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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27235 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Neither is sitting home on the couch bitching -- what makes this a coup attempt and not that?

The part where they attempted to prevent the democratically elected President-elect from assuming power.

  • -11

So the faithless electors in 2016 were also doing a coup?

That's a messy one. I say no in the form that actually occurred, but it wouldn't take a huge amount of change in the situation to turn it into a yes.

Say for example states had faithless elector laws in place that fined faithless electors but did not disqualify their votes, and enough of them decided to just cop the fine instead of putting the election winner in power, I think that would qualify as a coup.

I'm pretty sure at least some of the 2016 people caught a fine over it (WA maybe) -- anyways there was a massive public PR blitz trying to convince electors to flip, so were those people guilty of conspiracy to insurrect?

Again, not quite but getting pretty close. Conspiracy requires agreement, that's tricky to have with just 1-way communication.

They had, like a webpage and stuff, I can assure you that multiple people agreed this was a good idea -- if they failed to convince enough electors, this just means it was "not a good coup attempt", no?

You'd need to show agreement between the agitators and the actors in order to tarnish the agitators with the crimes of the actors, is my point. Usually it's not a crime to say someone else should do something illegal if there's no provable connection between your speech and their action.

However if you have for example a conversation where someone says to a Trump elector "I think we can get enough defectors to keep Trump out of office, you vote against him and I'll work on convincing others to do the same" and the elector says "ok", that I think could be successfully prosecuted under the same "conspiracy to deny people's rights to have their votes counted" charge that has been levied against Trump.

Aren't Trump and a bunch of people currently charged with a similar sort of (failed) conspiracy involving a attempt to get Georgia election officials to do stuff that they never did? Anyways, the electors who did vote faithlessly would seem to be participants in the (ineffective) 2016 conspiracy?

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