Originally Posted By: sini
“You do not have sufficient evidence that no shenanigans happened that influenced the outcome of the election”.

I have sufficient evidence: A) The Federal Election Commission endorsed tally of United States Electoral College is in, and it is 332 Obama to 206 Romney. These are official results; they are not disputed, are not in process of counting/recounting, are not being challenged in courts. B) Romney, an official GOP leader and the GOP presidential campaign nominee, conceded and acknowledged Democratic victory.

This is all evidence I need to be absolutely justified beyond any reasonable doubt that US 2012 election legitimately resulted in the victory for Democrats/Obama.

“You will undoubtedly claim that you cannot prove a negative, which is true but irrelevant here because you can create a strong case in this context - at least hypothetically.”

You are absolutely right that I will claim “you cannot prove a negative”, but you are unjustified in discounting it as irrelevant. Your line of reasoning – paraphrasing: “there is no strong evidence to suggest that there wasn’t any tampering occurred, hence tampering did occur and it did determined elections outcome as a result election was stolen” is a fallacious for following reasons. First, you are applying unreasonable standard of having evidence of no tampering. How would such evidence, aside from existence of undisputed official tally, look like? Second, you are asserting that magnitude of tampering was significant enough to change the outcome of historically not close (332 v 206) election. If we extend this reasoning to other, much closer, elections then we can conclude that most US elections were won because of tampering. I hope you’d agree that such result is an absurd conclusion. Third, this is formally invalid argument.

“The point is, you are calling those who do not hold to your biased and uninformed preconceptions delusional. Which is something I find rather silly.”

In this case delusional is a rhetorical device. When I say: “Delusional knuckle-draggers emerged from the stygian depths of right-wing fever swamps to beget yet another tinfoil conspiracy” I ‘formally’ mean: “You have started with a false premise when you claim elections were stolen.” Later doesn’t quite have the same zing to it as former, and as you probably well aware I am a huge fan of thinly veiled insults.

As to your quoted statement – you’ve yet to demonstrate “uninformed” or “biased” in context of our argument. I’m not the one to complain about abuse, but you have to keep in mind that pure abuse and complaining is not an argument.

“So, no - if you think the election was influenced - you are not delusional. That is my point. You may not be correct to say the election was influenced, but given the overall electoral conditions, you may be correct.”

First, the article I presented, or any of my follow-up posts at no point claimed to present evidence that there was no “shenanigans” present in 2012 election. As we discussed above, such evidence does not, could not exist.

Second, original discussion was very specifically worded to talk about stolen/not stolen election results. It didn’t concern with some hypothetical level of shenanigans that would not result in changing the outcome of elections, it was specifically worded (and used ACORN as an example) to state that level of shenanigans was sufficiently large to determine the outcome of 2012 elections.

Third, by further guarding/weakening your premise to paraphrase: “maybe some tampering, but not enough to change the outcome” you no longer oppose my stated argument. Again, my argument was never “there is no shenanigans”, I don’t know that; my argument was that “believing that there was so much shenanigans that it determined the outcome of otherwise not close election is delusional” and now you argued yourself into a corner where you do not strictly oppose my argument.

“Even polls were split on who would win. Saying that a poll you favored was obviously right because it favored Obama and Obama won is circular logic in this case.”

First, you are attacking a straw man. This is first time polls were mentioned in this argument and you brought it up. Second, polls, especially partisan ones, are at best weakly predictive. If polls is your justification for claiming shenanigans (you have yet to present any other), then you are not simply unjustified by alluding to some “hypothetical”, you are demonstrably wrong in asserting “shenanigans” solely based on poll information going in. You and Karl Rove and 49% of GOP voters.


Your first premise is false. If the type of shenanigans possible due to poor security outlined by myself and numerous State Audits and Security Analysts was readily detectable - then they would by definition no longer be security risks.

Your second assertion is silly semantics, as stated previously you were wording your disdain much too strongly. Yes if you cite ACORN specifically, then it becomes ridiculous - however questioning the general validity of our process in the age of unsecured electronic voting is rational.

Third: you are just playing meaningless word games here and moving goalposts. You need to parse what I said in relation to stated intent relative to your stated assertions. Not going to waste time correcting your deliberate misinterpretations. I restated for clarity - which you have ignored because you did not want clarity, you wanted to dodge and weave.

As to you last statement block - see my response to Jet. Apparently somehow you have not grasped that concept yet. The induction of poll was not to be predictive, it is a measure of what the public will swallow. IE: Had the result been outside mainstream polling values, people would scrutinize the results and be less likely to accept an outcome. Shenanigans only work when the final result still falls into the real of what people expect to see. So your entire assertion here is invalid, because your the one straw manning it up - never used polls as a justification for shenanigans, thats your assumption due to either your own dogma or a lack of reading comprehension.

For who could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him? - John Locke (2nd Treatise, sect 57)