Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

Ballots get rejected for all sorts of reasons, as the article mentions, fraud and errors. A double rejection rate can't be 100% attributable to fraud. Here's what the President claimed:

> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone..... ....living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!

What's the line between "we have the best burgers in the world," and actually lying? You'll notice that Mr. POTUS said "less than substantially," whch barely means anything. Maybe he thinks 2% is "more than substantially." You can't lie if you phrase everything in a way that doesn't say anything.

> The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone..... ....living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one

This is also patently false - they're sending out ballots to registered voters, not everyone regardless of how they got there.

> That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!

Who are these "professionals"?

I thought that according to the right, Americans were perfectly capable of making life / death decisions for themselves and those around them during an active pandemic. So a trivial thing such as misinformation should be easy to deal with for them.

The phrase does indeed say something. "anything less than substantially fraudulent" means near and total fraud. Claiming ~100% of mail-in ballots are fraudulent is baseless and untrue.

I just don't see how you can go from "anything less than substantially" to 100%. You can't go from "substantially" to any percentage.

For an example, I could pull the same trick on your comment. I could try and convince people that "does indeed," implies 100% confidence, and then I could point out that since from a Bayesian perspective you should never reach 100% confidence, you can't know what you're talking about. Obviously nobody would buy that, because it's not you that wrote down 100%, it was me.

What does 'substantial' mean? "of considerable importance, size, or worth.". We further constrain the definition with 'anything less than'. So what we're saying is, 'of an especially considerable importance, size of worth'. Okay, well, what does that mean? It has to be a number large enough to influence the election result, but there's no evidence election results have flipped elections due to enough fraudulent mail-in ballots. With this interpretation, the numeric quantity does not matter, but the impact does, yet it is still untrue.

He obviously doesn’t think it is 2% because 2% in California would be nowhere close to “rigging the election” (his words).

> many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!

So basically he is afraid of more people voting? Like how is a election where more people then ever vote rigged? Like wtf.

This might fall in line with the analysis of <forgot name sorry> which claimed that election results are more based on which people vote and which don't then on swing voters and that swing voters are pretty much irrelevant.

If this is true and it turns out that an majority of voters in the US is more on the side of the democrats then a voting method which makes more people vote could indeed cause a long term defeat of the republicans in a fair democratic non rigged manner!

You're getting entangled in the details. It's clear from his tweets that what he means is that mail-in ballots will cause a rigged election. We shouldn't trust rigged elections, so he's saying that if the election includes mail-in ballots, it will be untrustworthy.

In order to make that reasoning (you could say that arguments are not false or true, they're just arguments) he's using false (CA will not be sending ballots to "anyone") and unsubstantiated (mail-in ballots have been working for years without extended robberies and forging, why would this be any different?) claims.

You can search and reason about the words so that "technically" he isn't lying. But the actual message he's sending is very, very clear.

It's pointless to quibble about what POTUS is getting at. He clearly intends to claim "mail-in voting is fraudulent." The question of whether it's a lie has more to do with whether his claim is accurate.

Of course he's afraid of people voting: he and his party are only in power because people don't vote.

So "dark patterns" are ok?

Partially correct. He’s in power because the left didn’t vote as much as they could’ve, but he’s also in power because his party’s constituents overwhelmingly supported him and went out in droves to vote for him. Hillary thought she had a sure win, so she didn’t campaign in some states; Trump seized those opportunities and won more support.

The difference is that everyone knows “we have the best burgers in the world” is subjective, and therefore, not true. When it comes to statistics (read: not subjective measures), it’s possible to lie.

Specificity. It's an existing exception in advertising law (or so I've been told). Anyone can claim "we have the best burgers" -- and many restaurants do -- because it's non-specific. Ironically, if you were to attempt humility by claiming "we have the second-best burgers", that becomes a specific claim, and you'd need research to support it.

"The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state" is a specific claim, and would need to be supported. It's a different category of claim than merely boasting "I am the best president".

No what Mr. POTUS said was

> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent

Translation: 100% certainty that Mail-In Ballots are substantially fraudulent

Where do you get the 2% from?

> Maybe he thinks 2% is “more than substantially”

We don’t know what he thinks - we know what he wrote. And he didn’t write a “maybe 2% chance of fraud”

He specified a 100% certainty of substantial election fraud

I often hear it stated as "We disliked Hillary so much, we voted for someone worse".

And just to beat this dead horse slightly more: The US does not have democratic elections. Clinton won by that measure. Trump won because we value some people’s votes more than others.

The American voters’ approach to government often reduces to “cutting off the nose to spite the face.”

You can phrase it that way. But it's a deceptive statement. For the most part, people don't switch parties they vote for. They just choose not to vote instead. So taken in aggregate, you could say "we disliked Hillary so we voted for someone worse".

But the more accurate statement is that some groups of people decided not to vote at all because they disliked Hillary, and other groups of people decided to show up and vote.

It much be nice to be able to read the minds of non-voters and decide how they would have voted if they had bothered to.

> way. But it's a deceptive statement. For the most part, people don't switch parties they vote for.

You are forgetting that most Americans are self-proclaimed independents and not sworn to support either of the two parties.

I would say it's as much a result of flaws in the electoral college system. States like Texas and California are way too large for a winner-take-all to reflect voter will.

Although I'm no trump supporter, it would be incorrect to assume there is no democratic push to get out the vote. Vote Save America ( https://votesaveamerica.com/ ) is run by Crooked Media, who are most well known for having Obama officials running podcasts like Pod Save America and Pod Save The World (as well as noted black activist Deray hosting Pod Save The People). This is clearly a group that wants to get Trump out and they are actively organizing to encourage calling, texting, donating to democratic campaigns in swing states, and pushing for mail-in voting.

(Disclaimer: I am pro mail-in voting and lean leftist in my political beliefs. I am merely disagreeing that there are no pushes to encourage people to vote that are also anti-trump.)

Not "most": it's a plurality, not a majority (31/37/28 D/I/R)

https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx

If you look at the week by week numbers, you see variance; I suspect most independents lean one way or another, but their willingness to commit in a poll varies based on various affairs.

You’re right with regard to your first point: we don’t have directly democratic elections; We have representative (indirect) elections (a la the Electoral College).

With regards to your other point: Hillary did not win the election, no matter how you spin it. She won the popular vote, but that means nothing in terms of who becomes President (read: who wins).

We also don’t “value some people’s votes more than others.” The Electoral College votes based on the way that state’s populace votes, and every electorate’s vote is equal. However, each state can have their own rules regarding how those votes are distributed: some states are winner-takes-all at the state level, while Maine and Nebraska are winner-take-all at the district level.

One can argue whether the Electoral College should exist at all, but it’s worth keeping in mind why it was created: we are a union of states (United States of America), not a homogenous unit (United America?).

Most independents reliably vote one party or the other. The number of "true" independents, who will frequently switch the party they vote for, is about 10%.

> Hillary did not win the election, no matter how you spin it.

I didn't say she did. I said she won the democratic election, which you call the popular vote. It's the same thing.

> We also don’t “value some people’s votes more than others.”

This is another tomato tomahhto splitting of hairs. A Nebraskan voter's vote is worth about 3.4 Californian votes. If you don't consider that as "counting some people's votes more than others", I don't know what to tell you. We can argue about whether you think that is a good idea (aka have the electoral college debate). But there should be no debate whether we do systematically prefer some voters over others.

Actual political scientists 100% for sure do not split hairs like that unless there's a reason they're trying to distinguish between two flavors of democracy and there's risk of confusion, and would definitely describe any part of the American election system as falling under the umbrella of "democratic". For one thing, it's not some kind of club with very strict rules for inclusion and being in or out is super important in some kind of way, and for another it would mean almost no systems or parts of systems would be "democratic" so we'd just have to invent another word to take over the very useful role that word serves now.

[EDIT] to be clear it's fine to think some parts of our election systems suck (they definitely fucking do) but "it's not democratic" isn't a very useful, meaningful, or even clear objection, per se.

Sure. And if Trump only meant that people will campaign against him he sure has a roundabout way of saying it.

There's also some room in the law for puffery in advertising, which includes the use of vacuous statements like "the best".

Also worth noting that every election cycle there are professionals hired by party officials and ambitious candidates to tell millions of people how to vote.

They’re called “campaigns.”

And they work especially well on the kind of people who think Trump’s posture of outrage is in response to genuinely outrageous behavior.

> Like how is a election where more people then ever vote rigged?

Lets say the states decide to send out mail in ballots to all members of a house hold. A parent intercepts the ballots and fills them out on behalf of the kids or grandparents, or even the previous tenants. All of a sudden casting multiple votes becomes much easier by a single person.

In a more cynical situation, the ballots are intercepted and returned filled out by party members.

Correct. His implication that this somehow makes the voting process less valid is 100% wrong. It in fact makes the voting process more inclusive. But it is wrong to say there are no movements to teach people how to vote and to make voting easier explicitly with the belief that a more inclusive voting populace will vote trump out.

> We also don’t “value some people’s votes more than others.”

This stance just ignores the facts of electoral college vote allocation as well as the related and probably much more important existence and power of the Senate. The rules that define the federal government intentionally discount the contributions of millions in the most populous states. It's a crime that would have been rectified decades ago were it not explicitly written into the Constitution (see Baker v. Carr).