Yeah, that’s clearly the A-Team.
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Although, should you need a unit patch at some point, “Elite Secret Shenanigans” has a nice ring to it.
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The most obvious problem with the recount narrative is that secret operatives somehow changed tens of thousands of ballots in dozens of counties to prevent the incumbent president from being re-elected
but chose to let the downballot GOP candidates retain the senate and gain house seats.
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I had to Google that one.
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In 1972 a group of soldiers was sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today they make their living as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem and no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire… The A-Team. bombastic theme song
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You mean this one?
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At the city’s federal courthouse on Thursday evening, attorneys for Trump asked a judge to issue an emergency order to stop the count, alleging that all Republican observers had been barred.
Under sharp questioning from Judge Paul S. Diamond, however, they conceded that Trump in fact had “a nonzero number of people in the room,” leaving Diamond audibly exasperated.
What sort of a moron uses the term “a nonzero number of people”?
That’s a rhetorical question btw, the answer is “A lawyer who is trying not to admit that they are an arse, but failing badly”
DHS rumored to be about to fire Chris Krebs, presumably because he runs the CISA’s Rumor Control site. Rumor Control is embarrassing the administration by providing an official source that repeatedly debunks bullshit claims about the aftermath of the election.
Bullshit directly addressed on the site includes:
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OMFG DEAD PEOPLE’S VOTES ARE BEING COUNTED!!! Nope.
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TRUMP PRINTED SPECIAL BALLOTS WITH A WATERMARK!!! Nope.
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ELECTION OFFICIALS ARE FILLING OUT FAKE BALLOTS!!! Nope.
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SHARPIESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!! Nope.
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THE VOTE CHANGED SINCE ELECTION NIGHT SO IT’S FRAUDDDDDDDDDd Nope.
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THE VOTE COUNT IS TAKING SO LONG IT MUST BE FRAUDDDDDDDD!!! Nope.
…and many others. Via Reuters:
White House officials have asked for content to be edited or removed from the website, which has pushed back against numerous false claims about the election, including that Democrats are behind a mass election fraud scheme. In response, CISA officials have refused to delete accurate information.
In particular, one person said, the White House was angry about a CISA post rejecting a conspiracy theory that falsely claims an intelligence agency supercomputer and program, purportedly named Hammer and Scorecard, could have flipped votes nationally. No such system exists, according to Krebs, election security experts and former U.S. officials.
This is the most galling part about the Trump administration’s lasting effects: the wholesale rejection of truth that contradicts the PR narrative, without thought or care about the consequences. (Anyone who wants to immediately respond with “politicians lie all the time!” or some other variation on the “BUT OBAMA” excuse, keep your words behind your teeth. If you can’t tell the very obvious difference between run-of-the-mill political lies and an attempt to undermine the legitimate results of an election, we don’t have anything to talk about, because you’re pushing the same rejection of truth—possibly because it makes you feel better, I guess? As Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro are so fond of reminding everyone, facts don’t care about your feelings.)
Meanwhile, judges remain properly skeptical about the administration’s suits. It’s not looking awesome for the campaign in Arizona:
Put on the spot by the judge was the Trump campaign’s lawyer Kory Langhofer, who explained the automated process that reflected their post-election evidence hunt. It included an online form whose reliability Langhofer claimed was boosted by the fact that it included a CAPTCHA, which weeded out the bots. The attorneys then visited the complainants’ homes. The Trump campaign said it excluded the submissions of those who swore to lies, but they included the ones they could not prove were lying into evidence.
Judge Kiley replied that this did not show the remaining affidavits are trustworthy.
“That just shows you cannot disprove what’s asserted,” Kiley noted.
Shortly after, Langhofer went sharply off-message with Trump representatives telling any media outlet that would listen about their vast voter-fraud conspiracy theory.
“This is not a fraud case,” Langhofer said, casting the lawsuit instead as allegations of flaws within the voting system. “It is not a stealing-the-election case.”
which, just…
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The watermark one got me for about half a second and then I remembered that’s not how any of this works.
At this point I’m concerned that all the chaff will cause things like the double entered absentee ballots, which were caught as part of the normal course of things, and the glitch in the Dominion system to be brushed over.
The margin on a couple elections is within the honest mistake range. I am still concerned that there may be fraud as some areas, select counties in swing states, have Biden getting massive increases over Clinton or Obama while showing declines from those numbers almost everywhere else in that state. Even if its not a mistake, error, or fraud I am curious what happened in those areas.
Again, just… not a thing, no matter how hard Eric Trump or Breitbart wants it to be. Source, source, source, source.
The Michigan secretary of state released a statement to address this:
The erroneous reporting of unofficial results from Antrim county was a result of accidental error on the part of the Antrim County Clerk. The equipment and software did not malfunction and all ballots were properly tabulated. However, the clerk accidentally did not update the software used to collect voting machine data and report unofficial results.
…
The software did not cause a misallocation of votes; it was a result of user human error. Even when human error occurs, it is caught during county canvasses.
The only outlets actually reporting this as fact are these dumbasses, and you can take it as a given that if OAN says something, the literal opposite is true. It is a network thoroughly dedicated to the distortion of truth for political gain. (OAN, recall, reported that one of their “journalists” was chased through the streets of Kiev with Rudy Giuliani by ONE THOUSAND ANGRY TROOPS, frantically racing to the airport to escape, only to be personally met at the airport by George Soros in a limousine. Seriously, OAN is not the outlet you want to find yourself aligned with.)
The answer seems extremely obvious: many Republican voters split their ticket and chose to deliberately vote against Trump, while voting downballot (R).
The uneven distribution of votes follows from the fact that population isn’t distributed evenly throughout a state’s counties, and Trump’s support drops in denser population areas. Denser population areas tend to have higher percentages of people with professional jobs and/or university degrees, and generally those segments pulled hard away from Trump:
(Source, with data gathered from the USDA Economic Research Service)
There’s no conspiracy and there’s no epidemic of voter fraud. This election was a referendum on Trump, and voters went far out of their way to vote against him—including a significant chunk of Republicans who split their ticket.
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Further, the Department of Homeland Security released this statement today. It’s short enough to quote in full:
The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.
When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.
Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020.
While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.
It’s past time for the #stopthecount dingdongs to put up or shut up—they have failed to put up, and now it’s time to shut up.
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It’s past time for the #stopthecount dingdongs to put up or shut up—they have failed to put up, and now it’s time to shut up.
Again, since the votes aren’t certified it actually isn’t.
And ok, human error instead of software error, the certification process is supposed to catch that and it’s not done yet. Wisconsin and Georgia are doing recounts. Frankly I haven’t read anything on that one since it first came out… Otoh, our system it’s all automatic so it doesn’t make much sense either. Feed the ballots in then consolidate the USB drives and load them. But I know most states habe their own method.
As for the votes… Trump got more votes in these areas as well than he did last time. This is what I am talking about. Trump gained votes in almost every county in WI while Biden lost votes compared to Obama or Hillary. But in a few counties Biden gained huge amounts of votes, where Trump gained some, and that was the difference.
I’m not in favor of stopping the count anyway and the only reason anyone is is because the press has once again muddied the waters. The same press that decided that the president who has done the most damage to Russia in decades was supposedly working for them.
If an investigation does not take place, it goes back to his double standard of “I hate something if it doesn’t help me but I love it if it does”.
Is it a double standard if that’s the one everyone uses? Seriously, Trump is all this shit turned to 11, not the inventor of it.
Here’s your sign. That’s not an argument. All this means is everyone sucks–which, yeah, granted–but that doesn’t mean some people don’t suck more or that we shouldn’t care about it.
This is technically accurate and rhetorically disingenuous. Absent evidence of widespread fraud, which has not been even seriously hypothesized, recounts are going to change at most a few hundred votes in a few places. What are the margins in the contested states? Are there any with fewer than 4 digits? How much voter fraud are we hypothesizing, and how many hundreds of people are in on it in how many dozens of counties? How deep does this liberal conspiracy go, which for some reason forgot to change the senate and house candidate votes?
This isn’t Florida 2000, where the result hinged on a few hundred votes in one municipality. The burden of proof is to show that there was fraud of such a degree and volume to materially affect the outcome of the election.
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Are you sure? Conservative news felt the opposite in 2018. Jeanine Pirro seems to firmly believe that the media calling elections based on math—something that’s occurred for longer than I’ve been alive, and something that you should be very familiar with, because I know you’re older than I am and have witnessed more elections than I have—is not just fine, but the way it’s supposed to be:
“The democrats are refusing to accept the declared results of the national media. So how do they do this? Low and behold, they find ‘missing ballots.’”
She even does the air quotes around “missing ballots.”
The only substantive change between the 2018 and 2020 elections are that the latter involves control of the executive branch. Oh, and the massive unproven allegations of miscounts and fraud.
Which, it’s worth emphasizing just one more time, are all bullshit, manufactured by Trump, because he doesn’t want to lose. Because he knows a lifetime of grifting, theft, and tax evasion are coming due soon.
You should consider reassessing where you’re getting your news, because when you say things like that, you are promulgating a lie that you have been primed to believe by years of disinformation.
This is not a new tactic, though Trump-leaning conservatives in the past 4 years ignore this and other parallels to past instances of authoritarianism because they treat politics more like a team sport than something with consequences. And also because self reflection tends to breed self awareness, and self awareness is the enemy of authoritarian groupthink.
You’re spreading misinformation right there, in your post, with that link to RedState, a site that not only demonstrates massive right-leaning bias, but also regularly fails fact checks. To mangle a Trump quote, I prefer my news from sources that don’t regularly get caught telling obvious, empirically disprovable lies.
Why do you want to base your arguments on sources that are regularly caught manufacturing misinformation? I know it feels good to read news that aligns with one’s biases, but at this point it feels like you’re purposefully taking refuge in a rapidly collapsing pile of hard-right lies…because it…feels good?
Why are you carrying Trump’s water this time around? Why weren’t you and others protesting in 2018—or in 2016, when Trump won, flipping states that had previously voted hard democrat?
I mean, I get it. Things that feel good feel good, and things that feel bad feel bad. But on this one, the lies you tell yourself aren’t just hurting you. They’re damaging the faith that the electorate has in America’s ability to conduct fair elections.
It’s time to put away childish things, be a grown-up, and accept that Trump lost the election. He certainly lost the popular vote—by more than five million people. If you want to advance the conservative cause in a way that can actually win votes, then go join up with your local RNC chapter and phone bank or canvas for conservative candidates that actually represent the kind of conservative values that I know you and I both grew up with.
Donald Trump is not, and never was, the leader America needs. He’s a piece of shit. He was a piece of shit in the 80s, he was a piece of shit in the 90s, he was a piece of shit in the 00s, he was a piece of shit in the 2010s, and he’s a piece of shit in the 20s. Conservatives have a chance here to actually back a candidate in 2024 that might win my vote back, assuming they don’t go full-retard and nominate Trump But Actually Smart This Time.
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(Wrote a bunch of crap that doesn’t really matter here and deleted it. Suffice it to say I didn’t learn to distrust the media from Trump. But from their own actions well before him)
Even so, I would prefer that any and all investigations show no tampering and this is the result than there be issues and Trump win. The consequences of actual voter fraud being found and Trump winning are only slightly better than the fraud not being found if it exists.
I’ve said it a million times here. Trump was about my 15th choice out of the pack, and I was surprised that we got as much out of him that I liked as I did. And Biden will do nothing that I want. There was no real choice to be made. An asshole who does some of what I want, or one who does nothing I want.
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This is my fear. If they had gotten their butts kicked in this election, not just for POTUS but the House and Senate as well, they would have had to reassess what they were doing. But since they barely lost the White House, picked up seats in the House, may very well keep the Senate, and got their SCOTUS majority they will likely conclude that Trump was just a dumbass (not a false statement) and run someone like Tom Cotton or Mike Pompeo who actually knows what they’re doing. Because of how things went down in this election, I fully expect this scenario to happen in four years’ time.
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Techdirt weighs in. Their analysis is worth reading because Techdirt comes correct to any argument they choose to pick.
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Wisconsin has about 20,000 votes more for Biden. The last major recount in this state earlier this decade with a 10,000 vote difference only changed the count by 300-500 votes, I believe.
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Hey, man, I hear you. I hear and feel what you’re saying—I mean it, seriously. I held my nose and voted for Hillary in 2016, because my perception of her was (and likely still is) weighed down by a whole bunch of shit I absorbed when I was in my formative high school years during the Clinton presidency. I don’t like Hillary Clinton.
But at a certain point, you’ve got to recognize that the ends just fucking flat-out don’t justify the means. This is Donald Trump here, @Woodman. Donald. Fucking. Trump. If you’ve even vaguely been paying attention to the world since the 80s, you know who Donald Trump is.
You know that Donald Trump would absolutely accept foreign help for dirt on a political rival, and you know he’d be completely ignorant or utterly uncaring that there are laws there to prevent it. You know—you have to know, in your heart, unless you’re truly disconnected from reality, that Donald Fucking Trump would extort the president of Ukraine to initiate an investigation against a political rival. You’ve got to know in your heart that when David Holme testified that he sat there in that cafe and heard Trump’s super loud voice blaring out of Sondland’s cell phone, he was telling the God’s honest truth. You know that Trump’s objective was to get an investigation declared, because you know Donald Trump.
And you know that’s fucking wrong. You know that rises far past the level of impeachment. You know that’s something the President of the United States of America doesn’t fucking do.
And that’s why I hate Donald Fucking Trump, and why I’m a 42-year old lifelong Republican who Trump as converted into a lifelong Democrat. Because he’s a piece of human garbage, and Republicans let him shit all over the office of the presidency.
Republicans let that piece of shit destroy the United States’ international reputation. They let him threaten the United States’ standing in NATO, which—I mean, look, I know you’re not a goddamn idiot, @Woodman. I know you realize that the Pax Americana is fucking fundamental to the way of life that we enjoy. I know you know this.
Voting for Biden isn’t an embrace of Democratic political positions. It’s a return from the fucking brink of goddamn unhinged lunacy.
How any Republican can pretend that a conservative Supreme Court and a bunch of judiciary appointments is worth their fucking souls is beyond me. You baffle me. The ends don’t justify the means, but any Trump vote says that they do.
Is the destruction of American democracy worth pwning the libs?
I hope you don’t hate me for writing any of this. I certainly don’t hate you, because I know from two decades of hanging out (virtually) with you that you’re a great guy.
I just don’t understand how political gain is worth moral bankruptcy.
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