2020 Election Thread

[In2ition]

This was a good thread. Seems odd.

[3rdside]

This was a good book. Seems legit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Risk

Michael Lewis the author, arguably the worlds greatest non-fiction writer, covers in detail the impossible idiocy and intended corruption of the Trump presidency, which - in interesting news - is expected to be turned into a comedy series by one Barack Obama.

Revenge will be sweet, no doubt.

[Indy]

That twitter user clearly doesn't know much about stat analysis. The language he/she uses is all wrong for someone that actually analyzes stats. In addition, they didn't account for any differences between counties based on predicted results for things like % of registered voters by county, or overall population of county, or recency of poll predicting vote, or even indicating which polling results they are using for the data in the graphs (are they even the same polling provider for every dot conducted in the same time frame across the entire country in every county?).

[In2ition]

That twitter user clearly doesn't know much about stat analysis. The language he/she uses is all wrong for someone that actually analyzes stats. In addition, they didn't account for any differences between counties based on predicted results for things like % of registered voters by county, or overall population of county, or recency of poll predicting vote, or even indicating which polling results they are using for the data in the graphs (are they even the same polling provider for every dot conducted in the same time frame across the entire country in every county?).

Did you even watch the video? It doesn't seem like you did, since that was all explained in the thread and the video. The analysis was done by DataScience. I don't know what your background is Indy.

https://gofile.io/d/WtDVhe

[AmareIsGod]

Jared Kushner helped create a Trump campaign shell company that secretly paid the president's family members and spent $617 million in reelection cash, a source tells Insider

https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-k ... ra-2020-12

President Donald Trump's most powerful advisor, Jared Kushner, approved the creation of a campaign shell company that secretly paid the president's family members and spent almost half of the campaign's $1.26 billion war chest, a person familiar with the operation told Insider.

The operation acted almost like a campaign within a campaign. It paid some of Trump's top advisors and family members while shielding financial and operational details from public scrutiny.

When Kushner and others created the company in April 2018, they picked Trump's daughter-in-law Lara Trump, to become its president, Vice President Mike Pence's nephew John Pence as its vice president, and Trump campaign CFO Sean Dollman as its treasurer and secretary, the person who spoke on the condition of anonymity said.

Insider independently verified details of this person's account with other sources close to the Trump campaign.

The shell company — incorporated as American Made Media Consultants Corporation and American Made Media Consultants LLC — allowed Trump's campaign to skirt federally mandated disclosures. The tactic could attract scrutiny from federal election regulators.

Campaign finance records show Trump's reelection effort and its affiliated committee with the Republican National Committee spent more than $600 million through American Made Consultants since its formation.

For months, some of Trump's own top advisors and campaign staff have told Insider they had no idea how the shell company functioned, casting an air of mystery about the operation.

Trump's campaign leaders even launched an internal audit of the shell company and operations under former campaign manager Brad Parscale but never reported the results of that review. Some of those same advisors said they didn't learn about John Pence and Lara Trump's involvement until Insider contacted them for this story.

But throughout, the mystery hid in plain sight: Kushner, Lara Trump, John Pence, and Dollman, were often just feet away in the Trump campaign's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, a Washington suburb.

"They like to say they don't know, but that's not true," the person familiar with AMMC said. "What they wanted was excuses so they could blame other people. If they thought that, why did they keep using it?"

From January 2019 through the middle of November 2020, the Trump campaign and an affiliated political committee together spent $617 million through American Made Media Consultants.

It was almost half of everything they spent in the failed effort to reelect Trump, according to an Insider review of Federal Election Commission records and analysis provided by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Some Trump advisors have long accused Parscale of trying to hide money from the now-outgoing president, occasionally citing AMMC as an example of his obfuscation.

But the campaign actually spent the bulk of the money at AMMC — $415 million — after Trump fired Parscale as campaign manager on July 15.

A spokesman for Kushner did not return a request for comment from Insider. Dollman would not provide comment when Insider reached him by phone

"Lara Trump and John Pence resigned from the AMMC board in October 2019 to focus solely on their campaign activities, however, there was never any ethical or legal reason why they could not serve on the board in the first place. John and Lara were not compensated by AMMC for their service as board members," Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh told Insider on Friday.

Parscale declined to comment when reached by Insider on Friday.

Campaign law experts have long accused the Trump team of using a corporate pass-through to hide payments.

The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, led by former Republican FEC Chairman Trevor Potter, filed a civil complaint with the FEC in July accusing the Trump campaign of "disguising" about $170 million worth of campaign spending "by laundering the funds" through AMMC, in large part. Brendan Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center's director of federal reform said the payments to AMMC are a "scheme to evade telling voters even the basics on where its money is really going" and a "shield to disguise the ultimate recipients of its spending." said Brendan Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center's director of federal reform.

As a civil law enforcer, the FEC can issue fines to political committees it determines have broken election laws.

If the federal government suspects a "knowing and willful" violation of election law has occurred, the Department of Justice has the power to open a criminal investigation into a political actor.

While such investigations are relatively uncommon, several former Justice Department and FEC officials previously told Insider that Justice Department officials may already be discreetly investigating Trump's reelection activity. Some of Trump's own campaign leaders even seemed stumped by the AMMC arrangement. Generally, they knew that AMMC was being used to buy pro-Trump TV, radio, and digital advertising and pay for other media.

But they couldn't discern precisely how much each AMMC vendor was keeping for themselves.

The person familiar with AMMC said the rates its vendors charged the Trump campaign were often cheaper than what an outside political firm would have demanded. Using the shell company also allowed Parscale to keep Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle — the girlfriend of first son Donald Trump Jr. — on his payroll, the person familiar said.

The revelations come as Trump's top current and former advisors are trading blame for the president's loss to Democrat Joe Biden after a wild — and historically expensive — election cycle. Supporters of the current campaign team, led by campaign manager Bill Stepien, say that Parscale's lavish spending forced them to cut budgets during the final weeks leading up to Election Day, just when Trump needed money most.

Allies of the Parscale campaign team argue the reelection operation was flush with cash, buoyed by millions of small-dollar donations from hardcore Trump supporters. If Stepien had kept up that pace of spending, they contend, Trump would have defeated Biden.

The Trump campaign ultimately ran a net $7 million surplus, campaign finance records show: As of late November, it reported $18.4 million cash on hand versus $11.3 million in debt.

One Republican close to the White House suggested Stepien and his team may have kept themselves in the dark on purpose, so as not to get on Kushner's bad side.

But a former advisor to Trump's 2016 campaign said it was also possible that Kushner simply withheld information from Stepien's new campaign team.

"Nothing was done without Jared's approval," the former Trump campaign advisor said. "What Stepien doesn't know is because Jared doesn't want him to know."

[In2ition]

If Kushner is corrupt and did something highly illegal, go arrest him and lock him away. Or, wait until Biden is President and do it.

[Indy]

That twitter user clearly doesn't know much about stat analysis. The language he/she uses is all wrong for someone that actually analyzes stats. In addition, they didn't account for any differences between counties based on predicted results for things like % of registered voters by county, or overall population of county, or recency of poll predicting vote, or even indicating which polling results they are using for the data in the graphs (are they even the same polling provider for every dot conducted in the same time frame across the entire country in every county?).

Did you even watch the video? It doesn't seem like you did, since that was all explained in the thread and the video. The analysis was done by DataScience. I don't know what your background is Indy.

https://gofile.io/d/WtDVhe

No, he doesn't. He says he built a prediction, but it wasn't based on actual polling. It was simply based on census data. So he is saying he can predict who will win an election just based on that. So I guess turn out doesn't matter? Even historic turn out? Civil unrest doesn't matter? Change in demographics since the last census in 2010?

He also says that a really good model would be too high 50% of the time, and too low 50% of the time. Then goes to show his model over predicted Biden 47% of the time, and under 53% of the time. So a 6% spread. Then spends the rest of the time saying a 6% increase in "Dominion" counties is a sign of fraud. But his model is off by 6% to begin with. And it is based on 10 year old data.

And statisticians how have "rock solid data" don't have to use hedging language like "If this is fraud, it might look exactly like this."

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a sayin for a reason.

[In2ition]

That twitter user clearly doesn't know much about stat analysis. The language he/she uses is all wrong for someone that actually analyzes stats. In addition, they didn't account for any differences between counties based on predicted results for things like % of registered voters by county, or overall population of county, or recency of poll predicting vote, or even indicating which polling results they are using for the data in the graphs (are they even the same polling provider for every dot conducted in the same time frame across the entire country in every county?).

Did you even watch the video? It doesn't seem like you did, since that was all explained in the thread and the video. The analysis was done by DataScience. I don't know what your background is Indy.

https://gofile.io/d/WtDVhe

No, he doesn't. He says he built a prediction, but it wasn't based on actual polling. It was simply based on census data. So he is saying he can predict who will win an election just based on that. So I guess turn out doesn't matter? Even historic turn out? Civil unrest doesn't matter? Change in demographics since the last census in 2010?

He also says that a really good model would be too high 50% of the time, and too low 50% of the time. Then goes to show his model over predicted Biden 47% of the time, and under 53% of the time. So a 6% spread. Then spends the rest of the time saying a 6% increase in "Dominion" counties is a sign of fraud. But his model is off by 6% to begin with. And it is based on 10 year old data.

And statisticians how have "rock solid data" don't have to use hedging language like "If this is fraud, it might look exactly like this."

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a sayin for a reason.

Now, wouldn't the other counties and other voting machines come up with the same spread? Wouldn't they nearly all have the same type of change in the data? It would seem that it would be convenient for you that it only affects the ones that have Dominion and Hart machines. Wasn't there only civil unrest in quite a number of cities that the data didn't oddly change in? Perhaps you're right though.

[Indy]

The most change would be in bigger or bigger-ish cities. The ones that have grown a lot in the last 10 years. Like Phoenix, Vegas, Atlanta, Dallas/FTW, Orlando, etc. And all of those places saw significant shifts in their voting patterns. And I would bet bigger counties can afford to buy newer voting equipment.

[3rdside]

[ShelC]

He needs to be taken out of the White House, like now. Flynn should in jail, amongst others. They've been attempting a coup for weeks and everyone's like "Oh there he goes again". He doesn't care about corona spreading or Russian hacking. He's watching TV, tweeting, grifting and plotting to stay in power. And the more people around him who go along with this only reinforce his belief the election was stolen.

[Indy]

[3rdside]

Asinine, like the entirety of Trump’s tenure.

Even if one believes in the voter fraud conspiracy, a frankly asinine thought in its own right in light of everything that’s transpired since the election, I struggle to see how anyone could possibly think Trump a good thing for the country, nor think it okay for him to entertain the idea of an illegal coup on the back of said asinine thought, let alone act it out.

The more he rails against reality, isn’t it more obvious that he’s desperately trying to hide something?

[Indy]

Asinine, like the entirety of Trump’s tenure.

Even if one believes in the voter fraud conspiracy, a frankly asinine thought in its own right in light of everything that’s transpired since the election, I struggle to see how anyone could possibly think Trump a good thing for the country, nor think it okay for him to entertain the idea of an illegal coup on the back of said asinine thought, let alone act it out.

The more he rails against reality, isn’t it more obvious that he’s desperately trying to hide something?

yes

[3rdside]

Glad we’re in agreement.

[Nodack]

And as crazy as it sounds I am not ruling out a military coup attempt by Trump. He has been putting unqualified yes people in key places of the Pentagon. Flynn was talking about it and Trump was arguing in the WH with other staff about declaring martial law. What is the punishment for a failed coup attempt?

[ShelC]

Probably nothing, like most everything else involving politicians. Maybe an "investigation" that goes nowhere. Funny how so many flag hugging patriots would support it and are ready for it tho, backing a career grifter and con man who has them convinced he's always the victim and things are always rigged against him. The closer Jan 20th comes, the more desperate he'll become.

In general tho, this rigged election BS seems somewhat similar to the arguments involving corona and masks/social distancing/vaccine- the "how do we really know/do you really know/nobody really knows/I'm asking you", "this person worked with that person at this company so something must be up", "did you see this person talking about this set of data on Twitter/YT/certain news channels and websites" and it mostly ends up being nonsense, but believed by those wanting to believe it.

A large part of the population distrusts professionals, scientists, experts and believes what they want and think that questioning everything and only agreeing with what they want to believe is their right as an American and protected by the 1st amendment. And that's exactly the point of disinformation/misinformation campaigns. You have election security officials, elected Republican officials, Republican appointed judges, data experts, etc all saying it was a secure election and Biden won, but some just don't want to believe it.

FWIW, here's what happens when people are held accountable for their words. We need more of this:

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/lou ... 26652.html

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs aired a segment on Friday that amounted to a fact-checking refutation of claims that he and guests have made about an election tech company Smartmatic and its role in the 2020 presidential election, after the company threatened legal action. Other similar segments will be shown on Justice with Judge Jeanine on Saturday and Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, a Fox News spokesperson said. Lisa Boothe will host Judge Jeanine, as Jeanine Pirro is off for the holidays

Earlier this week, Smartmatic announced that it had threatened legal action against Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network “for publishing false and defamatory statements,” after talking heads on the outlets have pushed claims of election fraud, including unfounded conspiracy theories of rigged voting machine companies.

Smartmatic sent legal demand letters to the networks, arguing that “these organizations could have easily discovered the falsity of the statements and implications made about Smartmatic by investigating their statements before publishing them to millions of viewers and readers.” The company said that its role in the 2020 election was limited to working on Los Angeles County’s publicly owned voting system, even though anchors and guests have advanced claims that it had a much greater role.

On Friday, Dobbs opened a segment by saying that there were “lots of opinions about the integrity of the elections, the irregularities of mail-in voting, of election voting machines and software.” He then went to Eddie Perez, global director of technology development and open standard for the Open Source Election Technology Institute.

In the segment, an unidentified off-camera voice asks Perez, “Have you seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to flip votes anywhere in the U.S. in this election?”

Perez responded, “I have not seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to delete, change, alter anything related to vote tabulation.” He also said that he was not aware of them having any other direct customers with election officials beyond Los Angeles this cycle. He also said that Smartmatic and another company that has been targeted by President Donald Trump, Dominion Voting Systems, are “two completely separate companies.” “The ballots that are cast in the United States are tabulated in the United States,” Perez said, refuting another claim about votes being tabulated overseas.

Smartmatic demanded a retraction “with the same intensity and level of coverage that you used to defame the company in the first place,” including that it be published on multiple occasions and across network platforms.

“Beyond the financial harm you have done to Smartmatic, your disinformation campaign has created personal risk for the men and women who work at the company,” Connolly wrote. “Smartmatic and its employees and management have received countless threats in the wake of your reports.”

A Smartmatic spokesperson declined to comment “due to potential litigation.”

Dominion Voting Systems, meanwhile, has demanded that Powell retract her statements about their voting systems. “You reckless disinformation campaign is predicated on lies that have endangered Dominion’s business and the lives of its employees,” Thomas A. Clare and Megan L. Meier, two attorneys for the company, wrote in their letter.

[Superbone]

It really is despicable. Hit them where it hurts...in their wallets. And shame on these news outlets for undermining our democracy and falsely putting doubts in viewers minds. All in the name of viewership? Shameful.

[AmareIsGod]

Russia is hacking the shit out of our country and government. Trump hasn't said shit. Just barely commented on it as overblown and China's fault.

[Nodack]

Been there done that.