"evidence provides a compelling justification for mounting an investigation"
Lurid Archive and Nobody's Girl: that was precisely my point. Obviously if the real-world evidence (as opposed to the stand-up-in-court kind) was unclear, there'd be no point spending millions investigating. The real world evidence is overwhelming. The chance that it's wrong is on the order of your fingerprints actually belonging to someone else. (An excellent example!) Investigations are more than warranted. And, interestingly enough, as Nobody's Girl's links show, they have been actively stymied and sabotaged.
The other difficulty with understanding the scale of this thing is its distributed nature. It's like all of us with our little CO2-belching cars. My little Honda, by itself, does (almost) nothing, but all together, excess CO2 could wreck the planet. In the same way, each specific instance of problems--twelve votes here, five hundred there--aren't going to change the course of the election. Each type of fraud varied, too. Sometimes black people were intimidated from voting, sometimes votes were spoiled, sometimes the machines didn't work, and so on through about fifteen separate types of problems. But all the problems tended to have the same result, just as all cars spew CO2, not oxygen. The law has no way to deal with additive effects, whether it's global warming or stolen elections. But it's still essential to stop them, which is why real evidence matters, and court evidence is secondary.
The problem is understanding how all this could happen. I've been so puzzled by this that I wrote a post thinking about it, the gist of it being:
"
I think the hardest part about all this is how thousands, or at least hundreds, of people could work together without central instructions. In some cases there are clear indications of coordination, but there are also lots of cases where stuff just seemed to happen. Those are the ones that cause the disbelief problem.
But think about it. Thousands of people do the same things without central direction all the time. If they didn't, advertising would be useless. If they didn't, discrimination wouldn't be a problem. All that's needed for concerted action is a shared frame of reference.
Well, the Republican party recently has morphed into the party of winners. Winning is everything. Anything goes. ... So, if anything goes, and winning is everything, how hard is it to see that committed lineworkers might all bend the rules in the same direction? " |
