Statistical significance is only pertinent when sampling. When counting the population statistical significance has no meaning.
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Hasn’t it been scrutinized? The truth is, Trump and his cultists will never accept anything other than Trump was robbed. And this state of mind will manifest with any Trump candidate who loses. It’s their default mode.
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I think this is really a huge problem. Our system is not really set up to deal with election retrospectives. We don’t have a plan for how to redo an election or how to mediate a situation where election irregularities account for more than the margin of victory. So basically, we are crossing our fingers and hoping that it doesn’t happen. But we know that there are election irregularities and fraud in every election. We just assume that it is a small number/happens both ways and cancels itself out. This means:
- Judges and other mediators have some implicit motivation to rule that voter irregularities didn’t happen in order to avoid a situation where there isn’t a remedy.
- Suggestions to just bring evidence of fraud or irregularities after the election are not helpful because there likely isn’t a remedy.
- Systems have a tacit motivation to not made irregularities evident since that would undermine the confidence in the election without creating a solution to regain that confidence.
- Given the above, there is significant motivation to lie, cheat, or just nudge things in a certain direction since winning the initial count is really all that matters.
If you look at the situation here in Arizona, there are a number of undisputed facts that call things into question:
- Katie Hobbs ran for governor while also being the top election official in the state.
- Many voting precincts in Maricopa county had machine problems. These problems were concentrated in more conservative areas.
- It took nearly a week to count 95% of the vote. In Florida, a much larger number of ballots were counted within an hour. I have looked for an explanation of why Florida can count faster and the best I came up with is that Florida has machines that can cut an envelope open automatically. That hardly seems to explain the ability to count 100 times faster.
This doesn’t mean there was fraud. But at best it means that the election was run in a way that fails to inspire confidence. Hobbs won by a few thousand votes by last count. The attorney general race currently sits at a margin of 236 votes. If 1 in 500 voters that couldn’t cast a ballot at the election site due to the machine being down didn’t come back, that already is much more than the margin of error in the AG race. And if you consider that it was concentrated in conservative areas and only affect Election Day in person voters that skewed heavily red, it’s easy to make the argument that the voting machines going down might change the outcome of the AG race. Did Katie Hobbs cause that or was it just a happy accident? At best, it was incompetence.
But what can we do now? And that’s really my point. Nobody is going to get a do-over and nothing will change. But these are all things that people were pointing at before the election. The fact that it wasn’t changed feels intentional.
Do I think there was election tampering in 2020 or 2022? I have no idea and don’t think I could ever know that if I tried to know. The system is set up to make sure that I can’t know.
And if you bring this up, the response is that there isn’t any evidence of election tampering. Set up a system that would actually create evidence of tampering if there was tampering. Then I would think it relevant that there is no evidence. Right now, the system is set up to avoid making evidence.
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Best point.
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well but to this point, there’s not a shred of evidence that this is even the case. to the best of my knowledge, it’s just Kari Lake saying ‘I lost so they must have cheated.’ I haven’t heard of ANY evidence of any irregularities that would comes remotely near overturning the election.
well, this isn’t really true. There’s a ton of research in the field. I dated a girl for several years who wrote her masters thesis specifically on election fraud. This isn’t just some nebulous thing, it’s a well-studied occurrence. I think the fact that the public thinks that nobody’s looking into this has a lot to do with the distrust, but I know that this perspective is just flat out wrong.
And you’ve seen evidence that 1 in 500 voters faced this issue? I have not. That would be an important fact if it were the case, but nobody has presented any evidence that it is. And to this point, it makes me think most people don’t really have a good ‘feel’ for numbers. You could have said 1 in 1000 voters faced such an issue. You could have said 1 in 200. But in this case, you picked the number that happens to cover the spread, essentially. So it’s a very arbitrary thing to throw out, as if 1 in 500 is a reasonable take. I don’t think it is.
Well, recounts have changed results in the past, but outside of that, correct.
because the mechanisms in place actually WORK. That’s the point. The incidence of machine/polling issues is just so much more infrequent than most people think. There IS data out there to prove this.
there are measures for this. I truly don’t understand why people think there aren’t. People watch polling stations from both parties, as well as neutral watchdog groups. Data is collected everywhere. I think it’s absolutely bonkers that people think it’s so easy to tamper with elections.
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The previous owners of my house still have mail that shows up occasionally (despite them moving out 4 years ago).
I had 2 mail-in ballots show up addressed to them (in addition to the 2 addressed to my wife and I).
And that’s a great thing to bring up. Signature verification is part of election oversight/post-election correction. It was a part of the Arizona recounts/ verification of the 2020 election. You potentially COULD have used those ballots you received in the mail, but if you did so, and your signature didn’t match theirs, you could get pretty fucked.
So I would think ‘signature verification’ would be one of the things that you could have answered with when I asked what you would want to see post-election in Kari Lake’s case.
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It would be, but our ballots are on a separate sheet of paper. The envelope is signed… I assume they are being cross-referenced to everyone’s driver’s license (seems doubtful they are being truly analyzed, but maybe), and that the envelopes are then tossed - thus removing any evidence.
IDK about you guys, but my digital signatures come out like shit when using those clapped-out DMV signing pads… really doubtful it looks anything like my actual signature.
This is the process by which Arizona signatures are verified, if you want to know how the state handles them specifically.
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What if he used them and the people they were intended for voted in person? It seems to me that if you were to use someone else’s ballot, you need to know they are going to vote.
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Why don’t we define the foul lines?
Right field foul line: anyone can easily cast a fraudulent vote.
Left field foul line: the election system is 100% tamper proof.
Reality is within the playing field.
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Yea, I mean there are quite a few reasons it doesn’t happen often, and when it does, it tends to get caught.
agreed, the truth is certainly between these. I suppose I’ve defended our system the most of anyone here, and I haven’t suggested that it’s 100% tamper proof. On the contrary, I would insist that voter fraud DOES occur, probably in EVERY election. The thesis I mentioned earlier said as much, there’s no question that is the case. It’s the degree to which it occurs, and how much it can/does affect real elections that is really what is worth discussing.
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How do we quantify it though? That is the issue - it’s like people (leftists (different from libs and dems)) don’t want to know the real number or discuss it. Worse is that the information about this seems guarded and taboo.
Yes, I picked a round number that covered the spread to point out that if even a small percentage of voters were affected it would alter the outcome. I’m not saying the number is 500 specifically. I’m saying it doesn’t have to be big to have an effect.
It’s obviously impossible to know how many people left and didn’t come back since we don’t have records of their vote. But 30% of precincts in Maricopa county were reportedly affected. WIth 1.2 million votes cast in Maricopa county, that means potentially hundreds of thousands of voters were affected.
Signature verification is quite frankly a terrible system. If it isn’t, how come there is literally no other serious system that uses signature verification for identification purposes. It’s fraught with error in both directions.
Requiring voter ID is so simple and powerful that it’s not really worth it to me to talk about any other method of election security if you don’t start with it.
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Yes. There should be a post election metric relative to voter fraud for every county in the USA.
If you don’t measure it, you cannot manage it.
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The people crying election fraud are talking about deep state conspiracy acts that have nothing to do with voter ID. It’s not individual voters they worry about but the election apparatus itself.
Except that the same deep state scum are the ones saying Voter ID laws are racist.
Why are they racist, exactly? Why is it taboo to ask for secure elections?
When you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that barks is the one you hit.
This type of thing is pretty common. In GoP run states that have black dem areas, the voting locations are often sparse in relation to how many people live there. A multiple hour wait is going to result in some people deciding it isn’t worth it.
I am not saying this to say it’s all fair game as far as making things inconvenient for the opposition party. Just the opposite. It shouldn’t be a long wait, or difficult to vote for anybody.
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I don’t think you know what deep state means. AOC is not deep state.
Agreed. I’m not just talking about explicit fraud but rather just making it harder for the people you think will vote against you and easier for the people you think will vote for you. It is not something new or novel. My point is that without a way to remedy these issues post election, the incentive to do them is high.
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