Election results discussion thread (and sadly the inevitable aftermath)

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SilentPony

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So does he have any experience actually related to the matter at hand? Otherwise this is just an appeal to authority fallacy...



And Fred, a world renowned astrophysicist, from down the street told me they use time machines to go back and watch over voters' shoulders with invisible cameras.

Do either Fred or Mr. Mealey have proof? Of course not! I mean it's not like all that would require is showing the "how recounts occur" documentation from the states in question. Much better to go off unsubstantiated gossip.
Wait Fred said that?! Well fuck Fred is a smart guy. There might be something to this after all.
 

Houseman

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So does he have any experience actually related to the matter at hand? Otherwise this is just an appeal to authority fallacy...
It is not a fallacy to merely mention who a person is and what their background is. It is a fallacy to say "this person is an authority/expert/has a title therefore what they say is true"

I mean it's not like all that would require is showing the "how recounts occur" documentation from the states in question.
Well, it's part of his testimony under penalty of perjury.

Do you have that documentation handy? Because it would easily settle the matter.
If you don't, then there's still reasonable doubt that these re-scanned ballots would ever be detected, and this should still be investigated.
If you do, then we can put this whole thing to bed.
 

Silvanus

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Yep.
And you need to clear it out between scans unless you want duplicates to be counted.

So was procedure followed, or wasn't it? Was this a routine scanning error, or intentional fraud? You don't know. That's reasonable doubt and it needs to be investigated.
Just as we need to investigate to find out if the person I passed in the street was a jogger or a murderer. He didn't do anything unexpected or out-of-the-ordinary, but we just don't know. It's doubt. It needs to be investigated.
 

Houseman

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Just as we need to investigate to find out if the person I passed in the street was a jogger or a murderer. He didn't do anything unexpected or out-of-the-ordinary, but we just don't know. It's doubt. It needs to be investigated.
Your comparison fails because jogging is not something that is ambiguously a crime.
Re-scanning ballots is ambiguously a crime.


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Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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Not during the act. Nobody is looking over her shoulder to stop the process.
Afterwards, maybe. When it comes to a recount or audit, what do they count, and how are they counted?
What if someone finds problem in the recount, like duplicate signatures? Are they instructed to just shut up and count?
You mean, you've filled this file full of all this talk, and you haven't even properly checked?

This is a bit like saying that a book is going to be a disaster because the author might have made a load of spelling and grammatical errors, without bothering to consider that spell-checking software, proof-readers and book editors exist.
 

tippy2k2

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Just as we need to investigate to find out if the person I passed in the street was a jogger or a murderer. He didn't do anything unexpected or out-of-the-ordinary, but we just don't know. It's doubt. It needs to be investigated.
Jogger kind of sus fam. I saw them just running, they're not doing any tasks at all...



Vote Jogger
 

Houseman

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You mean, you've filled this file full of all this talk, and you haven't even properly checked?
Properly checked what? It's not my burden to prove that the election was run properly and that they have sufficient checks and balances to rule out that this is suspicious behavior.
 

Avnger

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Properly checked what? It's not my burden to prove that the election was run properly and that they have sufficient checks and balances to rule out that this is suspicious behavior.
It's your burden to prove the election wasn't run properly and that sufficient checks and balances aren't in place to rule in that this is suspicious behavior.

That's how the burden of proof works ya dunce.
You're making a claim of impropriety. You have to prove it. The only required response until that happens is "nu uh."
 

Houseman

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You're making a claim of impropriety.
And I'm claiming, as the video shows that ballots were run through multiple times. Burden of proof met. Wow that was easy.

Whether or not they had sufficient safeguards to catch this afterward is a different claim.
If the answer to that question is "I don't know", then you have reasonable doubt.

Oh yeah, didn't I ask you for that audit documentation? Did you find it yet?

I found this: https://billmoyers.com/story/georgias-hand-count-of-2020-ballots-was-no-risk-limiting-audit/

Here's a summary of the interview: https://wwmt.com/news/nation-world/georgia-runoffs-are-impossible-to-properly-audit-experts-say

SR: All of this is why what Georgia did wasn’t a risk-limiting audit or even close.

PS:
Right. You are trying to confirm the winner. You do not confirm the tally, you confirm the winner. You not use the sample-based results to alter the official totals. The only circumstance under which you alter the official totals is if you do a full hand count. They aren’t doing that—and Georgia’s audit law prohibits that.

You understand a legal situation, right? If this was an audit done under Georgia’s audit law, it can’t change the outcome. Therefore, by definition, it is not a risk-limiting audit, because it cannot limit the risk of certifying a wrong outcome unless it can correct the outcome. By definition, their process did not address the risk people that care about. Second, if it’s a recount, then it can’t be done by hand, it has to be done by machine [scanners] according to Georgia law.

So rather than an audit, recount, and re-canvass, it [the presidential re-tally] seems to have been their first canvass, because it’s the first time they looked to make sure that they actually had all their ballots accounted for. If they’re going to just keep counting until you get the same answer the machine did, that’s obviously biased procedure. That’s nowhere close to a risk-limiting audit.
"PS", is Phillip Stark, the inventor of risk-limiting audits, BTW, so he should know.

So, I mean, good job, you pressed me to prove a claim I wasn't making, and then I did, and now you probably regret that.
 
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Silvanus

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Your comparison fails because jogging is not something that is ambiguously a crime.
Re-scanning ballots is ambiguously a crime.
No, it's not. Double-counting ballots is unambiguously a crime. It's your speculation that scanning these papers more than once was a step towards that.

Both what the woman does in that video, and jogging past me in the street, are actions which are expected and routine. Both are things that could, speculatively, lead to the person committing a crime-- and for both things, there's zero reason to suspect that's the case.

You're suspecting somebody for something after seeing them do something run-of-the-mill and routine. I'm merely applying the same suspicion to another run-of-the-mill, routine action, to show how absurd it is.
 

Houseman

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No, it's not. Double-counting ballots is unambiguously a crime.
What's ambiguous is whether or not the counts were cleared between scans.

It's like if I showed you an image of a person shooting a gun at a target off-screen. Was the target a person? Was it an animal? Was this at a shooting range? Was it in self-defense? Those details make all the difference. What is expected and routine in one context can become illegal based on one or two key details.

It's not enough to drag someone to court just because the circumstances are unclear, but somebody should be checking for dead bodies, GSWs, or missing people at least.

there's zero reason to suspect that's the case.
A significant number of legislators and representatives disagree with you. They have sat through a combined dozens of hours of hearings, considered the evidence, and found enough reason to be suspicious of, and conduct further investigations into, this election.
 
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Agema

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Properly checked what? It's not my burden to prove that the election was run properly and that they have sufficient checks and balances to rule out that this is suspicious behavior.
It is your responsibility to not be an ignoramus who hasn't got the faintest idea what he deigns to talk about. You're not a child, you don't need other adults to educate you.

And as for burdens, it's yours to demonstrate the election was run improperly: unfortunately, by choosing ignorance, you have rendered yourself incompetent to do so.
 

Houseman

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It is your responsibility to not be an ignoramus who hasn't got the faintest idea what he deigns to talk about. You're not a child, you don't need other adults to educate you.
That sounds like a fancy way of saying "I don't know the specifics of the Georgia recount either". But unfortunately for you, in the meantime, I found an interview from the guy who invented Risk-Limiting Audits and lambasted GA's "audit" in post #4,729.

And as for burdens, it's yours to demonstrate the election was run improperly: unfortunately, by choosing ignorance, you have rendered yourself incompetent to do so.
Well, we have video evidence of ballots being scanned multiple times, data analysis showing votes being removed from Trump over time, hundreds of witness affidavits claiming that the election wasn't properly run in hundreds of different ways, and then, the expert who invented Risk-Limiting Audits claiming what GA did was an embarrassment to his invention.

I say I've met the burden, and then some.
 

Asita

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Why are you still acting like they're not doing it on purpose?
*shrug* Experience? House's persistent pseudointellectualism may have long since exhausted my patience and any right he had to the assumption of good faith, but Hanlon's Razor does apply here. While his argumentation is significantly more grating than that of more honest posters, his posts read more like he's working backwards and trying to find support for a predetermined conclusion more than they do him simply trying to annoy. As I mentioned a few pages ago, they read very much like he desperately wants to believe that the conclusion that Trump couldn't have legitimately lost and is looking for an excuse to claim that the preconception is 'supported'. I don't think he increasingly keeps running to OANN (a network self-described as one of the "greatest supporters" of Trump), Right Side Broadcasting Network (a youtube channel that was built from the ground up as a promotion network for Trump) and Epoch Times (a paper run by a Falun Gong splinter whose driving principle is to promote that faith and write against the Chinese Communist Party, and which literally believes Trump is the functional equivalent of the faith's messiah who will lead the charge against the CCP in an imminent apocalypse) just for giggles. I think he's turning to them because they're the only ones ethically and journalistically bankrupt enough to tell him the lie he wanted to hear, which in his mind means that they're the only ones 'fighting for his prejudices the truth'.

The guy is retreating further and further into his echo chamber, and rather blatantly falling for the old trap of mistaking "telling him what he wants to hear" with "trustworthiness". The moment they step out of lockstep with his preconceptions, they become persona non-grata. Hell, he slipped a while ago and more or less said it outright when he suggested that as far as he was concerned, William Barr (the man who has consistently been accused by DoJ alumni en masse as acting more as Trump's personal lawyer than Attorney General, and of practically weaponizing the DoJ for Trump's personal benefit) couldn't be trusted not to be turning a blind eye and acting against Trump because a few weeks ago the cult of Trump had deemed him not loyal enough. Not to mince words, the actual facts of the matter don't really matter to him because he's fundamentally presenting an emotional argument rather than a logical one. Houseman and others like him are arguing more from gut feeling (more specifically, their dissatisfaction with the results) than logic, hence why any allegation of the impropriety that they want to see gets trumpeted as proof of the same. To put it more directly, to them something is 'true' if they think it vindicates their prejudices and 'false' if it contradicts them.

And because it's an argument rooted in emotion - not dissimilar to a temper tantrum, in fact (you know, standard "I lost? I can't have lost! They must have cheated! That was so unfair!" bullshit) - the search for truth is warped into a search for validation of his prejudices, something those sources are all too willing to exploit. Any data that they see as supporting the preconception is latched onto as ironclad proof that they were right, and any data that they see as dismissive on it is seen as unreasonably biased against their 'common sense' conclusion. And that's really about as much thought that goes into it. It's a song and dance we've seen many times before. We saw this exact same pattern with the 9/11 "Truthers", with the "Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts for profit" bullshit, with Cdesign Proponentsists Creationists being "unfairly silenced" in academia, with QAnon, with Uranium One, with Burisma...the proponents of each of these desperately wanted the allegations to be true because it appealed to their prejudices and resonated with them on an emotional level; it told them not only what they wanted to hear - that their prejudices were just 'telling it like it is' - but that they were smart for rejecting the 'mainstream narrative'. It's a very simple (though sadly also very common and often effective) tactic that appeals to their inner child. It not only makes them feel vindicated in their prejudice, but as a cherry on top gives them the satisfaction of feeling like they were part of some privileged secret club that was more enlightened than the unwashed and/or corrupt masses. Ironically, however, this perception is only made possible by taking advantage of their ignorance and near ubiquitous unwillingness to put in the legwork for independent verification.

Example: Houseman keeps crowing about Republicans "being escorted out to applause", implying it to be something widespread and endemic. What he refers to is an incident at the TCF Center on Nov 4 in which - at the prompting of a recent tweet from Trump - a group of Republicans circled the vote counters and started chanting "Stop the count" in an attempt at intimidating the counters into end the process prematurely. It's worth noting that not only were they escorted out for being legitimately disruptive and attempting to impede the process, but that escorting them out had no functional impact on the Republican challengers even in just that location, as at the time both Democrat and Republican challengers in that building numbered more than 200 each. Mind you, challengers were supposed to be capped at 135 per party, so you could have literally bled dozens of challengers on both sides of the aisle and still have been over the planned capacity. And we didn't see that volume of ejections. He also likes to bring up the grossly hyperbolic mischaracterization of Republicans being escorted out if their masks so much as slipped, which in actuality is based on another event at the same location wherein a woman was escorted out after she was asked and refused to readjust her mask so that it would cover her nose. In both cases a singular event was misrepresented as an endemic one and ultimately presented the S.O.P. removal of disruptive/belligerent individuals as malicious targeting. This was achieved through removal of necessary context that is roughly on par with "Even Darwin admitted the eye couldn't have evolved".

But I don't see this as deliberate misinformation on House's part. I see it as reflective of his tendency to take the often hyperbolic (or flat out dishonest) tweets he's been grabbing from his echo chamber at face value and his typical unwillingness to actually scrutinize them, much less independently research the events the claims were made about. In both cases, he latched onto a hyperbolic tweet in which the tweeter was champing at the bit to find proof of their prejudice that Republicans would be unfairly targeted, and presented the events (bereft of context, as is so often the case with confirmation bias) as proof of such. House, of course, was looking for an excuse to believe the same and, as such, the allegation itself was all the proof he needed. He swallowed the mischaracterization hook, line, and sinker. He stubbornly refuses to hear otherwise because he's emotionally invested in that conclusion. He gives that much away through his objections. We've seen a few times now that if you tell him exactly how his sources misled him, he clutches his pearls and claims that you are simply prejudiced against the conclusion and simply 'buying the media narrative', maybe throwing in a false equivalence or suggestion that you're a hypocrite for daring to actually apply scrutiny to his claims and find them deficient. It's the same reaction we get when Creationists are told that there's no "controversy" to teach, or when you tell paranormal aficionados that claims of psychic power are not worth the paper they're printed on unless they can be reproduced in a controlled environment. The guy legitimately does not seem to understand the idea of independent research or vetting a claim, instead seeming to treat it as simply personal preference among necessarily partisan sources.

He is at fault for taking the tweets as gospel and jumping through all kinds of mental hoops to try and rationalize the bullshit he's swallowed, but fundamentally that boils down to him being gullible, lazy, and emotionally invested in the idea that Trump might somehow have actually won, rather than him being willfully deceitful. It's the same reason he takes as gospel Trump et al's lies that the courts haven't actually judged the merits of the evidence and dismissed the cases purely on technicality when the goddamn rulings and court opinions explain exactly why that same purported evidence was little more than the affiants passing off their ignorant supposition as proof of fraud. The guy's shown on numerous occasions in this and other threads that he rarely bothers to read even his own sources to completion and instead relies on some rather dishonest sources to give him both the cliff notes and tell him what opinions he should hold. It's no stretch to surmise that he doesn't bother to seek out and look at the actual source material, and simply assumes that everyone else shares that bad habit. If you've been following his postings, I'm sure you've noticed that his response to being called out on his frequent ignorance is not to correct his lack of research, but instead to insinuate that the other poster(s) must share his intellectual laziness and were - like him - merely mindlessly regurgitating the claims of their favored outlets, thereby necessarily putting his claims and theirs on equal footing. Hence Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately be explained by stupidity".
 

Houseman

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couldn't be trusted not to be turning a blind eye and acting against Trump because a few weeks ago the cult of Trump had deemed him not loyal enough
It was months, actually. I said that Trump's camp had disavowed Barr back in June/July.

If you're going to talk about the facts not mattering to me, get them straight.

Example: Houseman keeps crowing about Republicans "being escorted out to applause", implying it to be something widespread and endemic. What he refers to is an incident at the TCF Center on Nov 4 in which - at the prompting of a recent tweet from Trump - a group of Republicans circled the vote counters and started chanting "Stop the count" in an attempt at intimidating the counters into end the process prematurely.
No, actually. I mean, it's obvious you googled some of the key words and found evidence of the event you're talking about, because I just did that right now, but that's not what the witnesses were testifying about, or what I was referring to. If you would have listened to the hearings, like I did, you would have known that.
Here, I'll find some testimony real quick.

(timestamped video)

And you'll notice, this is from the Michigan hearings. The event you're talking about is in Georgia.

He also likes to bring up the grossly hyperbolic mischaracterization of Republicans being escorted out if their masks so much as slipped, which in actuality is based on another event at the same location wherein a woman was escorted out after she was asked and refused to readjust her mask so that it would cover her nose.
Nope, wrong again. If you seek backwards in the above video just a bit, you can hear Hima give testimony about mask slippages and selective-enforcement discrimination.
 

Silvanus

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What's ambiguous is whether or not the counts were cleared between scans.

It's like if I showed you an image of a person shooting a gun at a target off-screen. Was the target a person? Was it an animal? Was this at a shooting range? Was it in self-defense? Those details make all the difference. What is expected and routine in one context can become illegal based on one or two key details.

It's not enough to drag someone to court just because the circumstances are unclear, but somebody should be checking for dead bodies, GSWs, or missing people at least.
Even if the ballots weren't cleared between scans, it wouldn't be suspicious. Scanners fail to pick stuff up all the time based on tiny fluctuations of orientation/ alignment/ image quality. Scanning more than once is an expected occurrence in any context in which a scanner is used.

So, we're talking about you showing me an image of someone shooting a gun at a shooting range and at a target (i.e., an expected and routine action, taking place at an expected and routine place). But you're saying that because the person had access to the tool they needed to theoretically shoot a person, we must investigate it as if murder is a strong possibility.

A significant number of legislators and representatives disagree with you.
A significant number of legislators and representatives are saying stuff that, right now, is politically helpful for them to say. They know it won't go anywhere, but are happy to talk it up while it's helpful to their careers.
 

Houseman

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Even if the ballots weren't cleared between scans, it wouldn't be suspicious. Scanners fail to pick stuff up all the time based on tiny fluctuations of orientation/ alignment/ image quality. Scanning more than once is an expected occurrence in any context in which a scanner is used.
If the ballots weren't cleared (from the system) between scans, that means that the ballots were counted more than once. That's bad, for reasons that should be obvious.

We've heard multiple times, from witness testimony, that the proper procedure, should something fail to scan, would be to take the ballots out, CLEAR THEM FROM THE SYSTEM, put the error-prone ballot on top, and then run them through again.

Nobody is saying: "nobody should be scanning the same ballots for any reason".
I'm saying "if you don't clear them from the system in-between scans, that's fraud".
 

Elijin

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The big issue this overlooks is that his behaviour is not limited to this topic. Essentially every topic he engages in, he's "that guy", the contrarian, the devils advocate, the "Oh this minor technicality is flawed, so everything is flawed".

He likes to argue? Fine. There are many places to do that. He chooses to make a place that is often discussing racism, sexism, bigotry, etc his playground. Then, because it's where the action is, he takes the contrarian stance.

At bare minimum, he's morally bankrupt. Seeing serious discussion about peoples struggles as a good place to stir up some shit for an evening of entertainment.
 
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