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by mvc 1950 days ago
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.
1 comments

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.
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.

>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.

> 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?

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.

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.
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.
> 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.

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.
I assume you're talking about Republican administered election facilities and since they have a well documented seething hatred toward Biden you're suggesting that Biden actually won by a _much greater margin_ except for the fraud that no doubt occurred in Trump's favor.