Reply #125: Maybe I can take it more slowly, not sure if I can manage less vehemence.

[eomer]

The problem with the argument is that it terribly oversimplifies how things work. It imagines that fraud perps only have to decide which races they wish to steal and then they just pull an easy trigger and the election is stolen just the way they would like. It is sort of the Ronco appliance for election fraud -- it slices, it dices, it steals elections at the push of a button.

Reality, OTOH, is more complicated. There are myriad possible fact patterns involved in the implementation of an election fraud mechanism. To name just a couple: perhaps they needed one or more assets in particular positions in order to install a cheat and didn't have those assets in place in VA or MT. Or maybe there actually was a cheat installed in VA and/or MT but it didn't get installed on enough machines due to who knows what developments on the ground and therefore didn't steal enough votes. Even Chloe on 24, who can normally hack into any DOD or NSA super secret system in "just one more minute, Jack", is occasionally unable to get in due to some unexpected new countermeasure, someone looking over her shoulder at just the wrong moment, or some new director of CTU who gets suspicious and lowers her access rights.

With regard to the word "likely", Doug may be using that word but he is not staying true to its meaning. In the election cycles from 2000 to present there have been thousands of federal races. Doug is saying, if I understand him correctly, that he thinks that likely not one of those races has been hacked. So he is attaching the word "likely" but in reality is pushing the conclusion to the extreme. If he were saying that "likely most of the races were not hacked" or "likely a relatively small percentage of the races were hacked" or some such then he would have a more tenable position. But to go from 2 races that we assume (but don't really know) weren't hacked and then to extrapolate that "likely not one of the thousands of races over 4 election cycles was hacked" is truly a stretch.

Maybe my paraphrase doesn't capture what Doug wanted to say but that's the way I hear it. Do you think he means "not one" race was hacked out of thousands or something less extreme than that? (Or, of course, Doug is welcome to jump in and clarify).