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Which parts read as unhinged to you?
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.
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.
Oh just conspiracy in "two or more parties working together towards a harmful act" sort of thing. Doesn't have to be secret.
The part about a particular number of votes being needed to trigger the algorithm is an interesting part of it. In that reply to the second substack post he explains why Elmo's 20 million investment in the Wisconsin supreme court runoff didn't pay out for him, and it was about volume of votes.
There's also this graphic which is interesting.
I haven't read up on the expert academic but having a stalled career doesn't discount anything for me if so. The numbers and facts should speak for themselves anyway.
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.
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.
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.
So look at the variance in the 2016 vote and the much more regular pattern in the 2024 vote. And yes drop-off, or mail-in ballot versus voting-at-the-polling-station votes.
I read it like: 10 drop off votes vs 10 polling station votes = 0% difference.
20 drop off votes vs 10 polling station votes = -10%
10 drop off voted vs 20 polling station votes = 10%
Each county has one blue line and one red line. In 2016, some of the counties show both lines positive (few drop offs) and some both lines negative (largely drop offs). In 2024, no county had more drop offs than polling station votes, and of the drop offs they were overwhelmingly trump even in areas that were overwhelmingly blue in 2016.
I think that’s interesting.
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:
You might say “there are no numbers in there” and on that we would agree. Those numbers would not be esoteric symbol-strewn formulas, they’d be, like “5%”. And having them in front of us would be interesting to see without the need for a historian, a COBOL developer, and a Druid.
The key says "total vote" not polling-station votes, but sure.
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.
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
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.
94% of the vote was drop off / mail in? Please share your link.
Brain fart. Drop-off was 6%. The link I already shared has that.
It's more like 18%
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:
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.
OH. The next article in the series explains it. "Drop off" meaning the drop between Presidential selection and the next-most powerful office. In this case Pres - Senator.
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.
Yeah I know, every leftist wants to see the Democrats collapse because they can’t wish the same on the republiQans.
IF there’s anything to this, it means the Democrats won, though and leftists would get a lot of what they want. That they don’t care about that is all we need to know as it comes to midterms.
Of course that’s a big, if interesting, if.
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.
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.
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.
That's just silly. Crazy wrong.
So that contradicts your first statement.
You're ignoring the inherent contradiction by claiming what's "wanted" was and is never supported. That's not the case.
Hardly interesting to find that stuff out? Okay. I couldn't disagree more. We know from a number of sources trump colluded with russia for things like money and intelligence, we know there were a lot of voter roll break-ins and so on. And we know the Cambridge Analytica piece. That's a lot already - it's not an impenetrable fortress of unknowable things.
Fair enough then. IF anything happens you can read about it in the checkout line. And Kamala and Walz wouldn't support this publicly but I have no doubt they'd find any uncovered truths valuable.
"The era of big government is over". Ronald Reagan? No, Bill Clinton, right before screwing over unions and rolling back the federal safety net more than any Republican until perhaps Trump. Obama was Wall Street's bitch from the start and coopted a left wing push for healthcare reform to push a right wing healthcare plan. Both Clinton and Obama took in millions from Wall Street immediately upon leaving office.
~~Oh, come on.~~ Oh, fuck off. "Never" was obviously hyperbole, and accurate enough if you have to go back to 1945 for a counter example. It's arguably not even the same party since there aren't even any members serving today that we're serving back then.
The first wall of resistance the left runs into on almost every issue is the Democratic establishment (here after just Democrats). The only way the left has moved the Democrats on anything is to first subvert them and build an irresistible tide of public support, and the Democrats form the chief resistance we always have to overcome. Democrats were late to the party on slavery, lgbt rights, labor rights, labor friendly trade policy, monetary policy, welfare, and taxation. They have currently caved entirely to right wing framing on immigration, trans rights, and law enforcement. If you think I can't back every one of those statements up, you are wrong.
You missed my point entirely. We don't need to dig up secrets to show Trump's criminality. There is more than enough public information available to hang him up in the public square already. The Russia stuff blends a lot of reality with a lot of complete bullshit so that has become politically toxic, but just in the conduct of his administration alone there are countless undeniable crimes. We don't need more, we need the political power to impeach and prosecute.
Valuable for what? Calling a redo? That isn't going to happen. Be honest with yourself and admit that you are harboring that fantasy. You know it isn't real, but you just can't let go.
To be clear, I have no problem with actual investigation, but that sure doesn't appear to be what this group is doing. Nothing about this effort is convincing or interesting in the slightest.
The Wiki link is the total. The drop-off total is in the first link.
It equals 18% because it includes the mail ins, which - doesn't limit to drop-offs and yeah they used the term "drop off" so in that case it would be 6%
If the counties were identified we could maybe get a better number.
Fair enough, you think election numbers need to be vetted by experts to tell us how they're arrived at and for some cases I don't necessariy disagree. I'm just saying with enough data we could do some of it.