[jtxxwl2]

>Or a participant in some sort of fantasy vote-rigging conspiracy.

This is even more relevant outside of the US. In the US vote rigging conspiracies are impossible for some inexplicable reason, perhaps related to magical soil, but outside of the US they are a real concern.

[dragonwriter]

> In the US vote rigging conspiracies are impossible

No, they aren't, which is why our most recent ex-President (who also was notorious for inventing fantastical vote-rigging conspiracies out of no evidence in the same election) is currently at the center of a criminal investigation for one based on fairly hard evidence, and his political party is trying to change the Georgia State Constitution to derail the investigation.

There's a difference between “That vote-rigging conspiracy is an unsubstantiated fantasy” and “Vote-rigging conspiracies are impossible.” Pretty much no one in the US has ever argued the latter.

[jtxxwl2]

>No, they aren't

Have I been mislead? If it is possible to carry out election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried out by people that viciously hate the former president? Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries, and there is no magical means of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get away with it here as well. They have courts and investigations and evidence in other countries as well, and that has seemingly not prevented election rigging there.

[yibg]

Big difference between the general statement of "vote rigging is impossible" and "this last election wasn't rigged". The usual claim is the latter, not the former.

[jtxxwl2]

If it is possible to carry out election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried out by people that viciously hate the former president? Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries, and there is no magical means of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get away with it here as well. They have courts and investigations and evidence in other countries as well, and that has seemingly not prevented election rigging there.

[yibg]

The threshold isn’t just “it’s possible”. There needs to be some evidence. All sorts of things are possible, doesn’t mean we go around thinking they are true, or even assume they are potentially true.

It’s not Impossible I’ve murdered someone, doesn’t mean I should be presumed a murderer.

[2lwxxtj]

Yes, absolutely. We must use the evidence available and draw inferences, assuming that there is no magic soil type phenomenon involved. In this case, the evidence available includes 5 years of statements and actions performed by members of one political party which demonstrate beyond any doubt that they overwhelmingly possess a seething hatred of one of the candidates. It also includes undisputed evidence that election officials instituted rules for some election facilities that greatly hindered the ability of outside election observers to ensure no fraud was taking place. And it also includes undisputed evidence that these same election facilities are totally politically dominated by that one political party, and have been for decades. We can therefore infer that it is overwhelmingly likely that they engaged in fraud.

[dragonwriter]

> Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries

I'm not convinced that it is. Sure, election rigging happens, but that's not the “getting away with it” that would be at issue. Either people who get away with it undetected in the very short term are so good that they manage to suppress all evidence completely and it never comes out (which seems an implausible binodality in outcomes), or it usually is quite evident in even the very short-term, and either fails to do enough to change results, does enough to change results but is corrected by institutional processes, or it does enough to change results and is allowed to stand by corrupt institutions despite being widely decried.

There's not a whole lot of modern cases where election fraud is discovered only long-after the event rather than virtually in real-time.

Is vote rigging and conspiracy to rig votes possible in the modern world? Yes. Is it ever both significant and not immediately evident? It's not impossible, but it doesn't seem to be the case. If it were, you'd expect there to be examples of cases undetectable in the short-run but later discovered.

[jtxxwl2]

>Either people who get away with it undetected in the very short term are so good that they manage to suppress all evidence completely and it never comes out (which seems an implausible binodality in outcomes)

Why do you think that's implausible? What evidence of election fraud would you expect to be left behind that would be difficult to dispose of?

>is allowed to stand by corrupt institutions despite being widely decried.

By whom?

>If it were, you'd expect there to be examples of cases undetectable in the short-run but later discovered.

Why would that be expected? Many crimes are much harder to prove if the perpetrator is not caught in the act. Why would you not expect election fraud to be among them?

[rspeele]

It's kinda like how Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster could be real, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that they are almost certainly not real.

Some motivated people have spent a lot of time and money trying to find proof of those creatures, and come up with nothing but some blurry pictures (including some known to be intentional fakes) and conjecture. So there's not much reason to take them seriously.

[jtxxwl2]

It's also kinda like how Al Capone might not have ordered the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that he probably did, even though no one could definitively prove it.

And also kinda like how Kim Jong Un might be the preferred candidate of 100% of North Koreans, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that he is almost certainly not.

[rspeele]

Thanks for the additional examples. Another good one is the moon landing. I don't strictly know we went to the moon, I don't have direct proof, but based on the evidence available to me and the crappy arguments from people claiming we didn't, I'm pretty confident it happened.

As usual these arguments never really end, but thanks to prediction markets, this time the people who believed the possible-but-highly-unlikely outcome, "Trump actually won", ended up donating lots of their money to the people who believed the much more simple and plausible scenario: "No, he didn't".

[jtxxwl2]

>this time the people who believed the possible-but-highly-unlikely outcome, "Trump actually won", ended up donating lots of their money to the people who believed the much more simple and plausible scenario: "No, he didn't".

No, that's not what happened. People who believed the odds of the courts ruling in favor of Trump made the payout worth it gave their money to people who believed the odds of that not happening made the payout for that scenario worth it.

Of course, courts only have access to the evidence which is given to them by either side, so really we only know that the evidence Trump's legal team was able to get its hands on on short notice was not sufficient to convince the court to take the very significant step of overturning election results. We do not know who "actually" got more legitimate votes.

[mvc]

May I be so bold as to suggest that not all vote rigging conspiracies are considered impossible. Just the ones that have been rejected by every court that has tested them.

[jtxxwl2]

One theory I've heard is that the magical soil in the US would compel the riggers to confess and/or provide evidence of their guilt to the courts and to the general public, rather than lying and/or concealing that evidence. In the rest of the world, courts often are not provided with relevant evidence or confessions, and therefore rigging remains possible.

[drdeca]

If you remove the putting of stupid words in others’ mouths from this (great going there, btw), the only thing that remains is “but the courts could have not gotten the evidence”.

But if the evidence is not available, then there is no good reason to believe it. You have to explain why people claiming it have enough evidence to believe it, but the courts don’t have enough evidence for it to be even claimed in the courts, if you want to claim that the reason is that courts don’t have access to the evidence.

[jtxxwl2]

>But if the evidence is not available, then there is no good reason to believe it.

Based on this statement, I am guessing you are an American, and are therefore accustomed to all relevant hard evidence always being available. What you may not know is that in the rest of the world, sometimes some hard evidence is not available, so those people have adapted other mechanisms for forming beliefs about what is true. One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw inferences from other relevant facts.

For instance, in those countries, if a man who has professed a strong desire for wealth is tasked with guarding a large pile of money, and the money disappears, people in those countries will infer that the man likely took the money, even if no one saw him take it and the money is not later found in his possession.

[drdeca]

> One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw inferences from other relevant facts.

The “other relevant facts” are called “evidence”. An observation is evidence for a proposition when the posterior probability for the proposition, after updating on the observation, is greater than the prior probability of the proposition, before the observation.

Ok, so I guess you are saying that the evidence is not __legally considered__ evidence, or isn’t “evidence” in the legal sense of the term, and that that is why it wasn’t presented it court?

I have to admit that I’m not particularly clear on what kinds of evidence are and aren’t considered “evidence” in the legal sense admissible in court. Are you familiar with the criteria that make the distinction?

[jtxxwl2]

In a bench trial, the judge is supposed to weight the evidence presented, and issue various different degrees of relief based on whether it meets certain standards in totality. For a case where the plaintiff is asking the judge to overturn the result of an election, the judge would require a rather high standard of evidence.

I was talking about hard evidence specifically -- think a smoking gun with the suspect's fingerprints on it. According to what I have been lead to believe, if election fraud happened in the US, sufficient evidence of said fraud would be discovered and presented to American courts, though that is not the case in other countries.

Therefore if I have not been mislead, when a person considers whether there was election fraud in the US, they should only consider whether sufficient evidence has been presented to courts or to the media, not whether there exist other lesser forms of evidence.

[j4yav]

Doesn't this path lead to believing anything you like, once you free yourself from the chains of needing evidence? I feel like I'd lose all track of what is real if I used this logic.

[jtxxwl2]

My understanding is that people in those other countries have not been lead down such a path, even though they know that sometimes people get away with stealing elections in their countries. I believe they use reason and inference when judging what is real, because all relevant hard evidence is not always available to them.

[jeremysalwen]

> My understanding is that people in those other countries have not been lead down such a path

Ah, that makes sense. They would require evidence to believe something. So for example, in an election where there was no evidence of fraud, they would not believe there was fraud. Such as the one which occurred in 2020 in the U.S.

[jtxxwl2]

Yes, and examples of evidence might include that some election facilities were administered by people with a seething hatred for one of the candidates, and election observers in some areas were prevented from being able to meaningfully monitor the election process. Of course there are many other potential forms of evidence, but those two right there would be enough to give anyone pretty good reason to believe there was election fraud, provided it happened outside of America, since election fraud can't take place in America.