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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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."
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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?”
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