Total posts: 5,890
Posted in:
-->
@Greyparrot
There is no such thing as a voting system where fraud could not existWithout extremely unlikely premises, yes there is. They had one in Athens, read about it.
"Voting was done by raising hands and the winner was determined by nine “presidents” (proedroi). Athenians were very careful to avoid any possibility of cheating the system."
There is no way you're being serious.
You: you signed a contract and therefore owe me money!Me: No, I didn't.You: Prove it!Me: NoPOP QUIZ: Now what?Now I apply your standard of evidence and say that since you have not proven there was any fraud there was no fraud and all assertions which would be true but for fraud are true. One of those assertions is that you owe me money.
No, now is where you completely contort the conversation because you are incapable of holding an honest defensible position, so these silly little games is all you have.
This isn't for you, it's really just for the exercise of dealing with stupidity, and for the benefit of anyone reading if they are actually still paying attention to this silliness.
First off, the standard of evidence and the burden of proof are two entirely different concepts. The burden only concerns whose responsibility it is to do the proving, the standard of evidence is the degree to which the claim must be accepted for proceeding actions to be taken.
Second, just wrong (and you know it which is why you tried to deflect the conversation to your strawman of me, your usual tired tactic). What happens now is that you failed to meet your burden to prove your claim so it gets tossed out. I had no responsibility to prove the absence of a contract so I didn't have to do a damn thing.
Third, addressing your strawman, this is the reason I talked earlier about default positions. The argument isn't "no evidence of fraud = no fraud". The argument is "no evidence of fraud = we have no reason to change our position"
Our position, for hundred's of years now is that our elections are trustworthy and as we have learned more about how to further secure them we have done so. It is only now because Trump lost that you MAGA cultists are making these claims, and they all fail because you do not understand the burden of proof or the basic idea that fraud is not the default position.
I am an agnostic. Ignorance is still, by definition, not a conclusion.What definition of "conclusion" precludes it?/Phenomenon X can only be observed by observing correlated phenomenon B, but it does not necessarily produce correlated phenomenon B/Phenomenon B is not present//Therefore we cannot know whether phenomenon X is occurringThe last statement is both a conclusion, and an assertion of ignorance.
You're asserting two sperate things as if they are one. They're not. You can conclude that you are ignorant. The conclusion is in regards to your own state of mind. Your ignorance is in regards to the issue at hand.
This conversation goes back to you demanding that I produce an audit. I then asked you what conclusion you can draw from me (personally) not providing you an audit, and then had to explain to you why the answer was 'nothing'.
So the fact that we are both just as ignorant about what such an audit would or has produced as we were at the outset of this conversation does not help this conversation at all. Our state of ignorance is not the topic of this thread.
Since a doctor should absolutely not hide anything about someone's medical state from the person in question any refusal to reveal any information is suspicious.
The situation you describe is suspicious because you defined it as being suspicious.
If someone is "hiding" something from you, they're by definition doing it to conceal the truth.
The question here is whether one's withholding of the facts is being done to conceal the truth or for other legitimate reasons, such as for example the protection of rights. The motivation here is the question, you don't get to declare your point proven by asserting it so.
you call it "unconscionable" but the fact is that it is this information that legislators around the country have made public on purpose to fight fraud that is now being hidden.
And you don't think this national frenzy Trump created by declaring every democratic area of the country a cesspool of cheating and the resulting harassment faced by election workers might have something to do with a change in the behavior of election officials?
people wouldn't need to do their own 'amateur' audits if official audits had been done
Define "audit", specifically. Explain exactly what actions you expect should have been taken that weren't and what specific data you expected to be released that wasn't.
What would you know of their best interests?
I know that republican officials who support Trump have no interest in covering up a nationwide effort by democrats to cheat to elect Joe Biden.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
So very predictable. Liars gona lie.
How is anything in this ad a lie? It's literally his own words.
Created:
-->
@FLRW
"Trump, who owns 58% of the newly public company, now has a stake valued at $4.6 billion — at least on paper."
How? The company made something like $1 million last year and it's still under water. Who the hell came up with these evaluations?
Created:
-->
@FLRW
In a capitalist society, laws against fraud exist to protect not only the direct victims of fraud but also the overall integrity of the marketplace.
It really is remarkable how things that were once considered such basic common sense and that no serious person would ever think to question suddenly become a sign of your political affiliation all because Trump challenged it. And yet when we talk about the cult that is MAGA all the Trump supporters act like they have no idea what we're talking about.
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
You must be a banker that relies on a corrupt DA to free you from due diligence.
Part of due diligence is asking the only person who would know to disclose the details of the property you are considering accepting as collateral and knowing that you can trust their answers because they are required by law to tell you the truth.
Created:
-->
@ILikePie5
There is no crime here. No one was wronged. Banks made money off the money they lent. Trump made money off of what he borrowed.
So when a drug dealer gets arrested, he gets to be set free until the prosecutor can prove one of his drugs killed someone, right?
Want to explain where this happened in the case lol
He just explained how laws against fraud are to protect the marketplace, which used to be common sense.
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
And the tyrannical communist response from the deep state:
I'm sorry, was there a point you were trying to make here?
Created:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
I'll keep repeatedly quoting you as many times as is necessary to make sure that no one serious mistakes you for a serious person.
Most serious people would just present a rational argument instead.
Or you could just keep quoting me as if I hadn't already explained in detail why you are wrong and for which you had no response... Cause that's really going to send the message that I'm the unserious one here...
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
The fact that there could be widespread voter fraud is irrelevant.To people who don't believe in democracy.
No, to people who believe in logic and therefore understand what a non-sequitor is. There is no such thing as a voting system where fraud could not exist, so the mere possibility of it does not support a single argument you have made.
Are you seriously still this ignorant on how the burden of proof works?You are the one claiming I committed fraud by denying that you signed a contract; so the burden of proof is on you to show it.
Translation: "yes, I am still deeply ignorant on how the burden of proof works"
Here's an illustration since this is so complicated for you:
You: you signed a contract and therefore owe me money!
Me: No, I didn't.
You: Prove it!
Me: No
POP QUIZ: Now what?
Ignorance is by definition, not a conclusion.Tell it to the agnostics.
I am an agnostic. Ignorance is still, by definition, not a conclusion.
Yes, but you don't seem to have bothered to ask yourself why.It doesn't matter.
So not only are you incapable of telling different things apart from each other, but you don't even think different things need to be distinguished from one another. Ok.
Releasing for pubic consumption every piece of data on voters, including who voted, who didn't, or whatever other data you seem to think you're entitled to is not the industry norm nor is it the law in any state in the nation.How about releasing (or even counting) PBPF?
Not really trying to keep up with your acronyms, but if you think something should be released which isn't that's a perfectly (potentially) reasonable debate to have. That is still irrelevant to the question of whether their decision to not release it is suspicious.
If beating up blacks was the "industry norm" for police that would not mean it's legal or legitimate policing.
Correct. And if it were the norm it would also be unreasonable to draw any kind of conclusion from it other than the fact that we as a society have allowed a repugnant norm.
the fact is that we know before a single vote has been cast that the data you are suggesting be released is not going to be released, everAnd yet some useful information was released before the election through public APIs which were quickly shut down as soon as whoever ran those things realized they were being used for citizen audits. That's how the original lists of dead voters were compiled.That wasn't a mistake, it was public records; now hidden behind endless legal contests (illegally).
It never ceases to amuse me how you really think what is or isn't legal is up to you, not the legal system, to determine.
If information on voters was released and people were using it to perform their own amateur audits, I don't find it surprising in the least that this would be pulled back immediately. One of the core principals in our electoral system is the right to privacy, and I can only imagine the morons out there harassing people to accuse them of committing fraud or even asking them to verify their voting activities by complete strangers. The idea that our information would be put out there, especially in this country filled with MAGA lunatics is unconscionable.
To argue that the latter implies deception is to argue that the policies, procedures, and law itself was designed to be deceitful. That's absurd.It is not absurd to argue the law is wrong
That's an entirely different conversation from "there's widespread voter fraud".
Wow, there are corrupt people out there. Ground breaking.Yet a rejected theory every time you decry the possibility of a conspiracy of any size.
There is no conflict between accepting that there are corrupt people out there, and rejecting that those corrupt people are banding together to engage in massive criminal conspiracy against many of the groups own personal best interests... On the basis that there is no evidence to support this allegation.
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
then take note five years from now when nothing has changed.It's already changing. Far-left radicals are breaking out of the left wing cult as New Yorkers regularly see their stuff getting stolen by those in power who give it all away to illegal invaders.
Are these far left radicals in the room with you right now?
Created:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
[Double_R] But in cult world where up is down, black is white and triangles have four sides.......this is anything more than pathetic denial:[Double_R] Please find one example of democrats "denying election results""I think he is an illegitimate president that didn't really win.""You are absolutely right" - Kamela Harris"Trump didn't actually win the election in 2016, he lost the election." - Jimmy Carter[Double_R] Just because someone uses the same words didn't mean they're saying the same thing.
I went on to explain in great detail how language works, the role context plays in understanding what someone is saying, and then went on to explain the context in these specific examples to show you how they were saying something completely different.
Did you respond to any of that? No, of course you didn't. You just keep repeating the same thing on a loop as if your nonsense has not already been debunked. I can see why you believe the silly things you do; your bandwidth is severely limited. Apparently the language and context conversation is where your limit is reached so anything that requires you to understand that first will forever return nothing but an error message; "hard drive full".
Created:
-->
@Amber
Again, not how the law works.It's exactly how it works
Here is NY law:
Whenever any person shall engage in repeated fraudulent or illegal acts or otherwise demonstrate persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting or transaction of business, the attorney general may apply, in the name of the people of the state of New York, to the supreme court of the state of New York, on notice of five days, for an order enjoining the continuance of such business activity or of any fraudulent or illegal acts, directing restitution and damages and, in an appropriate case, cancelling any certificate filed under and by virtue of the provisions of section four hundred forty of the former penal law or section one hundred thirty of the general business law, and the court may award the relief applied for or so much thereof as it may deem proper. The word "fraud" or "fraudulent" as used herein shall include any device, scheme or artifice to defraud and any deception, misrepresentation, concealment, suppression, false pretense, false promise or unconscionable contractual provisions. The term "persistent fraud" or "illegality" as used herein shall include continuance or carrying on of any fraudulent or illegal act or conduct. The term "repeated" as used herein shall include repetition of any separate and distinct fraudulent or illegal act, or conduct which affects more than one person. Notwithstanding any law to the contrary, all monies recovered or obtained under this subdivision by a state agency or state official or employee acting in their official capacity shall be subject to subdivision eleven of section four of the state finance law.
Pretending that this isn't the law, or pretending that the law itself is irrelevant just exposes you to be nothing more than a partisan hack.
Fraud is still fraud and is still illegal regardless of how willing you are to pretend the dear leader can do no wrong.
Lying on a loan application is fraud.Who is the victim?
If I drive through a school zone doing 90 who is the victim? Go ahead, point to someone. And if you can't then guess what... You're still going to jail if you try it and get caught.
Victimless crimes are still crimes. They always have been and they always will be.
Conducting business as usual =/= lying either.
No, lying = lying. Like listing your 11k square foot penthouse as a 30k square foot penthouse.
What the Irish Society did to Doyle was actual fraud, and Letitia James aided and abetted them in doing it.
Your whataboutism is irrelevant. We're talking Trump and NY law, not Letitia James.
This is one of those Trumpian lies.No, it is not. You Trump Derangement Syndrome "Cry Wolf" types make up fiction as you go along, then double down on it to try and make it sound truer when it's patently false.
I'm not the one trying to argue that fraud =/= fraud.
And doubling down on your ignorant false comparison of a speeding ticket to a bank loan is pretty, well, just screams denial.And yet you have no response to it other than to call it names. Care to ponder why that is?Nowhere in that sentence you quoted am I calling you a name, or any names for that matter.
I didn't say you were calling me a name, I said you were calling "it" (as in my argument) names. Calling it ignorant and false is not the same thing as refuting it. If my analogy was so off base you would be able to point out why, but apparently you can't.
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
What is ignorant is pretending you can't use traffic tickets to harass someoneNo one here has argued anything remotely similar to this.Lol, literally everyone here has. You just don't want to listen.
Everyone here has argued that traffic tickets can be used to harass people? Wow GP, I must be responding in the wrong thread. Could you point me to where this fictional conservation you speak of is taking place?
When New York becomes a massively boycotted and avoided state,
It won't. Please take note of this moment, then take note five years from now when nothing has changed. Maybe then you'll finally start to see that you live in a fantasy world.
you will still see this as cultish behavior instead of a normal reaction to tyrannical communism where the state can discretionally take all your stuff if you say the wrong thing in public
It's cultish behavior because it's a reaction to a made up narrative that people believe only because Donald Trump told them to believe it.
How absolutely amusing and yet depressing watching the same group of people who spent the past 8 years screaming about law and order suddenly argue enforcing the law is tyranny when it happens to Donald Trump.
This is what TDS does to people in a one party state. They have no idea that most of the country doesn't belong to a 1 party cult.
And the "left wing cult" just welcomed it's newest member, Donald Trump's former VP. Crazy how this minority of left wrong radicals who occupy only the furthest reaches of the political left manage to keep swallowing up Trump's own inner circle.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
You are claiming there is massive widespread voter fraudI am claiming that there could be, and that the evidence which would theoretically be apparent to joe public is evident. If there isn't enough to impress you that is because the lack of election integrity takes the very form of non-auditability
The fact that there could be widespread voter fraud is irrelevant. There could be lizard people infiltrating our government, our inability to disprove it doesn't justify suspecting it.
First of all, you are the one claiming I committed fraud by denying that you signed a contract; so the burden of proof is on you to show it.
Are you seriously still this ignorant on how the burden of proof works? I literally just explained it to you. Did you read a word of it?
Denying a claim does not a saddle one with a burden of proof. Do you understand why? Do you understand when the burden of proof comes into play? HINT: the answers to all of these questions are in my last post ^^^. Read it.
Claiming victory because I can't prove there is no fraud is by definition an argument from ignorance.Which is entirely valid when ignorance is the conclusion.
Ignorance is by definition, not a conclusion.
Do you understand what an argument from ignorance is?
if you ask for a receipt and they look under the counter and say "Oh yea, there a receipt" and you say "well give me a copy!" and they say "uh trust us" then deception is the more reasonable assumption.
Yes, but you don't seem to have bothered to ask yourself why.
Giving you the receipt is the normal industry practice and the store policy of any store that intends to satisfy it's customers. So of course you should expect the receipt and of course a cashier attempting to withhold it from you is suspicious... Because it violates every norm we've come to expect.
Releasing for pubic consumption every piece of data on voters, including who voted, who didn't, or whatever other data you seem to think you're entitled to is not the industry norm nor is it the law in any state in the nation. Whether it should be is an entirely different conversation, the fact is that we know before a single vote has been cast that the data you are suggesting be released is not going to be released, ever. So there is nothing at all suspicious when you later ask for it and don't get it.
To argue that the latter implies deception is to argue that the policies, procedures, and law itself was designed to be deceitful. That's absurd.
When the lady claimed she never voted before Trump, you trusted her.I considered her motivations and her duties. She was sharing what she could possibly know. If she had said she saw evidence that people voted in her name, but refused to show it I would give her the same credulity I give to your rumored claims of substantive audits.
Right... So you trusted her.
According to reason she proved nothing. If a decades old claim is proof, then wide spread election fraud has been proven 50,000 times in the last year.
Well first off two wrongs don't make a right so you're wrong either way.
Second, I have never claimed her case was proven in my opinion and I couldn't care less about that so if you want to keep arguing about it find someone who cares.
Nothing about Kari Lake's recordings in any way support your stolen election narrative.It supports the dangerous corruption narrative, and the people who are dangerously corrupt have everything to gain by egregious apathy in this matter.
Wow, there are corrupt people out there. Ground breaking.
Created:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
What is ignorant is pretending you can't use traffic tickets to harass someone
No one here has argued anything remotely similar to this.
Is there any reason in particular you seem hell bent on contorting everything I say? Do my actual arguments bother you that much that you can't even face them?
Created:
-->
@Amber
Clearly the fact that Trump's lawyers and financial people who set up those applications for a loan whereby they placed a clear disclaimer in their proposal to the banks to verify the value/worth/data on his properties themselves when making their decision completely and utterly escapes you.
Again, not how the law works. Lying on a loan application is fraud. You don't get to waive the law by placing a disclaimer on the loan applications that says "I'm committing fraud".
This is one of those Trumpian lies. We call it Trumpian because there's just no other word for it, it's so brazen and so stupid that it isn't even intended as a legal defense and no qualified self respecting attorney would ever make because it will get laughed out of any trial. It's only put out there because it sounds good to ignorant people thereby giving Trump all of the ammunition he needs to proclaim himself the victim (his constant go-to). It's a political defense, nothing more.
And doubling down on your ignorant false comparison of a speeding ticket to a bank loan is pretty, well, just screams denial.
And yet you have no response to it other than to call it names. Care to ponder why that is?
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
In the end, investors will decide if it's worth investing in a state that could suddenly confiscate all your wealth if you say the wrong things in public.
Agreed, in the end investors will have to decide whether to invest based on right wing prapoganda or based on reality.
This btw, is exactly what it means to be in a cult. It used to be common sense that when you commit fraud, meaning when you blatantly lie on official legal documents in an effort to obtain something of value (like a loan) that if you get caught (perhaps because you decided to run for president resulting in your entire life being placed under a microscope, especially your financial life which you decided to make the centerpiece of your political campaign) then you would have to suffer the consequences.
But in cult world where up is down, black is white and triangles have four sides... getting caught and suffering the consequences = it's a political witch hunt by the state and after they come for Trump they will be coming for every investor in the state who says the wrong thing and arresting them for being off by a dollar on their latest real estate evaluation.
The MAGA base's entire world view is being molded everyday by Donald Trump, and it's all about whatever is best for him personally, the rest of us be damned.
Interesting point, because the real criminal in that situation are the banks that refused to do due diligence
So, in your world view, when an investor blatantly lies in order to falsely inflate the value of their assets, it's the banks fault for being frauded, not the investor's fault for defrauding them. Is that right?
*Grabs the popcorn while awaiting for the complete non-answer to follow*
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
You accused me of not thinking fraud is a serious thing.You said you would expect more serious examples.
Correct. You are claiming there is massive widespread voter fraud, yet the example you decided to kick this thread off with was a clerical error. An error is not as serious as fraud.
I asked what would make the examples more serious. The remainder of your evasive sophistry on this point is ignored.
Evasive sophistry, lol.
Translation: "arguments I have no rebuttal for".
Double_R on debateart failed to produce an audit performed by the state of Georgia. Therefore... [?]Therefore Double_R on debateart trusts there are audits, but cannot find them or trusts there are audits but has not even looked.Therefore Double_R on debateart is appealing to faith and loses the argument.
This is where your lack of philosophical grounding becomes obvious.
First of all, you are the one claiming there is fraud so the burden of proof is on you to show it. Claiming victory because I can't prove there is no fraud is by definition an argument from ignorance.
Second, it's not an appeal to faith, it's a basic application of Occam's razor. The state of Georgia claims they audited the results. Therefore one of two things are true: they either audited the results or they lied. If they lied, that means hundreds if not thousands of election workers would have to be complicit in this lie. The latter requires an insane amount of assumptions while the former does not, therefore the former is by far the more reasonable presumption.
Third, it always amuses me how you love to pretend I rely on trust and you don't. Unless you are sitting there hand counting every single ballot in every single state, you too have to trust that the information given is real. When the lady claimed she never voted before Trump, you trusted her. When those people showed up and told you they hadn't cast a ballot, you trusted them. You rely on trust every bit as much as I do.
Just know that this is why no one takes election deniers seriously and never will.Then there is nothing to worry about is there.
What I worry about is the damage being done by people who believe lies because they don't understand how to think.
When I say no one takes election deniers seriously I'm talking about the arguments which have no place in a functional and rational system. People who are educated generally know better. But the fact is that all of this propaganda is still very dangerous to the strength of our democracy. Consent of the governed (or a lack thereof) is still important regardless of whether those objections are based in reality
I see, so the burden of proof for a claimed contract is on the party seeking action from others?
The burden is on the person who makes the claim, as I explained from the start. Everything is just extrapolating from this sentence.
What is clearly implied in that sentence is that when someone is making a claim they are expecting others to move towards their position, that's the point of making a claim. Therefore the burden comes in because if you are expecting others to come towards your position, you are the one who has to provide the basis. The alternative to this would be that when someone makes a claim it is on everyone else to prove the opposite otherwise they are obligated to move towards the claimant. That leads to complete and total absurdity.
So if I told you I got kidnapped by aliens, believe me or don't. I doesn't matter. But if I tell you I got kidnapped by aliens and am now asking for you to warn others of the danger these aliens pose, then you're going to want evidence before you'd consider doing so. If I am unwilling to provide any, then you would be in the right to dismiss my claim.
In a legal setting, this translates into the party seeking judgement being the one who has to do the proving. If I file a counter claim against you seeking to be made whole by you for claiming I signed this contract, then I would be placing a burden on myself to prove we never signed one. Until then, "no I didn't" is a defense, not a claim and I have no burden while you certainly do.
When it comes to arguments, you are the person claiming our elections were stolen so that's your burden to prove. If I make a counter claim and decide not to back it up, you are free to dismiss it. But dismissing my claim doesn't prove yours, you have still failed to meet your burden. And thus, neither I nor anyone reading this thread has any obligation to take your claims seriously.
It's not a data point until we know what happened, until then it's just a claim.Like EJC's accusation of rape.
A claim for which EJC brought the claim and was rightfully saddled with the burden to prove, and according to the jury satisfied that burden. That's how it works.
so of course I would discard them.You discard claims because you think other people take claims too seriously. Interesting epistemology you got there.
I just explained to you why I discarded the claim. Did you read and absorb any of it? No, of course you didn't. Why respond to my actual arguments when you can just pretend I said something else?
which is where we will just part ways.Oh we parted ways a while back, when you realized you had not way to quantify the amount of mail fraud.
You mean when you failed to support your own claim that the amount of mail in fraud was anywhere near enough to swing elections, and instead tried to place burden on me? Yes, that's where we parted.
If you really think they're all engaging in some grand conspiracy to cover up the democrats stealing our elections there is no logic or reason that will ever get through to you.You may want to listen to the Kari Lake recording again. There are people "back east" who make people worried about car bombs.
Nothing about Kari Lake's recordings in any way support your stolen election narrative.
Created:
-->
@Amber
He paid all his loans back. No victim. No complainant. No crime. No fraud.That's not how the law works.Yes, it does. You clearly know nothing about the law in question in direct relationship to the common business practices of real estate and banking where loans for development and expansion are concerned. Kevin O'leary proves this point (linked above).
Every real estate investor seeks to inflate the value of their assets when it is favorable to them, just as I have done. What they don't do is claim their 10k sq ft penthouses are actually 30k sq ft. That's not a quibble over the value, that's fraud.
Taken to it's logical conclusion, O'Leary's argument is that there is no such thing as financial fraud and investors can say anything they want with no regard to the concept of truth and reality. That's absurd.
Your comparison of this fact of reality to a speeding ticket is childishly ignorant.
What's ignorant is pretending that the principal which makes a speeding ticket a legitimate and enforceable punishment in response to unacceptable conduct suddenly doesn't apply when we're talking about Donald Trump.
There are two types of enforcement for any wrongdoing in any sense; immediate and principal.
Immediate means the punishment is based on the immediate harm caused. Principal is about ensuring that dangerous behavior is kept in check. Putting someone in jail for murder is mostly about the former. Speeding tickets are an example of the latter.
We enforce the latter on the basis that *if* such behavior were normalized, it would be haful to society. For example: *if* real estate investors were permitted to make up whatever lies they wanted when applying for loans, the end result is that there would be far more loans given or than otherwise which would drive up everyone's interest rates to account for the scammers. It's not a victimless crime, it is harmful to society as a whole if such behavior is discovered and discarded, as you seem to want, because Trump.
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
Even Hochul agrees with me. That this case is unique to Trump, and other investors should not fear.
And I agree with her. No other investor is brazen enough to claim on a loan application that their penthouse is 3x it's actual size, or to repeatedly proclaim to the judge deciding the case that they did nothing wrong and all their evaluations were perfect as they were shown to be fraudulent one after the other.
The brazenness and scale of this fraud is certainly unique to Trump.
Yeah, as in the idea that impeachment should be reserved for actual wrongdoing.Which is what an inquiry is for.
Ah, so you support baseless witch-hunts now. Noted.
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
Interestingly enough, there was no congressional inquiry on the 2nd impeachment.
No, nothing interesting about it at all. The crime was literally committed in front of the entire country in real time, and everyone in Congress including Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy said as much. Of course it's politics, so as soon as they realized the cult was that brainwashed as to pretend it didn't happen they had to reverse course.
Now she is upset because an impeachment inquiry designed specifically to identify an impeachable crime doesn't fall into her "impeachment 101" praxis.
Yeah, as in the idea that impeachment should be reserved for actual wrongdoing. You know, as in an offense you can point to.
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
Because when it comes to the discretionary application of the law, it matters if you are running for president...on one side...and if you are not a NY DA.
Sure, now present an actual argument.
Created:
-->
@Amber
He paid all his loans back. No victim. No complainant. No crime. No fraud.
That's not how the law works.
You commit fraud when you produce knowingly false information in the process of obtaining a loan. Period. "No harm no foul" is not a thing. If it were then the next time I get a speeding ticket I would be able to tell the judge my ticket must be thrown in the trash because no one got hurt.
She protected the society, she backed the society, she used the property of the society to her benefit, both personally and professionally. I said that in my OP. What part of that did you fail to comprehend?
The part where you provide evidence that this narrative is accurate. Linking to an NY post article characterizing James's actions as such falls short.
Created:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
Does anyone care about the rule of law?
We do on the left. That's we we actually talk about what the law says and how it relates to the evidence. On the right all you guys seem to care about is who is bringing the charges and who they are sleeping with.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
Or... You could recognize that there are more potential explanations than "they were trying to commit fraud" or "someone else was trying to commit fraud".There are no other explanations.
Exactly, which is why no one takes election deniers seriously.
You lie:If the kind of fraud you are claiming may be happening was actually happening, you would have far more serious examples to talk about.
No, you just don't understand the most basic concepts of how language and communication works.
You accused me of not thinking fraud is a serious thing. That is an abstract statement, so your words are accusing me of not caring about it as a basic concept, as if to say if elections are rife with fraud it doesn't matter. That, is a blatant lie.
What I've argued clearly and repeatedly from the start is that we're not talking about some vague notion of fraud, we're talking about the scale of fraud and whether that scale is a serious threat to the integrity of the result (because that is the only time when it would make any difference). So in that context, this one example of a clerical error is a stupid thing for us to be talking about if the allegation you're trying to support is that our elections aren't secure.
The funny thing is that much of the above was explained literally immediately after the words of mine you just quoted, yet you conveniently left those off and moved on. It's almost as if you're nothing more than a partisan hack whose not actually trying to listen to anything I'm saying and make a serious argument in response.
You claim there was an audit. Show me the audit.Ask the pro Trump republican officials who performed it.You have failed to produce an audit.
Right, so let's test those logic skills of yours. Double_R on debateart failed to produce an audit performed by the state of Georgia. Therefore... [?]
Funny how you can't produce that number, almost as if it hasn't been published because no substantive audits were done.
Right, no substantive audits were done, so the audits that election officials said were done, and that hundred's if not thousands of election workers took part in, is all a massive multi state conspiracy performed largely by pro Trump republicans in order to hide the cheating the democrats did to boot Trump out of office and install Joe Biden.
Ok bro. Hold onto that fantasy if you really want to. Just know that this is why no one takes election deniers seriously and never will.
He wasn't talking about fraudHe was talking about election results. Specifically: denying them
So you are just incapable of telling completely different things apart from each other and don't understand how English works. Noted.
It would be fraud if I lied about a contractual obligation wouldn't it?YesTherefore there is a dichotomy: Either I just committed fraud, or you signed a contract.However since we know you have the burden of proof to show I committed fraud...
No, I don't have that burden because I'm not making that allegation. In this hypothetical, you are claiming I owe you money and you are seeking to be made whole. Because you are the one bringing the allegation and because you are the one seeking for others to take action on your behalf, that places the burden of proof squarely on your shoulders. Me claiming that there was no such contact (and thus you are lying aka committing fraud) in this circumstance is not an allegation, it's a defense of your allegation. That doesn't shoulder a burden of proof.
If I were asking others to now indict you on charges of fraud, then in that case I would be shouldering the burden because I would now be expecting others to take action on my behalf.
This is all in a legal sense. Philosophically the burden is on the person who makes the claim provided that they are expecting others to accept their claims as true (this was implied in the statement "makes the claim"). It is when you expect others to come over towards your position that the burden of proof applies.
Looking into things is treason and will get you locked up if you haven't heard.
No, they're very basic questions we need to answer before we can begin to claim this was evidence of fraud even anecdotally.
How did you infer that the impersonator didn't attempt to vote in an election with Trump?
Because then the lady would have likely been told at least one of those times that she already voted.
now it is, by definition, an anecdoteNo it is not. It's a data point. Data points like these have been compiled but people like you alternate between dismissing the whole because you don't trust the individual examples to dismissing the example because you don't trust the whole.
It's not a data point until we know what happened, until then it's just a claim. Data points on unverified claims are pretty useless, especially within a community that thinks everything is fraud until proven to them otherwise, so of course I would discard them.
I'm sure you're next argument will be some version of "but they're hiding the evidence" which is where we will just part ways. There are republicans all over this country in high elections offices. If you really think they're all engaging in some grand conspiracy to cover up the democrats stealing our elections there is no logic or reason that will ever get through to you.
Created:
-->
@Amber
Letitia James committed the EXACT crimes she alleged Trump committed.
This is a bafflingly false statement. Trump was found liable for committing financial fraud. James is being accused (on what basis none of these articles bothered to provide) that James as the AG improperly intervened in the foreclosure of a property when it's owners failed to pay after fraudulently misrepresenting their value.
At worst (which we have been given no reason to presume) this is a story about hypocrisy, which in itself is already headscratching because you're comparing an entire fraud scheme in the hundred's of millions to one instance of a $3M scam as if they're equal.
But beyond that... What exactly is the point here? Does anyone here care about James? It's she ruining for president? Trump's crimes done go away because the person to indicted him is also a criminal (which has yet to be shown).
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
People like Double_R would call this "anecdotal" and suggest that you assume these people are lying
No, people like Double_R would recognize that this isn't even anecdotal because we don't know anything about it.
- Who are these people?
- How do we know they are properly verifying the record?
- Has any of those been looked into?
But before we even get to any of those questions, so you not find this at all strange? This woman has had someone voting in her name for years in presidential elections and even primaries, yet she says she voted for Trump. Election turnout was far higher when Trump was on the ballot, so this impersonator came out for every election... Except when Trump was on the ballot? Sounds like an ass backwards operative.
But let's set all of that aside and grant the entire story as factual... Yes, now it is, by definition, an anecdote. Provide the data showing it happening regularly and then you'll have evidence of widespread fraud.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
Well I could assume you're they were all lying when I saw their faces and emotions, or I could assume your blind trust in tens of thousands of people who you don't know is warranted.
Or... You could recognize that there are more potential explanations than "they were trying to commit fraud" or "someone else was trying to commit fraud".
If you don't know what makes fraud "serious" then your previously attempted point is void.
Another example of how disingenuous you are. Nothing I've said implied in any way that "fraud" is not serious. We're not talking about the vague concept of fraud, we're talking about the scale of fraud in relation to the total. 4 dead voters in an entire state is not a serious issue when that state was decided by the razor thin margin of 12k votes.
If you didn't have strawman arguments you'd have no arguments at all.
You claim there was an audit. Show me the audit.
Ask the pro Trump republican officials who performed it.
If they really did audits and didn't hide data then we would have a number for that.
Funny how every state, including those run by republicans all hide the data showing massive fraud which swings elections towards the democrats.
That's not a problem with the system, that's a you problem.Jan 6, an enormous spike in support for secession, Trump getting railroaded leading to a complete collapse of trust in the federal and opposition state legal systems; and the very real probability of Trump getting back in come 2024 says it's a "us" problem.
Oh it's definitely an us problem - Republicans are idiots and are bringing the rest of us down with them. I remember a time when someone being indicted on 91 felony counts used to make them less viable, not more. I remember a time when stealing nuclear secrets and lying to the FBI about them would make someone less viable, not more. I remember a time when someone using Hitler's rhetoric when talking about immigrants would make them less viable, not more.
But this is half the country now. God help us.
We have no bodies for these elections because they ARE UNAUDITABLE.In person fraud cannot be audited either yet you have so issue with that, so what is your point?There are two options: invulnerability or auditability. The first is better, but the latter is tolerable so long as the response to discovered fraud is a new election.Vulnerabilities for in-person voting are just as much of a problem as any other vulnerability, but there is reason to believe the scope of such fraud is limited because there exists risks of being recognized.
And yet it's still UNAUDITABLE
You lost any basis to talk about constitutional rights when you discarded the 2nd amendment.
Strawman then deflect, same ole...
My arguments have nothing to do with your made up conception of anything I've said in the past. Your position is either valid and defensible, or it's not. If it was, you would spend more time focusing on that rather than making shit up about me to deflect to.
when fraud can change the outcome it's not democracy anymore. So no, your priorities are wrong. There is no balance. Fraud must be eliminated as a factor so that democracy exists, and any proposal for convenience must not change that fact.
Fraud can still be committed via in person voting, yet you are fine with it.
You do not follow your own logic.
You don't get to tell people mail in ballots are rigged and then point to the fact that people believe you as a valid reason to now have to get rid of them.Sure I can, if they can be rigged.
Mail in ballots can also be rigged, yet you are fine with them.
They never claimed the results were fraudulent genius.Yes they did. I'd post the evidence again if I hadn't done it more than three times.
What you've posted are sounbites that completely and entirely ignored all context which demonstrates that what you're saying is complete and utter bullshit.
I've already posted the full Jimmy Carter excerpt that includes the part you conveniently left out. He specifically and explicitly said Trump didn't win because of Russian interference. He wasn't talking about fraud, he was talking about winning the right way. These are completely different things. I'm am sorry if you cannot tell different things apart from each other.
He's not claiming ballots were stolen by illegals and recorded in the name of dead people.Then he's claiming those are not the only ways for the officially reported result to be wrong.
Correct. The problem for you is that "wrong" is an inherently subjective term, therefore it can mean anything.
If I am claiming the result is wrong in the sense that the person who won did so in violation of the spirit of democracy (like accepting help from a foreign advasary in the form of rampant misinformation being spread with no accountability) then it's an entirely subjective opinion.
If I am claiming the result is wrong in the sense that the actual count which determines the actual winner is wrong, that is not a subjective opinion and therefore doesn't get a pass in the world of facts.
The former is bad because it reflects poorly on us as a society for choosing the candidate who violated the spirit of democracy. The latter is bad because it means we didn't choose our leader at all. The latter is objectively worse for democracy because the entire concept of democracy is that we choose our own leader.
Circular logic 'I don't trust cops, therefore my distrust in cops is validated'
Yes, that is also circular logic.
I assume you're trying to pin that logic onto me. Sure, just show me where I have ever used it and then we can both recognize that we're both using circular logic (HINT: you won't find it because I've never made that argument).
Google philosophic burden of proof.Google appeal to ignorance and then think about what the original positive claim must be.
A default position is not a positive claim.
It would be fraud if I lied about a contractual obligation wouldn't it?
Yes
Well I say Trump wins, I counted the ballots with my invisible alien friends. You can't prove I didn't QED.I don't have to, that's why the burden of proof is a real thing. You made the claim, so prove it.Is that so? I made the original claim?What was the claim?
Start at the top...
Show me how many times this has happened.Give me surveillance footage of every ballot being delivered and the photos of everyone who lives at every house.Woops, you can't. That means it's unauditable.That doesn't mean *shrug* don't worry about it, it means that the people who decided it was time to send out ballots by mail (a completely untraceable system) wasted a lot of effort because democracy not achieved.
What it means is you have decided that only when it comes to mail in ballots, you (personally) must have names, addresses, photographs, video footage of everyone's houses in order to accept them but don't demand anything close to that before accepting in person ballots.
And of course the fact that democrats how by mail more so than republicans had absolutely nothing to do with this double standard at all.
No one cares about your unreasonable demands and misplaced burden of proof. Prove your claims or go home.
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
'How much does the president matter enough to justify my support?'Fixed for you.
No, fixed for you. This conversation started because you made the argument that correlation = causation with regards to everything that happens during a president's term, but now that this argument fell apart you have to pretend it was something else.
Then why did Biden question his own staff about the date? Only a mentally confused person would ask for assistance.Hur was right. If I asked you what date you were born and you had to ask someone else...I would say the exact same thing.UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.PRESIDENT BIDEN: Was it 2015 he had died?UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: It was May of 2015.You act like the average independent voter can't access this:
I'm not the one pretending the plain English says something it doesn't.
Here, since we all know you didn't actually read it and are just parroting what you heard, this is the full excerpt of that exchange (it's on page 83):
Biden: “Remember, in this timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying. … Even though I'm at Penn, I hadn't walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I 'd be running for president. And, and so what was happening, though – what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th.”
Rachel Cotton, White House lawyer: “2015.”
Unidentified male speaker: “2015.”
Biden: “Was it 2015 he had died?”
Unidentified male speaker: “It was May of 2015.”
Biden: “It was 2015.”
Notice how Biden asks what month he died and then immediately answers his own question by providing not just the month but the exact date. Then notice how his staff jumps in to plug in the year which confuses Biden for a second before remembering and confirming they were right.
There is absolutely nothing noteworthy about this at all. People forget dates and times all the time. We recall specifics like this by association, so by throwing out different parts of the story it all comes flooding back. That's how brains work. To pretend this shows Biden to be some senile old man isn't just disingenuous, it's stupid.
The polls are justified.
If everybody's consuming the same propaganda you are it's no wonder people see the world the way you do.
Lol, you post a poll covering all tribes and any change is automatically attributed to the right tribe?
My god dude. Read. Then reply.
The polls were broken up by democrats and republicans and showed how each groups answers changed over time.
Again, democrats rating of the state of the economy went from high 70's to the 50's within months of the election. During the same time period the republicans went from the teens to the high 90's. Nothing happened during this time period other than the election, any noticable movement in such a short eventless time period is clearly motivated by political bias. But it shows the stark difference. That's why polls like this are meaningless.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Greyparrot
So... The argument is that 5/29 was basically equal to January 6th? Is that right?You could say it was worse because of the fire and destruction and vandalism. It also lasted for days.
Right... Worse.
Please help me understand the following:
What political leader called for the people who showed up at the WH to be there, and were these people there because this political leader told them to be?
Was it this political leader's job to ensure the WH remained safe and did this leader carry out that responsibility or were they, say, watching the riot on TV wondering why everyone else wasn't enjoying it?
Was this riot part of a larger plot by this political leader to engage in a serious crime, like, I dunno, stealing a presidential election?
Did the rioters succeed in taking over the WH and forcing the elected leadership of this country to have to evacuate?
What sacred constitutional process had to be held up as a result of this riot?
Just curious
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Greyparrot
So... The argument is that 5/29 was basically equal to January 6th? Is that right?
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
Being president either matters or it does not.
Wrong. It's not an either/or, it's a scale. 'How much does the president matter?' is a legitimate question and it changes when we zoom in on each issue. The president leads just one of the three branches of the federal government. You also have state and local governments all throughout the country that are collectively just as important, as well as governments all throughout the world making their own decisions. You also have private entities everywhere (like big corporations) making major decisions that affect all of us which the federal government has no legal right to intervene in.
So the president certainly matters, but to suggest he's the only thing that matters is to pretend none of these other governments/entities exist or have any power/rights of their own. That's absurd, and yet it is the notion that all of these "look at the country then and now" arguments are based on.
Again, we judge president's not merely on what happens while they were in office but on what influence they had.
While your reflexive and cartoonish "context" defense seems on the surface to work in Biden's defense, in the end, it simply weakens him.
Context is always going to be a crucially important aspect of understanding any affair, so putting it in quotes and acting like I'm using it as an excuse just makes you look stupid.
A good example of this was Hur proclaiming Biden as too forgetful to be held responsible.
It's a good example of how effectively propaganda works. The transcripts have since been released and shown Hur's comments inn this to be factually wrong. He was lying, Biden remembered everything, but that won't stop the MAGA base from repeating this till November and beyond.
The big difference of course is that Trump had 3 good years in balance with the 1 bad year. Biden has a grand total of zero good years according to the polls.
That's because Biden was handed the mess Trump left him. Regardless of what blame you put on either of them, the circumstances Biden inherited are objectively worse than that of Trump. Biden was handed an economy still mostly shut down and a supply chain that was destroyed. Trump was handed an economy that had been growing for 7 straight years with no major national or global issues. To pretend isn't factual or doesn't matter is flagrantly disingenuous.
But even setting that aside, it's hilarious that you base your assessment on polls, as if we don't have objective ways to measure these things.
It also reminds me of why the polls are so skewed; because right wingers generally don't care about facts. One of the best illustrations of this was a poll done after the 2016 election. The polls asking people if they thought the economy was doing well showed about approval for democrats in about the high 70's in the final months of Obama's presidency. Then within months of Trump's election victory, that number dropped into the 50's.
Any rational observer can see that for what it is. There was no major change to the state of the economy that happened at that time, only thing that changed was who was in office, so it's clearly a partisan motivated drop.
So what was the change for republicans? It went from approvals in the teens at the end of the Obama presidency, and within months of Trump's victory was in the high 90's.
That's absurd and this example is yet another data point of what we already know; facts matter fat less to republicans. This is just another example of why we don't base any attempt at a factual assessment of something like the economy on polls.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
You have no idea what the actual story is with any of these claims, yet you already assume the ballot supposedly received in their name was fraudulent.There is no doubt that it is fraudulent. If they sent it in and then tried to vote in person that is an attempt to commit election fraud. If someone else sent in a ballot in their name... that's fraud.
Yes... *If*
Hence: You have no idea what the actual story is with any of these claims, yet you already assume the ballot supposedly received in their name was fraudulent.
You have failed to answer the question. Here it is again:How does a lot of small scale fraud get any "more serious" than lots of examples of small scale fraud and the certain knowledge that discovered examples are the result of extreme filter?
If I skipped over this question before it's probably because it's unclear what you're asking. Please rephrase.
Let's not forget you provided for examples of confirmed voter fraud and there are plenty more.
I didn't forget it, it's one of the data points that proves my case. Dead voters is a very easy thing to audit, yet in the entire state of Georgia they found only 4 examples. If the fraud you are claiming to be happening were actually happening there would be thousands of examples. There are not.
FS >= MVMBF_SI - PBPF >= MV(PBPF/MBTI* FCR) - PBPF >= MVPBPF( 1/(MBTI* FCR) - 1 ) >= MV1/(MBTI* FCR) - 1 >= MV/PBPF1/(MBTI* FCR) >= MV/PBPF + 11/(MV/PBPF + 1) >= MBTI* FCRMBTI* FCR <= 1/(11,000/10,000+ 1)MBTI* FCR <= 0.47
Um. Ok.
That means that if half of the people whose identities were stolen didn't vote, and that out of those who tried 6% didn't correct it (out of disgust or apathy) then the fraudulent count would be greater than the margin of victory.
You are still presuming that every provisional ballot is the result of an attempt at fraud which is nonsense. Most provisional ballots are due to registration issues. In my case I had to fill one out because I unknowingly showed up at the wrong precinct which is another large chunk of them.
If you're going to start with the default position that every ballot which was questionable in any way must have been fraudulent until proven otherwise then of course you are going to see fraud everywhere. That's not a problem with the system, that's a you problem.
I hope no one pays you to do any statistics.
Actually, providing numbers is a very big part of my job, and I make 6 figures doing it
If you get 50 convictions and there are a 100 murdered bodies you can now do statistics: Only 50% of murders are solved.We have no bodies for these elections because they ARE UNAUDITABLE.
In person fraud cannot be audited either yet you have so issue with that, so what is your point?
Quantifying voters who have been practically disenfranchised is not difficult to quantify at all and plenty of studies have done on this. If you pass a new voter ID law that requires particular ID types, you can easily see how many people don't have that ID and follow up to see how many of them ended up without it.You mean didn't get it for the election? That doesn't prove "disenfranchisement" since an equally valid explanation is that they just didn't give a shit.
You know these are real people you can talk to right now, right?
Many of them are living in poverty and don't have the means to get these ID's. In some cases they need multiple documents and have to pay multiple fees, not to mention the transportation costs of they don't live anywhere near these places.
The right wing ethos is that none of this matters, which is my point. It's easy when you already have a job, a car and a license. For many people it's not easy despite the fact that we're talking about something that's supposed to be a constitutional right.
There is a reason I keep using the term practical disenfranchisement. No, they're not actually being told they don't have the right to vote, but voting is no different than anything else in life in the sense that it's a cost benefit analysis. The more we have to sacrifice to participate the less likely we are to participate. So any law that makes it harder means less people participate.
I know right wingers love this because the less people vote the better they do, but this is where I think the real difference between all of us is. I think a society who's people vote for their own representatives is better than a society where representatives are only picked by a handful who were willing to jump through the hoops. You can write that off as being purely partisan motivated of you want, you can't argue that on this one point my priority is far more aligned with the basic concept of democracy than the point that it doesn't matter if these people get to vote if they weren't willing to jump through these hoops.
Alleged voter fraud is entirely different, because you have no evidence that the thing you're alleging to be happening is actually happening.Other than the evidence you've chosen to ignore, yes.
I haven't ignored it, only pointed out that it isn't sufficient to justify your claims.
I said the perception of untrustworthiness is a problem in of itself and the single indispensable mitigation of that problem is to be in fact trustworthy.
The only reason it's a problem is because people like you and Trump are out there telling people it's a problem. Turns out people will believe whatever they're told, I know shocker.
But while I agree with you that either way, it is a problem, what it is certainly not is an argument. You don't get to tell people mail in ballots are rigged and then point to the fact that people believe you as a valid reason to now have to get rid of them.
So when Nancy Pelosi and Maxene Waters doubts elections public trust also takes a hit. Ceded...Well except for the confederacy, the contingent election after that, Al Gore, and Stacey Abrams.
They never claimed the results were fraudulent genius.
Refusal to establish trust is a reason to suspect dishonesty.
Circular logic. 'I don't trust elections therefore my distrust in elections is validated'
Wrong. The burden of proof lies on the person who makes the claim.[Logic 101] Rejected.
Fixed.
Google philosophic burden of proof.
So if you are, for example, claiming fraud, then the burden is on you to provide evidence for that fraud.You owe me ten billion dollars as you previously agreed.Now where does the burden of proof lay? Surely you wouldn't claim that I don't have a contract signed by you without evidence would you?
I don't have to. You claimed I owe you ten billion dollars, so provide the evidence to support that claim or it will rightly be dismissed in any legal setting, anywhere.
Well I say Trump wins, I counted the ballots with my invisible alien friends. You can't prove I didn't QED.
I don't have to, that's why the burden of proof is a real thing. You made the claim, so prove it. And if you fail take your burden seriously then you relieve the rest of us of the burden of having to take you're claim seriously.
They're not saying Biden didn't win the right way, they're saying he didn't win.Trump didn't actually win - Jimmy CarterCue the BS, if you're predicting I'll ignore it I will. The plain English remains.
"there's no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election. And I think the interference although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn't actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf."
I know you struggle with context, bit he is clearly saying Trump only won because of Russia. He's not claiming ballots were stolen by illegals and recorded in the name of dead people.
These are not the same thing. Says English.
Who would miss ballots they didn't request delivered to addresses they don't live at?
Show me how many times this has happened.
there is very little the TDS zombies won't try to stop Trump. I'd believe IWRA would cheat in a heartbeat if there was no risk
I know, the projection is strong.
Created:
Posted in:
Things like, what is the proper default positionThe government has a duty to have elections, elections must be legitimate which means either auditable or invulnerable (preferably both).
No. The default position is that we presume honesty until we have a legitimate reason to suspect dishonesty (fraud).
where does the burden of proof lieThe government.
Wrong. The burden of proof lies on the person who makes the claim.
So if you are, for example, claiming fraud, then the burden is on you to provide evidence for that fraud.
how do we go about establishing a case for widespread fraudIf you can't make a system invulnerable it at least needs to be auditable. If the answer to the above question is *shrug* that means it wasn't auditable.
This answer has nothing to do with the question. All you're saying here is "these are some things I think we should do to improve the system. Ok, that's great. Until you start conflating your personal dissatisfaction with how far the system goes to prevent fraud with the election itself being illegitimate.
what is the ultimate goal hereManaged Democracy!
Not an answer. The ultimate goal for me is an election everyone can participate in first and foremost, while ensuring ballot integrity.
We can take risks, but only if we can quantify the damage.
I don't understand what you mean here. Are you suggesting that we have to be able to count every instance of fraud?
Neither have any of these people running around claiming the fraud swung the election, at least not to my knowledge. I'd love for you to prove me wrong.We don't need to. The inability of anyone to put error bars on it means we win the debate.
Wrong. You lose by default because you have provided no evidence to support your claims.
"I think he is an illegitimate president that didn't really win.""You are absolutely right" - Kamela Harris"Trump didn't actually win the election in 2016, he lost the election." - Jimmy CarterJust because someone uses the same words didn't mean they're saying the same thing.I think that just about sums up your whole ethos. Double standards of behavior protected by double standards of logic and evidence. I'm saving this one.
lol.
Yes believe it or not words can have more than one meaning, especially when spoken in completely different contexts. I would provide basic examples to demonstrate this but you will ignore them just like you did the last few I gave.
Do you understand how communication and context actually works?Context is back to save the day huh?
Yes, context is still a very important part of human communication. That didn't change since our last thread.
The latter is a rejection of reality based on allegations of a massive nationwide conspiracy.Does it have to be a massive nationwide conspiracy to steal an election?
It depends on what's being alleged. The word "steal" can have multiple applications. You can for example say the visiting team stole the game in the final minutes when they ran back two fumbles for touchdowns. In that example there is no wrongdoing being alleged, they're just pointing out that the home team had it and should have won.
That's the context the democrats you cited we're talking about. No one was saying Donald Trump didn't get the most votes through the proper application of the electoral college, they were saying that the system sucks and the way things work is antithetical to the very ideas we're supposed to stand for, and also that Trump played dirty by happily accepting Putin's help.
That's not what Trump supporters are saying at all. They're not saying Biden didn't win the right way, they're saying he didn't win. These aren't the same thing.
I've pointed this out at least twice now and could point it out a hundred more times and you will just keep repeating the same debunked nonsense as if you really don't understand the most basic ideas of how English works.
Then I guess we no longer trust voter registration either.Not if you are reasonable. It should have been obvious to you when there are actual human beings who object when somebody tries to remove the dead voters from the voter rolls.
No one objects to removing dead voters, you're just lying. The objection is at the way many of the states have carried this out which would objectively result in large numbers of legal voters also being thrown off the roles and the burden being placed on them to get themselves back on. If you care about democracy, which means everyone's voice counts, them that is not an acceptable trade off especially when dead people do not cast ballots says every audit that's been done (and yes, this is easily auditable).
No one is going through the trouble of stealing your identity and ending up in jail just so they can cast a single fraudulent ballot in your name.Nobody is ending up in jail because there is no way to trace the fraudulent ballot to the fraudster
People do end up in jail because of this, and everytime it's a monumentally stupid decision given the risk vs reward ratio. Hey few people are stupid enough to try this, and most of those that do are republicans because they've been so brainwashed by this nonsense.
Mail in balloting as practiced in 2020 and 2022 removes all the risk. That's why its susceptible to fraud.There is no reason that they can only send in one fraudulent ballots, they're only physically limited by the number of ballots they can collect from defunct or rarely used addresses during the period when mail ballots are sent out which is often 30-45 days before the election.
Are you even listening to yourself? Who do you think is doing this? Who is going door and doing oppo research on their neighbors stealing people's mail in ballots and do you really think no one's going to catch on when ballot after ballot in the same neighborhoods end up missing? And for what?
Nobody votes because they really think their one ballot is going to decide the election. People vote because they want to make their voice heard. Voter fraud of this type would need to be done on a massive scale to make any difference at all. Even if you were successful in flipping an entire state (Georgia's razor thin margin was still 12k votes), there are still 49 others so you're chance of swinging the election would still be marginal at best. No one is going to go through all this trouble and risk to not make a difference.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
It wasn't a fraudulent ballot, it was a clerical error.Alright, assume one of those seven people who told me they didn't send in a mail ballot had never tried to vote in person. Would the fraudulent ballots have counted?
Another perfect example of the problem here.
You have no idea what the actual story is with any of these claims, yet you already assume the ballot supposedly received in their name was fraudulent.
If one of those 7 people didn't show up to vote then there would be one less dispute to investigate.
The story keeps changing. Are you claiming the roommate sent in the mail ballot under a name not her own?
I'm saying that the example provided doesn't even qualify as an anecdotal example of fraud.
If the kind of fraud you are claiming may be happening was actually happening, you would have far more serious examples to talk about.How does a lot of small scale fraud get any "more serious" than lots of examples of small scale fraud and the certain knowledge that discovered examples are the result of extreme filter?
Because what actually matters is data, not anecdotes.
I am just as convinced by your anecdotes of alleged voter fraud as you would be convinced that the police are mistreating black people if I provided you as bunch of videos of it happening.
The way they would find out is exactly the scenario I described witnessing: They show up, are told a ballot was mailed to them and sometimes received from them, and then they deny it and are offered the provisional ballot.
And then those provisional ballots are investigated for validity, and if what you suspect to be happening was actually happening then the system would be inundated with examples of mail in ballots being wrongly cast. But yet despite years and years of right wingers searching for any hint they could find, nothing.
The one time this did happen was in 2018 when a congressional race in NC had to be redone because of actual fraud, which coincidentally was done by republicans (no wonder you guys believe so strongly that fraud is happening; projection).
Someone should have challenged that in courtThey did, many times; pseudo-judges hid under their bed. Real judges were quickly overruled by pseudo-judges.
Exactly my point.
Any judge you don't agree with is a fake judge, any judge you agree with is a real judge. So when you say they didn't follow their laws all you're saying is they didn't do what you think they should have done, regardless of whether the legal system already decided otherwise.
It is a false premise that a secure system must "disenfranchise" anyone.
And a strawman to assert that as my position.
We're talking about the balance between increasing security and ensuring accessibility. We don't have to pick one.
This is about trade offs. If you require a particular type of ID to vote you have to ask, how much will this improve ballot security and how will this affect people who don't have that type of ID? You need to decide based on whether the trade off is worth it. The problem is that you seem to care nothing about the people part of the equation, which is why our conversation will continue to go no where.
The most important difference though is this: When your system is vulnerable to fraud and unauditable you can't quantity the fraud.
We quantify the fraud the same way we quantify anything else which we don't have precise numbers for; we estimate based on known examples. There is no way to quantify the exact number of people who would have voted but didn't because of twelve hour lines, that doesn't mean we cannot make reasonable estimates.
The difference is that there is no evidence nor reason to believe fraud is taking place anywhere near the scale of the impact many of these laws are having on civic participation.You continue to make assertions you can't possibly support as to scale.
Quantifying voters who have been practically disenfranchised is not difficult to quantify at all and plenty of studies have done on this. If you pass a new voter ID law that requires particular ID types, you can easily see how many people don't have that ID and follow up to see how many of them ended up without it. If you get rid of mail in ballots you can easily find out how many people were unable to cast ballots as a result.
Alleged voter fraud is entirely different, because you have no evidence that the thing you're alleging to be happening is actually happening. So you're advocating for changes that will make tangible and measurable differences in civic participation all to prevent something you can't even show is occurring in the first place and in fact a common sense look at the issue says it's not. It's a solution in search of a problem.
Bitcoin is a trustworthy system. That is an objective fact (until the questionable prediction of RSA cracking comes to pass).Some may not believe it is trustworthy
So we agree that people believing a system to be untrustworthy doesn't make it untrustworthy. Glad to hear it.
You have a hypothesis: Everyone who doubts elections does so out of blind worship of Donald Trump.
Wrong. My hypothesis, along with this entire conversation, has nothing to do with the individual. This is all about looking at the big picture, and the fact of the matter is that what public officials say, particularly when that official is the president of the United States, and especially when that President has the kind of devoted following Donald Trump has - tells the public that the election results cannot be trusted, it would be absurd to expect any other result than for the public trust in elections to take a significant hit.
There is a reason why conceding the race and congratulating your opponent has always been a proud and sacred tradition in American politics. It's because everyone including and since the founding fathers understood this "hypothesis" as nothing less than common sense.
Because you have chosen to believe that, you don't think having secure elections would make a difference in public trust.
I've never suggested we should strive for anything other than secure elections, my point is that they are secure by any reasonable assessment.
I also think by the biggest issue isn't the actual vulnerabilities in our system, it's the politicians and right wing propaganda outlets who have decided they can benefit from this, like Fox news repeatedly broadcasting knowingly false stories about Domion and others. When nonsense is spread people will believe it, so none of this is the least bit surprising.
The point being that even the authors of the report you are citing to support your case agree with me.
Did you even read the report? The main concern they had with mail in balloting wasn't even the threat of fraud, it was the concern that many of these ballots are being filled out in the presence of others which they argued that could result in ballots being heavily influenced. The concerns that they did make about security have mostly been addressed (the report is 20 years old).
So again, this tells me everything I need to know. I don't get knee deep in all these conspiracy claims because I don't have to, the truth is if elections were as insecure as you claim and if fraud was happening on the scale you suspect you would have better points to bring to the table than an anecdotal story of a clerical error and a misrepresentation of a 20 year old report.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
To you, but you have already decided the so called election was the safest and most secure in history, you have chosen to not accept proof so no proof is needed. It's just a question of what standards.
Well, you're on track. It is a question of standards, but not just a question of standards. There are all kinds of very basic questions that need to be sorted out. Things like, what is the proper default position, where does the burden of proof lie, how do we go about establishing a case for widespread fraud, what is the ultimate goal here and where does the balance been ballot count integrity and voter accessibility lie?
These are the philosophical questions that every argument you have ever made on this issue is ultimately based on, and yet when I question you about basic stuff like this and when I give you analogies and examples get deep into these concepts you dismiss the entire conversation as if it's all just mumbojumbo. It's not. You can pretend all you want that these questions don't matter, but your positions will continue to be based on them regardless.
We saw a lot. You have no basis to claim there would be more, you have made no quantitative analysis I'm quite sure.
Neither have any of these people running around claiming the fraud swung the election, at least not to my knowledge. I'd love for you to prove me wrong.
Again, my position isn't just quantitative, it's also qualitative. If the fraud were enough we would have better examples to talk about, we wouldn't be wasting our time watching YouTube videos reporting on clerical errors and asking us to opine on what these clerical errors could possibly mean. We wouldn't be sitting here talking about water main breaks and trying to concoct scenarios in our minds of how it could all be a conspiracy. The fact that this seems to be the best you got in a country of over 300 million people is what tells me more than anything else that there's nothing here.
Please find one example of democrats "denying election results""I think he is an illegitimate president that didn't really win.""You are absolutely right" - Kamela Harris"Trump didn't actually win the election in 2016, he lost the election." - Jimmy Carter
Just because someone uses the same words didn't mean they're saying the same thing.
When Trump and his followers claim Biden didn't win the election, do you honestly, seriously, think they are saying the same thing as the quotes above are saying? Do you understand how communication and context actually works?
I'll go ahead and answer that for you; No, they're saying totally, completely, entirely different things.
Trump didn't win in 2016 in the sense that the majority of American voters voted for Hillary Clinton. He also (arguably) didn't win legitimately in the sense that he did so with the welcomed help of a foreign advasary. This is not the same thing as saying Trump didn't actually win the most votes in the most states that are needed to win the electoral college, which is how we select our presidents.
You can't possibly be dumb enough to not understand the difference here. The former is merely an expression of grievance stemming from the rejection of the moral legitimacy of a system by which the person who gets the most votes doesn't win. The latter is a rejection of reality based on allegations of a massive nationwide conspiracy.
Those are not the same thing.
But the poll worker could very well have invited his friends to come in and pretend to be other people, making the ID check irrelevant. This could happen, therefore ID checks are irrelevant.You mean name and address checks? Why would that make them irrelevant?
Because they can be susceptible to fraud. That's your standard isn't it?
They are validated by the fact that the individual submitting the ballot is a real, legal, registered voter, whose signature matchesMatches a voter registry database (maybe, lots of iffyness there), but if the voter registration was done by the fraudster?
Then I guess we no longer trust voter registration either.
You think there aren't a lot of cases of identity theft? https://bjs.ojp.gov/press-release/victims-identity-theft-20219%... in one year? That sounds high even to me. 22% over their lifetime sounds right.
No one is going through the trouble of stealing your identity and ending up in jail just so they can cast a single fraudulent ballot in your name.
This is another major part of the conversation we haven't even gotten to yet - the risk vs the reward. In all seriousness, why do you think anyone would risk jail time to cast one ballot that won't make any difference at all?
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
Answer the question in (B)
B) If she had not tried to vote, would the fraudulent ballot have counted?
It wasn't a fraudulent ballot, it was a clerical error.
Her roommate was a registered voter, so if she didn't go to vote her roommate's vote would have just been counted under a different name making absolutely no difference.
Moreover, the error was captured, investigated, and explained. The fact that this absurdly insignificant occurance made the news is all the proof any reasonable person needs to conclude that this isn't a real issue. If the kind of fraud you are claiming may be happening was actually happening, you would have far more serious examples to talk about.
Mail in ballots have to be sealed. You can't open them or alter the ballot without destroying them. That's what stops the fraud.Why would the ballot need to be altered in all cases of fraud?
It doesn't, you talked about chain of custody so I figured you were pointing to the chain. If you're talking about the starting point that's where the signature comes in. And if it is the case that thousands upon thousands of ballots (which is what would be needed to alter election results) were being unknowingly filled out by the wrong people we would know this because that would wreak havoc on the system when those voters who never casted a ballot start coming out in droves to find out where it went.
The only question is how high our standards need to be>= the standard before laws to prevent fraud were illegally nullified and ignored
Someone should have challenged that in court
Measures taken that might have prevented maybe a dozen fraudulent ballots (if any at all)How did you come up with errors bars that small?
Because of it were significantly higher than that we wouldn't be sitting here watching a YouTube video on the story of one voter who had her ballot mixed up with her roommate due to a clerical error that was caught and rectified.
They have been executed in such a way that they cannot be proven to be valid, they are a class of high-trust interactions that must be designed and executed in such a way that they can be proven to be valid or else they should be treated as invalid, therefore they (the elections) are invalid de jure.
They are sent to registered voters who requested them and returned with a verified signature. That's enough proof.
You keep pretending proof is some all or nothing proposition, that's not how it works. It's a scale and has to be balanced with it's impact on civic participation. An election that effectively disenfranchises voters at a rate which swings the outcome is no more legitimate than an election that is swung due to fraudulent/illegal ballots.
The difference is that there is no evidence nor reason to believe fraud is taking place anywhere near the scale of the impact many of these laws are having on civic participation. In 2020 if you wanted to vote in many of the precincts around Atlanta you had to wait on line for about 12 hours. How many people were unable or reasonably unwilling to do that? Don't know, but that is a clear tangible example that doesn't take a mathematician to figure out was significant. If you don't see that as an election integrity issue then you can stop pretending this is about ensuring elections represent the will of the people.
You're not even self aware enough to admit that that nonsense about belief and proof applies to everyone including yourself.
The fact that it applies to everyone and is not escapable was the entire point.
You are the one using your own lack of trust in our elections as proof that our elections are untrustworthy.
And yet no one invests in it.Shifting goalposts.
No, I'm not. Your claim is that people will trust the system and my point is that people will always find a way to declare any system that doesn't benefit them as untrustworthy. I pointed out that people don't trust crypto currencies because most people aren't interested in studying blockchain technology just as most people (even many of the people screaming the loudest about voter fraud) have no idea how the process actually works or what safeguards exist to prevent/minimize fraud.
Actually there are commission reports headed by ex presidents that say mail ballots are susceptible to fraud.
If no one cared before 2020 it's probably because the absolute number of mail-ballots didn't so universally swing outcomes.
Elections are decided by the choices the voters made, not by the method for which they made them.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Greyparrot
The actual claim is that because there is no way to validate mail in ballots to any degree of certainty, then there is no way to be certain they are valid votes.
They are validated by the fact that the individual submitting the ballot is a real, legal, registered voter, whose signature matches, and zooming out, the process is validated by the remarkable lack of issues we are having with regards to claims of identity theft that would be occurring en masse of the kind of cheating the right is alleging was actually occurring.
It's truly a bizarre take that you would allow arbitrary vote disenfranchisement with arbitrary rejection of signatures
I'm not a poll worker or a public official so I have no idea what you're talking about
All of a sudden, it becomes an issue when the right demands their voters to show up and vote in person because their vote may not be counted....
No one cares what the right demands their voters do.
After you even trying to make a sensible point here?
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
Did they put up cardboard to block observation of counting? Did a water-main suddenly break? Did a bunch of election workers come forward to blow the whistle?
This is exactly what I am talking about.
To the first point... I am not familiar with this particular anecdote. My first question is; who is "they"? My guess is you're talking about one instance in one location in which cardboard was put up and which there was either an explanation given or an investigation done that found no wrongdoing. But who knows.
I don't know why a water main broke. What I do know is that water mains break and that the absence of an explanation does not justify conspiracy allegations.
What is a bunch? I am aware of a number of allegations being made by low level election workers. I am unaware of any that were found to have any merit and were supported by evidence.
These along with every other anecdote I've seen fail to establish any link to a greater plot and fail to establish the scale of suspicious activity that would warrant a rejection of the results anywhere. Most of these have no merit and most importantly... None of this is surprising given that we have the president of the United States repeating this garbage on a loop ever since November 2020. These aren't instances that hissy so happened to be come across, this is the result of combing through every possible example produced in a country of over 300 million people. If there actually was fraud sufficient to alter election outcomes nationwide we would see a lot more than this.
That's because Trump won, and unlike the right the left actually believes in democracy.
It's amazing how much you guys love false equivalences.
The video didn't play, but we've already seen this nonsense before. Please find one example of democrats "denying election results" and explain how it is analogous to the right's full blown nationwide conspiracy they are alleging. I'll wait.
The idea that it's outcome swinging accuracy is your conspiracy claim. There is no evidence for that.There need only be evidence that the process could have allowed it. There is.
The process when someone shows up to vote is to have their ID checked. But the poll worker could very well have invited his friends to come in and pretend to be other people, making the ID check irrelevant. This could happen, therefore ID checks are irrelevant.
The fact that something could happen is not reason to suspect it is happening. You need more than that. Until you take that burden seriously, you relieve the rest of us of the burden of taking your suspicions seriously.
Created:
Posted in:
I am failing to see where the issue is here.That is because you aren't thinking deeply. See OP for hints.
They're are no hints in the OP. All you did was post a story of a purported clerical error, and all you've done since it's provide anecdotes of individuals who at worst tried to get away with double voting and were referred for investigation. That's exactly how any election system would be expected to work. The fact that you are telling me to go search for a more nefarious narrative instead of just explaining it tells me you've got nothing here.
What you're eluding to is the notion that the peoplewho are responsible for following those processes are not following them. Very different things.No I have always been saying that the people who are responsible for running a real election have failed.
And yet you are in no position to make that assessment.
The problem is still fraud though, just like the problem that chain of custody solves is planting evidence.
Mail in ballots have to be sealed. You can't open them or alter the ballot without destroying them. That's what stops the fraud.
The results of an election must be thrown out if the fraud could have changed them, regardless of whether any particular person is guilty of fraud beyond a reasonable doubt.
There is no such thing as an election that couldn't have been changed due to fraud. The only question is how high our standards need to be, which brings us back to the question about balance.
I don't remember what state it was but one of them had something like a 4 step process for submitting a mail in ballot. You had to fill out the ballot, place it in another envelope, sign it, place that in another envelope, etc. I remember seeing it explained and being confused as hell but then bothered by the reality that hundred's of people will probably do this wrong and any mistake will result in that ballot being thrown out (which was confirmed to have happened in not insignificant numbers).
Your attitude towards that seems to be "well that's what's necessary to ensure integrity" which would be a ridiculous take. Measures taken that might have prevented maybe a dozen fraudulent ballots (if any at all) will effectively disenfranchise hundred's of legal voters from the election. That's not election integrity, that's the opposite. That is the kind of thing that could actually swing an election.
Belief is irrelevant. The earth can be proven to be a sphere. Elections are only elections if they can be proven to a high level of confidence to reflect the will of the majority.If you don't believe elections can be proven to be accurate then you don't believe in elections as I define them.
Proof: the cogency of evidence that compels acceptance by the mind of a truth or a fact
Belief is not irrelevant, it is the entire point. You cannot, by definition, prove something to someone if they choose not to believe it (aka accept it within their mind).
Your entire position is circular. You don't believe elections are valid, therefore they have not been proven to be valid. They have not been proven to be valid because you don't believe they are valid.
This is why people like myself remain unconcerned that people like you do not accept the results. Let us know when you have evidence.
There is no such thing as a system that doesn't ultimately require trust.Bitcoin.
And yet no one invests in it.
If ballots could be verified and they were verified then I would have no issue. Your proposal that others would still call it fraudulent is irrelevant.
And yet my proposal has been demonstrated clearly. No one cared about mail in voting until Donald Trump politicized it and told the country it would be used to commit fraud, then suddenly everyone thinks it was used to commit fraud.
And despite massive nationwide conspiracy theory that mail in ballots were used to commit fraud, no one has a problem with it in the states where Trump won.
It is cartoonishly transparent that this is not being driven by practical concerns which could be easily rectified with a few more practical safeguards.
Will respond to the rest later.
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
I know, it relies on the cartoonishly simplistic premise that being president actually matters.
No, it relies on the cartoonishly simplistic premise that being president is the only thing that matters. High inflation? Obviously Biden's fault. High gas prices? Biden's fault. Russia invades Ukraine? Biden's fault. Hammas attacks Israel? Who else's fault could that be? Of course it's Biden's fault. It's as if the entire world waits to see who gets elected before they can decide their own path forward.
But of course, it only goes one way so long as we're talking about the bad. When Trump was in office we saw a million Americans die from a pandemic, the entire country locked down, unemployment at record levels, the federal debt exploded, and civil unrest leading to riots all over the country. Was any of that Trump's fault? No, of course not. Assuming we have even enough intellectual honesty to acknowledge it happened at all given that most Trump defenders skip over it entirely as if Trump's first term only lasted 3 years.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Greyparrot
That's how you create a fraudulent election system, by making sure fraudulent people (you did say EVERYONE)
Wow, congratulations on the gotcha.
At least you're being straightforward though about not being serious, so that's progress, I guess...
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
The provisional ballot count is a proxy for double votes.
No they're not. A provisional ballot is any ballot that requires further review before it can be accepted. In the last election I went to cast my ballot in the same location I had gone to for years to learn that they realigned everything. I didn't have time to go elsewhere so I filled out a provisional ballot. Weeks later I got a letter saying my ballot was rejected, didn't really understand why but wasn't worth it to me to make an issue out of.
One smiled and said "I was testing to see if you'd stop me." He walked out because the ballot he mailed was is true vote.Another said that he changed her mind about voting in person and the had never returned the ballot. The system recorded the ballot as having been received (someone sent it back).
So on other words, you're talking about people who tried to do it but the system wouldn't allow it...
I told them what I was told, that they would be contacted by investigators to confirm their identity and then the provisional ballot would be counted and the mail ballot would not be. I do not know that is what happened.
Right... It was sent back to people to investigate, which makes sense when it comes to whether a ballot is valid.
I am failing to see where the issue is here.
Taking the default position that everyone is committing fraud until they prove to you that they are not is not rationalIt is perfectly rational in several contexts. Every context where safeguards exist. Chain of custody for police evidence is another one.
Processes must be put in place and followed to ensure integrity. The process always assumes guilty until proven innocent. What you're eluding to is the notion that the people who are responsible for following those processes are not following them. Very different things.
If your default is to suspect fraud until proven otherwise then you will never trust election results.You propose it cannot be proven to be accurate?
There are still people out there who believe the earth is flat. You cannot prove something to someone who has decided it won’t be proven.
This is where the pejorative connotation behind the term “conspiracy theorist” comes from. The problem with conspiracy theorists is that there is no diffinitive test, which is to say their beliefs are unfalsifiable.
If the vote counters say Biden won then they were either incompetent or fraudulent, so now we have to audit them. If the auditors say Biden won, then the auditors (who were overwhelmingly republican) were either incompetent or fraudulent, so now we have to hire an outside MAGA group to come in and check the ballots for bamboo fibers. And when that effort fails, it's either because they didn't know what they were doing or because the cheating itself was too sophisticated to be caught through an audit. Evidence be damned. Logical consistency be damned. All that matters is that the end result wasn't acceptable.
There are laws that can fix it completely and were laws that fixed it most of the way. Which laws? The laws that were ignored and set aside in the 2020 election "cause covid".
The fact that states took into account the reality of conducting an election in the middle of a pandemic is not suspicious nor nefarious.
It's not "guilty until proven innocent" it's "unverified until verified".
They've been verified over and over and over again.
"trust us bro" is insufficient and always has been.
There is no such thing as a system that doesn't ultimately require trust. If you counted and verified every single ballot yourself and concluded Biden won, your personal confirmation would be worthless to the millions upon millions of Trump supporters out there who would just brand you as a part of the deep state.
It doesn't matter what system you come up with, the results will always have to be provided to you in some form. If they're numbers on a spread sheet, someone had to put it together. If you have images of the ballots to sort through, someone had to upload them. There is no such thing as accepting any result without trust, this is the problem I keep pointing out. You are inherently distrustful, so there is no possible way to prove to you what you do not wish to be proven.
Biometric blockchain, I've described it before.
Yeah, I'm sure the conspiracy theorists won't figure out how to demonize that one...
Curious, do you think there are major ballot counting issues in Florida?I don't know. I haven't heard controversy
That's because Trump won, and unlike the right the left actually believes in democracy.
What's fascinating alt Florida is that it's the literal reversal of what the Trump camp used to claim the results in the blue wall were fake. When the polls closed Biden was well ahead, them all of a sudden Trump caught up and passed him. Yet no one on the right found that suspicious at all. I wonder why.
Sacrificing outcome swinging accuracy for convenience is not reasonable. Both are values, but they do not compete.
The idea that it's outcome swinging accuracy is your conspiracy claim. There is no evidence for that.
The idea that democracy is supposed to be for everyone is not a side note, it's the entire point.
No one should have to pay for documents they need to exercise a constitutional rightExplain gun permits.
Explain what a "well regulated militia" means.
Better yet, don't. That's a conversation for another day, or more accurately another thread.
Yet when elections are sabotaged intentionally by officials (see Arizona election 2022) all of those anti-democratic institutions out to "save democracy" didn't care that election officials lied on the stand to cover up their actions (which made people wait in long lines).
Another conspiracy theory that took the facts well out of context. Not wasting my time debunking it.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
We're talking about laws, not social contracts.One of the sillier things you've said.
And yet it's a fact. You know they're two totally different concepts right?
I'm asking you for an argument and you're saying "No the preposition goes before the noun", they have nothing to do with each other. You assert a secret meaning and when I deny it you pretend I am denying the existence of coded language as a rule. There is coded language, and coded language for violence, but saying there are evil/improper people and evil/improper acts in the world is not coded language to call for violence.
No one has argued that merely asserting of evil people in the world is coded language for violence. How many times do I have to explain this to you?
The argument for incitement is based on the totality of Trump's words and actions from election day through January 6th. There is nothing difficult about that at all, yet you keep pretending that's not what I'm saying over and over again. Why? What is the point of reading anything I have to say if you're not going to listen to a word of it?
I am not itching to have deeper conversations about the nature of language because you can't find any precedent for your double standards.
The only double standards are the ones you're making up. See above.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Greyparrot
We're talking about laws, not social contracts.That would apply in the case of martial law, where the public does not agree with the law. Your dystopia keeps getting better and better
I think you mean your disconnection to anything I'm actually talking about keeps getting better and better.
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
We had both in 2016 for 4 years. We have neither in 2024.
Obama was in office in 2016, when Trump took over nothing changed. We continued the same trajectory of job and economic growth we had enjoyed for the prior 7 years. When Biden took over everything was a mess from the aftermath of COVID (which Trump was in office for), Biden had to spend the next 2-3 years to clean it up.
Trump supporters love to argue that things were great when Trump was in office, and bad while Biden was in office, therefore Trump was great and Biden bad. Setting aside the massive correlation/causation fallacy, it's cartoonishly simplistic. The question any thinking individual would know to ask is what each president did to affect their circumstances, there's almost nothing you can point to to give any credit to Trump and none of the things the right tries to use to justify their BDS holds up to rational scrutiny.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
"In Georgia, meanwhile, where Biden leads by about 1,600 votes, officials said they had about 13,000 provisional ballots.""Pennsylvania officials said Friday morning they were just beginning to process provisional ballots and said they had at least 85,000"Not that you care but I personally saw a significant rate of double voting when I was an election judge in 2022. ~6%
I have no idea how your quotes feed into your point or how's any of this relates to my point.
Provisional ballots take time because they have to make sure they are valid, that's a normal part of the process, I don't know why you find that ominous.
Tell me more about this 6% double voting. How did you identify these instances? How did you determine that number was 6%? What did you do about these double votes?
That's an assertion. Not data. You can't verify it, but you're claim I should trust people who were put in positions of authority so trust me I guess (lol).
My position is that if you are going to accuse someone of committing fraud you need some kind of evidence. Taking the default position that everyone is committing fraud until they prove to you that they are not is not rational and certainly does not give anyone any reason to take your assertions of fraud seriously.
Counting votes will always be done by human beings and will always be verified by human beings. If your default is to suspect fraud until proven otherwise then you will never trust election results. That's a choice you have made, that is not the fault of the democrats, judges, election commissioners, etc. and there is no law that can fix that. The question you should really be asking yourself is why you choose this path of eternal skepticism.
The only way to fully audit mail ballots (as practiced) is a total canvas. No total canvas was ever done anywhere.
Because that is an incredibly impractical thing to do and the reward is not worth it. Like I just pointed out, if it's guilty until proven innocent then you will just take issue with the total canvas. There is nothing that could get you to trust election results, at least not until you start to see the results you want, in which case I suspect you would suddenly be fine with all of it.
Curious, do you think there are major ballot counting issues in Florida? They do of course use vote by mail more than the majority of states in the country...
If birds always chirp, no chirping is evidence of no birds.If legitimate elections are auditable then the lack of auditable data is evidence that there was no legitimate election.
The absence is evidence can be used as evidence of absence in a situation where a given conclusion would necessitate that evidence. The problem is that there is no reason for the level of data you think should be available to the public actually be available to the public. You only think it should because you think it's everyone's job to refute your conspiracy theories regardless of whether you have any legitimate reason to suspect them. Not how it works.
The doubts are not reasonableYou have proven you are not a reliable judge of reasonableness.
So would you like to now discuss how we go about determining what is reasonable in the first place? No, of course you wouldn't. Just like how you wanted to argue that Trump did not signal to the mob that he wanted violence without engaging in any conversation about communication works in the first place.
Honest fellow citizens would have worked together to secure the elections, then there would be no reasonable doubt.
There is every reason for others to fight back against unreasonable measures which waste pubic resources aimed at convincing people like you of something you have decided to remain unconvinced of.
Also, elections is a balancing act and you only seem to be concerned about one side of the scale. Getting the vote count right is imperitive, but so is ensuring that everyone has the right to vote and that voting is made as easy as reasonably possible. No one should have to pay for documents they need to exercise a constitutional right, nor should anyone have to wait on line for 12 hours to cast a ballot.
The fact that people are concerned about the other side of the scale which you seem to care nothing about is not evidence of mal intent.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
It's not supposed to resolve anything between us, that's the point.Then it's not a social contract. Which means it's a useless piece of paper.
We're talking about laws, not social contracts.
yet everytime I try you avoid that conversationIf you're talking about your recitation of basic english intermixed by (and unrelated to) raw arbitrary assertions which would lead to absurdities if equally applied there is nothing to respond to.
Exactly my point.
If you were being consistent and were confident that your views ultimately would hold up to rational scrutiny you would be itching to have these deeper conversations, but you aren't so you don't.
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
well.. you are not gonna see evidence for it if the guy never gets charged for it. Common sense really.
Yes, it is. The question has always been why is closing your eyes and ears to the evidence a good thing? Are you not the least bit embarrassed to be in favor of that?
Can't wait to trade those nuclear codes in for some of that cheap gas and cheap food.
Right, the safety and security of the free world, or cheap gas and groceries (with no actual evidence gas and groceries would be any cheaper)?
MAGA math
Created:
-->
@ADreamOfLiberty
Harassment is what is happening to Trump,
He's running for the oval office, people talking about him is not harassment, it's literally what he signed up for.
If by harassment you're talking about the lawsuits, they were filed in response to Trump's decision to attack EJC publicly.
Either way, it's ridiculous to claim Trump is being harassed.
There is no overlap between the concepts of harassment and defamation.
WTF? Defamation is a literal form of harassment.
The overlap I was specifically spelling out was that both come with resolutions that range from practical solutions to punitive.
When you are found to be engaging, you are told you must stop, and you are handed a punishment, any minor violation at that point carries far more weight than the original violation.
This is really basic common sense. Imagine your child eating all the cookies in the cookie jar even after being warned to leave them there, so you spank him and send him to his room. Now imagine the next day he goes back in and eats one cookie... That turns out to be more of an offense than eating them all the first time, because this time he did it despite being punished for it which signals a far more egregious attitude towards the situation than originally shown.
This is why the first time you get a speeding ticket you might pay $60, the second you might pay $120, the third you might get you're license revoked. This is how enforcement of behavior works whether we're talking about the law, the workplace, or even your own household.
But yet when we apply the same exact concept to the orangeman all of a sudden it's TDS. You should really think about which one of us actually loses their mind and suddenly can't figure out how to apply the same standards we apply to everything else as soon as Trump is involved.
Now if Trump can agree with a party in a random lawsuit unconnected to him, why can't he agree with his own lawyers in a suit brought against him?
For the same reasons I spent weeks before explaining and which you ignored as is evident by every single post of yours on this topic ever since.
Defamation occurs when someone's speech meets the basic elements of the definition. That includes among others, actual malice and reputational harm.
Now go back to all of your other false examples and notice the absence of those elements.
Created: