2020 US Election - Current Events

Screen Shot 2020-11-06 at 8.29.37 AM.pngI dunno, does anyone really believe that DJT got 7 million more votes than he got in 2016, if the election was stolen?

C'mon, man.
The NBC analysts I watched last night believed that, in some states and very approximately, Joe Biden got about the same percentage of votes as Hillary Clinton did, and on top of that some of the 3% of voters that switched from voting independent. 2016, the "also ran" candidates commanded approximately 5% of the vote, and this year it looks like under 2%, with a generally higher turnout obviously.

So the question here is, why would anyone doubt that the turnout was higher this year?

Additional data:
Article:
The amount of money spent on US elections eclipses the annual total economic output of some small countries. The total spending by candidates, political parties and independent campaign groups in the 2016 race was US$6.5 billion – comparable to the GDP that year of Monaco, Kosovo or Liechtenstein, and more than double that of Liberia.

The 2020 election cycle is forecast to smash previous spending records, with the Center for Responsive Politics estimating it will cost US$11 billion. That would be comparable to the 2019 GDP of Equatorial Guinea or Chad.

Campaign spending was up, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that all that money managed to mobilize more voters.
 
Thanks for that clip!

- Trump acknowledges that he's losing the official count.
- He's sowing division and distrust, and presumably misinformation, resorting to a conspiracy theory to explain a reality that does not match his beliefs.
- He intends to win this election in the courts.
- He's far from conceding the election.
I think the comment refers to the fact that Trump is admitting the election is not going his way. That is as close as we are going to get to a concession.
 
Why has Arizona been called for Biden (16 hours ago), when 10% of the votes are outstanding and the gap is only 1.3%?

1604699440782.png

Is it mathematically impossible for Trump to win Arizona as it stands, or only improbable given trends?
 
Why has Arizona been called for Biden (16 hours ago), when 10% of the votes are outstanding and the gap is only 1.3%?

It has been called only by Fox News and the AP at this point. Different outlets have different formulas.
 
Why has Arizona been called for Biden (16 hours ago), when 10% of the votes are outstanding and the gap is only 1.3%?

Is it mathematically impossible for Trump to win Arizona as it stands, or only improbable given trends?
It's statistically unlikely.

Article:
Many of the gains have been driven by the shifting politics of Maricopa County, which is home to Phoenix and its suburbs. Maricopa County accounts for 60% of the state’s vote, and Biden leads there by 3.4 percentage points in votes that have already been tabulated.

Trump could only win if the remaining votes in Maricopa had quite a different proportion of Biden vs. Trump, favoring Trump, and there's no reason to assume they would.
 
This seems to be aging well... :D
Good luck blue church.
Don't worry, Trumps supreme court will help iron out the discrepancies between the votes that come in after election day that'll just keep shifting the vote toward the Democrats as time moves forward.
 
Good luck blue church.
"Blue Church" is a propaganda term.
Article:
The abstract is this: the Blue Church is a kind of narrative / ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States.

This propaganda tries to liken social progress to an authoritarian setting of ideology, akin to a shallow understanding of how the catholic church works. It fails to recognize that the "Blue Church" has no central authority, and that Trump has been using these same mechanisms.

It fails to recognize that printed books, newspapers, and proper journalism have always aimed at finding facts and enabling critical thinking based on them.

It fails to recognize that those who are "outside" of the "Blue Church" either don't acknowledge those facts, or fail to understand or accept the consequences, or base their thinking off a selfish value system. It's somewhat like Flat Earthers complaining that others don't respect them, and complaining that Flat Earth isn't taught in school; except that the subject of discussion isn't scientific fact, but the precepts needed to run a humane and compassionate society.

Using a propaganda term like "blue church" shuts off thinking about how these policies come about; it "explains" progressive politics as something imposed externally, with no evidence or clear theory on who is ultimately doing the imposing or why; and it rejects the idea that the populations driving this progress think on their own. It's a term embodying intolerance, disrespect, and a refusal to seriously engage with "blue" opinions. If you have this term in your brain, it intellectually isolates you from the majority; and that is the effect that the people who put it there intended.
 
Don't worry, Trumps supreme court will help iron out the discrepancies between the votes that come in after election day that'll just keep shifting the vote toward the Democrats as time moves forward.
Oh, and factually, the blue shift in Pennsylvania is from absentee ballots that "came in" before election day, but couldn't be counted before election day (as in other states) because Republicans blocked the laws that would have allowed it. There is no evidence that any votes cast after election day are being counted, or that they weren't cast by legitimate voters.
 
Article:
Local Republican officials were recruiting volunteers on Thursday to call Pennsylvania voters and urge them to send in their ballots—two full days after Election Day. This plea was emailed out just hours before President Donald Trump went on national television Thursday to declare the inherent illegitimacy of ballots received after Nov. 3.

The request, election lawyers say, appears to flagrantly run afoul of state law. Under Pennsylvania law and a recent state Supreme Court decision, absentee and mail-in ballots are valid as long as they were postmarked by Election Day and received by Nov. 6. Any Trump supporter who sends in their ballots either Thursday or Friday would not have it postmarked within the acceptable deadline—creating the precise situation that the president himself has deemed fraudulent and corrupt.

The email, which was sent by the group Kenosha For Trump and forwarded to The Daily Beast, said it was marshaling the effort on behalf of Trump Victory, the committee established by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to run the field program for the president’s re-election.

It went out just after 5 p.m. to a group of Trump supporters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “Trump Victory urgently needs volunteers to make phone calls to Pennsylvania Trump supporters to return their absentee ballots,” the email said. “These phone calls will help President Trump win the election!”

This is what evidence of (attempted?) fraud looks like.
 
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I dunno, does anyone really believe that DJT got 7 million more votes than he got in 2016, if the election was stolen?

Yes, you'd suspect a rigged, stolen election would be a more decisive win. In addition, if you were putting a lot of fake Biden ballots in the system, wouldn't you go ahead and fill out the rest of the ballot, and win a lot of Senators, Representatives and flip some state legislatures?

A Vast Conspiracy too dumb to maximize what they get for the risky effortof stealing an election is probably too dumb to pull off a heist at all.

(I mention this because I spent a lot of yesterday debunking specific instances for a friend who is an ardent Trump supporter, and who was believing a lot of memes about fraud -- debunking any one only led to her finding another. But undercutting the basic assumption made her stop and think. Might be worth approaching things in that way with folks.)
 
Yes, you'd suspect a rigged, stolen election would be a more decisive win. In addition, if you were putting a lot of fake Biden ballots in the system, wouldn't you go ahead and fill out the rest of the ballot, and win a lot of Senators, Representatives and flip some state legislatures?
Not simply that, but if the argument that ballots with no downballot votes is true, then that would be doubly stupid, as they would raise suspicion.
 
In addition, if you were putting a lot of fake Biden ballots in the system, wouldn't you go ahead and fill out the rest of the ballot, and win a lot of Senators, Representatives and flip some state legislatures?

What makes you think they didn't? your friend fell for that? (i'm hoping for Biden, but still that's wonky excuse-splaining)
 
Protecting much?
Oh, and factually, the blue shift in Pennsylvania is from absentee ballots that "came in" before election day, but couldn't be counted before election day (as in other states) because Republicans blocked the laws that would have allowed it. There is no evidence that any votes cast after election day are being counted, or that they weren't cast by legitimate voters.
I've made absolutely no claims in regaurd to anything you've *responded* to.

Before voting began (see the time stamp) I made a prediction.
The prediction was that Votes would keep coming in, after election *day* which would keep shifting in favor of Democrats... did this not happen? I made 0 mention of fraud, cheating, specific states, or even why it would happen at all. Simply that it would happen. Demonstratably, it DID happen.
 
Protecting much?

I've made absolutely no claims in regaurd to anything you've *responded* to.

Before voting began (see the time stamp) I made a prediction.
The prediction was that Votes would keep coming in, after election *day* which would keep shifting in favor of Democrats... did this not happen? I made 0 mention of fraud, cheating, specific states, or even why it would happen at all. Simply that it would happen. Demonstratably, it DID happen.
No, the point is, most absentee ballots that were being counted in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin "came in" long before election day.
Article:
A big reason for the delay: Laws in each state barred election officials from getting a head start on processing and counting the record number of mail-in ballots voters used amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Take Pennsylvania. The Republican-controlled legislature refused to change state law to allow county election officials to start processing mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. That left local election officials with mountains of absentee ballots to process and count on top of the in-person vote cast on Tuesday.

A vote is a vote when the voter votes. What came late was the counting of these votes. There's been this Trump idea that these late-counted votes would be "conveniently found" somewhere, but they're actual ballots of actual voters, most of which had "come in" to the election offices before election day.

The votes don't keep coming in, they're just getting counted late. It's an important distinction. You may have meant the same, but I'd rather describe it unambiguously.

And I think every expert predicted this.
 
What makes you think they didn't? your friend fell for that? (i'm hoping for Biden, but still that's wonky excuse-splaining)
What makes me think they didn't fill the rest of the ballots and steal the Senate, pick up some seats in the House, switch legislatures?
Largely the fact that they did not take the Senate ( runoffs in Georgia might change that, but that would not be based on Tuesday's vote), they did not pick up seats in the House, they did not switch legislatures. If something did not happen, to me (and to my friend, thankfully) that seems pretty good evidence that "they" did not do it.

Once you realize it didn't happen (stealing the rest of the down-ballot races), you might start to think about WHY that might be. It is, I guess, possible that there was a vast conspiracy that mastermined efforts to steal the White House for Biden but didn't bother stealing him the other branches of govenment he and they would need. Or there might be a simpler explanation.

That is not PROOF of no conspiracy. But the theory seems to predict something that didn;t happen -- that calls the theory into question. It made somebody think, who was previously swallowing conspiracy theories about Sharpie-gate, "suspicious" surges in votes being reported, and the like. Maybe they'll decide to think some more about those things, if their faith in the over-all conspiracy is, if not shattered, at least shaken. Maybe, if we're really lucky, they might question some other conspiracy theories being thrown at them out on them Interwebs,

I'm happy with that.
 
Or there might be a simpler explanation.
the simpler explanation is there are alot of never-trumpers and all the women and suburban housewives who supposedly were voting Biden. Just because people hate Trump doesnt mean they hate the Republican Party/Congress.

I wanted Biden to win (for reasons you won't like), but obviously i would vote repub always for Senate and House.
 
Article:
Precinct-level data shows that outside of heavily blue metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Tucson, which also have high numbers of Indigenous voters, much of the rural blue islands that have voted for Biden and Mark Kelly, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, are on tribal lands. On some Tohono O’odham Nation precincts, Biden and Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris won 98% of the vote. As of Nov. 9, the three counties that overlap with the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation went for Biden at a rate of 57%, as opposed to 51% statewide. Voter precincts on the Navajo Nation ranged from 60-90% for Biden.

Map showing how different Arizona precincts voted in the 2020 Presidential election (left). Map of tribal lands in Arizona (right).
Garrett Archer/ABC 15 Arizona (left) and Environmental Protection Agency (right)


That pattern is consistent with 2016, when the rest of the state went for Trump.

It looks like the indigenous people helped Biden substantially in Arizona.
 

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This is starting to look like a gish gallop.

Most readers here are familiar with the term, but for those who are new:
Article:
The Gish gallop is a technique used during debating that focuses on overwhelming an opponent with as many arguments as possible, without regard for accuracy or strength of the arguments. [..]

During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate. In practice, each point raised by the "Gish galloper" takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place. The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.
 
"HOW TRUMP STOLE 2020" by Greg Palast. This is about the 2018 elections.
Article:
In the lead-up to his run for Governor, Kemp purged 665,677, two-thirds of a million registrations. The Purge erased the voting rights of one in eight Georgians.

[..]

So my investigations team created a computer program at GregPalast.com which allowed Georgians to see whether they were on Kemp's purge list. We added a request at the site: contact us. Within days 1,900 did, angry, upset that they lost their right to vote without so much as a posting to their Facebook page.

[..]

What the Lenser/Swedlund team found was eye-popping. They went through Kemp's purge list of half a million voters name by name, and the registration addresses of every person Kemp said had moved their residence. Lenser looked at tax bills, where someone last had pizza delivered, phone bills, your alimony checks... accessing two hundred and forty databases that can confirm where you reside with stone-cold accuracy.

Notably, Mr. Kemp hadn't bothered to ask why thousands of people had supposedly moved out of Georgia but were still paying Georgia income taxes.

I lost the office pool. I expected about 15% inaccuracy in Kemp's purge. I was wrong, big wrong.

Lenser's first report blew me away: 340,134 Georgians that had been purged for moving were, in fact, still living in the home in which they'd registered. [..]

More than a third of a million wrongly purged--in this one state.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pTuF5YpOB4

Purge-mania was moving through GOP states like poop through a goose. By mid-2020, leading into the Presidential race, the urge to purge took over.
Ohio, 432,000 purged.
North Carolina, 576,534 purged.
Arizona, 258,000 purged.
Wisconsin, 99,000 and 232,000 more listed for the next purge.
And so on.

As the methods in these states were just variants on the Georgia system, I can tell you, as a former professor of statistics, the 70% bogus factor would be the same.
And, with at least two dozen other states rushing to Georgia-fy their lists, the total of voters wrongly removed would hit many millions by November 2020.
How many?
I dove into the deeper files of the federal Elections Assistance Commission, the EAC. An odd number jumped out. Between 2014 and 2016, the
number of voters purged for moving their residence had soared to 16,696,470. One in 12 registered Americans. Wow, we are a restless bunch.

But not according to the Census. The number of purged voters was nearly double the number of voters the Census counted as having moved out of their county or state. And the statistics got curiouser and curiouser. The purged-for-moving number had gone up by 1.9 million in the two years leading to the 2016 election. How strange. The Census reported that the number of Americans on the move in those two years had declined.

Worse, the EAC purge numbers were seriously undercounted. The EAC footnotes, I always read the footnotes, state that several states and counties don't report their purge operations. While Kemp had conducted the Big Purge with a lot of fanfare, other states quietly removed voters using Kemp's dead-wrong methods before the 2016 race.

And who was removing voters? The Democrat controlled state of New Mexico purged only two out of every thousand voters, or 0.2%. Then there was Indiana. Barack Obama won the state in 2008. However, by 2016, the Hoosier state wrenched violently into the Republican red zone. Where had the Obama voters gone? According to Indiana's report to the EAC, they just moved out. In the two years leading to the 2016 race, under Governor Mike Pence, Indiana purged a breathtaking 22.4% of its registrants. One in five voters. Thanks, Mike!

This is what Stacey Abrams was/is fighting.
The book goes on to list other ways voters were disenfranchised, e.g. student populations.

My personal take: I suspect it's why the Trump campaign narrative is that people voted who weren't allowed to. I suspect it's why Trump is taking the result the way he is: if you rig an election in your favor and then don't win, you have to believe the other side cheated, too.
 
From a European/German perspective, there are two important differences in how the USA run their elections:

a) The Electoral College. It's a mechanism that regularly contravenes a majority popular vote. Without the Electoral College, "swing states" would just be regular states. (I know it helps ensure that the country stays on a two-party system.)

b) Voter registration. We have government ID cards; all you need to vote is bring your ID to the polling place, no registration needed. And everyone gets a notification postcard in advance that tells us where our voting place is, and that can be used to request an absentee ballot. (I know you dislike government databases, but most of you have drivers licenses and a social security number.)
 
b) Voter registration. We have government ID cards; all you need to vote is bring your ID to the polling place, no registration needed. And everyone gets a notification postcard in advance that tells us where our voting place is, and that can be used to request an absentee ballot. (I know you dislike government databases, but most of you have drivers licenses and a social security number.)
Somewhat oddly it's the anti-authoritarian Republicans who want voter-ID. Ostensibly this is because of voter fraud (which is incredibly rare, current claims notwithstanding). But really they want it (or conversely Democrats don't want it) because it would disproportionately affect the Democrat vote - in particular the black vote in the southern states. Bottom line is that currently, it would be discriminatory. There's a great, factual, overview here: https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet
 
Somewhat oddly it's the anti-authoritarian Republicans who want voter-ID.
I was referring to a general ID, akin to a passport (and usable as a passport when traveling within the EU). Every adult has one, by law. That doesn't discriminate. In Germany, we can get it at our town hall for ~$30 (less for people on social security), it's valid for 10 years.
 
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I was referring to a general ID, akin to a passport (and usable as a passport when traveling within the EU). Every adult has one, by law. That doesn't discriminate. In Germany, we can get it at our town hall for ~$30 (less for people on social security), it's valid for 10 years.
Sure, but in the US 10% of otherwise eligible voters don't have any usable Photo ID. Fixing that would have to be the first step.
2020-11-12_09-23-28.jpg
 
Sure, but in the US 10% of otherwise eligible voters don't have any usable Photo ID. Fixing that would have to be the first step.
My point is that for us, it's the only step. If you have your government ID, you can vote, no additional registration required.
 
For all the discussion about the effect of voter ID laws, however, a study last year found that whatever impact those laws might have is offset by increased organization and activism by nonwhite voters — leading to no change in registration or turnout.
Content from External Source
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/8738...cans-and-democrats-like-little-else-heres-why

(that's not to say we shouldn't help our neighbors with rides and passing around the collection plate, if they don't have the 20-50$ for a government ID.)
 
In the UK, there is no compulsory ID card, and proposals to introduce one have always been controversial. In 2006 an Identity Cards Act was introduced by the then Labour Government and enacted by Parliament after acrimonious debates. The Act provided for a 'voluntary' ID card, but also envisaged that production of a card might be necessary for access to some public services, and that the card might in future be compulsory for certain occupations or categories of people. There was opposition on civil liberties grounds from a minority of MPs in both major parties. The Act was repealed in 2010 under the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government.
Compulsory ID cards were required in both World Wars but withdrawn in peacetime, though not until 7 years after the end of World War II. They are generally regarded as 'unBritish', and associated with totalitarian regimes abroad. I imagine that opposition might be even stronger in the US.
 
This is how you legally rig an election. Note that this is not for the US senate, but a seat on the Florida state senate.
Article:
Miami Rodriguez.jpg
MIAMI – Why would candidates for Florida Senate seats do no campaigning, no fundraising, have no issue platforms, nor make any effort to get votes?

Local 10 News has found evidence to suggest three such candidates in three Florida Senate district races, two of them in Miami Dade County, were shill candidates whose presence in the races were meant to syphon votes from Democratic candidates.

Comparisons of the no-party candidates' public campaign records show similarities and connections that suggest they are all linked by funding from the same dark money donors, and part of an elaborate scheme to upset voting patterns.

In one of those races, District 37, a recount is underway because the spread between the Democratic and Republican candidates is only 31 votes. The third party candidate received more than 6300 votes.

That third party candidate is Alexis Rodriguez, who has the same last name as the Democratic incumbent senator Jose Javier Rodriguez. The Republican challenger is Ileana Garcia.

Alexis Rodriguez falsified his address on his campaign filing form last June. The couple who now live at the Palmetto Bay address say they have been repeatedly harassed since then by people looking for Rodriguez, who hadn’t lived there in five years.

[..]

A comparison of candidates Alfonso and Rodriguez show unusual similarities.

Both filed as No Party Affiliated candidates, yet both had recently been registered Republicans.

Both qualified as candidate on the same day, June 12, 2020, by paying a qualifying fee.

Both listed Gmail addresses with identical patterns: first initial, last name and district number and 2020.

Both list one single contribution to their campaign; both contributions are $2000 self-loans, presumably to pay the filing fee.


Which makes me think there's another difference between our election systems: to run for any office here, you have to submit a list of supporter signatures (with addresses) when you file your candidacy. I doubt that these guys did that?
 
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Article:
The judge was not persuaded by affidavits given by GOP poll challengers, some of whom admitted they had not attended an Oct. 29 walk-through session before the election and “did not have a full understanding” of the process.

“It is clear also that they did not operate through the leadership of their challenger party, because the issues they bring forward were by and large discussed and resolved with the leadership of their challenger party,” said longtime elections director Chris Thomas in an affidavit.

In other words, there's a lot of ignorance around that could've been avoided if people had availed themselves of the information that was offered, and we're seeing conspiracy theories as a result.
 
My point is that for us, it's the only step. If you have your government ID, you can vote, no additional registration required.
It's worth to note - for U.S. readers - that beside carrying this mandatory ID card there is annother obligation in Germany:

Everyone is required to register a new address of residence within two weeks after moving in. That address is part of the data on the ID card.

That's the reason why we don't have to do anything but wait for an election invitation that points us to the correct community voting station.

A similar obligation would probably be hard to stomach for the majority of the U.S. population, for cultural reasons. On the other hand, modern data harvesting - mostly by third parties - has long eclipsed the small bit of personal liberty that this lack of mandatory registration may have provided.
 
I was tuned into Giuliani's latest press conference on Youtube just now via the Donald J Trump channel. At one point, the operators must have misclicked something, as they could be heard remarking on Giuliani's makeup running; there were also some picture and sound dropouts, and the people in the chat quickly became convinced that the transmission had been hacked. The Stream is not available right now.

The Independent has also been covering the conference.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2-JvHahfew

I'm really going to wait for the highlights reel, and a fact check for the false and unsupported claims that have been raining down left and right.

Most interesting to me was Giuliani's claim that "we only have 3 law suits" [1:35:50] not counting a fourth one in Michigan that they had retracted, and he also said that no lawsuit of theirs had been dismissed. I found an article describing them, here's an "only the headlines" excerpt:
Article:

Here Are All the Lawsuits the Trump Campaign Has Filed Since Election Day—And Why Most Are Unlikely to Go Anywhere​

Pennsylvania

1. To compel Philadelphia election officials to stop counting ballots.

2. To compel state election officials to allow Trump campaign officials closer observation of the counting process.

3. To compel Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and all 67 counties to impose an earlier date for voters to show proof of identification if it was not on their initial ballots.

4. To compel the Montgomery County Board of Elections to stop counting mail-in-ballots

5. To intervene in an already existing dispute before the U.S. Supreme Court about whether ballots the state received after 8 p.m. on Election Day should count.

6. To stop Boockvar and seven individual counties from certifying the election results

7. To stop Bucks County from counting mail-in ballots

Nevada

1. To impose an injunction on the automated signature-verification machines used in Clark County as ballots continue to be counted.

2. To compel state election officials to allow the public closer observation at a Clark County ballot-counting facility.

Michigan

1. To halt the counting of absentee ballots, on the grounds that campaign officials had not been given access to observe the process as required by state law.

2. To halt the certification of election results in Detroit, Michigan’s largest city and a Democratic stronghold.

3. To halt the certification of election results because of voter fraud

Georgia

1. To disqualify about 53 ballots.

Arizona:

On November 7, the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit in state court alleging voters’ ballots had been rejected because they contained “bleeds,” splotches” and “stray marks.” These allegations appear similar to claims circulating on social media that ballots would not be counted if voters filled them out using a Sharpie marker. Election officials have said these claims are false. A lawsuit with similar allegations was filed in the same court system by a group of voters who were represented by a conservative legal fund on Nov. 4; plaintiffs dropped the lawsuit on Nov. 7. They did not provide a reason for dismissing the case. On Nov. 13, the campaign’s attorney filed a notice of mootness, acknowledging the lawsuit was unlikely to change the outcome.
 
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