Reply #72: You're right. They can't. It's impossible.

[Igel]

The terms have been set: electronic voting, paper voting, lever-machine voting ... none are reliable, all have been corrupted. Apparently intentional "mistakes" by BOEs, by once- or twice-a-year poll workers. Turn-out fluctuations, lack or abundance of machines ... there's no possible way of answering the objections beyond everybody's reasonable doubt. Any attempt to show that any portion of the process was clean or just troubled by routine mistakes is discounted by yet another possible way the process might have been corrupted. Any single person's reasonable doubt might have been dealt with, but put all the reasonable doubts together and I don't think it's reasonable.

I have no trouble believing a half dozen contradictory things, and I cheerly admit there are parts of my life that nicely accommodate numerous incompatible contradictions, and I'm always on the lookout for more; I just don't expect to be taken seriously when I roll them up into a neat little ball.

Whenever I'm faced with proving something given those conditions, I just reply that the discussion has moved past the realm of testable hypothesis and into the realm of unfalsifiability. And things in that realm there's no arguing about (although one can easily argue whether or not things have become unfalsifiable).