I've been lurking on some right-wing websites, hoping to get a view outside my bubble. I was especially curious about voter fraud. There are some specific things that keep coming up—maybe the fact that I don't know what those things are means I'm living in ignorant bliss? Well, so far, not so much. Case in point:

I thought I'd been led to evidence of voter fraud by the case of Scott Foval. In a hidden-camera video, he revealed that he was a dirty-tricks man for the Democrats. He talked about disrupting events and voter fraud. But the video was pretty awful propaganda—giving little snippets with no context. The video was so bad that I didn't actually watch much. And the investigators who made the video didn't release their full footage—just the little snippets that suited their message. Instead of watching that drek, I just read other folks writing about the video.

At first I thought the video really revealed voter fraud! That sounded like an interesting thing to learn more about. Most methods of voter fraud you hear about seem dumb: lots of risk for a pretty-small change to the vote count. A practical method would be interesting. But when I kept digging, I didn't learn methods. Instead, I learned that the video showed Foval's speculation about how he might try to rig the vote if he were stupid enough to try it.

I'm not surprised that there's an echo chamber that passes this video around, claiming it shows evidence of voter fraud. It's pretty hard to figure out exactly what the video is presenting evidence of. If you skim an article about the story, it's pretty easy to skim over "could have rigged" and read it as "rigged". If you go in assuming it's about vote rigging, it's easy to keep thinking that. You're not so likely to bump into a fact-check unless you look for one. It's not like the Democrats want to push a counter-message about this video: that video caught them doing awful stuff, just not voter fraud.

Politics: where there are two sides to every story and the truth is worse than either of them.