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Sigh. The "election truth" people are still going full steam ahead, collecting unwitting supporters who want to believe the 2024 election outcome was hacked.
I'm not going to link to it - I don't want to amplify them - but here's a brief thread on how they're being misleading and outright dishonest in their claims
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@mattblaze are these ppl on substack by any chance? There were a couple of ppl there who authored a weekly or maybe monthly newsletter that claimed the 2024 election has been stolen. I didnt mind following them to see if they came up with anything substantial but then they made claims that the NSA had done an audit and they also knew it had been stolen but the "proof" they offered was a few text messages that could have been from anyone and i couldnt see where it was proof of anything. i didnt
@dwntwnT There's a whole bunch of them, operating under different names and on different platforms.
I remember the NSA story, which made no sense.
@mattblaze hadnt heard someone was raising funds. How awful.
@mattblaze Yep! It's all questions and irregularities and vague statistical improbabilities - no serious evidence once I drill down. I do think Kamala/ DNC should've honored the #TrumpPrecedent just to make a point, make sure all those risk-limiting audits are as robust as can be, making clear that Trump set this shitty precedent and maybe offering some sort of legislative remedy to crying "Stolen!" without serious evidence.
First, I would LOVE to believe the "election truth" people who claim the 2024 presidential race results have suspicious anomalies that indicate fraud. Politics aside, it would vindicate longstanding warnings from my colleagues and I that many US election systems have serious vulnerabilities.
But there's just nothing there.
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Asserting that a presidential election outcome was altered is an *extraordinary* claim, one that requires significant, compelling evidence to back up. But the "evidence" being presented is just nonsense: A bunch of statistics about "voting patters" that don't actually show anything surprising or suspicious.
There's a reason that Harris and Walz, who supposedly had their offices stolen from them, want nothing to do with these claims.
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If you read their claims, what they're doing is "analyzing" precinct and mail-in voting tallies from different places and claiming the results show "suspicious patterns".
Except:
- They aren't actually suspicious. They're readily explained by unsurprising demographic differences.
- Even if they *were* "suspicious", that's not how you show fraud.
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@mattblaze The thing I keep bumping up against discussing this online with folks is that they misinterpret the behavior of large populations: they think that a large population should cause every sampling to drift towards the mean, and that's the opposite of how it works. Especially when the sampling is non-random and includes modifying factors like "99% of the folks in this one town worship at the same place."
"You mean to tell me you think it's more likely that everyone in this town decided to vote against a candidate while voting for another candidate down-ticket in the same party, and that's no indication of fraud?"
"You're asking me if I think it possible that happened once in 100,000 polling locations? Um..... Yes?"
They also have no credible theory of how the massive-scale fraud they believe happened was supposedly carried out, either technically or logistically. They just make vague observations about a few know vulnerabilities in some systems, with no indication that even these were actually exploited.
It's supremely weak tea.
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They're conning statistically unsophisticated, disappointed voters with impressive-looking, but meaningless, "analysis" that tell people what they want to believe.
If you push back, they challenge you to prove a negative - "if this is wrong, just show there WASN'T fraud".
That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.
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There ARE real vulnerabilities in some of our election infrastructure, and this is absolutely a problem that we should fix (and on which significant progress has been made). But the mere existence of vulnerabilities is not evidence of fraud.
Always be skeptical of those telling you what you want to hear.
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The only differences between these claims about 2024 and the claims that the election was stolen from Trump in 2020 are:
- The losing candidate isn't amplifying the BS this time.
- No one stormed the Capitol this time
- No one is offering discount coupons for lumpy mail-order pillows this time.
Otherwise, it's just "Stop the Steal" with the names changed around.
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