IOKWARDI
The strongest evidence that nothing was significantly amiss is the fact that a lot of hard-core and well-informed Republicans (William Barr, Brian Kemp etc. etc.) agree that such is the case. The MAGA counter-argument that all these people are weak RINOs is beyond ludicrous.
I could not disagree more strenuously.
People can say all kinds of things. The evidence is what remains after everyone has said what they’re going to say. You can’t argue with a hand recount. That’s evidence. You can’t argue with registered voters being the only ones allowed to vote in elections and there is no way to reconcile the numbers Republicans attempted to put forward. That’s evidence.
The fact that Republicans had more than 60 bites at the apple in courtrooms all over this country to produce actual evidence of voter fraud and were unable to do so is… evidence!
The natural conclusion to your argument is that if “Bill Barr, Brian Kemp, etc. etc.” had been of sufficiently poor character that they chose to lie instead of telling the truth, then in your mind, it would have been a “stolen” election.
That’s just wrong.
I concur entirely with @excavating_for_a_mind’s post above. They nailed it.
I think I have confused the term, ‘ranked choice voting’ with ‘jungle voting’. I haven’t made up my mind about ranked choice voting, but I’m pretty sure I don’t support jungle voting. Thanks for helping to clarify my thinking about these concepts.
What was improper? Did these military guys vote, or not?
AIUI, some of the military absentee ballots were submitted late and some did not have the required postmark (however, since it’s known that not all overseas military mail can always be conventionally postmarked, many of them were accepted for counting anyway).
The issue seems to be that there were a lot of gray areas and local variations in procedures for absentee ballots in general, not just overseas military ones, and there was no clear universal consensus on what disqualified a ballot from being counted.
Pretty directly related (at least wrt who attempted to perpetrate wholesale election fraud) …
Investigators have sought answers this month from Gartland and others connected to the GOP in Georgia and in Michigan – both in FBI interviews and in grand jury subpoenas for documents and testimony. Investigators are looking at whether the Trump campaign played a role in the submission of false election certificates, according to people approached by the Justice Department.
The federal probe’s aggressiveness in the battleground states around the electors issue has not been previously reported.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/26/politics/doj-georgia-republicans-trump-fake-elector-probe/index.html
You did have to wonder there, for a while, if a bloodless coup plot would really be waved off by the DOJ. What’s new seems to be an elevated level of aggressiveness in the inquiry from Justice.
Sorry to continue the election fraud hijack, but the thing that really seals it for me is, how could an organized scheme to cast enough fraudulent votes to sway a presidential election not be found out by (supposedly) highly-motivated Republican officials? They’ve had 18 months now and they’ve discovered fuck-all.
For fraud like this, there would have had to be an organized team of people making it happen, printers making phony ballots, email chains between conspirators, etc. Who was in charge? Who executed the plan? And how could they have gotten away with it?
Let’s try and wrap it up: There will be No. Satisfying. Answer. Ever. It is all “baffle them with bulls***” the intent is never to obtain a valid ruling but to delegitimize the real ruling in the eyes of their base followers, making it so that those followers will say “well, I’m confused and do not understand so that must mean there’s something wrong” and hence support whatever measure is taken so the “right” result happens.
The goal is that the base will take it as an Article of Faith and that to show it’s factually impossible will mean nothing to them.
…
As mentioned above, part of the objection to vote-by-mail is a misconception that there is absolutely NO control over it. Heck, part of the objection to easy registration and voting and the conviction there must be rampant cheating is a sense that their voters have never sat down to think what are all the safeguards that are in place because they don’t easily see them.