There is no such thing as a voting system where fraud could not exist
Without extremely unlikely premises, yes there is. They had one in Athens, read about it.
"Voting was done by raising hands and the winner was determined by nine “presidents” (proedroi). Athenians were very careful to avoid any possibility of cheating the system."
There is no way you're being serious.
There were much more complicated systems than that. History.com is also an untrustworthy source. I saw them try to imply that since the native American population is (in their view, but not in a reasonable view) lower now than some guys estimate for pre-contact that means (Now - Then) = Number of people violently killed in a genocide.
That's first and last nail when it comes to the credibility of a publisher.
Also, it's not really possible to cheat by raising of the hands. Somebody in a crowded Agora is going to see if you raise two hands and it's obvious when a raised hand is a mirror of the other.
You: you signed a contract and therefore owe me money!
Me: No, I didn't.
You: Prove it!
Me: No
POP QUIZ: Now what?
Now I apply your standard of evidence and say that since you have not proven there was any fraud there was no fraud and all assertions which would be true but for fraud are true. One of those assertions is that you owe me money.
I had no responsibility to prove the absence of a contract so I didn't have to do a damn thing.
So you can assert fraud without a burden of proof?
Our position, for hundred's of years now is that our elections are trustworthy and as we have learned more about how to further secure them we have done so.
...
you do not understand the burden of proof or the basic idea that fraud is not the default position.
If you were alive in 1800 "our position" would be monotheisem (for over a thousand years). If the consensus of previous generations is the default then monotheism would be the default.
You also claimed that ignorance is not "a conclusion". If it's not a conclusion, it must be the default.
How can ignorance of god(s) existence be both a default and not a default?
(Are you seriously still this ignorant on how the burden of proof works?)
I am an agnostic. Ignorance is still, by definition, not a conclusion.
What definition of "conclusion" precludes it?
/Phenomenon X can only be observed by observing correlated phenomenon B, but it does not necessarily produce correlated phenomenon B
/Phenomenon B is not present
//Therefore we cannot know whether phenomenon X is occurring
The last statement is both a conclusion, and an assertion of ignorance.
You're asserting two sperate things as if they are one. They're not. You can conclude that you are ignorant. The conclusion is in regards to your own state of mind. Your ignorance is in regards to the issue at hand.
You did not address the counter example. I will proceed as if ignorance can be a conclusion.
This conversation goes back to you demanding that I produce an audit. I then asked you what conclusion you can draw from me (personally) not providing you an audit, and then had to explain to you why the answer was 'nothing'.
The answer was not "nothing". It was that you did not prove there were audits.
If there were audits there would be evidence of a certain kind produced. That evidence cannot be presented upon request. It is no different from claiming god has a certain nature and then failing to find evidence which that nature would produce.
The difference is that religious types know the game too well and make excuses (which fail none the less). All you've done is say "Well god does perform miracles upon request." and then going quiet when asked to find one of these miracles.
The default position is that something is not true, did not happen, does not exist. <- the epistemological premise which informs the actual burden of proof
The default is that audits did not occur, and that if they did occur their secret results fail to serve the purpose of an audit (establishing trust).
So the fact that we are both just as ignorant about what such an audit would or has produced as we were at the outset of this conversation does not help this conversation at all. Our state of ignorance is not the topic of this thread.
Stop galloping. You made a general epistemological statement: "Ignorance is still, by definition, not a conclusion." You have failed to justify this assertion and did not address a generalized counter-example.
Audits were not directly the context of this chain it was:
Claiming victory because I can't prove there is no fraud is by definition an argument from ignorance.
Which is entirely valid when ignorance is the conclusion.
Ignorance is by definition, not a conclusion.
Since a doctor should absolutely not hide anything about someone's medical state from the person in question any refusal to reveal any information is suspicious.
The situation you describe is suspicious because you defined it as being suspicious.
That sounds like something a ten year old would say. I did not define "suspicious" I gave an example illustrating what makes something suspicious. Drink some coffee.
If someone is "hiding" something from you, they're by definition doing it to conceal the truth.
Correct. Which is suspicious when you are entitled to the truth and not suspicious when you aren't.
The question here is whether one's withholding of the facts is being done to conceal the truth or for other legitimate reasons, such as for example the protection of rights.
If there were legitimate reasons to hide the information that outweighed the legitimate reasons to not hide the information, why did so many states (yes fewer now but that is besides the point) create laws which mandate publication?
"Our position, for hundred's of years now is that our elections are trustworthy"
Things change. The reason they are hiding the information now is because for the first time citizen audits were actually happening. Citizen audits were the reason they were public before.
An analogy would be this: The 1st amendment + civil rights act has always made it explicitly legal for a black man to make a speech in a public park. Suddenly (for whatever reason) a black man actually does make a speech in a public park. Just as suddenly the mayor and council start trying to pass laws against public speaking.
Rights are so easy to respect when no one is exercising them aren't they?
you call it "unconscionable" but the fact is that it is this information that legislators around the country have made public on purpose to fight fraud that is now being hidden.
And you don't think this national frenzy Trump created by declaring every democratic area of the country a cesspool of cheating and the resulting harassment faced by election workers might have something to do with a change in the behavior of election officials?
You don't think a stock market crash would have something to do with banks refusing to allow withdrawals?
Of course it's related, but that doesn't mean we're not being screwed or that the bank/government has the moral/legal right to screw us.
It was my pleasure and duty as an election worker to explain every security measure I was made aware of to anyone who asked. The large majority of the witness/whistleblowers for the 2020 election were election workers.
I was fulfilling my oath to conduct a real election. If I hid anything that was not required by reason and law to be hidden I would have violated that oath.
people wouldn't need to do their own 'amateur' audits if official audits had been done
Define "audit", specifically. Explain exactly what actions you expect should have been taken that weren't and what specific data you expected to be released that wasn't.
Assuming the gaps in election strategy are a constant (could not be fixed) the only way to generate fuzzy quantification of the amount of mail ballot fraud would be a statistically significant canvas.
That means tens of thousands of in-person interviews, two people at least, with body cams, going to addresses where ballots were sent and confirming identities, ballot requests, and ballot returns.
All camera footage should be publicly available along with queryable answers to the questions.
If it's not illegal to knock on a door and ask someone to vote, it certainly isn't illegal to watch footage of someone answering as to whether they voted.
All statistics on ballot counts should also be available and specifically if anyone claimed to have not sent in a ballot at a polling place that should be added to the canvas database. If they chose to try and vote provisionally that should be counted (PBPF).
With a statistically significant sample, the audit would then apply one of the fundamental theorems of statistics: The ratios in the sample population apply to the total population. That is if you knock on 10,000 doors and 500 people said they did not send in mail ballots when mail ballots were received you infer that the total number of fraudulent mail ballots is (500/10,000) * total number of mail ballots. That inference is what the audit would publish and if that number is on the same order of magnitude as the margin of victory then the audit would conclude the election was irreparably tainted and must be redone (with vulnerabilities fixed).
The above is a subset of what a legitimate audit would publish.
What would you know of their best interests?
I know that republican officials who support Trump have no interest in covering up a nationwide effort by democrats to cheat to elect Joe Biden.
The notion that you can divine the interests and beliefs of a person because of a party affiliation statement is hilariously naive. For instance I was a registered democrat when I worked as an election judge. A huge number of jobs required "partisan oversight", so I was paired with a registered republican judge to sign off on things.
You don't know who was "back east" but I can tell you one thing: I don't give a shit what party they claim to belong to. There are stupid people who think blindly trusting so called elections is necessary and patriotic and there are cynical people who don't know if there is a lot of cheating but know that it put them in power so they don't want to change the dynamic.
There is also the little problem of the people who would be blamed being the people whose duty it was presumed to be to audit the on-goings. The good old "The government has investigated itself and found that it did nothing wrong". That applies to so called right-wing officials just as much as anyone else.
