Where have all the conspiracy theorists gone? Gone to flowers every-one?
Okay, just humor me for a bit before I collapse with a permanent case of the vapors. Has anyone anywhere voiced even the tiniest hint of a whisper that there might have been electronic vote tampering/interference on a global scale? (Lookin’ at you, Vlad. And you, too, Elon. )
Questions are erupting at the Dope out of our gob-smacked incredulity:
“Where did the 16 million Democratic votes go?”
“Why did 45% of Hispanic voters vote for Trump?”
“Was the explanation for Trump’s win plain and simple American misogyny?”
And elsewhere:
Conspiracy theorists have gone bananas over smaller things than this. Are any of them speaking up now? Is/was election tampering possible on this scale? I don’t mean physical “hanging chad”-type stuff, but massive data tampering. Is anyone anywhere suggesting this? Can we just explore this topic a bit before we surrender to the tsunami of insanity that is rolling toward us? (And before I go out and buy my red cape and white Dutch-cleanser-girl hat.)
No talk by the Right is unsurprising. No talk by the reality-connected party is more surprising.
I think @ThelmaLou’s question is a legit one. The largest obstacle IMO is the patchwork of 4000 counties managing 4000 elections using 4000 different sets of machines, papers, and procedures.
To be sure there’s only a few states where bad actors would need to lean to alter the total EC outcome. But if D turnout is down about the same in swing states and hard blue states, then it becomes hard(er) to seriously entertain notions of nigh-universal tampering.
On reddit, there’s a letter circulating from a bunch of “computer scientists”, who are concerned that software in lots of voting machines may have been compromised.
I read it, and their claims are based entirely on the fact that that one Republican operative was convicted for tampering with voting machines, alleging that someone might have copied the software, that might have let them re-write it, that might have let them upload it to machines in 2024.
So pretty weak sauce, with no actual evidence of fraud in 2024.
Why? Why go to the trouble of figuring out how to mess with the vote counts with all the attendant obstacles, when it’s so easy to screw around with the psyches of the persons making the votes? Foreign entities and Republicans have got this down cold.
Between controlling the propaganda networks of Fox, NewsMax, OAN, right wing radio, a majority of local news stations via Sinclair, social media through Elon and his fellow tech bros, and assistance from foreign entities, chiefly Russia, there’s simply no need to screw around with the electronics. They’ve already successfully screwed around with the voters.
Why we refuse to acknowledge and address this as the chief concern is beyond me.
Yeah, I can’t imagine why they’d go to the trouble and expense of hacking electronic vote totals on a massive scale when old-school methods work just fine.
Idk even with all of those things existing the Republicans have done mediocre/bad in 2018, 2020 and 2022.
It could not be more obvious that the results we’re seeing aren’t a function of xeroxing votes because who (on either side) would go through that trouble for the inconsistent and middling results both parties have had.
Also hearing about the blueanon conspiracy theories like statlink is making me lose brain cells.
Someone needs to write a political thriller/comedy about the competing teams of election fraudsters, who end up countering each other so well that the election results end up being largely random.
Where are the conspiracy theorists on the Democratic side? Surely, we’re not above that?
I agree. I’m not talking about physical screwing-around (like xeroxing). I’m talking about sophisticated hacking at a global level by one or a couple of sources, internal or external.
The main problem with any sort of “it was all done by one central global electronic hack” theory is that many states use different voting methods. You couldn’t hack different methods using 1 tactic.
Same issue with that - if you’re willing to do this you should never get an unwanted result. Maybe someone really smart would have their side “lose” occasionally so it isn’t too obvious but when you zoom out the actual results have been insanely close since Trump has been in politics. Genuinely if you made me come up with a conspiracy itd be that someone wants to keep giving one of the parties tiny governing majorities for only 2 years so they keep underwhelming their voters.
Btw it’s looking like Pennsylvania is going to recount due to the senate race so most plausible electronic tampering will be caught. Which is another reason these conspiracies are stupid - it’s easy enough for someone to audit the vote and find out what you did. One conspiracy I saw make the claim that “they” were going to make sure the recount didn’t happen which im sure will be replaced by a new conspiracy once that doesn’t materialize.
Taken as a whole, I’d say Democrats are substantially less likely to embrace such an idea without serious evidence. Whereas, that was the Republican playbook even in advance of elections - if we lose, scream fraud.
In other threads, there’s talk of Democrats’ failure to embrace more hardball tactics being a contributing factor to losing elections. Maybe so. But if those tactics involve embracing bullshit, which virtually all modern election fraud claims suffer from, we rightly won’t.
If some real, serious evidence of deliberate voter fraud affecting outcomes surfaces, there’s a process. Recall that when Trump and his ilk tried to go through that process they lost some 60 or 80 court cases (nearly every one, IIRC). In the absence of that evidence, I’m not going to pay much attention to “whispers” or “some guy said”, even if it potentially benefits the people I’d rather see win.
Perhaps this right here is the problem with our electorate, and so be it. I won’t embrace bullshit.
I’m gathering as many packets as I can right now! I’m seeing a trend with them and I’m going to be dropping a huge bombshell in two weeks! It’ll blow this whole thing open.
Trump and the conservatives have well and fully pulled in effectively all of the conspiracy theorists of the nation to their side.
It also helps a lot if there’s some official person with access, who is saying something. And there isn’t.
That said, Trump is famous as a cheater and the Republican voters spent the last four years talking themselves into multiple voting, dual state voting, paying illegals to vote, destroying votes, etc.
I’m quite willing and accepting of the idea that Trump won. But if there was any true and significant widespread cheating, the people in charge of ensuring election integrity and the Harris campaign would both need to be very careful and certain before saying a single damn thing - and only if the numbers were truly large enough to change anything.
I’m not currently expecting any such thing but if there ever was an election to fear it, this would be that.
Because he gets caught (though has mostly avoided the consequences of doing so). When they cheat, they’re clumsy and often obvious about it. So I imagine if they did this time, we’d hear about it (and we have heard about a few extremely small-scale and insignificant efforts that failed).
Okay, not to beat this to death (she said as she continued to flog the deceased equine ), I don’t mean on the order of piss-ant-piddly “Trump cheating,” I mean Elon-Musk-Russian-level-billion-dollar HACKING. Not physical tampering but electronic-data-server fucking.
Gone to flowers every-one? 
)
), I don’t mean on the order of piss-ant-piddly “Trump cheating,” I mean Elon-Musk-Russian-level-billion-dollar HACKING. Not physical tampering but electronic-data-server fucking.