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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29556 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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On the fake electors, I initially found this compelling, but not anymore. As far as I can tell the electors met, pledged their votes to Trump, and recorded this on paper on the appointed date. This was in anticipation that election results in their states could change, and if so there could be a problem if there were no elector votes recorded by the date specified in the Constitution.

There wasn’t a scheme to substitute these electors in place of the ones representing the state’s certified winner. On Jan 6th Trump’s ask of Pence was that he not certify the election, not that he count votes from the electors for Trump.

An alternate slate of electors also met and recorded their votes in Hawaii in 1968. Nixon was certified the winner, Kennedy’s electors met and recorded their votes anyway, and then later a recount went in Kennedy’s favor. Nixon, in his capacity as Vice President, counted the Kennedy electors from Hawaii.

I was referring more to the entire legal process that was attempted. As for the Jan 6th riot, to me that's a non-issue. More of a media circus than anything.

My primary concern is simply that democracy is a lot like the banking system in the sense that it requires everyone to have faith in the system working. Once a sufficient number of people stop having faith in it, it ceases to function. Because of that, I think claims of cheating should be taken quite seriously, but false claims should be treated very harshly.

This seems pretty reasonable.

Because of that, I think claims of cheating should be taken quite seriously, but false claims should be treated very harshly.

Do you feel similarly about all the slander against Justice Thomas?

But there obviously was cheating. When the intelligence agencies are running an op against one candidate then there was cheating. You already crossed the rubicon!

When you can choose which stream is the Rubicon after the fact, you can always make it so the other side is the one to cross the line.

Cheating in what sense of the word? Influence campaigns? Those have been run by everyone. Intelligence agencies, state actors, private companies, etc. Anyone who has something to gain by one administration winning can try and convince people. That's how the system runs.

But if by cheating you mean what Trump keeps claiming, which is that large numbers of fake ballots are being added to the count, then no, I do not believe it. I would need to see pretty strong evidence to substantiate this claim.

The reason I'm skeptical is because cheating in such a way would require a huge number of people keeping silent. Given that any one of them would stand to gain a lot by defecting, it really seems unlikely that all would keep silent. Contrast this with something like Epstein being killed. Do I think that was a conspiracy? Quite possibly. The number of people involved was small. That would have been much easier to keep under wraps.

Chain of custody was destroyed for tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots across swing states. Conveniently after counting stopped simultaneously across several swing states, and started finding massive returns for Biden. The evidencr you would use to prove that these votes were all legitimate doesn't exist, because it was destroyed.

But if by cheating you mean what Trump keeps claiming, which is that large numbers of fake ballots are being added to the count, then no, I do not believe it. I would need to see pretty strong evidence to substantiate this claim.

This isn't quite what you're asking for, but I believe there was some recent news that the immigrant communities in Michigan (in, for example, Hamtramck) have been shown to have substantial amounts of vote-buying going on, wherein empty absentee ballots are collected. Claims of this go back well before voter fraud was made a partisan issue with the 2020 election, in, for example, this story. Sure, I get that those are biased sources, but are they wrong? (Of course, it is unsurprising that a D-leaning political machine would be more likely to be investigated by R-leaning people.)

I don't know that that was enough to sway the election, but if he was aware that stuff like this was going on, suddenly his actions seem a bit less crazy.

You ask how a conspiracy would be kept under wraps. Well, in this case, first, it wasn't as if it wasn't talked about beforehand, as I pointed to. But second, the fact that it's an immigrant community would substantially help, as they'd be more isolated, and not as likely to speak English. I'm also not seeing what gains from defecting you are pointing to.

Sure, there are some dirty tactics used with absentee ballots. I'm actually all for election security reform. I have no problem with voter ID requirements.

My problem is that the more grandiose claims of election interference are a lot harder to believe. Claims that the election was stolen by fake ballots being added to the count. Claims that dead people were voting in sufficient numbers to swing the election. I've never seen anything that supports these claims with sufficient evidence to be convincing.

As for the "gains", well, if you had evidence of a conspiracy to overturn a US Presidential election, that evidence could be used to get you almost anything you could want. Huge amounts of money, either from the right or from foreign powers. National fame. Or maybe just assuaging your own guilt. If you had thousands of people involved in something like this, you don't think a single one of them would defect?

I think I agree on both points, at least for something at scale large enough to have overturned the 2020 election.

As for the "gains", well, if you had evidence of a conspiracy to overturn a US Presidential election, that evidence could be used to get you almost anything you could want. Huge amounts of money, either from the right or from foreign powers. National fame. Or maybe just assuaging your own guilt. If you had thousands of people involved in something like this, you don't think a single one of them would defect?

You don't need thousands of people, and even if you did all that's necessary for none of them to speak out is for them all to think that owning the White House is more important than any of those other things. If you have that you don't even need them to explicitly collaborate, a distributed prospiracy would accomplish the goal perfectly well.

If you controlled the media, you could maybe start a campaign to convince your audience that the opposing candidate is a Threat to Democracy and his supporters are very likely to infect you with a Deadly Pandemic or something?

Can you give a single example where our intelligence agencies knew there was a damaging story coming to hit one candidate in a domestic election and sprung into existence to ensure the media would believe the true story was false? This to my understanding is unprecedented (albeit it is possible it happens and we don’t find out)

Cheating in what sense of the word? Influence campaigns? Those have been run by everyone. Intelligence agencies, state actors, private companies, etc. Anyone who has something to gain by one administration winning can try and convince people. That's how the system runs.

This is absurd. If soldiers can have their First Amendment rights suspended for the duration of their service, then clandestine, not-democratically-accountable state agencies can (or rather should, because apparently they cannot) be told to keep their hands off elections. The idea that public service should remain politically neutral is not particularly novel.

"Should" in what sense of the word? In an ideal world? Sure. In actuality, organizations act in their own interest. This is true for state agencies, private organizations, sovereign states, etc.

If the police decided strategically blocked streets to hinder access to majority polling stations with majority-Democratic populations, would you be saying the same thing?

If violence is being used to prevent voting, I really doubt anything we are saying matters. At that point we are inches away from armed civil conflict.

Who said anything about violence? I'm just talking about the police exercising their competences to direct traffic.

More comments

For those not familiar, the theory of how to accomplish this came from John Eastman:

[1] VP Pence, presiding over the joint session (or Senate Pro Tempore Grassley, if Pence recuses himself), begins to open and count the ballots, starting with Alabama (without conceding that the procedure, specified by the Electoral Count Act, of going through the States alphabetically is required).

[2] When he gets to Arizona, he announces that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States. This would be the first break with the procedure set out in the Act.

[3] At the end, he announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. That means the total number of "electors appointed" – the language of the 12th Amendment – is 454. This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe. A "majority of the electors appointed" would therefore be 228. There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.

[4] Howls, of course, from the Democrats, who now claim, contrary to Tribe's prior position, that 270 is required. So Pence says, fine. Pursuant to the 12th Amendment, no candidate has achieved the necessary majority. That sends the matter to the House, where “the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote ..." Republicans currently control 26 of the state delegations, the bare majority needed to win that vote. President Trump is re-elected there as well.

[5] One last piece. Assuming the Electoral Count Act process is followed and, upon getting the objections to the Arizona slates, the two houses break into their separate chambers, we should not allow the Electoral Count Act constraint on debate to control. That would mean that a prior legislature was determining the rules of the present one – a constitutional no-no (as Tribe has forcefully argued). So someone – Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, etc. – should demand normal rules (which includes the filibuster). That creates a stalemate that would give the state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors, if they had not already done so.

[6] The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court. Let the other side challenge his actions in court, where Tribe (who in 2001 conceded the President of the Senate might be in charge of counting the votes) and others who would press a lawsuit would have their past position – that these are non-justiciable political questions – thrown back at them, to get the lawsuit dismissed. The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.

This is, of course, quite norm breaking. I think it's reasonable to argue that it's not even a good-faith legal theory, that it's just plain illegal and Eastman knew it was illegal, and he was just doing wishcasting to try to give power to his guy. But really, it's not any more of a "coup" then the Compromise of 1877.

"Coup" is the closest word I can think to describe it. To my reasoning, one party is unilaterally inventing a conspiracy (note that "election fraud" only seems to be a concern when a Democrat wins) then using said conspiracy to attempt to stay on power when legitimately he was the losing candidate and must transition power.

Let me put it this way. Let us pretend that my accusations were true of a hypothetical person that is not Trump, and that they had succeeded. What term would be better to describe it?

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