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Here's my larger point - you can get the fix in if things are close:

    The race between Kennedy and Nixon had been close all fall. The candidates were tied in a late August Gallup poll, and Kennedy took a three-point lead after his historic TV debate performances. But Nixon gained momentum heading into Election Day, and he cut Kennedy’s lead to one percentage point in a poll taken four days before the election.

    Kennedy defeated Nixon when votes were finally counted in the Electoral College, by a margin of 303 to 219. But in the popular vote, Kennedy won by just 112,000 votes out of 68 million cast, or a margin on 0.2 percent.

    So arguments persist to this day about vote-counting in two states, specifically Illinois (where Kennedy won by 9,000 votes) and Texas (where Kennedy won by 46,000 votes). If Nixon had won those two states, he would have defeated Kennedy by two votes in the Electoral College.

    That fact wasn’t lost on Nixon’s supporters, who urged the candidate to contest the results. At the time, Kennedy was also leading in the critical state of California, which was Nixon’s home state. But a count of absentee ballots gave Nixon the state several weeks later, after he conceded it to Kennedy.

    In Illinois, there were rampant rumors that Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley used his political machine to stuff the ballot box in Cook County. Democrats charged the GOP with similar tactics in southern Illinois. Down in Texas, there were similar claims about the influence of Kennedy’s running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, over that state’s election.

    On Wednesday afternoon, November 9, 1960, Nixon officially conceded the election to Kennedy. He told his friend, journalist Earl Mazo, that “our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.” (Mazo had written a series of articles about voter fraud after the 1960 election, which he stopped at Nixon’s request.)

When you've got things close, you can tip the scales a little. When you don't know what's going on, you can tip the scales a little. None of the prognosticating class predicted Trump - they all tracked it badly. We have all sorts of bald-faced evidence of the Russians influencing the election - I mean, they raided the DNC and the RNC ran their shit in their TV commercials. But even then, the Russians didn't expect to win or they wouldn't have been so sloppy. They just expected to fuck shit up a little.

But that's if things are close. Zelensky won with 73% of the vote. Somebody described the Chinese shock at the Hong Kong elections yesterday being the equivalent of "Dewey Defeats Truman" if Truman won 90% of the votes. Guaranteed they had some sort of fix on but it wasn't enough.

As far as voting integrity, I don't think you need to overthink it. Up here we vote entirely by mail. it's stunningly drama-free - even when there's shit-tons of drama. I can look myself up in the voter record and see every ballot I've submitted since 2015 (eleven elections, by the way). So while I can be SUPER PISSED at how stupid some people can be, I have no doubts that their stupidity is legitimately represented. And I say this as someone who has worked on projects that I KNOW were passed by fraudulent ballot measures.

    While I'm interrogating you, do you think a 2020 Trump win would be the end of America/democracy, or just the GOP?

I think the world is largely unchanged for the overwhelming majority of native-born Americans and will continue to be that way. I think that the people fighting for change are fighting for change they can use and the people fighting for border walls and locking up children and all the rest of it are fighting for their preferences. I think the Trump presidency has made an extremely narrow section of America happy, a broader section deeply outraged and a big yellow pac-man of America vaguely pleased or vaguely dissatisfied.

According to Pew, a "prolific political tweeter" is someone who expresses ten political opinions on Twitter in a year.

And I mean, what does another four years of Trump look like? look at this shit. We're living in the era where a Scaramucci is a unit of measure. I'll bet there are AirBnBs in DC that have had lower turnover than the White House. What, exactly, are they going to do? Who is going to do it? We've seen clearly that Stephen Miller's idea of policy is "write angry emails to Breitbart" and "come up with Dr. Evil policies and let the courts squash them." The lasting damage the Trump white house has done has been in staffing, continuity and trust. Take away the judges the Federalist Society has slammed through and the Trump administration hasn't actively done anything substantive other than approve Paul Ryan's tax cuts.

Don't get me wrong - it's a dumpster fire. It's a catastrophe. But their biggest changes have been through omission, not through action.