind her, and took the throne. Jane was sent to the tower of London, but Mary knew that a pretender to the throne was a dangerous thing, and so had Jane executed a few weeks later.
Trump is way too dangerous to be left alone. That is why there are Trump retribution committees popping up all over the place. They will do their best to destroy him.
BTW, it is why I am vehemently opposed to the FEC. The plain fact is that there are long lists of Trump donors on public record. I guarantee you that to some degree donating to Trump poses a risk to your future employment, dating, friendship and other future dealings. We are disturbingly close to a Chinese style social credit scheme.
I went into Tesco supermarket today – the newspapers were spitting lies from their front pages, as they always do.
The Corporatist “Independent” (its name is ironic – for it is dependent on the Corporations and spreads their vile agenda) said that “Biden takes charge of fight against Covid” – a lie so extreme that is worthy of “Nullius”.
The “Times” had a front page story giving the credit for a new vaccine, not to President Trump who ordered the government to fund the research of the company (yes none of us would have done that – but leave the unconstitutional spending aside for a moment), but rather to two “German Turkish immigrants” (with a picture of the charming couple) – not so subtle subtext “the inflex into Europe is good – DEATH TO TO THE WEST!”
And so the agenda of the international establishment elite goes on.
A few random notes:
– The US is a really big country. Remember that you’re getting the unusual cases reported, not the usual ones. A few people just genuinely being that dumb is quite conceivable. (Not guaranteed, but it’s at least plausible.)
– The threat of court packing has receded with the results. And in this crowd, I don’t see a reason to discuss the possibility of false pro-Trump decisions. It could happen, I suppose, but it’s not what worries you guys.
– Vaccines at super-cold temperatures can be made to work. Here’s a story about Ebola vaccine cold chain processes designed for rural Africa, that needed to hit comparable temperatures: https://www.wired.com/story/the-wild-logistical-ride-of-the-ebola-vaccines-high-tech-thermos/ (And even if the protection is temporary, that gives us way longer to fix it in other ways, even if the fix is annual vaccinations.)
– The media deserves its lack of trust, sadly. They usually get basic facts right, but good lord do they fall down on everything else. But the networks you guys list aren’t generally a fix to that – they’re not trying to be news networks that cover a wide range of stories, they’re just trying to cover political stuff. They’re replacing the opinion sections, but in most cases they aren’t replacing the news sections, aside from a few specific fields.
That would be the greatest goad to the Trumpist world ever devised. I would welcome that as much as Shlomo M would welcome a hard-left new government, for the same reasons.
The right has traditionally been all talk, because the right has traditionally been more comfortable and content than the left. That’s why we want to conserve. Take away that shelter, and maybe we’d get something done.
Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose?
The problem is that Trump supporters generally fall into one of two categories: A) loud & proud and B) silent & scared. You are right that what you refer to is a great goad to the first category of Trump supporters, but for the second category of Trump supporters (and there are a lot in the second category)… well, it just reinforces their current thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
I see what you are saying. But I would contend that the reasons are different.
There are a lot of Americans who are good, decent people who voted for Biden and do not realize that AOC’s agenda will likely be quite moderate in ~50 years. Now, you may disagree that AOC’s agenda is likely to be considered moderate in 50 years. Okay. But that is why the reasons you refer to are different, right? Frog in boiling water… and all that.
Agree. But, current estimates are that about 3% of Americans took part in the American Revolution. We don’t need anywhere near 100% participation. But I bet that most of the silent and scared will still vote in accord with their hidden sentiments.
If I’m understanding you correctly, yes. I think the frog would be much less happy to sit there if he started the experience by being dunked quickly into the already-boiling pot.
https://twitter.com/christina_bobb/status/1326268639365001221
https://twitter.com/OANN/status/1326271836791820288
https://twitter.com/JudgeJeanine/status/1326155952152846341
https://twitter.com/bhweingarten/status/1325894530206412801
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztu5Y5obWPk&feature=emb_title
https://twitter.com/CuriousRabitt/status/1326215594740506625
https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1325964375652511745
https://twitter.com/AdamLaxalt/status/1326215395758501888
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1326156333305958401
https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1326192189634961408
https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1326272092401094656
https://twitter.com/EricTrump/status/1326017351960174592
https://twitter.com/joshdcaplan/status/1325964188758499328
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1326219268086767617
https://twitter.com/DavidBegnaud/status/1326196609642803202
https://twitter.com/BreitbartNews/status/1326180145162543106
Glenn Reynolds mentioned Newsmax recently. I looked at their website today for the first time, so i can’t judge, but this stands out.
Huh? You still read news on paper in England?
https://twitter.com/ChrisStigall/status/1326225514462371842
https://twitter.com/theREALbenORR/status/1326275134890586115
https://twitter.com/BreitbartNews/status/1326260147505819652
https://twitter.com/BreitbartNews/status/1326169639781625858
https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1325668851951030273
https://twitter.com/drefanzor/status/1326266636593106944
https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson/status/1325906120590888963
https://twitter.com/ArthurSchwartz/status/1326282306554900482
https://twitter.com/MattFinnFNC/status/1325801059206500353
https://twitter.com/senatormelendez/status/1325241230633046017
https://twitter.com/senatormelendez/status/1325945602320920577
https://twitter.com/TomFitton/status/1325948287963324417
https://twitter.com/TomFitton/status/1325962689483517952
https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1326212982083293185
https://twitter.com/dbongino/status/1325989063577530369
https://twitter.com/MattFinnFNC/status/1325999121501655043
Re: Schlomo abnd the public trust in the media.
Does the evident NPC behaviour of the left in blindly trusting the media, also explain why they’re leftists? That they believe that socialism will be good for ordinary people whereas the right know that gulags and retribution lists, as evidenced by AOC and Jennifer Rubin for example, are always just around the corner?
Great rant by Razorfist here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMUTYCPLvH4
Yes this is something I have thought about recently. I believe yes. I believe that Leftists have weak minds. It’s not a matter of intelligence, it’s a matter of MENTAL WEAKNESS. I see this with my friends, acquaintances, neighbors, coworkers, family. It’s not intelligence that makes someone a Leftist, there are intelligent people on both sides and there are dumb people on both sides. It’s a matter of mental WEAKNESS. Very scary.
And just to clarify/expand on my last comment – their mental weakness contributes to why they are Leftists and also their mental weakness contributes to why they blindly trust the media. So these are independent pathways or independent thought processes, but both of them have the mental weakness as a cause. In my opinion. But yes, obviously there’s a lot more complexity to both pathways than just that, needless to say.
I still don’t think they’re measuring “trust”, as in “the media says it and so it must be true.” I don’t know any progs who truly thought the riots here were mostly peaceful.
I think they’re measuring a different form of trust – trust as in “they’re on our side, and so I can trust them to say things that help us, to pursue their work on our behalf.”
Back in the real world, the Supreme Court is not going to flip a switch to make Trump win and Biden lose.
Roberts and Kavanaugh are politician enough to go with the flow. At the very very very most, they might rule that the election in one State was so effed up that it could not be said to have complied with the method prescribed by the State legislature. And consequently that State would get no electoral votes unless the State legislature named a slate before the deadline.
That would be a shot across the bows of the Dem Governors, Dem election officials, State courts and Federal courts which connived to change the rules without permission from the State legislature. But it would still leave Biden the winner.
But more likely, if anything gets to SCOTUS, there’ll be a lot of tutting and that will be it.
Incidentally for those who like 269-269 draws, the three States to watch are Wisconsin (Biden winning by a little over 20,000), Arizona (B + 14,000) and Georgia (B + 12,000) – if recounts etc flipped about 24,000 votes in those three States (highly unlikely) that would land us on 269-269.
But then it really would be worth MiniMike Bloomberg slipping a Republican Elector $50 million or so.
Shlomo Maistre – Sorry for the delay in response. You asked “why do you think that would this lead to the partisan gap in trust of media being lowered” which is a fair question. If the left loses, it will not like it and it will be casting about for villains. The press that misled it fits the bill quite well and they won’t want to be burned again anytime soon.
Snorri,
Our sales and circulation of newspapers has been declining for many years. However the papers still reinforce and never oppose the perspective of the leftist bbc. The bbc in turn is mirrored by ITV and exceeded in its batshittery by channel 4. All depend to a greater or lesser extent to state funding and mandatory taxation vis the tv license. Sky, which dominates cable news over here is indistinguishable from the bbc other than the permanent chip on its shoulder.
Broadcast news frequently refers to the print media which in turn breathlessly reports on what the broadcasters are saying. Both are prone to quote from the social media output of their fellow travellers.
Exposure to news via radio is dependent on a myriad of taxpayer-funded bbc local stations. Such non-bbc radio as we have (lbc/talksport etc) is generally dominated by presenters whose only wish in life is their own show on bbc.
That leaves social media as a news source for millions, dominated and directed by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. No joy there. Maybe some light internet trawling for a different perspectives? Good luck with that if google has anything to do with it. At least you guys have conservative talk radio to provide some respite.
In a bitter irony the joke from Men in Black that the real news is reported in supermarket checkout magazines has not aged well. Yesterday’s satire becomes today’s truth.
Can I add my own bete noire to this list? A disturbingly large number of people who thereby consider themselves well informed obtain most of their “reference material” from Wikipedia. Wiki is neither objective, impartial or truthful. It is doing untold stealth damage yet somehow manages to avoid criticism. It needs to be included in any discussion (incidentally I get nearly as much vicarious pleasure from wikis increasingly desperate appeals for donations as I do from those on the guardian website).
A notable example of how intelligence doesn’t correlate with NPC susceptibility is the spectacular meltdown of Sam Harris.
The man has gone stark raving tonto with TDS.
Nobody was following Joe Biden and he had zero support, and yet his vote count surpassed the most popular campaign in recent US history? Did you see the size and enthusiasm of Trumps rallies?
I would bet my life that this fraud is on the scale of millions.
Just to repeat that the international establishment elite do NOT represent “market forces” – the choices of many millions of ordinary people (which is all “market forces” really are) are exactly what they do NOT want.
Under the freedom of ordinary people (“market forces”) – there would be no place for a World Economic Forum, World Bank, IMF, and all the rest of it.
The vast “Woke” Corporations HATE ordinary people – we, the customers, are vulgar and disgusting according to the “educated” Corporate Mangers (the same sort of snobs who make up the government bureaucracy and the media). We should buy what we are TOLD to buy – and pay with a “Basic Income” of fiat money provided by the government and the Credit Bubble banks.
Banks do NOT want to rely on REAL SAVINGS – they prefer Credit Expansion backed by GOVERNMENTS.
Hollywood (television as well as film) does not want to rely on “racist”, “sexist” and “homophobic” customers – they want to bailed out by the GOVERNMENT.
The same is true for industry after industry – they all want government subsidies, and regulations creating government backed CARTELS – “Stakeholder Capitalism” (FASCISM – but “Woke”).
Hence the Corporations tend to back Puppet Biden – just as most large Corporations backed the “National Industrial Recovery Act” and the “National Recovery Administration” (the Blue Eagle thugs) that was created in 1933 (in direct imitation of FASCIST ITALY – of Mussolini, a leading “Progressive”) and was struck down (nine to zero) by the Supreme Court in 1935.
Does anyone not believe that a disgusting crook like Chief Justice Roberts (who, as Senator Cruz has proved, has BROKEN his oath to uphold the Constitution – time after time) would NOT find a way to allow “Woke” Fascism pushed by Puppet Biden and the rest of the international totalitarians?
Re: Paul
One of the advertisements for the great reset says “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy about it”
Happy about being on UBI, as long as you dont have any incorrect thoughts or you’ll be cut off and cast adrift. It’s the Chinese Social credit system brought to the west.
The establishment have been spending too much time with the CCP.
I know you guys will feel salty about a 5-4 decision by the Supremes. But if it’s 8-1 or 9-0, I hope you’ll give this stuff up.
(Also, I can see Roberts, but Kavanaugh? He’s a Republican partisan from way back. He’s not particularly right-wing in ideological terms, but he’s very much a Republican – he’s sort of the inverse of Thomas or Barrett.)
Alsadius – so if the Supreme Court says massive Election Fraud (for example hundreds of thousands of votes counted illegally in Pennsylvania) is O.K. then it is O.K?
Yes “we will give this stuff up” if by that you mean elections, because of the Supreme Court rules that Election Fraud is fine, what is the point of elections? No-point-at-all.
At least things will be out in the open – totalitarian tyranny, without disguise. And as Jake Tapper said – anyone who resists this is not going to have a job in future (“opposition means death by slow starvation” were the words of Trotsky, but he was blunter man than the mealy mouthed gentle Mr Tapper). Other Democrats altered that to anyone who has ever supported President Trump IN THE PAST – so no point giving in now, even people who give in now will be punished for not being part of the left IN THE PAST. And eventually the various factions of leftists will run out of “reactionaries” and will turn on each other. It has happened many times in the past.
Yes Flubber – you are quoting from the little illustrative story at the start of “Agenda 2030” the follow on to “Agenda 21”.
“Alsadius” is saying “Conspiracy Theory”. “Tin Foil Hat” “Blah, Blah, Blah” – but these are official United Nations documents, supported by the World Economic Forum – which means most governments (and most LARGE CORPORATIONS) on the planet.
No one stormed out of one of the many international meetings saying “this is tyranny – I will not go along with this!”
Nor is it big international conferences. We have had “Agenda 21” even at local council level in this country.
I did not need the internet to know of these things – they have even come down to my level.
And there was no resistance.
I think you have to be someone like Donald Trump to say NO.
Alsadius.
Republicans in the United States, like “Central Office” “Conservatives” in the United Kingdom, are all about “preserving the system” – that is why they are quite likely to let ELECTION FRAUD go, because to strike it down would shake “confidence” in their precious “system”, their precious “institutions”.
But people interested in liberty have a rather different point of view – we understand that “the system”, the “institutions” have become utterly corrupt, and must be smashed. Organisations such as the FBI are not guardians of justice – they are a direct threat to justice. Perhaps this was not always so – but it has been true for quite some years.
The “Justice” system persecutes the innocent, and COVERS UP for the guilty. On POLITICAL grounds.
I agree Kavanaugh is a Republican, of the establishment variety, but one needs to consider the Republican interest in this election, as opposed to the Trumpian interest.
An election in which Biden wins, but the Republicans retain the Senate and make gains in the House is pretty much perfect for establishment Republicans, so long as the Trumpkins don’t go bananas about betrayal and stuff. So the best policy is for establishment Repubicans to appear to back Trump’s challenges, but hope he loses in court. Which he will.
And in court, it is in the interests of Roberts and Kavanaugh to pay lip service to the unfortunateness of the irregularities but conclude that they don’t rise to the level of enjoining certification of the results. I suspect even Roberts would be delighted to have a good kick at the Arizona Redistricting case which was about the rights of State legislatures, where Roberts wrote a splendidly scornful dissent, making fun of the majority’s conclusion that the State legislature included the whole voting population passing a referendum. Making sure Trump loses, but some strong obiter in the opinion making it clear that when the Constitution says “legislature” it means “legislature”, not State Supreme Court, Governor or local election administrator, would work for all six “conservative” Justices, except conceivably Thomas.
Meanwhile Cocaine Mitch would be in clover. Potentially difficult 2022 midterms, where there are a lot of Republican Senate seats to defend, will be much easier if Biden is in office (or better still Kamala.) And the Republicans might retake the House. So long as the Trumpkins can be mollified.
As for Trump, I know he can’t help it, but it’s his own fault. By the time the counting is finished he’ll be within 25,000 votes of winning – say 7,000 in Arizona, 11,000 in Wisconsin and 7,000 in Georgia. How many moderate suburban housewives has he scared off with his act ? If he could have seen his way clear to offending even 25,000 fewer in the requisite States, he’d be looking at a second term.
Nah. The Democrats would just have burned a few more Trump ballots, “corrected” a few entries where voters “mistakenly” voted for Trump instead of Biden or obtained the necessary ballots from their natural constituency of the recently (and not so recently) deceased.
Election day for the Democrats was just about knowing how many additional Biden votes to add (which had already been prepared by Sleepy Joe Biden’s “most extensive and inclusive VOTER FRAUD organization in history”) and/or how many additional Trump votes to lose. By using a mixture of strategies they make it look more like error than fraud if nobody is bothered to look too closely.
The art of fixing an election in the US has always been to just turn the tide from Red to Blue enough to win without raising the election fraud above the level of “a few corrupt local officials acting on their own behalf”. The Democrats stole the 1960 election thanks to Mayor Daley and Joe Kennedy. They tried to steal the 2000 election, but screwed up the end game. They would have stolen the 2016 election but they failed to realise that Clinton was screwing up the electoral college vote by refusing to campaign in parts of the US where she was unpopular.
This time they were ready. They knew that Biden was a complete waste of space and that the only way they were going to win was by stealing it. Which is what they’ve done. The fact that they’ve “Only stolen the election by a bit” is meaningless.
Paul: I’m saying that if a Republican-dominated court overwhelmingly says that Republican claims of fraud are false, then they’re probably false. Those judges will be much closer to the evidence than you or I(and be getting it from less-biased sources, since they have to hear from both sides in the course of making their decisions), know the relevant law better than either of us, and they’ll be making an admission against interest. It’s not a mathematical proof, but if you’re demanding that level of proof, you’re basically saying that you won’t accept any Biden victory no matter what. My request is basically that you have some humility. Some things can look fraudulent but not be. Some things can actually be fraudulent, but not sufficient to overturn the election(which Biden won pretty convincingly). And, for the love of god, remember that these elections are run by governments, and you’re a libertarian. If you actually think them competent enough that all errors are intentional fraud, you should be a communist.
And I’m not saying “tinfoil hat” about the UN stuff. I’m saying “wooly-headed fools at big international organizations have been saying stuff like this for as long as there have been big international organizations”. The claims you make mostly seem legit, though I haven’t dug into them in depth. But I don’t think they matter much, because their wishlists rarely come to fruition. Because nobody except those organizations wants power to wind up in their hands.
As for preserving the system, three of those SCOTUS judges are Trump appointees. This is why I ask about 8-1 or 9-0 decisions – those would mean that even Trump’s appointees mostly think he lost. (I can understand why you’d be skeptical of a 5-4 or 6-3.) If your theory is that Trump’s people want Trump to lose so that election fraud can go unfought, you haven’t been paying much attention to Trump.
Lee: Yes, the current results are near-perfect for the establishment GOP. But the establishment GOP knows what happens when it fights with Trump, and they’re mostly cowards, so I can’t imagine them rigging anything to make it happen.
John: If they will just rig anything, how did Trump win 2016? They hated him plenty back then, after all. (And that “voter fraud organization” was a voter fraud detection organization – any video clip that’s 20 seconds long and saying something insane is clearly cutting away context, and everyone should understand that by now.)
As for the dead voting, that got a lot harder in the computerization era. And as for only stealing it by a bit, his victory is about as convincing in EV terms as Trump’s was, and much stronger in pop vote terms (which don’t matter for winning, but which are a good sanity-check on vote rigging). The state where Biden’s two-party vote share went up the most, at last count, was Colorado – hardly a state anyone would feel a need to rig.
Because they believed their own bullshit that Trump had almost zero chance of winning and Killary had it in the bag. By the time they realised they were going to win the popular vote but lose the electoral college it was too late to organize and what “fixers” they had in place were in the wrong states.
This time they knew the polls were bullshit, knew their candidate was next to useless and the only way they COULD win was outright vote fraud. They’ve known this since before the nomination in the summer and put both funding and people in the right places to guarantee the win even in the event of a massive Trump vote.
They used COVID-19 as an excuse to massively ramp up mail-in voting and bypass what minimal controls there were in place to reduce in-person vote fraud. The whole situation was perfect cover to ensure that the fraud could be managed behind the scenes with little-to-no exposure of those responsible.
How people CANNOT see this is beyond me.
TMLutas,
Well, I see what you are saying. For a wide variety of reasons, I think the villain the vast majority of the Left would blame/find in the scenario you describe would be Trump. The media would say/imply that Trump has stolen the election from Biden, and almost every Leftist in America would sincerely believe it.
Paul,
Agree.
I agree. But have the IMF, World Bank, and World Economic Forum eliminated market forces?
Wouldn’t you agree that market forces still exist? I do not mean this in a facetious way, but I believe that market forces do act (as best they can) even in the current situation (which is not a real free market – I agree with you) in which the incentives, restrictions, and regulations placed on the market forces by groups like the World Bank, IMF, etc shape and impact the market forces but do not eliminate the market forces themselves.
Would you disagree? And if so why?
I don’t mean this as a semantic difference – I think it’s an important point.
I do not think the World Bank or IMF should exist. But they do exist and market forces still exist (in my view) even though these oppressive globalist institutions also exist.
And if it is true that market forces (the everyday decisions of millions of ordinary people, as you rightly put it) are not eliminated by groups that distort free markets like the IMF, World Bank etc but are rather impacted and channeled by such groups, then I think it logically follows that the following two facts do not eliminate market forces but do impact how market forces function in ways that harm the sovereignty of USA:
1. All multinational corporations that wish to operate in China are accountable to the Chinese Communist Party
2. American office holders (especially POTUS and Congress) are accountable to American corporations
Alsadius,
“Paul: I find your lack of faith disturbing.”
FTFY
They have weak minds. Very weak minds.
It’s not a matter of intelligence. There are dumb people on both sides and there are intelligent people on both sides.
You probably have a strong (discerning, imaginative, perceptive) mind; most Leftists (especially MSM drones) have seriously weak minds (more tunnel vision, less able to discern patterns or connect dots that are outside their mental models, less sensitive to matters of principle, less able to discern differences between their own thoughts & feelings, and less able to discern differences between what ought to be and what is).
I don’t mean this to be insulting – I just think it’s true. And it’s actually pretty scary.
So let me see if I’ve got this straight.
1) They knew all the polls were falsely diminishing Trump’s standing by several percent, including the ones from pollsters known for having a pro-Republican bias, ones from pollsters who use election advertising mostly to drum up commercial polling business, and the ones hired by actual GOP campaigns. These polling errors were not caused by Republicans fearing retribution if their feelings were known, or hating pollsters – instead, they were fraud on the part of the people doing the polling.
2) They knew months in advance that Trump would cruise to victory, despite the fact that all this false polling meant they had no good data to base that conclusion on. Indeed, they had no more data than they had in 2016, but came to wildly different conclusions. (Was it the fearsome competence of Joe Biden that resulted in this improvement, or the well known political acumen of Kamala “didn’t even make it to the first primary” Harris?) Shlomo has established for us that they all have tunnel vision, can’t discern patterns, and don’t understand the difference between what they want and the state of the world, so in the absence of quality polling or a strong media narrative, it’s truly impressive that they came to such a heterodox conclusion that’s way off the beaten path and is far from the world they want to see. And it’s not like they hang out with Republicans who can set them straight.
3) This massive fraud operation turned the election from a fairly close Republican win in 2016 to a fairly close Democrat win in 2020 (less than 1% in the tipping-point state both times, I believe). In other words, unless you think Trump’s approval went up substantially(with a highly polarized electorate that has few swing voters), it clearly didn’t have much of an effect in the grand scheme of things.
4) Since the largest swings towards Biden relative to 2016 were in states full of white leftists like Colorado and Vermont, not swing states, that means that the fraud operation was focused there. This is contrasted against 2016, when Clinton had her people in the wrong places.
5) The tens of thousands of Republican poll-watchers nationwide have nothing more damning to report than “they made me stand six feet back during a pandemic” and “maybe there were only 130 of us in the room instead of 150”, plus a few ten second video clips.
6) Because of this relative lack of damning claims, Trump’s legal strategy to prove fraud currently hinges on cases like “Here’s 500 legal ballots cast in a state we lost by tens of thousands – we think those ballots shouldn’t have been allowed, despite us agreeing that they were legal votes cast by legal electors, so you need to disenfranchise Pennsylvania now”. And you think these cases should succeed.
7) Similarly, the people who advance these theories about stolen elections mostly base their arguments on mathematical arguments that ignore the possibility of ticket-splitting, the fact that precincts are chosen to be similar sizes, or ignorance of how vote totals roll in over the course of an election night in normal circumstances with races that aren’t seriously contested. This lack of good arguments is, like the previous point, no reflection on the merits of the underlying case.
Is that about the size of it?
I don’t “find your lack of faith disturbing”, because I’m not asking for faith. I’m asking for an argument where it takes me more than ten seconds to find a crippling contradiction. It doesn’t need to be bulletproof, but this stuff is just sad. Bluntly, I’m right of centre, and I routinely make arguments in public that vote fraud is more common than people like to think. If you can’t convince me, how on earth do you think you’ll convince Clarence Thomas?
Alsadius,
Why do you think this is relevant to assessing whether or not voter fraud occurred?
Why do you think this is relevant to assessing whether or not voter fraud occurred?
Why do you think this is relevant to assessing whether or not voter fraud occurred?
Why do you think this is relevant to assessing whether or not voter fraud occurred?
This is false.
Nope.
I am not sure what “people” you are referring to or what their argument is, but widespread violation of Benson’s Law does not ignore the possibility of ticket-splitting. Of course, there are many other types of evidence of voter fraud.
Nope.
I’m unaware of any crippling contradictions you have found.
Well:
1. We have only seen a small portion of the evidence that Rudy Giuliani & Team are seeing.
2. I am not trying to convince you that voter fraud happened. I do think there are quite a lot of quite compelling pieces of evidence out there. You don’t. I’m not going to spend the time to try to convince you. And even if voter fraud happened – that is not enough by itself to comprise a winning legal argument to invalidate fraudulently cast votes. So it’s complicated.
3. The situation is more complex than you seem to understand. If I were Trump I would A) not really want a second term and probably not push hard to get a second term through the courts (even if I think I could win) B) be collecting this evidence for the purpose of protecting myself and my family and my associates for after I leave office.
I suggest you have not got it straight.
I seriously doubt they knew that. They hoped their 10-ahead polls were right but they (and we) understood that only in the small hours of Wednesday morning would they know the actual figures and see the likely outcome – as I did when I looked over breakfast in the UK and saw the map clearly predicting a comfortable Trump EC win.
Hardly! Various factors were in play, and it is early to decide the role of each. I tend much more to assume that fearful Reps, and some Reps who wished to inconvenience the ‘find-votes’ post-election operation, were a huge part of it. The US libs may intentionally have touted their polls in public while being sceptical – but less sceptical than we – of their accuracy.
This of course means that
is also way off base. My opinion FWIW is that they believed they would win but hated Trump so much they always intended to be sure of it, plus as the time grew closer they had severe attacks of nerves (doubtless many on our side felt nervous too).
Also way off base because of its incorrect premise.
The post-electoral ‘find-ballots-needed’ operation started (of course) from the observed state – that was its point. And its purpose was to turned affected states from narrow-Trump to narrow-Dem.
Mail-in voting greatly increases risk of fraud – as the NYT told us in 2010 (and, for example, Jerry Nadler is also on record saying this). Thus over and above the post-electoral fraud we may reasonably wonder how many dead voters got their ballots in on time, not just late, and etc. However the early-Wed state was what it was, with whatever pre-election fraud included. I suspect crucial cases will turn on the post-Election just-after-time, make-up-needed votes operation, helped in places by provable numbers of pre-cases. We’ll see.
Fraud was also happening there (as in 2016 and 2012, along with illegalities over GoP poll-watcher exclusion in those years); why would it not? Mail-in make it easier to do, so we should expect an upswing in amount and be surprised if it were absent.
Real swings, as well as fraud-swings, may well also have occurred. However the reported results claim Trump gained in every category except white males. This is arguably a counterintuitive, therefore somewhat suspicious, result. What about either Trump or the evolution of the Dems in the last 4 years would diminish Trump’s support with white males? If the switchers were sexists who disliked Hillary, then I fear they were very questionably advised on how best to advance their agenda. 🙂
You appear seriously under-informed as regards numbers and distances, never mind incidents other than distanced or cheeringly-ejected poll watchers. However the USSC will doubtless sift this evidence, so we will have more information on its amount and robustness presently.
Again, you appear under-informed (also you seem to be using ‘legal’ in a somewhat circular way above 🙂 ). The constitutional case against the Pennsylvania nullification of its own legislature’s law is rather more than 500 votes. If the report is confirmed that the earlier USSC ruling to segregate the votes affected by this was ignored, that’s evidence in itself. Why would Pennsylvania Dems nullify the Pennsylvania law and the USSC segregation order for the sake of 500 votes in the circumstances you describe?
First I’ve heard of that one from our side – but TBS I can’t have read a fraction of what’s written. 🙂 But I have seen Biden people use that argument to try to explain why Trump has coattails like a winner yet could not be the winner.
There are fewer stars in the sky than odds against the spikes I witnessed in real-time in the Wisconsin and Michigan counts in the US small hours.
If you are saying that it is in the nature of a fraud to be done quickly and to unravel slowly, with more and more evidence emerging, I would agree. You understate the existing evidence (quite a lot, I feel), but of course the claim you are disputing asserts that more is likely to emerge.
This in turn leads to the point that “it’s not the crime, its the cover-up”. For example, a completely fictitious claim that the USPS whistleblower had retracted was no sooner made in the WaPo than said whistleblower indignantly corrected it and proposed to sue the WaPo. This minor but insolent incident warns caution toward ‘nothing (much) to see here’ reports.
With my corrections.
No, that is what I am asking from you – an argument that does not in parts travesty the one being advanced and then do a poor job of refuting the rest.
If I were to say your stuff is “just sad”, will you think that worth saying – or discussing?
We can certainly agree on that.
I’d start by noting that the spikes totalled near 400,000 votes in just two states, to establish we were taking about about a situation in which statistical impossibilities on that kind of scale, not just 500 votes, had been observed –
– and taken seriously. (You can still see – if CNN have not taken it down – the startled CNN guy stumbling to handle it as the first came in. He was expecting the Zuckerberg approach – train the US people to know it will be days or weeks of counting – but my guess is someone panicked. It was going to take some time to give Biden the lead he needed by the find-votes approach, which meant the average US bod would soon to wake up to what I woke up to in the UK: “looks like Trump’s pulled it off”. My guess FWIW is that someone panicked and decided to avert that in the totals and have the process make it up later, without sufficiently thinking what a step function in Biden’s voting total would tell.)
Shlomo: Re #1-4, I’m discussing the narrative you guys are building. They are not direct questions of fraud, they are an analysis of your arguments. Since those arguments have lead you to assume that fraud has happened, that seems relevant. Basically, you guys seem to be saying “Fraud must have occurred, because XYZ”. If I can show that XYZ isn’t true, then hopefully you’ll reconsider your conclusion about fraud being necessary. (I will agree that it’s still possible even if it’s not necessary, which is what points 5-6 were about.)
Re #5, what do you think is the strongest claim right now? Because the ones I’ve seen are accurately summarized by my description there.
Re #6, I’m again summarizing an actual legal argument: https://cdn10.phillymag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/11/voter-fraud-pennsylvania-lawsuits-web.jpg
Re #7, that was me going after three separate arguments. The first is a few versions of the “blank Biden ballots” theory – for example, the Georgia numbers of 95k Biden-only ballots and 800 Trump-only ballots. Thing is, those numbers don’t come from actual counts of President-only ballots, they come from taking the difference between President and Senate vote counts. A Biden/Perdue ballot will shrink the Trump-Perdue gap by 1 and raise the Biden-Ossoff gap by 1. Thirty or forty thousand of those (net of any Trump-Ossoff ballots) and you get the results we saw.
The second is the Benford’s Law argument, which is only applicable on data sets that span several orders of magnitude. Precincts are generally chosen to be of a very similar size, so they won’t follow a Benford’s Law distribution, any more than rolling a die a lot will produce Benford-compliant results. I saw a really good analysis of this from a math Youtuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etx0k1nLn78
The third is that you expect some quirks in the count. I don’t have a good source on this, but I’ve been an election-night junkie for two decades. In my experience, this stuff is normal. There was a by-election in my riding a few weeks ago, and I was watching the minute-by-minute horse race for about an hour. The Conservative and the Liberal were neck and neck – sometimes as close as one vote – for about 45 minutes. Then they finished counting one of the larger advance polls from a Liberal-heavy part of the riding, and the Liberal jumped ahead by 500, which was most of her margin of victory in the end. I’ve been a scrutineer for Canadian elections before. A good friend of mine runs the Conservative Party’s riding association here. There’s a good chance I know the person who was watching the count of that poll. I’ve heard no hint of treachery, no word of complaint – it was a clean count, by all accounts. Because sometimes, that’s just how elections go. You get a feel for it over time, and it doesn’t always look the way people who get their news the next morning expect that it looked.
FWIW, I agree in theory that Giuliani et al could have more evidence. But they’d better start advancing that stuff soon, because the things they have brought up so far is weak.
—
Niall: Re #1, this is at least more plausible. That said, any map that had Trump winning comfortably was a bad map. Anyone who looked at it in detail knew that there were a whole lot of mail-in ballots (with huge Dem skews) that still needed to be counted. But with that caveat, the rest seems reasonable.
Re #2, that was a reply to John Galt above, who said “This time they knew…the only way they COULD win was outright vote fraud.”. It seems you disagree with him – fair enough.
Re #3, I agree that mail-in ballots are more vulnerable to fraud than in-person, especially if they’re run poorly. I just don’t see how Dems got hundreds of thousands of ballots sent in that way to steal elections, without being caught.
Re #4, you don’t rig the vote in states you’re already winning handily, because it increases your chances of getting caught, and doesn’t increase your chances of winning. If the election comes down to Vermont, it means Trump won Reaganesque numbers.
And improving with everyone except white males seems like regression to the mean, given that he did really well with white males and poorly with other groups last time. People judging him by his track record, instead of hypotheticals, will have more varied and less stereotypical takes on him, so it’ll mix them up. Since he’s hardly been a Woodrow Wilson-style racist, he’s done nothing much to offend minorities in particular. Even just feeling that they have less to fear than they thought in 2016 might help him with them.
Re #5-6: Fair. But when I say “legal”, I mean it – see the picture I linked in my reply to Shlomo on #6 above. And last I heard, Pennsylvania was still being good about segregating the votes that are in dispute, as ordered.
Re #7, why are spikes so hard to imagine? The mail-in ballots are counted in big blocks, and those counts are released at once. But yes, if more fraud evidence triclkes out over the next 32 days, so be it.
As for the election-night coverage, I was watching Fox News. They seemed to think it wasn’t that great for Trump, and took some pains to say that it was a long way from over, explaining why it wasn’t done, and what votes were still outstanding. I know Fox has drifted a bit centrist over time, but they’re still well to the right of CNN or (god forbid) MSNBC.
Alsadius:
I focus on you, and yet not entirely on you.
Here, at Samizdata, and elsewhere, I read (sometimes long) essays by people I call Technicians.
At my congregation there are two people in particular I avoid long conversation with.
One is a fellow my age who is a self taught (Certificates only) to construct and maintain Networks (the computer kind). His living room is dominated by the elaborate lego sets he and his son (by a woman he never married and quickly became bitterly estranged from to the point that she kept him in family court for years trying to gain sole custody of her son from him) and his collection of laptops linked to his stereo and his cable box and his flat-screened TV. One time I asked if he could show the Men’s Group from the congregation who were gathered there a trailer for a film I thought they might like to see. There was a problem with the volume and it took him 20 minutes to figure out which device was at that moment in control of the volume the flat-screened TV was set at.
A 20 minute delay in a presentation can kill the presentation. Momentum can be everything.
I mentioned a son. The guy’s father was a big time drug dealer in the projects and like that sort, a great womanizer. So was this guy. He has mentioned being dumped “with prejudice” at least once. Now that this woman he picked up at a bar has had his son and given him hell in family court he has “resolved” to be “celibate”
The other person spends the time I am near him going over which Prophet in the Old Testament “proves” that Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is in fact The Only Begotten Son of God and The Messiah. Those phrases roll off my tongue as easily as “In nomine Partis, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus”.
I question this person’s Faith if he keeps have to look up “Proof” of what he says he Believes.
He also carries around those pamphlets and tracts the Jehovah’s Witness types hand out and pulls them out ready to discuss at length how they present “Bad Doctrine”. I do not doubt that Bad Doctrine exists. Liberation Theology, for instance.
I do question how persuasive this person is when he speaks of Faith or Doctrine.
This fellow is also, I m pretty sure a Technician.
You now who are also Technicians? Lawyers who forget that the Client makes the decision based on not just their legal advice, and Statisticians who think that they play much the same role.
You are a little of both the Lawyer and the Statistician. You think that from your still very narrow perspective you understand the Truth and can predict the Future. You think that you can read the minds of the people who will decide Donald Trump’s fate because you think you know everything there is to know about his case.
You are also the sort of person I would want only written reports from, and reports that are condensed by people able to boil off all the fat you include in your (probably, I hope, for your sake) bloated prose and reliably present that which is at the core and most useful. And only those parts applicable to what I have asked to see expanded so that I could understand what it is I wish to understand well enough to make the best decision I could.
But I would certainly leave you in the junior ranks of the decision making process.
Yours is a Limited Mind. I just hope and Pray it is not limited by your own choice. That would be a tragedy – for you. I would only care about you because I try to be a Good Christian. Free Will is a Gift from God. The greatest Gift God ever gave us. Free Will means you own who you are and what you do, and I own who I am and what I do, and if it seems am best for one of us to distance themselves from the other so be it.
What could happen in the courts?
The judges see a mess, where appointed officials have decided to break out of the envelopes the constitutions of their own states have stated the state legislators are allowed to place them in, specifically regarding when ballots are valid and when they cease to be valid. They see a mess where one side has not allowed the other to, as is right and proper and maybe even written into the law, monitor from a distance where one is actually able to reliably observe, the opening and the counting of those ballots. They see a software where holes you can drive a fleet of trucks stuffed with ballots enough to skew, as desired, the results from one side to the side to which those counting the ballots wish to see the results “flow”.
They see elections in a handful of important states run in such a way that the results cannot be trusted by anyone who can smell a good fish from a rotten one, including anyone who has such a bad cold they cannot smell it if you fart the deadliest fart possible right in front of them.
And they order a carefully monitors recount.
Not because Fraud has been conclusively “proven”.
In one of the Tom Baker Doctor Who serials, the Doctor describes a con man as having a “pleasant, honest face”. When his Companion (the first Romanna, I think) points out what he has said when the Doctor expresses distrust of the con man, the Doctor replies: “Well, he’s be a terrible con man if he didn’t.”
If the judges are able to say “something does not smell right” and calls for an entirely legal remedy to sort matters out to a conclusion that is BETTER FOR THE COUNTRY BECAUSE IT CAN BE TRUSTED, they will, unlike you, have understood the broadest extant and tightest limits of their role.
They will have been better than MERE TECHNICIANS, which is what we should (especially you) all strive to be, even but especially if we hope to lead anyone anywhere.
I have heard that Civil War veterans are disproportionately comprised of white males and Joe Biden was able to inspire enthusiastic turnout among this crowd.
Shlomo:
Biden’s brain has dribbled out of his ears, but someone in the organization that has coalesced around his name and walking corpse was inspired by Charles Dickens method for finding good names for his characters?
Or they were just denizens of Chicago and other large (largely) Democrat dominated cities?
One America Network has been investigating the computer fraud side of the Election Fraud – but now there website can not be reached (at least I could not reach it a minute or so ago – and I tried several different ways).
Under attack from the internet companies?
In any case the legal paperwork proving the NON internet side of the Election Fraud went in today – for both Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Well Alsadius – both film and sworn statements (including some Democrats) proving (at least) NON computer fraud, on a massive scale, in at least two States – Pennsylvania and Michigan. It is now time for you to APOLOGISE.
Are you prepared to apologise Sir?
I am not asking you to apologise about the denying the computer fraud (that was unproven when you commented), but you must now apologise for implicitly denying the NON computer fraud in at least two States.
As it is now known that the Democrats cheated, on a massive scale, in at least two States (Pennsylvania and Michigan) the rest of the charges against them seem likely to be true.
For example, it is is certainly likely that the Secretary of State of Arizona (who called the base of support of a President with a Jewish daughter National Socialists “Nazis”) is a leftist – the lady must resign at once, no fair count can take place in Arizona with the present Secretary of State in charge.
As for future elections – the United States Senate election in Georgia is going to take place soon. Obviously the Atalanta Democrat Machine, which has engaged in blatant election malpractice, can have nothing to do with it.
It may be necessary to call up the Georgia National Guard to oversee an honest election in Atlanta – clearly no city government workers can be involved in such an election, not after how they have behaved.
https://twitter.com/larryelder/status/1326906024146718721
https://twitter.com/larryelder/status/1326757667310723072
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1326929456653426688
https://twitter.com/Wizard_Predicts/status/1326933467121201156
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1326948273152647168
https://twitter.com/DavidShafer/status/1325956840769859586
https://twitter.com/kaijubushi/status/1325900802641321984
https://twitter.com/CiceroConsulta1/status/1325859099918041088
https://twitter.com/DavidShafer/status/1325960023902711813
https://twitter.com/marklevinshow/status/1326572247239290880
https://twitter.com/NanHayworth/status/1326607723996307457
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1326276736233992195
https://twitter.com/DataElefantFan/status/1324838425170595840
https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1326937255231938562
https://twitter.com/jmclghln/status/1326910605618503687
https://twitter.com/JFNYC1/status/1326876759233613824
https://twitter.com/JimHansonDC/status/1326882613584416774
https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1326890833354821637
https://twitter.com/AdamLaxalt/status/1324397419883163649
For those who not know – the Georgia National Guard are NOT United States army regulars, no contravention of Federal Law or Constitutional principles is involved in a State Governor calling up these volunteers to ensure an honest election in a corrupt city.
Nor is this a “Trump” matter – as President Trump will not be on the ballot for the United States Senate election in Georgia.
“Here, at Samizdata, and elsewhere, I read (sometimes long) essays by people I call Technicians.”
Oh, yes. Evidence-based people, as opposed to feelings-based people. It’s a deep divide.
https://twitter.com/kayleighmcenany/status/1326634874988617729
When we say that we are a nation of laws, we mean that, in order to keep us from being controlled by individual unfettered (and sometimes venal) discretion, we hand control over to the technical. “Technical” plays no favorites, and applies to everyone.
The law is specifically technical. Election law is technical.
The people most qualified to accurately discuss election law – not election morality, or crowd psychology, or political expediency, but election law – are technicians.
“The law” of the situation, in your analysis, is left to the junior ranks of decision-making, as if it is advisory, and as if it is presented in hopes to sway the discretion of the decider, who may use it or discard it at will. That’s not (in theory) our system. And thank goodness for that.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/10/i-was-in-philadelphia-watching-fraud-happen-heres-how-it-went-down/
https://twitter.com/NetworksManager/status/1326909190141571080
https://twitter.com/va_shiva/status/1326595796947656716
https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1326519593049985026
https://twitter.com/jimgeraghty/status/1326900899835490306
https://twitter.com/MarcusHUSA/status/1326503306223554565
https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1326533622514462720
https://twitter.com/ZekeJMiller/status/1326551624622305280
https://twitter.com/CLewandowski_/status/1326260720036704257
https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1326351783459958789
https://twitter.com/CortesSteve/status/1326668036225556481
https://twitter.com/PhillyGOP/status/1326623592965173250
https://twitter.com/dcexaminer/status/1326353321582620673
https://twitter.com/SidneyPowell1/status/1326585824297832455
https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1326595661689745412
https://twitter.com/NolteNC/status/1326514799405129728
https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1326367797442646016
https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1326368591072145409
False dichotomy NiV. A moral theory need not be consequentlist to be perfectly valid. What “evidence” backs it up?
Paul: http://www.oann.com? Working for me, though it’s a bit slow. Certainly it’s not being blocked. Might just be heavy traffic?
Regarding the suits, I won’t apologize based on your word alone, especially when you offer no details. Give me links, and I’ll take a look. (Or are these the same ones as in the Twitter thread Shlomo quoted?) As a general rule, few cases are ever as strong as their initial allegations make them look – this is just how lawsuits work. Still, I’ll give them a read, see what I think of them.
Regarding a different set of Trump lawsuits, I found this story pretty funny: https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1326932166262087681 They’re submitting affidavits based on responses they got to a web form, with no verification, but they’re trying to tell the judge that they’re reliable because they threw out the obvious lies, and they had a CAPTCHA. This is Arizona, so not related to the suits Paul mentioned, but that’s impressive levels of organizational incompetence that the Trump campaign is showing.
Regarding the Georgia votes, do you think it might be counterproductive to tell your team’s supporters that the election is rigged and they can’t possibly win? If the Democrats get both of those Senate seats, it’ll likely be (at least in part) because of this kind of fatalism being too widespread among Georgia Republicans.
Nullius in Verba,
Do you think that all cases of voter fraud that have occurred in American history have been proven by evidence that the public has been made aware of?
If yes, then I cannot help you. If no, then you should already know that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – at which point we are speaking about a matter of degree. What do you think are the reasons why your answer to the above question is “no”? Those reasons (and you should have at least five in mind) should not be forgotten when you assess the extent of the suspicion of voter fraud in the Nov 2020 Presidential election raised by the evidence of which you are thus far aware.
bobby b,
1. As Inverness Docksides Clown rightly alluded to, the job of the lawyer is not to make decisions but to advise the client. The client makes the decision. About everything, including whether or not to go to court – regardless of the reasons for doing so.
2. Your apparent understanding of how court cases are decided in reality (as opposed to how textbooks tell you they are made) is woefully naive – on so many different levels.
3. If you still think that the law applies to everyone equally in reality then… I could point to how already Joe Biden’s senior advisors are already doing what Michael Flynn was interrogated and railroaded by the deep state for doing and nobody is batting an eyelash.
“False dichotomy NiV. A moral theory need not be consequentlist to be perfectly valid. What “evidence” backs it up?”
What are you talking about? I was only making an observation on the psychology. And I said nothing at all about validity – or which type of personality is ‘right’.
But to answer your question – it depends what you mean by “validity”. If you mean “true” then all moral theories are valid by definition, when evaluated under their own terms, and invalid by definition when judged by a different moral code. If you mean “arrived at and shown to be consistent by a logical chain of reasoning”, then the reasoning provides the evidence. I don’t see that it makes any difference whether it’s a deontological or consequentialist theory.
“Do you think that all cases of voter fraud that have occurred in American history have been proven by evidence that the public has been made aware of?”
I don’t know. If there’s no evidence, I can’t tell.
“Those reasons (and you should have at least five in mind) should not be forgotten when you assess the extent of the suspicion of voter fraud in the Nov 2020 Presidential election raised by the evidence of which you are thus far aware.”
I’ve seen a lot of allegations. But as Associate Justice Kavanaugh can tell you, allegations are not proof. Some claims I’ve looked into and have found to be flawed. Others I’ve not found any definitive evidence on, one way or the other, so I’m agnostic. I don’t know that there has been massive fraud, I don’t know that there hasn’t. I don’t know. I intend to wait and see.
Nullius in Verba,
You appear to be what IDC might call a technician. We need people like you to tell us what the evidence says. We do not need people like you to tell us what the absence of evidence might say. We also do not need people like you to tell us the extent of suspicion that should be raised by the evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election of which we are thus far aware.
Lawyers? Clients? Way down the food chain. No, I was speaking of judges. Lawyers and clients propose. Judges dispose.
But, I’ve watched a lot of Perry Mason, and I know some lawyers!
It mostly does, but that’s why I said “in theory.” Words have meaning.
bobby b,
You were responding to IDC’s comment: “But I would certainly leave you in the junior ranks of the decision making process.” – what makes you think you were exclusively referring to judges?
And perhaps this explains why your original comment betrays an inaccurate and incomplete understanding especially when you said:
“When we say that we are a nation of laws, we mean that, in order to keep us from being controlled by individual unfettered (and sometimes venal) discretion, we hand control over to the technical. “Technical” plays no favorites, and applies to everyone.
The law is specifically technical. Election law is technical.”
You said ““Technical” plays no favorites, and applies to everyone.” “The law is specifically technical.” “Election law is technical.” I do not see any “in theory” there. But you did sneak it in at the end – which (if you meant to apply that to your entire comment as a kind of cover to escape from criticism based on reality) renders your comment pointless, because IDC’s comment was clearly not about theory but about reality. The two are actually quite different.
Marketing lawyers tell the client what the client wants to hear. Good lawyers tell the client what the judge wants to hear. Only the judge matters. The rest is just selling mediocrity. Sounds like you’ve had some bad lawyers.
Okay, I’ve also read some Grisham novels. Isn’t that enough?
As to the rest – the law IS technical. Election law IS technical. I put “in theory” in there because we don’t just run the evidence and the applicable law through a computer and get a result – we filter it all through a person. But that person is usually backstopped by several layers of appellate court that work primarily to keep the results within the technical realm. And, mostly, it works.
And I’m simply going to make an unsupported assertion that I’m fairly-well qualified to say this, having (I’ll guess) written more judicial opinions than you’ve read.
Okay, but you didn’t answer my question.
I do bow to your superior legal knowledge.
I do agree that election law is technical, and law is generally technical. That doesn’t mean that the decisions of judges are always technical – or even can be made solely based on what “the law” says “technically”, which is betrayed by at least the existence of multiple schools of thought as to how a judge ought to interpret the law. I would be curious is, for instance, you think that Roe v. Wade was decided based on what the law technically says?
More important, though is a broader point. Backing up, you had originally responded to IDC (it appears to me) based on the presumption that he was referring strictly to the legal aspect of the current situation of potential voter fraud, when I think IDC was actually referring to the situation as a whole, which is far more complex than just a series of legal questions. The entire situation with potential voter fraud in this election is not simply a legal situation, but is also a political situation, a media situation, a financial situation, etc.
The Judge is important, but the client (not the judge or the lawyer) is the person who makes decisions about whether to go to court – for any reason at all. And those reasons are very complex in the current situation.
Sadly, no one backstops the USSC politics. That was, fittingly, an abortion of a legal decision. It was a brilliant political compromise, but that’s not the USSC’s job.
And it does occur to me that we’re having two different discussions here (which also gets into your “you didn’t answer my question” above.) I read Alsadius as commenting on the legal merits of the fraud allegations – how they would likely turn out if and when they got to court. If, instead, everyone else is talking about “how would it affect the political situation to pursue this legal claim”, or “should we pursue this legal claim for political or moral reasons irrespective of how it might turn out in court” – some topic not related to “will this legal argument win” – then, no, I haven’t answered your question.
I was mostly reacting to the BS assertion that discussion of the legal merits shouldn’t be left to “mere technicians.” The Justices of the USSC, when they’re doing their jobs correctly, are “mere technicians.”
P.S.:
No need to bow, just don’t spit.
😛
It was a brilliant political compromise, but that’s not in theory supposed to be the USSC’s job.
FTFY 🙂
Yes I agree. In my opinion, there are actually MANY discussions of discrete (though related) topics happening in this thread and they have been conflated in numerous ways. A lot of layers to this.
I read Alsadius as commenting on the legal merits of the fraud allegations and also commenting on other things, including the well-founded suspicions of widespread voter fraud. There are related but also discrete matters. One is a legal matter and the other is a matter of judgment independent of what the law says or how it is interpreted.
Fair enough, I’m working on my acerbic tongue.
Bobby,
Technicians and lawyers advise. Leaders make decision.
But then again, the lawyers and the technicians have taken over and we have Nimrods walking around with in their hands with what NASA was able to use to put man on the moon.
I listened a few years back to a retired construction engineer who had gone blind from Glaucoma and whose nurse had to roll the oxygen tank around for him in an 5 bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park West. A rat scampered around in his kitchen as he explained where the “mice” were coming from (because he had helped to design so many buildings).
You are not quite as badly along as that retired engineer.
You do know that rat feces and needing an oxygen tank do not go very well together, right, Bobby?
You sound like a Lawyer Who Would Be Emperor.
The Dark Side is too strong in you for anyone else’s good.
Luke! I am your lawyer . . .
I’m commenting on a few things – I’m a verbose SOB, I’ll admit. Here’s the short form.
Fraud was nonzero, like in every election. But the arguments that it was enough to swing the results have so far fallen into three basic camps:
1) Legitimate arguments that aren’t nearly big enough to change the results (e.g., Pennsylvania changing their rules by fiat).
2) Ignorance of election processes(“Trump led early!”), how to apply certain mathematical tools to election processes(Benford’s Law), and/or how the legal system judges claims about election processes(some of the more hilariously bad Trump lawsuits).
3) Actual tinfoil-hat bullshit(“Democrats can trivially commit an unlimited amount of fraud in any election, and all the ones they’ve lost were just because they got lazy!”).
I’m entirely with you on #1. #2 I’ll poke fun at, but acknowledge the possibility of it moving up the list. And if enough of it does, then the “not big enough to change the results” might change. I’m very skeptical – I made a bet with a buddy the other day at 20:1 odds that Trump would lose, and consider it to have been a very profitable bet to make – but it’s possible. But don’t be that guy from category #3, talking about Hammer and Scorecard – even Trump’s cybersecurity appointees mock how ridiculous that idea is.
Bobby:
Seriously, anyone who works for their lawyer rather than their lawyer working for them will not be able to pay for a loaf of moldy bread soon enough.
Lawyers know how to accumulate billable hours, not design first Re-Usable First Stages of Rockets or develop GMO Rice that helps millions of people feel more assurance that they will get to their rice crop before the insects do.
Really, I do wish lawyers understood that though they are Skilled, theirs is not a genuinely useful Skilled Trade.
The same with the Tech Crowd.
There was a lovely Russian young lady, much sought after. Many times by people in the Tech field. She chose a plumber who decided the best way to have a reliable source of quality plumbing supplies was to get into the Plumbing Supplies field. He succeeded, and she chose him. Asked why, she replied:
“Men will tire of their toys, but never their toilets.”
This election could end the possibility of anyone bothering to vote again.
Florida was trouble enough and lingers on still – like Al Gore following his male masseuse around long after the massage.
Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Michigan … why bother voting for President ever again? Let the Media choose the President, with Social Media lurking in the background.
This is not a Game where Intellectuals can bat the Shuttlecock around then retire to Tea.
The future of not just a President or just one election are at stake. A nation is at stake.
Voter fraud stinks like meat or fish gone bad. If the meat or fish smells bad enough the restaurant owner does not serve it. If the election smells as rotten as the one in Pennsylvania (in particular, but Michigan is close behind) you do the recount without waiting for the Squints at the lab to tell you “Yup! This’ll be sprouting Maggots soon!”
Maybe Lawyers and Data Analysts are too educated to realize this?
Maybe that makes them the people whose advice far fewer people should have to need on a regular basis?
“You appear to be what IDC might call a technician. We need people like you to tell us what the evidence says. We do not need people like you to tell us what the absence of evidence might say.”
True, you don’t. You already know what a lack of evidence says.
“We also do not need people like you to tell us the extent of suspicion that should be raised by the evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election of which we are thus far aware.”
You can be as suspicious as you like – it’ll make no difference to the outcome. Judges are unimpressed by suspicions without evidence.
“Technicians and lawyers advise. Leaders make decision.”
Leaders made the decision that Biden won.
Leaders overriding technicians means there are no rules. No laws to break. It doesn’t matter whether Biden technically won, according to the rules. All that matters is whether the leaders feel he won. They don’t need proof or evidence. They don’t need to obey the technicalities – they’re irrelevant. And that’s where not needing evidence and letting leaders rule over technicians gets you.
When people decide feelings-based should rule over evidence-based, they’re generally assuming they’re the ones whose feelings are going to rule.
Nullius, I leave you to the Null & Void of your Dead Philosophy.
I will Pray for your Soul.
Like Satan, where you go, Hell goes with you. You just do not want to know why.
What is dangerous about you is that you are not alone. People like you would not destroy the world. You would merely allow the people who will destroy the world in because you do not see the point of fighting.
Again: you need Prayer. I will Pray for you.
I am glad I never became a full blown intellectual. I have not descended into that kind of Materialistic Nihilism that Intellectuals are quite capable of doing.
Feelings that lead to action are facts as much as feelings that have led to action.
Feeling certain that he could reach the riches of India, Christopher Columbus navigated almost blind (well, with vision that would certain be called impaired by today’s standards of navigation) to the Americas and finally established a foothold on a continent where so many people from Europe found new lives, new hopes, and freedom from the kind of petty rivalries that made Yugoslavia a hellhole as late as the 1980’s.
We act on our feelings, and later say, with full conviction, like Sarek: “It seemed like the logical thing to do.”
After all, Rational is best.
Or does Faith rise above Reason?
Only if people like you make it so.
The legal-technical world is our best chance of a fact-finding mission to determine whether or not fraud occurred on a wide enough basis to affect the election. We have no other system in place that can do this task with any accuracy.
If this system finds that fraud was widespread enough, it will correct the count. If it finds that fraud occurred but did not alter the result, the count will remain. This system is our only existing avenue for redress for fraud. Anecdotes and howling may be fun, but they get us nowhere.
If people such as you continue to cry “fraud” even if the system finds that the fraud didn’t alter the election, therein lies the cause of the danger that people will assume the system cannot work and is not worth their participation.
I cannot comprehend how you see danger to the world specifically from accuracy in this effort – that NOT crying wolf before seeing one will damage our democracy.
I will Pray for your Diseased & Degenerate Soul as Well, Bobby.
And your clearly Defective Mind.
May Life & God be more than rather than as Kind & Gracious & Generous to people they think are less Intellectually Advanced than they are as bobby b and Nullius in Verba are.
That is my Prayer for them both in this time when we should be preparing to give Thanks for the people in our lives, and to God for sending His Son to show use there is more to heaven and earth than can be encompassed by anyone’s Philosophy, most of all those of the Intellectuals.
With all due respect, I don’t understand what the fuck you are thinking when you say this. Can you please explain?
Have you looked on CNN recently? How about NYT, WaPo, NBC, ABC, Bloomberg, Chicago Sun Times, MSNBC, CBS, etc?
Are you under the mistaken impression that the mainstream media is taking any of the widespread credible allegations of voter fraud seriously? Do you think that the Fake News Media is portraying the allegations in an appropriate, balanced, reasonable light given the extent of credible evidence thus far made public? Do you realize that none of the mainstream Fake News Media outlets are even PRETENDING to actively investigate virtually any of the allegations or evidence?
Have you learned anything from how Roe v. Wade was decided (as your rightfully pointed out – it was basically a political compromise masquerading as a valid legal opinion)? Do you dispute that the Fake News Media is actively seeking to prevent Trump from succeeding in his lawful legal challenges to the outcome of the election? How can you expect any conservative to have trust in our election integrity after the Fake News Media is actively and explicitly seeking to make it impossible for Trump to succeed in his legal challenges?
And then there is Big Tech.
Do you really not remember how the Fake News Media actively sought and succeeded in undermining the legitimacy of the outcome of the 2016 election? How do you think the evidence of voter fraud in Nov 2020 stacks up against the evidence of the Russia Collusion Hoax in Nov 2016? Do you remember how the media portrayed the Nov 2016 election? Do you have any idea of the consequences inevitably produced – not by the poetic prose of Inverness Docksides Clown, but rather by ordinary Americans watched how the Fake News Media characterized the allegations & implications & evidence of Russian Collusion as compared to how ordinary Americans are watching how the Fake News Media is currently characterizing the allegations & implications & evidence of widespread credible allegations of voter fraud?
bobby b,
Are you being sarcastic? You really think that it is people who have suspicions of voter fraud who are causing the problems? Do you dispute that thousands of dead people voted and that nobody in the entire Fake News Media (except Tucker Carlson, Judicial Watch and a couple others) are calling for reforms to how voting registration rolls are maintained to ensure accuracy in future? And that’s just one of many examples.
Shlomo: One would think the last four years would have taught people that the media is not as all-powerful as you’re suggesting here. A story doesn’t disappear merely because the BBC doesn’t cover it. You are correct that the MSM isn’t taking these stories very seriously, but they can still have an impact if spread through alternate sources. (Call those sources samizdata, if you like.)
And yes, the impact you’re having is likely a bad one for your preferred causes. The only people who take these theories seriously are Trump fans. Convincing Trump fans that elections are hopeless and they might as well not vote? That’s unlikely to be good for the electoral future of Trumpism.
Most of your comment had to do with the media – with how this is all being presented to the gullible public. That has nothing to do with what I’m saying. I’m talking about the legal system conducting an evidentiary-based investigation of what actually happened on election day.
It’s certainly not an infallible system, but I’ve seen it work well many many times. Everyone shows up with their documents and their video records and their testimony and barfs their case up in front of the neutral fact-finder and then asks “what do you think?”
I’ve seen that system fail a time or two. (OJ?) But it’s rare that it fails – and we have nothing else anywhere near as good and accurate and reliable. I have a lot of faith in our legal system. Pols and media, not so much. But they’re not part of this particular equation.
So, if this process cancels enough fake votes, Trump wins. If the process is transparent and honest, people’s faith in “the system” is restored, life is good.
If this process cancels votes, but not enough to change the outcome, we’ve gone through our best process of investigation. At that point, if the process has been transparent and honest, continuing to cry “fraud” is not only pointless, it’s exactly what will harm the popular perception of our election process.
How the media and the pols handle public discussion of either conclusion is outside of my treatise here. I’m only speaking of how we sift evidence and determine what happened.
If we lose – and if we cannot point to some part of the process that clearly failed of its essential purpose – then we do our own cause the most good by accepting it and moving on. We don’t play Al Gore or Stacey Abrams. And we ramp up for 2024. Because if we just cry “fraud” in the face of it all, it’s only OUR voters that we’re going to discourage from voting in the future.
(And we work, in the meantime, to get rid of this mail-vote crap. I like the elections we set up for the Iraquis – in person, one day, inked fingers.)
((I think he called me an intellectual! I blush . . . )
As the parable of the Zen Buddhist Master says “We’ll see”.
I’m not convinced by the arguments from either Team Biden or Team Trump at the present time.
Also, a few more entries for the “Trump’s lawyers/lawsuits are really damn stupid” category, in addition to the ones above:
https://twitter.com/ByronTau/status/1327007461010788352 – Trump’s lawyers filed a Michigan lawsuit in a special D.C. federal court that only hears monetary claims against the federal government.
https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1326996227846787073 – Trump’s witnesses in Arizona, put on the stand to complain about their votes not being counted, actually have no information implying that their votes were not counted. (In the end, the lawyers reduced their case to asking for a hand recount of 191 disputed ballots. Biden currently leads Arizona by over 11,000.)
https://popular.info/p/why-trump-wont-concede – It seems like these lawsuits are being used as a fundraising tool, and the funds raised are used to pay campaign debts, not to actually pay the expenses of the legal challenges.
“What is dangerous about you is that you are not alone. People like you would not destroy the world. You would merely allow the people who will destroy the world in because you do not see the point of fighting.”
Of course I see the point in fighting! But to win, you need to form alliances with other people, most of who disagree with you. To get them to help you, you have to do deals, and promise to help them. And then you have to keep those promises.
So we could live in a world without rules and agreements, where every tiny gang fights for supremacy in a war without rules or limits or reason. They will lose – both because constant conflict destroys everything and makes everyone poor, and because they’ll lose to any bunch of gangs who manage to form an alliance.
Democracy is basically a deal where we will agree to submit without fighting to their rules when they win the election so long as they will agree to submit to our rules when we win. We agree limits on the rules we can impose on one another – so we have to abide by limits on what we can do to them, so they will limit what they do to us. And we agree on the rules for elections, so we both have a fair chance of winning power.
Democracy gives you the broadest possible alliance with which to crush your enemies. It gives you the best chance of winning policy fights and having everyone comply, and the best protection when you lose them. But following all the agreements and deals and promises involved in maintaining that alliance with people who disagree with you is hard. People who put feelings ahead of evidence don’t want to hear that, though. All they know is that they’re losing, it’s following the rules that lead to that outcome, so let’s throw out the rules! We’re fighting to win! If rules of evidence stop us winning, then ignore them! These rules are too hard, too complicated, too much effort. It’s the cry of an emotional toddler – “I want! Gimme!”
But without that alliance of people who only follow the rules because you do, if you won the Presidency that way it would be worthless. Because why should anyone obey you? They want something else. Following the rules doesn’t let them have it. So ignore the rules. Everything breaks down to warring gangs, fighting for survival in the hellscape ruins of civilisation, like the aftermath to Atlas Shrugged. You don’t win power by throwing away the rules, you win your own destruction.
To some degree, it’s what the Democrats are doing, and of course there is a possibility that they’ll take you down with them in the process. But the way to beat them is not to join them in the dismantling of law and order. Preserving law and order is ultimately more important than winning the Presidency.
So if you can operate within the system, and present evidence to show that the rules were broken and Trump really won, and so keep not only the Presidency but also a system in which holding the Presidency is worth a damn, then that’s fine. If it turns out there is no evidence, and you have to let Biden win to preserve the system in which you can maybe win next time, then you may have to live with that. But you should be fighting like mad to keep the system of constitutional democracy in place, which means fighting to preserve and enforce the deeply technical rules of the alliances. Perhaps feelings-based people are not best positioned for that fight?
We’ll see.
On the Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast, Charlie Cooke of National Review notes that if the voting in many states was allegedly rigged, how come the Republicans tended to do better in the Senate and House races than in the presidential ones? https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/mad-dogs-englishmen/episode-289-some-suggestions-for-biden/
My take is that while some of the counts look and sound fishy at first glance, if there was a systematic fraud one would expect this to show up in the Congressional results, and arguably, even more than in those for the WH. In fact, the GOP has had a pretty decent result overall – although the Senatorial races in Georgia, which are crucial, will be tight. It seems hard to square with the claim that this election was stolen. I’d want to see detailed allegations and evidence laid out in any lawsuits.
I find some of the conversations about this to be getting into serious conspiracy theorist terrain. There may well have been sharp practice – it is not as if it has not happened before – but certain features about this don’t quite fit the narrative. To repeat: if the result was “stolen”, why haven’t the GOP races in the Senate and House elections been worse?
NiV: Precisely. We don’t use democracy because it’s perfect. We use it because, as Churchill said, it’s the worst system except all the others.
I’ll also add one more famous quote – “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
Admins – I submitted two comments on Nov 12 right around this comment of mine on November 12, 2020 at 7:02 pm:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/no-joe-biden-is-not-president-elect/#comment-806443
Both of those two comments were a series of Twitter links with evidence of potential voter fraud. When I submitted those comments they were “under moderator review”. I just wanted to check in on status please. Thank you.
According to AP, right now Trump is behind in:
Wisconsin by 20,540 (99% reporting)
Arizona by 11,434 (99% reporting)
Georgia by 14,163 (99% reporting)
Pennsylvania by 60,057 (99% reporting)
Nevada by 35,453 (95% reporting)
The Dead have spoken, the election is over.
By one report, in Wisconsin I believe, over 9,000 dead voted.
This sort of scale of fraud (and everything else) takes a lot of organising, people have to get papers, take the risk of voting illegally (or know it not to be a serious risk), and all the machinations in marginal States all over the USA must surely leave a trail of discussions and money. Why is no one looking for anything that links them and where it points to?
@Mr Ed
This sort of scale of fraud (and everything else) takes a lot of organising
FWIW, I’m not sure that is true. If your state sends ballots out to everyone on the voter roll, and our politicians make sure that every effort to update and cleanse the voter rolls is prohibited, the actual act of voting isn’t all the difficult. I get a few extra ballots in the mail for someone else. I fill them in and send them in. All anonymously. No real risk. Rinse/repeat many times and you get a lot of fraud. The problem didn’t take place via a mass organization of getting voters to commit fraud, but rather maneuvers at the legislative and court level to make it easy for such fraud to be committed.
FWIW, all the protestations about fraud make me laugh a little, not because I disagree with them or think they are unjust, but rather the notion that one side or the other has some moral demand for a fair election. The truth is that if it had been tight the other way the reactions would have been exactly reversed. There was a time when people did care about this a little, but when you think that the very existence of America depends on one guy or the other winning, all ideas of fraud, fairness and legal rightness go out the window. All that matters is what can you do to leverage every circumstance to your advantage. For sure, you can dress it up in a “demand to do the right thing” but let’s not pretend that it comes from any true righteous indignation rather than raw partisanship.
Some remarks in the interests of our learning from each other, not quarrelling.
Bobby b is not naive about law – he has much experience. Part of that experience, I imagine, is knowing that a judge is not a computing machine, so the feel of the thing does matter. This may well lead to advantage for our side in some ways, but any judge will dislike a case that includes something really weak or sloppy – preparation matters. Some here have done sterling work finding a wide range of links (though of course there are many others). These points are bound to vary in their importance to the finished case, in their ability to be robustly confirmed or paralleled, etc., in their capacity to be understood better. They will also vary in their persuasive importance to people. Someone who has done commercial statistics research, like me, may see some statistical anomaly as powerful, another might care more about some deliberate act that is bizarre to account for save as fraud-facilitation, etc.
Historical fact: at Nuremberg in 1945-6, the UK judges did a better job than the US ones – it was they who broke Goering after he rather dominated the US cross-examination. They achieved this by immense preparation, which included hearing each others’ cases very critically. (For example, the main lawyer even had reserve documents to prove Goering was head of the Luftwaffe if he tried to deny it.) Knowing (on rational grounds) that someone is guilty can be both true and no substitute for careful preparation – as some of the US lawyers found. So while I suspect many of the ‘these Trump cases are ridiculous’ reports would, if we knew all, resemble other Trump-mocking stories we’ve heard over the years, I praise care and continued work.
While we can all think of judicial decisions that are ‘abortions’, we can expect the judges – precisely the ones we most hope from – to do due diligence and to try and think impartially about what scale and focussing of fraud occurred from the evidence. We surely know that legal-decision ‘abortions’ (just like voter fraud) tend to help our enemies. Our best hope is honest judges. I agree with bobby b that it will require competent legal presentation – there cannot be too much of that.
Like the judges, we should all desire the true outcome – what the election would look like if all fraud were stripped away. To think (as I currently do) that it would look like Trump is logically to anticipate that a good case should be doable given enough time. (I’ll let bobby b comment on whether he thinks it could be normal lawyering in this situation for any of the current cases to be holding actions to gain injunctions or delays while more detailed ones are developed.)
I have certainly criticised some of the objections above, and see some as very weak. However even mere Niall Kilmartin, occasional debater, welcomes the chance to test my views now, not in some hostile forum with one minute to address the wokster’s cheap point, let alone a fairer point from a fairer debater whose question needs a clear answer. Therefore I would rather hear such points now. I hope the actual legal team is thinking good and hard and critically. Though I have been very critical of e.g. some of Alsadius’ arguments (and could have written much more than the long comment I did if I did not have a day job 🙂 ), I will not ask him to apologise for making them because I find even a weak counter-argument can show where thought or explanation is needed in mine. And of course, some are less weak than others.
HTH. For both law and persuasion, the time to find where to explain more, where to research more, and where less is more in the choice of which points to hit, is here and now, not e.g. two weeks hence during some rare unexpected chance to discuss with a wider audience.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/alan-dershowitz-predicts-trump-will-win-pennsylvania-lawsuit
I like my legal experts to have known the feeling of literally having their clients’ lives in their hands.
If you don’t have skin in the game …
As I understand the responsive allegations I’ve seen:
– There were many contested ballots submitted with a vote marked only for the presidential race.
– If any fraud was committed past the point of physical ballot submission – in the tallying process, computer mischief, thumb drive tampering, etc – the only change/addition would be the one vote for the presidential election.
– Someone egaged in retail-level fraud – i.e., submitting one or two or five fake ballots – would likely vote the entire ballot, while someone engaging in wholesale-level fraud would be more likely to focus on one race. Ballots differ from locality to locality – from neighborhood to neighborhood, since local races are up for election – and the job of taking all of those differences into account while adding thousands of votes would be hard.
So, I don’t know that this argument gains anything.
Bobby b, maybe not, but I cannot help ask why one set of votes appear to have gone pretty well for the GOP, and the other not. It seems almost too neat for me.
Frankly, i don’t see the point of discussing (at length) evidence of fraud, or lack thereof, when not all the evidence has been presented to us yet.
I stated my position: Trump looked (to me) a better candidate after 4 years in office, Biden looked worse than Hitlery. Therefore, either there has been more fraud than in 2016; or else American voters do not see things the way i do, which would be a catastrophe for the US, the free world, and the would-be-free world.
When more evidence becomes available, i might decide that the latter is the case.
There are red flags.
Johnathan:
Actually, that looks to me like another red flag. That is based on my perception of Trump being (justifiably) much more popular than the Republican party.
Much depends on the pattern of voting, of course.
If there are fewer votes for Trump than for Republicans down-ballot, then that would strongly suggest that my perception is wrong. It could still be due to fraud, but it seems unlikely.
If otoh there are more votes for Biden than for Democrats down-ballot, then see bobby b’s reply.
Over and above bobby b’s good point (November 14, 2020 at 3:21 am) about the mere physical labour of spoofing many votes in a short time and the effect on down-ballot races, we should notice that boundaries constrict voter fraud effects. All boundaries constrain voter fraud to within them, congressional boundaries more than state ones.
The Dems would like to mix federal and national to suit them.
– Four years ago, when Trump asked for voter roll data, California and others made it very clear they intended to handle their voter laws, rolls, processes, etc., without outside supervision.
– However they would like their votes not to determine only California’s electoral college votes. They want these votes merged unsupervised into a single national pot in which one late harvested Californian vote equals one Texan in-person vote.
This is because they know, just as the founders did, that boundaries confine fraud. Biden’s claim to have reversed Trump’s Wednesday morning lead rests on votes from a hand-count of Democrat inner cities. The Dems would love to have these high-turnout high-Biden-ratio votes also apply to the congressional races in neighbouring areas – but they cannot export them and do not elsewhere have the kind of cover that a long-standing Chicago-style Democrat inner-city machine gives them to dial up votes.
That not all senators are re-elected in a given year also creates geographical constraints, but that needs a comment in itself (which I will let whoever wishes write).
That is based on my perception of Trump being (justifiably) much more popular than the Republican party.
Popularity goes from very hot to very cold, via lukewarm. If you’re a rural Pennsylvanian Trump supporter eager to vote for Trump, the odds are that you’ll probably also vote for the middle of the road GOP candidate for Congress, because the alternative is some damn commie. Whereas if you’re a suburban housewife fed up with Trump’s boorishness, you might vote for Biden, but also vote for the polite milquetoast GOP candidate for Congress in your district.
A lukewarm vote counts as a vote just as much as a red hot one.
In support of my thesis that there’s a cadre of “WE WANT BLAND !” voters in the US, I offer Susan Collins. The Donald lost Maine by 76,000 votes, and by 9.4%. Senator Collins won by 72,000 votes and 8.9%. And if there is a Sultan of Bland, it’s Collins.
And well done the polls – they had Collins running about 6% behind.
Yeah, my thesis here is basically the same as Lee’s. Trump is more popular in terms of enthusiasm – more people will hold a Trump boat parade in Texas than a Ted Cruz boat parade. But he’s more popular in a way that doesn’t translate into more votes. In the ways he’s less popular, he actually sheds votes. Most polls show about 5% of the Republican party still being #NeverTrump – our voice is way louder than that in the media, on Twitter, etc., because big parts of the old Bush-era Who’s Who are in that 5%. But even correcting for that, there could easily be a couple million voters nationwide who’d have voted to re-elect Pence if Trump had died in his first term, but who wouldn’t vote for Trump.
The question is how many non-Republicans Trump picks up – people who usually don’t vote, the low-education white working class, and so on. And specifically, how many of them *do* back Trump, but *don’t* back GOP Congressional candidates. I know this matches my priors, so don’t take it as holy writ, but it seems to me that you’d expect Trump to poll below most GOP Congressional candidates.
Here are links to comments I have made on recent Samizdata threads that contain evidence of potential voter fraud. Most of these comments contain multiple links and include the text from the link quoted in the comment so you do not need to click on each link to know what it’s about.
16 links:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/no-joe-biden-is-not-president-elect/#comment-806361
16 links:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/no-joe-biden-is-not-president-elect/#comment-806364
19 links:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/no-joe-biden-is-not-president-elect/#comment-806440
1 link:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/no-joe-biden-is-not-president-elect/#comment-806443
18 links:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/no-joe-biden-is-not-president-elect/#comment-806447
1 link:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/no-joe-biden-is-not-president-elect/#comment-806284
7 links:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/the-bbc-used-to-at-least-pretend-to-be-impartial/#comment-806010
6 links:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/by-censoring-the-hunter-biden-story-the-msm-has-destroyed-its-ability-to-convince-americans-there-was-no-vote-fraud/#comment-806072
21 links:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/by-censoring-the-hunter-biden-story-the-msm-has-destroyed-its-ability-to-convince-americans-there-was-no-vote-fraud/#comment-806091
6 links (about lists of Trump supporters)
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/by-censoring-the-hunter-biden-story-the-msm-has-destroyed-its-ability-to-convince-americans-there-was-no-vote-fraud/#comment-806121
“In the Georgia election, 800 ballots were marked only for President Trump, and 96,800 were marked only for Joe Biden.”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/exclusive-georgia-difference-president-ballots-president-trump-biden-statistically-impossible-indicating-obvious-election-fraud/
(Biden currently leads in Georgia by about 15,000 votes.)
Bobby: Yeah, I criticized that one above. It’s a terrible methodology – it isn’t actually counting blank ballots. It’s counting the difference in ballots.
Let’s say you run a simple election, and get 105 voters.
45 Trump/Perdue
45 Biden/Ossoff
5 Trump-only
5 Biden-only
5 Biden/Perdue (#NeverTrump)
Using this method, you’ll see 50 Trump ballots, and 50 Perdue ballots, for a gap of zero. You’ll also see 55 Biden ballots, and 45 Ossoff ballots, for a gap of ten. The Bernoulli trial will show that as less than a 0.1% chance, and make you think something is terribly wrong. But it’s not – you just used the wrong methodology and the wrong tool. (The actual odds, if you look at the actual blank ballots, is just shy of 25% – 50/50 splits are pretty common when you’re only dealing with ten blanks).
Do their math in Maine. There were something like negative 150,000 Trump-only ballots using this methodology.
But I’m all for a recount, to make people believe the numbers. I just hope you’ll actually believe it.
Here’s my problem: If there was balloting fraud, it’s a done deal.
It’s like filling up a barrel with liquors from people running up with full cups. You decide at the door if the person is a proper person, then you let them dump their cup in. You might later conclude that the person shouldn’t have been allowed in. You don’t know what was in their cup. How do you fix it beyond punishing that person after the fact?
A recount is merely going to tell you that there are 23.26 gallons of vodka, 11.16 gals of rum, etc., in that 55-gal drum. It doesn’t give you information sufficient to find that person’s contribution and remove it. It doesn’t tell you which portion of that vodka got there inappropriately.
(The one instance where a recount matters in when the computers are jigged and there are votes tabulated with no corresponding paper ballot. That may take some votes out. But in this era of mail-voting, I suspect the bulk of improper votes have been made on paper. They made it too easy not to do it that way.)
We got outsmarted and outflanked in the preparation for the election. Statistical data isn’t going to invalidate an election. There aren’t enough previously-segregated ballots that could be pulled out to make a difference, I don’t think.
There have been rare instances where a judge has ordered an election re-done. Very rare. And I can’t see our current legal system making such a leap for a presidential election, especially on statistical conclusions. (Most judges are as innumerate as I am. That’s quite innumerate.)
So, I disagree with you on most of your points, but end up with you on your final one – that this goes nowhere. And the more outraged we are now, the louder we proclaim that voting no longer matters in a rigged system, the fewer R voters turn up in 2022, or even in January in Georgia when they’ll be sorely needed.
(If Georgia’s presidential vote doesn’t match the will of the Georgia voters, it’s Georgia’s problem to fix. Presumably, if more Georgia voters think there was fraud than those who don’t, they’ll address this, because they’re the ones most damaged by this. Federal law can address some equal protection issues in voting, but voting law is mostly state law.)
Yeah, except that exit polls show that women voted in larger numbers for Trump than they did in 2016.
But Trump also lost Maine in 2016, and Collins also won Maine in 2014.
That Maine wants “bland”, doesn’t mean that the US as a whole wants “bland”.
The fact is, Trump is not “bland” because he is speaking truth to power: the power of the American ruling class.
Speaking for myself: I don’t want bland. I want freedom from the power of the ruling class.
Admins – I submitted about 5 hours ago a comment that contained a series of about 10 links to Samizdata comments of mine – each of which contains evidence (usually many links per comment) of potential voter fraud. Purpose was as a convenient reference comment for anyone who would like to explore a LOT of evidence from one central point. Looks like it’s still in moderator review (I know it has not been very long, sorry to pester) but just wanted to check on status please before people frequent this thread less. Thank you
Shlomo: since you are still here, i’d like to ask what you mean by “weak minds” and “mental weakness”.
I want to know, because your concept might have a lot of overlap with my concept* of political insanity; which i see as pervasive today.
* quite clearly defined, if i may say so myself.
Snorri – I don’t see your definition of political insanity in this thread – do you have a link?
I’d describe weak minds basically as: more tunnel vision, less able to discern patterns or connect dots that are outside their mental models, less sensitive to matters of principle, less able to discern differences between their own thoughts & feelings, and less able to discern differences between what ought to be and what is. It’s obviously a matter of degree.
I think the weaker one’s mind is the more likely he is a Leftist and also the more likely he is unquestionably accepts the narrative of the Fake News Media and/or fashionable Zeitgeist.
How does this compare to your “political insanity”?
Thank you Shlomo for your prompt reply.
My definition of political insanity came into focus only after your comments on mental weakness, so it was all in my own mind until i wrote this comment 🙂
My definition has 3 components:
* delusional insanity, such as believing your own (or own side) propaganda;
* a mild form of autism: being unable to see things from other people’s point of view;
* the hypothalamus ruling over the cerebral cortex: strong emotions prevailing over rational considerations of logical consistency and empirical evidence.
Delusional insanity seems to me the most important symptom. If you have that, not only are you politically insane, but also unable to distinguish between the sane and the insane.
It seems to me that there is a substantial overlap between your definition and mine.
@Snorri – I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask “Why would anyone vote for a clearly senile, low-energy, corrupt sexual degenerate like Joe Biden, especially with Kommie Harris in toe and likely to succeed him via the 25th amendment before too long?“.
That people did, in their millions (ignoring the question of whether he was pushed over the top by fair means or foul) is hard to deny, so Trump supporters are left with two possible conclusions. Either their fellow countrymen really are retards, Biden stole the vote or a combination of the two. I certainly doubt that those with Trump Derangement Syndrome in 2020 were voting Trump in any significant numbers in 2016.
If Trump does admit defeat and concede (even if it is only because he cannot prove the electoral fraud to the degree necessary to win a court case), then the US will have to seriously start asking themselves why they have been goaded into selecting this senile idiot and his incompetent Commie running mate to the highest elected office in the land.
To be honest, I’m completely at a loss as to why and my only reason for preferring Trump is that he’s less bad than the other lot and upsets the people that need to be upset (Marxists and the corrupt denizens of the Deep State)
Exactly!
Well … no, not exactly. Their fellow countrymen are not retards but politically insane. See above.
I’ll add that some Trump supporters are also politically insane, according to the above definition. But you know about stopped clocks.
I’d go for a combination of the two.
@John,
As Shlomo said, weak minds. A lot of people have weak minds, furthermore their minds are not strengthened by the educational system and the media.
Conversely, it takes a very strong mind to resist the incessant brainwashing from academia and media 24/7. In fact, you could also be optimistic and realise that half of the population rejected this brainwashing – they have strong minds
Of course, personal painful experience tends to strengthen the mind tremendously, especially when failed ideologies prove to be an utter disappointment. The only regret is that it took personal painful experience for a lot of these people when a cursory study of history would have told them the same thing
But people are just not willing to relinquish their beliefs until they see the impending edge of the cliff.
Alsadius (November 14, 2020 at 7:17 pm), what Bobby’s linked article says is that a judge could see the discrepancy as cause for a case – for ordering a recount, say. The judge (if they had not already found other anomalies enough to make the point moot) should ask to be shown not merely that the numbers for the two candidates were implausibly distinct from each other but also that that divergence itself diverged from the norm of prior votes. If both stigmata prove present (or a recount is caused for other reasons), a full recount should indeed record president-only ballots, ticket-splitting ballots and much else, to get detailed data for further statistical analysis.
BTW your particular example eliminates one discrepancy by another: to get your result, you make ticket-splitting an exclusively Republican phenomenon. I’d argue voting Republican but not Trump was less likely now that in 2016. Whether Biden now would prompt more or less ticket-splitting that Hillary then is debatable, but there are obvious reasons for him to cause some.
For myself, I notice (amongst other things) that 18 of the 19 US counties that chose every presidential winner since 1980 went for President Trump this year (Washington state’s Clallam County is the sole exception). No judge will award a recount because of that – but it is, in the strict sense of the word, anomalous.
Snorri, Shlomo and others, I advise having more categories for those who genuinely voted for Biden than just ‘insane’, ‘retards’, etc. (BTW, this thread is mostly about those who did not genuinely vote for him, being dead, out-of-state, illegal, the maiden-name and/or married-name vote of either an innocent unaware woman who genuinely voted in her other name or the intentional second vote of a woman who was anything but innocent, etc., etc.)
To help, consider the UK. A very large majority here think Biden will occupy the white house peacefully in January, because the beeb and others have told them so, but only the orangemanbad crowd (large but no majority) believe that is shocking and wrong for Trump to fight it in the courts, despite the beeb and others telling them it’s a scandal and yet another proof of his unspeakable evil. “The Democrats would be doing the same thing if it had gone the other way” is a common take.
These people are not insane retards. They combine some common sense with immense ignorance of much about the USA – and ignorance of their ignorance.
Obviously, your US voters have not such a good excuse for knowing little about the US but those who spend little time watching politics (unlike us) can be ignorant of much – and can reason from what they know, uncorrected by what they don’t. Others (I know some) can dislike cancel culture, can even describe many in their set as ‘hysterical’ about Trump, while yet being influenced by ideas they absorbed from that set long before seeing them as having gone hysterical. Someone who accepted a decade ago that Republican voter suppression was a real issue, and voter fraud an excuse those who did it deployed, doesn’t necessarily lose, or even review, that embedded idea just because they see clearly today that some of their same friends from back then are now saying crazy things about Trump. Both their feelings and their arguments can let them think there is a residuum of sane criticism that makes depressing Biden the lesser evil. They do not appreciate how their crazy circle protects that residuum from being challenged. Many don’t realise how little they know despite knowing some in their bubble are crazy.
Yet others, like my Seattle friend who is still talking to me, do try not to be in a bubble. Her depressed mental state reminds me a bit of some on our side in 2016 who refused to vote for Trump despite knowing what Hillary was.
So it’s all just a bit more complicated than every single Biden voter being an insane retard (or indeed not one single Trump voter anywhere not being 🙂 ).
Niall:
First, ‘retard’ is John Galt’s term, not mine. I explicitly rejected it. I have met several American academics who were insane*, but certainly no retards. We could call them idiotes savantes.
* though not as insane then as they seem to be now.
Second, let me remind you that i do believe that we are all insane to some extent.
That is because i have observed how much a change of diet has reduced my own insanity.
It is also because i’d feel gaslighted if i could not explain certain behaviors by insanity, and i am not talking only about politics.
Third, it is exactly because i cannot believe that there are so many Americans that are so insane, that i infer that the number of Hillary voters switching to Trump must have been larger than the number going the opposite way. The largest insanity does not consist in remaining a Democrat voter: it consists in becoming one.
In retrospect, should have been ‘greatest’ rather than ‘largest’.
And sure enough, turning to Instapundit, i found that the greatest insanity happens to be located in just 4 cities: Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.
What a coincidence!
Niall: If a detailed analysis of ballots shows it isn’t due to ticket-splitting, then a deeper dive could be warranted. But simply subtracting one from the other is an extremely weak argument.
And yes, my example was simplified. But one Trump-Ossoff plus one Biden-Perdue looks the same in the totals as two straight ticket votes, so I went with the net to keep it simple. I think it quite plausible that there’s a lot more Republicans for Biden than Democrats for Trump, because the former are an identifiable group, and the latter doesn’t seem to be a thing(most have gone to fully being Republicans, from what I’ve seen).
Snorri: Remember that vote shifts aren’t the only consideration. Four years is a goodly period of time. About ten million people died in those four years, give or take, and most of them were old. Old people vote frequently, and lean towards Trump. So if we assume 80% turnout among that cohort, and a 60/40 Trump split, that’s about 1,600,000 net votes Trump lost just from mortality. Similarly, the cohort that’s 18-22 now(about 17M strong) is heavily left wing, and couldn’t vote in 2016. Say 40% turnout there, and a 70/30 Dem split, and Biden picked up a net of about 2,700,000 votes. The total is about 4.3 million, simply from age shifts in the populace, not counting things like increased turnout or immigrants gaining citizenship. So if four million voters switched from Clinton to Trump, then Trump would still have lost ground on net.
Obviously, people do move to the right over time, which is why the hippie kids of the 60s are mostly backing Trump now. So some Clinton>Trump shift is to be expected. But my point is that you need a continuous flow of it, to make up for births and deaths moving the population to the left. If Trump was less effective at causing those shifts than other Republicans, he could fall behind, even if he was making converts on net.
Niall,
Well, I did not use the term “insane” or “retard” but I did use the term “weak minds”. I did not claim that people with weak minds is the only category of people who voted for Biden – and any such insinuation you/others may have perceived was not intended on my part.
I think there are definitely people with strong minds who voted for Biden and/or are Leftists and/or believe in the Fake News Media narrative.
But I think that people with weak minds (as opposed to strong minds) are more LIKELY to be Leftist and are more likely to believe in the Narrative of the Fake News Media/fashionable Zeitgeist.
And just to reiterate – having a weak mind is not AT ALL the same thing as intelligence – in fact, I do not even think strength of mind and intelligence are correlated. A lot of people have strong minds and are dumb as a rock. A lot of people have weak minds and are very intelligent (I know a lot of these folks in NYC).
Very true. There are many reasons why tens of millions of Americans voted for Biden – some “good” reasons, some “bad” reasons, some emotional reasons, and some rational reasons. It’s complicated and even one person’s vote is often driven by a series of factors. But, in my opinion, some minds really are WEAK and weak minds are more likely to believe in Fake News Narrative and Leftism and vote accordingly.
Obviously a major aspect of the discussion in this comment thread is directly or indirectly about
“How much evidence of potential voter fraud is there”
I do suspect that much of the disagreement in this thread over this question results in part from different levels of exposure to the actual evidence of potential voter fraud.
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/no-joe-biden-is-not-president-elect/#comment-806519
This link serves as a kind of table of contents or convenient reference point for evidence of potential voter fraud. That comment links to comments that contain “dumps of links” documenting evidence of potential voter fraud. Obviously, it’s no exhaustive, but there are many dozens of links so it’s a useful starting point.
Alsadius: I am sorry, but you are just bullshitting.
In the technical sense.
I actually believe everything I’ve said above(though the examples are simplified hypotheticals, of course, not literal truth).
What have I said that you think is bullshit?
Alsadius: thank your for the prompt reply.
By the Frankfurt definition, if you believe what you say, you are not bullshitting. (As i understand.)
But by my definition, if you say something w/o bothering to look at the evidence (assuming it is an empirical statement), then you are bullshitting even if you believe it.
Now, where is the evidence for your statements?
–I have given a link to an article stating that Biden under-performed Clinton in “every major metro area” except for the 4 which i mentioned. Can you cogently argue that the demographic shifts that you mention only happened in those 4 metro areas?
–Can you mention any pundit who shifted from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020, or neutral in 2020? I can think only of Ann Coulter. By contrast, i can think of several who shifted the other way.
Why do you think that the general public shifted the opposite way from pundits?
–Earlier on, WRT Benford’s Law, you stated (correctly) that
Yet, it seems that results do follow Benford’s Law — except in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. And then, only for Biden: results for Trump follow Benford’s Law even there.
How do you explain that?
(Although i think that this should have been compared to results in 2016.)
Regarding the 4 metro area thing, I frankly didn’t believe it. But it didn’t have a link to any data sources, so I didn’t dig into it.
But since you’re pressing me, I dug. 2016 results, 2020 results, both of which are at the county level.
First off, the four you listed.
Milwaukee: Clinton 66.4%, Biden 69.1%
Detroit: Clinton 66.8%, Biden 68.1%
Atlanta: Clinton 69.2%, Biden 72.6%
Philadelphia: Clinton 82.4%, Biden 81.3% (so Biden underperformed.)
Here’s some other ones I found where Biden beat Clinton. I didn’t check every metro area in the country, just random ones ad-hoc. I’ve also skipped swing states, just to prove a point.
Buffalo: Clinton 50.1%, Biden 51.8%
Baltimore: Clinton 85.4%, Biden 87.8%
Charleston: Clinton 50.6%, Biden 55.5%
Birmingham: Clinton 52.2%, Biden 55.7%
Minneapolis: Clinton 63.8%, Biden 70.7%
Indianapolis: Clinton 58.9%, Biden 63.3%
St. Louis: Clinton 79.7%, Biden 82.3%
Kansas City (MO): Clinton 55.7%, Biden 59.9%
Oklahoma City: Clinton 41.2%, Biden 48.1% (I think this is the biggest city Trump won)
Denver: Clinton 75.2%, Biden 79.6%
Albuquerque: Clinton 52.2%, Biden 60.9%
Seattle: Clinton 72.1%, Biden 75.5%
Portland (OR): Clinton 76.0%, Biden 79.2%
San Diego: Clinton 56.1%, Biden 60.2%
Probably 2/3 of the metro areas I thought to check, in non-swing states, Biden overperformed. He dropped in a few of the biggies (NYC, LA, Chicago), but more often than not he did a few points better. This is well in line with the four metro areas you cited above. Whoever started passing around that factoid clearly didn’t bother to actually check their stats, and decided to run with a poorly-researched conspiracy theory instead.
Regarding Benford’s law, it depends heavily on the size of the precinct when you look at single-city data. Sometimes it can just get a Benford-like distribution by coincidence – for example, in Miami-Dade, I’d bet Blankenship didn’t get more than four votes in any precinct, judging by that data. And seriously, if you’re including Chicago in this, you’re not worrying about vote-rigging any more. Yes, Chicago was famously rigged in 1960. But in 1960, Illinois was a key swing state. In 2020, they’re more likely to rig it for the vote on the progressive income tax than anything Presidential, because the results are so obvious.
Looking at the Pittsburgh data, Biden got 428,876 votes, and Trump got 282,170. That’s an average of 324 and 213 per precinct, respectively. Biden is way over on 2’s and 3s, Trump is way over on 2’s. Which is exactly what you’d expect if Biden got a lot of precincts with 200-399 votes, and very few with less than 100. And given that all precincts are about the same size, and his average was 324 per precinct, it’s pretty obvious that he won’t obey Benford. Likewise, Trump got a lot in the 200s, a lot in the 100s(but Benford predicts a lot), and a smattering with under 100 to fill out the high digits. Again, watch that Matt Parker video I linked above if you want to understand this in some detail – he digs into the Chicago stats quite thoroughly.
FWIW
Manhattan: Biden 84.5%, 377,605 Clinton 87.2% 515,481
Brooklyn: Biden 74.1% 514,133 Clinton 79.7% 595,086
Queens: Biden 69.0% 412,313 Clinton 75.5% 473,389
Chicago: Biden 74.3% 1,682,455 Clinton 74.4% 1,528,582
San Francisco: Biden 85.3% 375,630 Clinton 85.5% 312,443
Miami-Dade: Biden 53.3% 617,647 Clinton 63.7% 623,006
Cleveland: Biden 66.6% 402,315 Clinton 65.8% 383,974
Los Angeles: Biden 71.1% 2,980,478 Clinton 71.4% 1,893,770
Alsadius – I do not think your data means what you think it means. A lot of those are not major metropolitan areas and a lot of them have been trending blue, so one would expect Biden to outperform Clinton in many of those cities, anyway. Although I do not think that this kind of comparison is particularly relevant to proving or disproving voter fraud, in any case.
Also your explanation as to why it’s not noteworthy/peculiar that Biden’s results violate of Benford’s Law… did not make much sense to me.
Most importantly, however, is that you have not addressed the vast majority of the evidence of voter fraud that is available through this comment:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/no-joe-biden-is-not-president-elect/#comment-806519
There is far too much evidence for to summarize it, but AFAIK you have not addressed hardly any of the evidence. And if even just 33% of the evidence linked through that comment is true…
Yes, I specifically mentioned five of those eight. I skipped Miami-Dade and Cleveland because they were in swing states, and I was trying to show that it wasn’t just a swing state thing(since I doubt you’d take “Oh, Biden also gained in Phoenix and Miami!” as a counterargument). But yes, you’re correct.
Of the 26 we’ve mentioned so far, nine (Philadelphia plus the eight you just listed) had Biden losing support, and seventeen had Biden gaining support. That seems to match my “about two-thirds” pretty well. It’s not universal, it’s just common enough that Biden gaining ground in Detroit, Atlanta, and Milwaukee isn’t a huge surprise.
As for relative size, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_counties_in_the_United_States is relevant here, since it’s county-level data we’re comparing. The three that were originally listed, where Biden gained votes, were Wayne County(Detroit) at #19 in the country, Fulton County(Atlanta) at #43, and Milwaukee County at #53.
So let’s look at the ones we’ve pulled numbers for, and where they are on the list. I’ll also look up all the rest of the top ten, just to fill out the list a little.
Biden gained compared to Clinton:
Houston (#3): Clinton 54.2%, Biden 55.8%
Phoenix (#4): Clinton 45.7%, Biden 50.3%
San Diego: #5
Orange County(#6): Clinton 51.0%, Biden 53.5%
Dallas(#8): Clinton 61.1%, Biden 64.9%
Riverside(#10): Clinton 49.6%, Biden 53.3%
Seattle: #12
Detroit: #19
Minneapolis: #32
Atlanta: #43
Indianapolis: #51
Milwaukee: #53
Buffalo: #59
Portland (OR): #77
Oklahoma City: #80
Denver: #90
Kansas City (MO): #96
Albuquerque: #99
St. Louis: Not in top 100 (St. Louis County is, but my stats were for the city, which isn’t part of the county)
Baltimore: Not in top 100 (Baltimore County is, but my stats were for the city, which isn’t part of the county)
Charleston: Not in top 100
Birmingham: Not in top 100
Biden lost compared to Clinton:
Los Angeles: #1
Chicago: #2
Miami-Dade: #7
Brooklyn: #9
Queens: #11
Manhattan: #21
Philadelphia: #23
Cleveland: #35
San Francisco: #64
So Biden gained ground in six of the ten biggest counties, and lost ground in four. I’ve also bolded the four cities that you originally flagged as a sign of fraud. I don’t see any pattern here that’s within a mile of showing fraud. It looks like it’s just the fact that Biden did a bit better than Clinton, plus some random noise. The original claim, i.e. “Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia”, is simply not true.
Alsadius: I certainly cannot claim that you have been bullshitting today, but i won’t go as far as saying that you have demolished the arguments about the ‘anomalous’ 4 cities and Benford’s Law 🙂
WRT the 4 anomalous cities: if you find that one of them is not as claimed in the article (Biden lost votes compared to Clinton), then that suggests that looking at metro areas, rather than counties, is necessary to observe the pattern described in the article. After all, a pollster would not ruin his reputation by bullshitting about things that can easily be checked.
WRT Benford’s Law: I agree that the argument would be more convincing if the cities where the discrepancies between the data and B.’s Law were observed, were the same as the 4 cities where Biden improved on Clinton. But only Milwaukee is in both lists.
All the same, your claim that Benford’s Law does not apply would be much stronger if you could show that
* numbers of voters/precinct do not span more than one order of magnitude in those 3 cities: you claim this, but where is the data?
* in the 2016 election, Benford’s Law was not observed either, in those cities.
But let me watch the YouTube video to which you linked.
Alsadius,
As I said, I do not think that this kind of comparison is particularly relevant to proving or disproving voter fraud, in any case.
Also your explanation as to why it’s not noteworthy/peculiar that Biden’s results violate of Benford’s Law… did not make much sense to me.
Most importantly, however, is that you have not addressed the vast majority of the evidence of voter fraud that is available through this comment:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/no-joe-biden-is-not-president-elect/#comment-806519
OK, the video suggested by Alsadius does show that, in Chicago, Benford’s Law should not apply — to Biden, but should apply to Trump.
I’d have been happier if he had looked at Milwaukee. Maybe i’ll do it myself sometime.
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2020/11/unraveling-the-deep-state-coup.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ov26QVj5dk
Snorri: Depends who he’s trying to preserve his reputation with. If he’s trying to gain reputation with Trump diehards, this is exactly what he would say. It’s also worth noting that a lot of places took days to count votes. It’s possible that there was a brief moment in time where this was true. But it’s not true now, with nearly all of the votes counted.
Shlomo: I’ll give the basic version. Anything between 1000 and 1999 has a first digit of 1. Anything between 9000 and 9999 has a first digit of 9. But you need to double 1000 to get past 1999, while you only need to add 11% to get from 9000 to being past 9999. Doubling is a lot more work than adding 11%. However, this only matters if the underlying values change in a multiplication sort of way, and if it covers a wide range of values. Cities grow because some people want to be in bigger cities(if only for the jobs), which means that it feeds on itself. Thus, the first digit of city sizes should probably follow Benford’s Law. But it doesn’t work for everything. Let’s say I give you four dollars, and then double it if you win a coin flip. You’d expect half the values to start with four and half with eight, because there are no other options. Even though it’s multiplication, it covers too narrow a range for Benford to kick in. You need a large range – as a rule of thumb, at least a few orders of magnitude.
There simply isn’t that wide a range with precinct sizes. They’re all designed to be roughly the same size. They might cover one order of magnitude, in a city, but usually even less than that. So if all the precincts have ten voters(to pick a simple example), you’d expect maybe seven to vote, and you’ll see a lot of 5/2 and 4/3 splits. 6/1 splits will be rare, so you’ll see very few 1s. Benford says they should be over 30% of the total, but you’ll see them maybe 5% of the time. Because Benford doesn’t apply here – it’s too small a range.
Basically, Benford’s Law doesn’t prove fraud. It just says “Something is happening here than can’t be explained by numbers spread in a multiplicative way over a large range”. That something can be fraud, but more often it’s that the underlying data set just doesn’t work that way. Roll a normal six-sided die, and the results won’t match Benford at all – you’ll get too few 1s, about the right number of 2s, too many 3-6s, and no 7-9s at all. But the die isn’t fraudulent, it’s just not a Benford-type data set.
As for your links, I’ve tried to engage with the links ad hoc as you posted them, but that’s a lot to digest at once. Could you perhaps pick out a couple that you think are strong, and I’ll look at those? (Your Youtube link in your last comment has been taken down for copyright reasons, FYI.)
Shlomo: rest assured that the arguments that i made against Alsadius, do not in any way imply that i ignore other arguments.
Those that you made on November 14, 2020 at 5:38 pm, however, are to numerous to evaluate. I am planning to wait until Trump’s side select the strongest factual arguments they can make, and look at those more carefully.
Keeping always in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Alsadius:
And may i ask, how many Trump “diehards” have you met personally?
Alsadius,
I understand that you are saying that violations of Benford’s Law is more meaningful the more orders of magnitude spanned by the underlying data. This obviously makes sense.
1. But violation of Benford’s Law does not “prove” voter fraud – it just indicates anomalies in the data and indicates higher likelihood of data manipulation. While you are right that the data you point to does not prove voter fraud, it is important to note that violations of Benford’s Law never do prove voter fraud.
2. And yes, you are right that this specific case of precincts’ vote tallies violating Benford’s Law is not AS PERSUASIVE as a case in which the violation is based on data that spans multiple orders of magnitude. You should realize that if there is widespread voter fraud across those precincts, then we should not expect the voter fraud to increase vote tallies 200% or 400% or 800%. The underlying data is the underlying data – just because it does not span multiple orders of magnitude does not mean that there can be no indication of data manipulation or no meaningful violation of Benford’s Law. And, indeed, what we observe even in that specific case you point to is the EXTENT of the violation of Benford’s Law we can realistically expect to observe in the case of significant and widespread voter fraud.
3. Your assessment of the violation of Benford’s Law is wrong because you are holding the underlying data that does not span multiple orders of magnitude to the same standards that would apply to data that do span multiple orders of magnitude. The data you are working with are more likely to violate Benford’s Law in the absence of data manipulation or voter fraud, which lowers the value of violation of Benford’s Law, but does not eliminate the value ov iolation of Benford’s Law. And, indeed, what we observe even in that specific case you point to is the EXTENT of the violation of Benford’s Law we can realistically expect to observe in the case of significant and widespread voter fraud within those precincts.
Here is another example indicating data manipulation and violation of Benford’s Law – PA’s 67 counties:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ald3w9FBmA
Meant to say: the data you are working with are more likely to violate Benford’s Law in the absence of data manipulation or voter fraud, which lowers the indicative value of data manipulation shown by violation of Benford’s Law, but does not eliminate the indicative value of data manipulation shown by violation of Benford’s Law. What we see in the data is in accordance with a case of widespread and significant voter fraud, but does not prove said voter fraud. Violation of Benford’s Law NEVER proves voter fraud, though. Your assessment of the violation of Benford’s Law is wrong because you are effectively arguing that the meaning to be derived by violation of Benford’s Law is binary when it is, in fact, incremental – based on the characteristics of the underlying data and the degree to which Benford’s Law was violated.
Snorri: Well, there’s most of this thread…
Shlomo:
1) That was a big part of my argument, yes. Glad we agree.
2) When the data doesn’t span a wide range of orders of magnitude, it can be Benford-like by coincidence, but there’s little reason to expect it.
3) This is a better analysis – counties do vary over a wide range, unlike precincts. The issue with Pennsylvania is the fairly small number of counties. Those 67 counties got divided into 9 buckets for each candidate. The most anomalous buckets at first glance are Biden’s #4 (13 actual, 7 expected), and Trump’s #1 (29 actual, 20 expected). Doing a binomial probability calculation, the odds of each of those is around 1.4%. So they’re unusual, but not crazy, especially given that we tested nine different numbers per candidate. Correcting for the multiple tests, that’s not statistically significant, if I remember my old stats classes correctly. And while statistical significance isn’t a perfect system, it’s a decent rule of thumb, and one people often run across. So, like I’ve said a few times, I don’t mind digging deeper. But this is a yellow flag at worst, not a red flag. (Especially if it’s just Pennsylvania, and he tested ten swing states before settling on making a PA video. If the other nine are all reasonable, then he tested 90 values per candidate, and found one at 1.4%, which is exactly what you’d expect.)
Also, if you’re using Benford’s Law to find fraud, you should match it to an underlying theory of how the fraud happened. For several counties to have bad numbers, you need to posit a fraud operation that covered several counties. You also need to posit a fraud operation that changed things in ways that would result in non-Benford distributions. Simply doubling Biden’s vote count across the board, for example, would be a massive fraud that wouldn’t show up in a Benford analysis at all. Likewise giving him an extra 5% of registered voters – that would leave no trace in a Benford analysis. These sorts of tools only find frauds that produce weird number patterns – for example, a similar analysis was used a while back to show a pollster faked their daily tracking poll, because the numbers never stayed flat. They wanted to show action, so they picked numbers that were always up a point, or down two points, or something. Real tracking polls are sometimes flat, but it was their desire to not be flat that showed the fraud. Usually, Benford finds things like that, where a person’s mental model of how to best commit fraud doesn’t match statistical principles, and it’s their efforts to cover it up that make it stick out. It’s like asking someone to flip a hundred coins, versus “come up with a random string of a hundred coin flips”. The first one will probably have a run six or seven long that are all-heads or all-tails, whereas the artificial one usually won’t. It doesn’t “look random”, so they do something statistically unlikely to make it look better to an untrained human eye.
That’s the kind of fraud Benford catches. Not a “vote dead people’s ballots” fraud, or a “get all your people to vote twice” fraud. Usually, it’s the sort of thing that people design consciously, with the final numbers in mind. Anyone who could make a real Hammer/Scorecard system would know more stats than that.
Alsadius – we agree that the underlying data does not span multiple orders of magnitude.
I think that lowers the meaning derived from violation of Benford’s Law, but does not eliminate the meaning derived from violation of Benford’s Law. Again, as I said before, what we are observing in the data of the Chicago precincts and in the PA counties are (in both cases less meaningful) violations of Benford’s Law and are well within the range of outcomes we would expect to see if there were widespread and significant voter fraud. You point out multiple examples of voter fraud that would not lead to violation of Benford’s Law – but nobody here has claimed that all types of voter fraud would lead to violation of Benford’s Law. Likewise, nobody here has claimed that violation of Benford’s Law proves voter fraud. And yet the fact remains that what we observe in the data of the Chicago precincts and in the PA counties are (in both cases less meaningful) violations of Benford’s Law and are well within the range of outcomes we would expect to see if there were widespread and significant voter fraud.
Alsadius:
No, you haven’t met us personally.
I myself haven’t met any Trump fan personally, since i haven’t been to the US since 2004.
However, i have spent years at the Ivy League and in Alberta; and the Albertans, whether academics or pick-up drivers (or both) seemed significantly less insane than Ivy League academics.
In case you are British: I also spent years close to London. I would rate people over there, somewhere in between Albertans and Ivy League academics. Probably closer to the latter, but i am ready to revise my priors.
Alsadius (and other skeptics like NiV),
How do you respond to this?
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/11/10/evidence-of-voter-fraud-in-the-2020-us-presidential-election/
There is of course a lot of evidence of voter fraud not even mentioned in that article – some of which is available via:
https://www.samizdata.net/2020/11/no-joe-biden-is-not-president-elect/#comment-806519
London ain’t Britain. In fact comparing London to the non-London parts of Britain is like comparing the urban and rural populations of the US. They are very, very different places, populations and peoples.
The map of which regions voted for BRExit illustrates the point.
https://cdn.britannica.com/s:700×500/21/190621-050-7418E53A/majority-vote-region-referendum-United-Kingdom-European-2016.jpg
Many Brits would quite happily nuke London. It would solve a lot of the country’s problems.
What’s your point? Snorri did not say or imply that…
“Alsadius (and other skeptics like NiV), How do you respond to this?”
I’d be interested in seeing what the response of the election authorities in each of those cases is.
I don’t disagree that that there are a lot of apparent oddities that need investigating. I don’t dismiss the possibility of fraud. But I know at least one of those cases listed (the Antrim County one) had a plausible explanation given by the election authorities (I don’t take their word for it either, but it sounds more plausible than the alternative – that they successfully rigged the vote and then ‘caught’ themselves and corrected it), so it’s clear the compiler of the list isn’t so good at weeding out dubious cases either, so I would want to see all of them investigated, with *both* sides of the argument given their say, and the evidence tested to see how much has hard evidence backing it and how much is based on hearsay and misunderstanding.
“What’s your point? Snorri did not say or imply that…”
His point is that an American going to London and judging the political views of the British population by the people they meet there is like a Brit going to Washington DC and saying that pretty much everyone in America they met hated Trump.
I do, in fact, have a friend who has recently been talking with Americans on business and that’s pretty much exactly what he said. Even the Republicans didn’t like him, he said. I tried to explain about ‘Never-Trumpers’ and the difference between the big cities and the rural areas, but of course the people on the internet who give me the opposite impression are also reporting only what their own small circle of friends and neighbours tells them, too. Pauline Kael’s famous comment comes to mind.
I’d hate it if London were nuked.
A neutron bomb, on the other hand…
But of course Perry and other friends should be given notice.
“All victories inevitably come at a cost”. 😀
+ You can fool everyone one time.
+ You can fool some people all the time.
+ You can not fool everyone all the time.
Nice try.