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Notes -
"We don't know if bigfoot exists because my cryptozoologist uncle has been in prison for the last 30 years."
"Aren't there other people that can look for bigfoot? Maybe park rangers or something?"
"My uncle really is in prison. He can't look for bigfoot from behind bars."
"Ok fine but you haven't explained why your uncle is pivotal in the hunt for bigfoot! What stopped other people from looking for bigfoot? Assuming he exists of course."
"By now I've clearly established that my uncle has not been in a position to conduct any scouting trips for bigfoot, none of which you've even tried to dispute. Good day sir!"
Your problem was both that I was supposedly saying the RNC was helpless and not accounting for other interested parties. You said exactly that in your last reply. Now you’re acting as if you never said anything about the RNC and it was always exclusively about the third parties. That’s dishonest.
Nah, I did talk about the cryptozoologist uncle but I think he's being used by you in this argument as a distraction. @atelier claims we can't know if bigfoot exists because the uncle hasn't been allowed to work. That assumes the uncle is somehow foundational to the mission of finding bigfoot. If you reject the assumption (I do) then talking about the uncle is irrelevant. But if you do accept the assumption (do you?) the obvious follow-up is how did the world end up relying on just one man to find bigfoot? Why aren't the park rangers doing their job?
Gee, what could possibly be the relevant disanalogies between a random cryptozoologist, Bigfoot, and park rangers vs. the RNC, election fraud, and law enforcement? (Here’s a start: we definitely know election fraud exists.)
Sure, let's assume bigfoot definitely exists. Justifying away the lack of photos of bigfoot by citing the cryptozoologist' prison time (as atelier did) doesn't begin to explain why he would be the only person capable of supplying them. It remains a distraction tactic.
It does not, because there are a host of other disanalogies here which you apparently refuse to even countenance, as evidenced by your insistence on this incredibly unfitting metaphor. Are you really going to make me write up the whole list of them by your stubbornness on this point, or can you see for yourself what the problems might be? Well, I can guess what your answer will be, so I suppose I'll do it anyway.
The Republican Party is frequently the only entity legally allowed to send its own poll-watchers besides Democrats or other established political parties. In a two-party system, therefore, the absence of RNC poll-watchers and challengers is functionally equivalent to only one party getting to meaningfully observe. Presumably anyone can go and look for Bigfoot in national parks and the like. Not just anyone can work the polls.
Discovering Bigfoot is a matter of roughly equal independent interest for most anyone, and no one obviously stands to gain by concealing his existence. By contrast, the RNC has a special interest in preventing election fraud, and whoever is committing election fraud obviously stands to lose by its discovery.
A random cryptozoologist serves no national coordinating function among American Bigfoot-hunters generally. But the RNC is the only organization on the GOP side which plausibly has the reach and capacity to coordinate nationwide poll-watching for Republicans.
Law enforcement doesn't stake out polling precincts, they only go after voter fraud if someone brings them evidence proactively or they happen to discover it incidentally. There are usually no dedicated law enforcement units for election crimes, with limited exceptions in red states like Florida. Law enforcement has no direct fiduciary interest in preventing election fraud, unlike the RNC. In this they are like park rangers, for whom "Bigfoot detection" is no part of their job description. Moreover, given the partisan valence of voter fraud accusations, political considerations can easily deter local law enforcement from going after voter fraud in e.g. deep blue areas. But the RNC, as a private and openly partisan entity, is subject to no such constraints.
I hope that you will now cease flogging this broken-down horse.
Very helpful! I'm not sure why it took this much time and effort, and this far down thread to get you to answer a basic question about your argument. Having done so, the assumptions you are relying upon are much clearer:
RNC uniquely cares about preventing election fraud, more so than or the exclusion of other parties
The consent decree prohibited the RNC from sending poll watchers
The inability for the RNC to send poll-watchers hamstrung efforts to uncover voter fraud
RNC is the only organization that can plausibly coordinate poll-watchers for Republicans
Law enforcement does not really care about investigating voter fraud unless someone brings them evidence
Law enforcement avoids investigating voter fraud because of politics
#1 is just...what? Simply asserting that only/primarily the RNC cares about voter fraud does not make it so. #2 is false, the consent decree did not prohibit sending poll watchers. #3 is arguably false, but either way relies on the previous premises both being true. Even assuming #1 and #2 are true, it's not obvious how exactly the lack of poll watchers would handicap voter fraud investigations, as the judge in the consent decree discussed (see starting on pg 44 of the 2009 opinion). #4 is debatably true, but also requires #1, #2, and #3 to all being true. #5 is plausibly true (I know cops are lazy) but again relies on #1-#4 for this to matter. #6 is a bizarre claim to make about prosecutors, a group that is explicitly political and leans conservative.
Either way, I really appreciate the transparency. This was a markedly less frustrating comment to respond to because you took the time to lay out your assumptions clearly.
#1 seems clearly true on the intended interpretation, namely that the RNC uniquely cares about preventing election fraud against the RNC.
I don't understand, if #2 isn't true then why does the DNC seem to think it is? Per Politico: "To extend the decree, the DNC needed to show that the RNC violated the terms of the pact. Democrats pointed to a series of incidents during the 2016 election in which they alleged people who claimed or appeared to be working for the RNC were engaged in poll watching."
On #3, the idea is that poll watchers serve to deter and potentially spot shenanigans as they happen, but either way I don't see how having partisan observers all over the place wouldn't greatly increase the odds of catching someone out compared to not doing so.
#6 also seems true, since as you say, most prosecutors are elected and prosecutors elected in blue states or counties are not going to generally be incentivized to investigate voter fraud against their opponents' political party.
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