
28M Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections - lordvon
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_million_mail-in_ballots_went_missing_in_last_four_elections_143033.html
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ksaj
I'm skeptical of any and all articles like this that link to 404 pages as
their proof. Maybe an innocent error. Maybe a sham. Given the way the article
is written, and its broken links, I really doubt this is anything more than
propaganda. One would expect the information to be available elsewhere.

It's also important to note that they also have an article rebutting the one
posted here.
[https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/06/there_...](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/06/there_were_not_28_million_missing_mail-
in_ballots_143123.html)

Their definition of "real clear" doesn't really match mine, but at least the
second article is clear about why the first one is untrue. There is clearly a
demographic that will ignore their self-rebuttal and believe the first one as
gospel.

~~~
lordvon
Looks like the link is broken in the article, but looks like it is this one:
[https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/Mail-
Voting-2012_2018-...](https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/Mail-
Voting-2012_2018-1P.pdf)

That's quite a jump from 'broken link' => 'must be propaganda'.

Rebuttals should be analyzed just like the target of the rebuttal. Just as you
say the original article should not be taken as gospel, the rebuttal should
not be taken as gospel either. The author's accounting of the 28M votes breaks
down into 2 categories:

1\. 12M voluntarily not cast from the 3 states that auto-send to every
registered voter. The author arrives at this calculation by taking an average
vote percentage of those states, and applying it to the mail ballots. You
can't just apply general vote rate to the mail ballots, then further assume
the EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 12M remaining vote was due to people just not
bothering to vote. Baked into the author's calculation is that none of the
mail ballots in those 3 states could have been involved in fraud...

2\. 16M (building on the previous flawed calculation) the author just assumes
were people who manually requested the mail ballot, but just decided not to
send it in. Why? because there were a total 120M mail ballots sent and 16M /
120M amounts to 13% not voting, which is way lower than general population 50%
not voting. This is an assertion with no evidence, and we would expect the
percentage of people who do not vote when they MANUALLY request a mail ballot
to be much lower anyways. Even a fraction of 16M should raise eyebrows.

So as I understand it, the author's calculations are very hand-wavy and
unjustified. But you say this is a 'clear' rebuttal. Can you share how you
interpreted the article?

