Thread by @TheMattBeebe

Anyone else having challenging discussions w/ friends & family about whether concerns about voter fraud are legitimate? Here are some tips. Feel free to add your own:
FIRST, stop w/ the claims of back doors & statistical analysis & midnight Biden increases. You're losing them
1/

I won't argue here whether those claims are true except to say that I'm not persuaded & I've explained why elsewhere. UNDERSTAND your skeptical family & friends won't be either. Just stop.
They intuitively know fraud "probably" occurred, but they can't fathom the scope.
2/

Start with: Every state has a different approach for absentee ballots. Unless they're in PA, NV, WI, or MI (or have independently looked into this), they have NO IDEA how badly these states have bungled things. The basic controls that we intuitively expect to be there weren't!
3/

Most voters in "normal" states would be astounded at what elections officials in those contested states allowed.
Sure, we all understand the basics: fill out your ballot, seal it, affix a signature to it & ensure it gets dropped in a mailbox or ballot box for secure delivery
4/

We expect that the ballot will be subject to some level of scrutiny to ensure it is valid, and we accept there is some inherent risk that it might get tossed for a technicality. If we don't like those standards or don't want to take that risk, we vote in person.
5/

We would also expect that the scrutiny applied to our ballot would be applied equally to everyone else's ballot, and if there was a way that our non-conforming ballot could be legally corrected, we would expect that we would have the same chance as everyone else to do so
6/

We would also expect that our signature on the certification/envelope would be examined to ensure it was really us casting the ballot before it could be tabulated.
7/

We would expect a mechanism to exist that would keep a given voter from getting multiple ballots. Heck, most of us assume you wouldn't even get a ballot unless you explicitly requested one. (Some states actually do auto-send ballots - yikes!)
8/

Certainly if we lived in a state that required you to jump through some hoops to request a ballot, we would expect there to be a mechanism to ensure ballots didn't get sent out without a valid request from the voter who jumped through those hoops & only one got sent.
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We would also likely expect that our ballots would be handled securely, and activists working through their voter lists to encourage voting would be prohibited from helping people fill out their ballot or collecting them to "mail them for you".
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We'd also expect there to be a transparent process that allowed supervision of the verifying, opening, and tabulating of the ballot as a check and balance against potential fraud and to insulate against baseless claims of fraud.
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We also might expect that if some circumstance caused our ballot to be damaged so it couldn't be automatically read, but our intent was clear, that transcribing that ballot to a new, blank ballot would be carefully monitored in a very precise and controlled way.
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We would also expect that there is a mechanism that would stop you from casting a ballot on election day if you had previously requested or submitted an absentee ballot.
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And we'd certainly expect there to be a mechanism to ensure that only registered voters are allowed to cast a single ballot and anyone who already voted before election day, or wasn't on the voter rolls would be turned away or potentially offered a provisional ballot.
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And we'd also expect that if a voter casts a provisional ballot because there is something wrong with the voter roll and they're legally allowed to "prove-up" the deficiency that they would be required to do so within some set of rules before their vote could be counted.
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And we'd also expect that the process used after polls closed to handle, canvas, and tabulate was a very controlled, precise, and transparent process as proscribed by applicable law and observed by witnesses of both major parties or candidate representatives.
16/

Here's the problem: all of those expectations are reasonable & most people expect this is what occurs. EXCEPT NOT A SINGLE ONE of those expectations was consistently applied across the contested jurisdictions. Many failed to ensure most of them. The implication is clear...
17/

Once you find common ground on how egregious it is to have ANY of those expectations break down, you can start showing them the volumes of evidence showing just how widely each one was violated.
But get them to agree to the measurement criteria first.
The rest is easy.
18/18