You seem to be conflating election fraud with voter fraud in order to suit your argument. Is it intentional?
20 Likes
“Vote Fraud” is not the same thing as “In Person Voter Fraud”
I suspect you already know this, but I’ll have a go anyway. In person voter fraud is when a person actually shows up at the polls and casts a fraudulent vote. It is the thing that voter ID laws are ostensibly meant to prevent, and it basically never happens, because it is difficult and risky.
Voter fraud, more generally, can include things like mail-in vote fraud, or tampering with voting machines. Voter ID is not related to and cannot affect these kinds of fraud.
16 Likes
The media? Ha! That’s a laugh!
1 Like
Here’s some actual boring data. I live in the same town Mitt Romney used to live in, vote in the same precinct he used to vote in. We’ve used optical scan machines for years and years. Two years ago we had a town meeting election, members serve staggered 3-year terms. I had the smallest number of votes that still made the cut (324, I think), Martin Cohen was just below (320, I think). We had a recount (took 26 people 2.5 hours according to newspaper accounts) and Marty picked up 3 votes – still not winning, but only by one vote (he ran again the next year and won a seat, which is a good thing).
Things to note:
- sometimes 1 vote matters.
- even optical scan can have an error rate near 1% in a competently run election.
- it took .2 person-hour per ballot counted. this seems high, remember that people work in teams, perhaps would work faster over time.
- the better candidate doesn’t always win (seriously; Marty is an expert on several issues, and had more time to spend on committee meetings etc.)
- if you did your recounts at the precinct level, you could be done in a few hours.
13 Likes
Yes, it’s intentional, Max has one axe to grind and works tirelessly at it. He’s drawing a particularly long bow for this one.
13 Likes
Not ANY max, just the ones that have been shown to disproportionally disenfranchise minority voters.
have you yet noticed that a sentence with any, all, and never are always false? Almost like they’re the refuge of scoundrels!!
16 Likes
I will let the people disagreeing with you handle the racist allegations question, but how does everyone reconcile the smug citing of studies and articles which said the election was un-riggable in response to Trump’s preemptive allegations of election rigging?
Can we honestly have it both ways?
2 Likes
He has a history of doing that, so presumably so. (Most egregious previous example here)
6 Likes
We’re not really having it both ways because we’re talking about different types of election fraud (including one from cloud-cuckoo land).
The articles were correct that voter fraud and a nation-wide conspiracy by the establishment to rig the election were not going make him lose, as he pre-emptively alleged. If they seemed smug it’s because those allegations were patently ridiculous in light of facts and common sense.
Studies like that from the Brennan Center that Max cited have shown that voter fraud is virtually non-existent and remains nothing more than a GOP pretext to erect more barriers to poor and minority voters. Any serious person who’s studied conspiracy theories understands that one involving a minimum of thousands of disparate low-level players and several different types of voting systems across the country wouldn’t stay secret for long.
The concept of flawed and hackable electronic voting machines, on the other hand, has been well understood by IT security and political science experts since the late 1990s. Putting aside the context of Russian hackers meddling during the primaries and the general, it’s still not unreasonable or suggestive of any wide-ranging conspiracy for Halderman to recommend an audit of electronic tallies that seem statistically off compared to other precincts, if only to check for errors.
10 Likes
She’s made it over $1M already…
5 Likes
Blimey. She’s raising money quick. $1.5M now?
7 Likes
The discussions I heard about the paranoia about Soros manufactured voting machines were also sometimes rebutted with the claim of racism. But even though election fraud does not always equal voter fraud, they are related. Tampering with machines, losing or adding votes, filling out votes for homeless or senile or imaginary people, are all different methods to achieve the same goal.
1.74 million. Pretty sure it’ll be raised before Thanksgiving.
5 Likes
It’s not “racism” so much as piercingly stupid.
Conflating two unrelated points does not help your argument.
18 Likes
That sounds like a far less difficult project than Stuxnet. Something sneaky like supplying the counties with BadUSB compromised thumb drives would be overkill.
1 Like
After reading @robulus’s earlier comment, I made myself a little wager that Max would once again switch from using the axe grinder to grabbing a shovel and digging himself in further. Winner-winner, chicken dinner!
11 Likes
I am not trying to conflate the two things. My point was that they were different means to the same end. And the question of the Wisconsin vote being hacked is only being discussed here because of the results. If it is hypocritical for republicans to allege voting machine fraud right up until they won, then dismiss the idea as ridiculous, it is also hypocritical for democrats to take the opposite view.
It’s ridiculous to make an assumption of electoral tampering about an outcome prior to the election with no evidence. It’s not ridiculous to look at evidence that strongly suggests electoral tampering after an election and point out that evidence. The important difference is that term “evidence.”
23 Likes
The truth lies in the middle!
7 Likes
