What do you make of this?

Why? What on earth was wrong with the election? Just consider the facts. For months before the November vote, Biden was ahead of Trump in just about any opinion poll you choose to mention. The lead was consistent and people were forecasting a massive win for Biden, based on where he appeared to be in the lead. When the results were announced, they were nothing like as good for the Democrats as had been forecast. It was hoped that they might even win Florida and Texas, as well as scoring important gains in both Houses of Congress. That did not happen. Given those facts, why on earth should anyone think that the Democrats - by some means that has never been determined - rigged the vote? If you are going to fix an election, would you not end up with results that were better than forecast, not worse? This is what I have never been able to understand about the "rigged election" argument. Maybe you could enlighten me?

@indexer I do not trust polls, first-off. You will remember that polls had Hilary winning by a landslide with better than a 90% chance of winning the presidency. Of course that did not happen, and we later saw that the inner working of polls often heavily weight democrats over republicans, thereby favoring democrats by quite a lot. There are also the questions of how so many otherwise red states suddenly turned blue. There are questions about the mail in ballots. There are questions about the turnout. There are questions about the massive high number of votes in total. As for the election in general, and the possibility of rigging it, you have to consider that there is more than one element here wishing for a particular outcome. There is, of course, the deep state, which was challenged by Trump, which they wished to protect come hell or high water because that's where the real power is. There is also all of the massive efforts by the democrats to remove the president since day one. There was much at stake for them, and they simply could not accept the results, and so this offered them a great incentive to "try something different this time." Look, as I have said many times before, the evidence is not clear here. BUT we need to look into it at least. Thinking minds have to question this election as much as anyone would question a guy in another part of the world that claims he won 100% of the vote. I have also said we need to proceed as though nothing nefarious happened here, but also not give up trying to find anything that there is to find. If we find nothing at all, so be it. But I think to not ask questions is as dangerous as rigging an election. If the electoral system fails, the whole country loses.

@porwest My understanding was that there have been numerous attempts to find evidence of fraud, and none have been successful. Trump asked Georgia to look very carefully at signatures on mail-in ballots, claiming that there were thousands of cases of fraud - they did so, and found only a handful of questionable votes. There have been other cases of close checks being made, with none of them revealing anything significant. Of course there were many more mail-in votes this time - there's a pandemic of Covid-19, and people were encouraged to vote from home if they could, to avoid personal contact in polling stations. Some states have relied on mail-in voting for many years and reported no problems with the integrity of the system. Notions of thousands of votes suddenly appearing from nowhere are simply nonsense - nobody has produced any evidence that this happened - the systems are as reliable as one would expect in a modern western democracy. High turnout? No surprise there, given the high levels both of support for and detestation of the current President. Trump claims credit for a massive vote in his favour - he cannot have it both ways by saying that an even larger vote for his opponent is in itself suspicious. As for states changing their allegiance, there are three points worth noting: 1. This is what happens at every election. Power changes hands because people change their minds about which side to support. Those states could just as easily swing back again next time round. 2. In a number of states, people voted to support their sitting Republican senators and representatives while also voting for Joe Biden. The states did not suddenly "turn blue" - people simply expressed their view about whether to give the President a second term while retaining their traditional political preference. 3. There is evidence of population changes in a number of states that affect the balance as between - for example - white and black voters. Georgia is a case in point, where the black population, which tends to vote Democrat rather than Republican - has been increasing its proportion of the electorate. As black people come to realise that their vote can actually make a difference in their communities, turnout among black voters will tend to increase over time.