Tinidril

I find it a little hard to swallow that since inspections ended (thanks to Trump) that Iran hasn't started enriching some weapons grade uranium. It's not like it takes different equipment.

The "intelligence" that Iran is weeks away from getting a weapon is obviously complete bullshit. I'm just saying that I'm sure they have been working that direction, maybe just preparing for a time when it made more strategic sense to start building them. If they ever want nukes, they will need to make a whole lot at once, just to avoid getting invaded after the first test.

Here's the thing about refined uranium. It's a whole lot more portable than unrefined uranium. That's even more true of uranium that's been refined to the point where it could be used to make a nuclear weapon within weeks. There's no reason to think it would be stored on site, especially after a week of Israeli bombardment.

I'll bet fewer people will fall for Trump's lies than fell for GWB's, but not because we learned from Iraq. This war is really unpopular with MAGA. It's for the wrong reasons, but I don't think most will flip to Trump on this one.

Democrats might be interesting to watch. They are mostly cucked to Israel, but they won't want to pass on the opportunity to snipe at Trump.

Yeah I know, every leftist wants to see the Democrats collapse because they can’t wish the same on the republiQans.

You got it backwards. Leftists want the Democrats to abandon neoliberalism so that they won't collapse. There is a fringe (not me) that wants the Democrats to collapse in favor of a third party, but they also want to destroy the Republicans.

IF there’s anything to this, it means the Democrats won, though and leftists would get a lot of what they want.

We never have before, and the Democrats don't campaign on it, so I highly doubt it. Most Democratic administrations result in less of what Leftists want, not more. Not as bad as Republican administrations, but the last President to really move the country left was FDR. Biden did too, but he barely even tried to undo the previous Trump administration.

To be clear, Democrats are far better than Republicans for the left, but it's not because we expect to get any of what we want from either.

Of course that’s a big, if interesting, if.

Kinda like "if monkeys come flying out of my ass". Even so, it's hardly all that interesting. We still won't understand how Trump won in 2016. We still won't understand the rising tide of fascism in the US and the rest of the neoliberal world. We'll be no closer to taking back Congress in 2026, or doing anything with our proof of election fraud without it.

At the absolute best this would prove that Trump is a criminal running a criminal administration who should be removed from office. We can already prove that a dozen different ways, yet there he still is. I'm not "interested" in expending time, resources, or political capital on a witch-hunt that even Kamala and Walz don't find valuable.

Then we're back to my original objection to the first charts. In a time of strong anti-establishment sentiment, an establishment candidate is more likely to underperform down ballot races, and an anti-establishment candidate is more likely to outperform down ballot races - especially in a purple/swing state.

Which also brings me back to my original point that this is not a theory of interest to leftist voters - both because we already know why it happened, and because it provides cover for neoliberals trying to hide from the utter collapse of their ideology.

The press doesn't know how to differentiate between extremist neoliberals and the far left, so the far left gets saddled with extremist neoliberal nonsense.

We elected Biden on mostly anti-Trump sentiment then forgot and elected Trump again 4 years later. I think 20 years is more than enough time.

I don't know why you gave me the Wikipedia link, but the other link has exactly what I just said. This is straight from what you (and previously I) linked to:

Six percent of early voting was done via a ballot drop box.

In any case, 18% wouldn't change anything I said. With that, I'm done doing silly analysis just to show that there is no point in us doing silly analysis.

Brain fart. Drop-off was 6%. The link I already shared has that.

And yes drop-off, or mail-in ballot versus voting-at-the-polling-station votes.

The key says "total vote" not polling-station votes, but sure.

I read it like: 10 drop off votes vs 10 polling station votes = 0% difference.

Total in-person votes amounted to about 6% of the total vote. All of the numbers should be massively negative by your interpretation. If you lump mail-in and drop-off votes together, then you get just under a million votes compared to 1.5 million drop-off votes. The results of your interpretation should still skew mostly negative, but the chart is mostly positive. You have made assumptions about the charts that are not in the description and that make the chart obviously wrong.

Again I say, the whole thing is a mess, which makes me think that they don’t really want people to understand it.

We’ll just have to disagree on that then. I’m not saying I’m an expert, I’m saying the known vote counts in the following examples are all we need to know to warrant a further look:

Well, the fact that we had an election warrants a further look. I'm just saying that it should be looked at by people who won't make obvious mistakes like you just did. At some point we play a role

Those numbers would not be esoteric symbol-strewn formulas, they’d be, like “5%”.

Tell me you know nothing about statistical modeling without telling me you know nothing about statistical modeling. If you were to take any large random list of numbers, you could find all sorts of patterns that aren't there. Any experience at large statistics at all would have red flags flying any time someone picks out a very particular view when presenting data - especially if they obscure how exactly that view was obtained. Why 2016 and not 2020 or 2012? Why only Ohio? Why present the data this way and not some other way? Why make the key so confusing?

I'm not saying that there isn't something here, but the information this organization is presenting doesn't support that conclusion at all. If anything, it calls attention to how much obfuscation it takes to even make the case.

There’s also this graphic which is interesting.

I don't find that graph very interesting at all. First it's kind of annoying that they don't say what they mean by drop-off before presenting the chart. Later in the document they group drop-off and mail-in, so I presume they mean ballots in drop boxes. But then, I have no idea how the percentage of votes cast by drop-off could be a negative number. They also assert that the 2016 example represents "human voting" and the 2024 does not with no explanation of any kind. Isn't it possible that COVID had some lingering impact on how people cast their votes? The whole thing is a mess, which makes me think that they don't really want people to understand it.

The numbers and facts should speak for themselves anyway.

No, they absolutely should not. Not at this stage anyways. It's nothing but conceit for you to think you can figure this out from the data yourself. At this stage, it's up to the experts who have access to all the data and the knowledge of how to interpret it. Not one expert, but a lot of experts. At some point the issues and challenges would become better defined, and matters of opinion would start to separate from matters of fact. That is when average people would be able to judge what constitutes cheating and what constitutes playing the game.

There are plenty of people and organizations with resources, motivation, and interest in uncovering such a conspiracy. None of them are ringing the alarm bells. Were this a real controversy, it wouldn't be just some lone cobbled together group putting it forward.

I haven’t read up on the expert academic but having a stalled career doesn’t discount anything for me

It should, especially when the arguments put forward depend so much on expert opinion and there is only one expert being put forward. True is true, no mater who says it, but a complicated issues like this needs experts to add context that non-experts might not even consider. For instance, the sociological aspects I mentioned (makeup of purple states / covid impact on voter patterns) and others I didn't or wouldn't think of. Even just statistics themselves have a whole lot of nuance that can lead to crazy results if not handled correctly. Humans are terrible at understanding statistics at this scale.and complexity.

Agreed on the media part, but that’s a very old conspiracy.

I hate to use the word "conspiracy" on it - first because it implies that it's a "conspiracy theory" when most of it happens in plain sight, and second because it's less of a cabal and more just a bunch of rich folks with common interests acting in common ways.

Which parts read as unhinged to you?

Jumping right from claiming that Trump over-performing (compared to down-ticket races) more in swing states than other states leads straight to the conclusion that a "vote changing algorithm" must be responsible for the difference is a big one. There are other perfectly plausible explanations. For instance, maybe anti-establishment sentiment is part of what makes a purple state purple, and anti-establishment Trump voters are more likely to split their ticket. The analysis offered is incredibly shallow, and seems to rely entirely on statistical analysis without considering sociological context. I'm also curious why a group so competent as to be able to pull this off wouldn't have tipped votes in down-ticket races as well.

On the other hand, a lot of the voter suppression claims are very plausible, and some are even obviously true. It's almost not revelatory at all to say that Republicans use voter suppression to win races. Specifics of particular instances are worth questioning, but Republicans have been doing it in the open for decades, and it has definitely blown up in the time since the court gutted the voting rights act.

There is also the general over-reliance on a single expert, who is apparently "the leading U.S. expert in election forensics". Looking at his citations, that title is not justified by his academic career. What I see is some mild success early on, and a decade+ drift towards irrelevance. I see a career that could maybe benefit from a prominent association with a media frenzy over a stolen US election.

If every aspect of what's being alleged is entirely true, then yes. The thing is, it's a huge collection of different allegations that range from probable to unhinged. They aren't all going to be 100% true.

The fact that they spend so much time in their video on Trump saying they don't need votes is a big red flag to me. They put so much effort into priming people to believe that I don't think they have quite convinced themselves.

All of these allegations combined actually pale in comparison with the impact of media consolidation and establishment manipulation of coverage. Our primary process is an absolute travesty that can be trivially manipulated on the whim of the establishment to get whatever outcome they desire.