j reacts to the recounts in wisconsin & pennsylvania (and michigan)

i don't expect that the recounts in wisconsin or michigan will change the tallies much. you'll note that i never argued that the elections were being rigged by a foreign power, or that the voting machines were suspect or that data was being altered (with the possible exception of early voters calling in to change their votes, which i think should be investigated). what i argued was that the polls were obviously being manipulated to exaggerate white voter turnout and minimize turnout from non-white voters, and this indicated that there was an understanding in the background (and the sources suggested deep state intelligence collusion) that voter suppression tactics were going to swing the outcome of the election. the media used terms like "likely voters" as code words and jargon; what they meant was that they expected that the minority vote was going to be suppressed.

i didn't argue that the tactics weren't used in north carolina or florida or arizona, either. what i argued is that the margins in these states make the manipulation less obvious, and that it would consequently be a lot harder to prove. resources should be focused on the places where the fraud is most obvious, and that would be in wisconsin & pennsylvania & michigan.

(put another way, the polls predicted that the results in north carolina & arizona & florida were going to be close enough that a systemic bias could be explained solely in the margin of error. basically, they could cheat in these states and get away with it because polling is not perfect. that was not true in pennsylvania or wisconsin or michigan, where clinton was ahead by margins that exceeded any reasonable error. you have to rely on not just a systemic bias but also on an unreasonably large shy trump voter effect in these states that was consistent through all polling and even the exit polling. either people were lying to the polling firms consistently for months and the data reflected it or they weren't and votes were destroyed.)

i initially just thought they were using bad modelling. it took me time to realize that what should have been bad modelling was actually at the least predictive due to the understanding that the election was going to be stolen through voter intimidation and discarded ballots. they were modelling voter suppression, and that voter suppression that they modelled actually happened.

what that means is that the paper trail is probably in provisional ballots if it exists, but that there's no guarantee that it's there at all. a proper accounting would no doubt yield a correct result, but it would take a long time and probably break privacy laws. and, those ballots may have very well just been discarded.

i don't expect that there's going to be any way to prove that it was stolen, other than to point at the polling discrepancies and argue that this is fishy (and to point out that the media seems to have seen it coming). this was an inside job and these guys are pros. they know what they're doing. they didn't leave a smoking gun at the polling booth.

it's not that trump's vote totals are higher. they're not. he underperformed romney.

it's that millions and millions of votes for clinton seem to have just disappeared. and, if they disappeared then they disappeared. you're not going to find them hiding somewhere in a school gym in scranton.

i don't think this was trump's cronies showing up with baseball bats and giving people offers they can't refuse. i think this was highly co-ordinated. and i think they cleaned up - i think they destroyed the evidence.

if you're lucky, you might be able to find data that indicates that ballots were destroyed and that might be useful in passing reforms. but, i say that like it's some kind of accident, right?

-

yes, i'm saying that the united states is in truth a military dictatorship with a fraudulent veneer of fake elections designed to trick people into thinking they live in a democracy in order to prevent a real revolution. i've been saying that for years.

look at american foreign policy. it destroys democracy everywhere it finds it. but, you think it wants it at home?

-

but, i want to be clear: what makes this election different is not that it was stolen. the 2000 election was stolen. the 1980 election was stolen. the 1968 election was stolen. and the 1960 election was stolen, too. what makes this election different is that they stole states that were obviously not even in play. the difference is how brazen they were, and how much contempt they showed for voters in the process.