American Politics Discussion Thread

[Jowy]

It's completely impossible to cheat on any significant scale with all the safeguards in place.

[Mjmd]

Jowys comment needs defended so sure I'll try my best to prove non existence. I also think it might help to go through exactly how absurd republicans sound when they say there was fraud large enough to change the result of the election.

I'm a CPA and accountant by profession, but auditing was never a strength and I only have experience being audited not auditing. That being said for our basic purposes I hope I can adequately explain and go through some things as we go.

Lets start with a fairly straightforward assumption. In order to somehow add votes you need a real persons vote to steal. IE a simple check to see if a person who voted existed would come back as a positive. People get caught trying to vote for their dead relative even without a dedicated audit; this is an easy check in just normal procedure and under any kind of audit I think its fairly safe to assume this can be easily caught. 

Now lets assume we want do some mail in ballot fraud and we need to do it on a large scale mind. IE we need lots of voters who aren't going to try to vote themselves (again easy catch) and we need a reason a lot of mail in ballots would be requested and sent back from one location. Ya the only real candidate is assisted living facilities, probably mainly (only?) memory issues. The person doing again has to make absolutely sure that the person they are using isn't going to have anyone else vote for them. Again at scale you somehow have someone who knows the residents enough to know that no one is going to go "grandpa has been voting x party their whole life and I know they would want to keep doing so". So congrats fraudster you've managed to do this to your whole facility that you are 100% confident won't get accidentally duplicated. How many votes do you think 1 fraudster could get this way? 100? Seems absurdly high but sure lets say 100. As the Democrats your best polling is showing you down 10K votes. You want to win by 10K votes. You need 20K votes, but lets assume we use another method for some so we only need 10K from this method. The Democrats would need 100 accomplices to perfectly pull this off and not have anyone tell or let something slip. Just think about the absurdity of 100 people perfectly keeping this secret while perfectly performing their jobs. Again, I'm not saying mail in ballot fraud doesn't exist as I know individual fraud cases have occurred, but some kind of large coordinated scale? I mean armies sometimes can do these kind of operations secretly, but as memory care facilities aren't known for their high quality employees and across multiple states and facilities.... I'm not giving it any credence.   

So lets instead do some massive dumps. Lets just add ballots while counting. It requires less people in the know. In order to get away with this we are going to need the number of ballots to match the number of people who voted. Again easy check that I think we can assume is done just as normal course let alone an audit. So we have to add ballots and we also have to alter whatever voting check in system is present and check in a bunch of registered voters who didn't actual show up to vote. Now in Wisconsin there are two separate voting check in books. There is one that someone checks your name off and then another where you sign in. Do I think this is coincidence. You bet not! My bet is there is a whole host of safety procedures around. But lets assume you've figured out how bypass the non political and other party observing officials as well as whatever physical barriers there are to altering. As an auditor or just an accountant / FP&A type if you see expenses are high you don't look at all expenses. You see which area or account is high. I think its fairly safe to assume some statistical analysis is done on areas that had higher than normal vote totals (I've seen in the news so very safe assumption). What is the next step as an auditor to confirm? Auditors LOVE random sampling and there some lovely statistical analysis they do to make sure they have a large enough sample size to be a certain amount certain (I forget which legal word they use here) that things are materially correct. I'm guessing the auditors would set to north of 95% for each sample. Now the easiest check to do is to just confirm with that sample that they voted. Again, because you are just matching number of ballots to number of people who votes its a fairly fast and easy check. So we somehow needed like 5% chance the audit sample failed across multiple samples across multiple audits to have found nothing. If you do the math, the odds quickly grows to a minuscule number. Mind you that is once you've figured out how to get past this one simple check in the first place. Again, do I know all of the safety policy and procedures around this. No. But even to get past this one obvious one and avoid the odds of avoiding one type of simple audit check at scale is almost an absurdity.

Are there a million lies about how the Democrats stole the election. Ya sure. I just went through some of the main ones. I hope you can see how many fail points and issues there are to overcome even on the simplest seeming thing. IE please do some thinking through of these kinds of dangerous lies before just believing them because you hate Democrats.

[Amicalola]

The fascinating thing about you here, T-Hawk, is that from what I can tell, you seem like a reasonably intelligent, well-educated person. I certainly used to think that reading your website many years ago. I don't know if the issue (because it's pretty clear there's something wrong) is social isolation, propaganda, relationship troubles, employment, anything really. But it makes for a remarkable case-study. How could such a person become so thoroughly convinced by such obviously contradictory arguments? Because sure, maybe you can chalk people like Jowy and myself up to being 'libtards' or whatever charming word your most recent demagogue uses, but Mjmd? Darrell? These are people you used to have some common ground with politically. Doesn't it set the alarm bells off that even they think you've gone off the deep end?

[T-hawk]

The fascinating part here is how every rebuttal against cheating has to throw in a qualifier. They didn't cheat organized. They didn't cheat widespread. They didn't cheat by enough margin. They didn't cheat more than Republicans. They didn't cheat because they changed the rules so it wasn't. They didn't cheat because the pandemic magically allowed changing all the procedures. But nobody is claiming they didn't try and get away with it at at least small scales, given such a huge and obvious motive. And so we don't and can't know if the small scales added up to anything significant. The unknowability is enough to justify the Jan 6th protesting. There is a huge gulf between "untrustworthy enough to protest" and "actually overturn", and that's what none of you are understanding.

Mjmd's post about voting auditing is interesting, but it's mostly self-admitted speculation. I don't know the details either. As I understand it, there were indeed statistical anomalies showing overrepresentation of Democratic votes compared to polling and historical trends, which all got buried under the "not proof" and "no court found because they refused to look" hysteria.

The fascinating thing about you here, T-Hawk, is that from what I can tell, you seem like a reasonably intelligent, well-educated person. I certainly used to think that reading your website many years ago. I don't know if the issue (because it's pretty clear there's something wrong) is social isolation, propaganda, relationship troubles, employment, anything really. But it makes for a remarkable case-study. How could such a person become so thoroughly convinced by such obviously contradictory arguments? Because sure, maybe you can chalk people like Jowy and myself up to being 'libtards' or whatever charming word your most recent demagogue uses, but Mjmd? Darrell? These are people you used to have some common ground with politically. Doesn't it set the alarm bells off that even they think you've gone off the deep end?

This is the most polite ad-hominem I've ever read.

What 's happening is the same thing as everywhere on the progressive-leftist side: shoving the window so far in your direction that actually moderate positions get condemned as far-right extremism. Like simply asking questions about verifiability gets banned as "dangerous lies". And so you're imagining that I said extremist things that I never did.

chalk people like Jowy and myself up to being 'libtards'

Like that. I never fling insults like that. (I absolutely never use 'tard' - I have a brother who is disabled with Down syndrome, that's directly offensive to my family.) Yet you're hallucinating that I did. Read my actual posts and positions and don't imagine things I don't say, and you will find reasonability.

[Jowy]

Sounds like you should cheat in the next election and see how it goes for yourself.

[Jowy]

The previous post is just a joke. Don't actually try to cheat. I wouldn't wish American prison on anyone.

[Mjmd]

The fascinating part here is how every rebuttal against cheating has to throw in a qualifier.  They didn't cheat organized.  They didn't cheat widespread.  They didn't cheat by enough margin.  They didn't cheat more than Republicans.  They didn't cheat because they changed the rules so it wasn't.  They didn't cheat because the pandemic magically allowed changing all the procedures.  But nobody is claiming they didn't try and get away with it at at least small scales, given such a huge and obvious motive.  And so we don't and can't know if the small scales added up to anything significant.  The unknowability is enough to justify the Jan 6th protesting.  There is a huge gulf between "untrustworthy enough to protest" and "actually overturn", and that's what none of you are understanding.

Mjmd's post about voting auditing is interesting, but it's mostly self-admitted speculation.  I don't know the details either.  As I understand it, there were indeed statistical anomalies showing overrepresentation of Democratic votes compared to polling and historical trends, which all got buried under the "not proof" and "no court found because they refused to look" hysteria.

Just to clarify T-Hawk you've used it in the past as justification for overturning the election. You continue to not draw a line. There is a difference between peaceful protests and an organization replacing party officials who won't go along, pressuring state officials to change results, and then also pressuring federal officials including the VP to overturn. There is following legal rule of law routes to challenge and change laws and then there is a coup. Recognize the cognitive disconnect. 

My post is speculation, but logical and again the simplest of how many votes were cast vs how many voters voted is the simplest of checks and I think I laid out how hard that would be to do in the first place let alone get away with at scale. As far as doing it doing it in smaller amounts all over I find that even less likely. Again the more people involved, in more instances, and in more places is so many factors that can go wrong and be discovered immediately or be found. Your just adding in fail points.

[T-hawk]

Just to clarify T-Hawk you've used it in the past as justification for overturning the election.

Can you find where I said that? Serious question. I don't think I held that opinion for any more than a couple weeks after the election, when there was promise of serious evidence coming out, and then that never happened.

[Mjmd]

So I don't have to look back through pages, lets answer some questions.

Do you justify somehow Republicans trying to overturn our democracy?

Do you think believing that the election was fraudulent and that Republicans didn't try to overturn should be the basis for being in the party?

[T-hawk]

"Overturn" is subjective there. I can fire the partisanship just as much in the other direction by saying the Democrats were the ones who succeeded in overturning by cheating, and the Republicans were merely preventing that.

Let's try it without the deliberately subjective language. I do not support the federal government changing the electors that PA nominated. Both on the grounds that I think there isn't enough known information to justify it, and that it is ultimately a state issue rather than federal, that authority to select the electors should reside with the state. However I do support Republicans attempting to do so, if they *do* believe there is sufficient information and that the federal government should have authority over PA's own procedures.

Can you process that much nuance?