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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28013 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses? Trump himself has a big personal incentive to say the election is "rigged" if he loses no matter what. It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls, to one where the basic facts of reality are debated instead. The obvious example is the 2020 election. Lesser known was that Trump did the same thing in 2016 when he lost the Iowa primary to Ted Cruz. Now it seems he's preparing to do the same in 2024.

Many Republicans are more than willing to go along with this, mostly due to either negative partisanship or living in a bubble ("everyone I knew was voting for Trump, then the other guy won? Something doesn't smell right!"). If the pain of defeat stings, why not just be a sore loser instead? I've debated many people who thought the 2020 election was rigged, and inevitably it goes down one of three rabbitholes:

  • Vibes-based arguments that are short on substance, but long on vague nihilism that "something was off". Nearly 70% of Republicans think 2020 was stolen in some way, yet most are normies who don't spend a lot of time trying to form a set of coherent opinions, so the fallback of "something was off" serves as a way to affirm their tribal loyalty without expending much effort.

  • Motte-and-bailey to Trump's claims by ignoring everything Trump himself says, and instead going after some vague institutional flaw without providing any evidence to how it actually impacted 2020. For instance, while mail-in ballots are a nice convenience for many, there are valid concerns to a lack of oversight in how people fill out their ballots. People can be subjected to peer pressure, either from their family or even from their landlord or another authority figure to fill out their ballot a certain way. However, no election is going to 100% perfect, and just because someone can point out a flaw doesn't mean the entire thing should be thrown out. In a similar vein, Democrats have (rightly) pointed out that gerrymandering can cause skewed results in House elections, yet I doubt many Republicans would say that means results would need to be nullified especially if Democrats had just lost. These things are something to discuss and reform for future elections.

  • People who do buy at least some of the object-level claims that Trump or Giuliani has advanced about 2020 being stolen. There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into. For most political issues, parties tend to organically rally around a few specific examples that have the best evidence or emotional valence. The fact that this hasn't happened for Trump's claims is indicative that none of them are really that good, and they rely more on the reader being unfamiliar with them to try to spin a biased story. One example occurred a few weeks ago on this site, one user claimed the clearest examples were Forex markets (which were subsequently ignored), Ruby Freeman, and the Cyber Ninja's Audit. I was only vaguely aware of these, so I did a quick Google search and found a barrage of stories eviscerating the Ruby Freeman and Cyber Ninja narratives. I then asked for the response, preferably with whatever relatively neutral sources he could find, since I was sure he'd claim the sources I had Googled were all hopelessly biased. But this proved too high a bar to clear for him, and so the conversation went nowhere. Maybe there's a chance that some really compelling evidence exists out there that would easily prove at least some of the major allegations correct, but at this point I doubt it.

At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable. The big question on the Republican side now would be whether to claim the elections were rigged even if Trump DOES win. The stock explanation would be that the Dems are rigging it so they have +20% more votes than they normally would, so a relatively close election means Trump actually won by a huge margin. On the other hand, saying the election was rigged at all could diminish Trump's win no matter what, and it's not hard to imagine Trump claiming "this was the most legitimate election in the history of our country" if he manages to come out on top.

Every time someone tries to dismiss concerns about, call it 'election integrity," I would point them to the 2018 Election, specifically the Florida Gubernatorial Race. Specifically, Broward County.

An audit of the election was held and determined there were numerous irregularities, even if no actual fraud was detected

The margin between Desantis winning (and all the stuff that followed) vs. Gillum winning (instead of being found drugged out in a hotel room) was 33,000 votes out of 8 million. .4%.

Desantis cleaned house of election supervisors who had delayed or faulty counts, and every election since then has been reported on time, without error, and... surprise, tends to favor Republicans, now.

So one big thing that can be done is to rapidly remove and replace election officials who show questionable performance, bias, or otherwise don't seem interested in a fair, open election. Failure in one's duties should be punished, as I keep on harping.

You know what would really increase trust in elections? If there were somebody or bodies who is actually on the hook, who can be visibly and tangibly punished if a given election has too many 'hitches.' Because fundamentally, the people in charge of ensuring elections are secure ALSO have a bit of incentive to compromise said elections if it serves them. See this Judge in Philadelphia, for instance.

As others have said, ID requirements to cast a vote are reasonable. Limiting mail-in ballots, likewise reasonable. The big one is to ensure transparency when counting votes in high-density, high population areas, where fraud would be easiest to hide.

And there is a reasonable case to be made for areas reporting their results at about the same time. Fraud is harder to achieve if you can't be sure how many votes you have to manufacture to put your side over the top, so being able to report your results after you know what other have reported helps shift the incentives towards cheating.

On the 'unreasonable* side, maybe mandate the death penalty for anyone caught falsifying more than, say, 100 votes. There should certainly be some entity or agency who is in charge of tracking down and punishing election fraud after the election has taken place, so fraudsters can be punished even after the fact. I would even stipulate that the election is not to be overturned if substantial fraud is discovered, but those who perpetrated it should be sanctioned heavily as an example going forward, potentially to include the aforementioned capital punishment.

There should probably be some symmetrical punishment for those who attempt to overturn an election without producing proof of fraud, since that is also damaging to election integrity, false claims of 'rigging' can be 'allowed' but there should be some well-understood process through which such challenges are brought and decided.

People seemed to have defined "election rigging" as specifically electronically hacking election machines to change votes.

Rather than, say, changing all the election rules using emergency powers that didn't pass constitutional muster. Or charging your opponent with seventy-odd felonies, or keeping them off the ballots in some states etc. Or co-opting the intelligence agencies to wiretap your opponents and launder your oppo research.

Or just, you know, twiddling their thumbs while some idiot takes a shot at the candidate.

But by all means, let's mock the "vibes".

People seemed to have defined "election rigging" as specifically electronically hacking election machines to change votes.

Yes, because this is the universal definition of a rigged election and always has been (ie ballot-stuffing ie tampering with vote counts directly).

Shady behavior by an incumbent is universal in democracies. One party dominating the media is near-universal in democracies. The ‘establishment’ trying to stymie the ‘populists’ is near-universal in democracies.

The fact remains very simply that if most evidence that is considered evidence of 2020 being a “rigged election” counts as proof (or strong evidence for) a “rigged election”, then every election in American history has been rigged. Go back before about 1970 and corruption was vastly more brazen than anything Trump has seriously alleged, and that’s like 200 years of so-called democracy.

Low level corruption, propaganda and shady behavior is clearly universally accepted as part of America’s democratic tradition. The only thing beyond the pale (and even then only in the last few decades) is literal manipulation of vote counts in bulk, and this is the definition of “rigged”.

Well, that's your opinion, you can hardly expect people who do not belong to your socio-political tribe to agree just because you assert it.

Let me ask a question about election fraud, do you support the conviction of Trump on charges he tampered with the election by paying off a porn star?

No, why would I? That doesn’t mean the charge counts as rigging an election, though.

Here are several good faith ideas that can improve trust in your elections:

  1. live-stream the entirety of the voting and counting process in every polling station. Keep the videos for the next 100 years at least, make them easily accessible, and make sure that counting is done on-camera.

  2. They could eliminate mail-in voting, or alternatively require it to be signed and identity verified by notary.

  3. They could remove the concept of voting machines entirely, and count by hand by several oppositional counters.

  4. They could keep the physical ballots for the next 100 years, and also scan each one and upload to a publicly accessible archive.

  5. They could require voter ID, including proof of citizenship to vote.

Basically, anything that makes the process transparent and theoretically verifiable by anyone anywhere will help.

Well, they could start by legitimately doing election security. Eliminate mail ins. Eliminate anonymous drop boxes. Require photo ID for voting at at least TSA/FAA verification requirements. Purge voter rolls of noncitizens annually. Also the deceased and no longer residing in at the address. Count the votes in a single night in Democratic areas like almost all Republican areas are capable of doing. Sunlight the registration process so people feel that they are doing something a random person that stole their mail could not do.

Purge voter rolls of noncitizens annually

Huh? Who are the noncitizens on voter rolls? I've never heard this particular claim.

I know of there being problems with this in at least AZ, NV, OR, & FL (Desantis fixed it there, as he seems to do with every problem).

Arizona, too:

https://x.com/OversightPR/status/1839257642868298139

https://x.com/OversightPR/status/1843428428143263893

Recently in Oregon is an example https://www.opb.org/article/2024/09/13/noncitizens-registered-oregon-error/

There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into.

It seems to me that if each claim in that extensive list has an advocate diving deep into it, yet still convinced, that’s meta-evidence that more than one scheme might have been used. Instead of a single silver Biden bullet, perhaps it makes sense to look for a spray of silver shotgun pellets.

As for neutral sources on the validity of the claims, the moment any reputable news source even hints that they think a single Trump-positive election fraud claim has enough merit to consider possibly investigating, their editor will forever be branded a MAGA Republican in the bag for Trump. This is how political tribes work, and how they capture without explicit conspiracy: likemindedness, singularity of purpose.

I thought about this some more, and I think another sticking point is that this is an iterative game, and people know it is an iterated game. So, if you want them to be able to concede when they're wrong, there has to be done easy to do so that doesn't undermine their future ability to raise the same issue. I think a lot of people would probably grant that at least there is no solid evidence of widespread fraud in 2020, if they didn't also sense that this would be used against them, either immediately to demand more concessions, or in the future to demand acceptance of actual wrongdoing. It's a clear case of arguments as soldiers, and nobody is going to agree to unilateral disarmament. This explains both why people resist being moved from their public position but also why they seem to weigh it as a low priority.

Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?

Yes, but they're not going to do it because it would require them to swallow thier pride and look weak in front of thier own base (ie electoral suicide).

As I touched upon below the fundemental problem the Democrats and the Deep State are facing is that they have spilled so much ink about subverting the process to defeat Trump that normal people are now expecting them to do it. People are actively hunting for discrepancies, and anything that isn’t 110% by the book and signed in triplicate with a strict chain of custody from A to Z is going to be viewed as suspect. The only way to fight this is to ensure that everything is squeeky clean and beyond reproach, which it won't be because too many people are taking all the talk about about subverting the process to defeat Trump too seriously.

The only way to fight this is to ensure that everything is squeeky clean and beyond reproach, which it won't be because too many people are taking all the talk about about subverting the process to defeat Trump too seriously.

It sounds like you're saying there are some people that actually think trump is bad enough to subvert normal processes. The OP was asking for specific evidence but you didn't give any.

Unfortunately, showing evidence of people saying trump is a unique threat to democracy or whatever isn't enough because they could be exaggerating.

I admit it would be funny if it became a common talking point to get anti-Trumpers to say stuff like, "it would be right to commit electoral fraud or murder to save America from Trump, but I wouldn't do it"

It sounds like you're saying there are some people that actually think trump is bad enough to subvert normal processes.

I'm saying that people keep saying that Trump is so bad that it it would be worth subverting the normal electoral process to beat him. See all the rhetoric from wealthy leftists about "fortifying the election" and "saving" democracy from the people. Simply put, If you loudly advertise that you have the means motive and opportunity to do something, you're an idiot if you don't expect people to wonder if you might actually do it.

...and why that's why everything needs to be squeeky clean, because having advertised the desire/intent to subvert the processes, people are going to be hypervigilant for anything out of the ordinary, at which point "plausible deniability" may as well be "no deniability at all".

At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable.

It's unfalsifiable because the evidence that would prove or disprove election fraud was illegally destroyed. Ballot chains of custody were destroyed across several swing states. You can recount the ballots as many times as you want but you can't prove where any of those ballots came from. This is after several swing states simultaneously stopped counting on Election Day only to return massive pro-Biden dumps at 6am a few hours later.

It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls

This will sound unbearably demented to most posters here, and I'm aware of that, and fine with this, because I mean it earnestly: all talk of Trump's "shortfalls" is nonsense. Trump is obviously one of the greatest Americans to ever live. He spurred the renaissance of New York, mastered reality TV, turned his fathers modest real estate portfolio into a multi-billion dollar company synonymous with wealth as one of the most famous people to ever exist, then ran for president as a private citizen despite major opposition from both parties and won. He casually reinvents the language every time he speaks. He tried to do a denuclearization deal with Russia and China, we were literally on the cusp of world peace, and we couldn't get there because of the Russia hoax. Fundamentally we aren't good enough for Donald Trump. We were all sitting around debating the doom of Western Civilization and pro-woke and anti-woke and he's the only guy to stand up and say, we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on, we should make Detroit wealthy again, we should make San Francisco a paradise again, we should Make America Great Again, and going further than that we should Make America Greater Than Ever Before. He just did it casually, because he wanted to help his country, when he was full of success and worldly things. (Multibillionaire, supermodel wife, luxury real estate empire, grandchildren and kids.) And we sit around debating things like his tone and his shortfalls because, I guess, people have told so many lies about him that we cynically believe some of them have to be true.

Trump is unfathomably based for not dropping the 2020 election. Anyone else would have let themselves be bullied out of it. Anyone else would have quietly dropped the issue and made a nice conciliatory speech and walked away beat. But Washington DC is governed by a fundamentally sick culture where the wealth of the greatest country in the world is spent making the world a worser place. There is immense pressure within the system, all the time, to pillage everything for the wealth of the people running it, bomb some more countries for the defense contracts, ruin the world for the price it cost to ruin, then pay the experts to sell their misconceptions as the smartest ideas on earth. It takes immense pressure to not cave and do something good. Most presidents only do it a few times. Trump did it over and over and over again, more than anybody, even up to the point of this most important thing. They stole the election from him and he refused to concede it, even as they accused him of destroying democracy.

That's why he's going to win too, and why he won in 2016 (and 2020 alike). It's the quality from that first Republican debate in 2016, when Trump stood on stage and was the only candidate to say he wouldn't pledge to endorse the Republican nom.

Trump is the only candidate. He's the only one actually willing to stand up and fight. We all forgot what it even looked like to fight, we were all living in a world of sitting around waiting for Caesar and collapse and depression and loss, waiting and watching and coping. He makes it look easy! "Moderating" wouldn't help. All his "shortfalls" are his best qualities and why he is in fact The Best and will win at all. While we were sitting around passively debating the death of America he was imagining making America Greater Than Ever Before. You just come down the escalator, and you fight, and you win, and it's easy. And then you win some more.

Trump is obviously one of the greatest Americans to ever live.

Come on! He's clearly one of the greatest of the WORLD if not the greatest.

He casually reinvents the language every time he speaks.

Soon we will all be talking trumps english

He's clearly one of the greatest of the WORLD

Right, but Americans are already the greatest in the world, it goes without saying.

Your logic is sound

we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on, we should make Detroit wealthy again, we should make San Francisco a paradise again, we should Make America Great Again, and going further than that we should Make America Greater Than Ever Before. He just did it casually, because he wanted to help his country, when he was full of success and worldly things.

In what sense did he actually achieve - or even try to achieve - any of this?

There was minimal change in the trajectory of the manufacturing sector under Trump - there was a period of reasonable growth about the same as periods of growth under Obama in length and magnitude, stagnating in early 2019 before Covid made the numbers meaningless - and even after Covid corrections Biden also had a similar period of growth - slightly shorter but slightly faster - before stagnating similarly to Trump. What policy of Trump's was even supposed to achieve this? Tariffs is the only obvious candidate, but they came only in fits and starts and provoked a wide range of retaliatory tariffs. It doesn't matter though because clearly it didn't affect much either way.

If the answer to all this is that he wanted to achieve more but was thwarted by Congress/the Judiciary/Democrats/Republicans/the Deep State, then sorry but that's politics, maybe he isn't very good at it. Everyone agrees when Freddie De Boer says this to the left, but it's equally true for the right.

Shifting the vibes is by far the most important economic contributor. Talking about lower taxes and then not lowering them will likely bring in far more revenue than talking about raising taxes and then not raising them.

You just come down the escalator, and you fight, and you win, and it's easy. And then you win some more.

Except for, when, you know, you lose. And then you fight to argue that you didn't lose, and you lose that fight too.

Losing big is a part of winning big. Tom Brady lost at the Superbowl quite a few times, does that make him a loser? I think it's small-souled to look at a streak of big wins and cynically posture about failures and risk. Trump lost and then he kept fighting, which is the most important quality, which is that nice TV cliche that everybody talks about and no one really believes. His bankruptcies (large) set the stage for even greater success. That's the price of the game. But you just come down the escalator and fight and win and it's easy. And then you win some more. That's the attitude it takes to to imagine making America Greater Than Ever Before. It's the progressive forward-minded happy warrior (joy) that can imagine not just winning but winning more than anyone has ever thought possible. It's a big boast, it's uncouth and earnest and ridiculous. And it's the only way to really believe in the future, to unabashedly manifest a new golden age.

in my opinion trump should keep fighting about election fraud if he's correct, and not if he's wrong. the election fraud discourse over the past few years has both been, as far as i can tell, objectively very wrong, it's a classic example of a "conspiracy theory". IMO "conspiracy theory" is a very poor name, and what people really mean with that word isn't that something's a theory about a grand conspiracy, but a pattern of poor reasoning that leads certain types of people to wild, dramatic, and false conclusions. the election fraud isn't a "conspiracy theory" because it'd require a bunch of democrats to conspire to rig the election - that could totally happen! - it's a "conspiracy theory" because the reasoning people use to support it is of the kind people use to claim JFK vaccine CIA aliens.

we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on,

the reason we have a lot of service workers, and not a lot of factory workers, is that the production of cheap consumer goods has gotten really efficient, and people (including you) would rather pay money for good service at a restaurant, or enjoyable content delivered via the internet, than for more cheap consumer goods. infinity percent tariffs on cars would not revitalize detroit!

Tom Brady lost at the Superbowl quite a few times, does that make him a loser?

Losing leads to winning when you use it as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Trump did that with his bankruptcies. He repositioned his businesses. He learned that Trump the brand was valuable, and leveraged that by going into simple businesses and using his name to increase the margin on them.

He didn't continue in a series of endless lawsuits against his creditors, claiming that the casinos were in fact entirely solvent and making tons of money.

I appreciate your point, but I continue to believe that Trump and Republicans as a whole would have done better to take the attitude typical of a team that loses a game on a bad call or an unlucky injury: we lost, but it doesn't reflect on us as a team, we're going to come back and win. Much as it pains me to give this example, the 49ers in 2022 lost to the Eagles in the NFCCG on terrible luck. Brock Purdy suffered a freak elbow injury on a sack in the first quarter, and their backup QB suffered a concussion a few plays later. Left with no quarterbacks, the 49ers were doomed. And the Niners maintained, to themselves and publicly, that while they lost the game they were the better team. And they came back in 2023 on a mission, demolished the Eagles in the regular season, and ran hot all the way to the Super Bowl. Which they lost to the Chiefs, but what are you gonna do?

If Republicans had collectively taken the attitude that the various rule changes had delivered a Biden presidency, but not a fully legitimate Biden presidency, and that in recognition of this Biden should limit his programs to change the country, and if he didn't then Republicans in Congress had a mandate to prevent him from doing so. That's a sophisticated, effective argument that would appeal to moderates. The alternative has lead to significant losses of winnable Senate and Gubernatorial races, that are likely to hobble the effectiveness of a second Trump term.

That's a sophisticated, effective argument that would appeal to moderates.

They cheated! This kind of "sophisticated" klaptrap is a losing argument, because it's not earnest, it's not real. You can't honestly believe that they cheated (that's declasse, that's gauche), it's naive to really believe something so simple, so let's make up this complicated elaboration so that there's ironic distance to keep us all healthy and detached. They didn't cheat, they just changed the rules in unaccountable and unprecedent ways that felt like cheating, but technically I'm not calling it cheating because I don't want to cast aspersions about the process, which I'm casting aspersions about, but in a "sophisticated" way (insert crying seethejak under a happy mask).

If they stole the election from Trump, and Trump didn't say they cheated, but made some "sophisticated" complicated argument full of triangulationg, people would be pissed! They would have lost all faith in Trump. He wouldn't have just lost a few "winnable Senate and Gubernatorial races," he would have been exiled from the party. The GOP would have learned that Trump has no teeth, and they would have felt happy screwing him out of a third nomination.

Meanwhile Trump has learned the lessons from 2020 -- there are huge Republican orgs now dedicated to training poll watchers and lawyers undoing the rule changes and votes. Trump actually knows a thing or two about this.

Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?

Wait for Donald Trump to die.

Until then anything is pissing into the wind.

Trump has achieved a bizarre leverage over the Republican party, where even people who he has abused, insulted, and degraded still only offer milquetoast criticism against him. Trump controls enough of the Republican base that no Republican can go against him, and he isn't going to change his tune.

There's no negotiation here. Winning doesn't fix it. Losing doesn't fix it. Implementing supposed ballot security measures won't fix it.

Georgia was the epicenter of voter fraud theories. Georgia has voter ID laws. Georgia was run, in 2020, by a Republican Governor, and a Republican majority of 26 in the House. If a Republican administration, working with a Republican Governor, in a state long controlled by Republicans, can't root out the appearance of corruption using the techniques people are asking for to combat corruption, it's hopeless. Either the FEMA deep state is so powerful that it's unbeatable anyway, or nothing will ever convince people that Trump lost.

I think that a lot of people are under the impression that "wait until everything goes back to normal" is a viable strategy for dealing with whatever their pet problem happens to be.

I think the fundamental problem with that is confusing the symptom for the cause. It's certainly possible that Trump is uniquely causal of this voter ID thing. But I wouldn't bet on it going away after he dies. And I think the basic skepticism of election integrity (on the right, but also on the left from time to time) predates his POTUS run.

I don't think things are going "back to normal," if there ever was such a thing.

@Shrike

It's certainly possible that Trump is uniquely causal of this voter ID thing.

@TequilaMockingbird

If the establishment wants people to trust the process they really need to shut up about subverting the process to defeat Trump, and they really need to stop opposing things like requiring id to vote.

You both cite Voter ID, along with many other commenters in this thread.

Voter ID has been a fight in American politics since I can remember, and I'm sure it was around before that. Georgia passed Voter ID in 2005. Did Trump accept the result of the election in Georgia?

Arizona has had voter ID from 2019. Did Trump accept the result in Arizona?

Wisconsin's Voter ID law took effect in 2011 (aside: I love the website name Wiscontext). Did Trump accept the result in Wisconsin?

Michigan requires photo ID. Did Trump accept the results in Michigan?

It's pretty obvious that "pass a voter ID law" isn't going to fix things. And we can play various forms of "true voter ID has never been tried" with things like National ID cards showing citizenship or an American version of the Hukou system to register where everyone lives, but there's no actual push to implement that, and those kinds of government registries that allow for more direct Federal control over people's lives have been considered a Bad Thing by Republicans at all levels for generations. Given the repeated failures to implement RealID, we're probably not going to see a successful implementation of National ID any time soon.

Voter ID : Election Integrity as Police Body Cams : Black Lives Matter. It's a reasonable sounding procedural change that will ultimately change nothing.

But even if we agree on Voter ID, normally the conversation moves on to mail in ballots. The venerable @Rov_Scam has done the Yeoman's work and extensively outlined how mail-in ballot changes were passed, in many cases by Republicans to benefit Republican constituencies like the rural elderly and the self-employed. The only state to implement mail-in balloting by executive action in 2020 to go for Biden was New Hampshire. Which...actually I don't know of any Trump efforts to overturn the result in New Hampshire. If it happened I don't think it got a lot of press? I'll note that personally, I do not vote by mail, and I dislike vote by mail systems in general, because I don't trust myself to successfully fill out paperwork and my handwriting is atrocious, it is worth taking a few hours off during the day to make sure my ballot is counted. I'm also pretty sure that the most powerful constituency in American politics is Nursing Home Aides, who even leaving aside actually filling out ballots for their charges, can simply decide to "lose" the mail in ballots for residents whose politics they know to be antithetical to their own. I'm surprised neither side has promised massive pay increases for them yet.

Then the argument shifts to more subtle/secret Democrat manipulation schemes, but as we saw above there's not much pattern to R control of state government or D control of state government in terms of accusations of voter fraud.

But to return to our list of states above, let's zoom in on two: Georgia and Arizona both had R Governors and R State Houses. There was, obviously, an R in the White House for four years before the election. Both states had voter ID laws implemented before the election. Both states went for Biden, and despite extensive efforts neither state's results were ultimately overturned. Given that outcome, why should we expect implementing Voter ID laws nationally to lead to Trump and friends accepting another election loss, should it occur?

Arizona has had voter ID from 2019. Did Trump accept the result in Arizona?

This is a very poor choice of example given the widely reported issues in Maricopa county and the obvious conflict of interest invovled in the person in nominal charge of the count also being a candidate.

I really don't think there was anything in my post that suggests that adopting voter ID laws will Make The Problem Go Away, but I do agree(?) with you that my use of voter ID was imprecise at best. (I'd say the pause in the election count was worse for Election Integrity Vibes than the state of voter ID laws – most people don't care to grok the nuances of voter ID law but they are impatient to know who won the election.)

Fair. I didn't think you considered voter ID a complete solution either, I just focused on it to dig into one point.

Fixing perceptions/actualities of vote counting unfairness in blue machine run cities is either a coup-complete problem or near enough that it makes no difference. It requires probably allowing/forcing city government to annex suburbs such that the political unit becomes significantly more ethnically and politically balanced, but idk if that is remotely politically or practically possible. Any procedural changes short of that will still leave too much room for unaccountable actors to exercise influence on the process. Certainly it is not achievable by anyone by November.

At the end of the day it's very hard, in my mind, to square the anonymous ballot with election security, since the only way to be 100% certain that someone voted for a person in an environment where fraud is possible is to ask them.

I'm sure smart people can come up with a system using cryptography that preserves anonymity and ~guarantees secure elections, but most people won't be able to verify the security of the system themselves, so it's not actually helpful.

A slightly lower-IQ (and easier to understand) solution might just be to make all voting in-person and have a video feed that keeps a running headcount, and tally the voter headcount with the votes at the end of the day, or something like that. (I actually imagine similar measures are already used, though, but I've never looked into it.)

But at the end of the day I think the problem is more vibes-related. This is detached from whether or not the vibes are onto something or not – you can have a situation where lots of voter fraud doesn't cause a legitimacy crisis because it's not suspected in a high-trust environment, and you can have a system where there's a crisis of legitimacy because people suspect that elections are being rigged even if their security is airtight.

I'm not sure there's a way to fix a vibes problem quickly. I suspect the only way out of that is through.

I think it’s possible. If you have a barcode on an object that allows you to track it across a network, and you don’t necessarily have To know what the contents are. UPS can track millions of packages from warehouse to multiple locations to your front door by scanning the barcode on the box and uploading that to a server. Blockchain can be tracked without needing to know what the “package” contains or represents. This isn’t a ned to invent new technology. We could do things like this now with pretty muc( off the shelf technology. Scan the barcode on every ballot on paper at the point it’s cast. Scan every time the ballots move. If you see ballots arrive that cannot be traced to a precinct, then you’re likely seeing fake ballots.

Yep, that definitely makes sense to me. I think the point of failure there is "Okay, how do we prevent someone from backdooring the entire system and just filling in fake data?" And while I suspect there are answers to that, I'm not sure they are answers everyone will buy in a low-trust environment.

This doesn't mean interventions like this aren't worth doing, though. Perhaps that's precisely what's needed to end Voter Fraud Discourse, I don't know. I just expect that simply rolling some fancy whiz-bang foolproof and fast voter counter Rube Goldberg machine won't by itself be enough to Save Democracy – you'll need to prove that it works, and that might take many election cycles.

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How does voter ID work in connection with mail in ballots

Usually you write the ID number somewhere on the ballot, ie. Putting your driver's license number on the inside of the outer ballot.

You'd have to ask the Republican majorities in PA and GA that passed laws allowing for extensive mail in voting while also advocating voter ID laws.

It'll always be something.

Wait for Donald Trump to die.

Wait? This is perhaps the worst answer one could give.

The fundemental problem facing the chattering class, deep-state, and democratic party partisans is that Trump doesn't "control" the Republican base as much as he represents them (he may not be a particularly good representative, but that is beside the point). If you kill Trump there is a good chance somone else will just take his place.

If the establishment wants people to trust the process they really need to shut up about subverting the process to defeat Trump, and they really need to stop opposing things like requiring id to vote. TLDR a super-majority of Americans approve of requiring some sort of proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections and yet these are sorts of fight the DoJ is choosing to fight.

The fundemental problem facing the chattering class, deep-state, and democratic party partisans is that Trump doesn't "control" the Republican base as much as he represents them (he may not be a particularly good representative, but that is beside the point). If you kill Trump there is a good chance somone else will just take his place.

They believe there is no one as effective at that, by orders of magnitude, as Trump himself. So once Trump leaves the scene, his base will go back to having formless and directionless anger which will not translate to votes for anyone, or perhaps (in the case of white union workers) can be lured back to the Democrats. Without Trump's base, the old-school Republicans are a distinct minority party and we get one-party rule.

It may be worthwhile to point out that the Republicans were a minority party for the whole postwar period (often about half the size of the Democratic Party) but elected only two term Presidents (depending on how you want to count Nixon) until HW while the Democrats never had a President get reflected anywhere between Truman and Clinton. Republicans were seen as something of the same, stable party for a long time, even by registered Democrats (there's a reason the Republicans got 'evil' out of the 'evil party and stupid party' dichotomy). Plenty of Democrats wanted to vote for Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan over their opponents.

They believe there is no one as effective at that, by orders of magnitude, as Trump himself. So once Trump leaves the scene, his base will go back to having formless and directionless anger

The better argument, which I've made before at length, is that no other major political figure actually resembles Trump at a detailed level in their politics. Which is remarkable when you consider the degree of his takeover of the GOP and the eight years of dominance he's exercised over party politics. Every single potential heir to MAGA has clear major policy, procedural, and stylistic differences to Trump.

If Biden choked on an almond the Dems would get Kamala, if she laughed until she burst a blood vessel in her brain they would nominate Mayor Pete or Big Gretch or Gavin Newsom, and in that whole process virtually nothing would change policy wise. If Trump simply decided he wanted to golf more and spend time with Barron, policy in the GOP would fundamentally change under his successor.

So once Trump leaves the scene, his base will go back to having formless and directionless anger which will not translate to votes for anyone

I remember establishment Democrats and various "independents" saying the same thing about Ted Cruz and the Tea Party back in 2010/12 and now we have Trump.

As many have pointed out over the last 8 years, Trump is a symptom not the cause, and forgive me if i find your claim that if we ignore the problem it will go away unconvincing.

That doesn't seem to conflict with what he said. The anger from the base has been there in various forms for years. What Trump managed to do was convert that anger into support for him specifically, and for that support to reach a level where Trump can force others to toe the line.

The point isn't that anger will go away, just that it won't converge in a single direction. DeSantis for instance seemed poised to play himself as Trump 2.0, and that didn't work out for him.

DeSantis is in the same boat as Abbott he's got more pull as a governor of an important state than he would as a candidate and has nothing to gain from running as "Trump Lite" while the original is still on the menu.

At 45 years old, DeSantis can afford to wait a few years for Trump to retire.

Is there anything we can do to nudge the public into accepting that yes, Governor Cuomo can effortlessly curl 100 lbs dumbells the way you or I can effortlessly life the tv remote? At this point, it seems like "the weights were clearly fake" is completely unfalsifiable.

itsallsotiresome.jpg

Telling me to my face that a campaign that consisted of: -a clearly on the decline Biden, who had been a joke in all his previous attempts, -who only had any credidibility due to having been elevated the the Vice Presidency by Obama (who famously loathed him) as a sop to certain factions within the Democratic party, and who did little to nothing to support his candidacy -who had to have the rest of the party candidates drop out - save for Warren, to split the progressive vote - and rally behind him to stop Bernie Sanders from gaining traction -who routinely "called it a day" by 8 am, held few rallies, and couldn't manage to get anyone to show up when he did -with a running mate whose popularity was so abyssmal she couldn't even make it to the first party caucus

Was, in fact, secretly such a charismatic candidate that he shattered voting results, even above that obtain by historically transformative candidates, is to insult my intelligence. That simply does. not. happen. To ask me to not even question this is to insist that I ignore everything that I have ever seen about Presidential campaigns, to forget everything I know about general voting trends, to just have amnesia about how elections work, and how voters vote, in general. Such a claim falls well within the "to even claim this happened is evidence you're lying" territory; it may as well be the poster child for "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

To go on to claim that in spite of more than doubling the number of write-in ballots - and thus, the number of people voting remotely for the first time - we managed to get ballot rejection rates down to levels practically indistinguishable from zero!. In most cases, we were able to reduce the rate of rejection by five-fold! I guess we were all wrong about the Boomers!

Wait, no, we weren't; such a claim, again, flies in the face of reality. This simply does. not. happen. Ever.

But wait, there's more! I am also to simply ignore Georgia closing up polling stations due to a water main bursting, sending observers home, then dumping votes that went 100% for Biden that were totally already counted before Republican observers were given the boot, nothing to see here, it's honestly disturbing you'd even think to question such a thing, really. I am to simply take in stride that observers were kicked out, and windows blocked from outside observation, totall normal, totally legit, only a loony would think there might even be the barest scintilla of a possibility that something untoward was going on. Why, it's only fair that the Dems would insist on obstructing any attempts to crack down on obvious avenues of vote fraud, as such actions are prima facie evidence that Republicans are just sore losers, as there can certainly be no justification for such efforts!

But this is all old hat at this point; this "debate" has been had with you on the reddit, and here, ad nauseum. You will never offer anything other than the most perfunctary of rebuttals, with a sneer for anyone who disagrees.

who had to have the rest of the party candidates drop out

I never understand this line. Is the idea that all of the moderate candidates were just going to keep splitting the vote right up until the convention, and then just, idk, let Bernie have it on a plurality or something? The dynamics of primaries demand that candidates drop out to endorse similarly positioned frontrunners. Do you think it's just a coincidence the 2016 and 2008 Democratic primaries also become two-horse races?

and couldn't manage to get anyone to show up when he did'

'Enthusiasm' is overrated. For every Obama or Trump there is a Starmer or Scholz who coasts by on the incompetence or divisiveness of their opponent - that is definitely not unique to Biden. Similarly;

secretly such a charismatic candidate that he shattered voting results

The obvious explanation is negative polarisation - maybe Biden didn't drive huge turnout himself, but it's very plausible to Trump did both for and against him.

I am also to simply ignore Georgia closing up polling stations due to a water main bursting, sending observers home, then dumping votes that went 100% for Biden that were totally already counted before Republican observers were given the boot, nothing to see here, it's honestly disturbing you'd even think to question such a thing, really. I am to simply take in stride that observers were kicked out, and windows blocked from outside observation, totall normal, totally legit, only a loony would think there might even be the barest scintilla of a possibility that something untoward was going on.

This is just nonsense. The water main 'bursting' happened a 6 a.m. on the morning of election day, disrupting things for a few hours, way before any shift towards Biden was beginning to be observed. There was no big tranche for Biden co-incident with the water problem. The whole kicking out observers thing I have only ever seen reported third-hand by people like Giuliani - the Chief Investigator of the SOS's offices has testified that this never occurred, no doubt you don't trust her but I'm curious what in particular convinces you this did happen.

I'm curious what in particular convinces you this did happen.

For me it was the talking head that came on the news at ~11PM Pacific on November 6 saying that a water main had broken and counting would be suspended in Georgia for the night -- my memory on this is quite solid as I had a bet on the go for the Georgia results, and Trump was looking good at the time.

Certainly it's possible that the talking head was mistaken, and this has definitely been said by the 'most secure election evah' people -- but then they would say that, wouldn't they?

Even if I grant that this were the case, it seems likely that the Republican observers were told the same thing and went home -- which would have been fine if the officials had not started counting again a couple hours later -- which they very definitely did.

The whole kicking out observers thing I have only ever seen reported third-hand by people like Giuliani

This one there is no ambiguity -- it was in Philadelphia IIRC and there was all sorts of video at the time. Even observers who weren't kicked out were made to stand behind a rope like 20 feet away from the counting 'because covid'. If you don't believe this one you are positing some sort of conspiracy yourself.

For me it was the talking head that came on the news at ~11PM Pacific on November 6 saying that a water main had broken and counting would be suspended in Georgia for the night -- my memory on this is quite solid as I had a bet on the go for the Georgia results, and Trump was looking good at the time.

The talking heads (and social media) were reporting on the water main yes. Then the next day people started pointing out that no one called for any plumber for this, it turned into "there was a toilet overflowing". Giuliani got hold of the video of the arena when this happens, at that time, a couple of poll workers corral everyone to the door and have them leave, talk on the phone, then pull a batch of ballots that had been kept under a table earlier in the day and run those in the counting machines with no supervision from any poll watchers. The SoS said that there was a state observer present, but by his timeline he was only there one hour after the counting started.

The Federalist has a pretty good breakdown of what happened in Georgia.

I don't really care what the official excuses are after, when you create that big an appearance of impropriety, you have to go way above and beyond to clear it after. I've had the training to work elections in Canada and the whole thing was extremely clearly made to avoid every appearance of impropriety; No ballot box was ever to be opened without the observers present, you did not let it out of sight until the counting was done, no one was to be left alone with the ballots, you weren't to touch the ballots without being sure the other parties' observers' see exactly everything you were doing.

Ultimately, the most compelling evidence against is that the people who investigated this and claimed there was nothing weird or fraudulent, the Governor and Secretary of State, are Republicans, but that's flimsy considering how many Republican politicians would have gladly defected on Trump if they thought they could get away with it (if they thought they would be giving the killing blow to Trump's political career), just so they could get back to business-as-usual.

Whenever I hear people say that lawsuits couldn't find proof of fraud, the problem is that finding proof of fraud is almost impossible. But there is a lot of proof that the local election officials made deliberate efforts in multiple states to make sure that it would be impossible to catch fraud; which is as damning as finding the actual fraud and the public realizes that. If someone is seen going into a room holding a knife, methodically turns off the security cameras on their way in and then the next day someone else is found stabbed in that room, people know what likely happened. But that does not reach the point at which a judge feels comfortable overturning official results.

The water main story radicalized me. The media stated it was debunked merely because a government election official said shortly thereafter it wasn’t true. Didn’t offer evidence. Just ipse dixit. And that was apparently enough despite numerous real time accounts that differed. Of all people, Mollie Hemingway had an excellent take down of it.

Do you seriously expect me to believe that the candidate that I hate could be successful? How is that possible when I hate him so much?

I'm 5'8", well into middle-age, and not anywhere near my physical prime.

Were I to show up under center for any NFL team this Sunday, and then proceed to put on a record-breaking performance, putting up numbers the likes of which legendary passers like Marino or Rogers in their prime could only dream of, nobody's going to wait for the "smoking gun" of wire transfers to every team owner, emails from Goodell directly to officiating crews, etc., before proclaiming that the game was obviously rigged.

I expect any Biden supporters could create a list of negatives about Trump just as large as your Biden list.

And indeed, a huge swathe of Democrats did proclaim everything was rigged when Trump beat Hilary. A subject that was much mocked by posters on the right of the spectrum.

Please don’t put words in other posters’ mouths.

You may argue that they are taking something for granted, but you shouldn’t assert it.

That post made a lot of specific complaints and you're literally just dismissing them out of hand with literally zero content. I think you've forgotten what this place is for.

Please commit to explain how Joe Biden, despite his faults, has been more popularly elected than even prime Obama.

What do you mean by "more popularly elected?" Biden's EC margin was lower than either of Obama's and Biden's popular vote margin was between Obama's margins (lower than 2008, higher than 2012). More generally the US popular vote has been trending Dem for a while now. The Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote once (Bush 2004) in the last 30 years.

I am not talking about the relative margin.

Biden got 81,284,000 votes total, the most ever. Beating Obama's record 69,498,516.

I don't think population growth alone can account for that. And I'm not really seeing how one can justify it with enthusiasm.

If you think this needs explaining, then why do you not think that Trump's 74,223,975 total votes need explaining as well? You can weave the same sort of just-so story of how that outcome is implausible, with the same sort of emotional incredulity - how did an incumbent candidate who achieved so little of what he had promised to do and stumbled from scandal to scandal manage to attract some 10 million more voters than the first time around, and also blaze past Obama's record? Unless you are contending that the forces of election manipulation also conjured up millions (but fewer) fake votes for Trump for good reason, you are just left claiming a convenient cutoff point where your candidate's unprecedented increase in support is still low enough to be normal but his opponent's is high enough to be evidence of foul play.

Do not presume. I do think the higher turnout on both sides is suspicious.

It speaks to me of a complete free for all where all the normal rules and safeguards were thrown away because of Covid and where the legitimacy of the outcome is impossible to verify.

Had Trump won we may not be having this conversation because the topic would be something else, but it would still be suspicious.

How can one justify it with non-enthusiasm?

Take out a factor for population, and you’re still left with millions of excess votes. The number of citizens grew by around 7.5M, but there were over 17M more votes. That’s not the kind of gap that hides in a couple of stuffed mailboxes. It should be obvious, incontrovertible, a smoking gun.

But that’s not what we see. Existing mechanisms like poll watchers haven’t caught such fraud. Surprise audits by experts and partisans haven’t found anything close. States with wide variety in procedures and political incentives keep turning up the same lack of evidence.

Forget the Republicans. There’s a huge incentive for Democrat muckrakers to look for just one abuse in a red state. That kind of “gotcha” would be plastered all over social media. But we don’t see that, because there’s nothing to be found. Trump didn’t have to fake it to get 11M more votes.

If he managed that compared to his 2016 bid, surely Biden could manage it compared to Hillary Clinton. People stopped voting Green, stopped voting Libertarian, stopped sitting it out. It was just that polarizing.

While I am and have been generally skeptical for the strong version of the 2020 vote fraud argument:

There’s a huge incentive for Democrat muckrakers to look for just one abuse in a red state. That kind of “gotcha” would be plastered all over social media.

McCrae Dowless was.

Exactly. That’s the best they could come up with.

I think of cases like these as the motte for election interference. If we can’t find equivalents for the 2020 election, which was more charged, more vulnerable, and more closely scrutinized, I think that suggests an extremely low rate of fraud.

Existing mechanisms like poll watchers haven’t caught such fraud.

Funny you would say that, since one of the big 'smoking guns' was poll watchers in battleground states being effectively prevented from watching -- whether under the pretense of anti-covid measures, or counting continuing outside of their presence.

It’s not funny I’d say that. Poll watchers are doing an important job. If you’re talking about the Detroit or Fulton cases, I found them unconvincing.

Do you have more info on the COVID topic? I’m curious about the actual changes in policy. All I find with Google is scaremongering about amateur poll watchers.

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Voter turnout was up significantly in 2020 compared to any presidential election since at least 1992. This was true in every state, with most states seeing around a 6 point bump. It didn't even seem to matter if the state was competitive or not in the presidential election; Hawaii, which usually sees a turnout in the 30s or low 40s, jumped from around 38 percent turnout to around 52 percent turnout. Texas, the new loser, saw turnout increase from 43.4% to 51.3%. California and Montana both saw ten point increases. For whatever reason, Americans, regardless of political disposition, were more inclined to vote in 2020 than they were in previous years. If this, in and of itself, is evidence of fraud in swing states, then it's evidence of fraud in every state, including ones controlled by Republicans that voted for Trump in larger margins than in 2016.

The only metric of "voter turnout" is "votes cast," so ballot harvesting generating 10 million fraudulent votes is the same as 10 million extra people actually standing in line to vote, as far as turnout is concerned. Pointing to 2020's high "turnout" isn't evidence of legitimacy.

I mentioned arguments to the contrary being perfunctory, and we see a lot of this in this thread. Note that "well, Biden may not have been popular, but maybe they just hated Trump so much?" and then the argument stops right there. People publicly called Reagan the antiChrist, I watched prime-time network movies about how totally-not-Reagan was going to get us all killed; I watched every celebrity in the world shit all over GWB, also insisting he's going to get us all killed. Arguing that Trump was so uniquely hated that he drove record-shattering numbers of voters against him (while also driving record-shattering numbers of votes for him), and furthermore accomplished this feat with virtually no help from the Biden camp, who did precious little campaigning to build his own support, again requires me to ignore everything history has taught us of how elections actually work, of what motivates voters to vote. We have to have selective amnesia to think "well, maybe they just hated Trump that much" carries water.

I wouldn't say it's evidence of fraud in and of itself, but it is suspicious. And I have trouble with the legitimacy of mail in voting in general since it's much easier to coerce or buy votes with it, especially if the conditions are as relaxed as they were that time.

Easier mail-in voting + COVID meaning there was literally nothing to do except get sucked into politics.

Does this also apply to Trump? His 74M votes in 2020 is the second most any presidential candidate has ever received. Also beating Obama at his peak.

I think so. I find it hard to believe Trump is more popular than peak Obama either.

I dismissed a terrible line of logic. I didn't comment on the other points. This place is for rational discussion, and the argument that a poster thinks a candidate is bad therefore it is impossible that they attracted votes is just not at the standard of the motte.

Even Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote. Why would it remotely be a surprise that a far less divisive candidate attracts more votes, after a mediocre term for Trump that had the misfortune to end with a pandemic?

Clinton got 65,844,610 votes, less than Obama's 69,498,516 and much less than Biden's 81,284,000.

Why would it remotely be a surprise that a far less divisive candidate attracts more votes

In your view, is 2008 Obama more divisive than 2020 Biden? And if so explain how.

Trump went from 63 million votes to 72 million votes. How do you explain an average first term producing that amount of extra votes, unless there was a general increase in voting turnout for 2020?

Why the increase though?

Who knows? But any explanation needs to account for why both candidates saw a massive increase in their vote numbers. Biden wasn't the only candidate who got more votes than Obama ever did.

Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?

One (unfortunately) underappreciated way to build trust is to be trustworthy.

At least some of the claims about fraud are at least superficially plausible, so any plan that doesn't acknowledge and fix that is just more effective deception.

Aren’t you the poster who spent two years denying inflation was happening?

He is the poster who when it was pointed out to him the job numbers were fake didn’t believe it.

More effort than this, please.

I don't think so. I've argued in the past that Republicans think the economy is far worse than it actually is, that real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) wages are up, etc. but I've never denied inflation was actually happening.

I've argued in the past that Republicans think the economy is far worse than it actually is

This isn't the sort of thing that people are likely to be "wrong" about, because their evaluation of the economy is based on metrics that impact them directly.

Lunch at Five Guys costs me $30 right now, so for me, the economy is bad. There's no argument you can present to me on this forum right now that will make my burger stop costing $30. Job numbers, real wages, exact rate of inflation and etc, are all irrelevant, because my burger still costs $30. So instead of trying to verbally convince me that the economy isn't actually that bad, why don't we instead come up with a plan of action to make my burger not cost $30 anymore? Is there anyone in November running on a platform of making burgers not cost as much? Because I'll vote for that guy.

This line of thought is actually highly atypical. Even in 2022/2023 iirc a majority of Americans rated their own economic circumstances as good/improving, they just thought the country as a whole wasn't.

So instead of trying to verbally convince me that the economy isn't actually that bad, why don't we instead come up with a plan of action to make my burger not cost $30 anymore? Is there anyone in November running on a platform of making burgers not cost as much? Because I'll vote for that guy.

Well, I wasn't planning on getting involved in politics, but if that's what you're concerned about, I have a plan that all but guarantees to get the cost of that hamburger down: First, we'll raise interest rates up to Volcker-era levels. If this managed to get inflation down by double digits, with inflation currently sitting at 2.5%, it should be enough to get double-digit deflation. Next, I'm going to raise taxes on practically everyone. Current middle class brackets are in the 21%–24% bracket, let's get them into the 25%-30% range they were at before the Reagan tax cuts. Next, we'll get rid of all tariffs. There's no reason for Five Guys to be forced to pay extra if they can get cheaper beef from Brazil. Finally, end all immigration restrictions. Farmers, food processing plants, and restaurants shouldn't have to pay anyone $15/hr when there are plenty of people who would work for the minimum wage and be glad to get it. Now, there's a decent chance that you might not have a job after my plan takes effect, rendering the cost of restaurant food a moot point, but that would do it.

This isn't the sort of thing that people are likely to be "wrong" about, because their evaluation of the economy is based on metrics that impact them directly.

That makes sense. Unfortunately, it's demonstrably false. Polls ask both "how are you doing economically?" and "how's the economy doing in general?" (but, erm, worded better by people who know how to ask poll questions). While the former doesn't exactly track the stock market minute-by-minute, the latter is consistently (at least in the past several years) strongly affected by partisanship. I totally believe that people's feelings about their own economic situation is difficult to judge from top-level economic statistics, especially ones biased towards measuring how well the economy is working for rich people, but people's assessment of the economy of a whole is strongly influenced by their political leanings over any observation of the facts.

Also, to be clear, this isn't a "Republicans are lying" claim. Both sides are heavily influenced by partisanship here. Look at the first graph in the first link I gave above: at Biden's inauguration the answer to "is the economy getting better?" flipped from around 50% of Republicans/10% of Democrats to around 10% of Republicans/50% of Democrats. That chart seems more useful for determining who is president than anything else.

I would add that the problem is the government data is controlled by the people who benefit from positive data. It isn’t totally fake but there are fudge factors and it isn’t entirely clear if they are 1) being fudged and 2) if so the size of the fudging.

For example food inflation was in the mid twenties over the Biden admin. Industry group calculated it around 35%. Maybe the industry group is wrong or maybe the government is wrong. But the industry group seemingly fits my experience a bit more.

If such a candidate existed you wouldn't vote for him anyway. At least I don't think so, because I don't think communists are well-received here.

Paul Volcker wasn't a communist, and it doesn't take communism to keep prices stable instead of wildly inflating.

But no, nobody is running on that platform, because it would require cutting off the gravy train. The Dollar Endgame is coming, eventually, and when it arrives it will be in a rush.

You didn't ask for a candidate to "keep prices stable." You asked for a candidate to actively bring the price of products down. That's a much bigger ask, and much closer to the realm of price controls.

You

The guy you just replied to wasn't me.

I'm not a strict market libertarian, I think that if there are reasonable interventions we can make in the economy then we should do that. I agree that direct price controls are a bad idea, but to suggest that there are no actions whatsoever that can be undertaken to reduce inflation doesn't strike me as plausible.

Fair. My fault for not checking. But to but you and @KMC , the original comment did say to actively reduce prices. If this quick source is correct the last time we had deflation was 1954. And generally speaking, deflation means the economy is in a very bad condition.

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No, it's firmly in the realm of deflation.

The problem I've always had here, particularly looking down at some of the below comments, is the way that there seem to be several concentric circles of mottes on this question, none of which actually correspond to what Trump or some of his partisans claimed.

Thus, for instance, sometimes there's an argument that US election security could be significantly improved. I wholly agree with this. There are many ways that US elections could be made more secure, transparent, and responsible.

We also sometimes see the argument that the institutional landscape, particularly re: media, academia and 'experts', civil servants and bureaucrats, etc., is so thoroughly slanted as to systematically misrepresent the positions of right-wing or Republican figures. No election held on such biased terrain can be considered fair. The entire institutional ecosystem is soft-rigged against the GOP, regardless of whether there was any direct voter fraud. This is an argument that I have a lot of time for - if one faction has a huge advantage in political communication, and its credibility is laundered by all the major epistemic institutions of its society, then it's hardly a free and fair contest of ideas.

However, these were not the actual arguments made by Trump and allies, nor were they the arguments voiced on January 6. Those arguments were much more clearly motivated and false. I'm thinking of arguments like 2000 Mules. It may be true that US elections aren't run well, and that the media landscape is biased to an extent that calls into question democratic legitimacy, but neither of those make D'Souza's specific claims true, or even plausible. Likewise with other claims.

Often I run into defenses like "take Trump seriously but not literally", or "Trump lies like a used car salesman, Democrats lie like lawyers", and to an extent I think the points those defenses are making are valid - Trump's communicative style relies heavily on deliberate exaggeration, but the audience is 'in' on that exaggeration to an extent; and there are more subtle and effective ways to lie that don't involve stating identifiable untruths.

But at some point, I think, that eventually turns into "I believe Trump's lies communicate a larger truth" and from there into "what Trump says is false, but I support him because I associate those falsehoods with something else that might be true" and from there to "I ignore what Trump actually says and substitute something else, and I support that something else". At some point you're just too far away from the candidate himself or his campaign.

But isn’t the problem “the IC was willing to lie to try to influence the election for one candidate and if they were willing to break that norm why would they simply stop there instead of changing votes.”

And for that I don’t have a convincing argument that THAT would be a bridge too far. Now that’s not proof they did something but when they know by and large they won’t be caught because of institutional advantages — why not cheat?

Further it seems the latest in Georgia shows that the dominion machines are far from safe (I don’t understand why we need machines instead of simply paper ballots).

The entire institutional ecosystem is soft-rigged against the GOP, regardless of whether there was any direct voter fraud. This is an argument that I have a lot of time for - if one faction has a huge advantage in political communication, and its credibility is laundered by all the major epistemic institutions of its society, then it's hardly a free and fair contest of ideas. …However, these were not the actual arguments made by Trump and allies, nor were they the arguments voiced on January 6.

This seems like some sort of reverse-motte-and-Bailey on your part. Some crazies yell extreme theories, therefore the moderate theories are not worth considering?

At some point you're just too far away from the candidate himself or his campaign.

It also seems like an effort of sophistry to avoid the question of “how to get Republicans to accept the election results” by playing around with definitions until the people with legitimate reasons to distrust the election don’t count as Republicans any more, ergo dusts hands job done.

This seems like some sort of reverse-motte-and-Bailey on your part. Some crazies yell extreme theories, therefore the moderate theories are not worth considering?

On the contrary, I just said:

We also sometimes see the argument that the institutional landscape, particularly re: media, academia and 'experts', civil servants and bureaucrats, etc., is so thoroughly slanted as to systematically misrepresent the positions of right-wing or Republican figures. No election held on such biased terrain can be considered fair. The entire institutional ecosystem is soft-rigged against the GOP, regardless of whether there was any direct voter fraud. This is an argument that I have a lot of time for - if one faction has a huge advantage in political communication, and its credibility is laundered by all the major epistemic institutions of its society, then it's hardly a free and fair contest of ideas.

I said myself that I agree with the mottes! I just sometimes feel like the mottes, and my agreement therewith, are used to try to justify baileys that I find much more doubtful.

If those other issues were dealt I would bet enormous sums of money that support for stolen election claims would deflate slowly like a balloon over the course of several years.

Opposition to very commonplace and common sense election security measures is legitimate dry tinder for ever wilder rungs of supposition. And every day it’s not implemented the plausible deniability of the worst, least charitable takes about trumps enemies shrinks until we are at the point we are currently at, where the conspiracies start to seem more plausible even by people like myself who are naturally skeptic and repulsed by woo and snake oil salesmen.

If those other issues were dealt I would bet enormous sums of money that support for stolen election claims would deflate slowly like a balloon over the course of several years.

I agree entirely.

Unfortunately I think the terrain at the moment is such that, because any questions about those issues are right/Trump-coded, those on the left will reflexively oppose any of those reforms, because any movement towards the right is seen as presumptively Trumpist, and you can't negotiate with insurrectionists, and so on. Extreme polarisation has made it harder to solve the causes of polarisation.

And all this does is push people further to the extremes and strengthen the con men.

Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?

Serious question: is there anything the government could feasibly do now, to nudge Democrats towards accepting the result of the election in the event that Kamala loses?

Because my answer to your question is "Well, it could stop rigging elections."

Someone will inevitably cry, "But there's no clear and undisputable evidence of widespread or coordinated voter fraud sufficient to have changed the outcome of 2020!"

Sure, let's grant that. But let's also observe that setting up elections to come out the way you want them (i.e. rigging, in the most boring metaphorical sense) can be done in numerous legal and quasi-legal ways. In fact most attempts to "rig" elections are conducted in entirely legitimate ways, and people don't object because if everyone is free to do what they can to influence the outcome of the election, well, that's just democracy!

However there are at least two important institutions in our culture which we broadly expect to refrain from influencing elections. One is the government itself, including government actors like FBI agents and military personnel. Another is "the Press," that amorphous blob of journalists and corporations that purports to contribute to the political process by ensuring the dissemination of facts.

These two institutions have all but entirely abandoned the pretense of political impartiality. The recent example of 60 Minutes doctoring an interview in Kamala's favor can serve as just one instance of persistent and repeated behavior from the press. Disparities in the Justice Department's treatment of, say, 2020 DC rioters versus 2016 DC rioters can serve as just one example of persistent and repeated behavior from the government. The bureaucracy and the press are dominated by Democrats, such that a prospiracy to thumb the scales for Democratic candidates is basically inevitable.

One of my biggest problems with Donald Trump is that he often says false things that are directionally correct, which takes attention away from real problems to focus on fake ones. But one reason he might do this is simply that the truth is complicated and most people haven't got the attention span for it. I have not taken the time to make a lengthy linked catalog of ways which the government and the press abused their putative impartiality in part because most examples are, in isolation, small and easily dismissed. I'm not interested in getting dragged into a back-and-forth over the real significance of, say, dismissing Biden's violation of federal law due to his being an "elderly man with a poor memory." We used to impeach (or try to impeach) executives who used government power to hamper (or try to hamper) their political opponents. But not anymore! It's just that I notice the direction of these things, and the small examples pile up quickly.

(Well, don't worry. The FISA court ordered numerous corrective actions, which I'm sure will be followed meticulously any time they do not interfere with Democratic victories at the polls. What more do you want? Surely an impeachment would be far too much of a hassle.)

When Trump was first elected President, one common meme was for people to say and post, "NOT MY PRESIDENT." Hillary Clinton called Trump an "illegitimate President." Would you say that Democrats "accepted the results of the election" in that case? Because my read is that they very much did not, indeed still have not. Why didn't they accept the outcome of that election? What could the government have done, to nudge them toward greater acceptance?

Because if you can't answer that question, or you think it's a meaningfully different question, then I don't think anyone is in a position to give you a satisfying answer to your question, either.

Another is "the Press," that amorphous blob of journalists and corporations that purports to contribute to the political process by ensuring the dissemination of facts.

Most countries have partisan press - the UK obviously, but also France (Le Figaro vs Le Monde at the quality end), Germany (FAZ vs SZ) etc. America had partisan press for most of its history (Citizen Kane is about this), and does so now. The idea that there is one respectable paper per major city, and they all form an ideological monoculture such that you can talk about "the Press" as something that should eschew political bias, is what is weird and is driven by specific features of the US advertising market in the 2nd half of the 20th century. I don't think "there is no single newspaper and/or TV station which is generally accepted as impartial" makes a country less democratic.

It wasn't just 'specific features of the US advertising market in the 2nd half of the 20th century', there was a period of ideological homogenization that preceded and was bound up in a discussion about professional ethics which drew on reformism and progressivism in the first half of the 20th century. There's a reason the Press' efforts to portray itself as neutral in the '2nd half of the 20th century' worked: they made a genuine effort to follow the ethical standards set up in prior generations and that convinced a lot of people to buy what they were selling.

This is important because you're not just going up against the leftovers of a series of material causes, you're dealing with an ideology that has deeper roots in people's sense of social right and wrong. It's not just that people look back fondly on the period and want it back, it's that they agree with what was (at least partially) achieved in that period and want it back.

There are some RW presses. But now you add in Google. Google puts a thumb on the scales by promoting traditional old news that are clearly LW (eg NYT, NBC, WaPo) whilst not promoting RW.

So the monopoly that Google has really puts a stranglehold on info sharing. Thank god for Elon Musk at least.

That all seems basically correct to me. What you seem to have left out is that America in the 20th century developed a tradition of viewing the Press as the impartial, truth-oriented watchdogs of culture and society (to the point that journalists now feel comfortable calling it a "fact check" when they disagree with someone, or even simply disapprove of the framing of an issue). The Press has grown more partisan, but public perception hasn't caught up to that--even though most people understand that some news outlets are partisan hacks, their preferred sources are exempted. Gell Mann amnesia at an institutional level, as it were.

It's fine if each paper has its own slant! But if they all have the same bias, you have a problem. And you have an even bigger problem if the universities that produce "professional" journalists on one side and the industry financing new paper on the other also have the same bias, so that correction becomes all but impossible. I don't think it's a coincidence that people retreat into completely independent, badly financed, broadly unreliable (but at least not reliably biased!) alternative ecosystems such as blogs and forums.

When Trump was first elected President, one common meme was for people to say and post, "NOT MY PRESIDENT." Hillary Clinton called Trump an "illegitimate President." Would you say that Democrats "accepted the results of the election" in that case? Because my read is that they very much did not, indeed still have not. Why didn't they accept the outcome of that election? What could the government have done, to nudge them toward greater acceptance?

There’s a fundamental difference between being bitter about an election result and actually thinking the result was actually illegitimate. I will of course grant you that occasionally the language can appear superficially similar, but the difference is real and very important. Democrats absolutely accepted the result of the election. The process was not in question, and this was telling in the actual actions taken: they thought Russia meddled a bit too much and so the solution is policy to stop it happening again.

Hell, even after 2000, Democrats still by and large accepted the result despite some very potent arguments that they had been robbed by some uncontrollable aspect of the administrative state (broadly). Sure, you had a decent chunk of individuals who continued or even still continue to believe the election result was rigged or undemocratic or whatever, but this didn’t translate to the political class, and it didn’t lead to a fundamental dispute of elections more broadly, and in the actions, Florida got its shit together and fixed a lot of the issues for subsequent elections.

The immediate reaction of Trump and his allies was not merely bitterness but action that should be disturbing to all. They tried both literally and rhetorically to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly (mens rea according to the evidence we’ve seen) subvert the actual election, irrespective of fact.

Do you see the difference? “Let’s fix it” is of a fundamentally different character than “let’s change it”. The former recognizes that setbacks happen in politics — even unfair ones! And it recognizes that there will be other chances and that the system is more important than ego. But the second, oh boy, it’s shortsighted and selfish and threatens the whole thing. It’s kind of like a marital fight. There is a line between some things you might say to your spouse in anger, and some things which should literally never be said, because they can’t be taken back and might threaten the entire marriage. With the assumption that the marriage is a good one - here, the assumption that the system of democratic elections is a good one.

It’s not at all clear what kind of system Trump would put in its place, which is PLENTY worrying in and of itself, but I have a very hard time imagining it being better than our current one, and I likewise have I think very good reasons to believe that even if you think for example that the Justice Department needs reform and fairness, Trump is probably one of the worst people to actually do so. That Trump’s personal motivations largely aligned with the country’s in his first term wasn’t an accident but was at least in some sense lucky - but I’m not convinced this can be taken for granted in a second term to the same degree.

I don't see the difference. It feels like salami-slicing to me. You could say this about Bernie Sanders. 'Anyone who disagrees with the integrity of the process is a rebel and an anarchist' is a just-so explanation. 'It's different when we do it' is partisan hypocrisy.

Actions speak louder than words is the test. It’s disappointing but within the realm of expectations for losers to be whiny, sad but occasional for a low-status politician to actually flail around in denial for a bit, but something else entirely when the top takes actions that are demonstrably motivated by impure motives and backed by hot air.

Look. If you ask Trump — and many have! — how exactly he lost, he refuses to answer. Even if you hold up someone like Stacey Abrams, who infamously refused to concede the Georgia governor race, if you asked her why… she will fucking tell you! It’s absolutely incredible that Trump will not do the same.

But Trump doesn’t really believe the “hard” version of the stolen election hypothesis (that machines were rigged, that the numbers were physically changed, that someone added +1000 to the other guy’s total and minused a thousand from his etc) and never has. He has gestured toward it on occasion, but he doesn’t believe it.

The proof is in his many recent interviews where he talks about 2020 and having ‘lost by a whisker’ or by a tiny bit or whatever. That’s not what people who believe they lost truly rigged elections say, they say they lost because the other guy hacked the voting machines or stuffed ballots or prevented his guys from voting.

I mean, that's arguably circumstantial evidence for @Ben___Garrison 's thesis that the 2020 stolen election narrative was a cynical ploy by an unscrupulous sore loser, because Trump was definitely saying the election was concretely stolen back then. He may not have believed it personally but it was useful for him to have followers who believed it. If nothing else, he needed to at least partially legitimize his attempt at a procedural coup - you can't concede that you lost and then try to subvert the outcome. And, as noted in OP, a stolen election narrative protects Trump's status in the party and in the eyes of his followers.

Democrats absolutely accepted the result of the election. The process was not in question, and this was telling in the actual actions taken: they thought Russia meddled a bit too much and so the solution is policy to stop it happening again.

Didn’t the action they take was to spy on the Trump campaign and then bog them down in investigations that ultimately concluded the Russians did not in fact meddle? Didn’t they directly try to impeach Trump over similar issues? Didn’t the mainstream Press crow about “russiagate” for years on end? Didn’t democratic aligned judges use lawfare to nullify a democratically elected presidents policies over and over and over again? Didn’t they delay vaccine study results until after the election, murdering thousands of Americans just because Orange Man Bad?

Sorry but it doesn’t seem like they accepted Trump as the president. Wasn’t there a a whole “resistance” thing too? I mean. Sure it was fake and lame as far as resistances go, but one could argue the bureaucracy went along with it.

  • Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?

  • The campaign didn’t get meaningfully “bogged down” by any investigations, not anything special counsels don’t normally do

  • Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians

  • They tried to impeach him over something almost explicitly a quid pro quo - you could argue that some presidents get a pass for that kind of thing (Nixon sure as hell did it but that wasn’t what his impeached for) but it’s still, um, bad. And note that after the effort failed in Senate vote, they dropped it. You don’t see Kamala whining about it on the campaign trail

  • If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades

Scope and scale matter. My point stands.

  • -20

Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?

Catching one instance of sleazy behavior from a large group over a period of time generally implies that there's more than one instance, but that that was the instance that was easiest or luckiest to catch.

Your point doesn’t stand in the least. You’ve marshalled zero evidence for your dismissal nor addressed most of my points

The campaign didn’t get meaningfully “bogged down” by any investigations, not anything special counsels don’t normally do

I meant the administration, and of course it did. The news covered the mueller investigation breathlessly nonstop, over an essential nothingburger. How do you think that affects an administration?

Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians

sure after about 3 years of nonstop coverage and rampant speculation (Steele dossier? Never even existed)

If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades

It’s true, the Dems have been terrible on that for decades, but it reached a zenith.

Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?

No.

The ruling party in 2016 used multiple intelligence agencies to target opposition campaign personnel, on the basis of unfounded allegations presented by the ruling party candidate whose role in its generation was hidden due to its disqualifying nature, and subsequently overturned citizen-protection measures designed to protect American citizens from just such intelligence abuses, which enabled illegal leaks what would inherently have been classified information, to fuel election-year and then multiple post-election year conspiracies intended to undermine the opposition campaign and target up to cabinet level officials, conspiracies which were publicly pushed by party-affiliated media and legitimized by the party's leading member of the Senate Intelligence community.

...while campaigning that Trump would be an authoritarian who would commit security state abuses, and thus organizing the #Resistance that dominated media coverage for years to come and would help organize riots in several major American cities, including the US capital.

Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians

The original Russiagate lasted nearly half of Trump's time in office, and its narrative themes were later re-used to justify the first Trump impeachment and which remains a regular theme in Democratic C-lane social media campaigns since.

They tried to impeach him over something almost explicitly a quid pro quo - you could argue that some presidents get a pass for that kind of thing (Nixon sure as hell did it but that wasn’t what his impeached for) but it’s still, um, bad.

One of the presidents in question being Biden, who publicly boasted in his success to squash the corruption investigation the subject of which was the basis for impeaching Trump, not including the many other credible quid pro quo of the Biden dynasty.

If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades

The Trump experience of lawfare was abnormal precisely because it surpassed what any candidate had received in the last several decades, and on multiple grounds were highly reminiscent of mid-Cold War abuses that spurred the US Intelligence Community reforms of the 1970s and 1980s that were ignored in the process of targeting the Trump campaign. The abnormality of it was the subject of multiple extensive discussions and even deliberate justification articles posted in major media outlets and a post-2020 victory lap on the degree of cooperation required to 'fortify' the following election.

Scope and scale matter. My point stands.

Scope and scale mattering is precisely why your point falls to a basic Russel conjugation critique.

'My favored party accepted the results reasonably and mostly peacefully despite legitimate reasons to believe they were unjustly denied their rightful victory, your party unreasonably refuses to accept the legitimacy of their defeat and threatens everything in ways that should be disturbing to all...'

You put it much more eloquently than I could, and I might be yoinking your answer to reply to some others downthread.

  • -13

There’s a fundamental difference between being bitter about an election result and actually thinking the result was actually illegitimate. I will of course grant you that occasionally the language can appear superficially similar, but the difference is real and very important. Democrats absolutely accepted the result of the election.

They did not. When Hillary Clinton says Trump is an "illegitimate President," I just don't understand how you conclude that this is "superficially similar" language with a "real and very important difference." She wasn't alone. Is it your position that because she didn't say "literally illegitimate" or "actually illegitimate," we should assume she's just being rhetorical?

The process was not in question, and this was telling in the actual actions taken: they thought Russia meddled a bit too much and so the solution is policy to stop it happening again.

Russia is an easy target, of course, but listen to the examples of outright election denialism in that video. Much of it targets process, too. There are allegations of conspiracy. Trump is louder and coarser than most, but on substance he's not saying anything Democrats haven't been saying for years.

Hell, even after 2000, Democrats still by and large accepted the result despite some very potent arguments that they had been robbed by some uncontrollable aspect of the administrative state (broadly). Sure, you had a decent chunk of individuals who continued or even still continue to believe the election result was rigged or undemocratic or whatever, but this didn’t translate to the political class, and it didn’t lead to a fundamental dispute of elections more broadly...

To the contrary, I would say that it translated to the political class very well, in a variety of ways. But you're not entirely wrong: the Democrats have, I think, been better at translating their losses into action. They are doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance of the government and the press.

...and in the actions, Florida got its shit together and fixed a lot of the issues for subsequent elections.

I don't want to read too much into it, but I can't help but notice that after Florida decided to take elections seriously enough to avoid a repeat of 2000, it changed from "purple" to "reliably red."

The immediate reaction of Trump and his allies was not merely bitterness but action that should be disturbing to all. They tried both literally and rhetorically to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly (mens rea according to the evidence we’ve seen) subvert the actual election, irrespective of fact.

And yet nothing they did is without recent precedent in Democratic opposition to election results. Democrats have refused to certify elections results. Democrats have rioted in DC. Democrats have tried to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly subvert the actual election. None of this makes Trump's own misdeeds good, by the by; the point here is not "whataboutism." The point here is that I can't understand how anyone can pretend with a straight face that any of this hasn't been done before by the exact people now decrying it.

Do you see the difference? “Let’s fix it” is of a fundamentally different character than “let’s change it”.

No: you are treating Democratic attempts to ensure their own permanent victory as "fix" while treating parallel Republican attempted to ensure their own permanent victory as "change." There is no difference of character there, much less a fundamental one. Rather, this is simply "our noble soldiers versus your barbarous brigands" in electioneering parlance.

That Trump’s personal motivations largely aligned with the country’s in his first term wasn’t an accident but was at least in some sense lucky - but I’m not convinced this can be taken for granted in a second term to the same degree.

Are you suggesting that, if Donald Trump wins in November, you would reject the outcome of that election?

Yes, we do assume Hillary was being bitter, because action wise she didn’t do jack shit about it. For anyone paying attention, you might notice that not very many Democrats followed her rhetoric either.

You shouldn’t read into Florida’s subsequent results. 9/11 happened pushing a major Bush wave… and then Obama won it twice again. Being red is recent. This should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias that you’d even mention Florida like that, and be so flagrantly and factually wrong.

There’s some merit to the general pattern of “Democrats break X tradition for allegedly noble reasons, Republicans then see it as fair game and break X+1 tradition harder and more effectively”. Absolutely. But there’s a level of equivalence here that is just absurd.

For example. Yes. Riots in DC. Not the same as literally occupying the seat of government. These two riots are not the same. Likewise. Faithless electors your own link is talking about, uh, celebrities advocating for doing so? The whole thing was pageantry anyways as it seemed to pretty much every legal scholar everywhere that individual electors can’t actually go rogue. Contrast the Pence convincing effort or the alternate slate effort which had a (still not crazy high but not zero) chance of creating a more real crisis. It’s insane to me that you refuse to see this. At some point we moved from random House reps doing protest votes to actual, organized attempts to submit alternate electoral slates based on a sum total of zero evidence and a “throw literal shit against the wall and see if anything sticks” approach to evidence. Not. The. Same! At least hanging Chads were, you know, real.

Now note that I’m really not reading too deeply into Trump’s every word either. When he said that we wouldn’t even need to have more elections if he won it was obvious he was simply exaggerating how effective he would be about fixing problems. But new evidence about his activities in the aftermath clearly show he is ultimately corrupt in motivation and self-serving in action.

And of course with all that said, why on earth would I have a problem with the system if Trump were to win? He can and probably will get a ton of votes, all legitimately. The voting system broadly works.

As an example unless you are a gutless loser like that Georgia governor candidate, even if some halfway shady shit happens in state elections (fights about voting on the margins of the rules, like induced turnout related stuff) the typical reaction has almost always been “well let’s try harder to win more state gov’t seats next time”.

  • -13

Yes, we do assume Hillary was being bitter, because action wise she didn’t do jack shit about it.

She talked about it, and that is one thing Trump also did. Is it your position that Trump's "fight like hell" comment is irrelevant and should not be raised?

Because sure: as far as I know, Hillary didn't have conversations with election officials about "finding" votes. She knew to only cheat with the aid of close confidantes, not party randos.

Being red is recent. This should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias that you’d even mention Florida like that, and be so flagrantly and factually wrong.

I intended that to be a lighthearted throwaway comment, which I intended to signal through the "I don't want to read too much into this." Sorry that wasn't sufficiently clear, I should know better than to attempt humor around here. Though you will notice that there were no actual factual errors in my comment: it was after (i.e. later in time) the election process reforms that Florida became reliably red (for now!). That should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias, that you'd have such a... strong reaction to factual claims, just because they happen to present a narrative you don't like.

For example. Yes. Riots in DC. Not the same as literally occupying the seat of government.

@Dean handled this one amply, I think. This is medieval thinking from you. They're not hiding the Darksaber in the podium, and besides, we have three co-equal branches of government. Democrats didn't hesitate to storm the Supreme Court building, to say nothing of state buildings. No, Democrats did not do exactly the same thing in exactly the same place as Republicans, but you seem committed to riding the "it's different when we do it" train to the very last stop. You are engaged in special pleading.

It’s insane to me that you refuse to see this.

Right back at you, though, seriously. I don't like Trump. I don't like rioting. I'm happy to condemn both. I don't think it's insane to be upset about riots, whether Republican or Democrat. I think it's insane to treat Republican excess as a national emergency, while winking and shrugging at a laundry list of Democratic excesses.

And of course with all that said, why on earth would I have a problem with the system if Trump were to win?

I didn't ask if you would have a problem with the system. I asked, "if Donald Trump wins in November, [would you] reject the outcome of that election?"

Because you said:

There is a line between some things you might say to your spouse in anger, and some things which should literally never be said, because they can’t be taken back and might threaten the entire marriage. With the assumption that the marriage is a good one - here, the assumption that the system of democratic elections is a good one.

It’s not at all clear what kind of system Trump would put in its place, which is PLENTY worrying in and of itself, but I have a very hard time imagining it being better than our current one, and I likewise have I think very good reasons to believe that even if you think for example that the Justice Department needs reform and fairness, Trump is probably one of the worst people to actually do so.

I read this as you genuinely worrying that Trump would bring about an end to democratic elections. This seems like an insane worry to me, but I can imagine believing this for real. And if you did believe this for real, wouldn't it be in your interest (and the interest of the nation) to do whatever you could to prevent Trump from taking office?

Because for a lot of people in 2016, and 2020, and 2024, that seems to be the thinking. Cheating in debates or stacking primaries may not be the literal same thing as calling election officials with pointed questions about unusual polling circumstances (a water main? really?)--but it comes from the same mental attitude, namely: winning this election is more important than any standards, norms, or traditions that might be in my way. I agree that Trump gives zero fucks for standards, norms, or traditions. But it would be nice if we could stop pretending (and insisting!) that Clinton, Biden, Harris, etc. are any different in this regard. They're just (usually) slicker and sneakier about it.

For example. Yes. Riots in DC. Not the same as literally occupying the seat of government. These two riots are not the same.

Of course not. One riot was politically favored for prosecution and led to among the largest prosecutions in American history, and the other riot was disfavored and was not, as well as many following riots of similar partisan vein. This difference in interest of prosecution of prosecutable riots being the critical difference in prosecution is the basis of the critique, not an argument that one is not a prosecutable offense.

January 6 is not prosecutable on grounds of 'literally occupying the seat of government.' It is prosecutable on grounds of intent to disrupt the government processes, the publicized prior intent to take actions, the recorded evidence of illegal actions taken, and the jurisdiction of where it occurred. There is no distinction in the lawfulness of the acts between whether the disruption occurs inside the Congressional building itself versus other government buildings, or other places in the capital. January 6 wasn't the first time in even the preceding year that violent, disruptive, and/or intimidating protests had forced a relocation of senior government officials in the capital.

The prosecutable equivalence between events of political violence that is intended to disrupt is that they are political violence intended to disrupt. 'But their political violence was categorically different!' is special pleading, particularly when the difference is not the degree of severity of prosecution, but whether to prosecute at all.

They did not. When Hillary Clinton says Trump is an "illegitimate President," I just don't understand how you conclude that this is "superficially similar" language with a "real and very important difference."

Because of other actions surrounding what they said? While I really don't like that Hillary said the election was "stolen" and that Trump was "illegitimate", I still think there's a big difference between her comments and what Trump did. Hillary conceded almost immediately after the 2016 results were in. To my knowledge, Trump still hasn't conceded for 2020. Hillary never made phone calls demanding governors and secretaries of state "find" enough votes for them to win. Trump did. Hillary never egged on her followers to go to the capitol to protest or disrupt the electoral count. Trump, obviously, did.

To the contrary, I would say that it translated to the political class very well, in a variety of ways.

You linked an article where the Dems put forward abolishing the EC in favor of a direct popular vote (or some other system), but this doesn't seem germane to the argument that EverythingIsFine is making. There wasn't a broad rejection of election results by D leaders. The closest was probably Stacey Abrams refusing to concede in Georgia, but 1) she got a ton of pushback from this from her own party, and 2) even in this most extreme example, she didn't try to interfere directly like Trump did.

No: you are treating Democratic attempts to ensure their own permanent victory as "fix" while treating parallel Republican attempted to ensure their own permanent victory as "change."

What Trump did was fundamentally different from normal election reform, and thus his actions deserve to be seen differently. Dems saying we should abolish the EC (in future elections) or Rs saying we should require IDs to vote (in future elections) are very different proposals from Trump's "we need to overturn the votes from certain states (in an election that just happened).

  • -14

I am utterly unmoved by your repeated resort to "it's different when we do it," which is why I asked you the question I was interested in hearing an answer to. That you have written two responses to my downstream tangents while avoiding a direct answer to my direct question strengthens my impression that your original question was disingenuous and "boo outgroup" rather than sincere, as I had hoped.

Because ultimately if you're actually interested in the government (or anyone!) doing something to convince Republicans of the legitimacy of election outcomes, such that no one riots, or questions the legitimacy of the proceedings, or attempts arcane procedural shenanigans... that same "something" should presumably also prevent riots, or questions, or shenanigans, from Democrats.

If you can't think of a way to prevent Democrats from rioting in case of a Trump win in November, then why in God's name would you think it should be possible to prevent Republicans from doing so in case Kamala wins?

I don't want to read too much into it, but I can't help but notice that after Florida decided to take elections seriously enough to avoid a repeat of 2000, it changed from "purple" to "reliably red."

A bit of an admission against interest for me, but my prior is that FL has just had an unusually-competent run of GOP state leadership with JEB Bush (who, for all his neo-con wimpiness, appears to have been a good governor), Rick Scott, and Ron DeSantis. Also, it probably says something about the state of the FL Democratic party apparatus that their two most recent standard-bearers have been an ex-Republican (Charlie Crist) and a guy who almost got pinched for laundering his campaign funds and later got himself arrested in a hotel room with overdosing gay prostitutes and meth (Andrew Gillum).

There's three general teams here. The team whose side is rigging the elections. The team who cries about rigging the elections. And the supposedly impartial group in the middle, which sees it as more important to maintain the public's belief in the sanctity of elections than to maintain the actual sanctity of elections, and sees the easiest way of doing that as silencing, ridiculing, and/or ignoring anyone who points out problems. As long as that's the case, the first team is never going to convince the second team that there isn't any rigging going on. No matter how much they contribute to the jeering and ridiculing.

Why wasn't the 2022 Wisconsin Senate race rigged? Why weren't more House races in close districts rigged when the GOP only won by 4 seats? Hell, why didn't they rig the 2018 Florida Governor race? It's weird how we're only successful at rigging some of the time, when in other countries, with actual governments that rig elections (that many of the people who are very worried about rigging in American elections prefer to the American govenrment) are always successful.

There was an attempt. Its magnitude was insufficient. It has been so in every election of my lifetime IMO. The margins of vote rigging is approximately 100k for an urban machine going to the early 80s, that has likely been increased by half or so by mail in and harvesting.

It's weird how we're only successful at rigging some of the time, when in other countries, with actual governments that rig elections (that many of the people who are very worried about rigging in American elections prefer to the American govenrment) are always successful.

It's not weird at all, once you understand checks and balances, enumerated powers, and the structure of the Constitution generally. It's hard to rig American elections successfully. And yet for example "gerrymandering" is widely agreed to be a (frequently successful!) form of election rigging, even though it does not necessarily guarantee the desired outcome.

A totalitarian or even just an excessively powerful executive can afford to be hamfisted in their rigging of elections; to successfully rig an American election usually calls for greater subtlety, and even then there remains a greater likelihood of failure.

It feels like you're playing motte for the bailey above you. Nobody really denies that gerrymandering happens; we can all see it on the map. So yes, if you define gerrymandering as "rigging" (a word I personally wouldn't use to describe it) then technically US elections can be rigged to some extent. But that's very different from the claims Trump and friends are making, and indeed what many in this thread are making. Such claims involve fabricating votes wholesale up to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or even tens of millions. In such scenarios, why not just fabricate X number of votes (whatever is needed) to win every even vaguely competitive election?

Where did someone in this thread claim “fabricating [tens of millions of] votes wholesale?”

That seems like quite an extraordinary claim and I’d love to see the evidence they presented for it.

In the past, my understanding is that vote-rigging was done by partisan machines in certain jurisdictions. I have the vague intuition that there could be quid-pro-quo deals involved (e.g. the machine agrees to stuff ballots in exchange for getting city contracts, or whatever.)

If I somehow knew that there was industrial-scale voter fraud (say, via a mathematical analysis, or it came to me in a dream) but I wasn't sure exactly how, I would presume something similar was occurring, which would be (part of) why one party wasn't in power constantly - the power of the machine(s) to commit fraud was limited and territorial, and their willingness to do so was contingent on other factors that might not always be in place (e.g. kickbacks, connections, etc.)

I should add that my historical knowledge is sketchy here, and the question of modern fraud isn't something I've really researched or have strong opinions on. It just seems like, based on what I know of how fraud worked in the United States in the past, we should expect it to work differently than top-down ballot-rigging. For instance, last year there was a (judicially recognized) stolen primary election that apparently worked via absentee ballot box stuffing. That's very different than the local political party just counting the votes however they want, which is what I presume happens in at least some "democratic" states abroad (although I'm sure it's possible that bottom-up voter fraud happens in places like e.g. Russia as well/instead of top-down finger-on-the-count type fraud).

This was my reasoning behind the single Biden agenda I wanted to hear: a bi-partisan electoral committee focused on shoring up confidence in our elections. Democrats would not want this because it might give Trump or Republicans some faint hope, or possibly be viewed as a tacit admittance of guilt. There's also no evidence that Republicans would accept anything anyone said...so here we are. Nonetheless, the president's job, aside from bombing foreigners, is to represent the vibes of the nation and the vibes were: our elections are total crap. A smarter, stronger, more introspective leader would have realized the need to, at least, try and shore up the center.

Oh well...dreams of a bygone era.

If it was truly a bipartisan feeling, then election denying GOP Secretary of State candidates would've done a lot better in 2022.

"Elections are crap" may be a feeling that people get if they talk about long lines and so on, but no, the feeling one party is stealing elections is only among a group of one party, seen by their nominees and so on. Yes, I know, there's one weird poll showing some large amount of Democrat's think the Russians did shady stuff. Yet, there were no candidates in 2018, 2020, or 2022 that ran in any major way that Trump was not the legitimate elected President, by the current rules.

I don't think I said it was a bipartisan feeling. If I wasn't clear, what I meant was that Biden had an opportunity to do one thing that would have a) shored up the center bringing non-Trumpists back from the brink, and b) possibly, actually making our elections stronger and more transparent. From where I'm sitting it appears the exact opposite has happened with less optics into voter roles, voting dates, mail-in ballot rules,etc. I am short-USA so I don't really pay that close attention to the details, (are non-citizens voting in this election? Who knows?) but from a 50k ft. perspective, Biden missed the boat big time.

There is no reason we should have any doubts about the results and getting the vibes right is the one thing a president can do. Taking the position that this is only a Republican problem misses the elephant for the trees. We're in a situation where every candidate from here until our final pitiful collapse can claim shenanigans and everyone will believe it to the extent necessary for their side to win. The more opaque our elections the weaker the union.

One thing that I think would go a very long way is taking claims of fraud seriously and taking serious steps to demonstrate that the electoral system is being run to prevent fraud. So if I were in charge of the election system, I’d require that some sort of government issued photo ID be used. I’d bend over backwards to make it easy (with proper source documents) to get those kinds of IDs. Second, I’d create an organized and fair way to validate the voter rolls such that we don’t have large numbers of people on the rolls that should not be there. Matching up names to death certificates seems like a good way to get rid of dead people on the rolls. And I’m probably not too far off in saying that if you haven’t filed state income taxes or applied for state benefits in 3 or more years, you probably don’t live here. If you’re required to prove citizenship to register, I think that would go pretty far to prevent illegals from voting.

The counting I think could be shown online without too much problem. And I think doing so would be helpful because it’s a lot harder to monkey with a count that is done publicly. And I think I’d probably also have the totals by precinct and even voting location would make it hard to inject ballots without someone noticing. I want to make auditing easier without being able to identify who voted for whom is the goal. I’m not sure if it would be possible to have a sort of blockchain setup that would allow people to track their own ballot from the moment they cast it until it’s officially tallied, but if it’s possible, not only would it help with building trust, but would make audits easier as you’d end up having ballots show up that were not cast anywhere.

Third, I’d take reports of anomalies seriously. I don’t care what people think they’re seeing, but if it’s possible fraud, it deserves a full investigation. And prosecution for fraud should be a part of that.

Do all of that, and I don’t think anyone could doubt that the election was honest.

I strongly agree with your first suggestion of requiring IDs + making IDs easy to get for lawful citizens.

Third, I’d take reports of anomalies seriously. I don’t care what people think they’re seeing, but if it’s possible fraud, it deserves a full investigation. And prosecution for fraud should be a part of that.

I disagree here. How would this be different from the status quo? Giuliani and smaller Trump-aligned groups filed tons of lawsuits with next to no evidence... and they mostly just got thrown out of court due to having no evidence. People like Raffensperger were investigating claims people were making, but they consistently came up empty.

  • -10

I think there is an underlying understanding that many people (including some of the direct replies you got here) are already personally convinced that significant amounts of fraud happened, and their belief in it is so strong that any amount of American institutions investigating and finding that no fraud happened will not decrease their belief in the fraud so much as it will greatly increase their belief that the institutions have lost their integrity. If that is the case, the best way to regain the trust of those people is to make heads roll - that is, instead of organising an investigation that finds no fraud, organise an investigation that finds (significant, but perhaps not at the level of actually overturning the results) fraud, identify a perpetrator or group of perpetrators, and make a show of punishing them severely. This would be more effective the more this perpetrator could serve as an effigy of the outgroup. Life in prison for a single easily mockable overweight Democratic Party apparatchik transwoman would have gone a long way to restore faith in institutions in many Deplorables, and if that person did in fact perform election fraud it would not even be unjust under the standard American understanding of justice.

I do personally find it unlikely that there were no instances of fraud that this sort of spectacle could have been pulled off with. Surely, among the tens or hundreds of thousands of volunteers who are many standard deviations above the general public in terms of political engagement, and the many entities engaged in the counting process, there must be some place where someone with terminal TDS decided that the unique dangers of Trump weigh heavier than the sacred precepts of the system and decided to throw out or reshuffle some ballots while nobody unsympathetic was looking. That no official investigation seems to have turned up even one small fish of this type to crucify does indicate to me that the involved institutions may have prioritised not being seen as giving comfort to Trump over either fact-finding or public peace.

I think this might be a just so story. There was no serious investigation, no evidence presented, no experts testified in congress. So it’s sort of an odd proposition to suggest that a thing nobody even attempted to do could not have possibly changed anyone’s mind.

The position became very entrenched by now because every cathedral organ was screaming at them that “there was no fraud”, telling them that these were either stupid or bigoted for daring to think that, and telling them there was no reason to bother to ask questions, let alone investigate anything. At the same time the alternative press is reporting on reports of anomalies, there’s the president talking about fraud and filing lawsuits. Those lawsuits were not taken seriously and were dismissed on standing. In short the public was very loudly told nothing to see here, and no investigations happened.

Imagine the opposite. There are claims of fraud. And instead of being summarily dismissed, the attorney general of the states involved open investigations. Now there’s going to be evidence presented. If a pipe is supposed to have burst, then there’s going to be evidence that someone actually called a plumber who fixed that pipe. If ballots are showing up people are going to investigate where they came from. Computer experts would examine the voting machines and even publicly test them. Now there’s at least the sense that the system is looking at the claims. And whatever they find is publicly available. People can look at the data on the voting machine and decide, but at minimum it’s not summary dismissal. If you do that when Trump claims fraud, you can point to sworn testimony in court, a witness cracking on cross examination, or at least some evidence that he’s wrong.

This would be more effective the more this perpetrator could serve as an effigy of the outgroup. Life in prison for a single easily mockable overweight Democratic Party apparatchik transwoman would have gone a long way to restore faith in institutions in many Deplorables, and if that person did in fact perform election fraud it would not even be unjust under the standard American understanding of justice.

I think we're past that, unfortunately. Toss out a scapegoat, and that will be seen as "here's the one they couldn't cover up, just imagine what else they're hiding".

Trump is an instructive example here, I think. I would argue that he has been investigated pretty thoroughly, and now he's even been prosecuted, tried and convicted. I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that, by any reasonable standard, he doesn't have any skeletons left in the closet, and what we see is what we get. By contrast, the sense I get from Blue Tribe is not "the process has succeeded, we have discovered his crimes and punished him for them", but rather "we've barely scratched the surface, he's obviously guilty of a thousand times worse offences, and the fact that he isn't in jail is an indictment of the system." Further, it seems to me that the impeachments and prosecutions and conviction (and, one might argue, the assassination attempts) have only fed the appetite for a dramatic conclusion. People want to see the mammoth brought down under the spears of the tribe, and every spear thrown only increases that desire.

I think Democrats are wrong to take this stance with Trump, but I do not think they are obviously wrong. A similar argument was made for Bill and Hillary Clinton, and it held no water with me for what seem to me to be solid, entirely factual reasons. If we look at non-partisan examples, crime lords for instance, we see that despite intense investigation and prosecution, often they are only formally held to account for a small fraction of their misdeeds.

More generally, the problem is that there isn't a "we". Reds and Blues do not perceive sufficient shared values and interests to make power-sharing practical. Elections are a vast, opaque system, and the Federal Government they maintain makes them seem miniscule and transparent as glass by comparison. It turns out that our system requires more social trust than you need for credit cards to work, and we don't have enough any more so the system is breaking down.

By contrast, the sense I get from Blue Tribe is not "the process has succeeded, we have discovered his crimes and punished him for them", but rather "we've barely scratched the surface, he's obviously guilty of a thousand times worse offences, and the fact that he isn't in jail is an indictment of the system."

From a sane anti-Trump perspective, Trump's worst crimes are the rapes (where in a non-clownworld justice system he unfortunately gets off because of the statute of limitations and the he-said she-said lack of evidence), the unlawful retention of classified documents on a grand scale, and the various frauds committed as part of the attempt to overturn the 2020 election (of which the fake electors scheme is the most clear-cut crime). Both Jack Smith federal indictments (one for the documents, one for the election) are stalled because of legally dubious rulings by Trump-appointed judges. The Georgia election indictment is stalled because Fanny Willis couldn't keep her legs closed, which isn't the same but probably feels like it to people who have been brought up to believe that slut shaming is BAAAD. In none of these cases did the case get far enough for Trump's guilt or innocence to be relevant.

So the Blue Tribe position is "We caught Trump, we nailed him, and he is getting off because he successfully corrupted the US justice system before leaving office."

I think the legitimacy of elections is probably one of the most important things to protect in a democratic society. If people don’t believe the election is fair, eventually it’s going to go much farther than it did in 2021. Voting is the alternative to warfare and revolution. And if people don’t trust the election, they won’t accept the results. The best remedy is to take the accusations extremely seriously and do a thorough investigation, and if nothing is found, fine. But the tactic used in 2020 of blanket dismissal, condescending comments about disinformation, and generally mocking the very idea not only didn’t reassure the public that the government was committed to fair, open, and honest elections, but often pushed people the other way. The perception was “the government isn’t going to look at the evidence, and is going to simply label all of this as disinformation and call anyone who dares to question it a conspiracy theorist, so why should I believe it?”

As you can see from the below responses, there is no reaction that people who will accept other than their admittance they're trying to steal it, despite no actual evidence of widespread fraud or anything close to it. Or I guess, letting every nut be with zero evidence, but lots of claims equal to actual evidence because they agree with the nut that it was bad Joe Biden is President.

The good news is, as seen in the 2022 midterms, is the median voter in purple states find these argument completely "weird" and are happy to vote against people in the important governmental positions so them having any sort of power that may effect the Presidential election.

Yes, 30-35% of the country will continue to be reactionaries who want the clock to be turned back, whether it's 2004 or 1904, but that's always been true. It's slightly worse that as opposed to past periods, they're all in the same party, but this is not a historical shift. Conservatives have basically thought every win since Clinton, and by some measures, JFK, was basically illegitimate, it just used to be the purview of talk show hosts and dog whistling as opposed to open statements.

  • -21

FWIW, as a non-american the widespread resistance to basic vote protection has always struck me as deeply archaic and backwards. Being on the left doesn't automatically make you progressive, hell, even calling yourself "progressive" does not make you so. If, for example, voter ID is hard to get for poor people, make it easier. Don't refuse to improve the security of your election to the standards of a modern western society just because it's moderately difficult. Others have managed to do it, so can you!

At least from my vantage point, the american voting system seems easy to cheat in the first place and then hard to prove cheating after-the-fact by its fundamental design. That republicans only cry wolf when it suits them is true, but also at least they seem to have some basic interest in improving the standards. Democrats seem to be so deeply unsure about their real appeal that they fight tooth and nail against any attempt to make the system more reliable.

Edit: See marisuno's answer for what a serious election looks like. As long as american elections don't look like that, I can understand anyone yelling fraud; The onus ought to be on the system to prove its reliability, not the other way around.

I don’t see the desire to know that the system is fair as “reactionary”. It’s actually quite telling that we actually don’t have a reasonable way to detect fraud or secure the system. Add in a highly unusual election where millions are voting by drop box, introducing more opportunities for fraud, and yeah people might be a bit suspicious. I think the issues should addressed simply because until the state can demonstrate that it’s taking the problem seriously, eventually all elections will be contested simply because it cannot be demonstrated that the system has been secured.

At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable.

So is the idea that elections are not rigged. The real argument is over priors.

ETA:

Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?

Most posters are talking about regaining trust, but I'll point out that's not part of the question: you could achieve the result of "nudging" people to accept the results - at least publicly - by much more harshly punishing nonacceptance.

I think if elections were rigged then we wouldn’t see different parties win in different years. Also, if it was rigged against Trump, wouldn’t one expect him to underperform the polls? In reality, he overperformed the polls in both of his elections. (You can try to account for this by supposing that pollsters are in on the game, but now we’re just adding epicycles.)

As a partisan Democrat, if we can rig things so easily, I've always wondered why we didn't say, rig things in the very close Wisconsin Senate race in 2022 if we obviously rigged it for Biden in 2020 or why didn't we keep rigging things for Gillum and Nelson. Or did the rigging only start after 2016? Because if so, even then, it might've been smart to rig a few more Senate races so we likely weren't going to lose the Senate even if Kamala wins.

Rigging != Winning. If you are, like the Chicago machine that was caught 1 time out of decades (likely still ongoing) voter fraud you can manufacture 100k fake votes reliably, but you still sometimes lose. Such manufacturing was clearly at its easiest in 2020 due to the mail in, harvesting, and dropbox changes so you'd expect it to be at its greatest raw numbers of the modern era. Cheaters often still lose. See Tim Donaghy's book.

The obvious answer would be that if you rig too hard or too often, it becomes more and more difficult to deny. Then you have a much worse problem on your hands than merely losing a senate race here or there. Better to keep the illusion of fairness by taking an L once in a while.

This strains credulity when the party controlling the presidency has shifted back-and-forth across US history with a nearly metronomic frequency. Also, if Dems only need to take an L "once in a while", why don't they win, say, 2/3rds of House + Senate seats?

It's like a YEC claiming God specifically buried dinosaur skeletons in the ground to mislead scientists.

This strains credulity when the party controlling the presidency has shifted back-and-forth across US history with a nearly metronomic frequency.

So you think the argument is that elections have been rigged for decades? That’s the weaker straw man that’s easy to dismiss. I thought we were talking about 2020.

On the gripping hand, I think it would be even more worrisome if nobody cared about election integrity. Aggressively punishing complaints there is something totalitarian states like Russia and Venezuela do.

Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?

Implement ballot security measures at least as competent as Somaliland.

The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into.

That's because there are so many. IDK if this comprehensive: https://scifiwright.com/2024/01/summary-2020-presidential-election-fraud/; I doubt it. And I cringe when I see some of his sources. But it's a dynamic not too different from The Motte: If these discussions are essentially outlawed in respectable media, only the unrespectable will be having these discussions. I want these discussions to be had in more respectable fora! I think it would take the power away from the grifters who exploit these fears.

These discussions aren't "essentially outlawed" anywhere, the people making the claims just need to bring their receipts, which they consistently fail to do. You had Giuliani saying these things on national television, and getting dunked on because he had little evidence.

  • -15

That's just a lie. YouTube had it as declared policy that you aren't allowed to question election results until quite recently. And that was enforced with the same mechanisms as COVID related "misinformation". The twitter files included specifically stuff about "election misinformation" as well.

The idea that there is no finger on the balance has no leg to stand on.

You have to have transparent elections with actual oversight and accountability. That means only valid voters allowed to vote and an ability to audit the election results. No deleted logs, missing ballot images, or discrepancies between voter count and votes counted.

Claims of potential election fraud should be met with good faith investigations and adjudication rather than instant stonewalling. I don't know how you remove partisanship from a process which is entirely staffed by motivated partisans, so that's a problem. But leading the response to a claim with "Nuh-uh" followed by "You're stupid" followed by "I can't hear you. I can't hear you." isn't going give claimants any confidence that their concerns were taken seriously. And, yes, not all the claims are serious -- but it's in the interest of civics that they be taken seriously until they can be actually discounted by evidence. And by "evidence" I don't mean "Ask accused vote counters what was going on at 3 am when no observers were there and then take their word for it as if they're angels," but actually investigate if they're telling the truth and why their stories seem to change. That's the essential problem: from the outset all fraud claims were met with unchallenged derision and all counter-claims were accepted as unchallenged gospel.

As I said a week or two ago, I think the Trump team's approach to dealing with these issues was abysmal (as is his approach to dealing with most issues, IMO), but that doesn't matter to me. I am a "civics-first" conservative: I want systems that are transparent and correctable, and which inspire faith in the systems so that we can live our lives without constantly wondering WTF happened and why there is so much apparent gaslighting when we ask to see how it happened.

Here’s some ideas:

  1. Stop having your intel buddies publish what they knew was fake stories to help sway an election.

  2. Stop having your intel buddies try to prebunk real stories so that social media after pressure from your elected friends take down true stories.

  3. Stop trying to make it easier to have non citizens vote.

  4. Stop engaging in absurd one sided political lawfare.

The list can go on but democrats do so many things that undermine a free and fair election and then are surprised that they would directly do what they are indirectly trying to accomplish.

I agree, the Trump White House should not have put pressure on social media to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

  • -32

Make your point clearly and without low effort sarcasm, please.

Is this the most disingenuous on the motte?

Most disingenuous what?

Whether you mean post or poster, report if you feel it's justified, don't just go straight to shit-flinging.

He is blaming Trump for the misdeeds executed by the IC cabal that were targeted against Trump. Of course it is a disingenuous post and you shouldn’t be modding me but the other poster who clearly is posting in bad faith.

I am modding both of you, as you'd know if you looked before angrily reacting.

We should be able to state a post is clearly in bad faith.

You can, if you can do so civilly. Which requires putting in a little bit of effort - not a lot, but more than just "You're a liar."

I modded him because he was almost certainly posting in bad faith.

I modded you because you had a choice between civility and sneering, and you chose the low road.

Trump White House Deep State

I think if the reins of any election audit were handed over to Trump himself, with the final report requiring his sign-off, this would convince all but the most hardcore of Republican partisans/conspiracy theorists that a Trump loss in the election was the correct result. I don't know if such a thing would be unconstitutional, though; if it isn't, then Congress should be able to pass whatever laws necessary to allow such an audit to happen.

That just puts the cart before the horse. Trump has every incentive not to be fair or unbiased, not only because he could keep some small hope of actually overturning the result, but also to muddy the waters and retain his clout within the Republican party ("I'm not a loser, I'm a victim!")

Election skepticism wouldn't be anywhere near as much of a problem if Trump wasn't being a sore loser in the first place.

That just puts the cart before the horse. Trump has every incentive not to be fair or unbiased, not only because he could keep some small hope of actually overturning the result, but also to muddy the waters and retain his clout within the Republican party ("I'm not a loser, I'm a victim!")

Right, and that's exactly why if Trump himself were to say that he lost fair and square, that would convince the vast majority of Republicans, I believe. Very few people outside of him and others vetted by him have the credibility to certify a Trump loss as legitimate, and I don't really see a way for Democrats or other elements of the government to gain that kind of credibility in a short enough time frame to matter.

You guys need to organize your elections better. The reason people will believe Trump when he yells 'fraud', is because election fraud looks to be plausible.

There's usually no voter ID. The electoral rolls can easily be screwed around with (by both parties in different ways, even). Voting machines seem opaque even when they're not, and break down during voting, necessitating workarounds that don't inspire confidence. Mail-in votes are common and there's barely even a pretense of a chain of custody. And then there are outright shenanigans, such as kicking out the poll watchers.

I've said it before, you need to be able to convince the loser that he lost a fair game.

Consider how it works in the Netherlands:

  1. Everyone who is legally in the country is registered with his municipality. The same registry is also used for taxes, so you bet the government makes sure it's kept in order.
  2. When there is an election, everyone who is eligible to vote is mailed a voter card, which looks like this. It is personal to you and has your name on it. You should receive it at least two weeks before the election. If you don't get it for some reason you still have two weeks to get it sorted.
  3. When you go to vote, you bring the voter card and your ID (such as a driver's license, government ID card, or passport). They take your voter card and put it in a sealed box. Then they give you a ballot (all voting is on paper). This prevents anyone from voting more than once, and also prevents ballot box stuffing: there need to be at least as many voter cards as ballots at the end.
    • Polling stations are generally in schools, churches, or other public buildings. There is approximately one per 1000-1500 voters depending on the election. A wait time of an hour is considered a scandal.
    • By law your employer has to give you time to vote. Normally this doesn't matter, as the polls are open from 7AM to 9PM, well beyond normal working hours.
    • If you really can't make it, you can appoint a proxy by writing their name on the back of the voter card, signing it, and giving it to your proxy. One person can only cast two proxy votes, to prevent ballot harvesting.
  4. Each polling station counts its own votes, by hand. Each polling station submits an official report containing their votes, which is nowadays also published online. Anyone is allowed to attend the count, and anyone is allowed to speak up, and the comments will be written in the report. (You can get yourself kicked out if you really try, but that's also written in the report.) They add up all the results by computer, but if you really don't trust it, you can download the reports and check the work.

Media outlets will download the reports and make fancy visualisations such as this one from the last election. I encourage you to click that link, you can see every single vote that was cast. Each dot on the map is a polling station, and if you click them you can see how many votes were cast for each party.

We do sometimes still have sore losers who yell fraud, but we don't have anyone taking them seriously, not even their own supporters.

At least part of this is that American ballots are fiendishly complicated: how many issues are you voting on? My American ballot is a complex superposition of half a dozen different geographic boundaries in terms of which races I vote in: US representatives, state legislature (two different boundaries), municipal city races, county races, school district races, state court boundaries. By the time I'm done with it, my sheet of candidates to vote for probably has 30 or more names on it most years. In comparison I often see other countries with just "which party are you voting for?" and wonder if that's a better system. Hand-counting all the different races couldn't be done night-of easily. Also, the complexity of the ballot means that my specific combination of races I vote in plausibly identifies a pretty small set of street addresses, so anonymity is a real concern.

On the other hand, my county (counties run elections, here -- and yes, I get to vote for elections commissioner) does a pretty good job: it's a computer-printed-and-counted, but human readable paper ballot, and I can vote at any of the dozens of sites in the county. And there are plenty of options for early voting.

Looking at your itemized list sounds pretty reasonable to me, but I can't help but think of which constituencies, and how, each would be challenged. You can't assume everyone has an address! Nor that they check their mail.

At least part of this is that American ballots are fiendishly complicated

The complexity of the ballot is yet another weakness of the US electoral system. Having so many questions on a single ballot means that an attacker can deanonymize it and use this information to commit fraud. Complex ballots like that should be split into separate ballots, both because it makes counting faster and because it makes certain kinds of fraud impossible.

We've had multiple simultaneous elections. E.g. municipal elections, provincial elections, water board elections, district committee elections, the EU parliament elections, and referendums back when we still had them. They try to avoid it, scheduling them apart from each other, but when they are combined you just get e.g. three separate voter cards, three separate ballots, etc. This is a bitch to count which is why they rather not do it.

Eligibility may vary: someone from another EU country can vote in the EU parliament elections, can vote in a municipal or district committee election if they have lived there for at least 5 years, and can't vote in any other elections. There may be multiple elections going on at once, and you can only vote in one of them, so you just get only the one voting card and your neighbour may get all of them.

We don't get to vote for judges or school boards, sadly, so maybe it does not scale to the level of democracy in the US. On the other hand you could of course just spread them out and just have a couple of elections every year. We run our elections mostly using volunteers already, so it doesn't need to be that expensive (and democracy is worth something, right?).

counties run elections, here

The municipalities run the elections here, but there are set standards for doing so. They have to print the voter cards and the ballots and set up the polling booths (the picture of the voter card I linked has the coat of arms of the municipality of Sliedrecht on it, for example), but they have to follow the same process everywhere.

You can't assume everyone has an address!

Ah, but you can. If you really are homeless, you are supposed to register at a shelter in the municipality where you last lived before you became homeless. Then you'll get your mail there. I guess if you're truly vagrant you'll have trouble, but that surely can't be too different anywhere else.

(Edit: though this actually can be a bit of a problem. People may live in (ahem) informally rented housing, so they can't register. Especially students and other young people. This is technically illegal, but tolerated. They leave their registration at their parents' house. They can vote, but would have to travel back "home" to do so (or ask one of their parents to be their proxy). They also can't vote for local elections in the place where they actually live, since on paper they don't live there.)

Nor that they check their mail.

That's on them.

We've had multiple simultaneous elections. E.g. municipal elections, provincial elections, water board elections, district committee elections, the EU parliament elections, and referendums back when we still had them.

If only it were that simple

(pdf warning) https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wakegov.com.if-us-west-1/s3fs-public/documents/2024-09/November%205th%20General_SampleBallots_Guide_0.pdf

See the 181(!) ballot styles for Wake County NC (home of the state capital, Raleigh, and one of the state's 100 counties) starting on page 11. Your ballot depends on exactly which districts you live in for various things, which usually don't line up. These ballots this year are actually on the small side IME; it's usually 3-4 pages rather than 2.

I've never seen a ballot that has anything more local than city elections, so I can't imagine how it would be a privacy issue unless you've got a city of like ten people. I doubt that intersecting the city and senate district or whatever will result in a small set of people.

City, county, legislative district, port commissioners, hospital districts, judges, statewide office, federal.

The city is wholly contained in the county, so that adds no information. Same likely goes for judges and many statewide offices. Never seen elections for hospital districts.

Cities can spill over into multiple counties and judicial districts can be quite small. A ballot for Townsville city council district 123 but also justice of the peace for place XYZ and school board members for ABCISD and a county road maintenance bond for a county that only 10% of the city crosses into can be a very, very small intersection of people. But otherwise I do agree with you, the actual ballot is secret which is largely good enough and really it wouldn't take much effort otherwise to guess which way a given voter voted based on precinct counts, demographics, and party registration/donation.

I happen to live in the corners of a school district, city council district, city limits, and state and federal legislative districts. The exact set I vote for would narrow it down to maybe a square mile. I guess I can't speak to whether this is a median experience in the US.

Wait, there's no reason that your entire ballot needs to be published, right? Publishing the vote tallies for each race separately is sufficient. If there's no association between the choices you make in each race I hardly see the privacy concerns.

I don't think it needs to be, but OP's scenario with hand counts of everything that anyone can watch presumably means others can see it. Maybe if you literally diced them up into sets for each race, or something. But maintaining a secret ballot and open accountability simultaneously isn't always an easy task.

Ballots are already multiple pages, you could easily split it into enough pages so that no page could identify anyone.

I would claim that at minimum the Democrats are tilting the playing field through illegal or quasi-illegal mechanisms. For example, letting illegals vote illegally tilts the playing field in their favor, but there are still a finite number of illegals, they might not all vote for Harris, etc. Same with ballot harvesting. Therefore, Trump can still win, he just needs a larger margin.

I also share the same basic sentiment as many of the other posters. If you don’t want people to make unfalsifiable voter fraud claims, don’t make them illegal to falsify them. They can only be falsified by election integrity laws like voter ID, strict chain-of-custody, etc. If you outlaw election integrity, then all elections are by-default suspect.

The question isn’t whether you can prove that the ballots are illegitimate or not. The question is why can’t you? Any answer you can come up with is uncomfortable.

The question isn’t whether you can prove that the ballots are illegitimate or not. The question is why can’t you?

Because nothing will ever be enough to someone who's engaging in motivated reasoning. I support requiring an ID to vote, fixing gerrymandering, fixing incumbents' free mail privilege, etc. But if all these issues are remedied, I'm sure there will still be others. Yet US elections have been fairly secure so far -- that's why Trump's 2020 crusade kept turning up nothingburgers. The public perception only started diverging from reality (seeing huge issues everywhere, most of which didn't matter) when Trump started being a sore loser.

  • -16

I'll note every single Republican statewide 2022 candidate who talked up there being issues with the election and how they were going to steal it all put forth the usual concession speeches or statements on Election Night, outside of Kari Lake. Even guys like Mastriano, who ran the most 'stolen election' centered race. Even in states that were under Democratic control. So what happened to the great Democratic machine to steal elections if it was so obvious in 2020, but only one candidate think it happened in 2022?

fixing gerrymandering,

I have personally come to the conclusion that all geographic representation maps are gerrymandering. There doesn't seem to be a consistent enough definition of "fix" here that could satisfy everyone. And some of the seemingly-absolutely-fair mechanisms for doing so (assign voters to districts by valid dice roll) are in fact the worst. It's never a fight against gerrymandering, just whose map is better, and of course everyone likes their own map.

Although I'm taking suggestions for what an un-gerrymandered districting algorithm could look like, even if I don't think it exists.

I mean, other countries manage to pull it off. Like, I'm sure people in the UK have some issues, but there's not the widespread open complaining that happens in the US and nowhere the amount of obviously gerrymandered districts. I'll even say, if the GOP gets 49.5% of the vote and get 52.5% of the seats, that's not something as a partisan Democrat I think is the end of the world.

The issue is places like the recent Wisconsin state legislature, where the Republicans won 44% of the vote and got 66% of the seats. By the same measure, in 2022 in the Nevada legislature, the Democrat's won 41% of the vote but have a 2/3 majority as well.

I don't think there's a "perfect" fix, but there's ways to do it better than we do.

Generally when I see "other countries" brought into a discussion of gerrymandering, it's comparing to a proportional representation scheme, which I think would be interesting to try for the House. The only other country I can think of with geographic districting is the UK and there is plenty of complaining about district maps there too.

I think PR is preferable, but people are weird about having their own congressperson, so it'd be a tough sell.

From what I've seen, there's complaining in the UK and Canada, but nothing to the level of the wacky districts on both sides here.

there's complaining in the UK

The UK is particularly notable because it's famous for rotten and pocket boroughs, where entire MPs were dedicated to districts with a handful of voters. Granted, those were largely resolved by reforms more than a century ago, but it seems to me the allocation of roughly equal population districts in the US was a reaction to that. And people still complain about the FPTP system in the UK, because the presence of more third parties changes the representation dynamics.

Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?

I'm a big proponent of transparency in government, so anything that would help citizens monitor the election process would be welcome.

I would also suggest independent audits of our federal elections.

Nearly 70% of Republicans think 2020 was stolen

IIRC a pretty similar number of Democrats said the same thing about the 2016 election, at least as of a few years ago. See that entire looking spectre of Russian Collusion and the probably-wrong dossier. And I expect a similar fraction of whichever side loses this year to think similarly, even though I think it's pretty stupid generally.

IIRC a pretty similar number of Democrats said the same thing about the 2016 election

I'd be very interested if you have a source on this.

  • -11

It's YouGov (derogatory), but :

Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence.

Thanks, that'll be a useful bit of info in the future. Saved.

Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side. The likely counter would be the Mueller investigation, but it was very different from J6. It's not an ongoing idea that all elections are fake. Harris isn't implying "wait until I win or lose to see if the election is legitimate" like Trump is.

  • -26

Saying J6 was unique ignores the important reason it was: Incompetence by the security forces. Giving a political speech to a large crowd in the capitol city of the polity is basically the MOST LEGITIMATE thing a politician can do. That the security forces were unprepared was also an intentional choice made primarily by the mayor of DC and the speaker of the House. Both were opponents of the speech-giver, and politically benefited from their own incompetence.

That is actually the most terrifying take away from J6: That Democrats can weaponize their own incompetence to humongous political benefit.

I agree and this is one of the more under-reported issues.

The GAO report on the Capitol Police is pretty damning

The Capitol Police's process for assessing and mitigating physical security risks to the Capitol complex is not comprehensive or documented. Also, how the Capitol Police Board considers and decides which physical security recommendations made by the Capitol Police should be implemented is unclear. Federal guidance is available to help agencies develop comprehensive processes for assessing physical security risks to facilities. Capitol Police officials stated that they have been informally applying this guidance for the past 5 to 7 years. While the Capitol Police's process incorporates parts of the guidance, its process is not as comprehensive or well documented as the guidance outlines. For example, the Capitol Police conducts regular security assessments of the Capitol complex and buildings, but it does so without a documented procedure to ensure completeness and consistency. In addition, while the Capitol Police makes security recommendations, it does not have the authority to implement them.

TLDR: Capitol Police:

  • Didn't have a physical security risk assessment process written down
  • Randomly applied bits and pieces of other Federal guidance for risk assessment
  • Doesn't write down or document what they do to assess physical risk
  • Doesn't have the authority to implement their own security recommendations

The Capitol routinely offers tours to members of the public with very little scrutiny on their identification. We all go through far more at the airport to fly than you would going on a tour at the Capitol. I believe the limiting factor is that tickets for these tours are hard to come by and may require some sort of connection in a Congressional office. The Capitol is, in effect, about as well guarded as a mall (not The mall as in The National Mall, but a shopping mall).

You can fight over the degree to which J6 was a coordinated coup attempt, a mob action, a protest, or whatever. That's beside the point that if Capitol Police had been basically competent it wouldn't have happened. It's interesting the parallels to the thread on U.S. Secret Service -- When people tell the story of Omar Gonzales getting inside the White House the central theme is always "Holy fuck, how can the Secret Service be this bad?" That's the right response! And I think that should be a lot more central to the J6 story instead of "iT wAs aN AsSauLT on DEMocracY!"

This Johns Hopkins report looks at the demographics of the J6'ers who went to court after the fact. They have a high propensity for financial hardship and some level of criminal background. To be blunt about it - we weren't dealing with the top brass. For all of the press's laughable over-reporting on "Ranger Stacks" (not even the right term) and the omnipresent tactical gear, most of these people were LARPers who went to D.C. to because they didn't have much in the way of missing back home. They then overwhelmed a tiny, mostly absentee, and totally incompetent Capitol Police force.

"buT iT wAs aN AsSauLT on DEMocracY!"

Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side.

You are demonstrably mistaken.

There was literally a riot to prevent Trump's inauguration called "DisruptJ20." Even wikipedia has an article about it.

We are planning to shut down the inauguration, that's the short of it ... We're pretty literal about that, we are trying to create citywide paralysis on a level that I don't think has been seen in D.C. before. We're trying to shut down pretty much every ingress into the city as well as every checkpoint around the actual inauguration parade route.

The feds dropped all charges, including of the black-clad leftist terrorist arsonists. Just like they did in 2020. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/government-drops-charges-against-all-inauguration-protesters-n889531

You should ask yourself why you forgot these events happened just because the TV stopped talking about them.

Maybe you should also read the Wikipedia article?

In late November 2017, six people charged with rioting went on trial. Prosecutors alleged that these six people were taking part in DisruptJ20 protests and vandalism. A jury trial found the six defendants not guilty on all counts in December 2017. On January 18, 2018, the U.S. Justice Department dropped charges against 129 people, leaving 59 defendants to face charges related to the DisruptJ20 protest. By early July 2018, federal prosecutors had dropped all charges against all defendants in the case.

The reason the DOJ dropped the charges is because they lost every one they brought to trial.

  • -14

Jury trials based out of DC?

I don't wonder why.

Yes, as a general matter people have to be tried in the jurisdiction where the alleged crime they committed occurred. What should the DOJ have done? Wasted a bunch of money prosecuting another 200 cases it wasn't going to win?

  • -14
More comments

there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side

No, they only storm and disrupt political buildings between elections

I agree. It wasn’t even close. Because the democrat effort was longer, more impactful, and more insidious.

Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side.

I agree! Democrats caused way more property damage and loss of life, and terrorized a much broader swath of the population. Their political protest were nowhere near as orderly, civil, and pointed at exactly the people who were the problem as J6.

I also didn't like the BLM protests, but their major aim wasn't to undo a presidential election. They were a separate issue entirely.

  • -15

Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/11/11/anti-trump-protesters-pepper-sprayed-demonstrations-erupt-across-us/93633154/

For the third night in a row, anti-Donald Trump demonstrators took to the streets in several big cities and on college campuses across the United States, including an outburst of smashed windows and a dumpster fire in Portland that police countered with pepper spray and flash-bang devices.

About 4,000 protesters assembled downtown late Thursday chanting “we reject the president-elect!” the Associated Press reported. Some among the crowd vandalized 19 cars at a dealership in Northeast Portland, according to a sales manager, Oregonlive.com reports. Protesters then headed west, over the Broadway Bridge and into the Pearl District, where the windows of several businesses were smashed.

The protest was mostly peaceful until demonstrators met with an anarchist group, after which demonstrators vandalized buildings, kicked cars and knocked out power, KGW-TV reported.

Imagine if J6 had been J6-J9!

And Republicans protested in 2012 when Obama won re-election. But in that case and the one you cited, neither were trying to undo the results of the election other than expressing general disapproval that their side lost. Neither went to the federal capital, and neither were egged on by a sitting president.

  • -14

IMO the most amusing comparable incident was (VP candidate) Tim Kaine's son getting arrested for trespassing in the Minnesota Capitol with smoke bombs and fireworks.

But the sheer scale of lawfare against the Trump administration was also pretty darn disruptive even if "legal" -- in quotes because SCOTUS on a few occasions had to step in to resolve mutually-incompatible injunctions. Or how we had IIRC an agency head that refused to leave the position when replaced until a court ruled they had to leave. Not that all of it was misplaced, but it definitely reflected a desire to subvert the lawful powers of the executive purely on the basis of the character wielding them.

Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side.

First impeachment, #NotMyPresident, #Resistance, inauguration riots, post-election riots.

None of these seriously challenged the idea that Trump won in 2016.

  • -23

Sure they did, you just don't accept 'seriously.'

At the time, however, and for several years after, these were routinely associated with the Democratic party conspiracy theory- colloquially remembered as Russiagate- that Trump had conspired to corruptly win the 2016 election.

#Resistance and its associated elements routinely propagated conspiracy theories to that effect, to the point that even after the Mueller Investigation found no substantiating evidence of Russian collusion most Democrats believed it anyway.

The first impeachment is the equivalent, no?

No, it didn't challenge the idea that Trump won in 2016.

  • -14

there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side

because they are different groups so radicalism looks different between the groups? Repubs are populists, their reaction to disbelief with elections was to riot and generally distrust institutions even further.

Dems are statist bureaucrats and their response involved having all of the government machinery they control rebel against Trump, endless lawfare in the lower courts and district courts they control, government agencies continually leaking things to state aligned media. Laundering fake intelligence through "foreign" (really just parts of the state beyond Trumps jurisdiction) intelligence agencies back to the US so they could endlessly keep the Trump admin under surveillance. etc. Selectively enforcing laws and managing media coverage to encourage and legitimize their npc's riots while cracking down harshly on any opponent's riots (blm riots vs covid protests). Cracking down on access to positions in state institutions, things like diversity and inclusion statements being required in college's. Honestly the republican response to 2020 was pretty mild compared to the state's response to Trump in 2016.

Here’s how the government can regain the trust of the right wing:

  • Require an ID to vote.

  • ENCOURAGE as many audits and court cases (with discovery power, that are not dismissed on “standing”) as they want.

  • Pardon everybody who was involved in “January 6th”

  • Drop all the lawsuits against Trump.

  • Actual, televised court cases for any of the grievances republicans have wrt to “January 6th”.

  • Televised, with discovery power, and “you are held in contempt” power to investigate the 2020 election, the origins of Covid, and the vaccine.

Now that I’m writing this out I don’t think it’s really possible. A lot of people have heard the phrase “I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation” one too many times. They feel like their government is working against them and will happily just lie directly to their face, and until a LOT of that is undone I don’t think they’re really going to accept the election outcome.

It's very interesting how the belief in meritocracy falls away when advocating for Low Human Capital beliefs like election denial. Why can't people who think Biden stole the election live by the same laws I do, when it comes to civil lawsuits? If you can't prove standing, either you have a terrible case or a terrible lawyer.

  • -19

meritocracy

Meritocracy where a judge gets to make a subjective decision on if you get to have a trial or not?

I'm just a dumb asshole without a law degree, but here's how "standing" with respect to the election appears to me, a lowly voter:

"You didn't have standing to bring this case before the election because you didn't know if there would be any damage, but you don't have any standing to bring the case after the election because the damage has already been done. Heads we win, tails you lose."

Yes, if you have a good lawyer and good argument, it would've gotten past one of the dozens of judges, including Trump-appointed ones. One or two, OK, a grand left-wing conspiracy. But, every single election lawsuit failed because there was nothing there when it came to actual evidence, as opposed to some very well-made strings on cork board.

Again, why if the elections were so obviously stolen in 2020, is Kari Lake the only person to say her election was stolen in 2022? Even in states where no changes to the law were made. Did the Democrat's not steal them this time, after stealing them in 2020?

  • -11

Yes, if you have a good lawyer

The problem there is that lawyers have been known to get fired for taking RW clients, so it's not so easy to get one. Part of why Trump's legal team sucks so much is that it's common knowledge that taking Trump as a client will result in being blacklisted, and better lawyers have more to lose from that.

Now, the Trump claims regarding 2020 were basically ludicrous AFAIK, and that much is on him, but his lawyers sucking can legitimately be blamed on SJ/cancellation.

There's literally a whole society of conservative lawyers. There are indeed plenty of Federalist Society lawyers out there. They likely didn't take the case for the same reason there were people in Trump's White House telling him he lost the election.

Beyond that, the main reason it seems like Trump has had issues keeping good lawyers pre-President is just like in the rest of his business dealings, he's terrible at actually paying people.

ENCOURAGE as many audits and court cases (with discovery power, that are not dismissed on “standing”) as they want.

Waiving the requirement for legal standing will inevitably be abused by a bunch of crazy, partisan, pro se plaintiffs to tie up every election official and manufacturer of voting equipment indefinitely, let alone those coming from less-reputable lawyers. This is not a remotely-reasonable suggestion. If this is something truly desired by the right, then I am massively lowering my opinion of the right.

Drop all the lawsuits against Trump.

Did you mean to say prosecutions? Or are private citizens to be forbidden by the government from filing suit against Donald Trump?

If you had to guess which one do you think I meant?

I wasn’t asking rhetorically, given your other suggestions for changing the legal process.

Now that I’m writing this out I don’t think it’s really possible. A lot of people have heard the phrase “I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation” one too many times. They feel like their government is working against them and will happily just lie directly to their face, and until a LOT of that is undone I don’t think they’re really going to accept the election outcome.

It sounds like you desire more transparency in government.

Pardon everybody who was involved in “January 6th”

Drop all the lawsuits against Trump.

If somebody actually committed a crime, why should they get automatic clemency? It's like a BLM supporter saying "there will never be racial reconciliation unless you pardon everyone for everything that happened during the BLM riots."

ENCOURAGE as many audits and court cases (with discovery power, that are not dismissed on “standing”) as they want.

Actual, televised court cases for any of the grievances republicans have wrt to “January 6th”.

Televised, with discovery power, and “you are held in contempt” power to investigate the 2020 election, the origins of Covid, and the vaccine.

Would these do anything? If they get their day in court, the default outcome would be for them to... still fail on their merits. What happens then? Republicans will then just say the courts are still biased.

What is the point of relitigating all of this again? I feel like I've had this conversation, probably with you, like 1000x since 2021. This feels like we're going through a choreographed dance.

If somebody actually committed a crime, why should they get automatic clemency? It's like a BLM supporter saying "there will never be racial reconciliation unless you pardon everyone for everything that happened during the BLM riots."

Because there is a massive, massive discrepancy in the application of the law between these two groups of people, as well as the scope of what happened.

Would these do anything? If they get their day in court, the default outcome would be for them to... still fail on their merits. What happens then? Republicans will then just say the courts are still biased.

Because the alternative is "we looked at this and decided you lose. No we won't tell you our logic." Does that seem like it's helping? If it's going to fail on the merits, show me the merits; allow the debate to happen.

Because there is a massive, massive discrepancy in the application of the law between these two groups of people, as well as the scope of what happened.

Is there? This is usually taken as an article of faith by conservatives, but no one seems to put any actual numbers out there. Based on the way Trump talks, you'd think nobody was arrested. In Minneapolis, for instance, there were about 100 people charged with felonies in the wake of the riots and another 500 or so charged with misdemeanors. That may not sound like a lot considering that those numbers represent two days of rioting during which over 100 structures burned, but the contexts of the arrests are rather similar. I'm hesitant to offer advice on how to get away with committing crimes, but I'd recommend against livestreaming your criminal activities or posting them to social media. the BLM riots took place at night and were distributed across a large area where there was minimal media presence. Jan 6 took place in the daytime, had a lot of people in a concentrated area, practically none of whom were trying to conceal their identity, and the area itself was swarming with media. The people who got arrested in Minnesota were largely those who decided to livestream looting or post their hauls on social media, and the same was true of virtually everyone who was arrested in connection to Jan 6. In an emergency situation, the police have higher priorities than arresting individuals. Practically nobody was actually arrested on Jan 6, but identifying he perpetrators was like shooting fish in a barrel. Not as many BLM protestors were quite this stupid, but the police didn't ignore those who were.

The other thing that makes this line of arguing particularly vacuous is that, even if the number of BLM protestors convicted is proportionally lower, I have yet to hear any Democratic politician suggest pardoning any of them.

Because the alternative is "we looked at this and decided you lose. No we won't tell you our logic." Does that seem like it's helping? If it's going to fail on the merits, show me the merits; allow the debate to happen.

I think you're confused about how the legal system actually works. First, I'm not sure if your complaint is that the cases should be heard on the merits or that the courts aren't issuing written opinions. If it's the latter, be aware that being told "you lose" without explanation has nothing to do with standing and is the norm in litigation; written opinions are very rare. Some motions are filed strictly to protect the record and won't be challenged if the opposing party indicates that they're going to contest them. In these cases the court won't even formally deny them. If we decide to argue a motion, we'll get some sense of the judge's reasoning based on how he responds during oral argument, but most judges don't say anything during argument and don't rule from the bench. A week or so later you'll get an order granting or denying the motion and that's it; you move on with the case. And yes, this includes motions to dismiss and motions for summary judgment where the judge is practically ending the Plaintiff's case, at lease against one defendant. And, not that it applies to the election cases, but jury verdicts don't offer any more insight. You either get a defense verdict or a bill, with no further commentary except in unusual situations.

Now, in some cases trial courts do issue written opinions, particularly in cases where there are novel issues and the court expects an appeal. In those cases, the court will occasionally write a brief opinion that isn't published and has no precedential value, but is in the records for the appellate court to look at if they want to. I agree that some of the trial courts could have done so here. There are two problems with this, though. First, these cases were all asking for emergency relief. You can't expect the court to act fast but nonetheless have time to issue opinions detailing their reasoning. The second problem is that this wouldn't do anything. The standing objections were obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with the law, and there was plenty of commentary available. The court issuing an 86 page opinion that acts more or less as a primer on standing and why this Plaintiff doesn't have it would have done nothing to shift public opinion.

Now, if it's the former, and you really want the cases to be heard on their merits, then it gets even worse. First, I don't know what you mean by wanting full discovery power. Most of these lawsuits didn't involve any factual disputes. For instance, Texas v. Pennsylvania (which is what I assumed you had in mind when talking about dismissals based on standing) didn't involve any disputed facts. The question was whether actions taken by various state election officials violated the Constitution; no one was arguing that these actions weren't taken. An "on the merits" ruling by in trial court in this case would have likely been "there were no constitutional violations, you lose". Would that be a better outcome? Would a 120-page opinion explaining why state legislatures are allowed to delegate ministerial responsibilities really satisfy the people alleging MASSIVE FRAUD?

And what do you expect to accomplish with this discovery, anyway? None of the lawsuits, save Sidney Powell's, made any actual allegations of fraud. "Full discovery" is essentially asking the court to let you go on a fishing expedition. Where are you even going to start? If you file the day the election is called for Biden, you're looking at a few days for the defendants to respond, and for the judge to hear motions to dismiss. If he denies these motions and sets the case for trial, you're normally looking at a discovery deadline around May 1, over three months after Biden has been sworn in. Of course, there's no way you're even making that deadline, because you're going on a fishing expedition, which means you need to conduct discovery just to get to the point when you can begin conducting discovery. What are you looking for? Do you want emails? Are you going to request emails involving official election accounts in all the affected jurisdictions? You better plan on giving them ample time to sort through these emails to get rid of irrelevant information. Or since you don't trust them to do that you can sort through them yourself. How many emails do you think this is? How many of them do you think you'll actually want to use as evidence in court? How much time and money do you expect it to take for you to sort through all of these yourself? How many depositions do you plan on taking? Who do you plan on deposing? How much do you think this is going to cost? Given the breadth of the allegations, two years seems like an optimistic timetable for discovery completion, and that's before you get into all the other stuff. With any luck you might uncover the fraud and get your verdict before the next election. Assuming there are no appeals, Trump might actually be able to serve a few days of his term before being constitutionally ineligible.

The standing objections were obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with the law, and there was plenty of commentary available.

I think this is an underappreciated point. I am an interested layman when it comes to law but it was still pretty easy for me to find actual lawyers going through these complaints on social media and explaining the specific deficiencies with them. These are the same deficiencies a court would inevitably point to when they did issue a decision dismissing the case or granting summary judgement. The idea that all the judicial decisions had a partisan motivation seems contradicted by the fact that third party observers could identify the outcome and explain why that would be the outcome in advance.

You've had a debate (presumably on the merits of the claims) a thousand times and you remain unconvinced, yet you claim that everyone would be ok with it if the court would just listen to arguments? Seems more likely that people will just say the court is biased and keep believing.

Are you interested in converting Republicans en masse overnight, or chipping away at this distrust over time? If you're hoping for some audit to prove the election's integrity and get everybody to issue a mea culpa that same day - good luck. I think you're setting yourself up for the "Gosh, they're so unreachable" conclusion you seem to be angling for. And I'd expect said mea culpa to arrive at the same time as the many others I'd want from Democrats by now - which is never.

Best you can hope for is people quietly dropping it out of embarrassment, in much the same way many Republicans quietly stopped supporting the War On Terror when that albatross got too fat.

Candidates in 2022 managed to pull it off basically overnight, going for claims about how the election was going to be stolen from them, but all of them except Kari Lake managed to basically put forward standard concession statements and everybody seems to accept those elections, despite no changes being made in most states. So why are those elections different? Perhaps it's not the evidence, then.

I mean not actively voting against measures that explicitly disallow non-citizens from voting while simultaneously spending millions to fly migrants to swing states would be a start.

There's already a law against non-citizens voting. I'd also vote against a law if one was offered that said, "let's make murder really illegal."

Glad to have your vote sir.

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