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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   29602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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What is the steel man for the Trump fake elector scheme being no big deal? To be clear, I'm not talking about a steel man of Trump's behavior as it relates to J6 itself (the tweets, the speech, the reaction to the crowd, etc.), I'm talking exclusively about the scheme where, according to the Democrat/J6 report/Jack Smith narrative, Trump conspired to overturn the election by trying to convince various states, and later Pence, to use a different slate of electors. Here is the basic narrative (largely rephrased from this comment along with the Jack Smith indictment):

  1. There was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election (in the event someone replies with evidence there was, you would also need to prove that Trump knew it at the time to justify his actions)

  2. Trump's advisers, advisers that were appointed by himself, repeatedly told him there was no outcome-determinative fraud after looking into it. Despite this, Trump still insisted there was outcome-determinative fraud. Trump still insisted even after he started losing court cases left and right about there being outcome-determinative fraud. Assuming 1 is true this means that Trump is either knowingly lying or willfully ignoring people he himself picked

  3. Trump, despite knowing there wasn't outcome-determinative fraud (assuming 2), still tried to change the outcome of the election. First, he tried the courts where he knowingly lied about there being outcome-determinative fraud in court filings. When that failed he tried contacting various state legislatures and other state officials to ask them to certify his slate of electors. When that failed, his final option was to try to convince Pence to either use his slate of electors to win (a slate of electors not officially certified despite claiming to be certified), or to invalidate enough state's electors to make it so no one gets 270 electors, throwing the election to the house where Trump would then hopefully win given it becomes 1 state 1 vote there.

With that narrative, here are the Trump critiques that I want a steel man defense of:

  1. Trump knowingly lied about there being outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election. This is wrong.

        a. In the alternative, Trump is so dumb that he continued to believe there was outcome-determinative fraud despite evidence to the contrary. This disqualifies him from any political power.

  2. Trump tried to use this lie to change the results of the election. This is wrong.

  3. Trump used this lie to get slates of electors to falsely certify they were the chosen electors of that state. This is wrong

  4. Trump tried to convince various state legislatures that these were the lawfully chosen slate of electors and to decertify the Biden slate and certify his slate. This is wrong.

        a. In the event you think this was legal, Trump tried to convince various state legislatures to break norms that would be tantamount to a constitutional coup. This is wrong.

  5. Trump tried to convince Pence to step outside of his constitutional authority to make him president. This is wrong

        a. In the event you think this was legal, Trump tried to convince Pence to break norms that would be tantamount to a constitutional coup. This is wrong.

The strongest steel man that I can come up with involved the case of Hawaii in 1960

The New York Times summarizes the situation,

In one of the first legal memos laying out the details of the fake elector scheme, a pro-Trump lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro justified the plan by pointing to an odd episode in American history: a quarrel that took place in Hawaii during the 1960 presidential race between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

The results of the vote count in Hawaii remained in dispute — by about 100 ballots — even as a crucial deadline for the Electoral College to meet and cast its votes drew near. A recount was underway but it did not appear as though it would be completed by the time the Electoral College was expected to convene, on Dec. 19, 1960.

Despite the unfolding recount, Mr. Nixon claimed he had won the state, and the governor formally certified a slate of electors declaring him the victor. At the same time, Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, holding out hope that he would eventually prevail, drafted its own slate of electors, claiming that he had in fact won the race.

In his memo, Mr. Chesebro suggested that this unusual situation set a precedent not only for drafting and submitting two competing slates of electors to the Electoral College, but also for pushing back the latest possible time for settling the election results to Jan. 6 — the date set by federal law for a joint session of Congress to certify the final count of electors.

The competing slate conundrum in Hawaii was ultimately put to rest when Mr. Kennedy prevailed in the recount, and a new governor of Hawaii certified a freshly drafted slate of his electors.

Then, on Jan. 6, 1961, Mr. Nixon, overseeing the congressional certification session in his role as president of the Senate, received all three slates of electors — his own, the initial Kennedy slate and the certified Kennedy slate — but agreed that the last one should be formally accepted.

While this is the closest prior case of something similar, and thus no big deal, what Trump did is still different enough that it can be meaningfully distinguished:

  1. Both Nixon and Kennedy had good reason to believe they won. Trump didn't.

  2. Kennedy's first slate of electors, the ones that weren't certified, weren't the ones eventually counted. Only the ones certified by the state were counted. Trump's false electors were never certified, so asking Pence to certify them was completely unprecedented.

  3. Nixon accepted that Hawaii had final say over what was and wasn't their slate of electors. Trump didn't and continually insisted his slate was correct.

Another argument that I don't think is strong, but nonetheless might be the strongest steel man:

it was legal or it was in a gray area of legality and Trump had every right to push the boundary to stay in power as long as he doesn't break the law

This is not a strong argument because then it would've just been a constitutional coup and those are still wrong. The way many Latin American countries have constitutional coups is that they stack the court that allows them to reinterpret their constitution to give them more power or that allows them to violate term limits. This is still wrong despite technically being legal. The problem is the norm breaking, not the technical legality.

Trump is allowed to avail himself every permissible legal option to contest the results, but must vacate the office, which he did without incident. So the transfer of power was upheld. It does set a precedent for repeats of this though. Suggesting that the process was unfair, fraudulent, or rigged is also protected speech provided the transfer of power is not obstructed. The Constitution makes no mention of the process having to be fair or that the votes are properly counted, only that the transfer of power is upheld. Even if the dems transparently cheated, Trump must still leave if no recourse is possible.

Suggesting that the process was unfair, fraudulent, or rigged is also protected speech provided the transfer of power is not obstructed.

Depends how you do it. Filing a false police report is not protected speech. Nor is defaming identifiable individuals, if done with "actual malice". The Trump-Raffensperger phonecall is closer to filing a false police report than it is to normal political lying.

The Trump-Raffensperger phonecall is closer to filing a false police report than it is to normal political lying.

If you listen to that call Trump is very very clearly asking R. to 'find' invalid ballots that should not have been counted. (and that he believes to exist in large numbers)

If you call the police to report that somebody stole your bike, you think it was your neighbour, and they ought to investigate and 'find your bike', this is not a false report just because it turns out that you were mistaken as to the culprit.

The Trump-Raffensperger phonecall is closer

I would agree that this was a bad action, but, being very charitable here, Trump calling the Georgia Secretary of State to "find [number] of votes" doesn't seem different in substance from the Gore Campaign in 2000 calling the county authorities in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia Counties (all very blue districts!) and demanding they do a recount to ensure all their votes were counted. We don't have readouts from the sitting Vice President calling county election officials, but "find the votes" doesn't feel completely out of the question. Maybe the fact that Gore was trained as a lawyer would have prevented him from saying it explicitly, but implicit doesn't feel much cleaner here. Ultimately the election there was decided by SCOTUS (admittedly, on party lines) ruling that the disparate recount standards applied to different counties (read: only districts where finding ballots would be expected to tip the results a specific direction) violated equal protection under the Constitution. Rather uncharitably: Gore was found to, in violation of the Constitutional rights of the voters of Florida, conspire with partisan county election officials to change outcome of the statewide election, which would have tipped the electoral college.

Here you can even see The New York Times opining that absentee ballots which tipped the election should have been discarded for things like missing signatures and late postmarks. Strange they seem less interested in the legality of mail-in ballots cast in 2020.

Doesn't this argument justify constitutional coups?

The responses seem to group into a few categories. Here is, in my view, a good faith summary of these categories (that are not all mutually exclusive)

  1. Some variation of "your priors for fraud occurring are too low meaning that your standard for evidence is too high"

        a. the lack of voter security measures should increase your prior more than it did
    b. the history of past fraud should increase your prior more than it did

  2. Trump genuinely believed there was fraud. This made his subsequent actions all good faith attempts to right the wrong of electoral fraud

        a. this belief was based on there really being fraud
    b. this belief was based on flawed but still believable evidence of fraud (a reasonable minds could disagree situation. See 1.)
    c. this belief was based on Trump being either dumb, crazy or something similar which made him ignore evidence to the contrary

  3. What Trump did is merely part of a series of tit for tat norm violations, and while they are indeed norm violations, they just another escalation, so it isn't really that big of a deal

Am I missing anything?

That seems reasonably fair. Maybe add:

3.a. norms are sufficiently strong, and the mechanisms of government sufficiently firmly in anti-Trump hands, that there was never a real danger of this escalating to a coup. Trump probably knows this. So the norm violation is not of itself as dangerous as it looks, and is intended more as a signal of not rolling over than serious dictatorial intent.

For the record, I do find the entire January 6th debacle pretty disqualifying. I don't live in a swing state, so I guess my marginal vote doesn't really matter here, but I do find it a pretty solid reason to decide not to vote for Trump. I think he could have handled it better (without really personally buying into the theories of voter fraud swinging the outcome) if he had accepted the outcome, but channeled right-wing frustration with the trustworthiness of the system into an effort to root out voter fraud, with the aim to produce something disrupting the Biden administration like the entire Russiagate boondoggle dragged his own term. "I'll hand over power, but I'm going to make it my personal effort to make known to the American public how you cheated" is, I think, closer to the Overton window and could have been pulled off.

On the other hand (you asked for a steelman), January 6th is but an incremental escalation over the lawfare that surrounded the 2016 election. Unprecedented campaigns to cause faithless electors, and even attempts by Democrats still in good standing to reject the Electoral votes of the entire states of Montana, Wisconsin, Michigan, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. For all the discussion of having Congress reject specific votes in 2021, motions to do so were made in 2017. Kudos to Biden himself for rejecting those like Pence did, but Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal, Barbara Lee, the late Sheila Jackson Lee, Raul Grijalva, and Maxine Waters literally tried (and failed, although you could accuse them of trying half-heartedly) to overturn an election and nobody seems to care enough that they all have remained politicians in good standing afterwards. That this escalating debasement of federal elections was allowed without any real repercussions seems to raise legitimate questions about whether the concern about the sanctity of elections is truly about the elections themselves, or selectively imposed only when the oligarchs dislike their outcomes. See also implications that we should throw out actual ballot returns because Russian propagandists might have made a few messages that voters might have seen. Once you're convinced it's who, whom? (both sides very clearly do this), it's easy enough to dismiss pretty much any concerns as politically motivated.

It seems like it would have been a good time to run a very clean "return to normalcy" campaign, but Biden was just last night saying "lock him up" at a political rally, and hasn't exactly been the centrist I feel like he campaigned as, which sours me quite a bit on his chosen successor. I'm not going to say exactly how I'll vote, but I'm pretty openly disappointed with both sides here.

I am not entirely convinced the fake elector scheme was merely an incremental escalation, but I still find this argument more persuasive than most.

Let me turn this around- can someone steelman for me why norm violations are only a big deal when republicans do it?

Like yes, mos maiorum oppugnatus est. Tamquam istud Sulla ait. And it seems like the judgement of history is pretty clear that Sulla was the bad guy even if the Gracchi brothers- and arguably Marius- started it. Novel legal theories aimed at your political opponents are a norm violation. I’m sure we can take this arbitrarily far back but the current round of spiraling wasn’t a serious danger until sometime in Obama’s presidency, so it doesn’t seem productive to talk about ruby ridge or the patriot act or the new deal or whatever.

I agree the Dem norm violations are horrible too. The NY hush money case, the Georgia RICO case (still laughing at the thought of Fani Willis prosecuting a Trump RICO case when she can't even prosecute Young Thug in the longest trial in Georgia's history), the dumb Koi pond thing, the point about the vaccines that @AnonymousActuary mentioned below, etc. But, that doesn't really justify Trump's actions.

But, that doesn't really justify Trump's actions.

Does it not though?

Isnt the steelman of Trump's behavior (and arguably the entire motivating impetus behind it) something to the effect of "what's good for the goose is good for the gander"?

First, I'm saying they are both wrong and second and more importantly, trying overturn an election would be worse than any of those things.

Seems to me many serious defenders of Trump privately believe there are enough checks and balances to keep wannabe dictators from taking power; witness January 6th. They would make the case that it's worth having a wannabe dictator as president in this case because Trump is great and it's not that much of a risk. Plus they think everyone wants to be a dictator, and that Trump is just less secretive about it, and so no more dangerous than anyone else, maybe less.

If anyone here (Trump fans and detractors alike) believes Trump wouldn't become a dictator given the chance, I'd be fascinated to hear from them.

Trump didn't try to postpone, cancel, or otherwise take control preceding the 2020 election. There was an opening for it - a historic pandemic that lead to the erosion of many other liberties. If there was ever a time when someone could have tried to push boundaries like that, it was then. He posted some things on Twitter about worrying that it would be insecure. But he didn't direct the Federal Lawfare forces to push the issue.

I also think that outstaying the 2 term-welcome is such a taboo in American's minds, that it is unthinkable for anyone to break it. Few Trump supporters want him to be in office longer than two terms, and Trump would see it's unpopular and so he won't do it.

If that counts too much towards, "Trump would be a dictator if given the chance (but his own base won't give him the chance.)" then I think that the bar is set in a position that would trip most politicians. If there wasn't an Amendment forbidding three terms, Obama probably would have run again. FDR actually did run again, defying convention. The Executive has expanded in power with every administration for decades. 90% of presidents have the dictator spirit within them. We were only graced with 1 George Washington in our nation's history.

90% of presidents have the dictator spirit within them. We were only graced with 1 George Washington in our nation's history.

Don’t forget Calvin Coolidge, one of the best presidents we’ve ever had.

I also think that outstaying the 2 term-welcome is such a taboo in American's minds, that it is unthinkable for anyone to break it.

Don't quite know about this. You can't imagine what specific pathway and pressure dams could potentially be created in order for a cunning enough president to extend a second term beyond the normal timeframe. It could be a movement to postpone the election until voting mechanisms have been properly safeguarded, or for an as-yet unknown emergency (a form of low level civil war for example) that supposedly makes holding an election at a given moment too dangerous. Putin got around term limits by installing a puppet for a term and then changing the rules. Trump could do the same and become the true POTUS with Don Jr or someone as the nominal candidate.

I do agree with you that most politicians share the dictator spirit. But I think the norm of keeping it strictly secret, which Trump often doesn't abide by, is incredibly important to proper functioning democracy.

Anytime election stuff comes up I feel like it is at least worth mentioning that Democratic-aligned bureaucrats conspired to delay the vaccination trial results coming out, preventing an October surprise that quite plausibly would've tipped the election to Trump, at the cost of 4-digit numbers of American lives and this is generally acknowledged and somehow not seen as a huge deal.

I'd also like to point out that the "intelligence community" knowingly put out a letter falsely claiming that the Hunter Laptop story was a Russian attempt at changing the election, and later studies claimed that this changed enough voter's minds to the point that it could plausibly have shifted the election.

Will you say more about this?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/

See this mainstream article: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/01/fda-covid-vaccine-slow-rollout-trump/621284/ Basically, it's not proven (and unlikely) that delaying the trial results until after the election was the only consideration here. However, it was very plausibly a consideration. Either way, the delay was in retrospect the wrong choice, and under most reasonable calculations cost 4-digit numbers of American lives.

As non-US person I consider US presidential election system as mindbogglingly stupid, prone to fraud and unsafe. Ballot harvesting, voting machines, no requirement of any ID in many states, inability to actually count votes for days or weeks, etc. When I raised these questions before, a lot of people mentioned how this is complicated system where states have their own rules and so forth. It does not matter. Your elections are laughable and a mockery of security, it is far beyond anything I have seen in my country of Slovakia or other countries where I follow elections. Also your politicians are unwilling to do anything about it to make elections more safe and trustworthy, while constantly talking about "threat to democracy".

So the steelman of Trump's argument - or argument by any other candidate who loses and raises questions about legitimacy of election - no matter the results, your elections in their current state will always have huge issues with legitimacy and trust no matter who wins.

It boggles my mind that the United States, the most powerful country on Earth, is unable to issue all of its citizens with photo IDs.

This is one of those things where the Anglosphere simply has a different view on what the government should be doing compared to Napoleonic countries.

If the government maintains a register of everyone legally present in the country, then it can issue certified copies of entries in the register easily. This is perfectly technically feasible, and several countries have done it. The UK was going to do it under Blair, but he got voted out - the first thing the coalition did on taking power in 2010 was to abolish the register that was supposed to be the basis for the ID card scheme. It would be even easier to do for the US technically than it was for us because you normally issue SSNs at birth. But most Americans, and even most politically engaged Brits, think that making such a register is an act of petty tyranny.

If you don't have a population register, then all an ID means is that at some point some appropriate authority figure said "this birth certificate and this photo belong to the same person" and the government wrote this down.

unable to issue all of its citizens with photo IDs.

Honestly, the IDs themselves are probably the easy part. With birthright citizenship, it's not like we have a conclusive list of citizens even scattered around the country in fragments. It's plausible someone was a home-birth that was never registered with the government, or a child of citizens born out of the country and never registered. And we don't have unique identifiers for our citizens: The SSN is the closest (and terrible for a variety of reasons), but there are people who, for religious reasons the government respects, opt out of having an identifier assigned to them (separate from opting out of Social Security itself for religious reasons, like the Amish).

The way it works in Slovakia is that government knows your place of birth and that is where you are "automatically" assigned as a registered voter as soon as you turn 18. If you move your place of residence elsewhere, then it is on you to approach the government to get your residency papers in order so that you can be automatically reassigned for voting in this new place. If you know you are temporarily out of your city for voting, you can ask for special voter ID that enables you to be manually added to voting list elsewhere, you cannot just pop up in some random place, show your ID and vote. And despite all this, our most important elections have about the same turnout (68% in 2023 parliamentary elections) than let's say 66% for 2020 US presidential elections.

I guess this could be the same in USA. I suppose that if you get into the country legally, you get some kind of residency permit with some home address. In Slovakia, even homeless people have their residency officially marked just as the city/town where they live - there is a "default" government address, which also determines where they can go to vote.

The US doesn't have an explicit requirement to register your current address. I guess it's on my driver's license and that's supposed to be updated when I move, but those aren't required, and that's done at the state level. And some people have multiple residences, so you can't cue it on move-in dates.

It's interesting to talk with people from other countries about this, because the US doesn't track its residents anywhere near as closely as other countries I've been to. A hotel in Europe will consistently ask for my passport. In the US, they frequently only ask for a credit card, with maybe an ID only to check that I am the person with the name on the reservation.

The US doesn't have an explicit requirement to register your current address.

Neither is it so in Slovakia. You may move about in and out of the country, live decades elsewhere and that is fine. In fact it is a huge issue for major cities, that get portion of income tax of their residents for financing municipal activities. And they get nothing from people living there with official residency in other towns and villages. So they tie stuff like free parking places and other perks to official residency paperwork. But if you dont care, you can skip it.

The point is, that you will be registered voter based on the adress where you live in - for local or national elections. If you cannot be bothered to change the residency, then it is on you.

Birthright citizenship makes it easier, not harder, because birth in the US (which is universally registered, even if the register doesn't suffice to prove identity) is sufficient to prove citizenship.

Verifying citizenship in the UK is a mess because birth in the UK after 1983 doesn't provide British citizenship unless one of your parents was a citizen or permanent resident. If you can trace your ancestry back to 1983 through British citizens born in the UK then you can rely on the chain of birth and marriage certificates, but for a lot of people the documentation they would need to confirm their parents' (or grandparents' - most people being born today have parents born after 1983) immigration status 40 years ago doesn't exist.

I think "unable" is the wrong word. The United States government almost certainly could do this. The problem is lots of politicians (I suspect primarily Republicans) are skeptical of the kind of national database that would have to be constructed to do so. What is going to be on the cards? Are we just adding a photo to your SSN card? But that wouldn't establish where you live for voting purposes. Will it also have your address? So the federal government is going to have a database of the address of every citizen?

Lots of politics groups in America are suspicious of the federal government knowing too much or having too much power which hampers our ability to coordinate that way and is why so much is done by states instead.

I made a comment that responded to this exact thing here

Yes, there is a proof of "outcome-determinative fraud" - like for instance existence of ballot harvesting. If some person in my country of Slovakia came to the voting room with a bag full of ballots he "collected" and then tried to shove them into the official ballot box, that would be considered an election fraud and he would be arrested as an "outcome" by police that guards all the voting stations. So yes, your whole voting system is illegitimate and fraudulent as it allows unhinged voting practices, you are a banana republic.

But I will give you a benefit of doubt. Just as a thought exercise - please give me an analysis of "outcome-determinative fraud" let's say for the latest presidential elections in Russia and if you consider them fraudulent or not. Apparently according to the laws in Russia, the elections were splendid - no allegations of fraud were confirmed based on whatever they consider as "fair" elections in their minds. Or is your stance that elections were shady and Putin maybe did not get 88%, but he would for sure get 51%, so there was no “outcome-determinative fraud”, so all is well and good?

Point taken. "Outcome-determinative fraud" is not the right phrase. However, what I am trying to distinguish is a single person voting in two districts, or maybe a felon voting when they shouldn't, or maybe giving a single friend $5 bucks to vote for you as dog catcher from organized attempts to swing the outcome of an election. I agree ballot harvesting, among other things, is wrong and shouldn't be allowed, but you challenge the rules before hand, not after you lose. And before you tell me Trump was sounding the alarm on it, my memories of 2020 are that, yes he mentioned ballot harvesting here and there, but it was mainly about mail in fraud or fraud by the poll workers at the actual polls.

This is basically back to that CEO example where, yes, everyone knows there is stealing, but no one has ever blamed a bad quarter on stealing before since they knew that it wasn't ever big enough.

Saying that, someone did post a really good reframing to that CEO example, so I am still thinking about that.

So, ultimately answering the Putin hypo (even when it's obvious what the answer would be, I still don't like it when people don't directly answer presented hypos), the answer would be that yes, I do still believe the Putin elections are shady. This is cause there is not really a big difference between Putin being able to rig it 30%, 40% or 50%, so the outcome is still controlled by him. Contrasting that with cases of single person voter fraud and there is basically no risk it swings the election. Contrasting that with ballot harvesting and Trump had a chance to challenge that sort of thing before hand, not possible in Russia.

I agree ballot harvesting, among other things, is wrong and shouldn't be allowed, but you challenge the rules before hand, not after you lose. And before you tell me Trump was sounding the alarm on it, my memories of 2020 are that, yes he mentioned ballot harvesting here and there, but it was mainly about mail in fraud or fraud by the poll workers at the actual polls.

I am not a US citizen. I don’t care about Trump or Kamala or Obama or Bush or Gore. Your core election system is fucked, it allows for a fraud, which for sure played some role in tight Gore/Bush Florida election, where ballot machines somehow “missed” 61,000 votes, not even talking about other election shenanigans. Your whole political system is electorally suspect and thus illegitimate, no matter who benefits or rules.

I do still believe the Putin elections are shady. This is cause there is not really a big difference between Putin being able to rig it 30%, 40% or 50%, so the outcome is still controlled by him.

How is it controlled by him? Do you have any evidence of mass fraud outside of a few videos of soldiers peeking how people vote etc? Or is it that the whole system is rigged by holes, from selection of candidates, assasinations and assasination attempts to bullying of government workers, media system, espionage and the rest of it?

Again, from where I stand your whole electoral system is illegitimate. People do what the can, such as those supposedly 12% who supposedly voted against Putin. Who knows what are the real numbers and if fraud was “outcome-determinative”. The fact of illegitimate elections is “outcome-determinative” by itself.

How is it controlled by him? Do you have any evidence of mass fraud outside of a few videos of soldiers peeking how people vote etc? Or is it that the whole system is rigged by holes, from selection of candidates, assasiations and assasination attempts to bullying of government workers, media system, espionage and the rest of it?

I don't know exactly how it's controlled, I'm just taking the news and various western governments and NGOs at their word with places like Russia or China. Of course, there is always the leftist/isolationist critique that these all can't be trusted since they are just mouth pieces to help western interests, but I don't believe that critique.

Again, from where I stand your whole electoral system is illegitimate.

Do you agree that there is a "tipping point" where the level of fraud/election unfairness switches from "yeah it sometimes happens here and there, but it's small and not really a big deal, so elections can still be trusted" to "it is so pervasive you can't trust the results of any election"? It is not merely a difference of degree, it is a difference of kind when it gets that pervasive.

What is the steelman for the establishment being unable to steal elections?

Not unwilling, unable. Arguments from unwillingness, such as the ostensible criminality of mass electoral fraud, are tautological, as they assume the ability to read minds. Arguments of it being unnecessary are supremely tautological, as their first assumption is legitimate elections. Tautologies are not steelmen.

That sufficient measures exist to stop illegal voting; that sufficient measures exist to prevent the mass injection of fraudulent ballots; that relevant executive agencies have an interest in auditing elections and investigating to the fullest extent and neutrally charging electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud; that the courts have an interest in neutral hearings of electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud; that the media has an interest in investigating and neutrally reporting to the fullest extent electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud. The caveats of "fullest extent" and "leftist electoral fraud" are necessary, as no national-scope investigation has happened, and while there are rarely stories of left-aligned individuals being charged with electoral crimes, relative to those, stories of right-aligned individuals being charged with electoral crimes occur far more frequently. For the sake of charity, I will agree the inclination to criminal behavior as equal among the left and right, it is however no question that support for criminal behavior is a dominant ethic of the modern left. For these, the probabilistic assumption is one side is caught and/or reported on less often.

Do also consider the history of American conspiracies; principally, that evidence indicates coordination and silence are solved problems.

And to repeat myself, "it's a crime" and "they didn't need to" are not positions of a steelman. Not unwilling, unable.

What is the steelman for the establishment being unable to steal elections?

The fact that they didn't in 2016. (Unless you believe trump and hillary were secretly on the same side.)

The establishment must be at least one of: {unwilling, unable}.

And anyways, every political faction is fractally composed of sub-factions feuding over electoral legitimacy. Ideological alliances can put aside power-grubbing for the common good, but if you're going to assume cynicism in the first place, history has endless examples of the aristocracy fighting against central tyrants because they'd rather do the tyrranizing themselves. If you give your king too much legitimacy he doesn't need to delegate to you anymore. Rigging swing state elections would benefit national parties, but destroy the outsize power and influence of the local parties.

2016 is a starting point, but it is only a weak indicator of inability or unwillingness. I indict the administration of elections at all levels, so an adequate steelman incorporating the 2016 general election only pushes the question back. Were they unable to inject large numbers of fraudulent ballots? Or were they unprepared and failed to inject enough?

A common oversight on this subject is the thought that stealing national elections requires national coordination. It is in the interest of the California Democratic Party to win California elections, if they are fabricating large numbers of ballots in the general, they can achieve the immediate goal of maintaining local power while achieving the incidental goal of the state's electoral college votes going to the Democratic candidate for president. Same for Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia. It's the simulacra, the copy without an original. Many small groups who benefit from stealing local elections, who with no explicit cooperation steal a national election.

I indict the administration of elections at all levels

It sounds like you're assuming that democracy is and has always been a sham. (Or at least, has been a sham since some undeterminable point in the non-recent past.) But if democracy was merely a facade over authoritarianism, then we should expect there to be little difference in how "democratic" and "nondemocratic" states behave-- and little difference in their economic and military outcomes. But a cursory examination of history demonstrates exactly the opposite. If you compare european countries, the wealthy and prosperous ones are correspondingly less authoritarian, and while the authoritarian states pretend at democracy, they're transparently worse at in in various ways. If at some point the US stopped being democratic, we should expect some sort of regression towards an authoritarian mean-- except the US economy is one of the best-performing advanced economies worldwide.

There's still a lot of space for anti-democratic intervention; when it comes to elections "stolen" isn't a checkbox, it's a gradient. But self-evidently, whatever efforts the democrats have been making are on a lower order-of-magnitude scale of effect than the structural anti-democratic interventions of the electoral college and the fixed size of the house of representatives.

It is in the interest of the California Democratic Party to win California elections

Not exactly. The point of forming political parties is to acquire power and resources-- not for the party, but for the individual members of the party. In a competitive environment, yes, it's in the interests of the members to work together to defeat common enemies. But as a group eliminates its competitors, intra-group conflict rises in intensity... and many of those specific factions and people involved see that, toward the tail end, if the group finishes eliminating its competitors-- then suddenly they have no more bargaining power within the group. And all of this happens fractally.

So-- a member of the californian democratic party has incentives to force state elections to be as fair as possible, even at the expense of the CDP, because relative to their own state their greatest enemies are members of their own party.But they want national elections to be tilted as far towards the national democratic party as possible because "california" is one of the biggest factions in the democratic party, and can be confident that they can re-task federal resources toward themselves if only they can eliminate the republican party as a real competitor.

But a member of the Pennsylvania democratic party has exactly the opposite incentives-- they're in a fight for their life locally, but the national status quo (of getting money funneled toward them from the national organization that they can in term hand out through patronage networks to advertisers and campaign staff) heavily benefits them. If the national election was less fair, suddenly they would get a much smaller share of the democratic party's overall bucket of goodies.

And yes, presumably you have people who just want to win their city council seat at any cost... but they in turn rely on staff with unpredictable allegiances. Is that poll worker here because they feel a deep allegiance to the democratic party or to democratic ideals? Do my supporters vote for me because they genuinely like me or because they think I'm the least-worst option? Is any specific person in my hierarchy going to accept orders to fake ballots or are they going to rat me out to the media for a paycheck and (if they're lucky) a book deal?

I won't claim that no malfeasance goes on. But stealing an election and winning an election require a very similar set of skills and resources. Positioning yourself to do the former puts you most of the way toward doing the latter. And considering the existence of explicitly adversarial factions with difficult-to-gauge power and unity, it becomes very risky indeed to try and steal elections in any blatant way. That's why Obama gave up his position to trump in 2016 and why trump gave up his position to biden when he lost in 2020.

I can think of 2 counterarguments about being unable to at least do so secretly:

  1. The U.S. has an oppositional system. Corrupt states generally have one party so entrenched that the opposing party can't really do anything about it. Whereas if Republicans have strong evidence of Democratic cheating, they should likely have the means to either uncover it, or to cheat right back.

  2. An internal defector would also be likely. The election system involves so many people that it would be difficult to not encounter someone with moral objections or simply wants the fame and cash that would likely result in running to Fox News. I know you precluded this with your link, but your link only establishes it as theoretically possible rather than likely. Becoming a poll worker doesn't require the same level of background checks as secret clearance, and seems much harder to ensure a cohesive conspiracy.

I wouldn't expect Republicans of a given swing state to be able to thoroughly investigate the electoral procedures of their blue island cities. More, up until 2020 there was no serious consideration on the right of leftist electoral fraud. They weren't looking for it, weren't thinking about it, now that they are, we might expect investigations. Especially with the next Trump administration.

A low level government bureaucrat probably belongs to the group of people least likely to defect, save for those in criminal groups where defectors are killed. It's their job, for many it's the best they can get, why would they defect? Moral concern begs the question.

I wouldn't expect Republicans of a given swing state to be able to thoroughly investigate the electoral procedures of their blue island cities.

Why not? State power trumps local power, and a swing state likely has enough Republican power to have a decent shot at investigating it. I also don't buy that the right is only just now thinking about election fraud. This has been a talking point for decades, even if it ramped up in 2020.

A low level government bureaucrat probably belongs to the group of people least likely to defect, save for those in criminal groups where defectors are killed. It's their job, for many it's the best they can get, why would they defect? Moral concern begs the question.

It's a low level job, and low level jobs typically cycle a lot of people in and out. Hell, isn't it a common saying that young people have no respect for their jobs and barely even show up? Plus for many it's a temp job.

As for why they would defect, let me put it this way. Stormy Daniels got $130,000 for the rights to her story about sleeping with Trump. Let's say I have solid proof of voter fraud. If I took said evidence to Fox News, how much do you think I could get them to pay for it?

With regards to moral concern, it's a numbers game. According to a quick search there were 774,000 poll workers in 2020. And some states like Ohio and New York explicitly require a mix of party affiliation. The point is that a conspiracy requires pretty much everyone at a given location to be in on it.

Judicial power trumps state power, and left-aligned judges have been prolific at stopping Republican attempts at legislating electoral security; why would they be any more cooperative in investigations obstructed by hyperblue municipal bureaucracies? Beyond that, while fraud has been something generally talked about, it was not a matter du jour of the 2016 electoral cycle or the 2020 electoral cycle, its prominence today is novel to post-9/11 American political discourse.

Money is an incentive for defection, but there must be an interested purchasing party and goods to deliver. Daniels is a porn star who had evidence of having had sex with the President, of course she was going to be handsomely compensated for the story. A poll worker would have no story merely saying "This many ballots were fraudulently filed," even an interested party would not likely pay them, because that testimony is worth nothing.

The procedure for striking ballots as fraudulent is not a poll worker coming forward and saying "I fraudulently filled 10,000 ballots." The procedure is the poll worker comes forward and says "I applied a secret watermark to these 10,000 ballots; forensic expert team A will prove all 10,000 watermarks are identical and were indeed produced by the same process and human hand rather than being an artifact of printing or processing; forensic expert team B will prove I am the individual who produced that watermark all 10,000 times."

Goes to court. Forensic teams successfully tie poll worker to a ballot. Yes, a ballot, 1 ballot.

9,999 hearings to go, because every single ballot must be individually proved as fraudulent, else a legal ballot be illegally struck. See the scope of the problem?

You also assume this as a complex process requiring many people be aware. We don't know how many people are required to flip elections because the process is closed to audit. It could take dozens, it could take hundreds, it could take a handful of people placed at the exact link in the chain where boxes of fake ballots can be introduced and laundered with boxes of legal ballots. We don't know, and this by the way is and has been my entire point throughout my time talking about fraud on this site. When I say "We have no way of knowing" I am describing the act of criminal fraud. It is tax fraud for a corporation to have numbers closed to audit and it is electoral fraud for a government to have ballot numbers closed to audit.

Judicial power trumps state power, and left-aligned judges have been prolific at stopping Republican attempts at legislating electoral security; why would they be any more cooperative in investigations obstructed by hyperblue municipal bureaucracies? Beyond that, while fraud has been something generally talked about, it was not a matter du jour of the 2016 electoral cycle or the 2020 electoral cycle, its prominence today is novel to post-9/11 American political discourse.

Republicans would still likely take the matter to court if they believed fraud existed. Also, Bush v Gore was famously decided in Bush's favor. Kerry supported a lawsuit by Green and Libertarian candidates. There was an interesting result in that one in that the random recount was found to be rigged but beyond that didn't seem to go anywhere.

I would note a correlation between its recent prominence and a candidate who makes a lot of wild claims.

Money is an incentive for defection, but there must be an interested purchasing party and goods to deliver. Daniels is a porn star who had evidence of having had sex with the President, of course she was going to be handsomely compensated for the story. A poll worker would have no story merely saying "This many ballots were fraudulently filed," even an interested party would not likely pay them, because that testimony is worth nothing.

I covered the interested party aspect already - Fox News. Or how abut the Heritage Foundation? Or Donald Trump himself? Hell, even without any evidence, claim to be a poll worker who found fraud and Trump will organize a parade for you.

9,999 hearings to go, because every single ballot must be individually proved as fraudulent, else a legal ballot be illegally struck. See the scope of the problem?

I won't claim to be a legal expert, but this doesn't seem right. And even if it were, again the news itself would be something Trump would never ignore.

You also assume this as a complex process requiring many people be aware. We don't know how many people are required to flip elections because the process is closed to audit. It could take dozens, it could take hundreds, it could take a handful of people placed at the exact link in the chain where boxes of fake ballots can be introduced and laundered with boxes of legal ballots. We don't know, and this by the way is and has been my entire point throughout my time talking about fraud on this site. When I say "We have no way of knowing" I am describing the act of criminal fraud. It is tax fraud for a corporation to have numbers closed to audit and it is electoral fraud for a government to have ballot numbers closed to audit.

Yes, I do think it would lean on the complex side. Even a precision strike requires getting said people into that exact position. I don't think election fraud is 100% impossible, but I think this is a Russell's Teapot situation. I don't think that equal skepticism is being applied to claims of fraud being true as is applied to claims supposedly disproving said claims.

I can't say I strongly oppose more auditing, outside of that I suspect the only result of it would be that the people predisposed to believe in election fraud will latch on some innocuous detail and/or create a new appeal to missing information. I don't agree that Democrats have as much of a stranglehold on the gears of politics that their opponents can't and/or won't stop them. If they did Trump would be kept nowhere near power.

More, up until 2020 there was no serious consideration on the right of leftist electoral fraud

While president, Trump had a 'voter fraud' commission. Republicans were thinking about and looking for electoral fraud, they just didn't find any significant amount.

You mean this one?

On June 28, 2017, Kobach, in conjunction with the Department of Justice, asked every state for personal voter information.[6] The request was met with significant bipartisan backlash; 44 states and the District of Columbia declined to supply some or all of the information, citing privacy concerns or state laws.

Make the argument he faced near-total bipartisan opposition, sure. Don't make the implicatively false tie with the 2020 General and the patently false "didn't find any."

What is the steelman for the establishment being unable to steal elections?

Just being sure, but I assume that the unwritten assumption here is "unable to steal elections without being caught", right?

After reading the post you linked, my basic counterargument is that massive electoral fraud is just much harder to pull off than anything else we've caught the government doing. Given that it is harder (because of the highly decentralized nature of US elections), there would be way more "breadcrumbs" left behind so we would have good evidence if it happened. I'm having a similar conversation with many people here which is that my priors for election fraud are clearly much lower than yours, so I need much stronger evidence to convince me compared to you.

Stealing an election implies not getting caught.

The essay elaborates specifically on how those programs weren't caught. COINTELPRO was a lucky break-in. MKUltra was uncovered while the government was looking at something entirely different, after decades of nobody coming forward. We know, generally, the CIA was running guns and drugs, but the extent is unknown, and what they do today is likewise unknown. How much does the CIA hold in unaccountable bitcoin, for example? It's certainly not $0.

What are your "priors" for no fraud? I can conceive of what those priors would necessarily include.

Necessity? This assumes consistent electoral legitimacy and this is a necessarily irrational belief. There is no basis for a necessity prior.

Morality? It requires an unwillingness to break the law. It's no longer journalists making the comparison, a general calls him Hitler, Harris calls him a fascist. True or false, there is no basis for a moral prior.

Journalism? The modern media establishment would neither investigate nor report on systemic leftist fraud, as they would be reporting on themselves. There is no basis for a journalistic prior.

Investigations? The FBI has been working against Trump since the Obama administration, they were working against him while he was the sitting President. No evidence supports the impartiality of the agency. Additionally, Republicans have only recently been made aware of the potential fraud occurring beneath them, and the areas for that potential fraud are hyper blue cities of purple states. How do Pennsylvania Republicans investigate fraud in Philadelphia? Who's cooperating with them? More, in states like California and Oregon, who would possibly investigate leftist fraud? There is no basis for an investigative prior.

A note before the last, since your priors can only rationally hinge on this: in the United States, to strike a ballot, it must be proved how that exact ballot is fraudulent. A hypothetical poll worker who fraudulently fills out 1,000 ballots and washes them together with legitimate ballots cast at their precinct has no fear of reveal or recourse because in this instance there is no method to differentiate legitimate and fraudulent ballots. It would not only require the poll worker to admit what they did and the exact number, but also be able to identify and prove with court-accepted evidence what ballots they cast in fraud, as it is illegal to destroy a legitimate ballot.

Courts not hearing the cases is all you have, and it would be fair were it not for the above. The citizenry has no method of auditing elections, and it should surprise no one that a crime that is so enabled by the system its revelation all but requires its perpetrators come forward has such little evidence. I would say in real fairness to the courts, what were they going to do? Pause the process for citizen journalism? I would say it, but leftist judges in random circuits have no problem making sweeping constitutional rulings. It is as simple as this: the matter was not given a full hearing by SCOTUS, their declination to hear the case is the strongest argument, but what would they hear? What results from what formal investigation? No, it is the strongest evidence because it is the only evidence, it is very weak evidence indeed.

Journalism? The modern media establishment would neither investigate nor report on systemic leftist fraud, as they would be reporting on themselves. There is no basis for a journalistic prior.

All of them? Every single one? Every single MSM journalist is in on this? I 100% believe in institutional biases that can lead to things that looks like conspiracies but are not actually, but this is well beyond bias into a full blow conspiracy. Now, me saying conspiracy doesn't automatically dismiss it like some who say throw around conspiracy do, but it does mean that the more people you add, especially if you add people from more and more disparate groups (keeping a secret in one group in the CIA is easier than keeping it in one CIA division is easier than keeping it in the CIA is easier than keeping it in the CIA + journalists, etc), the more likely it is for things to leak.

How do Pennsylvania Republicans investigate fraud in Philadelphia? Who's cooperating with them? More, in states like California and Oregon, who would possibly investigate leftist fraud? There is no basis for an investigative prior.

Do you think it's impossible to investigate things like criminal gangs as well? The problem is similar, but it still happens. People will never be 100% lock step with the party, especially as you expand the scope of the fraud. There are always people willing to whistle blow if the group gets large enough.

A hypothetical poll worker who fraudulently fills out 1,000 ballots and washes them together with legitimate ballots cast at their precinct has no fear of reveal or recourse because in this instance there is no method to differentiate legitimate and fraudulent ballots.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is why they have explicitly partisan poll watchers to watch the poll workers to make sure they don't cheat. You can literally walk in and watch poll workers work and if you see someone doing something, they will throw out the votes before they ever get put in the pile and get mixed up.

Also, there is this grand jury report into electoral fraud that occurred in Chicago in 1982: https://sites.duke.edu/pjms364s_01_s2016_jaydelancy/files/2016/04/Report-of-the-Special-Grand-Jury-US-District-Court-NE-Illinois-.pdf

It is a good example of a large scale conspiracy that must have gone undetected for a number of years before they were caught. There are references to precinct captains passing on fraud techniques to the new generation of precinct captains.

The report has a list of fraud techniques they use and its interesting to look at the list and look at some of the flash points around electoral security at the moment. For example Republican's seem to be very concerned over voter rolls not being up to date but this report shows that voter rolls that have voters on them that are no longer living or no longer capable of voting are a target for fraudsters.

If you truly want a steelman you have to be maximally charitable, so a premise that Trump was "dumb or crazy" for his possible sincere belief that the election was stolen is a non-starter. Imagine asking for a steelman for the Earth being flat. A premise that flat Earthers are just dumb or crazy, and therefore shouldn't be doing science, doesn't steelman the assertion that the Earth is flat.

  1. Trump sincerely believed the election was stolen. At the time, he found Sydney Powell, Mike Lindell etc more convincing the Attorney General, his Chief of Staff, White House council, the head of election security, etc

  2. Armed with their information, Trump and Chesebro formulated a plan to make sure the true winner was certified. They proactively organized uncertified electors as the state governments had certified electors based outcome determinative fraud.

  3. So the fake electors were intended as a contingency plan. Trump and his team truly believed that, by the time everything was sorted out (perhaps with some more aggressive fact-finding or legal victories), these electors would reflect the actual will of the people; the state certification being erroneous.

  4. When Trump informed Raffensperger that certifying the votes with Trump losing was illegal and likely to cause problems for Raffensperger, this was simply true. This wasn't norm breaking, but ensuring election integrity by exhausting every means available.

  5. When Trump pressured Pence, it wasn’t a violation of norms but rather a push to consider what might have been the correct electors in the contested states. After all, if Pence had simply agreed, it would have allowed more time for states or the Cyber Ninjas to review and verify their results. Trump’s belief was that this action wouldn’t have overturned the election but simply delayed it for the truth to come out.

A premise that flat Earthers are just dumb or crazy, and therefore shouldn't be doing science, doesn't steelman the assertion that the Earth is flat

I agree, it doesn't steel man that the earth is flat, but it does steel man that the people claiming the earth is flat aren't doing it out of malice/willful deception. The first line in my post is "What is the steel man for the Trump fake elector scheme being no big deal" and saying Trump is dumb or crazy satisfies that since it is a way smaller deal that Trump is just dumb or crazy than he tried to overturn the election. Another way to say it isn't a big deal is to say that the election really was stolen, or that this was a normal process, etc. So, it depends what exactly the steel man is for.

Trump sincerely believed the election was stolen. At the time, he found Sydney Powell, Mike Lindell etc more convincing the Attorney General, his Chief of Staff, White House council, the head of election security, etc

Trump sincerely believing the election was stolen seems to be the most common reply to this that I've talked about in a bunch of other comments, so I guess that is the ultimate steel man.

Just read about the limitations of a steelman. For example, its possible to steelman creationism or flat earth science. That doesn't make it an illuminating endeavor. Many or most Americans do not (more likely cannot or will not) see anything wrong with Trumps handling of the 2020 election. When asked in a 2019 survey, about 40% of Americans don't see anything wrong with asserting the Earth is less than 10,000 years old either.

  1. Trump's advisers, advisers that were appointed by himself, repeatedly told him there was no outcome-determinative fraud after looking into it. Despite this, Trump still insisted there was outcome-determinative fraud. Trump still insisted even after he started losing court cases left and right about there being outcome-determinative fraud. Assuming 1 is true this means that Trump is either knowingly lying or willfully ignoring people he himself picked

A big problem here is there simply wasn’t enough time to actually conduct a serious investigation. In order to actually investigate the election fraud claim that voting machines changed votes, you’d have to forensically audit dozens of machines in every state. To do so properly would take several weeks. The people claiming no fraud were saying so within days. Likewise for counting irregularities where it appeared that the counting was stopped and republicans shooed out of the room before the democrats pulled out hidden ballots to begin counting again without republicans watching. No one, to my knowledge, was put under oath and questioned, no investigation of the videos showing this kind of thing was done, we certainly never put anyone under oath to testify about the claims. And again with mail in ballots being dropped en mass. Nobody really investigated such claims, nobody bothered to look at the ballots in question, no officials were put under oath to answer questions.

None of that was investigated in the very short time between the reporting of the results and the claims by these officials. The best that could charitably be said is that they called the head of elections in the states, and the official in charge said “we didn’t see anything.” On no planet is asking the person who might have committed fraud if he did so anything like a real investigation. The officials stating there wasn’t fraud have no way of knowing this because no evidence was collected and no investigation was done. The cops investigated themselves and found nothing wrong. Nothing to see here. And questioning is is disinformation.

  1. Trump, despite knowing there wasn't outcome-determinative fraud (assuming 2), still tried to change the outcome of the election. First, he tried the courts where he knowingly lied about there being outcome-determinative fraud in court filings. When that failed he tried contacting various state legislatures and other state officials to ask them to certify his slate of electors. When that failed, his final option was to try to convince Pence to either use his slate of electors to win (a slate of electors not officially certified despite claiming to be certified), or to invalidate enough state's electors to make it so no one gets 270 electors, throwing the election to the house where Trump would then hopefully win given it becomes 1 state 1 vote there.

The lawsuits were never heard. And when they were dismissed, they were dismissed on standing. To say we know for certain he was lying is pretty uncharitable. He couldn’t have known whether there was fraud as no evidence was ever investigated properly. And while I don’t agree with either the false electors or the Pence thing, I’m just not sure what else could have been done. He thinks there’s fraud, there’s no investigation, and there’s simply no time to try. The options at that point are either the Hail Mary he did try or give up and pack up to leave and hope there’s an investigation that exonerates him in several years.

I had this strange deja vu, and what do you know.

Have you gotten any new evidence since then, or are you just going to keep demanding we roll the dice again? Maybe it'll come up in your guy's favor this time.

A big problem here is there simply wasn’t enough time to actually conduct a serious investigation. In order to actually investigate the election fraud claim that voting machines changed votes, you’d have to forensically audit dozens of machines in every state. To do so properly would take several weeks. The people claiming no fraud were saying so within days.

The same can be said for the people alleging fraud. Absent some specific evidence, of which none was provided, there was no basis for which Trump to even suggest that the election was fraudulent. Yet he was making these allegations before they had even finished counting the votes. This throws the whole call for forensic audits of voting machines into question as well. There was concerted effort to "audit" the election results in several states, but the auditors never explained exactly what they were looking for, or what they were doing, or how they expected what they were doing to demonstrate what they were looking for. Instead, they poked around with constantly changing procedures before concluding that the vote total wasn't substantially different from the official numbers. Not that this satisfied the election truthers, who merely backtracked and said that the methods the auditors used wouldn't have uncovered any of the other 199 types of fraud they alleged without evidence.

The lawsuits were never heard. And when they were dismissed, they were dismissed on standing. To say we know for certain he was lying is pretty uncharitable. He couldn’t have known whether there was fraud as no evidence was ever investigated properly.

Dismissal on standing grounds did not prevent the lawsuits from uncovering fraud; that would have required fraud to have been alleged in the first place. What the lawsuits did was allege improprieties in election procedure and ask that the court throw out the results for an entire state as a remedy, or at least throw out some tranche of ballots, the goal being that if certification could be prevented in enough states it would throw the election into the House. IIRC, these suits never alleged any facts that were in dispute, and thus would not have resulted in any kind of discovery or investigation. These cases being heard on the merits would have simply meant that the parties would have gone into court and argued different issues than they actually argued. Some of these cases were heard on the merits and were found lacking; I doubt the ones dismissed for standing, or laches, or any other affirmative defense would have fared differently had they been allowed to proceed.

You want to file a lawsuit that will actually result in a thorough investigation? File one that makes specific allegations of fraud: Tell a story in the complaint about how specific people took specific actions at specific times. Have actual witnesses on hand whom you can depose under oath, subject to cross-examination. Be prepared to do some of your own cross-examination as the other side puts up their witnesses contradicting yours. Don't be afraid to get subpoenas. Even if you have forensic evidence that your expert says is ironclad, it's worthless unless you have lay witnesses who can substantiate your claims. Saying there's proof that votes were switched is meaningless if you don't know who switched them. In other words, you have to have an actual case. It's not hard. Attorneys manage to file real cases every day, even attorneys who suck.

there was no basis for which Trump to even suggest that the election was fraudulent. Yet he was making these allegations before they had even finished counting the votes.

Correction: He was making these claims before the election even happened.

You might well have reason to suspect the results if the results coming in were more than 1σ off from internal polling. If you’re looking at a poll in Georgia that says Trump should win 60-40 over Biden, and Trump ends up losing 40-60 to Biden on a poll with an error margin of +/-3% it’s not going to be hard to see that something strange is happening here. If this happens over several states, especially if they all happened to break in the same direction. Like if 5 states that should be in the bag for Trump suddenly swing for Biden, it’s really something that should be looked at.

So, in other words, if Trump wins by a wide margin, and Kamala Harris says that her own internal polling shows her winning by a landslide in all 50 states, this should be enough to conduct whatever and as many investigations as she wants, and that we should delay certification until all of them are complete and/or she should refuse to conduct the electoral vote count until she's satisfied?

It should be enough to raise a question. Keep in mind that both parties have their internal polling data so if she’s lying about the data, Trump can easily show that his polling data that disputes hers. Plus there is exit polling, and so on that can be used. A serious anomaly deserves to be investigated, not just to assure that the correct person takes office, but also to assure the public that the election process is free, fair, and not being tampered with.

The lawsuits were never heard. And when they were dismissed, they were dismissed on standing.

Repeating from another comment, not every lawsuit was dismissed purely on standing. And even for those dismissed purely on standing, many judges talked about the merits anyways. They probably did to expedite any appeals in case their standing portion got overruled.

A big problem here is there simply wasn’t enough time to actually conduct a serious investigation. In order to actually investigate the election fraud claim that voting machines changed votes, you’d have to forensically audit dozens of machines in every...

This is an impossibly high standard to meet. You can say this after every election that has ever occurred. You do not need an investigation into every single machine say "there was probably no fraud here". What happens, as with every other event, is you have some initial prior for how likely an event is to occur, case A: an asteroid is going to fall on earth, case B: it will rain tomorrow. In case A, you have a very low prior. In case B, it is much higher. If someone at work tells you case A, you don't believe him. If that same person tells you case B, you do. The difference is the prior. In case A, you would google it, probably check twitter, probably also check government websites to make sure, and you probably also double and triple check you are on the actual government website and not a spoofed website. You'd do none of this for case B (well, you might google it later). Saying there is election fraud is obviously closer to case A than B, or at least that is where my personal priors are. That means that Trump would need to provide evidence there was fraud, meanwhile, all the other side has to do is debunk those claims. They do not need to prove each and every machine was free from fraud since the prior for there being fraud is so low.

You keep saying "outcome determinative fraud" as though the first part matters -- how's anyone to know whether the fraud was 'outcome determinative' or not without serious investigative authority; maybe even at all, given the way the ballots get separated from the PII early on in American elections.

Actually you lead me to something I've thought for quite a while in the 2020 aftermath -- the way that courts require proof of fraud that turned the election directly led to the low quality of some of the Trump campaign's lawsuits. If you are expected to prove not only that there was fraud against you, but also that the fraud amounted to at least some specific number of votes, unless you have significant cooperation from the folks counting the ballots (hint: Trump did not) your only play is to throw everything you have at the wall and hope that enough votes are found to stick.

This didn't work ofc, but I'm not sure that anything else would have worked better -- why don't you try a steelman: put yourself in the shoes of a Trump who was absolutely positive that there was significant fraud in PA, GA and NV, but can't prove exactly how much. What is your best move?

why don't you try a steelman: put yourself in the shoes of a Trump who was absolutely positive that there was significant fraud in PA, GA and NV, but can't prove exactly how much.

It is hard to put myself in these shoes without knowing why I am so positive there was significant fraud in the first place. This is obviously because the moves I make depend on why I am so sure. Am I sure because I had someone admit they committed fraud? Okay, I'd pursue that and hope they rat more people out. Am I sure because of statistical anomalies? Well, if I am positive there was fraud based off of statistical anomalies then I'd use that to target my investigation to look for harder, specific evidence. And if the statistical anomaly is strong enough by itself, I'd do a fireside chat that is amounts to a powerpoint presentation on "here is statistical evidence of fraud", and if it really is strong enough, then the MSM will either be forced to report on its strength, or their contortions trying to debunk it will be obvious to everyone, winning the public to your side. If the reason I am so sure is that I have video evidence of fraud, I would post that to the world as well with the same MSM reaction. Either way, now you have the public on your side (assuming the evidence really is that strong), so now, when you go to court, even if it isn't technically within the law, courts are to bend over backwards to find a legal interpretation to give the election to Trump if there is huge public pressure to do so (public pressure acquired from posting very strong public evidence). And if the courts still don't work, with enough public pressure, even Democrat politicians would be forced to admit there was fraud and they'd join the Republicans in not certifying Biden. I hope that makes sense since it's hard to be concrete without knowing why I am so certain.

What actually happened is that Trump followed a million different leads, but none really went anywhere. This is much more consistent with a person doing motivated reasoning. If Trump did have rock solid evidence, then that would be the evidence would be repeated everywhere from people defending Trump's actions. But it's not that way. It's a hodgepodge of different things more akin to a gish gallop.

When and why did political machines stop doing fraud? What changed?

I imagine the same way it happened with Tammany Hall in New York. It became increasingly obvious that Tammany Hall had the real power so anti-Tammany people grouped together and started winning elections. Eventually, these progressive anti-Tammany coalitions passed electoral reforms that stripped these groups of their power.

Except those reforms you are talking about haven't actually been implemented, or were reversed. And no one tests the systems for rigor. When they do the FBI prosecutes them not the people letting fraud happen. The FBI has not conducted a vote fraud sting in my lifetime.

If you live in a large city I encourage you to try this: Go to vote, and intentionally screw up your signature horrifically. Make it incomprehensible. See if they ask you for ID. The city in which I reside is currently 0/4. The one I went to college in was 0/2.

There’s unfortunately no real investigation and really nobody neutral to do it. And it’s unfortunate because without that, trusting the results just doesn’t work. We know now that it’s never going to be taken seriously, and it’s probably going to mean a lot more people decide that any results they don’t like is fraud. And this is kind of a Democratic own-goal. If there’s not fraud then investigation into the election proves it — anyone can look at the evidence and see what’s there and not there. As it stands, the response of “lol trust me bro” just makes future claims more likely whilst undermining the legitimacy of the government in power. 70% of Republicans don’t think the results are legitimate, and so there’s always going to be a shadow over the results of the election.

I agree, there 100% should have been a 2020 election commission with equal D's and R's to investigate any and all alleged voter fraud. It would've healed the country. Let the R's and D's call whoever the hell they want to testify, including the cranks, let it all out in the open.

There was an audit carried out in Arizona, by the Republicans' preferred auditors. It found a lot of sloppiness (some on the part of the election administration, some on the part of the auditors), but not the pattern of favouring one side or the other that you would see if this was fraud rather than incompetence. This didn't stop Kari Lake winning a Republican primary in which her key argument was that she recognised the fraud and other Republicans did not. And the Gateway Pundit photoshopped the auditor's report to say they had found fraud on a scale large enough to affect the result.

@The_Nybbler says further down the thread that he would not accept the result of such a commission. I don't think anyone who was plugged into the right-wing alt-media ecosystem would.

Only works if Trump gets to appoint some people. And what if they found there was in fact fraud? Then how does that heal the nation? Presumably Harris would need to resign, Biden appoint Trump as VP, and then Biden resign? But that would never happen.

Yep. All the "solutions" are predicated on the idea that nothing can be done about any fraud, therefore the thing to be done to preserve the integrity of the system is to discredit anyone claiming there was any fraud.

Only works if Trump gets to appoint some people.

Yeah, that sounds fine to me since that's what the people that thinks there was fraud would want.

And what if they found there was in fact fraud? Then how does that heal the nation? Presumably Harris would need to resign, Biden appoint Trump as VP, and then Biden resign?

Yeah, sounds find to me as well. And if they don't, just impeach. And if that doesn't happen, public outcry next election would elect enough people that would impeach and then appoint Trump. Yeah, it's unrealistic, but Dems have nothing to worry about if there wasn't fraud.

Such a commission would certainly be a whitewash, with all the Ds and all the never-Trumpers working to make sure nothing was exposed whether it was there or not.

Well, yeah, but I'm assuming an actually equal commission, not whatever the hell the J6 Committee was. An actually equally commission where the R's that believe in fraud get to call all the people they want to call and force them to testify. Where they get to question all the witnesses the D's and never Trumpers call.

It's meaningless. The majority puts out their report saying "nothing to see here", there's a minority report saying "TOTAL FRAUD!!!!11111", and nothing changes except the "nothing to see here" people have another authority backing up their claims.

Also the fraudsters have another authority to back up their claims.

If the reason I am so sure is that I have video evidence of fraud, I would post that to the world as well with the same MSM reaction.

I mean, there was a video of a precinct pulling out a box of ballots that had been covered by a table cloth after sending away all observers. A month later, a reporter reviewed the video footage and insists that the box was legitimate and that there is "no evidence of any wrongdoing."

I think even with the official story there is obvious wrong doing - particularly sending away all observers and then deciding to continue counting without waiting for the observers to return. But is that wrong doing significant enough to sway the election? Probably not this specific instance. But how many specific instances are needed before it might sway the election?

Of course, no one was so kind as to leave a genuine smoking gun, a video confession in the midst of the act. There were a great number of times poll workers violated local election rules, and these instances are as proven as it can be outside a court of law. But without being able to investigate these, it is impossible to know if these actually turned the election.

And if the statistical anomaly is strong enough by itself, I'd do a fireside chat that is amounts to a powerpoint presentation on "here is statistical evidence of fraud", and if it really is strong enough, then the MSM will either be forced to report on its strength, or their contortions trying to debunk it will be obvious to everyone, winning the public to your side.

Your assumption that the "public" would rally around any given evidence of fraud is laughable. This is a close election. Everyone either voted for the other guy or didn't vote at all. Everyone is either motivated against accepting evidence their guy actually lost, or politically disengaged.

I'm assuming you voted for Biden? Imagine if you saw a video of someone "cleaning up unclear ballots" to favor Biden. Instances where neither candidate was selected or both candidates were selected by accident, and every time the poll worker filled in the Biden bubble and erased the Trump bubble. Do you think that the average Biden voter, upon seeing this, would say, "That's F'd up! I'm going to share this with everyone I know and protest that Trump should be the rightful president?"

Of course not! They would justify it to themselves as just a lone wolf that couldn't affect much, or that "they voted for a Democrat for senator, of course they meant to vote Biden!" They certainly wouldn't amplify the video.

What about those who don't have a horse in the game? Well, they were too focused on whatever it is that people who don't vote focus on. Imagine not caring about politics. Crazy stuff.

Trump voters really were convinced by the videos and accounts going around, so much so that upwards of 70% of Republicans still believe the election was stolen. Having this group of the public on his side did pretty much nothing for Trump besides get him into even more trouble once they decided to try a riot for themselves.

I'm assuming you voted for Biden?

Starting with a response to this since it might shed some light on my posting motivations (if need be). I did not vote in 2016 (not old enough in '16) or 2020, nor do I plan to in 2024, mostly cause I live in New York state, among other reasons. However, if you dragged me in front of a voting booth, then I'm 99% certain I'd vote a straight R ticket in every election, including 2024. In fact, I'm probably the closest to voting than I've ever been mostly cause I really like Vance, even if Trump has soured on me. But, even without Vance, I'd probably still still vote a straight R ticket if you dragged me there.

Probably not this specific instance. But how many specific instances are needed before it might sway the election?

Did you read my comment about the CEO and worker stealing money? I think this applies here.

Your assumption that the "public" would rally around any given evidence of fraud is laughable.

I know the US is incredibly polarized, but if Trump presented smoking gun evidence of fraud, I sincerely believe it would break through that polarization. The reason it didn't break through was that the evidence wasn't strong enough. Sure, you could say the left wing MSM would just bury any good smoking gun evidence, but if they did, the public would see through it ala Epstein killing himself, or, if you take the Hanania view that media is biased but still fundamentally truth seeking like I do, then media would cover the story in a biased, but still truth presenting way.

RE: the worker stealing money analogy:

For me the analogy breaks down at the beginning. Republicans have always accused Democrats of fraud. Florida has a few counties that are notorious for it. Chicago is notorious for it. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

Let's say a CEO knows that employees sometimes waste time on their phones or talking about non-work topics, and that this cuts into their bottom line. Sometimes the company has bad quarters, and some grumbling is given to the employees getting paid to chatter. A few of the more egregious examples get written up but not much happens.

Then the company has a year where everyone works from home. There are many more reports of employees doing errands during normal business hours, more reports of overtime than usual, time card irregularities. The business has a horrible year and ends Q4 with a loss.

Is it reasonable for the boss to think he's being taken for a sucker?

It seems the disagreement ends up at disagreeing on our priors of how likely election fraud is, like with a lot of other people that have replied. My priors on fraud are way lower than yours, so I need way stronger evidence to overcome that. So, for your version of the hypo I would disagree with

There are many more reports of employees doing errands during normal business hours, more reports of overtime than usual, time card irregularities.

this part because it shows decently strong evidence (assuming the reports aren't spurious) for employees wasting more time than they usually do, thus explaining the bad year. Meanwhile, I don't see strong evidence for 2020 fraud that would explain Trump's bad year. I think it's not strong cause my prior on election fraud in the US is so low, but, if the same events occurred in a random third world country with a history of unstable democracy and fraud, the same evidence might actually push me over the edge and conclude that was fraud. (or maybe not. Depending how much I cared about this random 3rd world country, I still might not think there was fraud if the official explanation poked enough holes the fraud explanation). So, ultimately answering the hypo, yes it is reasonable for the boss to think he's being taken for a sucker, but the differences are sufficient enough that the hypo doesn't apply to 2020 Trump

If you click the Heritage link in my comment above it has documentation on over a thousand proven instances of recent (last 30 years) voter fraud in the US leading to over a thousand criminal convictions and overturning dozens of (generally local) elections. I think my priors are better supported than yours.

I will say I am familiar with that link, because I recently used that same link to disprove the supposed effectiveness of voter fraud. The person whom I had argued with had suggested that 200K fraudulent votes in the right locations would overturn the election. I took him at his word on that number, but argued that an organization whose goal is to find as much fraud as possible found less than 1% of that number over 30 years.

It also establishes that the government does have methods of detecting fraud, thus establishing that the fraud would have to either evade said methods or the audits themselves would also have to be fraudulent. This matters because the claim often pushed is that voter ID is necessary; which, even if we say elections are being stolen, if voter ID wouldn't catch it then what's the point of focusing on it? Trump repeatedly claims fraud in states that already have it.

I will say on a personal note that with regards to the whole, "if evidence existed the public would see past any attempts to bury it" idea, I'm not even sure. My personal view is that, similar to the Haitians eating cats story, I've generally become numb to claims of evidence. This is because quite frankly I've heard too many stories online that end up being bullshit with an unrelated or AI generated pictures that I figure someone with more time will sort them out. I don't even remember how many are the same ones I've already heard and have been debunked but still manage to circulate or get twisted by the repeated retellings. If you want to say I'm intellectually weak or biased, sure. I'm just telling you how humans work.

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I don't think I ever denied local fraud, but do any of those cases relate to national elections to congress? Or statewide elections for something like a governor? Were any of them significant enough to even have the chance to flip an election (aka not those voted in 2 states examples or single cases of a felon voting when they shouldn't. However, someone organizing hundreds or thousands of these cases would count) even if they actually didn't flip it? Have any of them been linked to the democrat or republican party or has it been for personal gain?

It might read like I'm moving the goalposts, but small scale fraud like this is consistent with "swiping a few dollars here and there" in my CEO hypo, so I've been consistent.

Being more clear now, my prior for local fraud in the middle of nowhere is way way higher than my prior for fraud for a statewide or national level election, so skimming that that fraud database doesn't really surprise me.

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put yourself in the shoes of a Trump who was absolutely positive that there was significant fraud in PA, GA and NV, but can't prove exactly how much. What is your best move?

Publish all the evidence that made you absolutely positive. This must not be done in "throw everything you have at the wall" Gish-Gallop style, though, because if the 5th item on your list of evidence is pretty convincing but the first 4 items turn out to be nonsense then you risk nobody bothering to read past the 2nd or 3rd.

Even if everybody agrees the evidence should have made you absolutely positive, this doesn't get you inaugurated in 2020, but it does guarantee you 2024, a stronger showing in the House and Senate from 2022 on, and mass support for election reform in your favor that could last for generations.

Publish all the evidence that made you absolutely positive.

If this evidence is less than absolute proof that more fraudulent votes were counted than the margin of your loss, your case is immediately dismissed and you are mocked/demonized for promulgating baseless claims of election fraud -- the other way at least there is some chance of having your day in court.

Who said anything about court? Your theory that judges are more likely to dismiss people who publish more evidence is an interesting one, but there is a reason why I said "publish", not "file". As I admitted, if the judges dismiss you then you still lose 2020, but if the voters don't then your team wins 2022 and 2024 and a lot of opportunities to prevent whatever fraud you detected from happening again. Maybe it takes time to go through evidence in the moment and make sure you're not hurting your credibility by putting credence in bad evidence too, but after three or four years have passed Vance shouldn't be dancing around when asked if Trump lost, he shouldn't be pointing to social media censorship (or whatever "big tech rigged the election" meant) as reasons why Trump morally won, he should be advertising "trumpwon2020.com" or whatever URL they picked to host all the evidence they have that Trump actually won.

if the voters don't

If...

Fair, but "at least there is some chance" applies here too. Wasn't that the point of Trump's "you won't have to vote anymore" speech a while back, that if you can convince enough voters to beat the "margin of fraud" then you can get into power to shrink that margin to 0?

Isn't it much better, then, to convince these voters by specifically explaining to them how the fraud is working and what needs to be done to stop it? If you have a plan that's more detailed than "just elect Trump" then even if you fail at the presidential level you can still get election reforms going at local levels.

Trump is a narcissistic dude, and is probably much more interested in being elected himself* than repairing the electoral system per se -- this absolutely is a character flaw, but it doesn't mean that he's faking the interest in fixing the fraud.

*I do think that he wants this because he truly believes he's able to improve America, which is an important distinction between most politicians who are guided by more of a lust for power

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that he was faking.

IMHO Trump's only clear advantage over most Republican candidates is that, despite his very loose relationship with honesty in general, he will occasionally turn on "I'm going to piss off everyone who disagrees with me" mode as a costly signal of sincerity. Kamala's trying to backpedal on her previous statements on things like policing and border security in very weasel-worded ways that are obviously intended to barely placate moderates while being easy to un-backpedal from later. Vance's "Trump would have won except for big tech" phrasing is a great way to say something technically true without either actually agreeing with Republicans who think it was vote fraud or openly disagreeing and pissing them off. But when Trump goes full on anti-illegal-immigration or 2020-was-fraud or whatever he doesn't use his charismatic-real-estate-negotiator language, he brings out scare-the-normies level language that he's clearly not going to back down from. He might be mistaken but he's not lying.

My point is just that relying on him alone to fix any problems is strictly inferior to relying on both him and on grassroots-level efforts too. Maybe some of the evidence that convinced him was spurious (the reason I'm not convinced is that I waded through enough of that) and he'll go after those red herrings and never get around to other real problems, so the only way to get real problems fixed is to publish the evidence. Maybe he won't get reelected because that's just not happening again, and fixing any vulnerabilities will have to be done by others, so the only way to point out what to fix is to publish the evidence. Maybe he would have been reelected if he made a strong case for voter fraud evidence, but he didn't, so there are people who would have voted for the anti-voter-fraud Trump but will vote against the weird-fake-electors-thing Trump. Maybe he will be reelected and will go after real problems but will be thwarted by federalism or another branch or the deep state or whatever and fixes will have to come in at the local level. There's just so many ways that Trump making a public case could make things better. It seems like the one big risk here for him is that putting everything out in the open might reveal that none of it is convincing, but that's also a situation where "good for Trump" vs "good for the country" diverge, and I'd be on the "good for the country" side in that case.

Actually you lead me to something I've thought for quite a while in the 2020 aftermath -- the way that courts require proof of fraud that turned the election directly led to the low quality of some of the Trump campaign's lawsuits. If you are expected to prove not only that there was fraud against you, but also that the fraud amounted to at least some specific number of votes, unless you have significant cooperation from the folks counting the ballots (hint: Trump did not) your only play is to throw everything you have at the wall and hope that enough votes are found to stick.

It is a bit a structural trap, yes. By requiring the standard of impact to raise to 'outcome determinative', it prohibits the sort of indicators that would normally be pursued to identify/recognize outcome-determinative fraud, while at the same time systemically encouraging weaker, and thus easier to dismiss, expansive-but-weaker claims whose dismissal can be used to justify claims of no fraud. Defenders can point to the dismissal of unfounded accusations as proof that there is no basis of accusation to warrant further examination, while ignoring that the scoping of acceptable arguments gerrymandered what would be investigated from the start.

In metaphorical terms, this is the equivalent of demanding proof that most of an iceberg is below the waterline, and then only reviewing reports from the people who then claim to have seen underneath the water from an impossible distance.

Yes, it was impossible for them to have seen the things they claimed. No, disproving their claim of having seen underneath the water does not actually disprove whether there was an iceberg. You've already filtered out the people who would only claim to have seen the tip of the iceberg. This procedural hurdle works because the requirements smuggled in a change of argument centered around the already-filtered observers, and from a position that starts from a presumption of negation (there is no reason to believe the existence of something not already observed), rather than precaution driven by the nature of the observed (the nature of floating ice is that the majority will be beneath the surface, regardless of whether the underwater mass is observed or not).

From a legal system built on a presumption of innocence, that approach may make sense. But the threat of an iceberg comes from the nature of the thing, not the characterization of the observer of the hard to observe bits. If you steer a ship on the principles of 'harmless until proven sufficiently harmful,' you are going to sink a lot of ships, and certainly more than if you didn't have such a high bar on sufficient proof of sufficient harm.

This is far from the only context where this sort of standard would be detrimental. There are plenty of contexts where the signature of something is far more detectable and demonstratable than the following force that effects. Dismissing the signatures because the signatures themselves are not sufficient force is just ignoring the signals.

You're assuming the conclusion. See marisuno's answer the last time american elections came up. As another non-american, I 100% agree with it; in my country there is also lots of grumbling about the obviously, hilariously biased way in which the right-wing is treated by state institutions & media, but almost nobody is alleging fraud. Why? Because we have at least basic voting protections.

I 100% agree that the there should be radically increased voter fraud protections, all paper ballots, require IDs, etc. I also 100% agree that perceptions of fairness are basically as important as actual fairness, so the voting system should be hardened to reflect that. However, that doesn't change the fact that, despite not having those protections, there hasn't been good evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in past US elections (at least in the modern era), and that no one before hand questioned the actual outcome of the election, even if there might have been a few gripes here and there.

An analogy: say you have an employee that manages the cash at a company. This position has existed for hundreds of years. Over the years, there have been cases of employees in that position swiping a few dollars here and there, but nothing major. A new CEO comes in and, after a bad quarter, says that the employee has been stealing money. He says they've stolen so much money that it is the reason the company is in the red this quarter. He might have evidence of small scale money stealing, but no good evidence of anything large scale. He wants to install a new system that tracks all the money to the dollar so that nothing goes missing. Every other CEO in the past, good quarter and bad, knew there was cash stealing here and there, but no CEO in the past blamed that minor cash stealing for a bad quarter.

My thoughts on this analogy:

  1. the CEO is right to want a system to track cash
  2. the CEO is wrong to say there was major stealing without strong evidence for it
  3. the CEO is right to say there was stealing, but should be careful to make it clear that it wasn't the reason the quarter was bad

I want to applaud you for choosing this example, since it perfectly encapsulates the democratic/insider framing. Variants of this dynamic are currently happening in several countries simultaneously, so it's critical to understand it in general.

Please imagine that, in your example, that what you wrote is the PoV of some employee. His outrage: Completely out of the blue, a new CEO claims what never has been claimed!

Now imagine another possible PoV: A shareholder. From his perspective the company has long enjoyed outstanding trust and had gotten a long leash for a long while. It has been allowed to do its thing and almost all higher positions, in particular every CEO, has been an insider who worked decades in the same company. But lately it has seemed increasingly fishy: There wasn't a distribution in a while, multiple employees have some minor scandals but they don't result in any actual consequences for them and even allegedly independent auditors turn out to be personal friends of the management.

This goes on for a while, each new CEO promising to change it around, but somehow everything seems to get worse at the same steady pace as before. It culminates in a truly new CEO being hired: The first outsider, obviously still some kind of elite, but he didn't work his way up on the inside like everybody else.

Now he starts working at the company, and literally every employer is openly hostile to him. There's multiple scandals, such as a department head secretly keeping a subdivision running that he was told to close and deliberately lying to the CEO about it, or his personal staff leaking infos outside, or the internal affairs dep publicly starting an investigation on spurious claims and then silently closing it when nothing turns up, the list is endless. He can't find out where the money is going and doesn't trust any report by anyone inside the company on the topic. Eventually, he concludes that he can't prove any malfeasance - not in the "currently not enough evidence" sense, but in the "fundamentally impossible without any trustworthy arbiters" sense. He loses his temper and alleges that the people managing the money have to do something that has to cause the current problems, and asks the shareholder to allow further, major restructuring to uncover what is happening.

Imagine also, if you need to, that this outsider CEO is crass, mean-spirited and impulsive, hell maybe even a bit incompetent.

As a shareholder, I wouldn't go "well technically you have no proof that there is malfeasance", I would go "holy fuck does this sound dysfunctional we need to restructure". Maybe I'd want to hire a different outsider CEO, but all things considered the current one is at least understandable and seems to actually work on my side for once, unlike the others.

I really really liked this reframing. This is probably the closest I've been to changing on my mind on this. I need to think about it more, but my initial thoughts are that Trump did have at least a few people that he picked and should've been on his side on the inside that also told him the claims of fraud weren't real. Yet, he always ignored them and followed the ones telling him there was fraud and he even repeated specific claims of fraud that his people on the inside debunked.

The counter to that counter is that those that didn't think there was fraud were just naive and trusted institutions too much. So, even though Trump picked them, they just ended up being unintentional mouth pieces of the institutions anyway. Anyway, I need to think about this more before I am sure this actually convinced me since this logic can apply to many other situations of institutional trust as well. To be clear, am I understanding this argument correctly where it doesn't actually matter if there was outcome-determinative fraud for the argument to work? Even the spurious reports now have gravity because you can't trust any of the debunking from those institutions, right?

doesn't actually matter if there was outcome-determinative fraud

I wouldn't say it doesn't matter, it's just you can't know but have good reasons to be suspicious.

I'll give you a similar example from my own life as a scientist. When I was still a student, I was told that women were preferentially hired as researchers only for the case of equal qualification and I mostly believed it. Then, as a scientific help, I started hearing third-hand talk about committees who would publicly claim this, but behind closed doors actually just decided beforehand they're going to hire a woman no matter what. As a PhD candidate, my (female) supervisor (frustratedly, since she was in favor of a man) flat-out told me that she has been part of such a committee, and that this is not even rare. Of course publicly she obviously would never admit this. Now as a researcher myself, I've been in on hiring decisions, and it's just obvious that you'd always take a woman if you can. You easily double your chances to get grants & publicity with her, you insulate yourself from claims of discrimination, it's just a complete no-brainer. A man needs to be MUCH more competent to make up for this.

But technically, I have no proof how wide-spread this is. Many people are still claiming that this would be some right-wing conspiracy theory, silly them, of course we only hire women for equal or higher qualifications, it says right here in the official regulations, and who would go against official regulations? If there is some public dispute of any particular hiring decision at some random university I will usually have no evidence whatsoever. But from personal experience I don't expect there to be evidence even conditional on the hiring decisions being biased. I also expect the hiring decision to be biased, also from experience, so even if I know literally nothing at all beyond that there is a controversy I'd say it was probably biased anyway.

However, that doesn't change the fact that, despite not having those protections, there hasn't been good evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in past US elections (at least in the modern era), and that no one before hand questioned the actual outcome of the election, even if there might have been a few gripes here and there.

Little known fact - Obama would not have become the Democratic Presidential Nominee had four people in his campaign not cheated in the primaries.

Were they in Obama's campaign? The story calls them "local officials", and details

Burkett confessed that “there were meetings at which several people explicitly agreed to forge these petitions” and that his job was to “forge petitions for candidate Barack Obama.” Furthermore, Board of Voter Registration worker Beverly Shelton “was assigned to forge petitions for candidate Hillary Clinton,” while former County Board of Voter Registration worker Dustin Blythe “was assigned to forge petitions for candidate John Edwards.”

It's pretty damning that the three of them got away with this (only the "ringleader" Butch Morgan was convicted), and it might have ended up being a turning point that led to Obama's election (though the "momentum" theory here is a little shaky), but it doesn't seem like it was a conspiracy to elect Obama so much as it was a conspiracy to avoid excruciating embarrassment. Imagine having to drop one or more candidates from the ballot because of a county where the campaign failed or forgot to get the 500 requisite signatures.

You are correct, I misremembered because there was an attempt at suing the Obama campaign but it didn't go anywhere (probably because they weren't as involved.)

I'm unsure if this would've played out as simply as you and the author of the link claim. I would guess that, clinton would have won nearly all of the delegates, Obama would've had a fairly big scandal, but he probably would have also survived and still been the nominee. Looking at the wikipedia page for the 2008 Dem Primary, Indiana looked to be one of the last primaries, so I wonder if Obama would've clinched anyway. I didn't do the math, but I'd suspect that even with a moderate drop in support, given there weren't many primaries left, Obama would still win. However, if the scandal really did blow up then super delegates might all switch to Clinton, so hard to say.

Regardless of all that, kudos for finding a good example.

If a system exists that is hard to audit, is that lack of evidence of malfeasance evidence that malfeasance does not exist?

I would suggest that if a party doesn’t want to fix obvious weak points it suggests there a reason why.

So I conclude based on Dems’ actions they cheated.

The fact Dems always fight voting security measures certainly increases my priors that fraud occurred by Dems, but definitely nowhere near enough to make it the more likely explanation.

  • Trump believed that there was enough fraud to effect the outcome of the election

  • He needed a venue in which to make the argument for this and present the case for why he thought this

  • If there existed conflicting electoral slates, the Vice President had the power to reject the certification, and allow a period of time for the congress to have a debate about the validity of any complaints. Such a debate has occurred in 1876, 1969, and 2005.

This seems pretty wonky, and the type of thing that nobody would usually ever care about or even know about if it weren't for cable news/twitter/hysterics.

To be clear I think that this was a completely reasonable thing to do. I think that our system of government is based on (and functions best) when it is competing forces pulling each other in tension.

I think that consensus arrises from conflict.

Every time that Trump is allowed to make his case publicly, so long as the case has no merit, it will lose supporters. Or, if it does have merit, it will gain them.

By not allowing Trump to make his case, and for trying to punish him for it with absurd conspiracy theorizing about "January 6th", it signals that Trump's opponents might fear that his case does have merit, and that by presenting the evidence for it, it will gain supporters.

Trump was clearly not trying to "overturn democracy" or "change the results of an election" or any other bullshit like that. Especially the idea that he was trying to "change the results" (he wasn't, he was trying to determine them) should disgust anybody who cares about American Democracy.

Daylight is the best disinfectant, etc.

This all seems to hinge on whether you believe Trump genuinely thought there was outcome-determinative fraud or not. If you did, then all of Trump's actions are just pushing the boundaries and gray areas of the law in pursuit of trying to right his perceived wrong. However, if you think that he actually knew there wasn't outcome-determinative fraud (with the best evidence of this being Trump's own advisers repeatedly telling him there wasn't along with repeated legal losses), yet pushed to overturn the election anyways, then the parade of horribles of "threat to democracy", "coup", "change the results", etc. would be fair to apply to him.

Also, repeating what I wrote in the other reply, if the best steel man involves Trump being so dumb or crazy to realize there wasn't fraud despite it being obvious to anyone else that would've been in his shoes, then it replaces the best reason to not vote for Trump with another really good reason to not vote for him.

This all seems to hinge on whether you believe Trump genuinely thought there was outcome-determinative fraud or not.

So you're telling me all of the outrage over "democracy being under threat" is caused by people not being able to believe that Trump could genuinely believe things he says? This whole thing is just the biggest case of typical mind fallacy and projection?!?

I swear to god this country is going to give me an aneurysm.

So you're telling me all of the outrage over "democracy being under threat" is caused by people not being able to believe that Trump could genuinely believe things he says?

Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.

I swear to god this country is going to give me an aneurysm.

Ditto. At least we can agree on that.

Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.

Not really. None of the issues in PA and WI happened in Florida. Florida is another state that used to have large Democrat machines that were routinely accused of fraud, but you could never quite prove it. Then Desantis came in, cleaned up the dirty voter rolls, streamlined the counting process, tightened up the vote by mail process (particularly post date rules and signature rules), got rid of insecure drop box, and then actually enforced all of that.

And magically no shenanigans. No more Miami-Dade reporting after the rest of the state had been done for hours. No more pallets of ballots magically being found at 3am. Etc etc. It turns out there is great evidence for fraud happening, because why you engage in active election security, all these suspicious activities disappear.

That’s not evidence of fraud happening. It could well be evidence that Florida cleaned up their act enough that irregularities from regular organizational incompetence no longer occur. But I suppose that depends a lot on your priors here.

That being said, I do strongly agree with enforcing electoral security the way that you say Florida has done. If the main point was a pre-emptive “Improve election security or else we’re not going to trust the results of this next election,” I would be on board with that. But instead, it sounds a lot more like a post-hoc “Nuh uh, we didn’t lose even though we have no hard evidence!”

Well, sure. My priors is we have known about machine fraud for centuries and nothing has changed so why would it stop?

Is there evidence of it happening repeatedly in American presidential elections to a large enough degree to have affected the results? If so, that would cause me to update my priors by a lot.

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No. Just because Bill Barr said “we found no evidence of fraud” doesn’t make it a fact there is no fraud. It was fucking weird how all swing states just happened to stop counting at the same time. It was fucking weird how Biden received a vote dump in the middle of the night. If this happened in a foreign country after years of the IC actively plotting against the executive, we’d presume shenanigans.

I do think Trump genuinely believed he was cheated and there was real reasons to believe it. Now I don’t think belief was enough without hard evidence but I do think it is really shitty how unwilling the system was to analyze in detail prior to J6 what the evidence actually was.

It was fucking weird how Biden received a vote dump in the middle of the night.

Nah. It was so non-weird you could see it coming months in advance. It's reasonable to wonder whether the protections on mail-in ballots were sufficient, or whether other election rules like "Wisconsin law requires that the results of those absentee votes be reported all at once" were a bad idea, but when absentee ballots are reported all at once, in large heavily blue cities in a year when a majority of blue voters went absentee and a supermajority of red voters didn't, it would only be weird if the large vote dump wasn't massively blue.

See my other comment. In short the innocent and fraudulent answer looks similar meaning there is an easy ability to do fraud. Especially when you know what the bogey is.

If you'd said "This fucking looks weird", I would have absolutely agreed. The rules for how ballots were counted in Wisconsin were a bad idea. Democracy derives less of its value from "the median voter is super smart and should be in charge of everything" than it does from "there are a lot of people similar to the median voter who ought to be able to trust they're not being screwed over", so predictably reducing voter trust, even if the new suspicion is unfounded, is a horribly anti-democratic mistake. The Democrats used to know this, e.g. back when opposition to voting machines was left-coded, and it's shameful that they're forgetting it when they no longer expect to be the ones who might need to be distrustful.

Weird that this effect only occurred in certain states though -- it's been a while since I dug in, but as I recall the breakdown for mail-in vs in-person ballots is available for most states. If I'm remembering right, Florida is an example of a battleground state in which:

a. the votes were counted in a prompt manner

and

b. the difference in Dem/Rep turnout for the two methods was not very large.

a. the votes were counted in a prompt manner

A lot of states didn't let mail-in ballots be processed until after election day polling closed. Reasonable if you don't want to risk preliminary count data leaking and influencing later voters, but not great if your priority is "prompt". Florida seems to have figured out how to thread the needle on that by allowing all the tricky work to be done ahead of time:

“They can determine the validity of ballots, confirm they should be counted and run them through machines,” Morley said. “They just can’t press the tally button.”

I'd still worry about possibilities of low-level fraud, since maintaining a proper chain of custody for weeks has to be a lot harder than doing so for hours, but it seems to have done wonders against possibilities of delays.

b. the difference in Dem/Rep turnout for the two methods was not very large.

No? The first data I found claims that early voting by mail was from voters registered 31% R to 45% D (24% minor or no affiliation), versus early in-person votes from voters registered 45% R to 32% D. That's not as large as the "how could you go out in public during a pandemic" vs "are you going to be a shut-in the rest of your life" bluster to pollsters before the election would have suggested, but it's still pretty large, and that's for the state as a whole; I wouldn't be surprised if the less moderate Democrats and more moderate Republicans were disproportionately in the larger cities.

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Trump being so dumb or crazy to realize there wasn't fraud

I'm trying not to get too heated here, but I have to object to this characterization.

In my IRL circles, it's pretty much a unanimous consensus that there was electoral fraud by the Democrats in 2020… because there's similar electoral fraud by Democrats in every election, since probably the late 19th century at least. "My grandpa voted Republican till the day he died… and he's been voting Democrat ever since" isn't just taken as an old joke, but as a broad description of reality. Nixon was the winner in 1960. 2020 was exceptional only in the scale and brazenness of the mass ballot manufacture. Indeed, some hold that, were it not for the need of Republicans to overcome this "margin of fraud," the "silent majority" of Christian conservatives would win every time.

For an example of such views online, one can spend some time reading posts on sci-fi author Sarah Hoyt's blog, and the comments, on the topic — most recent is here. Or just read many of the comments over at Instapundit.

And sure, you can just dismiss all these people — and thus much of "red tribe" America — as all "dumb or crazy." It's not like we're not used to being stereotyped as a bunch of backwards, gap-toothed, inbred morons. (I suppose the Halloween horror movie season has me reminded once again of how many times Hollywood has used "murderous/rapist hillbillies" as antagonists.)

I don't understand your point, are you saying we don't need evidence for fraud because you and your circle have been so sure of it for so long? Do you believe every losing Republican candidate prior to Trump should also have denied the election result? What would you think if dems acted the exact same way?

I don't understand your point

My point is that people who are neither "totally crazy" nor "totally stupid" can still believe that 2020 was stolen, contra OP's assertion otherwise.

The BOP is obviously on the people claiming fraud meaningfully ended.

Democracy only serves its purpose if you can convince the other half of the country that they lost fair and square. If they remain convinced you cheated, it's broken and will eventually spin out into civil war given enough time.

How rational, easy to prove or the character of the people who hold the doubt are all completely immaterial. All that matters is that they are in large enough numbers and capable of violence.

Democracy has to convince the losers, or it is defunct. That is how it is. And all complaints that this is unfair or insane are to lay at the feet of democracy as a concept, not at the those of the electorate. Since its entire claim to legitimacy rests on representation.

If half the people think the election is rigged, it is rigged in any practical sense. The ritual isn't powerful because the incantation was said in the exact right tone. It's powerful because people believe in it. And if they don't, it isn't; and you have to fix it or the magic won't work and peaceful transfers of power will stop.

I'm not sure it's a knock on democracy to say that it can break down and fail at times. We know that. Maybe this is one of those times. I don't know who is to blame? You can't blame someone who's convinced of something despite evidence -- they're idiots. You can't blame someone who's failed to convince an idiot. How could they? At a certain point it's all just atoms and very sad.

You can't blame someone who's failed to convince an idiot. How could they? At a certain point it's all just atoms and very sad.

Of course I can.

Why did that person see fit to extend the franchise to idiots?

At some point refusing to question the assumptions that lead to the end of the republic is dogmatism. Popular suffrage is not a suicide pact. And if this solution doesn't prevent civil wars, there are other ones available.

Hmm, I think the belief that democracy is the least worst system can survive the probability that there are a lot of idiots and it will sometimes fail. But that's a big discussion.

Democracy in America is already dead and dying then, because it seems to me there’s simply no practical way to convince one side of losers because they’ll nitpick any evidence to the contrary to death. Maybe this is to be expected, as a symptom of the larger decline of democracy across the world in recent years.

A couple of weeks ago in the weekly attempt to enforce consensus on the election issue there were plenty of practical ways. Thing is, they all involved actually taking things seriously, not having a prior of 0 on cheating, and not trying to paper over the problem to maintain the appearance of the integrity of the system. As long as your solution set is limited to "keep doing insecure elections, refuse to disallow obviously fishy things like ballot harvesting, and have no remedy when election laws are violated e.g. by ejecting observers or having the observers not be able to object", yes, you can't convince one side that things are on the up and up.

To that side, what you're asking is "how can we cheat outrageously and have the result be accepted by you?" and obviously the answer to that is "you can't".

Or, to quote @naraburns in that earlier thread, 'Because my answer to your question is "Well, it could stop rigging elections."'

Ok, if you truly need better election security to be convinced to accept the results, then make that a core part of your platform. Don’t focus on a whole bunch of other things with election integrity only a marginal footnote, and then afterwards come out with “Heads I win, tails the election was rigged because you can’t prove it wasn’t!”

If that’s truly your biggest concern with democracy, then make it an issue front and center and make the Democrats pay when they try to avoid it, just like how the Democrats have done that this election by focusing on Trump’s disregard for the electoral process. Instead, the revealed preferences of the MAGA constituency don’t appear to be anywhere close to emphasizing election security as one of their foremost issues.

That is also my appraisal of the situation.

For an example of such views online

Sure, those views are there. But where’s the actual proof from unbiased third party sources? Last time I participated in such a discussion on TheMotte, the answer was that it does not and cannot exist because there are no unbiased sources, which I suppose is a valid viewpoint to hold, but means that any further discussion is moot.

Trump said he thought there was fraud, and acted like he was genuine in this belief.

He has maintained this now for 4 years despite substantial incentive to change.

I think the steelman basically looks like "Trump was living in Trump-world where there is massive fraud, and in Trump-world his actions were justified because the alternative amounted to the end of democracy, so it wasn't unvirtuous for him to try it though it was correct for him to get slapped down".

The reason I have a hard time accepting this is that, in hindsight, an implied condition of my request for a steel man of Trump is that it would also not negatively effect the reasons to vote for him. It's kind of hard to say "Trump is either incredibly dumb or incredibly crazy" as a way to defend him while simultaneously saying he should be president (to be clear, I'm not saying you think that he should or shouldn't be president)

The best reason to not vote for Trump is all the 2020 election stuff, so that steel man is probably the best argument to defend Trump in his 2020 election scheme, but simultaneously adds a whole new best reason to not vote for him.

But why wouldn't there have been fraud in 2020? There is significant fraud every year and it was made even easier in 2020 in most of the swing states that went for Biden. OTOH, states like Florida which implemented election security measures saw a highjinx-free election where Democrats (now deprived of their Miami fraud machine) tanked.

There is significant fraud every year

This is the fundamental disagreement that I seem to be ending up at with nearly everyone that replied to me. If you believe significant fraud happens every year, then it happening again in 2020 doesn't need strong evidence. But, if you don't, like I don't, then you need much stronger evidence.

When did significant fraud stop and why?

It's kind of hard to say "Trump is either incredibly dumb or incredibly crazy"

Except the steelman doesn't say that; no matter how many times you assert it, "genuinely believes the election was stolen" does not equal "incredibly dumb or incredibly crazy."

I agree there's another option (given that no evidence of fraud exists): that he always believes what it benefits him to believe but this is actually not dumb but clever in his case because it advantages a political actor to be convinced of their righteousness. In other words his brain is built differently not for truth seeking but winning and that is a good trait in a politician who is on your side.

Personally, this is close my philosophy of Trump (minus the "this is a good trait" part). He has a different relation to the truth.

There's a certain type of boss where he tells his employee to do something. The employee says it's not possible. But he keep telling him to do it and he finds a way to say yes. There may or may not be steelman reasons he tried to say no. It may be possible but stupid. It may come with some major caveats. He might just come up with something that looks vaguely like what the boss asked for thinking it will shut him up. But to said boss, he doesn't care about the details. It's indistinguishable from the employee just not wanting to do it.

I think Trump's way of doing things is that he can get anything with the right amount of influence and schmoozing, and the details can be fudged. An example would be that in his NY fraud case, he argued:

  • That different forms of measurement can come up with different results, therefore it's subjective whether a property is 10,000 sq ft or 30,000.

  • When Trump bought Mar-a-Lago he agreed that the property was for a private social club, and this zoning could not be changed without approval. He listed it without any restrictions, on the basis that he thought he could renegotiate that if needed.

  • That things he own are worth significantly more simply by having his name attached.

I think he doesn't care about facts, he cares about people, because he can get people to do whatever he wants. So when he calls Raffensperger, it's not actually about whether there was fraud. He just has to convince him to find 11,000 votes. Whether those votes exist or not doesn't matter because there's always a way to accomplish something. Claiming fraud exists is no different than flattering your business partner. It's a thing you say that gets you a good result.

Yes, and it means people here claiming that he was acting in good faith when trying to dispute the election results, because he really believes there was fraud, are making a kind of category error. There is not really such thing as 'acting in good faith' for someone with a brain like his.

I asked someone else, but I'm curious your response to this too.

What would it take to convince you that Trump knew there was no outcome-determinative fraud? More generally, what would it take to convince you of any fraud? Say Alice gets a check in the mail signed by Bob. Alice calls Bob and asks about the check. Bob says he didn't sign it. Alice asks her check forgery friend to see if the check is real and they say it is fake. Alice goes to multiple different banks and they all say the check is fake. Alice then tries to cash the check. At what point would you say Alice knows the check is fake? Or do you say Alice still doesn't know the check is fake?

At a certain point, you need to either conclude that Alice is lying about not knowing the check is fake, Alice is incredibly dumb, Alice has some sort of amnesia, or that Alice is crazy in a way where she doesn't trust anything she hears.

Edit: I read your other reply to me after posting this, so I see that the example doesn't really apply since your priors of election fraud happening are much higher than mine. In order to make it actually apply to your world view, I'd have to add "Alice has a long history of receiving checks in the mail that everyone around says are fake, but are actually real", which would match your higher prior on election fraud being a common occurrence (and not match mine)

I mean, of the Trump-voters here, I'd say probably about 30-40% are also living in Trump-world (which totally explains their intentions to vote for him), and the rest are so shit-scared of Kamala Harris that they think Trump's still the lesser evil*.

(I'm not a Trump-voter or a Harris-voter, because I'm not American. I'm grudgingly hoping Harris wins, but my main concern is totally orthogonal to any "normal" politics concerns; I'm concerned about WWIII and Trump's advanced age, although I'd far prefer Vance to Harris as leader of the free world.)

*If I had to point to a single thing as "if it were anyone but Trump opposing her this would be a slam-dunk", I'd point to the Fair Game notice on Elon Musk in retaliation for his uncensoring of Twitter. This is an ongoing attempt to censor the press for direct partisan advantage by use of government force - the sort of thing that can easily spiral into one-party state via media control - and it happened under Biden who's known to be more moderate than Harris. Frankly, I'm deeply disturbed by the extent to which this hasn't been a massive scandal.

What’s the “Fair Game notice”?

The literal Fair Game notice was/is a Scientology term; L. Ron Hubbard would declare someone "fair game", and this meant "use any and all means to ruin this person" (frivolous lawsuits, slander, illegal spying and leaking to tabloids, framing for crimes...).

There seems to be something akin to a Fair Game notice (though presumably not with that exact name) in place against Elon Musk following his purchase of Twitter (and gutting of its censorship bureau); loads of different federal agencies have done things to screw over unrelated Musk businesses (the one I recall off the top of my head is the FCC retracting the rural-Internet grant to Starlink, on the basis that it hadn't met the target yet, despite the target not being due for another couple of years; there's a dissent from that order which lists a bunch of others, though I don't know all the details, as well as noting that Biden was fairly open about this). My understanding is that this is half of the reason Musk's star has been waning recently (the other half being that Twitter isn't his sort of business and it's distracting him).

As noted, due to Twitter being among other things a news service, this is in direct opposition to freedom of the press (as well as impartial justice). You can plausibly argue that this is significantly worse than Watergate due to the sheer scale of the corrupt operation (the Sedition Act was still worse, but that was 225 years ago). But, uh, this seems to have not been a huge scandal, which has disturbing implications about the USA.

Has Musk's star been waning? The Starship booster landing the other day was probably the technological achievement of my lifetime.

His nominal net worth was less in early 2024 than it was when he bought Twitter; it's somewhat more now, but it's still nothing compared to the ridiculous rate at which it grew before that.

His star has been waning, in that his image is under attack.

His achievements have been waxing, and this incongruence is part of the dirty political tricks we're complaining about.

I think one important distinguishing point you don't mention re:Hawaii is that Nixon, presiding over the session, sought and received (unanimous) consent from both houses of Congress to count the alternate slate of electors for Kennedy. The then-operative electoral count act had specific provisions for Congress to decide which sets of electors ought to be counted. Trump's plan relied on the Vice President having unilateral authority to decide which set of electors should be counted. It's obvious that Trump's plan is indefensible because ~0 people who supported that plan would support Vice President Harris doing something similar with respect to the 2024 election.

Thanks. I agree this an important point. To add on, even if Trump's plan was to simply have people object, debate, then reject the proper slate without using his slate, that would still be wrong since the only reason to reject the proper slate would be if they believed there was fraud. So, Trump pushing for this is him pushing that there was fraud or other irregularities so extreme that they shouldn't even get a slate of electors.

There was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election (in the event someone replies with evidence there was, you would also need to prove that Trump knew it at the time to justify his actions)

Trump clearly believed that the election was stolen, often even when everyone else in the room was telling him to give it up.

Trump still insisted even after he started losing court cases left and right about there being outcome-determinative fraud.

Those cases were all spurned on lack of standing. This is lazy argumenting.

Trump, despite knowing there wasn't outcome-determinative fraud (assuming 2), still tried to change the outcome of the election.

This is the rhetorical trick. The disputed 2020 election results are an "outcome," so disputing them becomes "changing the outcome". Neat. 🙄

Trump knowingly lied about there being outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election.

Election Night 2020 Florida wraps up results early, great results pour in for Trump, then half a dozen swing states stop counting ballots simultaneously before huge 6am Biden drops. For four years now I have been told that this doesn't count as evidence, for no particular reason. You could try to prove that the 2020 election was legitimate, if all the ballot chains of custody hadn't already been destroyed.

Trump used this lie to get slates of electors to falsely certify they were the chosen electors of that state.

Show me the text you want a steelman before you editorialize it.

Trump tried to convince various state legislatures that these were the lawfully chosen slate of electors

What do you think you're saying, exactly? Everybody knows, including Trump, that his alternate electors were not the officially certified electors. That's not the argument!

Kennedy's first slate of electors, the ones that weren't certified, weren't the ones eventually counted. Only the ones certified by the state were counted. Trump's false electors were never certified, so asking Pence to certify them was completely unprecedented.

What's the point of providing alternate electors if you don't attempt to get them counted as alternates? Note that this is completely precedented: The disputed election of 1876 faced a number of alternate elector slates.

The problem is the norm breaking, not the technical legality.

If the 2020 election were stolen, then the most important norm was already broken before Trump did anything.

Trump clearly believed that the election was stolen, often even when everyone else in the room was telling him to give it up.

What would it take to convince you that Trump knew there was no outcome-determinative fraud? More generally, what would it take to convince you of any fraud? Say Alice gets a check in the mail signed by Bob. Alice calls Bob and asks about the check. Bob says he didn't sign it. Alice asks her check forgery friend to see if the check is real and they say it is fake. Alice goes to multiple different banks and they all say the check is fake. Alice then tries to cash the check. At what point would you say Alice knows the check is fake? Or do you say Alice still doesn't know the check is fake?

Those cases were all spurned on lack of standing. This is lazy argumenting.

Not all of them. And even for those dismissed on standing, the Judges frequently talked about the merits anyway. If I had to guess, they probably did this just in case they got overruled on appeal as a way to speed up the legal process given how time sensitive this was. That way, if the standing portion got overruled, the appeals could keep the overall dismissal since they touched on the merits. Even if they all were dismissed on standing, there is still the problem of people that Trump himself picked repeatedly telling him there was no outcome-determinative fraud.

This is the rhetorical trick. The disputed 2020 election results are an "outcome," so disputing them becomes "changing the outcome". Neat. 🙄

I don't understand the critique/trick. I wasn't trying to make a grand statement here, just trying to say "he thought this thing and then acted on those thoughts". It would be the same as me saying "Alice knows the check is fake and decided to cash it anyway". It's more of a connecting statement to tie his thoughts to his actions and not anything else.

Election Night 2020 Florida wraps up results early, great results pour in for Trump, then half a dozen swing states stop counting ballots simultaneously before huge 6am Biden drops. For four years now I have been told that this doesn't count as evidence, for no particular reason. You could try to prove that the 2020 election was legitimate, if all the ballot chains of custody hadn't already been destroyed.

Of course it is evidence, it is just very weak evidence. Another theory consistent with this set of facts is that, in many states, mail in votes and early votes were not allowed to start being counted until election day, so, the surge in mail in and early voting from COVID meant that results would take a while to count. Combine that with the partisan split between election day voting and mail in/early voting and you get what we saw in 2020. If you followed any of the people closely covering the election, you'd know they all said this would happen months prior. Counterpoint that I've heard a lot so I'll preempt it: "that is just evidence they were preparing to rig it beforehand". My reply is that is certainly possible, but now you need to convince me that this plot is somehow so grand that random journalists are talking about it, yet so secretive that the best election fraud evidence is vague statistical maybe anomalies or super unclear video of something maybe wrong happening? That seems incredibly unlikely.

Show me the text you want a steelman before you editorialize it.

I worded that section poorly in hindsight. Basically, I listed a bunch of critiques of Trump, so the steel man I'm asking for would be the best argument against those critiques. The critiques are obviously framed against Trump cause they are Trump critiques, so the the argument against the Trump critiques can accept or deny the frame as it sees fit.

What do you think you're saying, exactly? Everybody knows, including Trump, that his alternate electors were not the officially certified electors. That's not the argument!

Well, those electors did sign pieces of paper saying they were the officially certified electors. And Trump and co. are all trying to say "use this slate, use this slate" which only makes sense if the slate was certified, otherwise see the next section.

What's the point of providing alternate electors if you don't attempt to get them counted as alternates? Note that this is completely precedented: The disputed election of 1876 faced a number of alternate elector slates.

Perhaps, assuming that Trump genuinely believed there was fraud, trying to get his slate certified by the state legislature was fine. But, since he didn't, he shouldn't have tried to have his slates be used. The election of 1876 is precisely the reason they created a law to say what happens when there are disputed slates of electors. However, what we have with Trump isn't a case of "which slate was properly certified?" (maybe we do assuming you agree with me above that Trump thought his slate was certified), it was a case "one slate was properly certified, this other slate wasn't, but Trump wants the other slate to be picked anyways".

If the 2020 election were stolen, then the most important norm was already broken before Trump did anything.

I agree with this. In fact, if it was stolen then not only would J6 be justified, much further violence would be justified.

Again take a 20,000 foot view. The IC had spent four years making shit up to try to undermine Trump and or help Biden. On election night Trump looks poised for a victory. Then in almost unprecedented fashion the counting stops and then lo and behold Biden wins after a giant ballot dump.

If you just had those facts and it was a third country you would say “that smells really bad.” You wouldn’t say “oh but the people in charge of the elections said it was good and sure they destroyed the evidence but we have no reason to believe they were wrong.”

On election night Trump looks poised for a victory.

In what way was Trump poised for victory? Most of the polls/predictions were pretty heavily in Biden's favour.

Around say 10 PM on election night

I am not pretending it wasn't at least a little suspicious the way the vote counts jumped as we all went to sleep that night (the blue line jumping over the red line me was funny). I'm just saying the innocent explanation of partisan difference in mail in votes is the far, far more likely explanation than widespread, outcome-determinative fraud. That is a high, high bar to clear and needs a lot of very strong evidence.

So, yes, in your third world country hypothetical I would probably say it was fishy and there's a good chance of outcome-determinative fraud. But, if I later learned there were innocent explanations of this that outweighed the probability of outcome-determinative fraud, I would believe those innocent explanations. A big difference with third world countries is that my priors for outcome-determinative fraud are way higher. If you tell me a random country in Africa had outcome-determinative fraud, I would probably believe you without even looking it up. And if I did, I'd probably just look at headlines or check if that country has a history of election fraud. However, if you told me the French or British or US elections had outcome-determinative fraud, I would need much stronger evidence since that is a much more surprising conclusion.

The problem is the fraudulent explanations and the innocence explanations look similar AND thr lack of security means it would be hard to tell the difference coupled with the obvious incentive.

Maybe there would be a red mirage or just maybe Biden got truly 60k of votes when he needed 75k and they added 15k. So the red mirage was in part true and in part false. They would look the same.

We judge it based on our priors. If we have two alternative explanations to explain the same set of facts, we choose the explanation that is more likely based on our prior belief. If it's wet outside, it could be that it rained, or it could be that a forest fighting helicopter dropped their bucket of water by mistake. Both explanations fit the facts, but the rain explanation is more likely cause our priors of rain occurring are much higher than a forest fighting helicopter dropped their bucket of water by mistake.

Yeah, but in that analogy the firefighting department predicted rain, said it'd look as if one of their helicopters dropped its bucket but it'll be rain. 5 minutes before it was wet outside, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and completely cloudless. All weather stations in the areas in question stopped reporting the weather at the same time, then deleted the records of the raw instrument data as fast as they could after the event, so any and all subsequent attempts to reconstruct the weather are done with already processed and edited data, and there's even a video of firefighting helicopters flying erratically over Atlanta.

Now none of this is actual proof, but I would not blame anyone for believing shenanigans happened.

This seems to be boiling down a disagreement on our priors on election fraud likelihood, like with many other people replying. I do not agree with that analogy of what it was like before the election. Adjusting the analogy, I would say it would be like the weather man saying "Firefighting helicopters are continuing to fly over area A to get to the forest fire, but lucky for us in area B, we won't have to deal with them flying over us (analogous to there being fraud, but not significant fraud). Expect scattered sun showers (analogous to setting expectations for the 'red mirage') and low visibility from all the ash in the air (analogous to the info environment making it hard to tell what it true or not in the moment and afterwards).

then deleted the records of the raw instrument data as fast as they could after the event

responding to this specifically since I see it brought up a lot. I can't interpret this fact without also knowing how normal it is to do such a thing. Is it a normal practice? What is the reason for not storing it? Maybe there's a good reason, maybe not. Maybe it's best practice and storing data has been tried but they changed it for a good reason. Who knows. Without context, I can't really interact with that info. It's like if you told me "Bob doesn't save his receipts when he goes the grocery store! Something fishy is happening", then we obviously know that it is no big deal. But, the only reason we know that is that we have the context of it being extremely common for people to not save their receipts, so Bob not saving them as well isn't notable.

There is a very obvious innocent explanation of the "ballot dump", which was trailed by both sides before the election - as in the Trump campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden because they are stealing the election", and the Biden campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden and Trump will wrongly claim that it is evidence of fraud." The root cause is that (unusually) there was a large partisan gap between postal and in person votes, because fear of COVID-19 was a partisan issue.

In states which can't open postal votes early (which includes all the key swing states in 2020), in-person votes are counted faster than postal votes, because the envelope opening, signature verification etc. all take time and have to be done before you can count the ballots. [In states which do open postal votes early, the postal votes are counted faster than in-person votes because after opening but not counting them they are neatly stacked, all right-way-up etc. As a result Texas and Florida both looked competitive in the early stage of the count until the in-person votes started coming in].

In states where in-person votes are counted at precinct level and postal votes are counted at county level (which is most states, but I don't have a list handy), the in-person votes dripple in over the course of hours, whereas the postal votes come in in big lumps - especially when a big metropolitan county like Fulton or Wayne posts a batch of postal votes.

Everyone who was paying attention, including Trump, knew that there would be a late break to Biden in key swing states for these innocent reasons. Trump "knew" (in the legally and morally relevant sense) that the "ballot dump" was not evidence of fraud, even if his supporters didn't.

He also "knew" that the Dominion voting machines lie was false - the version of the story he was running with involved claims about the ownership of Dominion which were contradicted by the public record. (Smartmatic had Venezuelan connections, Dominion didn't).

I don't think that Trump "knew" that the gish gallop of hinkiness that the right-wing internet started putting together within hours of the close of polls would not find enough dodgy ballots to throw the election into question because I don't think anyone knew that at the time. But he did know that it was a gish gallop - that if he wanted to get it adjudicated in the time available (based on his behaviour, I don't think he did) he would need to be clear and focussed about what he was alleging (he wasn't). When Trump tries to take his best evidence of fraud to a sympathetic audience, you get something like that Trump-Raffensperger phonecall. Trump's people are trying as hard as they can to make specific allegations of fraud which Raffensperger can admit or refute (Trump himself is not helping), Raffensperger's people are saying "We already investigated that - there is an innocent explanation that we can show you offline." and Trump is saying "Oh no you didn't."

That isn't what a co-operative fact-finding process looks like, or even an adverserial one conducted in good faith. I have worked for unethical bosses (Fortunately, not for much longer than the duration of a contractual notice period), and Trump's end of that call sounds like a boss trying to get a subordinate who is slow on the update to falsify documents. "NASA needs to know that the O-ring is clean." "But I checked, and it's burnt half-way through." "Who do you believe, the boss or your lying eyes." "Excuse me?" "I need you to be a team player." etc.

The root cause is that (unusually) there was a large partisan gap between postal and in person votes, because fear of COVID-19 was a partisan issue.

Also situations like a homeless-support NGO that apparently provides mailing services for every single homeless person in Philly, and there's some (conspiracy thinking)(honest questioning)(take your pick) about ballots from sources like that.

Here is where this explanation breaks down. They stopped counting (no one could really say why). Then very early in the morning the next day there is massive vote dump. So either they stopped counting when they were 95% of the way there (which doesn’t make sense) or for some reason they refused to release the already known vote total.

Of course there are innocent explanations but the behavior was quite odd. Also the Dem discussion on red mirage can equally be explained as the Dems planned on potentially gaming the vote so they told everyone about the red mirage so that when they cheated they could say “we told you about the red mirage.” Just like the IC prebunked the true Hunter Biden story.

You can come up with any number of scenarios that are theoretically plausible, but they're all just conjecture, not evidence. Suppose I have an argument with Smith on Tuesday night. The next morning, I get up to go to work and my car won't start. I sue Smith alleging that he broke into my garage when I was asleep and damaged my car so it wouldn't start. I don't produce any evidence of a break-in. I don't produce any evidence that Smith was anywhere near my house in the relevant time frame. I don't produce any evidence that the vehicle's failure to start was the result of tampering. I don't specify what is preventing the car from starting (battery, fuel system, electrical system, starter, etc.) How seriously should my allegations be taken? I've outlined a plausible scenario, but I haven't provided any but the most general details and I haven't provided any evidence. This is the level the Trump fraud allegations were operating on. Actually, this is above that level, because here there's at least an identifiable person I'm making allegations against. The Trump situation is closer to me getting into an argument with an unidentified Home Depot employee and alleging that someone who works for the company must have done it.

Also the Dem discussion on red mirage can equally be explained as the Dems planned on potentially gaming the vote so they told everyone about the red mirage so that when they cheated they could say “we told you about the red mirage.”

Except this makes little sense. If this were planned months in advance, one would think they wouldn't need to stop counting. Fake ballots could have been ready to go from the outset, not manufactured over the course of a week following the election.

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