County Explains PA Ballot Mistake That Sparked MAGA Freakout

Please explain how my statement above is “freaking out”.

ETA: It’s been over two hours with no response. Perhaps I don’t merit an explanation.
ETA Rev2: Over four hours now. Perhaps you don’t merit the opportunity.
ETA Rev3: After 24 hours, your non-response is duly noted. Perhaps you feel a little foolish.

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Too bad DeJoy tossed the automated sorting machines and experienced staff!

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Let 'em get into a tizzy. It’s good for them.

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The FBI, Luzerne County District Attorney’s office and Pennsylvania state police secured and sorted through three days worth of garbage

Someone went dumpster-diving through three days worth of trash, which of course had to be after (three days, maybe) the ballots were thrown out. The ‘contractor’ made it known after the fact. It could be that an honest mistake was discovered three days later. But it is unlikely that the ‘contractor’ attempted to keep the whole thing secret. So, yeah, smells like rat-fucking.

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A free and fair election doesn’t imply or require a perfect election. Such mistakes have happened in every election and will tend to even out between the two sides. Go back in the archives and you will read stories from every election (and that’s only the ones that were found). This one was found and will be corrected. This is evidence of human fallibility and nothing more (as if we needed evidence for that).

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We don’t know what percentage of people have T cell memory from cross-reacting coronavirus from common colds. Nor do we know what level of protection that provides. The point is that everyone has to assume they are susceptible unless they have recovered from a documented infection, and even then there is no guarantee.

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How many previous conspiracies are required before we’re allowed to investigate whether this was also one?
I don’t think this was a conspiracy to actually affect the results but I do suspect that this was staged to create maximum stink and the appearance of election tampering, which would require only a very small local team.

That Bayesian prior, if you will, is based off of everything we learned from the impeachment hearings, Ron Johnson’s continuing “investigation”, durhams “investigation”, Barr’s “summary” of the muller report, etc. Basically, before I consider if there are non-nefarious explanations for the contractors alleged actions, I want confirmation that the chain of events described by Barr’s DOJ actually happened as described.

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Uh, thanks! Clearly, I need to actually read the supporting material before opining!

And I agree with the Hive’s consensus that this was a ratf*cking, put-up job. Those OGPers (Once Grand Party) sure know how to go low.

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Pulling three days of trash was probably just to establish whether there was a bigger problem. The nine ballots had already been found, this would have been a safety sampling to see if it had happened before.

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Hanlon’s Razor - “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

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Also why we should implement runoffs when the results are too close. None of this bullshit that millions of votes are cast, and a winner is called by a thousand, when many more than that margin were cast aside for one reason or another.

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It’s not that they are too stupid, it’s that the truth is slow. The options for actual political journalists are one of the following two:

  1. Hold the story until you have sufficient time to understand the actual context and then investigate to confirm that what you think is true is indeed true. Then write the story a week after the right-wing has declared a smoking gun and silence from the LaMesTrEAm MeDiA confirms a conspiracy.

  2. Report on the story timely and attempt to punch holes in the right-wing assumptions underlying a conspiracy, but because you don’t know enough yet, you can’t yourself credibly explain what is going on.

Those are not good options. I’d argue another alternative that political journalists should try to track what right wing cesspool created the story and report on how the conspiracy ended up being national news and why in the absence of actual facts people are spreading conspiracy theories. Then lay out the steps of what a credible investigative report would look like for that case.

The mainstream media almost picked up that line of thinking here after it became aware how bizarre this case is and was handled. Make that the story until you have actual facts seems like a logical position, but my guess is that makes your readership/viewership plummet and doesn’t stop the right wing from blasting it out anyway.

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That may be. But the ballots were found in the dumpster, so someone had to go looking for them.

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All this top level hype and focus by AG Barr & Trump & Co. for 9 out of more 200,000 registered voters (.0045%) in a single county in a single state in the entire union certainly strikes me as an appropriate and not at all suspect use of our government’s time.

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Or have ranked choice voting, which has worked well in Maine so far.

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I’d like to know more both about the supervisor who “found” them and the employee, frankly. Agree that it’s odd that you just happen to spot some ballots in the dumpster.

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When does Atlas become culpable in peoples’ death? Or will this just become another Camron example in his quote: “to not lose sight of the fact that a life has been lost — a tragedy under any circumstances.”

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Hanlon’s Razor - “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

one of my favorites to live by

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“Jr”. is the evil spawn; the Current Occupant is “Sr.”

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