[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.

[mrtesthah]

There is no “overwhelming evidence” of any election or voter fraud. Such claims have been debunked[1]. Your use of that adjective does not make them true, and your assertion is literally theorization of a conspiracy.

1. https://voterprotectionprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...

[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?

[CyberDildonics]

This isn't someone slashing your tires overnight when you are parked on a street.

It involves thousands of people directly and an extreme amount of information collecting and statistics analysis.

[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.