does it really matter if the unlawful changes are considered fraud?

They are UNLAWFUL.

Well I think it does in terms of accuracy if one is going to claim something was fraud, rather than say, claiming it was unlawful actions by politicians.

Also these have rather different implications in terms of possible solutions to the problem.

If the problem is mostly politicians and bureaucrats making unlawful changes, no amount of cracking down on fraudulent ballots will help.

I believe that there was election fraud, but whether or not it was enough to sway the election I don't know.  However, states violating election law based on their secretaries of state's opinions on "safety during a pandemic" DID affect the election.  Democrat groups took advantage of the slack laws and, perhaps as allowed at the time, flooded the system and gave it to FJB.  That was by far the biggest factor in 2020.

I agree on that. I just don’t consider doing something within the law to be fraud in the general meaning of the term.

It also doesn’t seem like “stealing” the election in the sense it is generally meant. But I suppose could be considered theft like taxation is extortion.

No doubt the politicians used every excuse to increase their power and enrich themselves, as they almost always do.

Plus “public health” officials saw this as their big chance to “do something” and “help”.

What is the basis for your claim wrt the design intent?

Honestly I don’t remember as it was probably back in high school. I do not mean to imply that is it’s only design criterion.

That is a good question of whether a much smaller number of fraudulent votes could have affected the electoral college outcome is a good one.

I believe the Heartland Institute study mentioned in this other thread http://www.pilotspin.com/index.php?topic=7426.0 tried to address that. Has anyone actually read that study and thinks it is worth looking more carefully at?

    Add to the list the states that allowed state SoS and judges to rewrite election allows outside of the legislative to allow mass mail in voting with no signature verification, and no cutoff dates.

I think these changes likely had an affect on the outcome overall as the mail-in voters are much more leftist.

I don't consider that outright fraud, which usually means things like fake ballots for dead people, duplicate ballots, etc. Do you count that as fraud?

Do you consider it a form of "stealing" the election?
Or rather a form of cheating?

I consider it dirty politics as usual.

Yes. A complete redo of the 2020 election as soon as possible, at the time, using only paper ballots, requiring ID, and one-day counting would have been ideal but of course doesn’t exist. It could still be done, but has not been and here we are facing another election with most of the cheat mechanisms still in place.

Well, being able to name something that is at least theoretically possible means that is not a logically non-falsifiable belief. That means it is then possible to begin to consider issues like how to objectively consider the totality of the evidence and what the evidence is. Key questions for a specific proposition are what standard of evidence should be used to support the claim and how the different types of evidence are weighed. An important item to note is that it is possible for a belief to be effectively non-falsifiable if one won't consider any evidence that can be practically obtained or if one non-objectively weighs evidence grossly disproportionately.

So I started to consider what the evidence was with the claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and at first thought it might be one of those cases where things are so close that one can't even with all the evidence theoretically know a conclusion to say greater than 95% certainty.

So the first thing I went to look for was the actual popular vote counts as reported. It seems like Joe Biden won by over 7M votes, or 5.1%. (https://www.cookpolitical.com/2020-national-popular-vote-tracker). So it really isn't a case of an inherent level of statistical uncertainty causing the confusion here. Instead one has to find evidence for some process that would result in over 7M false votes.

I could be convinced the 2020 election was not stolen if every deposition, testimonial, video, election official statement, voting machine data and ballot were unearthed and examined with extreme focus and with bipartisan observers documenting each finding.

You do know that pretty close to the last item mentioned, the ballot examinations, was performed in Maricopa County? While that did uncover evidence of troublesome counting, admission of ballots, etc. it failed to show any good evidence that the results on the improper ballots were so biased that including them or excluding them would significantly impact the choice of electors in AZ. This is actually evidence which suggests that whatever fraud may have present did not affect the outcome of the election. That is just one piece of evidence of course.

Well Rush, at least you are open about your non-falsifiable belief!