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If you really think “2000 Mules” has been debunked, allow comments

The Guardian has acknowledged there might be an elephant a mule in the room.

Trump’s ‘big lie’ hits cinemas: the film claiming to investigate voter fraud

2000 Mules has been resoundingly debunked by factcheckers, but the film has earned praise from Trump and other Republicans

Not having seen 2000 Mules, I will offer no opinion on how convincing it is. But I do have some advice for the Guardian, and other media outlets too, and it is advice that would be exactly the same whether the claims made in Dinesh D’Souza’s film turn out to be right or wrong. If you genuinely want the truth to come out, allow comments.

The Guardian‘s opinion section used to be called Comment Is Free, taken from the words of C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian from 1872 until 1929, “Facts are sacred but comment is free”. CiF was great. Although the majority of the commenters were left wing, they were kept on their toes by a strong minority who were not. Equally important, the Guardian‘s writers were kept on their toes. A badly researched or tendentious article would not go unchallenged. For instance, see the comments to this article about the George Zimmerman case. After she became the paper’s first female editor, Katharine Viner replaced “Comment is Free” by an initiative called “The Web We Want”. The web she wanted was one in which comment was no longer free: ever since then, comments have been disallowed on most articles, especially those where the response was likely to be hostile to the Guardian worldview.

Their gaff, their rules. But didn’t Ms Viner’s birthing parent ever tell her that what we want is not always good for us? As I argued in a post called “It pays to brief your own side properly”,

The mainstream media has passed a milestone in its decline to irrelevance when someone who wants to successfully argue for the same things the MSM argues for must use other sources besides the MSM.

Since CiF became TWwW in April 2016 the repose of the Guardian-reading classes has been disturbed by some unpleasant shocks. Among them were Brexit, the election of Donald Trump in the US, and, ten days after I wrote the post on briefing your own side properly, the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse. A reader in 2021 who relied on the Guardian alone would have had no idea that was coming. A reader in 2013 who kept half an eye on the below-the-line comments to stories like this and this would have certainly known that George Zimmerman’s acquittal was a strong possibility.

So? No one asked me to be the guardian of Guardian readers from nasty surprises. Maybe they prefer the curtains of their mansion drawn, even if that does mean that trouble in the street only becomes apparent when a brick comes through the window. But that is to assume the worst of them. Judging from the number who took part in the arguments back when comment was free, there were plenty who, quaint though it might seem, wanted to know the truth. And it seems to me that vigorous, uncensored argument between people from all political tribes would be an excellent tool in itself to settle the truth or falsehood of the claims made in 2000 Mules. What’s this about the accuracy of geolocation data? The Guardian has an educated readership. Ask the audience.

Sadly, saying that a factchecker working for the Associated Press has deemed the documentary to have “gaping holes” does not impress as much as it once did. Here is what the Associated Press said in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s laptop: “AP Explains: Trump seizes on dubious Biden-Ukraine story”:

ARE THE NEW EMAILS AUTHENTIC?

The actual origins of the emails are unclear. And disinformation experts say there are multiple red flags that raise doubts about their authenticity, including questions about whether the laptop actually belongs to Hunter Biden, said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the nonpartisan Wilson Center in Washington.

Nina Jankowicz? That name sounds familiar. Well, the AP did get it right when their fact-checkers called her a “disinformation expert”.

50 comments to If you really think “2000 Mules” has been debunked, allow comments

  • William O. B'Livion

    But that is to assume the worst of them.

    They are Socialists, Communists, and various other sorts of tyrannical troglodytes.

    It is not an assumption.

  • NickM

    This is slightly OT but I feel very strongly about it.

    I recently got this from Facebook…

    We’ve suspended your account
    ON 28 MAY 2022
    Your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards.
    Your account is not visible to people on Facebook and you can’t use it.
    28 days left to disagree with the decision
    If you think that we’ve suspended your account by mistake, we can take you through a few steps to disagree with the decision.
    You have 30 days after we first took action on your account to disagree, or your account will be permanently disabled. There are 28 days remaining.
    Learn more about our Community Standards

    The last bit does contain a link to the “Community Standards”. I have also (obviously) deleted my full name with which this Kafka-missive starts with.

    Now, I have no idea of what I am accussed. Yes, I just re-jigged my Facebook a/c after many years. I tried it and said nothing because after a quick squizz thought it was just nonsense. I couldn’t honestly give a toss about the teething of the child of someone I did GCSE German with in 1990 and neither of us had bothered to stay in contact with… I mean I couldn’t even be bothered to write something nasty. I mean there are many vastly more amusing and useful ways to spend time online…

    I rather like Stack Exchange. Mainly Maths, Tolkien, Physics and Aviation. Believe it or not I am posting this from the house I share with my wife!

    Anyway, recently I had to re-sign for FB because a Corel forum wanted it and I’d re-jigged myself with a lot of expensive ‘wares (tax-deductible) and kit (ditto) for a big job which was also a big job for a mate. And a big learning-curve which means better graphics and things getting better is what it is about, right?

    So, I get that from Zuckerberg’s Empire of Dirt (I think the TM for that belongs to Johnnie Cash). I am really annoyed. Just read it for sheer the tone of it. It’s the Star Chamber.

    I have violated “Community Standards” without saying anything.

    How do you reply to that?

    The pre-Napoleonic Code had the death penalty for…

    “Plots”

    And,

    “Not revealing ‘plots’.

    We’ll keep on truckin’

  • Ferox

    NickM – They are doing you a favor. I deleted my FB account years ago; if only they had deleted it for me, I would have had a badge made to wear on my lapel, maybe along with that picture of Johnny Cash giving the finger to the camera.

  • Alex

    Nick, if you have really not posted anything at all, is it possible that your account has been misused by someone else?

    I started using Facebook again this year after a decade long absence. Like you I have little interest in school friends who I haven’t kept in touch with any other way, but I do check the local history group on there once or twice a week or so. It’s a pity that most online activity has disappeared into the walled gardens, but it has: the newsgroups and web forums are basically dead, so if you wish to interact with people beyond a few niche sites Facebook seems the best way. The Stack Exchange sites are great for many topics, and your list is very similar to my own most visited SE sites, but it isn’t any good for local history or the goings on of a town or suburb etc.

    I think all this is quite relevant to the original post, as comments on newspaper websites are increasingly moderated not just by The Guardian et Al, but by the smallest local rag, to remove anything off message. With half the web disappearing into walled gardens too there’s a considerable chilling effect on free speech if your social media account you use to see your family photos and keep up with your local community is at risk because you said something “offensive” elsewhere in the tentacled giant’s argosian panopticon.

  • Dave Ward

    Resoundingly debunked by factcheckers

    As soon as you see that claim you know it’s bullshit… I’ve watched 2000 Mules and the video evidence alone is jaw dropping.

  • jmc

    Ah, fact checkers…

    Lets see. That AP “fact checker” is a psychology major from a very fancy (i.e expensive) LA private university who after a short career at a dot com got a journalism masters (from Columbia no less) and is now at the very bottom of the journalism heap at AP. One step up from intern.

    She must be a trust fund baby or very stupid as those kind of jobs pay little or nothing and have zero real career prospects.

    So exactly the sort of person who I would trust to decided what is true of false.

    Not.

  • KJP

    Zimmerman’s conversation with the police dispatcher went something like this:

    Z “There is someone acting suspiciously”
    PD “Can you describe him?”
    Z “He is about 6 feet tall, wearing a hoodie”
    PD “What colour is he?”
    Z “He is black”

    When it was reported in some of the US media the penultimate sentence was omitted making it look like Zimmerman was taking a racial stereotype.

    Zimmerman looks at least partially Hispanic but was always described as white: if he had been killed by an obviously white man I bet he would have been described as Hispanic.

  • Matthew

    When our betters say they want a conversation, it means they talk and we listen. The Guardian is trying to have a conversation and we are not doing what we are told. The lack of a comment section makes the conversation better.

  • Fraser Orr

    I recently got one of those memes on my FB feed. Some quote putatively from Stephen King that started “Book banners after all, insist that the entire community should see things their way and only their way.” and so on, sentiments I wholeheartedly agree with. However what made me laugh was at the bottom was a note saying “Americans for Progressive Change limited who can comment on this post.”

    It seems irony no longer exists in political discourse.

  • Jacob

    Forget the 2000 mules.
    Here is and exact account, by Time magazine, how the election was stolen.
    They congratulate themselves for their big achievement (the steal) and explicitly state that if the election had resulted the other way (Trump reelected) there would have been chaos and unimaginable riots.

  • […] If you really think “2000 Mules” has been debunked, allow comments Interesting. […]

  • bobby b

    “Debunked” now merely means “we have come up with a number of talking points that will help you to change the subject and direct the conversation elsewhere.”

  • The Fyrdman

    Off topic I know but Hurt (where the line re. ‘Empire of dirt’ is drawn from) was a Nine Inch Nails song that Cash covered. Credit where credit is due.

  • Johnathan Pearce (London)

    Dislike of contrary views also, by the way, explains to some extent why Mr Putin thought he could decapitate Ukraine’s leadership in a few days, turn the whole country into a fiefdom, and send any resistance packing. He has shielded his fragile ego from advice and criticism.

  • Let us, as an exercise, compare our state of information as regards yesterday’s acquittal.

    We, unlike Guardian readers, were aware that Durham faced a jury containing three Clinton donors, an AOC donor, a woman whose husband worked on Hillary’s 2008 campaign, a supporter of defunding the police, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team as the accused man’s daughter. This last woman did raise that point to the judge but he told her not to worry about it and refused to excuse her. The judge was appointed by Obama after his service on the Obama 2008 transition team, previous to which he worked in the DOJ with the defendant.

    That is, I assume Samizdata readers knew this, though of course they would not know it from Samizdata as such – AFAICR, no post here covered the trial – and I don’t think they’d learn it from the Grauniad, the BBC or the US Dem-MSM. However I assume readers here also read elsewhere. I was certainly aware of it from not long after the trial opened. Perhaps some of the above is news to some of us but am I right (by all means say if I am wrong) that pretty well none of it is news to all of us?

    I’m guessing we are also aware that, while the trial confirmed background facts about the intentional fictitiousness of the collusion accusation, the exact charge was that Sussmann lied to the FBI (explicitly about whether he had a client and implicitly about whether her name was Hillary), so anyone who had trained their conscience to believe Hillary’s email server did not require actual prosecution would not find it too hard to decide that the defendant’s lie likewise hardly required prosecution let alone conviction. As with the email-server law, the justification for the law Durham used is to make it possible to prosecute conspiracies that would otherwise be hard to subject to law, but if a juror had eagerly believed the conspiracy back then, they might be eager to think the formal offence petty and unimportant now.

    If I am reasonably correct about the above then we are presumably both better informed and not as amazed as our opponents were after Rittenhouse got acquitted. (We may feel various emotions, but amazement is not amongst them.)

    Grauniad readers by contrast (assuming the Grauniad covered the trial as the US Dem-MSM did – I did not check) have heard virtually nothing of what emerged in the trial (as in the Rittenhouse case), so (unlike after the Rittenhouse case) are even less surprised by the verdict than we are, albeit for very different reasons.

    One thing I don’t know – what is the null hypothesis for a randomly-chosen judge and jury from inside the beltway. How many of the above links to the defendant and his collaborators should one on average expect just from the Washington DC location, before we postulate contrivance. (I’ve read criticism of Durham for filing in that jurisdiction, but do not know whether the nature of the case obliged him to.)

  • Snorri Godhi

    Niall: I became aware only after the verdict of the problems with the jury in the Sussman trial; so i’d be grateful to be told why no better job was done in jury selection. Didn’t Durham have a say in that?

  • “Apparently, the documentary ‘2000 Mules’ played a role in this new ‘guilty’ plea.”

    Apparently, the ex-mayor of San Luis, Arizona does not read the Guardian – or had reasons of her own to doubt that the movie had been sufficiently debunked to make standing trial prudent.

    The article states that

    she had a total of three lawyers, plus a local one, all paid by the DNC

    Don’t they read the Guardian? Don’t they believe the movie has been ‘debunked’?

  • bobby b

    ” . . . i’d be grateful to be told why no better job was done in jury selection. Didn’t Durham have a say in that?”

    First, the juror pool in Washington, D.C. is always going to skew heavily towards Democrats. It’s a Democrat stronghold. Approximately 6% of D.C. residents are Republicans. Bring in 100 potential jurors, and you’re likely to have 90 who are (or lean) Democrat.

    Second, the judge controls who is bumped from a jury. Each side may get a certain number of automatic strikes as they wish to use them, but it’s a small number. After that, it’s up to the judge to decide whether a juror can fairly serve. An attorney can ask the judge to disqualify a juror, and give reasons, but the judge decides.

    This particular judge used his discretion in a very questionable way, allowing some jurors to remain who ought to have been bumped. But, an appeal on this basis is very hard – it is up to the judge’s discretion barring some concrete showing of bias. And, the bias which would qualify has usually been some showing that a judge personally benefited – i.e., that he was bribed, or had some financial stake in the game. Mere political leanings don’t suffice – as that would be an admission that judges have political biases.

  • Snorri Godhi

    Thank you, Bobby!
    A follow-up question which i leave at your discretion to answer:

    This particular judge used his discretion in a very questionable way, allowing some jurors to remain who ought to have been bumped. But, an appeal on this basis is very hard

    Would an appeal not constitute double jeopardy, anyway?
    Or could it all be construed as a mistrial?

  • bobby b

    An appeal by the prosecution after the jury has been sworn in is usually barred by double jeopardy. If the prosecution had decided that the inclusion of these jurors was sufficiently wrongful, they could have filed a notice of appeal directly after the court ruled against them – before the jury was actually sworn. In my state, the Court of Appeals would then examine the appeal and decide whether or not to take it up for consideration.

    It’s one of the few times a criminal case can be halted while a ruling is appealed. But, again, even if the prosecutor had timely filed his NoA on this issue, it’s a question that is left mostly to the judge’s discretion – which means an appellate court won’t usually overrule the judge.

  • Ferox

    If it was an acquittal doesn’t that mean all the jurors were persuaded of his innocence? Otherwise it would be a hung jury wouldn’t it?

    Which means that unless all the jurors were tainted the prosecution must have failed to convince at least one honest juror.

  • bobby b

    The value of a motivated partisan juror goes beyond their one vote out of the jury’s twelve (and the defense in this case seems to have had five such jurors from what we know so far.)

    People mostly just want to go home, and it’s always obvious to jurors that, when they have a committed group on one side, things are going to go the group’s way or get real long and then go that way anyway . . .

    One juror who’s already picked a side can wreck your entire trial before it starts. Five . . . ew.

  • John

    Partisan judges and juries prepared to ignore facts and laws in order to protect their own are not an exclusively US problem as the recent acquittal of those who took down the Colston statue in Bristol clearly shows. See also numerous cases when extinction rebellion “protestors” are given a stern telling off and a £75 fine. Sometimes it’s not even that as one M’lud spent most of his summing up by telling the accused how much he admired them.

    And don’t get me started on the poor schlubs given the thankless and potentially highly dangerous task of passing judgement on Derek Chauvain.

  • Mike V.

    Ferox,

    Not Guilty does not mean innocent. It means they weren’t convinced of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. To paraphrase the Foreperson in her interview “This is Washington, everyone lies.” was their attitude and a clue to the jury’s thinking.

  • Ferox

    Yes, but my point was that a verdict means that all of them were not convinced. Otherwise it would have been a hung jury.

    So although I am sure corrupted jury members had a detrimental effect on the deliberations, we can’t be sure that the prosecution didn’t just FUBAR it, or that they just didn’t have the makings for the particular charge they tried to bring – as opposed to the scenario of one bought-and-paid-for jury member obstinately refusing to convict despite overwhelming evidence of guilt.

  • my point was that a verdict means that all of them were not convinced. Otherwise it would have been a hung jury. (Ferox, June 2, 2022 at 12:15 pm)

    For the reasons bobby b explains (and others), the acquittal does not mean every juror thought the charge had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt. It does not even mean that any of them truly thought that. This jury chose a forewoman who said after the trial

    “I don’t think it should have been prosecuted. There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.”

    so clearly the majority that chose her were not so deeply focussed on whether the lie was actual, not just possible, and any holdout(s) faced that hostile majority followed by grave risk of being outed as heretics in a community that might treat what then happens to them for delaying the inevitable verdict as ‘no more than those nazi/racists/Maga-scum deserved’. I would not yield to that, nor others here I trust, but it is no great surprise that those of that Washington DC jury who are not (yet) already known to be compromised did not include such a person.

    So Ferox’ claim that

    we can’t be sure that the prosecution didn’t just FUBAR it, or that they just didn’t have the makings for the particular charge they tried to bring

    is supererogatory even before we examine the trial and see that the prosecution established:

    Sussmann wrote then FBI attorney (now Twitter stalwart) James Baker the night before their meeting.

    “I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. I’m coming on my own—not on behalf of a client or company—want to help the Bureau.”

    Baker testified that Sussmann told him the same thing in person, yet billing records, and much subsequent activity, clearly show that Sussmann was lying. He was working for Hillary Clinton via the Perkins Coie law firm.

    I assert we can be sure (beyond reasonable doubt) that the verdict was perverse with respect to the evidence.

  • Ferox

    For the reasons bobby b explains (and others), the acquittal does not mean every juror thought the charge had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt. It does not even mean that any of them truly thought that.

    If that’s true – that every juror thought the case had been proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and yet they still acquitted – then the jury system is irretrievably broken. And also, if that is true, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference if none of the jurors were tainted – they would have voted to acquit anyway due to fear of the mob.

    So what now? Does this mean that as long as the Clinton Machine operates within the confines of the District of Columbia they are untouchable by law? Al Capone with a screechy voice?

  • Ferox (June 2, 2022 at 2:43 pm), the title of one of the articles I linked to in my post above is ‘Sussmann Jury Nullification Marks the End of American Justice as We Knew It’. Niall optimist Kilmartin takes a more positive view – but understands the author’s concern. ‘The Hunger Games’-style separation between capital and nation is not quite so far away as one might wish. And we are a bit OT here; this post’s main topic is a restrained response to the usual suspects insolently claiming to have ‘debunked’ yet more evidence that the election was stolen. Both the Bidens and the Clintons have been operating openly as corruptocrats for decades.

    > what now?

    You’re asking me? 🙂

    1) My impression FWLIW is that many people in the US are waiting till November to see if the Dems can steal yet more votes than they did two years ago and so retain (sufficient) control, or not. Instapundit is given to pointing out that people who wish to prevent that can achieve more by volunteering for campaigns, vote monitoring and etc. than by writing on blogs.

    If the Dems achieve a second as in-your-face steal, well,

    2) the day before he left Britain for America at the start of the American revolution, Benjamin Franklin told Edmund Burke that (until the revolution-provoking troubles arose) Britain’s American colonies had been a rare example of an empire where distant parts were as well governed as those around the capital, so the question was

    “whether they [the Americans] were to give up so happy a situation without a struggle”

    If the midterms are yet more openly stolen than was the 2020 election, that will indeed be the question. The opinion of Niall Kilmartin, over in the UK, as to the likely answer is worth even less than the little my opinion above in (1) was worth. And I would understand if any better-informed readers did not care to state theirs even far down the comment thread of a blog that I think is not read as much as it should be by potential friends, let alone enemies. 🙂 “Events, dear boy, events” will tell us all in time.

    I am on record as thinking that the PC woke are unusually inept at foreseeing long-term consequences of what they do, while sometimes – precisely because they know they intend to break and/or corrupt the law – being better at foreseeing and forestalling immediate legal/political resistance to what they plan. As of now, they are at work targeting election attorneys, etc.

    [Burke quotes Franklin’s remark in ‘An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs’ to help show that the American revolution was in origin defensive, fighting to retain practical rights the Americans had long experienced – rights that were now being threatened – not (at the start of the revolution) to acquire additional rights.]

  • Mark of the Covenant

    I’m wondering if we’re not seeing the first salvo of a campaign as opposed to ineffectual flailing. I find it hard to believe that this trial was Durham’s first and last word on the subject of DC corruption since he would surely have known a conviction was a long shot. I suspect that regardless of the stated goal of a conviction, the actual goal was discovery. What actionable intel was obtained by the prosecution through the mechanics of this trial? Who, post-discovery, is now exposed to prosecution (or the threat of it) who was not prior to this trial?

  • Jacob

    Instapundit is given to pointing out that people who wish to prevent that can achieve more by volunteering for campaigns
    Republicans should try to outdo Dems in (absentee) ballot stuffing. If these are the rules – play by them and beat your opponent. No use to cry “stolen election” after the fact. That is one area where Trump failed miserably. He did not understand that making speeches at rallies is not enough. You have to do ballot stuffing, the more the better. Cheating is the method established by US voting procedures.

    By the way: massive and uncontrolled absentee ballots were adopted as emergency measures under the Covid pretext. Covid has gone. Have the rules reverted to their previous state – i.e. very limited and well defined cases where absentee ballots are permitted?

  • Old Guy

    I saw 2000 mules last Saturday and felt it was quite convincing. I was in tech for 28 years and now teach it at a university so I understood what they were doing and felt that the bar that they set for inclusion/counting was pretty high and so the numbers that they came up with were most likely low.

    I personally think every legislator at the state level should be made to watch it and then decide what they are going to do about voting in their state.

  • Ferox

    Have the rules reverted to their previous state – i.e. very limited and well defined cases where absentee ballots are permitted?

    In the state where I live, all voting is now done by mail-in ballot (and was even before Wuhan Flu came along). How any sane person could fail to see that mail-in ballots break the secret ballot model is beyond me, but Prog-Dems run the state and mail-in ballots are their favored method.

  • Snorri Godhi

    John:

    Partisan judges and juries prepared to ignore facts and laws in order to protect their own are not an exclusively US problem as the recent acquittal of those who took down the Colston statue in Bristol clearly shows. See also numerous cases when extinction rebellion “protestors” are given a stern telling off and a £75 fine. Sometimes it’s not even that as one M’lud spent most of his summing up by telling the accused how much he admired them.

    Leaving aside the fact that these are all British examples (i can think of ‘continental’ examples), the main difference, in my opinionated opinion, is that the cases you mention do not involve members of the ruling class as defendants.

    The way i see it, there are 2 main classes of ‘Western’ countries: those where the ruling class* is held to lower standards than the middle and working classes; and those where the ruling class is held to higher standards.

    (* or at least the clique within the ruling class that goes under the name of Establishment/Deep State.)

    The Nordic countries are examples of the latter.
    France and Italy used to be examples of the former, but have been getting better.
    Not sure when the US became a member of the former class, but in my opinion the double standard has never been more blatant than since the run-up to the 2008 election; and is becoming increasingly blatant, to general indifference.

  • Snorri Godhi

    [Trump] did not understand that making speeches at rallies is not enough. You have to do ballot stuffing, the more the better. Cheating is the method established by US voting procedures.

    🙂
    I don’t know much about the Bible, but i suspect that Jacob’s favorite Prophet is Jeremiah.

    But Jacob is not Machiavellian enough to realize that Republicans cannot get away with ballot stuffing anymore.
    What a Republican candidate should do, is promise an independent inquiry into election fraud after the election, and challenge xer opponent to make the same commitment.

  • Snorri Godhi

    Ferox:

    In the state where I live, all voting is now done by mail-in ballot (and was even before Wuhan Flu came along).

    Could you tell us what state that is?

    How any sane person could fail to see that mail-in ballots break the secret ballot model is beyond me, but Prog-Dems run the state and mail-in ballots are their favored method.

    Mail-in ballots do not necessarily violate voting secrecy. Not the way they are done in ‘normal’ countries. But since the US is hell-bent on ignoring best practice when it comes to elections, i don’t know about your state.

    NB: I do think that, normally, voting should be done in person; but that is not feasible for people residing abroad, for instance.

  • Ferox

    Washington.

    If you can sign a blank ballot envelope and give the unmarked ballot and signed envelope to someone else to complete, how does that preserve the secret ballot? Mail-in ballots commoditize the vote. And I don’t believe the ProgDems see that as a bug, but rather as a feature of that voting mechanism.

  • Jacob

    You have to adapt to reality. If mail ballots and absentee ballots are the new standard and legal method you have to play by the rules. He who collects the most ballots and stuffs them in, wins. These are the rules. My advice is not Machiavellian but practical.
    Republican activists were asleep in 2020. They need to wake up.

  • Jacob

    “If you can sign a blank ballot envelope and give the unmarked ballot and signed envelope to someone else to complete”
    Anyone can sign a ballot. Not necessarily it’s owner.
    You don’t need proof that the election was falsified. Enough to prove that the election method is unsafe. Nobody can deny that.

  • Snorri Godhi

    If you can sign a blank ballot envelope and give the unmarked ballot and signed envelope to someone else to complete, how does that preserve the secret ballot?

    Huh?
    This does not sound like what is done in (what i consider) normal countries.

    In any case, in the US (but not in normal countries) there are plenty of opportunities for fraud even without mail-in voting.

  • Jacob, 2020 is not the first time the Democrats used vote fraud to steal an election. They did so in 1960 in both Chicago (Mayor Daley – obvious even at the time) and Texas (Lyndon B Johnson – now well verified).

    Unlike Trump, Nixon chickened out of denouncing it and fighting. One may instead interpret watergate as Nixon deciding that if the Dems can cheat then he could do a little cheating of his own. The Dems, the deep state and the media (but I repeat myself) did not agree. It did not end well for him.

    One of the reasons to vote for a Republican, especially a non-RINO one, is that it is statistically less safe to be corrupt there.

    However that is also a practical problem with Jacob’s strategy, aside from other issues – it is less safe for Republicans to be corrupt.

  • Ferox

    In Washington you get a ballot and an envelope to put the ballot in, mailed to your address on file. You fill out the ballot but only sign the envelope. Then you seal the ballot inside.

    The ballot is dropped off at a ballot box, and then they are collected. They supposedly check your signature against a database of signatures they have on file, and verify electronically that it’s a legitimate signature. Once the signature is verified the ballot is separated from the envelope, at which point it is an anonymous vote.

    The problem is that the vote is commoditized since you can sign the envelope without putting the ballot in it, and then give the signed envelope and the blank ballot to the purchaser.

    I don’t know how they do it in other countries, but if someone can watch you fill out your ballot, or else fill it out for you, then there is no secret ballot, and votes can be bought and sold. QED. I don’t see any way that mail-in ballots could ever preserve the secret ballot principle.

    ProgDems love it.

  • Snorri Godhi

    Thank you, Ferox.
    The potential for vote-buying cannot be avoided, but there is a way to maintain anonymity.

    Before an Italian election, the consulate sends me a registered letter containing:
    A. a large return envelope, stamped & addressed to the consulate;
    B. a voting certificate;
    C. a smaller envelope;
    D. a ballot.

    I am supposed to mark the ballot, put it into the small envelope, seal the envelope, put the small envelope and certificate into the return envelope, and mail it.

    Don’t remember if i have to sign the certificate, but i do have to show my photo ID and sign a receipt when i retrieve the registered letter from the post office.

  • Snorri Godhi

    One of the reasons to vote for a Republican, especially a non-RINO one, is that it is statistically less safe to be corrupt there.

    However that is also a practical problem with Jacob’s strategy, aside from other issues – it is less safe for Republicans to be corrupt.

    One of the reasons to reject Jacob’s voting-fraud strategy is that only NeverTrumpers would get past the primaries; after which, you might as well abstain in November.

  • Ferox

    Nothing in any of that stops you from selling your vote, and being able to verify the sale to the buyer. Even in “normal” countries, mail-in voting permits election tampering.

  • Snorri Godhi

    Nothing in any of that stops you from selling your vote, and being able to verify the sale to the buyer.

    I said so already, but between giving up my right to vote and enabling fellow voters abroad to sell their votes, i prefer the latter.

    There is also the practical difficulty of matching buyers and sellers without either of them being found out.

  • The Wobbly Guy

    How about some 4D chess? The Repubs should ballot stuff… for the Dems. Do it so egregiously, by such a staggeringly obviously corrupt number, that nobody can deny that it happened. If the population was 100,000, get 300,000 votes for the Dems alone.

    Then they will have to refute the results, rework the rules (finally!), and then hold elections again.

  • bobby b

    “Then they will have to refute the results, rework the rules (finally!), and then hold elections again.”

    I sympathize with your sentiments, but we’ve spent too long and wasted too many chances by expecting some modicum of decency and shame from them. (“Surely, they’ll have to finally admit that AGW is crap!” “Surely, they’ll have to agree that Trump never peed in some Russian bed.” “Surely they’ll now have to acknowledge that the vaccines don’t seem to work well.”)

    They would simply take that 300k-vote win in a 100k-voter constituency and proclaim that we’ve now become freer in our voting and that we obviously miscounted the population, and then jail us for Disinformation when we objected.

  • […] media refuse to engage the factual evidence presented by the Dinesh D’Souza film “2000 Mules” of probable election violations […]

  • […] media refuse to engage the factual evidence presented by the Dinesh D’Souza film “2000 Mules” of probable election violations in numerous […]

  • Visiting the Issues&Insights link to this piece led me to Fact Checking the Fact Checkers: Debunking AP’s ‘2000 Mules’ Hit Piece. It’s worth it just to read the AP claim that the people visiting the ballot dropboxes wore gloves for warmth not some sinister vote fraud reason – while watching a woman walk up to a dropbox in latex blue surgical gloves, drop ballots in, then promptly discard the gloves in an adjacent bin.

    I can see why the Grauniad would not want commenters posting that combination. It does not of course, of itself, instantly show the entire election was stolen – but that’s not the point. The narrative from the start was that it was absurd to imagine election fraud, that only crazy bigoted Trump supporters, unable to face the plainest facts, doubted the ‘experts’ testimony this was “the safest election ever”. That narrative dare not face graphs with vertical Biden vote dumps, nor irregularities in counting supervision, nor one mule let alone 2000, nor a woman posting ballots in swiftly-discarded surgical gloves. Long before we get to statistical analyses, or adding up all the evidence, that narrative dare not admit there is valid cause just to ask questions – because then the Time article would look like a confession, and the refusal to discuss would look like evidence the narrative’s echoers, not just the vote-fraud perpetrators, had a pretty clear idea all along that Biden’s victory was a mystery that could not well bear the light.