News today

[ILisBest]

No surprise

 

[ILisBest]

 

[ILisBest]

 

[ILisBest]

 

[rillaman]

Stories like this have no impact on progressives. Men like Enes Kanter are the real problem.

 

[stoneaxe27]

No surprise

Only fools believe O'Keefe. He is a convicted fraudster. Even his pimp undercover film was staged.

 

[stoneaxe27]

That is an outrage! Who was the U.S. President in 2018?

 

[dtrain79]

Do you think that's actually why Bolsonaro is in jail? (He attempted something of a coup after losing to Lula, who in bemusing fashion had been imprisoned by Bolsonaro.)

How are you folks such suckers that you think the far right wing Twitter takes on USAid and South American elections are accurate? You are citing a story below the USAid spending in Brazil went up in 2019 when Bolsonaro was in power. Who was the President from 2019-early 2021?

The truth is, South America has moved right because the left is generally not very good at solving problems, and so voters down there are probably not impressed by it. The issue is that the populist right hasn't been very good at solving problems either (with some exceptions, as populist right wing parties tend to be better on some matters ala crime). Of course, some of the South American right wing governments aren't populists (Milei in Argentina is basically a libertarian nationalist, Chile has mostly been governed by a pretty reasonable right wing, and so on). That said, USAid or no USAid, the right-leaning governments will have to govern effectively to stay in power, so at some point the South American left will have a resurgence that has nothing to do with USAid.

I wish the best for our South American neighbors. I suspect their right wing governments will be better than the left wing ones, but that ultimately the death of USAid won't save them if the public finds their own governance lacking.

 

[dtrain79]

My problem when discussing election fraud and voter suppression (one an obsession of the right and the other the left) isn't that they've never happened but in the grand scheme, they are almost irrelevant. Yeah, I suspect that, out of 165M or so votes in 2024, we had a few thousand votes cast that shouldn't have been. And that wasn't enough to matter in a single state. The same goes for voter suppression, there are handfuls of voters here and there who run into some obstacle that causes them to miss an election/not vote/whatever. But it's very limited.

The system is generally well run and fair. There are lots of fraud checks because we largely require a separate voter registration (there are state exceptions to this, a few allow "day of" registration). I do think universal voter ID is a positive because it would reduce the limited chance of fraud even further, and increase confidence in the system. But it wouldn't change much at all in terms of the actual vote totals, which reflect the popular will in that election.