>Despite evidence to the contrary, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
What evidence? An accurate statement might have read, "Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen".
>You can really only prove this type of thing in a single direction, by providing evidence that there was fraud on such a scale as to have swung the results.
This assertion relies on the baseless assumption that the elections are fair unless proven fraudulent. Given the history of elections the opposite could just as easily be argued. This is one of the most important reasons to have total and complete transparency on every level of an election with an auditable paper trail that can be publicly scrutinized leaving no doubt about the integrity of the election among any honest arbiter.
Personally I have doubts about the integrity of every election in my lifetime, and I'm not a young man.
“Despite the lack of conclusive evidence” — this sounds like there is some evidence. But there isn’t. Trump’s own attorney general said so. He quit his job when pushed by the president to ignore the lack of evidence and instead issue a statement that there might have been fraud.
If you’re inclined to doubt every election, did Trump win in 2016 by fraud too? Bush in 2000? Their margins were very tight and they lost the popular vote. Doesn’t that seem like a more likely situation where fraud would carry the day?
2020 was obviously a very unique election because of the mail-in voting. There are various data on that (and this is not partisan whatsoever) available here [1]. You had 40 million more absentee/mail-in ballots than in 2016, paired with what were many extremely bizarre statistical changes. To give just one example, in 2016 the percent of rejected ballots that were because a person had already voted in person was 1.3%, in 2018 it was 1.4%, in 2020 it was 13.5%!
I didn't vote for Trump and don't really have a horse in this race, but I also don't feel comfortable with mail in voting as a meaningful percent of all-votes. This is even more true as the entire country becomes more polarized and radicalized. This sort of mentality is going to motivate an increased number of people to try to cheat the system, and encourage "selective vigilance" from those involved in guaranteeing the integrity of the electoral process.
And perhaps the most important point is that in terms of how a democracy functions, whether elections are fair or not is a secondary concern to whether people think they are or not. The main benefit of a democracy for a society is stability. People looking to change their political future were able to set aside their pitchforks and pick up ballots. But when people don't think those ballots matter (even if they do), then we're back to square one.
The total rejection rate did decrease from 1% to 0.8%. I was referring to the reasons that ballots were rejected. On the page referenced, ctrl+f for "Top reasons for rejecting absentee ballots."
>If you’re inclined to doubt every election, did Trump win in 2016 by fraud too? Bush in 2000? Their margins were very tight and they lost the popular vote.
It's impossible for me say, unfortunately, because of our black-box elections carried out (mostly) on electronic voting machines that don't allow for real audits and, for the most part, don't have complete paper trails. In my opinion it is absurd to have confidence in any process that is not completely transparent.
> Doesn’t that seem like a more likely situation where fraud would carry the day?
It now seems like this is your opinion. So 100% of elections since 2000 where the opposition won are bitterly contested as illegitimate by party partisans. I'm starting to think these political parties might be the problem.
It’s not my opinion. But isn’t it objectively true that the national popular vote is much harder to fake than a few hundred votes in a specific state? That’s just the nature of organizing the effort.
So if all US elections are unreliable, surely the 2000 one is more suspect than the 2020 one.
So, by rough equivalency the same amount of either Republicans OR Democrats belive in stolen elections.
The portrayal of either party by the other is ridiculous.
Clearly it is both a common and non-partisan belief. Safely put, one in three United States Statesians don't believe in the legitimacy of elections they don't win.
Aside from the sibling comment's point, keep in mind that the 2000 election was actually decided by a court case. Regardless of how you judge this fact personally, it is at the very least bound to distort survey responses.
The evidence of participants and observers, the evidence of recounts and audits. You know, all the actual evidence that the election was free and fair, that actually holds up under scrutiny.
Unlike all the 'evidence' to the contrary which crumbled when shown the light of day.
> Personally I have doubts
Great, but these are unsubstantiated at this point. It's like you think that there are no mechanisms in place to ensure that elections are run honestly.
>It's like you think that there are no mechanisms in place to ensure that elections are run honestly.
The "mechanisms" in place to ensure that elections are run honestly are lacking and/or non-existent in many municipalities and states around the country (something any informed, unbiased election expert will tell you regardless of their political affiliation).
The overwhelming majority of voting in the US takes places on electronic voting machines that run proprietary, black-box software. Further, US electronic voting machines have been proven vulnerable to hacking and manipulation over and over again.
These issues have not been recognized, much less addressed. The fact is that our system of recording and tallying votes on these vulnerable electronic machines that cannot be audited renders our elections insecure. This isn't a partisan issue (for the record I voted 3rd party in the last two elections and voted for neither Republicans or Democrats). You are correct when you say my doubts are "unsubstantiated". Also unsubstantiated is any confidence that votes were accurately cast and recorded. We - all Americans - deserve a reliable, transparent, auditable voting system that everyone can be confident in.
Yet these machines have held up where challenged, and paper recounts have confirmed their results. So there is evidence that, in general, things are OK.
This idea that there is no evidence that the system works is just wrong. There's plenty, and that's in stark contrast to the 'evidence' that the election was stolen.
I agree that an reliable and transparent system is the best, and should be the aim, and I'm sure there is room for massive improvement, I wouldn't seek to deny it.
But likewise you can't just dismiss the evidence that the election was OK as "I don't trust it", when there are a variety of measures taken that are positive evidence of reliability, with no particular evidence it wasn't.
> What evidence? An accurate statement might have read, "Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen".
An even more accurate statement would be, "Despite Donald Trump's blatant attempt to change the outcome of election results[1] [2] his followers still believe he has won the 2020 election"
That's not more accurate, it adds extraneous information in order to antagonize people, and removes the "nearly one-third of Americans" to imply that it's an unusual opinion.
"Despite the release of another Jurassic Park sequel, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen."
One can argue about whether it's truly extraneous information, but the "despite" is absolutely the wrong connective.
The people who think the election was fraudulent do so because of Trump's actions, not despite of them. Those people's thinking is horribly flawed, of course, but it's still better to represent it accurately.
What evidence? An accurate statement might have read, "Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen".
>You can really only prove this type of thing in a single direction, by providing evidence that there was fraud on such a scale as to have swung the results.
This assertion relies on the baseless assumption that the elections are fair unless proven fraudulent. Given the history of elections the opposite could just as easily be argued. This is one of the most important reasons to have total and complete transparency on every level of an election with an auditable paper trail that can be publicly scrutinized leaving no doubt about the integrity of the election among any honest arbiter.
Personally I have doubts about the integrity of every election in my lifetime, and I'm not a young man.