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I’ll back @ymeskhout here and say that there’s a pretty significant amount of motte-and-baileying going on, where people retreat to ‘obviously the Deep State didn’t literally hack voting machines and the people who claim to have evidence of large-scale ballot stuffing are grifters, but there was still a widespread effort across the country to swing it for Biden using unsavoury methods’. And then the minute pressure is relaxed, people go back to ‘the deep state literally stole the election’.
So I understand why he’s being a hardass and saying, ‘can any of you provide any evidence at all that the election was literally, actually stolen’. And he gets crickets, or attempts at sanewashing.
I do actually believe that the combination of censorship, changed voting rules, and keeping Biden in a basement so his senility wouldn’t show add up to ‘an election that should shame a first-world country’. But the American Right has an amazing ability to take valid, compelling critiques and convert them into obviously wrong factual claims.
When it comes to "hacked voting machines", I remember that being the explanation for how Trump beat Hillary coming from the liberal/left side. My go-to example of that is the otherwise reasonable and sensible Jane on the old SSC who provided accounts of how the Russians had hacked the machines and stolen votes and meddled in all kinds of elections to give Trump the victory.
What's that saying again, 'what goes around, comes around'? If you've been going on for years about how obviously voting machines are insecure because the operators/owners of the software are all Republican donors, then you can't expect to swing round now and go "no, this election was 100% secure" when it's the other side making the complaint.
Obligatory disclaimer: I don't think there was voting machine hacking by Russians or Republicans or Venezuelans or Democrats (even though the attempt to introduce electronic voting in my country in 2002 faltered and ended up a total fiasco), but what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If, when your candidate lost, you had 'reputable' sources going on about 'this is how the machines could have been hacked', you don't get to call it conspiracy theory when the other side do it when their candidate lost.
It’s actually permissible to consistently criticize unjustified claims of election interference no matter what side they come from.
Whackadoodles on the left should be criticized too, but there’s nothing quite like the “MAGA election was stolen” brigade on the left, probably in no small part because Trump is a special kind of politician.
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I'll say three things about this:
I have professional familiarity with voting machine security, enough to know that most people would be horrified to realize how insecure they are.
If I were Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, I would fire my intelligence chiefs if they weren't trying to influence American elections to our advantage.
It stands to reason, therefore, that any sufficiently motivated and financed group could be (and has probably at least considered) trying to hack elections.
That doesn't mean it's actually happening, of course, but the concerns are not crazy moonbat conspiracy theories.
I think we'd have to be concerned with the likely motives of such actors.
I think Russia and China etc don't have much reason to care whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge - the outcomes on things they actually care about are probably within a standard deviation of outcomes regardless of which party is in charge of what. What they are likely to care about more is the overall levels of tribal division and conflict.
Low internal conflict means that anything we do or intervene in overseas is likely to be broadly supported, consistent over the long term, decently well-planned and robust against setbacks. High internal conflict means that anything either party does will be opposed by the other for tribalistic reasons if nothing else. Interventions will tend to be the opposite - inconsistent, weak, poorly-supported, poorly-planned, likely to be canceled at minor setbacks.
As such, they probably don't really care about actually hacking voting machines, except in as much as half-assed and ineffective attempts to do so reduce everyone's confidence that whoever gets elected won legitimately. They are probably much more interested in backing extreme activist groups on both sides to amp up the overall level of division. Which IIRC is pretty much all they've been credibly accused of doing.
??? That is clearly not true. Trump intends to collapse NATO and let Russia do as they wish to their neighbors. Biden doesn't.
Well, he said that at one point, but he also threatened to bomb Moscow if they attacked Ukraine. Whatever any of us might believe, it's pretty clear that Putin started planning his invasion of Ukraine right around when Biden was sworn in. Not exactly a sign that they thought Biden and the Democrats would be much more effectively tough on him. Seems more like American chaos is what they really want.
I mean you can twist this the other way too.
Perhaps Putin felt he needed to take decisive action because of the potential for Biden administration policy to make the geopolitical situation worse for Russia.
It’s possible Trump was deterring Russian aggression against Ukraine by being a bit of a wildcard and also Putin not wanting to put him in a hard place, vs. having him as about the friendliest US president he could hope for. Once Trump was out the calculus changed. Trump was also extremely unpopular with basically all of our allies, in and out of NATO, and that division was generally good for Russia.
But also they do love American chaos.
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Iran also really hates Trump and the GOP has more hardliners on Iran than the Dems.
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Disagree that 3 follows, because it being easy to hack voting machines is very different from it being easy to hack voting machines and get away with it.
Any large criminal conspiracy of this type is going to involve some idiot mooks on the ground and a lot of contact points for someone to notice something suspicious. And any small conspiracy is going to have to focus on a single point where any anomaly large enough to sing a major election will be super obvious when compared to the exit polls.
Whether the machines are 'secure' or not, I don't actually believe anyone can influence enough of them to change large national elections without getting caught.
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I was professionally involved in fending off foreign election influence/interference in 2020.
Some cases are publicly documented. Scale for influence is very hard though, and actually affecting the voting count is very, very hard. Not because the machines are all that secure, but because we have a decentralized system.
What perhaps has been effective at influence is “hack and leak”, as happened with Guccifier and was (incorrectly) suspected of the Hunter laptop.
What’s far more effective for foreign countries is not trying to affect voters directly, but instead buying good will via donations to say think tanks, universities, and pet projects of prominent politicians.
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We've seen American attempts to influence elections in other countries, something which seems to be conveniently forgotten; Obama making suggestions about what way to vote in the independence and Brexit referendums for one.
And notice how we know that fact because the evidence is really obvious.
I believe China could influence our elections. I don't believe they could do it through hacking voting machines or changing vote counts, without leaving clear evidence behind.
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Yes, exactly. Everyone does it, we all know this, we pretend to be shocked when it's suggested that we would do that and we pretend to be outraged at the suggestion that anyone else might do it to us.
Conflating a politician making an overt statement of preference, regarding the closest ally of the US, and covert influence or interference operations is not a smart way to analyze the issue of election meddling.
You seem to think I am making an argument I'm not.
I'm saying I think that Russia trying to meddle in American elections is plausible and in fact I would expect them to try.
I am not saying I believe all the various theories about how they did.
Oh I agree you weren’t making a specific claim.
They do try. I was adding some context for evaluating the types of claims that get made by both sides of the aisle.
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Much like my complaints about irregularities, violations of law and policy, and the decline of true secret balloting, I actually am very sympathetic to people that are highly suspicious of voting machines. There simply is no need for voting machines with software. Introducing additional vulnerabilities where they're not strictly necessary is just a bad idea on general principle. People should simply show up to their voting location, present their identification for comparison against the registered voters in the locale, complete a paper ballot, and have that ballot counted locally with results reported to a central location. Additional mechanisms that involve software, ballot movement, centralization, and so on just introduce unnecessary vulnerabilities that rightfully decrease trust in elections. I don't really think there is any grand conspiracy going on, but if there was, it would probably involve introducing a bunch of pointless vulnerabilities with pretty lame excuses for doing so.
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Not to be too whiny, but this isn't just a characteristic of the American Right. The biggest social movement on the left over the past decade has been BLM and BLM-adjacent movements. When it comes to some of the core complaints regarding police brutality, police acting as an adversarial group towards the public, and other policing issues, I and others that now identify more with the right are often sympathetic. Instead of trying to build a coherent coalition around that and stick to the facts, they come up with absolute nonsense like "hands up don't shoot" and the idea that police are "hunting black men". It's ridiculous, it has nothing to do with facts, and it makes the country a worse place. People believe ridiculous fabulists and race-grifters rather than sticking with the defensible critique.
There are a lot of examples like this (Israel-Palestine, business practices in the medical industry, predatory lending in housing and education) where the facts are actually relevant and probably sufficient to build a substantial coalition, but the most prominent voices push the most retarded version of the argument that you've ever heard in your life.
True, thanks for the pushback. I wonder how much of this is downstream of having a healthy grassroots community. The British Left, which has an extensive set of community organisations and publishers behaves on the same kind of way (see ‘the countryside is racist’) but the right mostly doesn’t as far as I can see.
(Instead they all stick their fingers in their ears and chant ‘this is fine, this is fine, everything is fine, nothing is wrong, I can’t hear you lalalalala’).
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I agree this is a concern though we might disagree on how widespread it is comparatively speaking. The best guard against this phenomenon is for the sane actors to disavow the retarded versions of their arguments. I'm someone who has long supported BLM's policy positions (at least the Campaign Zero ones released in 2016) and I'm not shy about acknowledging the retards who are nominally on my camp, or otherwise acknowledging reality and facts adverse to my positions.
I'll bite. Describe some of them.
Sure, anyone who when asked 'how many unarmed black men were shot by police last year?' answers something insane like 10,000. Anyone who calls for the literal abolition of police or prisons. Anyone who believes the Jacob Blake shooting was unjustified (though I'll leave room for a compelling argument based on the reality of the case). Anyone in general who lies or otherwise misrepresents the circumstances for any particular incident of police abuse. Anyone who argues that the only explanation for any racial disparity must be racism. I could go on, and you're welcome to take me to task on anything else within this constellation.
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