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Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses? Trump himself has a big personal incentive to say the election is "rigged" if he loses no matter what. It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls, to one where the basic facts of reality are debated instead. The obvious example is the 2020 election. Lesser known was that Trump did the same thing in 2016 when he lost the Iowa primary to Ted Cruz. Now it seems he's preparing to do the same in 2024.
Many Republicans are more than willing to go along with this, mostly due to either negative partisanship or living in a bubble ("everyone I knew was voting for Trump, then the other guy won? Something doesn't smell right!"). If the pain of defeat stings, why not just be a sore loser instead? I've debated many people who thought the 2020 election was rigged, and inevitably it goes down one of three rabbitholes:
Vibes-based arguments that are short on substance, but long on vague nihilism that "something was off". Nearly 70% of Republicans think 2020 was stolen in some way, yet most are normies who don't spend a lot of time trying to form a set of coherent opinions, so the fallback of "something was off" serves as a way to affirm their tribal loyalty without expending much effort.
Motte-and-bailey to Trump's claims by ignoring everything Trump himself says, and instead going after some vague institutional flaw without providing any evidence to how it actually impacted 2020. For instance, while mail-in ballots are a nice convenience for many, there are valid concerns to a lack of oversight in how people fill out their ballots. People can be subjected to peer pressure, either from their family or even from their landlord or another authority figure to fill out their ballot a certain way. However, no election is going to 100% perfect, and just because someone can point out a flaw doesn't mean the entire thing should be thrown out. In a similar vein, Democrats have (rightly) pointed out that gerrymandering can cause skewed results in House elections, yet I doubt many Republicans would say that means results would need to be nullified especially if Democrats had just lost. These things are something to discuss and reform for future elections.
People who do buy at least some of the object-level claims that Trump or Giuliani has advanced about 2020 being stolen. There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into. For most political issues, parties tend to organically rally around a few specific examples that have the best evidence or emotional valence. The fact that this hasn't happened for Trump's claims is indicative that none of them are really that good, and they rely more on the reader being unfamiliar with them to try to spin a biased story. One example occurred a few weeks ago on this site, one user claimed the clearest examples were Forex markets (which were subsequently ignored), Ruby Freeman, and the Cyber Ninja's Audit. I was only vaguely aware of these, so I did a quick Google search and found a barrage of stories eviscerating the Ruby Freeman and Cyber Ninja narratives. I then asked for the response, preferably with whatever relatively neutral sources he could find, since I was sure he'd claim the sources I had Googled were all hopelessly biased. But this proved too high a bar to clear for him, and so the conversation went nowhere. Maybe there's a chance that some really compelling evidence exists out there that would easily prove at least some of the major allegations correct, but at this point I doubt it.
At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable. The big question on the Republican side now would be whether to claim the elections were rigged even if Trump DOES win. The stock explanation would be that the Dems are rigging it so they have +20% more votes than they normally would, so a relatively close election means Trump actually won by a huge margin. On the other hand, saying the election was rigged at all could diminish Trump's win no matter what, and it's not hard to imagine Trump claiming "this was the most legitimate election in the history of our country" if he manages to come out on top.
Wait for Donald Trump to die.
Until then anything is pissing into the wind.
Trump has achieved a bizarre leverage over the Republican party, where even people who he has abused, insulted, and degraded still only offer milquetoast criticism against him. Trump controls enough of the Republican base that no Republican can go against him, and he isn't going to change his tune.
There's no negotiation here. Winning doesn't fix it. Losing doesn't fix it. Implementing supposed ballot security measures won't fix it.
Georgia was the epicenter of voter fraud theories. Georgia has voter ID laws. Georgia was run, in 2020, by a Republican Governor, and a Republican majority of 26 in the House. If a Republican administration, working with a Republican Governor, in a state long controlled by Republicans, can't root out the appearance of corruption using the techniques people are asking for to combat corruption, it's hopeless. Either the FEMA deep state is so powerful that it's unbeatable anyway, or nothing will ever convince people that Trump lost.
I think that a lot of people are under the impression that "wait until everything goes back to normal" is a viable strategy for dealing with whatever their pet problem happens to be.
I think the fundamental problem with that is confusing the symptom for the cause. It's certainly possible that Trump is uniquely causal of this voter ID thing. But I wouldn't bet on it going away after he dies. And I think the basic skepticism of election integrity (on the right, but also on the left from time to time) predates his POTUS run.
I don't think things are going "back to normal," if there ever was such a thing.
@Shrike
@TequilaMockingbird
You both cite Voter ID, along with many other commenters in this thread.
Voter ID has been a fight in American politics since I can remember, and I'm sure it was around before that. Georgia passed Voter ID in 2005. Did Trump accept the result of the election in Georgia?
Arizona has had voter ID from 2019. Did Trump accept the result in Arizona?
Wisconsin's Voter ID law took effect in 2011 (aside: I love the website name Wiscontext). Did Trump accept the result in Wisconsin?
Michigan requires photo ID. Did Trump accept the results in Michigan?
It's pretty obvious that "pass a voter ID law" isn't going to fix things. And we can play various forms of "true voter ID has never been tried" with things like National ID cards showing citizenship or an American version of the Hukou system to register where everyone lives, but there's no actual push to implement that, and those kinds of government registries that allow for more direct Federal control over people's lives have been considered a Bad Thing by Republicans at all levels for generations. Given the repeated failures to implement RealID, we're probably not going to see a successful implementation of National ID any time soon.
Voter ID : Election Integrity as Police Body Cams : Black Lives Matter. It's a reasonable sounding procedural change that will ultimately change nothing.
But even if we agree on Voter ID, normally the conversation moves on to mail in ballots. The venerable @Rov_Scam has done the Yeoman's work and extensively outlined how mail-in ballot changes were passed, in many cases by Republicans to benefit Republican constituencies like the rural elderly and the self-employed. The only state to implement mail-in balloting by executive action in 2020 to go for Biden was New Hampshire. Which...actually I don't know of any Trump efforts to overturn the result in New Hampshire. If it happened I don't think it got a lot of press? I'll note that personally, I do not vote by mail, and I dislike vote by mail systems in general, because I don't trust myself to successfully fill out paperwork and my handwriting is atrocious, it is worth taking a few hours off during the day to make sure my ballot is counted. I'm also pretty sure that the most powerful constituency in American politics is Nursing Home Aides, who even leaving aside actually filling out ballots for their charges, can simply decide to "lose" the mail in ballots for residents whose politics they know to be antithetical to their own. I'm surprised neither side has promised massive pay increases for them yet.
Then the argument shifts to more subtle/secret Democrat manipulation schemes, but as we saw above there's not much pattern to R control of state government or D control of state government in terms of accusations of voter fraud.
But to return to our list of states above, let's zoom in on two: Georgia and Arizona both had R Governors and R State Houses. There was, obviously, an R in the White House for four years before the election. Both states had voter ID laws implemented before the election. Both states went for Biden, and despite extensive efforts neither state's results were ultimately overturned. Given that outcome, why should we expect implementing Voter ID laws nationally to lead to Trump and friends accepting another election loss, should it occur?
This is a very poor choice of example given the widely reported issues in Maricopa county and the obvious conflict of interest invovled in the person in nominal charge of the count also being a candidate.
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I really don't think there was anything in my post that suggests that adopting voter ID laws will Make The Problem Go Away, but I do agree(?) with you that my use of voter ID was imprecise at best. (I'd say the pause in the election count was worse for Election Integrity Vibes than the state of voter ID laws – most people don't care to grok the nuances of voter ID law but they are impatient to know who won the election.)
Fair. I didn't think you considered voter ID a complete solution either, I just focused on it to dig into one point.
Fixing perceptions/actualities of vote counting unfairness in blue machine run cities is either a coup-complete problem or near enough that it makes no difference. It requires probably allowing/forcing city government to annex suburbs such that the political unit becomes significantly more ethnically and politically balanced, but idk if that is remotely politically or practically possible. Any procedural changes short of that will still leave too much room for unaccountable actors to exercise influence on the process. Certainly it is not achievable by anyone by November.
At the end of the day it's very hard, in my mind, to square the anonymous ballot with election security, since the only way to be 100% certain that someone voted for a person in an environment where fraud is possible is to ask them.
I'm sure smart people can come up with a system using cryptography that preserves anonymity and ~guarantees secure elections, but most people won't be able to verify the security of the system themselves, so it's not actually helpful.
A slightly lower-IQ (and easier to understand) solution might just be to make all voting in-person and have a video feed that keeps a running headcount, and tally the voter headcount with the votes at the end of the day, or something like that. (I actually imagine similar measures are already used, though, but I've never looked into it.)
But at the end of the day I think the problem is more vibes-related. This is detached from whether or not the vibes are onto something or not – you can have a situation where lots of voter fraud doesn't cause a legitimacy crisis because it's not suspected in a high-trust environment, and you can have a system where there's a crisis of legitimacy because people suspect that elections are being rigged even if their security is airtight.
I'm not sure there's a way to fix a vibes problem quickly. I suspect the only way out of that is through.
I think it’s possible. If you have a barcode on an object that allows you to track it across a network, and you don’t necessarily have To know what the contents are. UPS can track millions of packages from warehouse to multiple locations to your front door by scanning the barcode on the box and uploading that to a server. Blockchain can be tracked without needing to know what the “package” contains or represents. This isn’t a ned to invent new technology. We could do things like this now with pretty muc( off the shelf technology. Scan the barcode on every ballot on paper at the point it’s cast. Scan every time the ballots move. If you see ballots arrive that cannot be traced to a precinct, then you’re likely seeing fake ballots.
Yep, that definitely makes sense to me. I think the point of failure there is "Okay, how do we prevent someone from backdooring the entire system and just filling in fake data?" And while I suspect there are answers to that, I'm not sure they are answers everyone will buy in a low-trust environment.
This doesn't mean interventions like this aren't worth doing, though. Perhaps that's precisely what's needed to end Voter Fraud Discourse, I don't know. I just expect that simply rolling some fancy whiz-bang foolproof and fast voter counter Rube Goldberg machine won't by itself be enough to Save Democracy – you'll need to prove that it works, and that might take many election cycles.
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How does voter ID work in connection with mail in ballots
Usually you write the ID number somewhere on the ballot, ie. Putting your driver's license number on the inside of the outer ballot.
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You'd have to ask the Republican majorities in PA and GA that passed laws allowing for extensive mail in voting while also advocating voter ID laws.
It'll always be something.
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