2020 Election Commentary

[Pat]

Yes and no. Most of that will come off federal grants towards state infrastructure and local public jobs during the next few years. They can only increase taxes so much. And even them, most states simply don't have enough of a perk for people to overpay in income and property taxes. NY and CA are going to be the states where these changes will likely affect the most. Manhattan tolls will likely increase to $20 in the next five years as well and then there's no guarantee another large scale global event won't affect the world again. Forget about national debt, this is the only thing where it's almost safe to say that will never get paid off in today's world.   

No, this is pure inflation. They're not funding the stimulus with explicit taxes, the Fed is just making new money out of nothing. Since they're increasing the number of dollars without adding any new value, that means each dollar will eventually buy less and less. It's a tax, but a hidden one, and one that affects not just your income, but also your savings. They've kept that bill from coming due with monetary policy, but it's had a lot of negative effects, and it's an open question how long they can keep kicking the can down the road.

[FelixGamingX1]

No, this is pure inflation. They're not funding the stimulus with explicit taxes, the Fed is just making new money out of nothing. Since they're increasing the number of dollars without adding any new value, that means each dollar will eventually buy less and less. It's a tax, but a hidden one, and one that affects not just your income, but also your savings. They've kept that bill from coming due with monetary policy, but it's had a lot of negative effects, and it's an open question how long they can keep kicking the can down the road.

The balloon's gonna pop sooner or later. Apparently nothing was learned from 07-08. Inflation is a common problem in South America, when you cross that line there's no turning back. Politicians will be too busy pointing fingers and blaming each other. Next comes mass corruption, then before we know it we are a 3rd world country. Whether this pandemic was intentional or not China will have gained major economical advantage. Our best bet would be if the UN came to some sort of agreement this pandemic was largely caused due to negligence by China, and they would be responsible for repairs but then they wouldn't settle for it. WWIII?

[Pat]

I don't agree. Plenty of dictators have been voted into power

Not really in free and fair elections.

Chavez was elected fairly, and plenty of others. What defines a dictator isn't the path to power, but what they do to consolidate it.

and dictators and democratically elected representatives both need public support.

Yes and no. There's actual support, then there's not opposing them. For a leader, simply having people not oppose them can be enough, so long as key people support them.

Don't see the distinction. Even in a functional constitutional republic, voting for someone doesn't mean you support them. You're just picking who you see as the best option. You might not agree with all of their platform. It might not even be a close fit. Furthermore, with fixed terms a la the US, you really have no control over what they actually do once they're in office. Not only that, but very few people follow what their elected representatives are up to, or even have a good idea what the job entails, so voting for someone is based more on personality and sensationalism than substance.

But if you're dissatisfied, you can vote them out. So they don't need your support, just some degree of tacit acceptance, and seeming to be better than the alternatives (seeming because a lot of what we judge leaders on is out of their control). That's not qualitatively different from a dictatorship. The main difference is the threshold is higher for a coup, because the public can't just vote them out.

And Chavez had widespread support. People love their charismatic demagogues handing out free stuff.

But the will of the governed? That's only a feature of democracies insofar as they tend to be more transparent and allow freer discourse.

It's more like this. Let's suppose I am the leader of a city of 100,000 people, each of whom provides me with $1,000 revenue on average, for $100 million in all. What do I do with this money?

Now, if they are all disarmed except for my 100-man Imperial Guard, I can give each of my Imperial Guard $500,000 - for half a million each I can find 1 man willing to shoot the other 999 unarmed protesters if he has some company. I just need to look after those 100 men really well and I can rule the other 99,900, and keep $50 million for myself.

But if I need 50,001 of them to vote for me, giving them $1,000 back isn't going to impress them much, so I can't keep that $50 million spare, I have to give all $100 million back - $2,000 each. Those 50,001 people are only $1,000 better off, though, that may not be enough to convince them, especially if they have to trudge along dirt roads and pay for a tutor for their kids and pay doctors and so on out of that. So instead I take that $100 million and spend it on roads and schools and medical clinics. This also doesn't guarantee support but at least after tossing me out at the next election they speak well of me and I might be able to get back in at some later time.

Which is to say, increasing the franchise tends to work to encourage leaders to consider the overall public good more.

That's not the public good, you just explained cronyism, special interests, and the seemingly endless growth of the welfare state as an series of escalating bribes. That's horrifically destructive because it creates a culture where the public lines up at the public trough for handouts instead of doing something productive, and since there are real stakes the conflicts between factions become vicious.

[jhkim]

Guess dissent is no longer patriotic again (that was fun in the shift from Bush to Obama -- the left flipped gears so fast even I was surprised).

How about some actual science? https://gnews.org/534248/

Short form: Biden's votes actually violate Benford's law, which has been used successfully to nail down Iranian election fraud (2009) and other forensic analyses.

OK, I looked it over. The raw data and the scripts are available on github, which is good. Here's the direct github link.

https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords

The thing that stood out to me was how they selected the three counties for analysis. Given hundreds of counties, one will expect there to be some counties that have statistical outliers. Benford's law is a statistical tendency, not an absolute. There can and should be exceptions from it - particularly in non-random data like districts. There should be a chi-squared for the overall likelihood, not just a graph.

I'll see if I can reproduce any of the statistical analysis.

[Brad]

Those things won't happen in Trump's 2nd term. The left overplayed its hand and the fraud avalanche is laughable and there's more evidence incoming. It's like a kid with a mouthful of cookies trying to tell you they have no idea what happened to the cookies. Math still works and Notorious ACB and "Uncle Clarence" are ready to rock. 

Dude, you have to show me MASSIVE vote fraud, not thousands upon thousands of instances of only a few hundred votes here or there! Also, they couldn't even wait a month before talking about a 90% effective vaccine for this fake ass pandemic.

"Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall."

[oggsmash]

  Perhaps this just triggers the beginning of the right wing peaceful protests?   There are irregularities with the mail in.  It was a shit show, and IMO, there should be same day in person voting only for elections, period.   They should be on Sunday, not Tuesday.  I think the rude awakening, around the country is going to come when a sizeable contingent of the right leaning people begin to view the left the way a sizeable contingent of the left views the right, as evil.  Once that ever happens, ah well, let's hope for that amicable divorce.

[jhkim]

It feels to me like people are mostly vaguely talking about "so much fraud" - but much of it is light on specifics, and hundreds of unproven claims of fraud don't constitute proof. I've looked into some claims, but it takes time to really dig in.

There certainly have been cases of fraud in the past - but again, Republicans have had undivided control to investigate and prosecute fraud in the 2016 election and at least a window to act on the 2018 elections. Do people think that the 2016 and 2018 elections were fair, and that only in this election has widespread fraud been a problem? Or is it that fraud was a major problem, and that Trump and congressional Republicans failed to act on it?

It seems to me that the most major claims of fraud in the 2020 general election claimed here are:

1) The Antrim County glitch that caused 6000 votes to count towards Biden. But that was caught by cross-checks, and no one official has claimed that it was intentional fraud. That county is Republican dominated, and the local officials are Republican.

2) The sworn affidavit of an election monitor in Michigan, posted by jeff37923, posted in Reply #691, claiming major problems in the process. However, jeff37923 says that Larry Correia's Facebook feed but was since taken down. (And thank you, jeff37923, for saying that it should therefore be taken with a grain of salt.)

3) A statistical analysis from RedState author Scott Hounsell. I tried looking into it, but it didn't give any sources for it's numbers and doesn't seem to have any cross-checks by anyone else.

4) The claim that there were more votes than registered voters in Wisconsin, advanced by Brad, followed by the claim that it was ludicrous that 90% of registered voters had voted. I don't see that there is anything here. The initial claim was wrong, and the idea that 90% is ludicrous doesn't add up given that 2016 had 87% nationally.

5) The Benford's Law analysis claim. I don't have a conclusion yet on this. This at least gives it's sources as well as code - which is good. It claims a statistical anomaly, but it doesn't give a likelihood or explain why it chose the three districts that it did.


What frustrates me is that when I look into any given claim of fraud, I feel like there is little effort to defend the claim. Instead, that claim is just abandoned and posters switch over to a different claim.

[Ghostmaker]

2) The sworn affidavit of an election monitor in Michigan, posted by jeff37923, posted in Reply #691, claiming major problems in the process. However, jeff37923 says that Larry Correia's Facebook feed but was since taken down. (And thank you, jeff37923, for saying that it should therefore be taken with a grain of salt.)

What is this supposed to mean? Are you stating that because Facebook -- a leftist corporate entity that's been caught REPEATEDLY jerking conservatives around -- removed or otherwise muzzled Correia, that Correia is somehow untrustworthy?

Wow, dude. That is a serious shit-the-bed bit of idiocy there.

[Brad]

What is this supposed to mean? Are you stating that because Facebook -- a leftist corporate entity that's been caught REPEATEDLY jerking conservatives around -- removed or otherwise muzzled Correia, that Correia is somehow untrustworthy?

Wow, dude. That is a serious shit-the-bed bit of idiocy there.

I am taking note of your IP, comrade, for daring question the intellectual honesty of the most esteemed poster jhkim. We will be submitting you for re-education shortly.

[Ratman_tf]

It feels to me like people are mostly vaguely talking about "so much fraud" - but much of it is light on specifics, and hundreds of unproven claims of fraud don't constitute proof. I've looked into some claims, but it takes time to really dig in.

There certainly have been cases of fraud in the past - but again, Republicans have had undivided control to investigate and prosecute fraud in the 2016 election and at least a window to act on the 2018 elections. Do people think that the 2016 and 2018 elections were fair, and that only in this election has widespread fraud been a problem? Or is it that fraud was a major problem, and that Trump and congressional Republicans failed to act on it?

It seems to me that the most major claims of fraud in the 2020 general election claimed here are:

1) The Antrim County glitch that caused 6000 votes to count towards Biden. But that was caught by cross-checks, and no one official has claimed that it was intentional fraud. That county is Republican dominated, and the local officials are Republican.

2) The sworn affidavit of an election monitor in Michigan, posted by jeff37923, posted in Reply #691, claiming major problems in the process. However, jeff37923 says that Larry Correia's Facebook feed but was since taken down. (And thank you, jeff37923, for saying that it should therefore be taken with a grain of salt.)

3) A statistical analysis from RedState author Scott Hounsell. I tried looking into it, but it didn't give any sources for it's numbers and doesn't seem to have any cross-checks by anyone else.

4) The claim that there were more votes than registered voters in Wisconsin, advanced by Brad, followed by the claim that it was ludicrous that 90% of registered voters had voted. I don't see that there is anything here. The initial claim was wrong, and the idea that 90% is ludicrous doesn't add up given that 2016 had 87% nationally.

5) The Benford's Law analysis claim. I don't have a conclusion yet on this. This at least gives it's sources as well as code - which is good. It claims a statistical anomaly, but it doesn't give a likelihood or explain why it chose the three districts that it did.


What frustrates me is that when I look into any given claim of fraud, I feel like there is little effort to defend the claim. Instead, that claim is just abandoned and posters switch over to a different claim.

That's why the elections are being investigated. Detectives don't throw up their hands on the first day of a case and go 'Well! We have no hard evidence! Time to go home!'

Though Biden and his supporters would love for everyone to blindly accept the election "results" before they're certified.

[GameDaddy]

That's why the elections are being investigated. Detectives don't throw up their hands on the first day of a case and go 'Well! We have no hard evidence! Time to go home!'

Though Biden and his supporters would love for everyone to blindly accept the election "results" before they're certified.

Why do elections need to be investigated now? Both Republicans and Democrats sit on election committees that oversee the process at the local polls, and at the State level, where the local votes are tallied. There are overseers over the entire process of all political denominations. No one did any investigating in 2016, so why now?


Becuase the Drumpf lost. They weren't excited to investigate when he won, why not then in 2016??? He didn't lose by a narrow margin either. there are five million more votes for Biden for President than the Drumpf received. Even if some minor errors were discovered, it wouldn't be Five million votes worth. Him and his communist buddies Putin and Xi, and Poland and Hungary, and Turkey need to get the hell out of our politics.

The Drumpf really needs to run off and figure out where he can scrounge up the 400 million he is going to need to pay off Duestche bank (Run by Communists, by the way...), Angela Merkel is former STASI. I have a junior staff photo of her in a commie uniform, and that photo is of her STASI membership card.  Becuase he is totally in hock to them, and they are going to foreclose, which would be most excellent by the way. Seeing Trumps named removed from the towers in our large cities would be a vast improvement of the cities in question.

'effin hypocrites

[Steven Mitchell]

'effin hypocrites

Yes, you are.

[jhkim]

2) The sworn affidavit of an election monitor in Michigan, posted by jeff37923, posted in Reply #691, claiming major problems in the process. However, jeff37923 says that Larry Correia's Facebook feed but was since taken down. (And thank you, jeff37923, for saying that it should therefore be taken with a grain of salt.)

What is this supposed to mean? Are you stating that because Facebook -- a leftist corporate entity that's been caught REPEATEDLY jerking conservatives around -- removed or otherwise muzzled Correia, that Correia is somehow untrustworthy?

Wow, dude. That is a serious shit-the-bed bit of idiocy there.

Absolutely not. This isn't about Larry Correia or Facebook. It's that there should be some sort of link or confirmation to establish the authenticity of the supposed sworn affidavit. If it is true, there should be some sort of confirmation beyond "I saw one person post this on Facebook." Previously, jeff37923 was asked for a source for what he posted, and he himself said that he couldn't find a link - and he himself said to take it with a grain of salt.

If you can find any sort of confirmation that the affidavit is real, then I would be interested and take it seriously.

That's why the elections are being investigated. Detectives don't throw up their hands on the first day of a case and go 'Well! We have no hard evidence! Time to go home!'

Though Biden and his supporters would love for everyone to blindly accept the election "results" before they're certified.

I agree that the results should be checked and confirmed, and I support investigations into possible fraud based on the amount of evidence. However, detectives also don't go "Aha! He's guilty!" and take away someone's rights when there isn't hard evidence.

Until hard evidence is brought forward, then I think we should proceed with the legal process of election.

[Brad]

Him and his communist buddies Putin and Xi, and Poland and Hungary, and Turkey need to get the hell out of our politics.

Is this a joke post?

[GameDaddy]

'effin hypocrites

Yes, you are.

....awwww ....are you just mad because I'm telling the truth about the Republican scumbags that support DICKtaters and who want to be on their knees bobbin for Putin and Xi?

...on your knees with the rest of them then!