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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   30527 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.

As non-US person I consider US presidential election system as mindbogglingly stupid, prone to fraud and unsafe. Ballot harvesting, voting machines, no requirement of any ID in many states, inability to actually count votes for days or weeks, etc. When I raised these questions before, a lot of people mentioned how this is complicated system where states have their own rules and so forth. It does not matter. Your elections are laughable and a mockery of security, it is far beyond anything I have seen in my country of Slovakia or other countries where I follow elections. Also your politicians are unwilling to do anything about it to make elections more safe and trustworthy, while constantly talking about "threat to democracy".

So the steelman of Trump's argument - or argument by any other candidate who loses and raises questions about legitimacy of election - no matter the results, your elections in their current state will always have huge issues with legitimacy and trust no matter who wins.

It boggles my mind that the United States, the most powerful country on Earth, is unable to issue all of its citizens with photo IDs.

This is one of those things where the Anglosphere simply has a different view on what the government should be doing compared to Napoleonic countries.

If the government maintains a register of everyone legally present in the country, then it can issue certified copies of entries in the register easily. This is perfectly technically feasible, and several countries have done it. The UK was going to do it under Blair, but he got voted out - the first thing the coalition did on taking power in 2010 was to abolish the register that was supposed to be the basis for the ID card scheme. It would be even easier to do for the US technically than it was for us because you normally issue SSNs at birth. But most Americans, and even most politically engaged Brits, think that making such a register is an act of petty tyranny.

If you don't have a population register, then all an ID means is that at some point some appropriate authority figure said "this birth certificate and this photo belong to the same person" and the government wrote this down.

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