It’s safe to come out now, right?
ya… kind of a big run on my local grocery. but seemed fully stocked today.
Only until Biden loses based on the voter fraud… then you’ll have to stay in the basement like Joe.
Good luck with that. So far, as reported from the Four Seasons, not much evidence beyond “distance to watch from”…
But the counting continues.
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How can this last for a whole week? Especially in Alaska, where there are less than 1 Million people and only a bit more than 30% turnout.
Do you have any evidence apart from a few all caps tweets from liar in chief?
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You were probably expecting a bit of push back on this, and you’re getting it. Still, kudos for expressing your view in a forum which, by its international nature, is going to hold views that sharply disagree with yours. I’m going step back a bit and talk about epistemology, that is, the study of where our beliefs come from and how we justify them. This is very important today, when a large number of people have sharply different beliefs about objectively verifiable facts.
So, what is your epistomology? Do you tend to believe things because you want them to be true? Is it OK if you do? Do you trust sources of information because you agree them politically? How do you consider and evaluate the evidence that supports the things you believe? These are deeply important questions that you should give some thought to.
Back to the US election. You and I inhabit very different “information bubbles”, with different information sources, rhetoric, and styles. It’s a remarkable thing that I know this, based on a couple of your statements, but it’s true. Here are a few facts which I hope are uncontested in both our information bubbles:
- Throughout his 2020 campaign, Trump said repeatedly that if he lost it would be because of fraud.
- The Trump campaign is right now trying to find instances of fraud (website, hotline).
- As far as we know, they haven’t come up with anything yet.
- To overturn the election result, tens of thousands of (Biden only!) votes have to be discarded in PA, GA, AZ and NV.
In the light of this, do you still think that Trump can retain the presidency by legitimate means?
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Notice Andrew’s choice of words: He writes the voter fraud rather than voter fraud. The voter fraud is the fraud Donald Trump and his people have been talking about since before the election. Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh wrote that, if votes received after election day flipped the results, that would cast a cloud of illegitimacy over the election. Donald Trump said we should count the legal ballots and not count the illegal ballots. I doubt Andrew can defend his baseless claim of the voter fraud any better than he can explain the Joe Biden basement meme.
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The only fraud in this election I’ve seen so far was this old man telling he had won the election when he had not. 
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There was election fraud, but the real issue is just how much fraud there was and if it was at all significant. I’m not sure they will be able to figure out a lot of the fraud as the ballots are anonymous once in the system, but if there are more ballots than people that voted, that would mean something. To determine that, we need to let the recounts and legal process play out. Trump is also correct that many ballots may be thrown out for not arriving on time or following the rules on the ballot, such as putting it a secrecy envelope or having a matching signature. Of course each side is now trying to defend their side in sketchy ways to either trust the results as is now (the Dems) without due process of law, or fight to throw out these invalid ballots (the Repubs). Did election officials follow their own laws with these, or did they let these invalid ballots through?
Other issues are like the software issue found in a Michigan county, where the votes swung from Biden to Trump by 5500 votes after a recount was done. I’ve read from different sources, one saying this issue was either a software bug that was fixed in an software update that was not applied in those machines, and another source claiming that the machines were set up wrong to not read the markings on the ballot correctly. If it’s a software bug, with this software being used in many other states, then a recount should resolve this.
The integrity of the elections now and in the future depend on letting the legal process play out and see what is discovered.
Do you have any information issued by a reliable source to back this statement ? I’m curious because I haven’t read anything worth trusting making such claims.
The problem with various sources is that they are not specific, where did you read it was a software glitch ? Who said so ?
Fake News start when people are just reporting things they read, saying stuff like, it’s been said, or various sources mention it. Such a serious allegation needs to be supported by facts, not rumours.
Here’s a fact, reported by real journalists, quoting their sources:
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office released a statement on November 7 explaining what went wrong in Antrim, and how it was corrected.
“The error in reporting unofficial results in Antrim County Michigan was the result of a user error that was quickly identified and corrected; did not affect the way ballots were actually tabulated; and would have been identified in the county canvass before official results were
reported even if it had not been identified earlier,” the statement said.
The software program, Election Source, worked properly and correctly counted votes, but the county missed an operation step, the statement said. This resulted in a miscommunication between the software and the county’s central election management system that was quickly corrected.
“This was an isolated error, there is no evidence this user error occurred elsewhere in the state, and if it did it would be caught during county canvasses, which are conducted by bipartisan boards of county canvassers.”
Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy is quoted on the county’s Facebook page: “We continue to work hard to ensure the integrity of the election results.”
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Good fact-checking article from the BBC here.
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Read my statement again. Consider that one person changing a vote, voting on behalf of someone else, correcting someone’s vote, or similar is voter fraud and that happens and can’t be denied. How much election fraud and whether it’s significant is the question.
So it was a programming error and an update was not made to the tabulators which caused this. The statement says the canvasses throughout the state are still ongoing, which would find other errors like this if they happened. Likewise in other states. As would a recount if mandatory by law or any campaign desires to ask for one.
Let the legal process play out.
Couldn’t agree more
Why are you all getting wound up by @AndrewA? He’s a fun dude but we know he likes pushing buttons, and pretending to be a Trump supporter is one way to do it. And it’s working clearly.
Nothing is abnormal at the moment. Trump spent the last 6 months planting in his supporter’s minds that Biden would only win thanks to The Voter Fraud and now he’s exactly in his role: claiming that this election was rigged. After 4 years watching him in the White House, are we even surprised? Everyone knows he hates losing, and that if you’re invited to play golf with him, you’d better not beat him.
What he’s doing right not is not a tantrum, he’s just buying time. He screams that there was fraud, and asks people to contribute to the recount effort on his website and if you look at the small prints, you’ll learn that only 50% of your donation will go to the recount effort, the rest will pay his campaign debt. Next thing we’ll hear is that it’ll pay his personal debts…
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I just want to say thanks to everyone involved in this thread. It is the first thread I look for when I log on to the site and I am really enjoying and learning from it. I think is the first time I have seen a civil discussion with outstanding points from both sides without the hate. Must be that one wheel thing. Next President needs to ride a unicycle.
I am not eloquent or educated enough to really add anything of value to the discussion very often but I will say this. I feel that it used to be each side honestly wanted what they thought was best for the country. They understood where the other side was coming from, they just didn’t agree with them. Now it seems like we have to hate each other if we don’t agree. Damn shame.
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This thread started on the old forum where there was categories and sub-categories. So it didn’t interfere much if you just visited the forum for your unicycle fix - personally it took me months to even see there was another sub-category with rants and digressions.
With the new forum, it’s more prominent. But I’m with @DaUniGuy, it’s stayed civil and people argued their cases, it didn’t turn into nasty attacks and insults like it does on other social media platforms…
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Since we’re in the Off-topic category …
… I don’t see any problem yet.
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@Richard_C I’ve studied epistemology myself in a small way, and I’ll send you a private message rather soon with why exactly I believe what I do. Anyhow, interesting point of view. The statement I quoted would be false as far as I know… Guiliani or whatever his name is (too tired to look it up, sorry) said that they had enough incriminating evidence that it was safe to say that the courts would not accept a Biden victory, and that Trump would get another 4 years.
Good to know you retain a proper respect for your duly elected president.
Anyhow, as it is, I never use Twitter and have not read a single Tweet from Trump throughout November, probably longer. The only time I’d see his Tweets are when they’re linked on news articles, which I rarely read.
To everyone else, here are some rumours and/or more credible things (yes, that’s an edit) I’ve heard:
- Trucks showed up at voting centres in swing states at 1:00 AM (after they publicly declared they were going to stop counting) with hundreds of thousands of Biden votes, and no Trump votes, which is of course statistically impossible.
- Republican poll-watchers apparently were not allowed to watch the polls as they are allowed to under law, in some places even after there was a court order that stated the polling stations must change how they restricted poll viewing.
- Voter turnout in key locations that Biden won was sometimes over double that of the previously-estimated voter turnout. That’s very suspicious.
- Biden did worse than Obama and Hillary Clinton in all the states I checked (which, to be fair, was not many, but I wasn’t choosing them specifically, just clicking randomly)… except Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Fishy, no?
- Swing states with Democrat governors… all stopped their counting randomly quite early in the night? Oh wait, don’t worry, they started again in secret once all the poll watchers were gone (enter the aforementioned trucks).
None of us can actually first-hand know what’s happening, and so we’ll have to wait till the votes are properly counted. I feel quite certain there was fraud, go ahead and feel quite certain there wasn’t. But consider yourself before you say something like this:
You and all your liberal friends may chortle into your cappuccinos at this (giving yourself a funny little milk mustache in the process), and view it as slamming down the, erm, trump card.
But don’t forget that ya’ll spent the time since 2016 saying that there was election fraud and that Trump got in because the election was rigged. As a very wise man once said, “The same people who spent 4 years telling us there was voter fraud are now assuring us with straight faces that any interference in the election is impossible.”
So think before saying that there was absolutely not fraud, nor could there be.
Also:
@JohnFoss for president? What do you say, John? Or should we just teach Kamala Harris (the next president if the Dems win) to ride?
This is exactly why epistemology is important. Which sources of information do you trust? Rudy Giuliani’s say-so, or the observable fact that none of the actual lawsuits filed by or on behalf of the Trump campaign contain any evidence of fraud other than hearsay within hearsay?
The other facts you cite are very far from being generally accepted as facts. Again, why do you choose to believe this particular set of facts? This is a question for you to ask yourself, rather than a question that I would like an answer to.
I’d be happy to take this to private messages. This is a terrible and dangerous situation, and perhaps it would be best not to have it spoil the happy place that is unicycling, even off-topic.