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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   30526 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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What is the steel man for the Trump fake elector scheme being no big deal? To be clear, I'm not talking about a steel man of Trump's behavior as it relates to J6 itself (the tweets, the speech, the reaction to the crowd, etc.), I'm talking exclusively about the scheme where, according to the Democrat/J6 report/Jack Smith narrative, Trump conspired to overturn the election by trying to convince various states, and later Pence, to use a different slate of electors. Here is the basic narrative (largely rephrased from this comment along with the Jack Smith indictment):

  1. There was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election (in the event someone replies with evidence there was, you would also need to prove that Trump knew it at the time to justify his actions)

  2. Trump's advisers, advisers that were appointed by himself, repeatedly told him there was no outcome-determinative fraud after looking into it. Despite this, Trump still insisted there was outcome-determinative fraud. Trump still insisted even after he started losing court cases left and right about there being outcome-determinative fraud. Assuming 1 is true this means that Trump is either knowingly lying or willfully ignoring people he himself picked

  3. Trump, despite knowing there wasn't outcome-determinative fraud (assuming 2), still tried to change the outcome of the election. First, he tried the courts where he knowingly lied about there being outcome-determinative fraud in court filings. When that failed he tried contacting various state legislatures and other state officials to ask them to certify his slate of electors. When that failed, his final option was to try to convince Pence to either use his slate of electors to win (a slate of electors not officially certified despite claiming to be certified), or to invalidate enough state's electors to make it so no one gets 270 electors, throwing the election to the house where Trump would then hopefully win given it becomes 1 state 1 vote there.

With that narrative, here are the Trump critiques that I want a steel man defense of:

  1. Trump knowingly lied about there being outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election. This is wrong.

        a. In the alternative, Trump is so dumb that he continued to believe there was outcome-determinative fraud despite evidence to the contrary. This disqualifies him from any political power.

  2. Trump tried to use this lie to change the results of the election. This is wrong.

  3. Trump used this lie to get slates of electors to falsely certify they were the chosen electors of that state. This is wrong

  4. Trump tried to convince various state legislatures that these were the lawfully chosen slate of electors and to decertify the Biden slate and certify his slate. This is wrong.

        a. In the event you think this was legal, Trump tried to convince various state legislatures to break norms that would be tantamount to a constitutional coup. This is wrong.

  5. Trump tried to convince Pence to step outside of his constitutional authority to make him president. This is wrong

        a. In the event you think this was legal, Trump tried to convince Pence to break norms that would be tantamount to a constitutional coup. This is wrong.

The strongest steel man that I can come up with involved the case of Hawaii in 1960

The New York Times summarizes the situation,

In one of the first legal memos laying out the details of the fake elector scheme, a pro-Trump lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro justified the plan by pointing to an odd episode in American history: a quarrel that took place in Hawaii during the 1960 presidential race between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

The results of the vote count in Hawaii remained in dispute — by about 100 ballots — even as a crucial deadline for the Electoral College to meet and cast its votes drew near. A recount was underway but it did not appear as though it would be completed by the time the Electoral College was expected to convene, on Dec. 19, 1960.

Despite the unfolding recount, Mr. Nixon claimed he had won the state, and the governor formally certified a slate of electors declaring him the victor. At the same time, Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, holding out hope that he would eventually prevail, drafted its own slate of electors, claiming that he had in fact won the race.

In his memo, Mr. Chesebro suggested that this unusual situation set a precedent not only for drafting and submitting two competing slates of electors to the Electoral College, but also for pushing back the latest possible time for settling the election results to Jan. 6 — the date set by federal law for a joint session of Congress to certify the final count of electors.

The competing slate conundrum in Hawaii was ultimately put to rest when Mr. Kennedy prevailed in the recount, and a new governor of Hawaii certified a freshly drafted slate of his electors.

Then, on Jan. 6, 1961, Mr. Nixon, overseeing the congressional certification session in his role as president of the Senate, received all three slates of electors — his own, the initial Kennedy slate and the certified Kennedy slate — but agreed that the last one should be formally accepted.

While this is the closest prior case of something similar, and thus no big deal, what Trump did is still different enough that it can be meaningfully distinguished:

  1. Both Nixon and Kennedy had good reason to believe they won. Trump didn't.

  2. Kennedy's first slate of electors, the ones that weren't certified, weren't the ones eventually counted. Only the ones certified by the state were counted. Trump's false electors were never certified, so asking Pence to certify them was completely unprecedented.

  3. Nixon accepted that Hawaii had final say over what was and wasn't their slate of electors. Trump didn't and continually insisted his slate was correct.

Another argument that I don't think is strong, but nonetheless might be the strongest steel man:

it was legal or it was in a gray area of legality and Trump had every right to push the boundary to stay in power as long as he doesn't break the law

This is not a strong argument because then it would've just been a constitutional coup and those are still wrong. The way many Latin American countries have constitutional coups is that they stack the court that allows them to reinterpret their constitution to give them more power or that allows them to violate term limits. This is still wrong despite technically being legal. The problem is the norm breaking, not the technical legality.

You're assuming the conclusion. See marisuno's answer the last time american elections came up. As another non-american, I 100% agree with it; in my country there is also lots of grumbling about the obviously, hilariously biased way in which the right-wing is treated by state institutions & media, but almost nobody is alleging fraud. Why? Because we have at least basic voting protections.

I 100% agree that the there should be radically increased voter fraud protections, all paper ballots, require IDs, etc. I also 100% agree that perceptions of fairness are basically as important as actual fairness, so the voting system should be hardened to reflect that. However, that doesn't change the fact that, despite not having those protections, there hasn't been good evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in past US elections (at least in the modern era), and that no one before hand questioned the actual outcome of the election, even if there might have been a few gripes here and there.

An analogy: say you have an employee that manages the cash at a company. This position has existed for hundreds of years. Over the years, there have been cases of employees in that position swiping a few dollars here and there, but nothing major. A new CEO comes in and, after a bad quarter, says that the employee has been stealing money. He says they've stolen so much money that it is the reason the company is in the red this quarter. He might have evidence of small scale money stealing, but no good evidence of anything large scale. He wants to install a new system that tracks all the money to the dollar so that nothing goes missing. Every other CEO in the past, good quarter and bad, knew there was cash stealing here and there, but no CEO in the past blamed that minor cash stealing for a bad quarter.

My thoughts on this analogy:

  1. the CEO is right to want a system to track cash
  2. the CEO is wrong to say there was major stealing without strong evidence for it
  3. the CEO is right to say there was stealing, but should be careful to make it clear that it wasn't the reason the quarter was bad

However, that doesn't change the fact that, despite not having those protections, there hasn't been good evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in past US elections (at least in the modern era), and that no one before hand questioned the actual outcome of the election, even if there might have been a few gripes here and there.

Little known fact - Obama would not have become the Democratic Presidential Nominee had four people in his campaign not cheated in the primaries.

Were they in Obama's campaign? The story calls them "local officials", and details

Burkett confessed that “there were meetings at which several people explicitly agreed to forge these petitions” and that his job was to “forge petitions for candidate Barack Obama.” Furthermore, Board of Voter Registration worker Beverly Shelton “was assigned to forge petitions for candidate Hillary Clinton,” while former County Board of Voter Registration worker Dustin Blythe “was assigned to forge petitions for candidate John Edwards.”

It's pretty damning that the three of them got away with this (only the "ringleader" Butch Morgan was convicted), and it might have ended up being a turning point that led to Obama's election (though the "momentum" theory here is a little shaky), but it doesn't seem like it was a conspiracy to elect Obama so much as it was a conspiracy to avoid excruciating embarrassment. Imagine having to drop one or more candidates from the ballot because of a county where the campaign failed or forgot to get the 500 requisite signatures.

You are correct, I misremembered because there was an attempt at suing the Obama campaign but it didn't go anywhere (probably because they weren't as involved.)

I'm unsure if this would've played out as simply as you and the author of the link claim. I would guess that, clinton would have won nearly all of the delegates, Obama would've had a fairly big scandal, but he probably would have also survived and still been the nominee. Looking at the wikipedia page for the 2008 Dem Primary, Indiana looked to be one of the last primaries, so I wonder if Obama would've clinched anyway. I didn't do the math, but I'd suspect that even with a moderate drop in support, given there weren't many primaries left, Obama would still win. However, if the scandal really did blow up then super delegates might all switch to Clinton, so hard to say.

Regardless of all that, kudos for finding a good example.

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