Egann
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Original Join Date: Sometime in 2008
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Post by Egann on Nov 18, 2016 20:11:31 GMT
Week in self-imposed exile over, welcome to one of three or four threads I have planned out for the coming months, ranging on topics from how to fix our general elections in the United States to a President Obama retrospective (I would have done that first, but thusfar his lame duck has been bizarrely silent and I’d like to hold off on that until I know why.) But we need to start with the elephant in the room. Why did Hillary Clinton lose when everyone thought she would win?OK, I should qualify that; Hillary Clinton supposedly won the popular vote. I say supposedly because Clinton has at this point 62.9 million votes to Trump’s 61.5, with third party candidates pulling about 7 million votes. This is more or less a 1% margin of error, and while yes, we’re talking about a million votes, I don’t trust our--or any--voting system to be accurate to 1%. Not asking you to agree, but I'm saying I don't. And yes, I think there’s probably some voter fraud here. The 2016 election had Republicans win the House, the Senate, and--the unreported thing--win record number of governor and state house seats at the same time. The only trend the other way is Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote. To give you an idea of how odd that is, I tried to go to bed after the NYTimes projected a legislature win for Republicans because that’s pretty much the race. The presidency is the shiny event everyone looks at, but the metrics actually follow the legislature. It’s just a matter of waiting for the margins of error to drop low enough to report the high stakes news. Occam’s Razor says voter fraud. Other Explanations? Media Bias Becoming an Echo ChamberAccording to a Media Research Center poll, a whopping 70% of voters thought the media was untrustworthy with--get this--32% of Clinton supporters thinking it was in her favor. This represents a huge degree of media skepticism. There are a lot of possible explanations for these numbers, but rest assured they talked about this in George Soros’s mountaintop closed doors meeting of Likeminded Absurdly Wealthy Democrats. (I don’t mean this facetiously; the Democracy Alliance requires you to donated $200,000 per year into one of their approved charities, and dues are $30,000 per year. Just the upkeep of membership in this group is a quarter of a million dollars per year. Rich donor club indeed!) There are many possible conclusions you can draw, but I make two. First, O’Reilly probably spoke true when he said that three of the major news networks intentionally set out to destroy Trump.Confirmed true? No, but it explains too much. My guess is that while many people didn't explicitly figure this out, a significant share of voters sensed it If I had to wager as to why, it would be because internet sources of news are reasonably consistent in aggregate, so an abrupt motion of traditional media will be easy to notice. Understand why you feel different? Probably not, but many people would unconsciously think something was wrong. Second, the misinformation mostly affected dedicated Democrat voters, forming an intense echo chamber. In fact, as this election has burned many a conservative-liberal friendship to the ground, the echo chamber is more intense than ever. The result is their base was deeply patronized, but limited in scope. It also means that the media has an incentive to publish polls showing Clinton is ahead because of their pro-Clinton bias. If you believed these polls, you would have gone into election night thinking Clinton was in for an easy evening...and the news you were living in an echo chamber would be a hard pill to swallow. I guess I’ll close with a few words from the last people I ever thought I would agree with anything on.
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Post by SteveT on Nov 18, 2016 20:35:17 GMT
EDIT: Dammit, Steve. Cordial time. Cordial!
1. Popular vote: Where are you getting 1% margin of error? Did you start by doubting the numbers and then go looking for a reason? 2. Voter fraud. So in a world where Clinton won the popular vote but Republicans had gains in other elections, your answer is voter fraud? Why wouldn't fraudulent voters vote straight Democrat across the ballot if they are already making the effort to vote for Clinton? You can't just make something up and claim Occam's razor without at least doing us the courtesy of listing what other options you considered and why they are less likely. I have anecdotal evidence of Republican friends who didn't vote for Trump, but otherwise voted Republican. And that anecdote is more substantial than your assumption of voter fraud. And don't forget about gerrymandering when it comes to House seats. 3. Media collusion. Fox News has the highest ratings of any individual news channel, and they present themselves as fighting back against the tyranny of the mainstream media. That's like Walmart claiming to be an alternative superstore. 4. Echo chamber. I'll agree that this is a problem. People need to read a wide variety of news sources and apply critical thinking to check their biases. 5. Polls. Pollsters have integrity and professional reputations to maintain. They aren't just making up numbers. They publish their methods and people can dig in and criticize those methods (see: the Carlton effect). Statistics are a thing. Trump's victory was within the margin of error for many polls because it was a tight race. It's the pundits who misrepresented the data to assure people that X Candidate was totally going to win.
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lordofshadow
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Original Join Date: August 11, 2002
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Post by lordofshadow on Nov 20, 2016 7:36:27 GMT
There is no evidence of voter fraud beyond isolated incidents, and there never really has been in the US. Why do you assume that there is? What evidence or information leads you to believe this? There are explanations that don't resort to conspiracy theory or assuming that something happened when there is no evidence for it. Republicans didn't win the house and senate; they already had them from the midterm elections two years ago. They actually lost ground in both, just not enough to flip control. That is very consistent with the popular vote. The only branch of government that flipped control was the presidency, and that was in spite of the popular vote - it's unfortunate that they're inconsistent, but the mechanisms that allow this to happen are pretty well understood by even casually engaged voters. Why did pollsters get it wrong?[/i] Well, first of all, this result was only a little outside the typical margin of error for national elections. A 2% error is the average aggregate polling error for most elections in modern history. It's tempting to blame it on a media bias towards Hilary, but that's a really simplistic view considering that everyone in the political establishment and the media - even conservative media like Fox news - consistently underestimated Trump throughout the entire process, starting with the beginning of the primary season. I don't think there is a true consensus amongst political scientists and psephologists yet, but it's looking like some sort of systemic polling error: something that consistently caused a portion of Trump voters to get missed by the polls, or some incorrect assumptions about how to scale demographic models. Why did Clinton lose?Everyone underestimated how compelling anti-establishment candidates would be, how desperate white voters without college education perceived themselves to be, and how much willingness there was to overlook facts, scandals, "disqualifying" things, and even policy discussion. That latter is very much a result of echo chambers. That's the lesson of this election. It's been consistent since the primaries: it's why Ben Carsen was in the running. It's why Bernie was such a challenger to Clinton. It's why Clinton underperformed. It's why Trump handily won the nomination, and it's why he won the presidency. Obviously there's room to dig much deeper into all of these angles.
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Post by Jasi on Nov 20, 2016 23:08:15 GMT
Lately I've been reading people speculating that Russians hacked voting machines in Wisconsin, something I imagine isn't news to most of you: medium.com/@daleberan/a-truly-fancy-bear-2384f413df1c#.5dm2y1e8lThis person is acknowledging that this is firmly in "theory" territory at the moment and that it has not been proven... but nor has it been disproven. The short version is this:
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Egann
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Posts: 124
Original Join Date: Sometime in 2008
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Post by Egann on Nov 21, 2016 3:10:43 GMT
Their market placement is probably the reason why they've got such high ratings, and even as the now largest company in the room, they're still a minority of the mainstream total. Fox wouldn't upset their viewership by changing this. I don't have firm proof of collusion, if that's what you're after, but if you're willing to put your thinking cap on and follow me with a step or two of deduction, I think there's solid evidence such collusion existed. This is a video from Project Veritas, a conservative attempt to detect and reveal Democrat voter fraud (so there will obviously be selection bias). Here we see hidden camera interviews of various DNC staffers discussing how they incite incidents at Trump rallies. If you actually watch the whole video you'll see descriptions of proxy network communications--a "double blind wall to preserve plausible deniability" to make connections to campaigns hard to detect. I find this stuff fascinating because it's basically TOR applied to a chain of command...but that's not the point. The point is that Creamer here says that they hire agitators to follow a script and create incidents in the lines to Trump rallies, that way it skirts outside of Secret Service control. He says the media will cover an incident no matter what. I'm not so sure. A line to a rally is an awful boring thing to watch. Film crews will want to get through the line and set up to actually film the event. Getting a film crew who just happens to be passing through to film such an incident? That's a fluke. They might not even have a camera ready! There is another possibility, however; make your own luck. If these double blind walls of communications extend to people in the media, who know when and where the agitators will be, they can film the incidents they create almost 100% of the time. A quick google search for news articles about violence at Trump rallies will tell you the names of the reporters on the other end of the pipe. From that, you can infer which news agencies as a whole are part of the collusion. In other news, fluoride toothpaste doesn't prevent tooth decay, but it does render teeth visible via spy satellites. Now, to be fair after this came out Creamer retired, so this entire model is likely obsolete. Actually, there is. To be fair, this is a local NYC official discussing NYC in particular, and how the voter ID laws there allow voter fraud. There's not much evidence of this in larger...oh, wait. Yes, bussing people to a different state to influence elections, and more to the point a confession of having done it for years. That's lovely, isn't it? The problem I had with the polls was not that they weren't within their margins of error, but that they were consistently on Hillary's side. Random chance would have had some polls show Hillary, some show Trump. What we saw was a few showing Trump, which implied a much stronger lead than Clinton actually had. Yes, this is in the "cover your ankles" zone, but this is also an exhibit of faulty poll-work. I hate to bring up something that bucks the popular belief, but this is demonstrably wrong. If you actually look at the NYTimes exit poll data, Trump only got 1% more of the white vote in total. Yes, Trump did significantly better with Whites with no college degrees, but this was almost entirely cancelled out by other whites voting the other way, and at the end of the day the white vote was basically a wash. No, the answer is actually in the non-white races: Trump performed better than Romney did across all races measured. Whites, blacks, asians, even the latinos he's supposedly going to deport voted 8% more for him than they did for Romney in 2012. That is a pretty devastating sweep. People don't talk about this because that doesn't fit the narrative, but the narrative also doesn't fit the facts.
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Post by SteveT on Nov 21, 2016 3:20:43 GMT
Project Veritas has a history of using creative editing to push conspiracy theories. I'm not giving them the clicks after the Planned Parenthood debacle.
Again, what's the point of rigging the popular vote, but not the electoral? It's a nonsensical, ineffective caper. It's a Wile E. Coyote scheme. If the had the power to manipulate the popular vote, why stop there? They may as well be going out and painting the letters on Trump tower a slightly different shade of gold. That will show him.
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Egann
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Posts: 124
Original Join Date: Sometime in 2008
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Post by Egann on Nov 22, 2016 23:53:04 GMT
^ The blunt answer is I think they aborted efforts outside of their major hubs after the Veritas videos. The furor after their release definitely forced Creamer to step down and for the rest of the system to reorganize. I am aware of Veritas's history of creative editing, and I can certainly see it with the NYC board of education chairman interview; he's clearly talking a local problem and they're making it sound big. That said, I think the voter fraud is minor; it's grounds to take the vote with a grain of salt and no more. My bigger conern is the agitator-media connection, and I have a hard time seeing statements like, 'It's not hard to get some of these assholes to pop off. It's a matter of showing up to the rally in a Planned Parenthood T-shirt or saying 'you know, Trump is a Nazi, you know.' You can message to draw them out and draw them to punch you,' as anything other than an admission of inciting violence, and that only seems to make sense if you assume some degree of media collusion. Feel free to disagree if you can parse those words differently, but I don't see how that's possible. Russia! I neglected to talk about Russia! Russia definitely had stakes in this election, that is for sure. One of the only things going well for Russia's economy is their oil exports, and with our embargo on exporting oil exploration technology (a fallout of Crimea, I believe) their oil exports struggle mightily. Large quantities of competing oil come form areas ISIS now controls. There's also this elephant in the room that Saudi Arabia (a major rival) has donated something between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton foundation as of 2016. (Billionare Ethiopian Oil Tycoon Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi, Qatar, and Kuwait all show up in the lesser donor pools.) Clinton had a huge vested interest in Arabian oil because they backed the Clinton Foundation to the tune of $20 million at a minimum lowball. What's going on? I don't know. I imagine that the donations to the Clintons was protection money from ISIS, and possibly something they might remind her of should she have the chance to pass anti-fracking legislation against their American competition. Russia couldn't donate that kind of money without looking weak, so they had to put all their eggs in the Trump basket instead. The news of Russia interfering in elections is nothing new, either. Not only is this par for the course in Russia...it's par for the course in the US as well, with states like California donating to put Democrat governors into the states around it, for instance. That said, I think it was a grave mistake of Hillary's to claim Russia was trying to influence America's elections. On face value it looks good, but not so much when their competitors show up on your donor list. Everyone was trying to influence the 2016 election, not just Russia.
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Egann
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Posts: 124
Original Join Date: Sometime in 2008
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Post by Egann on Nov 26, 2016 22:12:46 GMT
...Double Post for an update. Jill Stein is pushing (and fundraising) for a vote recount in several key states Trump won, namely Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Clinton's campaign will participate in a recount. This is...divisive to say the least. This is ridiculously late for a recount--not only is it almost three weeks after the elections, it's after a major holiday. If someone wanted to compromise and manipulate official records, they have almost certainly had a chance to do so during the Thanksgiving/ Black Friday weekend. Certain that's what happened? Definitely not, but considering the stakes I think it's a possibility worth mentioning. Especially if the numbers from a recount and the official election turn out to be wildly off, which is more or less what overturning the vote would require. That should raise all sorts of red flags. It's also a fundamentally unfair recount, as it targets states Trump won rather than states either candidate won with a narrow margin. Say I was correct earlier and the recount finds the voting system isn't accurate closer than about 3%. That means the states actually on the table are Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, Nevada, Colorado, and Minnesota (and possibly a couple others depending on how you parse the states.) It's not surprising that the larger states on this list voted Trump--he did win, after all--but selectively targeting states the victor won and none which the loser won is looking to change the results, not looking for a fair election. Personally, I would love to see vote audits become a thing outside of tight and heated elections. Perhaps then we would actually have a good idea how accurate our voting system is and have a set way of detecting voting problems. A heated election where people want to break the system to get their way, however, is not a good time to do that.
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Selena
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Odinsdottir
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Post by Selena on Nov 27, 2016 0:16:41 GMT
Audits:
Both sides claim the opposition is cheating in every single election, even though actual evidence for widespread fraud is almost non-existent.
A vote audit should occur in every election, even in the absence of controversy. It's simply a matter of good bookkeeping and accuracy. Elections are the most important force of change in our government structure, so we should've been going above-and-beyond this whole time to ensure that we're being as careful as possible.
Get on Washington's level and adopt national mail voting, noobs:
The biggest security risk in voting is electronic voting machines. Digital records are easier to tamper with than paper records. 100% absentee ballot voting is the way to go, and I feel sorry for you people who have to stand in line all day. We get ballots weeks in advance, can research everyone thoroughly, and then vote at our convenience. When done, all you do is mail it back or drop it at a collection location.
This would alleviate the disenfranchisement of the elderly, the infirm, and the working poor who can't afford to lose 5 hours of pay while waiting in line to push a button. It also leaves a clear paper trail and makes it infinitely harder for outside forces to tamper with anything.
It is ridiculously simple, just do it.
The reason Clinton has more popular votes:
It's not a conspiracy. It's cities. That's it.
Most of the US population is concentrated in urban areas. And most of our giant cities are located in blue states. Take California. Tends to be conservative in rural areas (most of the state's landmass) but ultra-blue in the cities. She won California by four million votes, mainly from the urban population. Between New Jersey and New York, she picked up an extra two million votes, again from urban areas.
Once a state is called, it doesn't matter how many surplus votes the winner picks up afterward. You can win New York by several million votes and you still get the same number of electoral votes.
This is phenomenon that has become more pronounced over time -- and will continue to grow more pronounced. Urbanization shows no signs of letting up any time soon. Population grows faster in cities due to how many people are crammed in one area, and people continue to move closer to cities for employment reasons. Not a lot of open land left for private homesteading. Most of it was either settled long ago or bought in huge swathes by agricultural corporations.
Because of urbanization, we may reach a point where liberal presidential candidates always win the popular vote.
Why Clinton lost the rest of the country:
The reasons are numerous but straight-forward.
Clinton lost the key swing states because the whole theme of this election was being "anti-establishment." You can't get more establishment than a Clinton unless you're a Kennedy. The public has an immensely negative view of the government. It also became pretty evident that most of the general population doesn't even understand how our government works. And so people were willing to burn the broken system to the ground. That's why Jeb Bush lost, too.
She lost because she and the DNC don't engage the public enough. They prefer high-class private fundraisers with elite donors because they think money is ultimately what matters in determining the outcome of an election. The rest of the population have felt ignored for a while now.
She also lost because Democrats are legitimately pompous and holier-than-thou. They tend to ignore criticisms and valid complaints. Instead of correcting their own faults, they over-focus on how awful the opposition is. Which is true. But that doesn't mean you can ignore your own failings. Of which there were many.
The DNC did no fucking damage control for the email leaks and their shenanigans during the primary. At all. If anything, their arrogant dismissal of the scandal just made things worse. Centrist voters focused on anti-corruption saw that and ran the other way. They expected everyone to stay on board solely based on Trump being... well, Trump. They didn't realize some people were willing to tear the whole country down just to get rid of establishment leaders.
Obamacare was a legit issue for a lot of middle-class voters. I know a lot of families around here who are paying more for health insurance than they ever did before, and companies used Obamacare as an excuse to axe a lot of their employer benefits. It helped the lower classes (including myself) but has some big faults in other areas. Should've just gone whole-hog and did a national health service, but that's *hissssss* socialism. Obamacare was a half-assed version of a health service that just gave more power to insurance companies. There's been no real effort to tweak the system since its inception, so middle-class voters were wary of Democrats.
General bumbling of other issues and undiplomatic answers to some big questions, but I could go on for a while.
Things that likely DIDN'T cost Clinton the election:
Third party votes. Conservatives were more inclined to vote for Gary Johnson, while people on the far left were more likely to vote for Jill Stein. Jill Stein barely got any votes. Johnson got a fair amount (as far as third parties go). If anything, third party votes would have cost Trump the election -- not Clinton. But that's my theory on the numbers.
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Post by SteveT on Nov 27, 2016 1:04:29 GMT
The audit/recount is unfair only in the same sense that Clinton losing the election despite winning the popular vote is unfair. The system we have is that if you want a state to audit its election results, you have pay them. Jill Stein is acting within the system by choosing which states she wants to pay. Those are the rules, and her actions are within those rules. The hypothesis is that the electronic voting machines have been compromised in these states, so testing that hypothesis demands a recount of those states. If Republican want a recount of Colorado, for example, they are within their rights to buy one.
Voting in the U.S. has a lot of problems attached to it, one of which is that you have to buy an audit if you want to be sure the results are legit. Voter suppression is another one, as Selena pointed out. My favorite example of voter suppression was the time Alabama instituted a voter I.D. law then (totally unrelated, you guys, totally unrelated) closed a bunch of DMVs in black counties. That kind of shit is supremely transparent and does a lot of damage to the narrative that voter ID laws are a good idea.
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Egann
Member
Posts: 124
Original Join Date: Sometime in 2008
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Post by Egann on Nov 30, 2016 3:24:14 GMT
Audits:
Both sides claim the opposition is cheating in every single election, even though actual evidence for widespread fraud is almost non-existent. A vote audit should occur in every election, even in the absence of controversy. It's simply a matter of good bookkeeping and accuracy. Elections are the most important force of change in our government structure, so we should've been going above-and-beyond this whole time to ensure that we're being as careful as possible. Get on Washington's level and adopt national mail voting, noobs:The biggest security risk in voting is electronic voting machines. Digital records are easier to tamper with than paper records. 100% absentee ballot voting is the way to go, and I feel sorry for you people who have to stand in line all day. We get ballots weeks in advance, can research everyone thoroughly, and then vote at our convenience. When done, all you do is mail it back or drop it at a collection location. This would alleviate the disenfranchisement of the elderly, the infirm, and the working poor who can't afford to lose 5 hours of pay while waiting in line to push a button. It also leaves a clear paper trail and makes it infinitely harder for outside forces to tamper with anything. It is ridiculously simple, just do it. (Sorry Steve: I'm still trying to make quotes work, as I'm used to manually keying the username in. That doesn't work here.) Intelligence is the ability to manipulate existing systems to your own ends, and the story of this election is people live in their own bubbles of news outlets, so when you say evidence is almost non-existent and that Washington's mail voting is the best...I'm skeptical. A local system in a state like Washington--which was nowhere near close--will almost certainly work, but on the national level a lot of smart people will be looking for exploits. On the one hand Steve is correct that voter ID laws can (and have been) abused as voter suppression, which inevitably leaves a paper trail. I'm less sold that voter fraud would necessarily leave a paper trail, at least not one anyone has looked for with an audit. I would rather see proof of non-corruption than assume silence necessarily translates to it's absence. I want to stick a pin in Obamacare. It got as much opposition from the right in Congress and it's two rounds in court as a true socialistic single-payer bill would have, perhaps more. Why bother with the half-way? I'm pretty sure the reason is an agency conflict of some sort, but I'm not done mulling this one over, yet. I suspect the lack of response on the email leaks was a planned down-play. The emails contained some really damning stuff--like intentionally driving Sanders out of the campaign--and there really wasn't anything they could do for damage control without attracting even more attention to it. Not talking about it in hopes people would forget was their best option. That kinda worked for their most faithful followers, but not beyond that. If you refuse to address your own failings, then the comparison is irrelevant; you will become worse eventually. Thinking of someone as "better" or "worse" in these regards is largely a matter of habit, and not reality, as the beltway interests they would bow to are more or less the same. At least until you talk about Trump. Trump is a terrifying lose cannon to these people because he has almost no connections to any beltway interests...which means there's no way of knowing how things will proceed. The next four years will be the most amusing politics ever, but there's not a bomb-shelter deep enough for me to properly enjoy it from.
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Post by SteveT on Nov 30, 2016 14:26:36 GMT
The best argument I've heard against vote-by-mail is that it compromises anonymous voting. There are plenty of opportunities for abuse. The usual list:
1. Abusive relationships where one person fills out ballots for everyone in the house. 2. Employers demanding to see your ballot before you mail it in to make sure you voted right. 3. Votes are less secure and can be intercepted by pretty low-tech means.
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