SSCReader
5hr ago
You are not getting it -- this conversation never happens, people just do stuff.
That however isn't good enough. In order for the audits (some even by Republican officials) to match, it would have to be organized. Otherwise one person is paying homeless people to vote, one person is faking postal ballots from scratch, one person is faking postal stamps from the right areas on ballots that are late, one person is swapping ballots by faking damaged ones and the last is adding a tranche of made up votes to the reports. And obviously none of these people can rely on monitors being kept away because they aren't organizing anything. So you have to have someone else decide to keep Republican monitors away even though they have no idea anyone is actually cheating.
There will be simply too many discrepancies in too many places, so not only do all the auditors have to be on side to cover it up, they also have to know which things are THEIR side cheating and not the other.
It's simply not viable. Your options are one single lone wolf actor making small changes or an organized group. A whole swathe of lone wolf actors acting independently is not going to work.
If Democrats can indeed even with no communication, cheat undetectably individually and then cover up something they don't even know is happening, and convince Republicans to also participate in the cover up while not saying anything to anyone, then quite frankly elections are the least of your worries because Democrats have evolved into a psychic species and we're going to be manifesting Daemons from the warp any day now.
SSCReader
12hr ago
How do wokies deal with the very common idea of "You don't like thing x, but you have to do thing x as part of your job / role / responsibility?" They don't, the cry out "oppression!"
I wager most of them just get on and do it. We could also turn that around of course. Christians sometimes refuse to do their jobs and cry oppression (Kim Davis and gay marriage?), and often complain about being persecuted for their beliefs. So it goes. It's nothing to do with being a religion pseudo or otherwise, just that people who believe things strongly enough understandably may not want to violate their beliefs. And if forced to will often complain about it.
Nothing special about wokeness in that regard.
SSCReader
12hr ago
I think there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on any value between 50.0000001% and 99.9999999% though.
I would certainly agree with that!
SSCReader
12hr ago
Yeah it's maybe not perfect. But if you must convince every single person the election is legitimate, then one person (the heckler equivalent) is able to unilaterally undermine the legitimacy of the election. Much like a single heckler can unilaterally silence a speaker. It's not quite tyranny of the majority either, I agree.
"In discourse, a heckler's veto is a situation in which a party who disagrees with a speaker's message is able to unilaterally trigger events that result in the speaker being silenced."
SSCReader
12hr ago
The Democrats acted in a way that was indistinguishable from how you would act if you did do something wrong.
As did the Republicans as I showed you an example of.
In a democracy run by rationalists with good faith politicians and rational voters, the responses should be "let's audit" I agree. That is not the world we are in. So it is not the response you should expect. Because it is not what Republicans would do in return as they demonstrated perfectly. That is the the framework everyone's actions need to be interpreted within.
But your point was all about the fact that persuading had to be done, not anything beyond that. And Republicans failed at that harder than Democrats did.
And you may well not fix flaws! They might be too expensive to fix or have other trade offs. Remember there are two competing axes of voting legitimacy, maximizing legitimate voters and minimizing illegitimate voters. Those trade off against each other. There is no objectively correct answer. It's a values choice. And within our non-good faith framework, Democrats would be crazy to do anything to reduce turn out even fractionally if they think high turn out helps them. Likewise Republicans would be crazy to do the opposite.
As PA demonstrated, Republicans took an act they erroneously thought would help them, then flipped on it as soon as they discovered it would not. That is the framework our democracy operates within. No-one is operating in good faith. They are all acting for what will help them most. Expecting the Democrats to rise above when Republicans do not is an isolated demand for rigor.
Your good faith framework might be nice (I'd surely prefer it!) but it is not the world we are in and both Democratic and Republican politicians need to act accordingly. And they largely do.
I think you are massively over-estimating the "future death of America" issue here. Democracy will continue, politicians will continue to be conniving rats (in my direct experience of working with national level politicians!) and that the best we can do is set one group of conniving rats against the other such that they broadly even out, by attempting to out connive each other.
SSCReader
13hr ago
One of the major points I (and others) was making is that this not a situation where you can rules lawyer your way out of it. Democracy requires consensus, you need to be persuasive and to make everyone feel like the elections are free and fair.
You can't persuade everyone of anything, so this is just the heckler's veto writ large. And your own view can just be flipped, if persuading people is the only measure.
Democracy does require consensus, so YOU (the generic you, not your own personal self) need to be persuasive and to make everyone believe the elections were NOT free and fair. If you cannot convince enough people, then they stand.
See how that works? Republicans pushed for mail in voting when they thought it would help them, then flipped to calling the laws they themselves passed as being unconstitutional (see PA, below), those are not the actions of people trying to build consensus and persuade people objectively that the election was rigged. They are the actions of political partisans seeking advantage.
So they were not persuasive. They failed to persuade the majority the election was rigged. Time and time again expansive claims were walked back. If you want to blame anyone, blame those who claimed they had rock solid proof repeatedly then demonstrated they were untrustworthy. As much as you think Democrats need to persuade you the elections were fair, you also need to persuade them that they weren't. And from Sydney Powell to Rudy Giuliani, to Dan Moul a terrible job was done.
You may be examining this objectively and deciding what would help you trust the process better, but unfortunately many of your fellow travelers were not. So the consensus stood, because your side failed to persuade them.
"Act 77 also had the support of almost all of the Republican state representatives in the Pennsylvania House, including state Rep. Dan Moul, a Republican from Adams County who joined the lawsuit over the mail-in voting law in 2021.
"So my bad. I should've checked the constitutionality of that big bill," Moul says.
Moul is one of 11 Republicans in the state House who are claiming in the lawsuit that the mail-in voting provisions in Act 77 that they voted for three years ago are unconstitutional.
"We pass bills all the time. Do we go back and check every single one to make sure it stays within the confines of the constitution? We'd never get anything done if we did that," Moul says."
Why should we trust Republicans on this matter who vote for a law (because they thought it would help rural turn out and thus Republicans), then "realize" it is in fact unconstitutional and whose excuse is basically: I just voted it for it, I didn't check it was actually in line with the Constitution I was sworn to uphold, right after it becomes a big deal about giving Democrats an advantage? Suspicious isn't it? Almost enough to persuade you that it wasn't anything to do with fairness or election security, just who got the advantage.
And finally. If your argument is that consensus must be reached then:
"Recent polling shows roughly 28% to 36% of the overall U.S. adult population express ongoing doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election"
It was. The majority of people do not believe the election was rigged. They were persuaded. It can't be a requirement to persuade everyone, especially when it becomes a partisan issue. 18% of Americans think the moon landings were faked. 20% think the government is microchipping them. A third of Americans think the FDA has a bona fide cure for cancer they are hiding.
Persuading everyone simply cannot be the standard. And if it were, well your side also failed to meet that standard, significantly more so in fact. That's quite a lot of persuading that still needs to be done for your consensus.
"Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?"
Given the churches repeated and ancient schisming I think you have it the wrong way round. The left has the same sort of purity death spiral we see in Christianity.
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