Trump vs. Biden

[The Cat]

 

[Jaguar]

Erie postal worker denies recanting ballot fraud claim

Hopkins' allegations, though, were already beginning to fall apart before news broke that he had recanted his statement.

The Erie Times-News on Tuesday morning reviewed 129 mail-in ballot envelopes that were postmarked Nov. 3 but arrived at the Erie County Board of Elections after Election Day.

Of those 129 ballots, only two postmarked Nov. 3 were processed through the Erie facility, the Times-News discovered in its review, which was conducted in the presence of Erie County Board of Elections Chairman Carl Anderson and others.



Use your head, people. FFS. We don't have widespread fraud in U.S. Elections. And no amount of emotional gymnastics is going to change the statistics.

 

[Red Herring]

It's not like there were international observers present who say there was no fraud...

 

[Jonny]

Erie postal worker denies recanting ballot fraud claim

Hopkins' allegations, though, were already beginning to fall apart before news broke that he had recanted his statement.

The Erie Times-News on Tuesday morning reviewed 129 mail-in ballot envelopes that were postmarked Nov. 3 but arrived at the Erie County Board of Elections after Election Day.

Of those 129 ballots, only two postmarked Nov. 3 were processed through the Erie facility, the Times-News discovered in its review, which was conducted in the presence of Erie County Board of Elections Chairman Carl Anderson and others.



Use your head, people. FFS. We don't have widespread fraud in U.S. Elections. And no amount of emotional gymnastics is going to change the statistics.

No, no systemic fraud. Just systemic misinformation.

 

[Totenkindly]

Basically they don't care if the fraud accusations are disproved. They just want to generate animosity and resistance to the next administration, because these are the kinds of feelings that linger and people won't follow up on the results of the investigation -- they just regurgitate the initial accusations to feed their anger and disappointment.


There is this, although I don't know what the methodology was...


Nearly 80% of Americans say Biden won White House, ignoring Trump'''s refusal to concede: Reuters/Ipsos poll | Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nearly 80% of Americans, including more than half of Republicans, recognize President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the Nov. 3 election after most media organizations called the race for the Democrat based on his leads in critical battleground states, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll...

It just gets very old. Even hearing "insiders" saying they just don't see the point in stopping Trump from doing/saying stupid things about fraud because it will play itself out -- talk about irresponsibility. there are always victims of false accusations. Everything Trump says and does is typically at someone else's expense, there is no "free griping"; it all is to the detriment of someone else, just to placate his hurt feelings about something.

 

[Stigmata]

I really hope the congressional Republicans siding with the false election narrative is all just posturing to secure the fervor of Trump's base in the Georgia senate runoff elections, and after that they decide to drop him like bad habit. Otherwise, I'm very concerned on where this is going. Firing tenured Pentagon officials and installing loyalists is like play #1 in the coup strategy guide. People keep mentioning January 20th, yet January 20th doesn't mean anything if the constitution isn't enforced.

 

[Mad Hatter]

Basically they don't care if the fraud accusations are disproved. [...] Nearly 80% of Americans say Biden won White House, ignoring Trump'''s refusal to concede: Reuters/Ipsos poll | Reuters[/url] It just gets very old.

I've seen the 80%, but also that 78% of Republicans think that there were fraud or other irregularities.

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

Some family friends, it turns out, are Trump supporters who get their news from various youtube channels. They know we voted for Biden. Before I really knew the extremity of their views, I'd promised to have them over soon for a cookout. I'm finding out via social media that the husband has been mingling with the AB and is himself an "ex" member. Really not sure what to do. These people don't fuck around.

 

[Jaguar]

It just gets very old. Even hearing "insiders" saying they just don't see the point in stopping Trump from doing/saying stupid things about fraud because it will play itself out -- talk about irresponsibility. there are always victims of false accusations. Everything Trump says and does is typically at someone else's expense, there is no "free griping"; it all is to the detriment of someone else, just to placate his hurt feelings about something.

Not only do you have Trump playing this game, you have other Republican losers playing the exact same game in other states. Why? The Senate. There's also a grift going on - "The legal defense fund for losers" scam. Not only is Trump doing it directly, so is this loser:

GOP candidate John James starts high-dollar legal fund to challenge Michigan election loss

The guy lost by 85,000 votes. Now, ask yourself where the money is really going. Is it to sniff out fraud? Of course not. Read on:

The organization, called the James Legal Fund, is a joint fundraising vehicle between the James campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC). It can collect donations, pay fundraising expenses and disburse money to both committees. Further, the partnership allows the fund to accept six-figure donations from individuals and transfer money out of the RNC to other GOP committees, such as the Trump campaign.

Even the two jokers in the Georgia senate races - Perdue and Loeffler - are throwing rehearsed crap at the wall:

“The management of Georgia elections has become an embarrassment for our state. Georgians are outraged, and rightly so. We have been clear from the beginning: every legal vote cast should be counted. Any illegal vote must not. And there must be transparency and uniformity in the counting process. This isn’t hard. This isn’t partisan. This is American. We believe when there are failures, they need to be called out — even when it’s in your own party. There have been too many failures in Georgia elections this year and the most recent election has shined a national light on the problems. While blame certainly lies elsewhere as well, the buck ultimately stops with the Secretary of State. The mismanagement and lack of transparency from the Secretary of State is unacceptable. Honest elections are paramount to the foundation of our democracy. The Secretary of State has failed to deliver honest and transparent elections. He has failed the people of Georgia, and he should step down immediately.”

Can't they at least be original in their wording? I guess they just cut and paste from Lindsey Graham's senate playbook.

 

[Totenkindly]

I've seen the 80%, but also that 78% of Republicans think that there were fraud or other irregularities.

Yeah, that's why I am not sure what to make of it.

The other problem is that it's a process involving 160 million votes, in a variety of 50 states, etc, and it's run by county. There's always going to be mistakes.

(I work in systems and we process millions of transactions -- when you dig into the numbers, you will find issues sometimes in the realm of 2000 cases coming through the pipeline, as an example, that are causing something to throw a particular error; but compared to the amount of cases/transactions we process, that number that sounds so large to a single person is actually very very tiny compared to everything that did work correctly and sometimes not worth spending millions of dollars to tweak the system for, they can handled in other ways, manually, when they do come to light. And yes, they get caught and reported for investigation.)

Basically, I am sure either side will find mistakes in how a small number of ballots was processed that could result in a change to the numbers. When they run recounts, sure, the tallies typically end up being adjusted in some way. But usually not in a meaningful way. (Florida 2000 was one example of where a race was close enough and down to one state, that it became a focal point for investigation. But there have been occasional local/smaller contests that were closer, since the number of votes and thus the range of possible outcomes was smaller. But again, they have processes in place for recounts.)

So the question is:
1. Does the system function on the broad scale properly?
2. Are the mistakes in ballot counting accidental / due to chaos, or are they purposeful?
3. On what scale of magnitude are these mistakes occurring?

Trump is screaming, "FRAUD! PURPOSEFUL CHEATING! MISTAKES ALL BENEFIT ONE SIDE! ELECTION WAS LOST BECAUSE OF THEM!"

The reality so far is, "SYSTEM WORKS! MISTAKES BENEFIT BOTH SIDES! ACCIDENTAL FLAWS OVERALL! NOT EVEN CLOSE TO CHANGING RESULTS!"

I just find it despicable that he has no basis to make these claims, currently, but assaults the process and impugns his opponents. Maybe that can be an option AFTER investigating, if warranted, but he had no actual evidence at the time of his claims. It's even more gross when he attacked the state's mail-in ballot process in PA (for example)... but only in the counties he lost, while being apparently just fine with the mail-in process in the counties he won.

 

[Mad Hatter]

It's the same thing every time with conspiracy theorists. When something goes wrong or their fears come true, they think it's intentional when in most cases it's just people fucking things up. Hanlon's razor.

 

[Jonny]

The conspiracy theory stuff just doesn't hold water. Two recent tweets from Dave Wasserman below, regarding the first two states to certify their election results. One very Dem leaning, the other very Rep leaning. Both paint a similar picture, which is a shift toward the Dem (Biden) relative to 2016 (Clinton). Just based on these two 2020 results alone, and knowing what we do about Trump's 2016 margins in swing states, we might expect Biden to win. If we assumed a uniform 2.9% shift, we would expect Biden to have flipped Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and NE-2. If we extended that shift to 7.6% toward Biden, we would also expect Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia to flip. We basically got that, sans Florida and North Carolina.

 

[Jaguar]

Pennsylvania Lt. Governor John Fetterman on Trump's election lawsuits: 'Math doesn't care about your feelings'

 

[anticlimatic]

Conspiracy theorists are worth zero time and attention, IMO.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

I just find it despicable that he has no basis to make these claims, currently, but assaults the process and impugns his opponents. Maybe that can be an option AFTER investigating, if warranted, but he had no actual evidence at the time of his claims. It's even more gross when he attacked the state's mail-in ballot process in PA (for example)... but only in the counties he lost, while being apparently just fine with the mail-in process in the counties he won.

Exactly. There are a great many components to the merited disgust that people feel towards him and those in the periphery who enable him, and it's difficult to articulate the individual components because the sum total is so absolutely heinous - and we're bombarded, daily, leaving us constantly too immersed in the lot of them to be able to see the forest through the trees - but this is definitely one of the fundamental components of his routine shitstorm that's irrefutably unacceptable. There's no way around the fact that he's calling "FIRE!" before there's any proof, and the consequences of him doing it are morons like this across the country jumping on his bandwagon:

It's not even really possible to go online without running into this - the damage he's done to our country, his hordes of rabid minions - in some form. I realize it was happening before him, but nowhere near to this extent. It certainly wasn't threatening to democracy itself.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

I don't think I've seen anyone share this yet, WP: Top Republicans back Trump’s efforts to challenge election results

Behind the scenes, Trump advisers and allies are increasingly resigned to a Biden victory, according to people familiar with internal discussions, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations.

But few so far are actively discouraging the president or his campaign from pursuing all legal paths to contest the results. Only a smattering of Republican senators have acknowledged Biden’s victory, and there has been little coaxing on the part of senior GOP lawmakers to help Trump come to terms with his loss. Some said there is value in ensuring the integrity of this year’s results, while others described a chaotic and scattershot operation that they hoped would eventually push Trump to cooperate in a peaceful transfer of power.

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” said one senior Republican official. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave."
​

There's actually a huge downside. These periphery enablers are spineless turds.

 

[Totenkindly]

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” said one senior Republican official. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave."

Yup, that is actually one of the comments that I was referring to -- there IS a huge downside, he is destroying faith in the process and convincing people that Biden's administration is not genuine, and making it harder for him to run his presidency and/or the country to move forward productively.

Again, Trump is whining at everyone else's expense. And these toads are letting him do it because they won't clean up their own messes.

After all, he might leave office... but he won't leave. He will continue to just undermine whatever he can.

 

[The Cat]

 

[anticlimatic]

The "Trump is staging a coup" story from the media is, frankly, hilarious.

It's like they've been at an Orange Hitler 11 for four years, and have no idea how to turn it back down. They have to keep portraying Trump as an authoritarian dictator intent on subverting the constitution, because the second they stop it means their entire narrative surrounding him for the last 4 years falls apart, and they'll have proved themselves wrong. So onward with more of the same panicked indignant pearl clutching!

Everyone would be much better served if they turned off CNN and did literally anything else with their time and energy. The stuff you people read and call news has become Bush-era Fox News levels of garbage. They're not even pretending to be news anymore.

 

[Jaguar]

Blame Mary Trump:

"Stay vigilant--this is an attempted coup.”