They did it. They actually did it! The newest lawsuit finally gave proof why there’s voter fraud: Ballot integrity was systematically loosened so that the fraud became undetectable.
Of course! That makes so much sense. I mean, I had doubts, but they’ve settled them. They didn’t offer proof before because they were busy detecting the undetectable voter fraud. They weren’t putting up and wouldn’t shut up because the voter fraud was there. It was just invisible!
I loved their analogy.
Let’s say I told you that Bigfoot is real. To be sure, Bigfoot is not real, but for the sake of conversation, let’s say I was trying to convince you otherwise.
You’d naturally ask for some kind of evidence. Initially, I’d respond by saying I have so much evidence of Bigfoot’s existence that I hardly know what to do with all of it. But once the conversation progresses, I’d switch gears and say, “You know, asking for evidence misses the point. Bigfoot covers his tracks, making his existence undetectable, which I believe is itself proof that Bigfoot is real.”
At this point, you’d probably stop listening to my argument about Bigfoot, which would be the appropriate response.
And yet, this is the point at which we’ve arrived with Donald Trump and his claims about voter fraud.
This would have been more effective before the Electoral College cast their votes today but here it is. My first political cartoon on the election.
Conspiratorial thinking is a frightening sort of whirlpool to get sucked into because it is self-reinforcing. There are certain telling phrases that indicate someone is leaning that way and which generally convince me further discussion is pointless, e.g. “just asking questions” or “the experts have become politicized.” Both indicate to me that there is unlikely to be any refuting evidence they will accept.
It never ceases to amaze me how much social media can really get folks to lock in on confirmation bias. I’ve always strived to look at issues from a few different perspectives. I have a lot more friends and family than I care to admit on either side of the spectrum just locked in on their beliefs even if the evidence proves otherwise.
This is what happens when the president continues making baseless claims of voter fraud
Summary is that an ex cop was paid to “investigate” voter fraud and ended up ramming a vehicle and holding someone at gunpoint until the real cops came along and stopped him.
To nobody’s surprise, there was no voter fraud involved. The ex-cop is now on trial for felony aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
@Road_Rash It’s not just social media, but that certainly doesn’t help.
What an odd story. It happened in October, and most of the stories are from then but they’ve been updated recently, but I can’t see what’s been updated. Though the one on the NY Post looked like it was saying he was arrested Tuesday, but that makes even less sense.
Here’s my deal with the election and potential issues. Several last minute (For election changes) were made. There are several weird statistical anomalies. And some states went half cocked with mail in ballots. Several states did odd things while counting.
Yet just a few days after the election is over it’s called the most secure ever.
OK, how did someone come up with that determination just days after the election? Before some results were even finalized.
This has always been my issue with potential voter fraud, you can likely scan through this thread and see me say it more than once. When someone says there is fraud the most common response is to the exact same recount and say there isn’t. The states who clean up their voting rolls get sued, and mountains are moved to keep people from putting voter ID laws in place, laws that usually cause higher turn out in the very minority populations they supposedly suppress.
So no, if you don’t put decent protections in place, or enforce the ones you do have like signature checks, not cleaning ballots, or filling out information on them at the time of counting, and on the back end you don’t do any of those things or audit anything, even randomly, when both sides in the last 20 years or so have screamed about interference or fraud, then yeah, I’m suspicious. I’ve been that way for years and I’ve seen nothing to change my mind.
I work a poll location in Indiana and I see how several things could be done. And at the same time I wonder how the hell ballots are found days later in any quantity. The whole system is full of holes and half assedness. It’s only an issue during a presidential election and then two months later nobody cares enough to fix anything, or even see if anything is actually broken.
Ugh, rant over. Biden is president, I’d like to see real action taken to secure elections going forward.
No arguments there. I’d love to see real investment in voting systems, preferably open source that can be properly vetted.
How do you figure?
Cato institute says the effect is greater. Vox says its a neutral effect.
Of course with states giving out ID to illegal immigrants that dilutes the effect some.
From your reference, the notification about the requirements was correlated with a slightly (1.5%) higher turnout. That’s not at all the same thing as “voter ID laws . . . usually cause higher turn out in the very minority populations they supposedly suppress.”
As they say, [citation required].
We’ve discussed it here before, but I don’t think voter ID laws would be inherently discriminatory–if we expended resources to enable people to get IDs very easily, e.g. mobile sites to come to underserved areas, fee waivers for income, etc.
But I’ve rather come around on whether they would even be beneficial. WA has had vote-by-mail my entire voting career and no one credible on either side has made any reasonable allegations of fraud. Everybody is pretty happy with it. When you have states like TX trying to limit voting locations in their own major urban counties–and then suing other states for following their own laws because it somehow disenfranchises TX–I can’t help but think that “fair elections” is not the real motivation.
It should be noted that the attorney general of Texas who brought the suit against other states, Ken Paxton, has himself been under felony indictment for security fraud since 2015.
If I were a conspiracy theory sort of person, I would suspect that Paxton’s efforts to mess with other states’ voting had less to do with changing the election outcome and more to do with currying favor with Trump so he could get one of those shiny new presidential pardons.
Of course, either way you look at it, Paxton’s kind of a jerk.
It’s not over yet. Trump’s trying to get Congress to overturn the votes cast by the Electoral College when they meet on January 6. Vice President Mike Pence will preside over it and be the one that will confirm Trump’s and his own replacements. Pence is considering taking a trip out of the country right afterward, which would put him out of Trump’s immediate blast radius.
Going back to what I said a while ago, there’s still rumblings about Trump running again in 2024, but he apparently said at one point he wasn’t thinking about that and was focused on what was happening now (overturning the election). But if Trump does run in 2024 or endorses one of his kids, that shuts out any chances Mike Pence would have of running himself. So in a way, it isn’t just other Republicans that are politically being held hostage by the uncertainty of what Trump will do in the future, it’s his own Vice President.
I’m really beginning to wonder if Donald Trump isn’t headed for a rapid and sudden downfall that means we won’t have to worry about him mucking up the 2024 race. His time as President, especially this last year, has made his true colors shine through, and it isn’t just orange. The frequent staff turnover was described as “chaos in the White House” but was a continuation of his usual business style became indicative of his demands of 100% loyalty and his willingness to get rid of people if they no longer gave 100%. That’s not the sign of a leader. It’s the sign of someone who rules by fear.
There’s so many people lining up for pardons that the White House is having to use a spreadsheet to keep track of them all. Trump likes giving pardons as much as he likes firing people, and sometimes he gives pardons to those he fires.
He won’t have the shield of being President to protect him from law suits much longer. Melania’s already planning on moving back to Mar-a-Lago, but Palm Beach doesn’t want them back. And oops! Trump’s push years ago to get Mar-a-Lago reclassified from a private residence to a private club means he legally cannot live there for more than 21 days each year. Palm Beach is already fighting to keep that enforced. Signs have been put up in New York City saying that people don’t want Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner there, either.
Trump can’t be given the new vaccine until about February or March because doctors don’t know how the treatment he was given in October will interact with it. Doctors don’t know yet how long an immunity to the disease lasts. He’s not in great health right now, so if he hasn’t developed useful antibodies, he could get sick with COVID-19 again. If you’re a believer in conspiracy theories, here’s one I just made up: What if Trump didn’t actually contract the virus? What if he said he did so he could look good when he emerged victorious three days later?
While the perks a President can get after they leave office are numerous, guess what a First Lady gets? Answer: nothing. The only thing allocated for a First Lady is $20,000 a year after the Former President dies. How well is that going to sit with Melania?
Radio talk show host Ron Reagan, President Reagan’s son, once said, “When Bill Clinton loses the election [for his second term], Hillary will divorce him.” At the time, I bought into it and repeated it a few times to others. It didn’t happen then. Will it happen now? Donald and Melania are more of a “power couple” than Bill and Hillary were. Melania has a prenuptial agreement with Donald. There’s valid reasons for getting them, but to me, they’ve always felt like an escape clause that you get in writing because you don’t fully trust the other person. How long will she stick by him and trust him now that he’s firmly entrenched in self-deluding and destructive behavior? Is she going to come to view him as a liability as some (but not enough) Republicans are starting to?
As Trump continues to obsess and rant about the election, he’s doing nothing about the problems we have if he’s not taking steps to actively make them worse in the future. It will be someone else’s problem, not his, so why not poison the well on the way out? He’s burned a lot of bridges, all the while making sure that he looks good doing it. To me, that’s his driving force. “The Donald only does what makes The Donald look good.” Everyone else? Feh.
While he wallows in his conspiracies and sees people who he used to call friend starting to leave him behind because even they are recognizing he’s not the “very stable genius” he once proclaimed, others are stepping forward to do what he won’t. They are demonstrating the integrity and leadership we need now and Donald Trump is deliberately not providing. He’s been told that people won’t remember what he did first but they will remember what he did last. Does he even care?
I think his direct influence within the R party will drop rapidly once he is out of office. I do not think he will wield significant political power again.
This piece refutes your statement here quite a bit, but Trump still has time to increase his numbers substantially. Just out of curiosity, where are you getting your information from? I’m no fan of Trump, but I’m a firm believer in the ability of both parties and media outlets to manipulate information to fit a narrative.
I don’t think it’s the number of pardons given so far that’s concerning, it’s all the people who are trying to get one personally that is. But I’m not up on the whole story, that’s just what I glean from the blurbs I’ve been seeing.
The basis for the law suit is that PA didn’t follow their law, the Supreme Court of PA changed the law. Which is something it’s simply not allowed to do. The national Supreme Court has come close to this several times, and if this continues a whole bunch of people are going to regret it. There is a theoretical conservative majority on the court right now, if enough precedent is set that courts can make law than what is to control that? I don’t want a form of government that is more like what I’ve read India runs under.
As for the voter ID laws, I found multiple anecdotal and early research that showed an increase, but most of the actual studies call for real studies. None of which anyone has done apparently. And hey, Indiana has one of the toughest laws, which I call a joke. We are allowed to look at the ID, if the name is mostly correct and the picture sort of looks like them and has a expiration date (except some exclusions) they vote. If any of that doesn’t match then they still get to vote a provisional ballot, which they have 10 days to verify and according to our election commission no one ever verifies them.
In WA do they mail a ballot to everyone or is it on request? One of the issues I’ve seen with mail in ballots is ballot harvesting, what is in place to prevent that? Don’t say signatures or witnesses since PA and WI both pretty essentially waived those when it came down to it.
Oh, and I found out what was meant by the most secure. Cyber secure from foreign interference… talk about a quote taken out of context.
For the sake of this country and everyone in it I hope you are correct.
Okay, so I got the part about the pardons wrong. Here’s something I wish I was wrong about: The amount of desperation leaking out of the White House is getting extremely pathetic. I’m not even surprised that the idea of declaring martial law came up in the past couple of days.
Hey, uh, Mr. Trump? “Beautify Berchtesgaden” was an episode of Hogan’s Heroes. I know you like TV, especially being on TV, but don’t you have, you know, actual, meaningful things you really should be doing?
