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Trump believed that there was enough fraud to effect the outcome of the election
He needed a venue in which to make the argument for this and present the case for why he thought this
If there existed conflicting electoral slates, the Vice President had the power to reject the certification, and allow a period of time for the congress to have a debate about the validity of any complaints. Such a debate has occurred in 1876, 1969, and 2005.
This seems pretty wonky, and the type of thing that nobody would usually ever care about or even know about if it weren't for cable news/twitter/hysterics.
To be clear I think that this was a completely reasonable thing to do. I think that our system of government is based on (and functions best) when it is competing forces pulling each other in tension.
I think that consensus arrises from conflict.
Every time that Trump is allowed to make his case publicly, so long as the case has no merit, it will lose supporters. Or, if it does have merit, it will gain them.
By not allowing Trump to make his case, and for trying to punish him for it with absurd conspiracy theorizing about "January 6th", it signals that Trump's opponents might fear that his case does have merit, and that by presenting the evidence for it, it will gain supporters.
Trump was clearly not trying to "overturn democracy" or "change the results of an election" or any other bullshit like that. Especially the idea that he was trying to "change the results" (he wasn't, he was trying to determine them) should disgust anybody who cares about American Democracy.
Daylight is the best disinfectant, etc.
This all seems to hinge on whether you believe Trump genuinely thought there was outcome-determinative fraud or not. If you did, then all of Trump's actions are just pushing the boundaries and gray areas of the law in pursuit of trying to right his perceived wrong. However, if you think that he actually knew there wasn't outcome-determinative fraud (with the best evidence of this being Trump's own advisers repeatedly telling him there wasn't along with repeated legal losses), yet pushed to overturn the election anyways, then the parade of horribles of "threat to democracy", "coup", "change the results", etc. would be fair to apply to him.
Also, repeating what I wrote in the other reply, if the best steel man involves Trump being so dumb or crazy to realize there wasn't fraud despite it being obvious to anyone else that would've been in his shoes, then it replaces the best reason to not vote for Trump with another really good reason to not vote for him.
So you're telling me all of the outrage over "democracy being under threat" is caused by people not being able to believe that Trump could genuinely believe things he says? This whole thing is just the biggest case of typical mind fallacy and projection?!?
I swear to god this country is going to give me an aneurysm.
Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.
Ditto. At least we can agree on that.
Not really. None of the issues in PA and WI happened in Florida. Florida is another state that used to have large Democrat machines that were routinely accused of fraud, but you could never quite prove it. Then Desantis came in, cleaned up the dirty voter rolls, streamlined the counting process, tightened up the vote by mail process (particularly post date rules and signature rules), got rid of insecure drop box, and then actually enforced all of that.
And magically no shenanigans. No more Miami-Dade reporting after the rest of the state had been done for hours. No more pallets of ballots magically being found at 3am. Etc etc. It turns out there is great evidence for fraud happening, because why you engage in active election security, all these suspicious activities disappear.
That’s not evidence of fraud happening. It could well be evidence that Florida cleaned up their act enough that irregularities from regular organizational incompetence no longer occur. But I suppose that depends a lot on your priors here.
That being said, I do strongly agree with enforcing electoral security the way that you say Florida has done. If the main point was a pre-emptive “Improve election security or else we’re not going to trust the results of this next election,” I would be on board with that. But instead, it sounds a lot more like a post-hoc “Nuh uh, we didn’t lose even though we have no hard evidence!”
Well, sure. My priors is we have known about machine fraud for centuries and nothing has changed so why would it stop?
Is there evidence of it happening repeatedly in American presidential elections to a large enough degree to have affected the results? If so, that would cause me to update my priors by a lot.
Of course, IL in 1960 was a battle of voter fraud wherein the DNC machine in Cook outworked the RNC machine in southern IL.
Most states now acknowledge the existence of ancient (aka 60 year old) voter fraud machines that would routinely manufacture 100k or so votes (see IL in 1982, the sole one contemporaneously caught). But no one has any explanation as to why this magically stopped when procedures in those areas remain the same. Few of the grand jury recommendations from the 1982 case are currently in effect in Illinois, for example.
Almost all of those recommendations are fully opposed by a major American political party for reasons that seem obvious to the curious.
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