> Despite evidence to the contrary, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Speaking of naive realism, what evidence? I'm not even asking what evidence was provided, but what could be provided at all.
You can't really prove that elections were fair, especially post factum. Best case, you can show that protections against known frauds were there. And compared to elections I took part in, American elections often look woefully inadequate in that regard.
In fact, at least one American president, Lyndon B. Johnson, remains under serious suspicion.
> Despite evidence to the contrary, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
> Speaking of naïve realism, what evidence
You can really only prove this type of thing in a single direction, by providing evidence that there was fraud on such a scale as to have swung the results. Otherwise, one could endlessly claim that the election thieves just covered their tracks so well that you don't have any evidence of your assertions regarding their behavior.
The burden of proof was on the ones making accusations of election stealing, and as was reflected in how they lost case after case regarding this, _they did not provide it_.
>Despite evidence to the contrary, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
What evidence? An accurate statement might have read, "Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen".
>You can really only prove this type of thing in a single direction, by providing evidence that there was fraud on such a scale as to have swung the results.
This assertion relies on the baseless assumption that the elections are fair unless proven fraudulent. Given the history of elections the opposite could just as easily be argued. This is one of the most important reasons to have total and complete transparency on every level of an election with an auditable paper trail that can be publicly scrutinized leaving no doubt about the integrity of the election among any honest arbiter.
Personally I have doubts about the integrity of every election in my lifetime, and I'm not a young man.
“Despite the lack of conclusive evidence” — this sounds like there is some evidence. But there isn’t. Trump’s own attorney general said so. He quit his job when pushed by the president to ignore the lack of evidence and instead issue a statement that there might have been fraud.
If you’re inclined to doubt every election, did Trump win in 2016 by fraud too? Bush in 2000? Their margins were very tight and they lost the popular vote. Doesn’t that seem like a more likely situation where fraud would carry the day?
2020 was obviously a very unique election because of the mail-in voting. There are various data on that (and this is not partisan whatsoever) available here [1]. You had 40 million more absentee/mail-in ballots than in 2016, paired with what were many extremely bizarre statistical changes. To give just one example, in 2016 the percent of rejected ballots that were because a person had already voted in person was 1.3%, in 2018 it was 1.4%, in 2020 it was 13.5%!
I didn't vote for Trump and don't really have a horse in this race, but I also don't feel comfortable with mail in voting as a meaningful percent of all-votes. This is even more true as the entire country becomes more polarized and radicalized. This sort of mentality is going to motivate an increased number of people to try to cheat the system, and encourage "selective vigilance" from those involved in guaranteeing the integrity of the electoral process.
And perhaps the most important point is that in terms of how a democracy functions, whether elections are fair or not is a secondary concern to whether people think they are or not. The main benefit of a democracy for a society is stability. People looking to change their political future were able to set aside their pitchforks and pick up ballots. But when people don't think those ballots matter (even if they do), then we're back to square one.
The total rejection rate did decrease from 1% to 0.8%. I was referring to the reasons that ballots were rejected. On the page referenced, ctrl+f for "Top reasons for rejecting absentee ballots."
>If you’re inclined to doubt every election, did Trump win in 2016 by fraud too? Bush in 2000? Their margins were very tight and they lost the popular vote.
It's impossible for me say, unfortunately, because of our black-box elections carried out (mostly) on electronic voting machines that don't allow for real audits and, for the most part, don't have complete paper trails. In my opinion it is absurd to have confidence in any process that is not completely transparent.
> Doesn’t that seem like a more likely situation where fraud would carry the day?
It now seems like this is your opinion. So 100% of elections since 2000 where the opposition won are bitterly contested as illegitimate by party partisans. I'm starting to think these political parties might be the problem.
It’s not my opinion. But isn’t it objectively true that the national popular vote is much harder to fake than a few hundred votes in a specific state? That’s just the nature of organizing the effort.
So if all US elections are unreliable, surely the 2000 one is more suspect than the 2020 one.
So, by rough equivalency the same amount of either Republicans OR Democrats belive in stolen elections.
The portrayal of either party by the other is ridiculous.
Clearly it is both a common and non-partisan belief. Safely put, one in three United States Statesians don't believe in the legitimacy of elections they don't win.
Aside from the sibling comment's point, keep in mind that the 2000 election was actually decided by a court case. Regardless of how you judge this fact personally, it is at the very least bound to distort survey responses.
The evidence of participants and observers, the evidence of recounts and audits. You know, all the actual evidence that the election was free and fair, that actually holds up under scrutiny.
Unlike all the 'evidence' to the contrary which crumbled when shown the light of day.
> Personally I have doubts
Great, but these are unsubstantiated at this point. It's like you think that there are no mechanisms in place to ensure that elections are run honestly.
>It's like you think that there are no mechanisms in place to ensure that elections are run honestly.
The "mechanisms" in place to ensure that elections are run honestly are lacking and/or non-existent in many municipalities and states around the country (something any informed, unbiased election expert will tell you regardless of their political affiliation).
The overwhelming majority of voting in the US takes places on electronic voting machines that run proprietary, black-box software. Further, US electronic voting machines have been proven vulnerable to hacking and manipulation over and over again.
These issues have not been recognized, much less addressed. The fact is that our system of recording and tallying votes on these vulnerable electronic machines that cannot be audited renders our elections insecure. This isn't a partisan issue (for the record I voted 3rd party in the last two elections and voted for neither Republicans or Democrats). You are correct when you say my doubts are "unsubstantiated". Also unsubstantiated is any confidence that votes were accurately cast and recorded. We - all Americans - deserve a reliable, transparent, auditable voting system that everyone can be confident in.
Yet these machines have held up where challenged, and paper recounts have confirmed their results. So there is evidence that, in general, things are OK.
This idea that there is no evidence that the system works is just wrong. There's plenty, and that's in stark contrast to the 'evidence' that the election was stolen.
I agree that an reliable and transparent system is the best, and should be the aim, and I'm sure there is room for massive improvement, I wouldn't seek to deny it.
But likewise you can't just dismiss the evidence that the election was OK as "I don't trust it", when there are a variety of measures taken that are positive evidence of reliability, with no particular evidence it wasn't.
> What evidence? An accurate statement might have read, "Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen".
An even more accurate statement would be, "Despite Donald Trump's blatant attempt to change the outcome of election results[1] [2] his followers still believe he has won the 2020 election"
That's not more accurate, it adds extraneous information in order to antagonize people, and removes the "nearly one-third of Americans" to imply that it's an unusual opinion.
"Despite the release of another Jurassic Park sequel, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen."
One can argue about whether it's truly extraneous information, but the "despite" is absolutely the wrong connective.
The people who think the election was fraudulent do so because of Trump's actions, not despite of them. Those people's thinking is horribly flawed, of course, but it's still better to represent it accurately.
Per your link, Johnson was under suspicion for a congressional election a couple decades before he became president. This was likely a function of a typical election at the end of the era of machine politics (and not sure why you would mention LBJ rather than Kennedy’s victory in IL in 1960, which may well have been dispositive in an American presidential election - but then again, so was ballot graphic design in one county in one state in 2000).
In LBJ’s 1964 presidential election victory, he won an absolutely overwhelming landslide. I am not really sure what point you think you are proving.
Knowing what happened in a 1948 election is mostly irrelevant to figuring out what happened in 2020, other than "sure, in some election systems, fraud is possible." Lots has changed since then. Electronic voter machines didn't exist, new election laws were passed, and so on.
I'm not going to say that figuring out for sure what happened in 2020 is easy, but you do need to look at things that happened the same year.
It's not one of Carlin's, I think, but there's this old joke
Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.
Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
You slightly butchered the joke; how would a printer, by itself, be useful? Here’s what I believe to be the original:
> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
While a funny joke, the point isn't really applicable here.
Parent poster, as I understood their comment, wasn't asserting that electronic voter machines are impossible to defraud. They were pointing out that you cannot reasonably make a comparison between elections 70 years apart because way too much has changed (one large change being electronic voting machines) for them to be comparable anymore.
The passage of time isn't an argument. If the only things cited are voting machines, then voting machines are immediately conceded as untrustworthy, no argument has been made.
Yes, it wasn't a full-fledged argument, more of a sketch. But assuming that how elections happen doesn't change over the years doesn't seem like a great default either?
> Speaking of naive realism, what evidence? I'm not even asking what evidence was provided, but what could be provided at all.
The onus is on the accuser to come up with evidence. Until then, the countless observers, the sheer number of people involved in coordinating their local election infrastructure, the voting machines audit trails, the numerous recounts, the actual cases of fraud which pointed to republican voters, all are evidence that the election was not 'stolen'.
But it doesn't matter when you're dealing with 'crony beliefs'. Unless Jesus Christ himself appears, walks on water, does the whole water/wine thing again, calls Trump a moron and tells everyone the holy spirit handled the election, it's not going to change anyone's mind. And even then, the mental gymnastics of the rightwing propaganda machine will figure out a way to spin this.
If you want examples of actual stolen election, look no further than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore. Actually, I would say that any election in which a president does not win by popular vote is by definition stolen, even if the voting process is 100% ironclad.
> Actually, I would say that any election in which a president does not win by popular vote is by definition stolen, even if the voting process is 100% ironclad.
It's so funny how people can post something acting as though they are sane and rational, and then finish their thought in a way that reveals they are fully radicalized.
It's no secret and it's a shared belief (shockingly, even among non-'radicalized' people, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_reform_the_United_S...) that the electoral college is undemocratic, obsolete (quite stupid by today's standard), vulnerable to interference (like we saw in 2020 and we'll definitely see in 2024) and it led to the current SCOTUS anomaly. For a nation that prides itself with 'innovation', to never end up reforming its electoral process and amend the constitution is just mind boggling to me. The electoral college was supposed to protect the country against people like Trump. We all know how well that worked out for everyone. And we'll find out again in 2024, as fringe groups inside the republican party are quietly setting up their people in key places.
If your counterargument in favor of the electoral college is that 'the constitution says so', there are a lot of constitutional amendments which prove that it's possible 'it can no longer say so'.
I'm saying that if you actually believe that elections won in compliance with the legal rules at the time of the election are, in fact, stolen elections, you hold an incredibly radical opinion. The terms of the election in the US are to win the electoral college. Campaigns, money, candidates, all of the efforts involved are done with the shared understanding that that is the goal. If the goal was to win the popular vote, or any other metric, then the entire arc of polticians who have presidential aspirations would be different, and many who would have won the electoral college and lost the popular vote would in fact win the popular vote instead or whatever metric you have in mind.
You don't have to agree with the electoral college's system to understand that if someone wins an election based on the rules defined up front, they have won the election, and that those that achieved other measures of electoral support in that election have lost, since those measures were not the goal of the candidate to achieve. To think that not only is this not the case, but that the election was "stolen", goes even beyond being radical, it's entirely irrational, as it would be if you said a baseball game was "stolen" by the team with the most runs but failed to secure the most hits. It's very likely that if that winning team knew that hits was the goal, and not runs, that they'd have won under those rules as well.
Protecting us from crazy candidates due to an uninformed public was one of the arguments for the electoral college, but the main reason was simply to facilitate the ratification of the constitution by slave owning states that wanted to get more representation due to having more enslaved people without actually having to give them the right to vote and without having to consider them fully human.
The three fifths compromise would have been difficult to work out if you didn't use an electoral system.
> The electoral college was supposed to protect the country against people like Trump.
As I understand it, this is incorrect. IIUC, the electoral college still exists in order for the mega-cities not to outvote the countryside every single time. Otherwise, it would be like two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner; the cities would always vote for policies only good for cities, and completely ignore any bad effects on the countryside.
Speaking of naive realism, what evidence? I'm not even asking what evidence was provided, but what could be provided at all.
You can't really prove that elections were fair, especially post factum. Best case, you can show that protections against known frauds were there. And compared to elections I took part in, American elections often look woefully inadequate in that regard.
In fact, at least one American president, Lyndon B. Johnson, remains under serious suspicion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal