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How can you restabilize a situation in which an active participant has committed to destabilizing it by propagating myths about a stolen election?
Not by inventing novel legal theories to convict your main political opponent over.
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Let’s not rehash the stolen election thing here. A lot of us believe he was directionally correct and if you go back thru the files it’s well litigated.
I think 'directionally correct' in this case roughly translates to 'motte and bailey'. Or perhaps it's worse - perhaps it functions just to sanewash Trump.
That is, I can see an argument that systemic media bias, tech oligopoly, deep state institutions, etc., made the overall political landscape so distorted in the popular consciousness as to make a free and fair election impossible. That makes sense, and I have some sympathy for it as a position.
But that's a motte - that's a sanewashed, 'directionally correct' version of what the stolen election claims actually were.
The actually-existing version of StopTheSteal, the one that Trump endorsed, is not that. The Trump position was not "systemically slanted media landscape", but "literally cheating" - ballot dumps, fake voting machines, you name it.
The sanewashed version might be true! There's an argument that goes something like: "Democratic legitimacy is not merely a result of voting, but rather depends on robust norms of civic participation and deliberation, which must be resourced and facilitated by civic institutions. Such institutions include both public and private bodies, including media such as newspapers, television, radio, online social media, internet news and search, and so on. They also include the sources of information for public debate, such as academia, think tanks, or 'experts' broadly construed. In the United States, however, civic institutions are dominated by the left - by a silent, unspoken but nevertheless well-understood consensus - to such an extent that it is genuinely impossible for conservative or right-wing viewpoints to have a fair hearing in the public square. Such viewpoints can only be expressed in cordoned-off areas of conservative media, which by virtue of their isolation are unable to facilitate the kind of robust deliberation that democracy depends upon. Under these conditions - the total domination of the civic sphere by left-biased authorities - the very notion of democracy is degraded, and large sections of the population are effectively frozen out of democratic participation. No election held under circumstances such as these can be considered 'fair'."
I think that argument is probably true! I think it's not the whole story, but as far as it goes, it's true and it points to the crisis of American democracy.
It just doesn't get you to the stolen election claim that was actually made.
I find it kind of condescending that your idea of sanewashing reads like a struggle session excerpt.
I think once the Dominion CEO demonstrably perjured himself by claiming that Dominion voting systems don't have modems in them (photographically, demonstrably false) and then again by claiming they weren't connected to the internet (demonstrably false again per the dominion records leaked by Dar Leaf), I decided that voting machines are completely ridiculous and no one should ever assume an election in which a voting machine is involved is fair. If there's one thing that absolutely should not be networked in any way and for any reason, it's election systems. I understand there's some potential benefits like poll book cross checks, but I have a corporate lab full of half-patched decades-old Windows appliances with network ports on them, and the vast colonies of malicious, firewalled, outbound-requesting viruses they host are an object lesson in why you never, ever connect any of this junk to any network, ever, even if you think it's a secure network. Credentialed VPNs, firewalls, even semi-isolated networks like FirstNet are just giant high-value attack surfaces full of old hardware waiting to be exploited. In a post-SolarWinds universe, I have zero confidence in the security setup of any nation-wide government networks. I have no idea what kind of security setup is established for voting machines, because I can't actually audit them myself and no one will tell me on account of "trade secrets". As far as I'm concerned, they are mysterious black boxes with labels that say "trust me bro".
This is, of course, not evidence of election fraud! But the only way to get this evidence is by hand-auditing the entire system to confirm things like:
Anyway, this is a total fiction that we will obviously never achieve. But I'm supposed to trust some risk-limiting audits that don't actually come out right until a technician can do some kinda firmware update, and assume every machine works correctly. And no hand-recounts allowed, including when I pay for them and state law compels you to conduct one. And half my issues are, by judge's orders, thrown out on standing. Sure.
Hand counts get you 80% of the way to achieving all of the above, partially by omission of needless complexity, partially by design. Some other low-hanging fruit like Voter ID could probably clean up a lot of the remainder (provided you trust the ID checking process).
Look, maybe I can't prove fraud because I lack standing or the judge decided that state law says a risk-limiting audit is a hand-count or whatever. But given how basically every voting system in the nation is out of compliance with standards set forth by HAVA's VVSG, and given how the standards in VVSG are entirely voluntary and there's zero federal action taken against anyone for having joke-tier state standards that fall dramatically short of VVSG (which should be considered the bare minimum from a security standpoint), and given how SolarWinds had the whole government's ass hanging out in the breeze for ten months before anyone noticed, and given how the CEO of a major voting system company is lying under oath about internet connectivity even existing on their machines... Why should I be required to jump through a billion hoops to credibly allege election fraud when I can credibly validate 80% of my concerns with a single hand count? And in that case, why the hell use the machines at all?
Without Trump alleging all kinds of stupid shit, I wouldn't have really considered any of this. This isn't some weak sauce "the media is mean to us and so democracy is broke" sob story borne because Trump kicked and screamed and threw a tantrum when he lost. At least as I understand it, "directionally correct" means "how the fuck does anyone with any working knowledge about computer security believe any of this isn't pwned six ways to Sunday". I don't think I'm alone.
This is getting too long, but I'll briefly mention there's other tranches of how-the-fuckers who are equally annoyed by things like all the COVID-related legislative exploits, the ballot harvesting zuckerboxes in Georgia with the videos of dudes stuffing ballots, that one truck that got stolen after dropping off something that allegedly looked like ballots in Pennsylvania, the various dozens and hundreds of ballots registered to random empty lots in the Arizona audits, that one county in CO that paid for a hand recount per state law but got a risk-limiting audit and sued and lost, that one Democratic primary where the only way they allowed a hand recount was because somehow a candidate (who went on to win) got zero votes the first time and she knew she voted for herself (just a weird mistake with the scanners whoops wowee how did that happen - find me a hand count where this could happen)... Doubtless not all of this constitutes election fraud, some of it might even just be sore loser whining like you describe, but some of this is shady middle finger wagging backed up by porous arguments and judges not wanting to step in it, and I have no doubt that there are some people on this board who raise a directionally-corrected eyebrow at this stuff, instead of rolling their eyes on instinct.
I'm not particularly inclined to argue voting machines. As it happens I actually agree that voting machines and electronic votes in general are a terrible idea, and I feel glad that my country exclusively deals in paper ballots.
But I'm not sure how that specifically addresses the issue? Again, the StopTheSteal argument was premised on a number of specific claims of fraud. Moving from those claims to a generic argument that voting machines are a sub-optimal way to run an election - well, sure, I agree, I'll let you have that motte, but boy, that is a large and expansive bailey you've just vacated.
You can argue that no election conducted with voting machines should be considered legitimate. Sure - like I said, I don't like voting machines at all. But if so, then that also goes for 2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000, 1996... in fact, over a century of American elections would have to be thrown out. (Half that if you restrict to computerised voting, but still, a long time.) That is not, however, the argument that StopTheSteal made.
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I just did a search for "dar leaf dominion emails" and didn't find anything substantial. Care to share what you found?
There's a lot of documents, and it looks like the guy has been excerpting individual records as he encounters them to show them to various politicians. The whole tranche is currently up on his Twitter: https://twitter.com/SheriffLeaf/status/1769561564993192198
The documents show:
It doesn't look like everyone (or anyone, really) at Dominion is twirling their moustaches and cackling as they disenfranchise the American people. It looks like they run like a standard tech company, which is to say all over the place, constantly fighting fires and doing the needful to get their sales. I'm sure 2020 was a complete nightmare scenario for these guys, where suddenly all their customers are radically transforming their deployments and doing novel, untested, gigantic-scale absentee and mail balloting.
But very clearly they're held together with duct tape and prayer in a lot of cases, which is about the opposite of what I'd like to see from critical election infrastructure. The glimpses of the architecture they have put together with all of these machines raises some significant doubts about the security of the enterprise, particularly if rank-and-file technicians can just go pop open the database manager and flip the counts around - surely this is the kind of thing that could be trivially accomplished if one could land a zero-day on any of the long-dated Windows 7 machines floating around in their customer base.
I'm told, with no particular means to corroborate this, that ES&S is about the same.
Thanks. I'll take a look. This sounds like another one of those data dumps that tries to impress by volume but which really contains very little actionable information. But the mere presence of it with the suggestion that it's important convinces motivated bystanders who never scrutinize it themselves. You would think that if there were damning evidence inside, someone would already be highlighting it, specifically.
Since I got downvoted for this skepticism, I think this is key part of the above explainer. Yeah, it sounds like routine software company patchwork, but it's a big leap from there to actionable claims of fraud. "Stop the Steal" is as dumb a mantra as "Most Secure Election Ever." They aim to convince through emotional appeal backed only by weak insinuations. For the kind of election fraud claimed by Stop the Stealers, you do need to find a couple of moustache-twirling villains intentionally changing vote counts through illicit means, not just the implications-without-accusations listed above.
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“Directionally correct”
The man has been lying for years about election fraud, even when he won (and didn’t mount an investigation).
Trump is an embarrassment to conservatism, morally and politically, and should have been jettisoned by the GOP years ago. He makes things worse by inflaming progressivism and turning away moderates/centrists, and the sooner he’s gone from political life the better.
Sure, this state-level prosecution was targeted/politically motivated, which I consider bad, but the man is a constant liar with no regard for rules/laws/norms, so he set himself up for this kind of thing.
He has amazing instincts. He gets everything right.
I do agree he is of lower moral fiber. But maybe we need a guy like him. The system is broken as witnessed by this trial. He’s like the sin eater. Takes everything they throw at him and keeps moving forward.
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Litigation of conspiracy theories by conspiracy theorists are uninteresting.
It sounds to me like when you say "directionally correct" what you mean is "wrong in every factual respect."
Concerns about the US electoral system aside, Trump did not win the 2020 election. There was no substantial voter fraud.
I like being both directionally and factually correct. For instance: Trump is a convicted felon.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Our current treatment of felons is very unjust and needs reform: e.g., they should all have their voting rights reinstated for a start. Personally I’m proud and excited about the prospect of voting for a convicted felon in November. Perhaps it will help signal that we’re ready to start easing the stigma surrounding convicted criminals.
It would be far better if we only convicted those who were properly stigmatized.
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Although 2020 was probably an outlier in the volume of shouting and shenanigans about stolen elections, I'm pretty sure partisans, even moderately respected ones, have made "stolen election" claims about every presidential campaign since at least 2000.
Not like Trump did. He refused to concede and he and his close associates pushed all manner of blatant nonsense that failed to get any traction because of a stark lack of evidence.
As with many things, it’s not that no one else in politics has ever done Bad Thing, it’s that Trump finds a way to take things to a new level.
Like Mrs. Clinton's ginned-up "collusion" theories in 2016? Those managed to derail half a presidential term.
This is a hilariously weak whataboutism.
The evidence for election rigging was nonexistent.
At least Russiagate had enough evidence to put a few people in jail.
“Derail half a term”
Oh come on. What derailed a whole term is that Trump is an incompetent leader and he ran a clown show. Trump was the biggest setback for Trumpism.
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This rhetoric is indistinguishable from the rhetoric we get served by the media about every Republican candidate every election.
Except this time it’s true.
And one can prove that by ignoring the media rhetoric and listening only to longtime Republicans and former Trump officials who have condemned Trump for a very long list of his personal and professional failings.
It’s funny because one thing so many Trump fans like about him is that he isn’t like normal politicians and doesn’t comply with various norms that supposedly made regular GOP politicians weak. Problem is, some of norms Trump has violated involved actual breaches of the law.
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If Trump really believed the election was stolen he would have launched a civil war.
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if you come for the king, you best not miss. the only legitimate challenge to an election result are the ones that succeed otherwise you are a threat to democracy
It is true that if it is a legitimate challenge to an election result, there would be ways of knowing this. The existence of people who believe false things does not mean those false things are true.
It is true that an illegitimate challenge to an election result is a threat to democracy. Illegitimate challengers are criminals, and they should be punished to the full extent of the law.
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I don't believe it was the 'most secure election ever' but pandering to the crybabies does not make them stop crying.
It's in everyone's interest that we secure our election from crybabies who believe that crying about their boomer's election defeat is an acceptable political strategy.
Punish defectors. It is the path to stability, whatever the defectors would have you believe.
As a counterpoint to the other response, if it weren't for your first clause, I'd think you were talking about the 2016 election. #NotMyPresident #TheResistance
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A true-blue commissar speaks to TheMotte.
Do not engage in this kind of sneering, low-effort personal attack.
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How do you heal?
Stop escalating.
Trump was summoned into existence by the media. Their hate just makes him grow that much larger.
If Biden had been a gracious victor, he'd be coasting to a second term and would go down in history as a uniter. Instead, he decided to go all-in on hate. His speeches lately (e.g. at Morehouse) have been some of the most negative and hateful I've ever seen from a President. In the words of Donald Trump: sad. It didn't have to be this way.
No president would get re-elected in an environment of high inflation after trust in institutions was permanently lost after footage of them transparently lying to justify losing their nutty over the chink virus.
This is unnecessary.
Thanks for telling us all you got vaccinated, smart move
You've been spamming threads with these kinds of snide remarks, and the last time you did this you ended up getting banned and told to knock it off. Once again I am telling you to knock it off, and banning you for three days. If you have a point to make, make it clearly and directly. Stop attacking people (not just me, you've been attacking people almost at random for the past couple of days). Your contributions so far seem to be nothing but low effort and obnoxious. Keep it up and you will be permabanned.
How could I have possibly been more clear or direct
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Sure they can. If nothing else, you can just make up election results saying they won from whole cloth, declare those "the official result" and punish any "election denier" who dares to claim those numbers are anything but 100% true and accurate.
But, like @The_Nybbler says below, you almost certainly don't need to go that far. Just use control of the media and the institutions to ensure enough of the peasant masses are marinaded solely in your official narrative, and enough of them will go along. Particularly if the other candidate is currently rotting in a cell somewhere.
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Unless of course the media keeps telling people there's no inflation, to trust in the institutions, and never mind about Fauci's lies, COVID is so 2020, we've moved on. Which of course is exactly where we are.
People don’t believe the media to nearly the same extent as they did pre-2020.
I'm not sure this is true. It's just that believe different media.
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Yes, but even though that belief is smaller, there's still enough to get Biden through, particularly given all the ovine Boomer Republicans who aren't going to vote for "a convicted felon".
Curious if that’s actually a large constituency and not just a handful of columnists.
I'm talking about people I know personally, fellow Alaskans, who acted similarly in the Ted Stevens case — including one person who argues that if you vote for "a convicted felon" God will literally damn you to hell for it.
You're predicting Trump loses Alaska?
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Incorrect. Trump was summoned into existence by his followers. The media reported on his crimes.
If Trump had been a gracious loser, he might be worth nominating for another term. But he went all-in on hate. It didn't have to be this way.
His "followers" didn't give him $2 billion of free media coverage during the 2016 cycle. When Trump declared, he was only polling 10% in the GOP primary. He didn't break 40% until March of 2016. He was lucky enough to be running against a weak and numerous slate of wooden neocons who hadn't seen which way the wind was blowing and couldn't get out of each other's way. When Ben Carson is your closest competition, you know things are pretty dire.
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"he might be worth nominating for another term"
Do you sincerely believe that? If Trump had been a gracious loser, would you have personally voted for him? If Trump had been a gracious loser, do you think that would make him a better candidate than Biden? (After all, Biden hasn't been a gracious winner).
If not, I must call this out as a false equivalence. I don't think you're being sincere in this statement.
The fact of the matter is that the small group of American leftists who dominate our media and communications is consumed by its hatred for the right wing. The airwaves and Internet are controlled by a small group of people who cannot restrain themselves from broadcasting their irrepressible hatred for half the population 24/7, and that's exactly why we're all in this mess. There is no peaceful future as long as that nonstop firehose of visceral hatred keeps flowing through every media outlet.
For there to be peace, the media class needs to let go of that hatred.
What sort of demographics describe the composition of this small group of American leftists dominating the media?
I feel like you're trying to lead into some kind of "da joos" point, but if anything prominent Jews in the media have been unusually likely to break ranks lately. Between the increasing emphasis on race and the heating up of the Israel/Palestine conflict it's been a difficult few years to be a high-profile left-wing Jew.
Demographically I would say the people I'm talking about are disproportionately white women, but aside from that they tend to be pretty ethnically diverse.
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Impossible to say
Impossible to know, or impossible to say?
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I now firmly believe there was active vote alteration (before i thought it was limited to an unfair process)
What changed your mind?
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Can you explain what changed your mind? I'm agnostic on the topic.
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I don't wish to add fuel to conspiracy theories about the 2020 election by engaging you in disagreement.
If you don’t intend to engage in argument, then go back to your echo chamber. Smug drive by posts are useless.
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It's a small pond here at TheMotte. Don't need to worry about some wild take here swaying politics to any significant degree. You can safely drop your concerns and have some fun, bucko.
I respect that moderating intense disagreement is difficult and that the rules prohibit wild takes at another's expense.
It is a matter of fact that there exist conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. It is a matter of fact that I am not interested in adding fuel to them.
If you don't want to have that argument for the sake of the mods, then bless your little heart! But then maybe don't act like you're doing a public service by refusing "to add fuel to conspiracy theories" for rhe benefit of some broader forum or general epistemic hygiene.
Despite your good intentions and best efforts here (I'm sure), your participation has probably already hardened and refueled said conspiracy theories. Seems like a failed strategy.
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Ask Hillary?
Content
Quite.
Between the backseat moderation and the general antagonism, you've made it very clear that you'd rather wage political battles than understand them. You've done so by breaking a number of rules, but more importantly, you're missing the point of this forum. Do you think you'll convince anyone by sniping away instead of defending your bold statements? Do you think you or anyone else will learn something from it?
Take a day to cool off.
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Your post implied that voting for Trump could not "restabilize" anything because he "propogated myths about a stolen election". But so did Hillary! It's extremely relevant because it undermines the implied argument. Put another way, why use many word when few word do trick?
That seems to me to be a deflection rather than an argument proper.
I am against propagating conspiracy theories because I believe in facts and logic. Otherwise people will make things up.
I'm talking about punishing convicted felon Trump for his crimes. I'm not talking about Hillary.
Are you trolling me?. Hillary is extremely relevant to the conversation about "propagating stolen election myths". She said 2016 was stolen. That's not a conspiracy theory. You cannot pontificate about Trump as some unique denier of elections in this case. You either need to refine your argument or make a concession.
The fact that you're not talking about Hillary is the problem.
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...myths?
I don't wish to add fuel to conspiracy theories about the 2020 election by engaging you in disagreement.
Don't put words in my mouth.
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You can label it as you like, but the pipe did 'burst' in Atlanta, the poll watchers were sent home in Phoenix, etc
That you deny it happened doesn't make it not so
Those sound like conspiracy theories to me. I don't buy it. I don't think anyone should buy it.
Trump is a convicted felon. Convicted felons lie.
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