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asymmetricinfo's profile
Megan McArdle
Megan McArdle
Megan McArdle
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@asymmetricinfo

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Megan McArdleVerified account

@asymmetricinfo

Columnist at the Washington Post. Opinions my own. Email me: Megan.McArdle -at- http://washpost.com  Buy my book, The Up Side of Down http://amzn.to/1a3i2tK 

Washington, DC
Joined September 2008

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    Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

    Okay, all of you folks yelling IF YOU THINK ISOLATED CASES OF FRAUD OCCUR, WHY ARE YOU SO SANGUINE? HOW ARE YOU COMFORTABLE WITH FRAUD? I need to tell you guys a story. About ballpoint pens.

    9:10 AM - 11 Nov 2020
    • 497 Retweets
    • 1,523 Likes
    • Titus Groen Andre Tarteletter Stochastic Epicurean Stell Greg Gransden Vikram Bath1 Maddison Reid Robin Phillips Jason Rankin
    90 replies 497 retweets 1,523 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        Readers of my columns have heard this one before. Sorry. Bear with me.

        3 replies 3 retweets 160 likes
        Show this thread
      3. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        So when I was just a young slip of a girl, making my way in the Big City by doing temp work, I got a multi-week gig at a moderately sized office that was, I infer, having some financial problems.

        2 replies 5 retweets 180 likes
        Show this thread
      4. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        I infer this because they decided to save money by cracking down on office supply expenditures. No more would profligate use of file folders burden the corporate exchequer! No more would pilfering employees get away with bringing home their office-provided Bic ballpoint pens!

        2 replies 5 retweets 218 likes
        Show this thread
      5. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        Upon reporting to work, I was given a ballpoint pen and cautioned that in order to get another, I would have to turn in one (1) malfunctioning or empty pen. This rule went quite a ways up the hierarchy, though there were dark rumors that executives got as many pens as they liked

        3 replies 7 retweets 293 likes
        Show this thread
      6. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        I was fortunate to immediately fall in with virtuous company; the girl who had the desk nearest mine warned me that I needed to secure my pen. Ideally by etching my name on it, and locking it in my desk should I desire to, say, use the facilities.

        4 replies 6 retweets 201 likes
        Show this thread
      7. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        It goes without saying that I had to take my pen home with me at night; the desk locks were not particularly hard to pick, and if I were so foolish as to leave my Bic pen, with a retail value of $0.59 hard US currency, in a drawer, it would not be there when I returned.

        5 replies 6 retweets 231 likes
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      8. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        Because, of course, shortly after the rule went down, someone lost their pen. So they stole someone else's pen. Soon it seemed large parts of every day were devoted to getting your hands on a pen to replace the one you'd just had stolen, or securing your pen against such theft

        6 replies 10 retweets 279 likes
        Show this thread
      9. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        Not that it was just the pens, of course. Pencils were also a big item, file folders, notepads, and so forth The cost of wasted hours must have been staggering, as was the profound mistrust it sowed between employees who could soon see each other as little but stationary bandits

        15 replies 13 retweets 494 likes
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      10. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        (to the three economists who got the joke in the previous tweet: hope you enjoyed it)

        16 replies 2 retweets 434 likes
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      11. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        The point being: the optimal level of fraud is never zero. At some point, it's more costly to wring out those last few instances than to just accept that yes, sometimes people steal your pens. Or vote their demented grandmother's absentee ballot.

        10 replies 51 retweets 707 likes
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      12. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        And the reason we don't worry is that it's not systematic. You should worry about people stealing pallets of office supplies, not individual notepads. And similarly, individuals deciding to vote for grandma doesn't affect outcomes as long as people in both parties do it.

        13 replies 24 retweets 484 likes
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      13. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        What matters is wholesale fraud: parties racking up tens or hundreds of thousands of nonexistent ballots. And while one hesitates to say "impossible", that's pretty damn close in this age of modern record-keeping.

        20 replies 22 retweets 465 likes
        Show this thread
      14. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        There may be a reason that the last of the old party machines, with their legendary graveyard votes, died at the dawn of the computer age.

        5 replies 10 retweets 315 likes
        Show this thread
      15. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        So yeah, I'm sure you'll find six ballots here or twenty there that seem to have been cast for people who didn't request them. That wouldn't change the outcome of any of these races, particularly since you're only looking for Dems who did it (and I guaranteed Republicans did too)

        10 replies 22 retweets 456 likes
        Show this thread
      16. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        Is it right? No. Shame on you! But that's not why Trump lost. And there is no system that can prevent every single such case. I could probably vote on my mother, my sister, or my Dad's driver's license, if the poll watchers weren't super careful.

        6 replies 8 retweets 352 likes
        Show this thread
      17. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        And the costs of such a system would be enormous--exactly the kind of mass, scary, this-is-what-they-use-to-take-our-guns database that normally freaks conservatives out.

        7 replies 12 retweets 386 likes
        Show this thread
      18. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        Come to think of it, guns are a good example here: we could virtually eliminate gun crime by banning guns and going house to house to grab them. We'd save a whole lot of lives that way, prevent a lot of disability & fatherless kids. But the costs to liberty aren't worth it.

        37 replies 11 retweets 304 likes
        Show this thread
      19. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        Anyway, to go back a few tweets and resume my earlier point: it's not enough to think maybe there was some idiosyncratic small-scale ballot theft. You need a large, systematic theft, the voting equivalent of "stealing pallets and pallets of pens"

        8 replies 7 retweets 264 likes
        Show this thread
      20. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        As my colleague @henryolsenEPPC has laid out here, it's not just that we have no evidence that this kind of systematic fraud happened, we have affirmative reason to think that it didn't in, for example, Philadelphia.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/10/we-can-be-confident-trump-voter-fraud-claims-are-baloney/ …

        17 replies 41 retweets 391 likes
        Show this thread
      21. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        If there was fraud, we'd expect it to be more consistently for Democrats, rather than, for example, INCREASING Trump's 2016 margin in Philadelphia. We'd expect to see it in cities rather than suburbs. We'd expect turnout to rise in cities, but not rural areas.

        12 replies 15 retweets 279 likes
        Show this thread
      22. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        But finally, the whole argument that mail-in balloting allowed rampant fraud doesn't actually make a great deal of sense. Okay, yes, many ballots went to people who no longer live at that address. But this happened across the state. How does the party get their hands on them?

        40 replies 12 retweets 251 likes
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      23. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        Does the party have better information on who lives where than the secretary of state? How does the party predict who won't vote? How do they get the ballots--which are in private homes--without ever, once, accidentally asking a Republican to help them out?

        10 replies 9 retweets 269 likes
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      24. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        Also, if this happened, it will be super easy to prove: get a list of all the absentee voters, and start calling them.

        5 replies 5 retweets 186 likes
        Show this thread
      25. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        It seems somewhat telling that for all the online speculation about ABSOLUTELY RAMPANT FRAUD, Republicans are trawling with huge rewards for evidence then showing up in court to argue about whether to count a few thousand PA ballots that arrived after the statutory deadline.

        5 replies 23 retweets 322 likes
        Show this thread
      26. Megan McArdle‏Verified account @asymmetricinfo 11 Nov 2020

        Anyway, that's why I can acknowledge that someone, somewhere, probably voted dear departed Grandma's ballot (either the way grandma would have wanted, or in a giant [expletive deleted] to the hideous old bag) without needing to put the FBI on Defcon 1. In case you were wondering.

        42 replies 14 retweets 389 likes
        Show this thread
      27. End of conversation

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