This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.
Ditto. At least we can agree on that.
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.
Of course, IL in 1960 was a battle of voter fraud wherein the DNC machine in Cook outworked the RNC machine in southern IL.
Most states now acknowledge the existence of ancient (aka 60 year old) voter fraud machines that would routinely manufacture 100k or so votes (see IL in 1982, the sole one contemporaneously caught). But no one has any explanation as to why this magically stopped when procedures in those areas remain the same. Few of the grand jury recommendations from the 1982 case are currently in effect in Illinois, for example.
Almost all of those recommendations are fully opposed by a major American political party for reasons that seem obvious to the curious.
That’s exactly the point. Trump’s defeat likely didn’t involve “above average” amounts of voter fraud, merely the moderate level that has been ongoing for at least a century in this form and in various other forms since the founding of the republic, under both major parties.
More options
Context Copy link
What was the 1982 case? I don’t see anything that pops up for Illinois in 1982.
And why would a seemingly isolated case be evidence of consistent fraud throughout the decades? It seems unlikely for widespread electoral fraud to be uncaught for so long; someone else in the discussion even mentioned how faked petition signatures for Obama were caught
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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 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:
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.
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.
I may not have been thinking of Florida, and was definitely thinking of actual vote tallies rather than "registered as" -- but regardless, 45-32 is nothing like the 90%+ D in the late-nite Biden drops seen in other places.
Isn't "other places" apples-to-oranges, though? The city of Milwaukee was at 19.3% for Trump in 2016. If the mail-in voting included around 40% of those voters plus 60% of anti-Trump voters just like in Florida as a whole, you'd expect 14% for Trump among mail-in ballots. They saw 14% for Trump in the big "drop" of mail-in ballots, part of 19.6% for Trump on the whole. The math here really does check out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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?
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.
More options
Context Copy link
The BOP is obviously on the people claiming fraud meaningfully ended.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That is also my appraisal of the situation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link