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Did it meaningfully alter the outcome? Was it foul play?
For example, I can’t take seriously the whining over mailed ballots because I live in a red state that has long had them. I know there are other cases where “hey that’s not fair” was only brought up about some uncontroversial procedural change when it was judged to have perhaps disadvantaged Trump.
Does any of it remotely compare to the blatant, documented attempts by Trump and co to alter or evade the election outcome?
Expansion of mail-in ballots made it possible to generate mass quantities of votes with no verifiable chain of custody. This makes it trivial for political machines to generate votes. This is a very simple argument. It sounds like you don't understand the position you are trying to mock.
Anyways, many of these rules were changed last-minute exactly in anticipation of marshalling results against Trump. Instead of denying things that happened, try denying that they mattered.
If the election was stolen, everything Trump did was restoring the right outcome. Your frame presupposes that the election had a neutral "outcome" beyond dispute, when that's exactly what's under dispute.
I do understand the position I am mocking and I live in a red state that has long had mass mailing.
Doing fraud at scale leaves evidence. Where’s your evidence, not just the potential for fraud?
Actually, even if the election was stolen Trump’s actions were still blatantly illegal. Going through the courts is the proper approach, not calling up election officials to pressure them, or creating extralegal electors, or pressing your VP to use made up powers to simply deny the election result.
Show me the chains of custody for the ballots. Prove to me that these ballots were all cast by real live American voters, and not gathered up by a machine city postal worker spinning up a box of votes. This can be done in other countries. So why are so many of the chains of custody destroyed here?
The entire federal government runs on made-up powers. What do you think the Necessary and Proper Clause does.
The constitution does not provide the VP the power to deny election results.
The fact you can’t agree on that when Pence could (god bless him) doesn’t bode well for your ability to evaluate something more nuanced like say election integrity and reasonable standards of evidence.
Your avoidance of presenting evidence, instead of theories about what could have happened or dissatisfaction with how the election was run, remains telling.
If you think he's arguing in bad faith, report rather than responding. Either he's arguing in bad faith, and you calling him out won't tell him anything he doesn't already know, or he's not, and you falsely accusing him will incense him for no reason.
Ehh I’m not sure I’d call it “bad faith” but you’re not wrong that it’s not the most productive conversation.
The path we’ve gone down about the VP election theory is frankly cracking me up.
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You are very hung up on this. It sounds like you want to defer all debate to some omnipotent authority so you don't have to defend your interpretation. "Deny election results"? Those "results" are exactly what is under dispute! To me, your argument parses as follows: "It's illegal to dispute the election after it is stolen." Oh, ok!
Likewise, you could ask for evidence, but I guess it's easier for you to smugly imply that I have one. The fact that chains of custody no longer exist doesn't bother you at all? Vote counts stopping across several swing states? Nothing is ever evidence I guess: you've declared a priori that you are neutrally describing the "result," and I am advancing "theories".
The legal theory that the constitution empowers the VP to unilaterally determine election outcomes is an utterly ridiculous one and Trump’s own VP refused to go along with it.
The VP’s constitutionally defined role in the election process is a distinct issue from whether there was significant fraud in the 2020 election.
This week’s thread is full of requests for evidence by me and others that the 2020 election was stolen, rigged, or otherwise plagued with widespread fraud.
None has been provided; mostly there is whining over the request and lawyerly approach by everyone’s favorite public defender.
You are welcome to step up and make the case.
Nobody proposed this theory. This does not resemble what was debated in 2020 in the slightest.
You have decided a priori that what I have brought up re: mail-in ballots and urban machines isn't worth discussing: why should I provide more evidence when it will be equally dismissed as no evidence.
Trump claimed Pence could unilaterally decide to decertify the entire election.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/01/fact-check-trump-falsely-claims-pence-had-right-overturn-election/9284564002/
I decided nothing a priori about presented evidence.
Looking back on this thread, I’m not seeing where you presented evidence of specific cases of voter fraud or the like; I’m seeing you describe how it might have happened.
Those are not the same thing and the particular demand is for concrete evidence; we have an oversupply of theories here.
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Can you provide evidence that it did not?
Can you prove there isn’t a teacup orbiting the other side of the moon?
I mean, if it were orbiting the moon, it couldn't constantly stay on "the other side", because orbits are around a body's centre. And while the L2 point is a thing, L2 orbits are unstable (the Earth-Moon especially so, IIRC) so after a while it'd become visible.
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Again, this is where the nature of the contested environment comes up.
As I said above "purpose of an election is not to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and their voters) can accept as legitimate."
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
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Let's grant that for the moment . Doesn't it then follow that the candidates must ALSO have to convince enough people their objections are legitimate?
Where a candidate demanded that they would only accept the election as legitimate if every single ballot of 200 million or so was tracked from source to counting, then no election is ever going to satisfy them because it is just not feasible for zero errors or mistakes to be made at that scale while keeping to the idea of a secret ballot. Similarly, a candidate demanding his opponent accept the legitimacy of the election when only 5 votes were cast all of which happened to be in said candidates handwriting is asking too much.
In other words, just as the election has to be seen to be legitimate, the objections to said legitimacy must themselves have to be seen as legitimate (as in must be convincing). If you cannot convince enough of the electorate that your objections are legitimate then by exactly the same logic you are using, the objections themselves have no force. If no-one believes the election was stolen, then it was not stolen for these purposes.
Given that around 70% of people do not think the election was stolen, and they are the majority, then wouldn't that suggest the objections themselves have been found wanting in the very court of legitimacy you are talking about?
No, it doesn't follow because this is a contested environment and as such there's no "presumption of legitimacy" much less a "court of legitimacy".
But the contested environment includes whether people believe the claims of illegitimacy. There may be no presumption of legitimacy but there can also logically be no presumption of illegitimacy.
If a person who has no information is at state 0 and 1 is legitimate and -1 is illegitimate, then the only thing that matters (in your model at least) is convincing enough people to move towards 1 and away from -1.
People (who have no exposure to attempts to sway them one way or the other) don't start with thinking the election is illegitimate or legitimate , they start by not having an opinion EITHER way.
No presumption of legitimacy, no presumption of illegitimacy.
No, because again this is a contested environment and legitimacy is a product of agreement. You're not starting from zero, you're starting from negative one because in the absence of information there is no agreement, and no agreement means no legitimacy.
But no agreement is not the same as no legitimacy! Because this is fundamentally not a symmetrical world. People have to actually disagree and act as if they disagree, because inaction IS implicit acceptance of legitimacy when there is already an existing governmental system. And most people, I submit, will not (and I think this is born out by history) act as if an election is illegitimate just because they have no information either way. Hell even when it is clearly illegitimate most people simply will not act. Government legitimacy is a product of your actions not your beliefs. And most people do not act on things where they have no information (or think they have information).
In other words, it requires actual disagreement, with actual actions taken off the back of it, to render something illegitimate practically. Not simply not agreeing. So I think you are incorrect on where most people actually start from. Bob is not going to go out and start a revolution because he doesn't have information one way or the other. He may not think it is definitely legitimate, but he isn't going to go and take up arms based on that. And if Bob doesn't then the election is de facto legitimate. The courts and the agencies and other world governments will keep on treating the winner as the winner, until and unless enough Bob's actually do something about it.
Bob can internally think the election is illegitimate as much as he wants, but until he actually does something about it, it is irrelevant (and as you pointed out, it is only the contested nature that is important) if Bob is unwilling to actively contest it, then no matter the reason, it is no longer contested.
The election is legitimate until enough someone's do something about it. And they are extremely unlikely to do that if they don't have actual information (or believe they have actual information) showing it is illegitimate. It doesn't even have to be violence, it could be mass civil disobedience. Many millions of American's refusing to pay taxes and daring the illegitimate government to do something to all of them or something else.
Logically by your own definition, Biden's election WAS legitimate enough. Because he remains President. He convinced enough people to act as if he was. In a contested environment it doesn't matter what people believe or say, it matters what they actually DO. It doesn't matter whether the results were accurate, or truthful, only that enough people act as if they were. And that is exactly how people are acting. My MAGA neighbors are complaining about it sure, but they are still filing their taxes, and going to work, and buying their groceries and going about their day, exactly as they would if they thought Biden was legitimate. And therefore Biden is legitimate.
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Endlessly repeating "contested environment" does not negate the fact that the steal crowd is making claims about factual matters which can be evaluated on a factual basis given the evidence available to us.
If they don't care about facts, and want to "take their ball and go home", and force us from a real existing condition where the guy with the most votes wins to one where we have to renegotiate our electoral processes from the ground up, that just means they've been prosecuting aforementioned claims in bad faith-- and their bad fath claims should be responded to appropriately--
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