13 ms·

Curious about where you see an institutionalized support on the left for election tampering claims, if you have any sources.

freedomben 5y ago
Not GP, but Hilary Clinton 2016 [1]: > “There’s just a lot that I think will be revealed. History will discover,” the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee continued. “But you don’t win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, ‘Whoa, something’s not right here.’ That was a deep sense of unease.” [1]: https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-election-160716779.html https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi... Hilary Clinton again in 2020 (which is the same election that Trump complains about, by the way) [2]: > The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee predicted that among several scenarios, Republicans are going to try to “mess up absentee balloting” so that they could get a potentially narrow advantage in the Electoral College. > “We've got to have a massive legal operation, I know the Biden campaign is working on that,” she said. “We have to have poll workers, and I urge people, who are able, to be a poll worker. We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places. This is a big organizational challenge, but at least we know more about what they're going to do.” [2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clinton-says-biden-should-not-concede-2020-election-under-n1238156 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clint... I also remember well the "Selected not elected" days after Bush v. Gore. That went on the entire time that Bush was president and went to sleep for a couple of terms when Obama won. Just to be clear, I'm not making a judgement on who is right here. I think the truth is a lot more nuanced than "right or wrong." I;m just pointing out that we have a long history of politicians/parties questioning election results, but until now we've never had widespread attempts to silence it.
- hobs 5y ago
  The difference is that with Bush you have hanging chads and a court decision that after the votes were counted would have probably come out differently, and a concerted political effort to turn that to their advantage. The republican party just literally spent months on questioning the election in places like Arizona with no evidence of any fraud, and there's plenty of documentation on how (almost always republican) politicians use lies to get people to not vote: https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/DeceptivePracticesReportJuly2012FINALpdf.pdf https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Dece... Basically, if you want to argue that its a "he said, she said" thing, you're going to need to come to the table with receipts about it, and trump is just completely full of shit on a level that's untenable and weirdly turned into this January thing where we almost had lawmakers killed.
  - slowmovintarget 5y ago
    Nope. They finished the recounts. Three times. None of them came out in Gore's favor.
    - hobs 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida#Florida_Ballot_Project_recounts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia... Here ya go - seems like that's incorrect.
      - Lascaille 5y ago
        Wikipedia articles about partisan US politics are often incorrect.
        hobs 5y ago
        I'm going to go ahead and say that 22 years later we've probably seen the edit wars die down.
      - slowmovintarget 5y ago
        Actually, it shows I'm correct, at least for the court decision. In all of the counts requested by the Gore team (those effected by the Supreme Court decision), all of them came out in favor of Bush. Had there been statewide recounts, according to that page, things may have been different.
    - weaksauce 5y ago
      The state in which they recounted was the state where his brother was the governor.
  - freedomben 5y ago
    I'm not trying to argue that it's a "he said, she said" thing, and as a matter of degrees, Trump is way worse. My main argument though is that humans (no matter which "side") are terrible at holding themselves to the same standard as they do other people, especially their opponents. For that reason I expect the rules to soften the next time the pendulum swings to the right.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > Hilary Clinton 2016 ... actually conceded the night of the election. Bitched about it later, for sure. But conceded the election immediately. Something that hasn't happened yet for Mr. Trump.
mberning 5y ago
- flyingcircus3 5y ago
  What is the falsifiable hypothesis of the stolen election? There's nothing coherent about an ever evolving list of grievances. I'm convinced this is by design. If there were a sound theory, it could be disproven. But if its just a nebulous collection of disjointed complaints, the wound can stay open forever, which is the actual goal.
  - mythrwy 5y ago
    Lack of signature matching, mail in ballots with little to no oversight, removing poll watchers from one party and video of ballot harvesting are all things that happened. It doesn't "prove" a stolen election but it does raise suspicions.
    - flyingcircus3 5y ago
      "Removing poll watchers" was in response to those poll watchers intimidating the poll workers. The lack of signature matching/oversight is not evidence of wrongdoing. Its the possibility that wrongdoing might not have been caught. Once again, none of this is a falsifiable hypothesis. It's simply a list of grievances designed to erode trust. I'm not familiar with ballot harvesting.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      Signature matching doesn't really change anything, though. At best, that would allow someone to vote on behalf of someone else, but there is still one ballot per voter. And pretty quickly I'd expect it to make the news when people complain that their vote got rejected because the state says they voted already. The "ballot harvesting" video was debunked thoroughly in a matter of hours after it was released.
  - tatrajim 5y ago
    The 136-page 2nd interim report of the Office of Special Counsel of the state of Wisconsin, recently released, raises troubling issues. See especially: Chapter 6: Wisconsin Election Officials’ Widespread Use of Absentee Ballot Drop Boxes Facially Violated Wisconsin Law. Chapter 7: The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) Unlawfully Directed Clerks to Violate Rules Protecting Nursing Home Residents, Resulting in a 100% Voting Rate in Many Nursing Homes in 2020, Including Many Ineligible Voters. The author, Former Supreme Court justice Mike Gableman, concludes: "This Report has documented not just one, but a great collection of Wisconsin election law violations. As a political matter, the actions of state actors certifying electors in any Presidential election can be reconsidered as the Wisconsin Legislature sees fit using its plenary power under Article II of the federal Constitution, as recognized in McPherson and Bush v. Gore. Indeed, McPherson noted that “there is no doubt of the right of the legislature to resume the power at any time.” McPherson, 146 U.S. at 35 (emphasis added)..." https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/22/brandtjen/media/1552/osc-second-interim-report.pdf https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/22/brandtjen/media/1552... I hope the MSM will pay due attention to the issues that this report identified.
pyuser583 5y ago
The 2000 Presidential election was attacked as illegitimate. I was watching the latter seasons of X-Files and Fox Mulder made a comment on 2000 elections, something like “that sounds about as reliable as our elections.” Plenty of folks, Howard Dean comes to mind, said they were straight up illegitimate. Even now many on the left insist it was a tie or something. This thing of “if you don’t win the elections, question the results” started then. The press had no problem allowing baseless speculation and outright dishonesty in 2000. But when it was a Democratic cadidate, suddenly the truth matters. To make matters worse, so many journalists are Democrats … it’s insane. Not just Democrats, but urban, college educated Democrats. Not exactly a cross section of the country.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  > Even now many on the left insist it was a tie or something. It doesn’t help that the US system can have a winner who didn’t get the majority of the vote. There are a number of aspects of the US voting system which are less than perfect, and that’s just one.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    > It doesn’t help that the US system can have a winner who didn’t get the majority of the vote This is incorrect. You require a majority of votes in the USA in the presidential election. What you seem to be missing is that people do not vote for the President but vote to direct how their state votes. States vote for President. People vote for states.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      I think you have described the problem. More specifically, states vote for the president but not in a way that is proportional to their percentage of the union’s population.
- cm2187 5y ago
  Though it is as old as democracy. Thinking about the scene from citizen kane where kane’s newspaper prepared two alternative headlines for the day after the elections: “kane elected” and “fraud at the polls”.
_yoqn 5y ago
“Racially motivated patterns of voter suppression are responsible for Stacey Abrams not being governor of Georgia right now.” — South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D), in remarks in Bow, N.H., Oct. 25, 2019 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/30/did-racially-motivated-voter-suppression-thwart-stacey-abrams https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/30/did-racia... Also don't forget about Bush v. Gore. It's apparently a "historic" moment when Gore finally conceded the election to Bush. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/al-gore-concedes-presidential-election https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/al-gore-concedes...
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  That is completely different than claiming there were millions of hacked ballots and all kinds of other crazyness. Those are legitimate political arguments about voter suppression laws. No one on the left claimed Kemp and Republicans stuffed ballot boxes or China hacked whatever. The argument is based in facts. Many Republican controlled states, especially in the south, have historic issues with suppressing the votes of black and brown Americans. You can argue over the extent to which this suppression still exists and how much it affects election outcomes. But it is not even close to the same as arguing that the election was completely fraudulent because of real voter fraud, that the SOS or whatever bureaucrats should overstep their authority to throw it out.
  - mythrwy 5y ago
    Some people might have talked about hacked voting machines (who came up with that theory?). Others talk about stopped counts, regions not reporting until seeing the results of other regions, and then ballot harvesting to make up numbers.
  - _yoqn 5y ago
    [dead]
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      > - The Pennsylvania Supreme Court (not the legislature) changed their voting laws to accommodate widespread mail-in ballots and drop-boxes which was against the state constitution. And yet no one challenged the law until after the third election it had taken effect. Until after the results had come out. There's a doctrine called laches: you have to complain about things that wrong you when you find about them, and if you wait too long, you don't get to complain anymore. Furthermore, as for election challenges go, you're not going to invalidate any votes that had already been validly cast under the existing interpretation of law, even if the interpretation is incorrect per court rulings. For example, when there were last-minute challenges to absentee ballot procedures, any absentee ballots cast before the decision came out under the old procedures would still be valid, even if they didn't meet the new procedural requirements. So anyone thinking that courts would invalidate election results via after-the-fact court challenges is either ignorant, lying to themselves, or is stuck somewhere in la-la land.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mardifoufs 5y ago
There you go, there was a pretty mainstream and "approved" campaign to try to get the electoral college voters to not vote for trump in 2016. It wasn't condemned as an attempt to undermine our election and democracy, but more as a heroic last ditch effort to save it which is very ironic lol. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13920444/electoral-college-trump-hamilton-electors https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13920444/... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-electoral-college-was-meant-to-stop-men-like-trump-from-being-president/508310/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-ele...

freedomben 5y ago

Not GP, but Hilary Clinton 2016 [1]: > “There’s just a lot that I think will be revealed. History will discover,” the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee continued. “But you don’t win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, ‘Whoa, something’s not right here.’ That was a deep sense of unease.” [1]: https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-election-160716779.html https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi... Hilary Clinton again in 2020 (which is the same election that Trump complains about, by the way) [2]: > The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee predicted that among several scenarios, Republicans are going to try to “mess up absentee balloting” so that they could get a potentially narrow advantage in the Electoral College. > “We've got to have a massive legal operation, I know the Biden campaign is working on that,” she said. “We have to have poll workers, and I urge people, who are able, to be a poll worker. We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places. This is a big organizational challenge, but at least we know more about what they're going to do.” [2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clinton-says-biden-should-not-concede-2020-election-under-n1238156 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clint... I also remember well the "Selected not elected" days after Bush v. Gore. That went on the entire time that Bush was president and went to sleep for a couple of terms when Obama won. Just to be clear, I'm not making a judgement on who is right here. I think the truth is a lot more nuanced than "right or wrong." I;m just pointing out that we have a long history of politicians/parties questioning election results, but until now we've never had widespread attempts to silence it.

hobs 5y ago
The difference is that with Bush you have hanging chads and a court decision that after the votes were counted would have probably come out differently, and a concerted political effort to turn that to their advantage. The republican party just literally spent months on questioning the election in places like Arizona with no evidence of any fraud, and there's plenty of documentation on how (almost always republican) politicians use lies to get people to not vote: https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/DeceptivePracticesReportJuly2012FINALpdf.pdf https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Dece... Basically, if you want to argue that its a "he said, she said" thing, you're going to need to come to the table with receipts about it, and trump is just completely full of shit on a level that's untenable and weirdly turned into this January thing where we almost had lawmakers killed.
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  Nope. They finished the recounts. Three times. None of them came out in Gore's favor.
  - hobs 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida#Florida_Ballot_Project_recounts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia... Here ya go - seems like that's incorrect.
    - Lascaille 5y ago
      Wikipedia articles about partisan US politics are often incorrect.
      - hobs 5y ago
        I'm going to go ahead and say that 22 years later we've probably seen the edit wars die down.
    - slowmovintarget 5y ago
      Actually, it shows I'm correct, at least for the court decision. In all of the counts requested by the Gore team (those effected by the Supreme Court decision), all of them came out in favor of Bush. Had there been statewide recounts, according to that page, things may have been different.
  - weaksauce 5y ago
    The state in which they recounted was the state where his brother was the governor.
- freedomben 5y ago
  I'm not trying to argue that it's a "he said, she said" thing, and as a matter of degrees, Trump is way worse. My main argument though is that humans (no matter which "side") are terrible at holding themselves to the same standard as they do other people, especially their opponents. For that reason I expect the rules to soften the next time the pendulum swings to the right.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rootusrootus 5y ago
> Hilary Clinton 2016 ... actually conceded the night of the election. Bitched about it later, for sure. But conceded the election immediately. Something that hasn't happened yet for Mr. Trump.

mberning 5y ago

flyingcircus3 5y ago
What is the falsifiable hypothesis of the stolen election? There's nothing coherent about an ever evolving list of grievances. I'm convinced this is by design. If there were a sound theory, it could be disproven. But if its just a nebulous collection of disjointed complaints, the wound can stay open forever, which is the actual goal.
- mythrwy 5y ago
  Lack of signature matching, mail in ballots with little to no oversight, removing poll watchers from one party and video of ballot harvesting are all things that happened. It doesn't "prove" a stolen election but it does raise suspicions.
  - flyingcircus3 5y ago
    "Removing poll watchers" was in response to those poll watchers intimidating the poll workers. The lack of signature matching/oversight is not evidence of wrongdoing. Its the possibility that wrongdoing might not have been caught. Once again, none of this is a falsifiable hypothesis. It's simply a list of grievances designed to erode trust. I'm not familiar with ballot harvesting.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Signature matching doesn't really change anything, though. At best, that would allow someone to vote on behalf of someone else, but there is still one ballot per voter. And pretty quickly I'd expect it to make the news when people complain that their vote got rejected because the state says they voted already. The "ballot harvesting" video was debunked thoroughly in a matter of hours after it was released.
- tatrajim 5y ago
  The 136-page 2nd interim report of the Office of Special Counsel of the state of Wisconsin, recently released, raises troubling issues. See especially: Chapter 6: Wisconsin Election Officials’ Widespread Use of Absentee Ballot Drop Boxes Facially Violated Wisconsin Law. Chapter 7: The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) Unlawfully Directed Clerks to Violate Rules Protecting Nursing Home Residents, Resulting in a 100% Voting Rate in Many Nursing Homes in 2020, Including Many Ineligible Voters. The author, Former Supreme Court justice Mike Gableman, concludes: "This Report has documented not just one, but a great collection of Wisconsin election law violations. As a political matter, the actions of state actors certifying electors in any Presidential election can be reconsidered as the Wisconsin Legislature sees fit using its plenary power under Article II of the federal Constitution, as recognized in McPherson and Bush v. Gore. Indeed, McPherson noted that “there is no doubt of the right of the legislature to resume the power at any time.” McPherson, 146 U.S. at 35 (emphasis added)..." https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/22/brandtjen/media/1552/osc-second-interim-report.pdf https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/22/brandtjen/media/1552... I hope the MSM will pay due attention to the issues that this report identified.

pyuser583 5y ago

The 2000 Presidential election was attacked as illegitimate. I was watching the latter seasons of X-Files and Fox Mulder made a comment on 2000 elections, something like “that sounds about as reliable as our elections.” Plenty of folks, Howard Dean comes to mind, said they were straight up illegitimate. Even now many on the left insist it was a tie or something. This thing of “if you don’t win the elections, question the results” started then. The press had no problem allowing baseless speculation and outright dishonesty in 2000. But when it was a Democratic cadidate, suddenly the truth matters. To make matters worse, so many journalists are Democrats … it’s insane. Not just Democrats, but urban, college educated Democrats. Not exactly a cross section of the country.

lostlogin 5y ago
> Even now many on the left insist it was a tie or something. It doesn’t help that the US system can have a winner who didn’t get the majority of the vote. There are a number of aspects of the US voting system which are less than perfect, and that’s just one.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  > It doesn’t help that the US system can have a winner who didn’t get the majority of the vote This is incorrect. You require a majority of votes in the USA in the presidential election. What you seem to be missing is that people do not vote for the President but vote to direct how their state votes. States vote for President. People vote for states.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    I think you have described the problem. More specifically, states vote for the president but not in a way that is proportional to their percentage of the union’s population.
cm2187 5y ago
Though it is as old as democracy. Thinking about the scene from citizen kane where kane’s newspaper prepared two alternative headlines for the day after the elections: “kane elected” and “fraud at the polls”.

_yoqn 5y ago

“Racially motivated patterns of voter suppression are responsible for Stacey Abrams not being governor of Georgia right now.” — South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D), in remarks in Bow, N.H., Oct. 25, 2019 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/30/did-racially-motivated-voter-suppression-thwart-stacey-abrams https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/30/did-racia... Also don't forget about Bush v. Gore. It's apparently a "historic" moment when Gore finally conceded the election to Bush. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/al-gore-concedes-presidential-election https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/al-gore-concedes...

dillondoyle 5y ago
That is completely different than claiming there were millions of hacked ballots and all kinds of other crazyness. Those are legitimate political arguments about voter suppression laws. No one on the left claimed Kemp and Republicans stuffed ballot boxes or China hacked whatever. The argument is based in facts. Many Republican controlled states, especially in the south, have historic issues with suppressing the votes of black and brown Americans. You can argue over the extent to which this suppression still exists and how much it affects election outcomes. But it is not even close to the same as arguing that the election was completely fraudulent because of real voter fraud, that the SOS or whatever bureaucrats should overstep their authority to throw it out.
- mythrwy 5y ago
  Some people might have talked about hacked voting machines (who came up with that theory?). Others talk about stopped counts, regions not reporting until seeing the results of other regions, and then ballot harvesting to make up numbers.
- _yoqn 5y ago
  [dead]
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    > - The Pennsylvania Supreme Court (not the legislature) changed their voting laws to accommodate widespread mail-in ballots and drop-boxes which was against the state constitution. And yet no one challenged the law until after the third election it had taken effect. Until after the results had come out. There's a doctrine called laches: you have to complain about things that wrong you when you find about them, and if you wait too long, you don't get to complain anymore. Furthermore, as for election challenges go, you're not going to invalidate any votes that had already been validly cast under the existing interpretation of law, even if the interpretation is incorrect per court rulings. For example, when there were last-minute challenges to absentee ballot procedures, any absentee ballots cast before the decision came out under the old procedures would still be valid, even if they didn't meet the new procedural requirements. So anyone thinking that courts would invalidate election results via after-the-fact court challenges is either ignorant, lying to themselves, or is stuck somewhere in la-la land.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mardifoufs 5y ago

There you go, there was a pretty mainstream and "approved" campaign to try to get the electoral college voters to not vote for trump in 2016. It wasn't condemned as an attempt to undermine our election and democracy, but more as a heroic last ditch effort to save it which is very ironic lol. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13920444/electoral-college-trump-hamilton-electors https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13920444/... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-electoral-college-was-meant-to-stop-men-like-trump-from-being-president/508310/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-ele...