“. Pretending that voter fraud cost the election is not part of reality.” “Many of the claims in this piece have been debunked”
Can you provide me with evidence that this has been debunked? I’m all ears.
No.
I'm lazy at this point. You can actually research the pieces you post, or you can just assume they are correct, ignore people who warn you otherwise, and go on with your life.
I've been looking for concrete examples of voter fraud to write about. They exist, but most of the overblown statements have been debunked. It isn't trivial to find this, but doing so will be a good exercise. Sometimes it is hard to sort through the google searches to get to the facts, especially when a meme has taken hold, because everybody with a blog (which is what, like a million people) all breathlessly post the same mistaken information as if they are some how adding value to the discussion.
I could have picked on almost a dozen threads posted, don't feel like I singled your post out, it was just where I was reading when I decided to vent.
BTW, one thing that makes it hard to find evidence debunking claims is that, when the claims have no basis in fact, nobody will be reporting "facts" that debunk it, because that would be boring. A reporter isn't going to write a story about how some blogger thinks there was 141% turnout.
To show how hard this really is, I focused on a specific claim, about a precinct in Richmond which voted all for Obama. Since Virginia has a great voter information web site, it made it a little easier. I found the precinct, and then went back over the past 5 elections to see how it voted. There was a redistricting, so I had to check that the precinct didn't change all that much.
I found that there were rarely any republican voters in that precinct. Romney did particularly bad, but not "way outside the general performance of the precinct" bad.
I couldn't do this for precincts in Philidelphia, because I can't find an online source of precinct-level information, although I believe it exists somewhere.
I did the same thing for some Ohio counties mentioned, and found the same results. I also did an analysis of Ohio and found that the number of precincts that had 10 or fewer republicans in 2012 was about the same as the number in 2008.
BTW, note that most of the complaints here are statistical, and we aren't talking about the cases where we think illegals might have voted, or that people might be registered in more than one place. Those are pretty much impossible to "debunk", because when there are NO prosecutions, those making the claim will say that nobody cared to look into it.
Assuming you think that obvious voter fraud cost SOMEONE an election somewhere, and you have a specific race you would like me to comment on, respond with it, and I'll do my best to do some research on that race, and tell you what I learn.
And while I research, I'd hope that you would think about, and answer, the question -- why is that politician you are looking at NOT fighting the results, if you are so certain they should have won?