Just to be clear, we’re talking about electoral fraud, not voter fraud. The term “voter fraud” refers to individual voters committing fraud (voting more than once, voting as someone else, etc.). This appears to be a rare thing.
Electoral fraud refers to things like deliberately miscounting votes, switching votes, people being illegally prevented from voting, ballot stuffing, etc. Outright illegal acts such as these also seem to be rare, although it’s difficult to say what local officials may get away with.
The bigger problem is officials gaming the system by things like gerrymandering, reducing the number of polling places or making them hard to find, deliberately creating eligibility requirements that on average favor one group over another, etc.
Another issue is electronic voting machines. There’s always the possibility of bugs, deliberate mis-programming, or hacking. It’s never been proven to have occurred to my knowledge, but the possibility is enough to make me think that we should be using paper ballots, simply to remove any questions.
While it usually is, we still should always remain vigilant. It happens in other countries and there’s zero reason to believe that it can’t happen here.
Haiku isn’t based on syllables, but on morae, which really aren’t a feature of English. And they must always have a reference to nature and the seasons. And they’re based around a juxtaposition of two images, with a “cutting” word between them. And they’re written in a single vertical line.
If you’re going to nitpick, you eventually find out that haiku sensu stricto is really a purely Japanese art form.
Robert Kennedy is a quack - as is the guy who wrote that article (the original source on the graphic) - look at his views on the Kennedy Assassination (not Roberts views).
One of the ideas put forth was that the MOE in international elections exit polls was 3/10 of 1% (or the accuracy) - this is mathematically impossible with the sample sizes done in US elections - based on SAMPLE ERROR alone.
Even with a sample size of 10K - you’d be dealing with a MOE of about 1% - and that is just based on sample sizes.
These are people that desperately want to believe something - and twist the facts to support their position.
No one is saying that the errors observed could be accounted for by sample error alone. NO SANE STATISTICIAN in the world believes this. They keep on doing the formulas for Sample error and act like the is a 1 in a trillion possibility. Yes it is - if you were dealing with a true random sample - which you aren’t.
And simple common sense shows how ridiculous this is - they have states like Alabama and such showing huge differences.
Why on earth would anyone think Hillary Clinton needed to cheat in Alabama? If she can’t win there - she is done.
It would be like Mitt Romney cheating in Utah or Barack Obama cheating in DC.
ETA: btw - I’m not disagreeing with you - just quoted this to add on - not contradict
One more thing - even if this wacko was correct - of the eight examples he gave - even if you went by the exit polls - Clinton still won in seven of those - and as the delegate selection in democratic primaries is proportional - this wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
I don’t know about other people, but whenever I get either phone calls from poll takers or exit polling, I just tell them “It’s none of your goddamn business who I voted for” or plan to vote for.
As others have well explained, this is indeed all tinfoil hat. I’ll only add this: America has extremely local, and extremely complex voting. Far more so than most other OECD democracies. Each State has its own laws and sometimes even more local officials than that have a lot of power in overseeing the election apparatus. The final thing to remember is the actual people who have to interpret the vast and complex election laws on election day are volunteers, poll workers who are not lawyers, not legislators, and who are mostly just people who want to give of their time but who are probably not super well equipped to handle anything complex. They don’t receive that much training. However, that being said some states do a good job with their poll worker training, others, do not. Sometimes the training reinforces consulting guide sheets/quick help sheets that distill complex election law into a form your average volunteer (non-lawyer) poll worker can easily understand. Sometimes it does it in a way that can lead to an individual poll worker misinterpreting things.
I once ran into a problem at a poll because I had an unexpired driver’s license with an old address on it. Election law in my state stated clearly that was still valid ID, but at first the poll worker thought it wasn’t. But I was able to explain it to him and he did some more digging and realized he was okay to let me vote. This was for a general election. By the way–primary elections tend to be even more complex. Caucuses more complex still. The gulf in “caucus rules” and “person running the caucus’s knowledge of the rules” is even more vast.
To be frank, it’s amazing our voting apparatus works as well as it does, there’s immense point of failure and it’s frankly overly-complex.
If you want to cherry pick bad voting day experiences then claim these represent evidence of something, it’d be really easy to do that, but it’d also likely not be true.
I do agree with what an earlier poster said about vigilance, but the simplest explanation for most voting kerfluffles in the United States is that it’s complex, ran by amateurs, and easily fucked up.
Also note voters are often wrong. Voters regularly do not know they need to pre-register, and claim they’re being discriminated against when they show up to vote on election day and can’t vote. Some States allow same day registration, but many do not. Voters in the primaries have frequently not understood the concept of a closed primary, that if they were a registered independent or registered with another party they needed to file paperwork switching sometimes months in advance to be allowed to vote in the primary of their choice. When they show up to vote and are told (correctly) that they cannot, they vent on social media that they’ve been disenfranchised.
Sanders actually only polled better in the <30 demographic band in NY. Clinton took a nominal win of 52/48 in the 30-39 band (a statistical tie, essentially) and improved from there. So, um, yeah…it’s pretty clear who the working people of NY preferred.
