Tinidril @ Tinidril @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

And yes drop-off, or mail-in ballot versus voting-at-the-polling-station votes.

The key says "total vote" not polling-station votes, but sure.

I read it like: 10 drop off votes vs 10 polling station votes = 0% difference.

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.

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:

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

Those numbers would not be esoteric symbol-strewn formulas, they’d be, like “5%”.

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.

There’s also this graphic which is interesting.

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.

The numbers and facts should speak for themselves anyway.

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.

I haven’t read up on the expert academic but having a stalled career doesn’t discount anything for me

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.

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.

Which parts read as unhinged to you?

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.

If every aspect of what's being alleged is entirely true, then yes. The thing is, it's a huge collection of different allegations that range from probable to unhinged. They aren't all going to be 100% true.

The fact that they spend so much time in their video on Trump saying they don't need votes is a big red flag to me. They put so much effort into priming people to believe that I don't think they have quite convinced themselves.

All of these allegations combined actually pale in comparison with the impact of media consolidation and establishment manipulation of coverage. Our primary process is an absolute travesty that can be trivially manipulated on the whim of the establishment to get whatever outcome they desire.

It's too early to just accept this as fact. It may be true, and may not. It may be true but didn't swing the election. What's absolutely true though is that the race shouldn't have been close enough to even make a Republican win remotely believable.

The Democrats made it close by putting wealthy interests ahead of voters to the highest degree they thought they could get away with. Dance long enough on the Cliff's edge and eventually you fall in - or maybe you get pushed. Not a lot of difference ultimately.

Why would the left wing need a reason why Kamala lost? Any reason that isn't "because neoliberalism has failed again" works against the interests of the left. To the extent that this idea has any believers whatsoever, it comes from the centrists who desperately need an excuse.

Not really. They used to have pretty good privacy agreements. I don't know about now. They do supply agrigate information to pharmaceutical companies, but that has become a pretty fungible resource. The only big consumer of individual DNA information is law enforcement, and that's more of an expense than an income flow, since reviewing warrants and providing responses costs money.

An important lesson in infosec is that the best way to reduce the cost of discovery and warrant compliance is to regularly delete any data you don't need or aren't legally required to retain. Companies like this don't have that option. Data is both an asset and a liability.

When it's an inexpensive product that nobody ever has a reason to buy twice yet remains an ongoing cost for the company? (They keep the data available for review and continue to update it with useful information as knowledge of genetic traits and lineages grows). That's not a way to build an ongoing cash flow to cover expenses. Especially when all the people inclined to be interested have already purchased.

Shit, Oracle was down in the low $400B range in May. Apparently being evil pays well in the current administration.

A little searching finds only one company that really fits the bill. Costco has a market cap of $433B and had a reported $14.8B cash on hand as of May 11. That's an interesting possibility that I wouldn't have guessed. Costco is less evil than most big corporations, so that's a little hopeful if I got it right.

Oracle comes close with a market cap of $583B. That's indeed over $400B, but that would make the description a bit weird. In any case, Oracle makes more sense from a business angle. Unfortunately, they are near the top of the evil scale.

It's not a great business model if you think about it. Customers pay a small fee once then never again.

Biden didn't even fucking do yet.

Yet? I'm not sure how to argue with someone who thinks Biden is still president. It doesn't seem worthwhile.

(definitely couldn't be a negotiating tactic)?

No, it definitely wasn't a "negotiation tactic". It was meant to avoid negotiating without Biden's adoring masses noticing that he did a 180. He caved to AIPAC, as he would continue to do throughout his term.

Why the hell would Iran go back to fulfilling it's obligations under the agreement when the US was still ignoring it's obligations? Why would it bother negotiating with a country that doesn't honor negotiated agreements? Everyone in the foreign policy space knew exactly what it was.

Yes I know how you ended your comment,

Then why the fuck did you haul out "both sides"? Why are so many people desperate to throw everything into that frame?

Absolutely, I just don't think it actually helps Democrats in the long run to pave over their often deep flaws. If we were harder on Democrats 30 years ago, we probably wouldn't have Trump today.

Biden ran on getting back into the deal with Iran, then insisted that Iran must completely return to fulfilling their side of the deal before we would consider returning to ours.

Both sides are not the same but Biden shouldn't be let off the hook for his sudden flip on this issue.

You just had a comment in this thread

Mods will mod. I don't think that comment should have been removed, but I'm not going to protest it.

You trying to get your comments removed for slapfighting too or what?

I'll go with "what". I'm not sure the mods will penalize me for not following your commands.

let it go

It may go whenever it wants.

You don't get to decide when others disengage, only yourself. If you don't want more replies, just stop commenting.

What is this, an Abbott and Costello bit? The words in a sentence are important - all of them. There are differences between people being for violence (as if that's a thing), people recognizing that violence is sometimes necessary, people thinking that violence is appropriate in response to this issue, and people calling for violence. Those all mean different things. Maybe you throw them all in the same mental bucket, but they are not the same. This is a symptom of thinking in thought terminating cliches. That used to be a Republican thing, but its sad how often I'm seeing it now on the left.

And I disagree.... You and I are not going to agree on the violence thing.

Which is fine. There is nothing wrong with us disagreeing on that. The problem is when you mix that in with accusations that I (and others) support violence in cases where we don't, or claim we are calling for violence in response to this incident when we have done no such thing.

Please disengage from this conversation.

Sure, I have no doubt that you can keep it going all by yourself. You really don't need me for it.

What does "violence is not the answer" exactly mean? I see several people pointing out that it sometimes is the answer. I don't see anyone calling for violence as a reaction to this incident, which is what you claimed.