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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):
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)
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
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:
Trump knowingly lied about there being outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election. This is wrong.
Trump tried to use this lie to change the results of the election. This is wrong.
Trump used this lie to get slates of electors to falsely certify they were the chosen electors of that state. This is wrong
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.
Trump tried to convince Pence to step outside of his constitutional authority to make him president. 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,
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:
Both Nixon and Kennedy had good reason to believe they won. Trump didn't.
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.
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:
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.
What is the steelman for the establishment being unable to steal elections?
Not unwilling, unable. Arguments from unwillingness, such as the ostensible criminality of mass electoral fraud, are tautological, as they assume the ability to read minds. Arguments of it being unnecessary are supremely tautological, as their first assumption is legitimate elections. Tautologies are not steelmen.
That sufficient measures exist to stop illegal voting; that sufficient measures exist to prevent the mass injection of fraudulent ballots; that relevant executive agencies have an interest in auditing elections and investigating to the fullest extent and neutrally charging electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud; that the courts have an interest in neutral hearings of electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud; that the media has an interest in investigating and neutrally reporting to the fullest extent electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud. The caveats of "fullest extent" and "leftist electoral fraud" are necessary, as no national-scope investigation has happened, and while there are rarely stories of left-aligned individuals being charged with electoral crimes, relative to those, stories of right-aligned individuals being charged with electoral crimes occur far more frequently. For the sake of charity, I will agree the inclination to criminal behavior as equal among the left and right, it is however no question that support for criminal behavior is a dominant ethic of the modern left. For these, the probabilistic assumption is one side is caught and/or reported on less often.
Do also consider the history of American conspiracies; principally, that evidence indicates coordination and silence are solved problems.
And to repeat myself, "it's a crime" and "they didn't need to" are not positions of a steelman. Not unwilling, unable.
The fact that they didn't in 2016. (Unless you believe trump and hillary were secretly on the same side.)
The establishment must be at least one of: {unwilling, unable}.
And anyways, every political faction is fractally composed of sub-factions feuding over electoral legitimacy. Ideological alliances can put aside power-grubbing for the common good, but if you're going to assume cynicism in the first place, history has endless examples of the aristocracy fighting against central tyrants because they'd rather do the tyrranizing themselves. If you give your king too much legitimacy he doesn't need to delegate to you anymore. Rigging swing state elections would benefit national parties, but destroy the outsize power and influence of the local parties.
2016 is a starting point, but it is only a weak indicator of inability or unwillingness. I indict the administration of elections at all levels, so an adequate steelman incorporating the 2016 general election only pushes the question back. Were they unable to inject large numbers of fraudulent ballots? Or were they unprepared and failed to inject enough?
A common oversight on this subject is the thought that stealing national elections requires national coordination. It is in the interest of the California Democratic Party to win California elections, if they are fabricating large numbers of ballots in the general, they can achieve the immediate goal of maintaining local power while achieving the incidental goal of the state's electoral college votes going to the Democratic candidate for president. Same for Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia. It's the simulacra, the copy without an original. Many small groups who benefit from stealing local elections, who with no explicit cooperation steal a national election.
It sounds like you're assuming that democracy is and has always been a sham. (Or at least, has been a sham since some undeterminable point in the non-recent past.) But if democracy was merely a facade over authoritarianism, then we should expect there to be little difference in how "democratic" and "nondemocratic" states behave-- and little difference in their economic and military outcomes. But a cursory examination of history demonstrates exactly the opposite. If you compare european countries, the wealthy and prosperous ones are correspondingly less authoritarian, and while the authoritarian states pretend at democracy, they're transparently worse at in in various ways. If at some point the US stopped being democratic, we should expect some sort of regression towards an authoritarian mean-- except the US economy is one of the best-performing advanced economies worldwide.
There's still a lot of space for anti-democratic intervention; when it comes to elections "stolen" isn't a checkbox, it's a gradient. But self-evidently, whatever efforts the democrats have been making are on a lower order-of-magnitude scale of effect than the structural anti-democratic interventions of the electoral college and the fixed size of the house of representatives.
Not exactly. The point of forming political parties is to acquire power and resources-- not for the party, but for the individual members of the party. In a competitive environment, yes, it's in the interests of the members to work together to defeat common enemies. But as a group eliminates its competitors, intra-group conflict rises in intensity... and many of those specific factions and people involved see that, toward the tail end, if the group finishes eliminating its competitors-- then suddenly they have no more bargaining power within the group. And all of this happens fractally.
So-- a member of the californian democratic party has incentives to force state elections to be as fair as possible, even at the expense of the CDP, because relative to their own state their greatest enemies are members of their own party.But they want national elections to be tilted as far towards the national democratic party as possible because "california" is one of the biggest factions in the democratic party, and can be confident that they can re-task federal resources toward themselves if only they can eliminate the republican party as a real competitor.
But a member of the Pennsylvania democratic party has exactly the opposite incentives-- they're in a fight for their life locally, but the national status quo (of getting money funneled toward them from the national organization that they can in term hand out through patronage networks to advertisers and campaign staff) heavily benefits them. If the national election was less fair, suddenly they would get a much smaller share of the democratic party's overall bucket of goodies.
And yes, presumably you have people who just want to win their city council seat at any cost... but they in turn rely on staff with unpredictable allegiances. Is that poll worker here because they feel a deep allegiance to the democratic party or to democratic ideals? Do my supporters vote for me because they genuinely like me or because they think I'm the least-worst option? Is any specific person in my hierarchy going to accept orders to fake ballots or are they going to rat me out to the media for a paycheck and (if they're lucky) a book deal?
I won't claim that no malfeasance goes on. But stealing an election and winning an election require a very similar set of skills and resources. Positioning yourself to do the former puts you most of the way toward doing the latter. And considering the existence of explicitly adversarial factions with difficult-to-gauge power and unity, it becomes very risky indeed to try and steal elections in any blatant way. That's why Obama gave up his position to trump in 2016 and why trump gave up his position to biden when he lost in 2020.
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