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What is 'bad faith'? Maybe, when someone uses poor arguments or selectively chooses facts to further a personal goal that isn't 'truth-seeking'. But does that require them to intentionally do so, or does it merely require them to fall into a pattern of doing so? The ... "election denier" ... operate in functional bad faith, not conscious bad faith. And they share that with most participants in political discussions. When someone reads an accusation of bad faith, they imagine they're accused of conscious bad faith, and then get upset that their genuine attempts to discuss aren't taken seriously.
Say you're arguing with a Christian about whether God exists. They make the usual arguments, that 'something caused the universe, so that thing must be God', 'humans are simply too complicated for evolution to create', 'the historical case for Jesus's miracles is undeniable', 'all logic needs axioms and thus has no grounding, so it must be grounded in something, which is God'. Yeah, these are all fallacious, some trivially so - 'thing that caused the universe' doesn't have to be spiritual or sentient, fossil and DNA evidence for evolution is overwhelming, history is replete with other strongly attested miracles that didn't happen. And, if you're approaching the question from a position of genuine intellectual inquiry, how is it possible to - not to make so many mistakes, everyone is mistaken about everything - but to make so many mistakes in the same direction? But if they're saying things that are superficially convincing and support their claim, whether or not they're accurate, it all makes sense.
Okay, but ... some of us have been fundamentalist christians or progressives in the past, and that's not what it feels like. You genuinely believe in what you're saying. You, initially, see your interlocutor as someone who's misguided but could be persuaded. Your mistakes come from lack of knowledge and cleverness, bad sources of information, a lack of discipline and carefulness in thinking, and all sorts of social and moral constraints. But if that's "bad faith", then most discussions people have are bad faith.
Okay, to you it's obvious that most vote fraud arguments are terrible, obvious enough to dismiss those making it as bad faith. I agree that the arguments are terrible, seemingly obviously so. But it's also obvious that the spirits of our ancestors don't inhabit their graves, that praying doesn't help people with medical problems, that freudian psychoanalysis is bunk, and that neither democrats nor republicans are evil moral mutants. Yet man, very intelligent people of the past or present whole-heartedly believed all of those, and made all sorts of tortured arguments for them. The fact is, understanding the complicated world and society we live in is just hard. Even in areas with better-than-average truth-seeking institutions and incentives, like corporations or universities, people end up with a lot of false beliefs. Take away the institutions and incentives, like in casual news/politics discussion, and people end up blabbing nonsense even in areas with no partisan divides. Then add Trump, who many Rs saw as the only guy on their side in Washington, losing an election, and they saw the usual weird events that happen in any large-scale social system as proof of election subversion.
Most of them would not be. But they don't know that, in the same way that a preindustrial Muslim doesn't know they'd be Christian if they were born in Europe instead of the Middle East. And some of them still would, because mistakes don't go away if there's no tribal motive, they're just not amplified as much.
I'm not arguing that most of the fraud arguments are made in bad faith, regardless of how terrible I think they are; I'm arguing that this particular argument is made in bad faith. Republicans had no particular opposition to mail voting until Trump decided he could get some kind of advantage by making a big deal about it. This isn't some long-held Republican principle, it's a convenient argument to a self-serving end. That's where your Christianity analogy fails; I'm Catholic myself, and if a sincere Protestant wanted to have a conversation about faith with me I'd be happy to discuss it with them, even if their aim was obviously evangelical. But I'd be less happy if I found out they had recently converted because there was some personal advantage to them doing so that was wholly unrelated to their spiritual needs. I think people like Joel Osteen get a little too much flac from irreligious types because he seems like an obvious huckster. But I'm reluctant to join in on the dogpile because, despite his wealth, there's nothing in his past that suggests he isn't sincere. That, and I've actually listened to his sermons and it's obvious that his critics haven't because nothing he says is remotely objectionable. But I'd probably feel different if he were a twice-divorced advertising executive with a conviction for writing bad checks who became a self-ordained minister at the age of 40 after realizing that a combination of Billy Graham and Tony Robbins was a license to print money. And who also was a frequent visitor to tit bars and had been kicked out of every country club in the Houston area because he was too much of an asshole for the members to want to deal with.
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