Clearly, there is an emerging epidemic of suspicious coin-flip events… http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000624046/article/aaron-rodgers-unhappy-about-coin-flip-gaffe
The thing about conspiracy theories with staying power is they tend to be incredibly complex and totally impossible to actually pull off without some non-conspirator (or many, many non-conspirators) discovering the plan prior to it reaching fruition. The more impossible, the more ardent its supporters. (Just my observations based on anti-vaxers, 911-truthers and Jacques whatshisbutt’s posts here on BB.)
That’s why a comparison between coinflip-truthers and other conspiracy theorists a little odd. Someone really could cheat at a coin flip. I don’t know anything about the circumstances of these coin flips, how they were recorded, if they were all done at once or if they were each carried out in different places, whether each candidate got to send a scrutineer, whether those people knew how to scrutinize a coinflip, etc. Maybe any systematic cheating is too implausible to fathom.
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I just don’t understand the risk/reward calculus that goes into rigging the county delegate selection. The value is 6/(x*1000) (where x is probably between 1 and 5).
What do you gain by rigging 6 thousandths (at best) of the vote?
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Cheating a coin flip probably a better cost/benefit than actually voting, and people still do that.
(I don’t honestly know what the risk of getting caught and / or the penalty for getting caught, but I’m assuming both are remarkably low)
I don’t know most details, but the coin tosses were done at the precincts for the separate caucuses that were tied up (Ames, Des Moines, Davenport, and some others), so they were done in different places by different people at different times. So it wasn’t the same coin, same person tossing it, and it was called in the air. If the Clinton campaign figured out how to effectively coordinate manipulating that ahead of time they’d have super villain powers that could have been better put to use to just manipulate the caucus in some other way where they’d have unambiguously won well before a coin was tossed.
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Psychically controlling the outcome of coin tosses as a great distance is a a tough sell. An individual who is running a polling station saying, “Hmm… a coin flip? Let’s say Clinton won that.” is a lot more plausible. Anyway, from the description it seems like this wouldn’t be an easy thing to do either way. But I make that assessment based on details of how the whole thing was set up.
I agree with @TooGoodToCheck_'s comment above, but also I note that generally people who are willing to commit crimes just don’t think they will get caught and rate the risk at near zero. The fact is, if you were in fact good at coin flipping then the risk of getting caught would basically be nil. I mean, sure, someone might later say, “Hey, isn’t that guy you got to flip the coins a stage magician, that doesn’t seem right?” but it’s not like you’d go to prison.
Anyway, I do concede that the circumstances as they were make it hard to believe there was cheating, and even if we could believe there was cheating, it would have to have been done independently at different stations, so it would be likely it was only one of the flips.
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I noticed at a very young age that whenever I flipped a coin it usually landed the same as it started, whether I caught it or let it fall. Been (ab)using that ever since!
This is more in line with what I’d suspect for Clinton-related vote fraud (which I certainly wouldn’t put her above):
Given the likelihood of her being the next POTUS, this is really hideous.
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Ooh, about 1 in a million I’d say…
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It’s not exactly winning-the-lottery unlikely, but it’s still unlikely. (And more than that, it feels more unlikely than it is because it’s a whole series of events that all went the same way rather than one unlikely event, like randomly guessing a card from a deck.)
Million-to-one! (Edit: D’oh, ninja’ed.)
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Yeah, that system is… uh… bad? I mean, given this it is far more likely there was some chicanery leading up to the decision to have the coin flip than cheating on the coin flip itself. The worst part of that video is him announcing it won’t change the delegate math to try to influence the vote. Who gets more votes won’t change who gets more delegates - how could that be? If there were an even number of delegates that would make sense, but he says there are 9. Or are delegates decided individually and the total is just an irrelevant sum (i.e., could get you 51% of the vote in 9 of 9 sections and get all 9?). Honestly, the voting system seems to have no credibility. It looks like someone came up with it in the 1700s.
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Why are there even delegates? The primary system makes no more sense than the electoral college does.
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The whole thing seems crazy. Couldn’t they just have ballots?
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Send a voting card to all registered democrats in the country, ask them tick one box (or even rank the three candidates), send it back, count it.
Done. No need to take a year over it, or give a bizarre amount of importance to people in fictional states like Iowa, or ‘New’ Hampshire.
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Yeah, if there’s a New Hampshire, then where is Old Hampshire? Can they tell me that?
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Have you ever been to Iowa? I’m really glad that they aren’t using straw polls for the general elections, or vote based on weights of ballots by the bushel. It looks like this there everywhere:
The good news is that it’s proportional delegates, so even with the chicanery and archaicness of it all, it gains Hillary a negligible benefit. Unless you believe in “momentum” which seems to me like a creative way for pundits ignore the results of effective campaigning and ground operations and look at the world as moved by an invisible magical spirit force affecting people’s minds.
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So I’m watching all this from a backward island on the other side of the world called “Australia”. But I do like me some US late night TV.
Is it just me, or is there a very strong pro-Hillary narrative amongst liberal talk show hosts?
It just seems like Hillary is still the miles-ahead, presumptive nominee, while Sanders is the crazy old guy whose hair sticks up in the air, even though the reality is a long way from there. Or is that just better TV?
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NPR has a story on the Clinton coin flipping. tl;dr: there were at least a dozen ties decided by coin flips with Bernie winning a “handful.” And, b/c of the wacky caucus-delegate system, in order for Clinton to pick up those 4 extra delegates, she would have had to won 47 tossses in a row. Hills would have had to cash in some hardcore Illuminati favors to pull that off.
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No. In fact, there are at least twice that number, and Sanders won several of them. But the truth is rarely as interesting as the wacko conspiracy.
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