Weak Arguments: They have no kraken

I have said very little on this blog -- if anything -- about the post-election controversies in the US which consist largely of Trump and a shrinking group of supporters arguing that they haven't really lost because....

I have said little about it because it was boring, and because I had confidence the process would run its course through the electoral college vote. Anything I said during that period between the two votes would so quickly become dated there'd be no point to having said it.

Now I'll say this: Trump's arguments were always very weak, even ludicrously so. I actually heard an apparently serious Trump supporter make this point: Biden got a significantly lower vote count in New York State than Hillary Clinton did. This proves he was (except when cheating) a weaker candidate. This proves that all the states that he won and Clinton lost, must not really have been won fairly at all.

Seriously. That’s not only a real argument, it seems to be a fair sample of them.

Just to be clear: here is the answer to that one. The tactical people around Biden were not idiots. They knew that Clinton had lost. They knew that she had gotten more popular votes than Trump largely by running up the score in safe states, safe for ANY Dem nominee, like New York and California. They were smart enough not to make the same mistake. They did little campaigning in the safe states, spent little ad money there, and focused on the battleground states almost exclusively. So, yes, they got fewer votes in some of the safe states than Clinton had. That isn’t proof their candidate was weaker, only that they are capable of arithmetic.

What is the strongest case for election fraud? It is simply that there is always fraud. This is a big country. Fifty states — and DC has 3 electoral votes. More than three hundred million people. There was surely some fraud somewhere. There was likely a lot of precinct-level stuff going in both directions. If you dig enough you’ll find some, somewhere. THAT is the case.

And the counter to that is that if we disregard the results of an election every time that can be (truthfully) said, we’ll have no elective branches of govt left. The evidence for systemic asymmetric voter fraud on Biden’s behalf is paper thin. Mr hair-dye-drain has pursued it because he’s got nothing better to do and the checks aren’t bouncing

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