Trump and Trump supporters have claimed that election results like this indicate election fraud:
In-person votes, counted first:
Trump - 39,200
Biden - 30,600
(A solid lead for Trump on 56%).
Postal votes, counted next:
Trump - 9,800
Biden - 20,400
(A massive lead for Biden on 71%)
Add them together and you get:
Trump - 49,000 votes
Biden - 51,000 votes
(A modest overall win for Biden on 51%).
The postal votes look a bit suspicious at first sight, but the actual explanation for this is that Trump advised his voters to vote in person. In his addled mind, he thought that postal votes for him would be deliberately lost in the system somehow, which is nonsense if you think about it for half a second. If corrupt election officials are prepared to shred postal Trump votes, why wouldn't they also be prepared to shred in-person Trump votes?
Biden did the sensible thing and told his voters to vote by post if possible (because of Covid) or in person if they preferred. Thus maximising the likelihood of any potential voter actually voting for him. There must have been some potential Trump voters who couldn't vote in person and didn't get round to voting by post either. Biden hedged his bets; it was a good strategy, regardless of Covid.
I can't find a breakdown of in-person and postal votes. It looks to be about 30% postal and 70% in person. So (let's assume), because of the candidates' exhortations, only 20% of Trump voters voted by post against 40% of Biden voters. Multiple those numbers up, assuming an overall narrow 51%-49% split in this particular area, and you get the results shown above.
It is not at all unusual for the Democrat candidate to win an election - they won four out the previous eight (or six out of eight if you go by popular vote and not by electoral college votes!). It is less usual for a sitting President to be voted out after one term, but it does happen i.e. Jimmy Carter (Dem) in 1980 and George H.W. Bush (Rep) in 1992. Hillary Clinton and Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral college vote and were prepared to take it on the chin, rules are rules, so Trump is being a pathetic bad loser IMHO.
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The only conspiracy theory that I will subscribe to is that Pfizer weren't too happy with Trump's suggestion that drug prices be capped, which is why they delayed the announcement that their vaccine works until a few days after the election. Had they announced it shortly before the election, Trump would have got a real boost, seeing as it was his government which funded the research.
A similar thing happened to Julia Gillard in Australia, go figure. Rent seekers appear to have undue influence in elections; they have a lot of spare cash to spend on lobbying to make sure the rents continue to roll in. It's a Georgist thing, not a left-right thing.
Big Green Bills
6 minutes ago
29 comments:
"It's a Georgist thing, not a left-right thing" That's the issue on a lot of things most of the time....
"In his addled mind" "so Trump is being a pathetic bad loser IMHO?
Is that confirmation bias informing your thought?
"why wouldn't they also be prepared to shred in-person Trump votes"
There's witness evidence for this too.
There's piles of evidence, just *no proof*. 98% of it might be untrue. And the judiciary have not scrutinised the evidence yet.
All you can say about this is: "claims by the Republicans about election fraud do not matter"
Scott Adams, the well kmown catoonist and leftwinger from the US says it best: " You don't need evidence when bullies chased out witnesses"
https://blogs.lotterypost.com/konane/2020/12/scott-adams-bullies-chased-out-witnesses-to.htm
I think the point to take from all this is that even if the votes counted for each candidate on the US Presidential election are roughly representative of the votes as cast by each individual voter, there is significant evidence of at the very minimum attempts at electoral fraud, and it all comes from one side. Its not like Democrats don't have previous in such matters. And as such this means that US elections will no longer be accepted by the Red side as genuine. An election not only has to be fraud free, it has to be seen to be fraud free, and its obvious US elections no longer are. They have arrived at a situation whereby even the Democrats are saying 'Well maybe there were a few bad apples but it didn't affect the outcome'. Thats not a good position to be in, where there are widespread small electoral frauds, and nothing is done about them. It basically says 'Whoever cheats best, wins'.
The political divide has become so toxic, particularly on the Left, that any behaviour is seen as acceptable in order to beat the opponent, because the opponent is morally unacceptable to them. When you believe that 'Trump is Hitler', then as with hindsight any behaviour would have been acceptable to beat Hitler in an election, any behaviour is acceptable to beat Trump too. What this attitude misses is a) maybe Trump isn't Hitler, and b) what if killing Hitler resulted in an even worse tyrant coming to power? A worse tyrant than Hitler I hear you cry? Well Hitler ultimately lost, mainly due to his own strategic miscalculations. A wiser tyrant might have avoided war with 3 world powers at once and his regime could still be in power today. Thats the thing about the future, you just can't predict it.
@Sobers - yes I think that's a good assessment.
RS, it's a conspiracy, man!
N, summarise?
S, Given the number of law suits and complaints the Rep's have filed, surely there must be at least one judge or election official who is not corrupt-and-in-the-pocket-of-the-Dem's who will uphold it or verify it?
And if Dem's have such a well oiled election stealing machine, why didn't they use it in 2016?
As far as the relative merits of Trump/Pence and Biden/Harris are concerned, I have no strong opinion one way or another. I don't like any of them and I am aware that the European media always paints Trump in a bad light, so I will give Trump the benefit of the doubt. But it's none of my business as I do not live in the USA.
" An election not only has to be fraud free, it has to be seen to be fraud free"
Correct. But by making these wild claims of massive voter fraud (not pin-pointing isolated cases here or there which might well have happened) it is Trump who is eroding trust in the normal democratic process.
FFS, he was President for four years and had plenty of time to introduce a more reliable voting system if he had really didn't trust it.
L, first comment, yes, thanks.
He can't introduce a more reliable system - In any case they have a solid reliable legal system if the law is followed, but running the elections according to the law is under state control not his control.
Have you really not seen the videos of the checkers being forcibly ejected from counts, or seen the live TV clips from the early hours of Nov 4 where vote totals actually reduced in real time when the counts had been officially closed for the night? How about the boxes of ballots 'found' under a table when all the observers had been told to leave?
What about the election centres where they breachd constitutional law by accepting unsigned ballot forms?
If you think there wasn't significant fraud in those swing states you must have been living under a rock for the past month Mark!
@MW all your q's have been answered 6 weeks ago. Where have you been. Why the sudden concern?
Can you show me anything which is not a conspiracy? (Etymology - to breath together)
The judiciary are not corrupt per se, just being 'patriotic' by defending the system, sure that means the republic is lost
The Dems did use it in 2016. Just not hard enough. It's commonly accepted Nixon was robbed by Kennedy in 1960, nothing new
There's piles and piles of evidence. Most of it is rubbish. A small part if it is true. And that part has not been looked at yet by the judges not the media judges
Trump has been trying to point out the capacity for fraud for a very long time. It's part of draining the swamp. Alas, already it's filling back up again
Yes, his policy is dubious, but he is certainly a strong leader, something not seen for decades
@MW all your q's have been answered 6 weeks ago. Where have you been. Why the sudden concern?
Can you show me anything which is not a conspiracy? (Etymology - to breath together)
The judiciary are not corrupt per se, just being 'patriotic' by defending the system, sure that means the republic is lost
The Dems did use it in 2016. Just not hard enough. It's commonly accepted Nixon was robbed by Kennedy in 1960, nothing new
There's piles and piles of evidence. Most of it is rubbish. A small part if it is true. And that part has not been looked at yet by the judges not the media judges
Trump has been trying to point out the capacity for fraud for a very long time. It's part of draining the swamp. Alas, already it's filling back up again
Yes, his policy is dubious, but he is certainly a strong leader, something not seen for decades
"It basically says 'Whoever cheats best, wins'."
As RS points out, it's been saying that for decades.
"A wiser tyrant might have avoided war with 3 world powers at once and his regime could still be in power today."
A wiser tyrant wouldn't have pissed off his chief of intelligence to such an extent that he actually worked against him.
W42, if Trump had won, we would be seeing the exact same videos, except it would have been the Democrats crying fraud.
W42: "If you think there wasn't significant fraud in those swing states you must have been living under a rock for the past month Mark!"
Lots of judges and election officials (including many Rep sympathisers) have looked at lots of evidence, neither of us have.
I accept that there might have been some mistakes or even fraud; I accept that some judges and election officials might be corrupt, but surely at least one or two of Trump's appeals would have stuck by now?
RS, JFK clearly played very unfairly (and was a self-aggrandising shit) but I've never heard accusations that he didn't actually get more votes that Nixon.
And Trump IS the swamp!
B, ta for back-up.
@MW
"Lots of judges and election officials (including many Rep sympathisers) have looked at lots of evidence, neither of us have."
The whole point is that judges have *not* looked at the evidence yet. Seriously! They've dismissed every case on things which do *not* need them to look at the evidence. Can you see the problem yet? I realise its hard to believe. But thats exactly the purpose of fake news - to hypnotise even smart people.(you have to want to be hypnotised too)
And Trump is not the swamp. He drained it. But alas replaced it with a golf course :)
So you could say Trump is 'the golf course' certainly.
RS, you and I have no idea how many judges and officials have looked at how much or what evidence. It appears to be "a lot" and "a lot". So to simply claim none of them looked at anything is stupid.
@MW, actually I have a very good idea.
One only has to look at the outcomes of the judgements - which show them declaring NOT to have looked at the evidence.
They may well actually have looked at it.
But their judgements were made on legal points which do NOT consider the evidence.
Capiche?
"surely there must be at least one judge or election official who is not corrupt-and-in-the-pocket-of-the-Dem's who will uphold it or verify it?"
All the cases have been thrown out on points of law/procedural issues, not because the evidence was not good enough. Indeed the evidence has never been examined in any court.
The US has arrived at a situation where no judge would find for Trump, even if it was a slam dunk case. The consequences for them personally would be horrendous (they'd be painting a target on their and their family's foreheads for every Left wing 'activist' out there). And the political consequences don't bear thinking about. What do you do when one political party in a 2 party state has been found to be systematically involved in electoral fraud? Not only that, huge numbers of Democrat leaning public servants have been conniving in such behaviour? What can you do about that? Start de-Democratisation programs in every public department? It seems l got to the point where the Democrats are so corrupt its impossible to convict them, they are too big to fail.
"And if Dem's have such a well oiled election stealing machine, why didn't they use it in 2016?"
Who says they didn't? For all we know Trump might have actually stormed 2016, and only just crept over the line because they underestimated his popularity, and didn't cheat hard enough. But more likely is that they believed their own hype, Hilary was 99.9% sure to win, who would vote for an orange coloured TV buffoon, they assumed they had the vote sown up and never bothered to cheat too much. They weren't going to make that mistake this time around.
I think that's right Sobers.
I have friends who now call me a racist and Nazi because I refuse to discount everything Trump has done. I don't even like the bloke, but refuse to ignore the corruption under an obscene veil of planet saving of his predecessor which Trump has been a clear leader in exposing.
Trump is no Republican.
So today, to call someone a racist is tantamount to a death threat. I don't say that lightly. It's a weapon that effectively paints a target on the victims back for the crowd to aim at.
So imagine a nation of people, with mortgages, working for politically correct corporations. Who will be the first to make a stand, when one allegation of racism means the salary is gone, then the mortgage defaulted and finally the family split. What life is left?
A death threat.
For the coward and the bully, this is an easy choice. There are a lot of cowards and bullies in America evidently. There are slightly less honourable ones.
Very disappointed in the number of you endorsing the election fraud conspiracy. Hook, line and sinker you've been taken in by the nonsense that the clear loser has been spouting.
The electoral college is what has enabled this dangerous thinking, if it was counting the votes cast as a whole it would be many times more clear who won - nobody sane would claim a 7 million vote majority was fraudulent. And if there was PR, there wouldn't be the ridiculous polarisation that a duopoly results in. The biggest two parties would have to moderate their positions to get into a position to make a coalition, and more votes would get representation. Just like the UK, I would 99.9% refuse to vote for R or D, even if it meant that I would never have representation
S and RS, you are changing the topic. The topic was "these voting patterns are not 'proof' of election fraud", which they aren't. Yes, there is a PC brigade who hound people out of their jobs, but there are also racists (like RS) who torment their colleagues or subordinates.
M, agreed and ta for back up. That's another argument for going by the popular vote. So even if (unproven) three or four million Biden votes were fraudulent, he's still the clear winner.
" That's another argument for going by the popular vote. So even if (unproven) three or four million Biden votes were fraudulent, he's still the clear winner."
You can't say that, because the election wasn't run under popular vote rules, so the incentives to vote are different. If you live in California or New York and are a Republican, there's no point voting. There's a massive Democrat majority in those places, so many just won't bother. And of course the same applies to Democrats in solid Republican States. So you can't say 'Xm more people voted for Biden, therefore he won under OMOV' because the election wasn't run under OMOV.
S, I said it was an argument FOR using popular vote. If nothing else, it reduces the incentive to cheat (if that is what happened, as yet unproven) in marginal or swing states.
I did NOT say that the result would have been the same under the popular vote rules.
If anything, the electoral college system favours Rep's, but whether it favours Rep's or Dem's is neither here nor there, it is a shit system. It is unrepresentative AND incentivises cheating.
The Electoral College is Affirmative Action for white people, so definitely favours the Republicans
All Trump's presidency proves is that personality is more important than politics. No-one cares about Trump's policies, because his personality is so repellent. The fact that he didn't invade or destroy a single country while he was president, unlike his saintly predecessor, is routinely ignored, because he's a white (well,orange)-skinned racist sexist buffoon with a poor command of English.
Well, now Bomber Biden is back and everyone is cheering.
B: "The fact that he didn't invade or destroy a single country while he was president, unlike his saintly predecessor, is routinely ignored"
I have given him credit for that! Also I am aware that the UK media is wildly biased against him, so I give him the benefit of the doubt on many things.
Nevertheless, the motive to steal the election was huge, so we're the huge rewards. And it's so easy to do. Not to mention it's been got away with by us racists so many times. This is not proof, sure. And are you still saying it didn't happen? Climate change would be far more likely. As would the adoption of LVT.
The SolarWinds hack recently has compromised every enterprise in the world. No one doubts computer systems are hackable from this observed fact. But we must applaud the patriotic voting computers. Because they, are the only computers in the worod which are unhackable. The only ones. We must applaud these patriots for protecting democracy. The only ones who can do it. (Incidentally they also utilise SolarWinds)
Onward, with the torment of the cowards and bullies. Whose families make them so.
RS how do you know that the election wasn't hacked the other way and millions of Biden votes weren't discarded? There's no evidence for that either but it must be as likely an outcome all things being equal in cloud cuckoo land
I don't. But you are begging the question. The point is that elections are rigged.
Thanks for reinforcing my point
And you only respond when I've hit the spot deep inside you. I know you, better than you do.
RS, about the only special "knowledge" you have is how to annoy people without moving the conversation forward in any way.
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