Reminding people that there’s an election is not taking sides. It’s certainly not an instance of “vote manipulation”. I’m not commenting on the broader issue, just this specific claim, which is bonkers.
The entire purpose of a campaign is to manipulate the outcome of an election. A rally manipulates the outcome, as does a debate. As does a news article that raises question about one of the candidate's integrity.
True. I am not disputing there aren't any efforts to manipulate voters. I would be surprised if there were not. But the relevancy that the media tried to transport just wasn't adequate.
I genuinely believe that many just have been played, but that could have been mitigated by providing at least a somewhat believable perspective.
This is an instance where imprecision in language is being weaponised for talking points. There are always many small errors and fraud in any large election. I don't think anyone would dispute this. And it is tolerable because the error is unlikely to be statistically significant.
The question is whether there is large scale, organised electoral fraud. Of that there's precisely zero evidence.
So when the “mainstream” media says “there is no fraud”, they're talking about organised fraud, not small counting errors and individual voter misconduct.
I think the real issue here is people are being blasted with some misleadingly official-looking "Election Over! X totally and indisputably Wins!" news, the day before a big set of elections.
You must also find it massively irresponsible for Trump to state he won the election as early as Wednesday morning.
Fortunately, his statements, like those of the media, aren’t how the winner is determined. Rather, all the votes are counted and then certified. The media waits until the unofficial counts are outside of the reach of recounts. Trump’s legal challenges are contradictory: he’s arguing to continue counting in states where he is behind and stop counting in states where he is ahead. It doesn’t work that way.
After 2000, the media has been very conservative in waiting to call elections. In any case, they’ve twice miscalled a presidential election but it didn’t impact the ultimate winner, because at the end of the day, we follow the rule of law.
I was teasing, too. There is no real evidence of a significant pattern of voter fraud. The outcry is just part of a media campaign by right-wing organizations to justify legal measures intended to suppress voter turnout among Democratic constituencies.
Doesn't need to be intentional, the fact that when the mistake was shown after the fact, the best they could do is invalidate tens of thousands of votes, which very likely were for one candidate, shows how the win was stolen from him.
Perhaps if Congress and media actually addressed voting fraud concerns rather than pretending that our elections magically became perfect now that a Democrat won something, then no one would have shown up.
But as it is, it's unclear who won the election without fraud.
I’m criticizing the press for not calling the winner.
In most elections, the press takes their duty of calling the winner very, very seriously. Almost like it’s a constitutional role.
And yet when it would have mattered, they decided not to.
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