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Can someone help me to understand this election fraud stuff? I promise I'm not a quack. I pretty much ignore anything Trump has to say, since he was obviously

• igammarays 6y ago
  There are some convincing arguments made by data scientists examining time-series data. Most of the results are suppressed from Google, if you try searching "Lynda McLaughlin from the Data Integrity Group" you can find more info using Yandex or Bing. > According to their analysis, which was published online as early as Dec. 24, time-series election data shows Trump’s votes were decrementing in various counties instead of increasing as they do normally. > At least 30,593 votes were allegedly removed from Trump as result, including 17,650 votes in Dougherty County, 7,008 votes in Dodge County, and 5,935 votes in Putnam County. This is by simple analysis of time-series data that was posted to public sources like the New York Times. There was an open-source repository on Github with the analysis, but it has since been removed. I regret not downloading a copy. [1] https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/theres_evidence_of_vanished_votes_in_pennsylvania.html https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/theres_evidence...
  • Bishop_ 6y ago
    The source you're citing is citing another source, which is behind a paywall. I'd like to look at the time series data as well, but it looks like either the "Data Integrity Group" didn't provide or The Epoch Times felt it unnecessary to share the data in the article. > The Epoch Times was unable to verify the allegation independently. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210104154823/https://www.theepochtimes.com/georgia-election-data-shows-17650-votes-switched-from-trump-to-biden-data-scientists_3640670.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210104154823/https://www.theep...
  • sb52191 6y ago
    Two things that I'd need explained to trust this take: "Often, the data are in the hands of Democrat politicians and bureaucrats who refuse to make it available." 1) The Georgia SOS in charge of elections is a Republican, so why would it benefit him to work against the Republican Nominee 2) If the data is being held by Democrats who refuse to make it available, what "data" did The Epoch Times analyze that showed votes being removed? In my experience, stuff like this often boils down to people's lack of understanding of systems or practices and they read into "anomalies" that might look weird to an uneducated outsider, but for someone that knows what they're talking about, isn't sinister...
  • the_drunkard 6y ago
    i'm curious if this phenomenon has existed during previous elections. for example, is this a normal event when compared to previous elections or is this type of activity indeed suspicious. from the article you linked: > The one thing the time-trend line should never do is drop, which would mean that votes are disappearing from Trump's tally. > That's exactly what happened. In at least 15 counties, according to the Epoch Times story, Trump lost in-person votes, while he lost absentee votes in three other countries. The total result was staggering: > At least 432,116 votes — 213,707 election day votes and 218,409 absentee votes — were removed in total.
    • snakeboy 6y ago
      This is one fallacy I saw over and over and over again back in November. Taking 10 counties in Pennsylvania and saying "Doesn't that look suspicious to you??" It's all meaningless junk stats without a random sample of other counties around the country and from the last few elections for comparison.
• Grimm1 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related_to_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election#Summary_of_post-election_lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related... The lack of standing was only a single component, Judges did see what "evidence" the suits had they found it uncompelling in addition to lack of standing. Below is the ruling from one of the Arizona cases: "The judge ruled that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing; their fraud allegations were vague and implausible, and their evidence was unreliable or irrelevant."
  • snakeboy 6y ago
    Thank you. That quote does seem rather damning. I imagine similarly in Georgia the judges saw evidence and proceeded at their discretion.
• godtoldmetodoit 6y ago
  Like you, I looked into the first 5 or so claims that were made, and found that there was nothing there. They are firmly in "boy who cried wolf" territory with me now. If they had a smoking gun, I have confidence my various news sources would be telling me. I make sure to keep a healthy dose of conservatives and sane anti-establishment types in my media bubble, and I trust them to tell me the truth on that kind of thing. The kind of sources I'm talking about here are Saagar from Rising, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald etc.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• tzs 6y ago
  The claims that the Dominion voting machines miscounted (on accident or purposefully) have been addressed by hand recounts of the physical ballots. That was done for all of Georgia, and I believe in several other locations, and the hand counts matched the machine counts within the normal margin of error for a hand count. Another claim about the voting machines is that they were fed extra ballots. For example, a poll worker said they saw another poll working repeatedly running a set of ballots through one of the machines. Sounds bad, right? It turns out that part of the testing to verify machine are working is to run test ballots repeatedly through machines in a test environment not connected to the live environment. That is what the worker was witnessing. That this would happen and is a normal part of the process was covered in a poll working training session that that poll worked had not bothered to attend. There were claims of Republican observers not being allowed in to observe in Pennsylvania. That is in fact true--some observers were not allowed in. That was because there was already the maximum legally allowed number of observers, split equally among Democrats and Republicans. There were claims that a bunch of ballots were smuggled in, in Pennsylvania if I recall correctly. There was even a short video from surveillance cameras showing boxes of ballots being taken out from under a table and opened and added to the queue to be counted. But if you looked at the full video, you'd see that those were ballots that had been in the queue to be counted, and when it was time to take a break from counting had been placed in the official ballot storage containers, locked, and stored under the table. All the purported proof of fraud video clip showed is the normal resumption of counting after a break. There was a claim based on a worker reporting a bunch of mail in ballots being counted that did not have signatures on the ballots. True--but in the state the signatures were on the envelopes, not the ballots themselves. The procedure, which was carried out, is that workers open the outer envelope, take out the signed inner envelope, check the signature on the inner envelope, and if it matches the on file signature, open the inner envelope, remove the ballot, and add it to the queue of ballots to be counted. Pretty much everything being offered as evidence of fraud has been like that--people seeing normal procedures that have been used without controversy and accepted by both parties for ages, not understanding them, and saying it must be fraud. There have been claims not based on fraud. Most notable is Wisconsin, where plaintiffs claimed that the election officials had misinterpreted the state's election rules and had been conducting elections in an invalid way. The state Supreme Court agreed with that one, and Wisconsin will have to change its procedures. But the court refused to throw out the election because Wisconsin had been using that procedure for years (it was actually put in place by Republicans about a decade ago). They were not going to take the extraordinary step of invalidating the entire election (and it would have to be not just the Presidential election...it would have to be every election in the state, and arguably past elections too). And they were especially not going to grant the plaintiffs' request to just throw out the election in counties where Biden won but leave it standing were Trump won. As far as courts not considering the evidence goes, much of that seems to be based on the idea that since the cases have not gone to trial the court must not have looked at the evidence. For some of the cases that is correct. If plaintiffs don't have standing, or the court does not have jurisdiction, the court will dismiss the case without looking at evidence. Plaintiffs can go refile in an appropriate court. But for the cases where the plaintiffs did have standing and filed in the right court, the court will examine the evidence as part of considering defendant's motion to dismiss. If all you've got is vague accusations rather than concrete evidence, you aren't going to get very far. It is one thing to say in a press conference that you have a ton of concrete evidence that you are going to take to court. When you actually get to court, you have to present that concrete evidence in your civil complaint. They have tended to either not do that, or the evidence will obviously not be admissible at trial--often it has been hearsay, or hearsay of hearsay, or even more levels of hearsay than that. > This is keeping me up at night, feeling like the whole exercise of democracy could be a total sham, and possibly always was. It might help to consider this. Many of the judges tossing out these cases have been staunch conservative judges appointed by Trump, picked by Trump and McConnell specifically because they could be counted on to reliable issue solidly conservative rulings. Yet plaintiffs have done no better with them than they have done with liberal judges. To believe that they are all in on some sort of election rigging requires believing that the people rigging the election are vastly powerful. They can pretty much ensure any election outcome they want. But then you have to explain why this all powerful group forgot to rig things so they would get a solid Senate majority too.
• aw1621107 6y ago
  > I keep hearing from conservatives that the actual evidence was never properly examined in court, and that the cases were mostly dismissed on issues of legal standing. I'd like to try to address the first bit there, and maybe ask a question on the second. Warning: I am not a lawyer. ---- First up: "the actual evidence was never properly examined in court" This depends very heavily on what "properly examined" means. There's absolutely no question that evidence was filed in several lawsuits, so it's definitely seen by both the judge and defendants. The evidence has also been explicitly mentioned in rulings, so there's no question it was at least considered by the judge. For example, take Law v. Whitmer, from Nevada [0]: > The Court nonetheless considers the totality of the evidence provided by Contestants in reaching and ruling upon the merits of their claims. > Contestants offered Mr. Baselice to opine on the incidence of illegal voting in the 2020 General Election based on a phone survey of voters. > The Court questions Mr. Baselice's methodology because he was unable to identify the source of the data for his survey and conducted no quality control of the data he received. > Contestants offered Mr. Kamzol to opine that significant illegal voting occurred in Nevada during the 2020 General Election, based on his analysis of various commercially available databases of voters. > The Court questions Mr. Kamzol's methodology because he had little to no information or supervision over the origins of his data, the manner in which it had been matched, and what the rate of false positives would be. Additionally, there was little or no verification of his numbers. > ... > As reflected herein, the Court finds that the expert testimony provided by Contestants was of little to no value. The Court did not exclude consideration of this evidence, which it could have, but gave it very little weight. This wasn't the only case where the evidence was explicitly examined; Bowyer v. Ducey from Arizona [1], and King v. Whitmer from Michigan [2] are also cases where the evidence is explicitly called out in rulings (and there are probably others as well). So the evidence was definitely examined in at least some cases; what a "proper" examination would entail, I don't know. Another thing to note is that courts generally have rules about what evidence is considered admissible; evidence that doesn't meet certain standards (e.g., hearsay) generally cannot be used in a lawsuit. Even expert testimony may be excluded if it doesn't meet the standards used by the court (e.g., Federal Rules of Evidence, Rule 702 governs expert testimony). In other words, it's not enough to just have evidence; the evidence needs to meet certain quality thresholds. The plaintiffs can complain that their evidence wasn't examined, but if it's not good evidence that's really on them. One last thing is that one also needs to consider whether further examination would even matter. If your lawsuit is deficient enough that the outcome is obvious early in the proceedings, it makes no sense for a judge to order discovery, evidentiary hearings, etc. ---- Next: "the cases were mostly dismissed on issues of legal standing." The thing is that cases can be dismissed for multiple reasons. If a case is dismissed both for standing issues and on its merits, does that count as "just" a dismissal for issues of standing? The other problem here is that, at least on the federal level, courts are only allowed to hear specific suits ("cases" and "controversies"). This has been interpreted to include standing; in other words, a federal court can't skip standing just because it wants to see the case move forwards. Standing for state courts is determined based on each state's laws, so it isn't really feasible to give a blanket description, but suffice to say, if a state's laws say that a plaintiff must establish standing, and a plaintiff fails to do so, the court must dismiss the case. ---- > Electronic voting has always been criticized, so I don't know why this year should be any different. But that just seems worse, that potentially decades' worth of elections could have been tampered with if any of those Dominion claims are true? One thing to note is that it's usually purely electronic voting that gets the most criticism. The voting machines in the most contested states all had paper trails, which generally alleviates the worst of the criticism. ---- [0]: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/11/20-OC-00163-Order-Granting-Motion-to-Dismiss-Statement-of-Contest.pdf https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/... [1]: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/12/Order-Granting-MTD.pdf https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/... [2]: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/11/Preview_7405F132-B4F1-4A0A-9BB1-28CB11C48E21.pdf https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/... Edit: Add missing cite