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The RNC of 30 years prior, you mean? And aren’t consent decrees settlements to lawsuits? Seems pretty disingenuous to call it “voluntary” when the nigh-certain alternative was an even worse court-imposed judgment.
Yeah, surely the prior three decades of forced atrophy had no effect on their ability to effectively discover and root out such things. Two years should be more than enough to get them up to speed! Not to mention that they obviously extensively raised the issue in 2020, their next earliest opportunity, much to your oft-voiced chagrin.
Why do you think the prospect of a worse court-imposed judgment was nigh-certain? Do you believe it's disingenuous to label voluntary any lawsuit settlement? I'm assuming the RNC is not a mom & pop business whose legs start shaking at the sight of a legal document. They had the resources to litigate the allegations and chose not to, I'm assuming because the chances they had a meritorious defense was dim.
Right, we're back in familiar unfalsifiable country. If the RNC lose on an issue it's not because it wasn't meritorious but rather because the RNC is perpetually helpless and unable to defend its interests against an onslaught of relentless attacks. These types of excuses can be self-soothing as a coping mechanism, but they're not very persuasive to other people.
You've conveniently supplied an easy answer to your own question:
Whether or not they had a meritorious defense, I cannot say. Either way, settling because you are highly likely to lose at trial is not "voluntary" in any meaningful sense, any more than cutting off your own finger to avoid someone else cutting off two.
Again, I neither asserted nor implied anything as to the legal merits of the RNC's position. I simply drew the obvious inference regarding the effects of the settlement on their institutional capacity to effectively engage the relevant issue, entirely independently of whether that settlement was warranted.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Republican Party. Now that I've sworn the oath, can I speak without further insinuations?
Cool. So to recap, @atelier 's explicit claim is that it's impossible to know how much voting fraud happens in this country because the RNC was subject to a 30 year consent decree about the conduct of their polling observers. Somehow (unsure how) this on its own hobbled their institutional capacity to such a devastating degree that they were left helpless from effectively engaging on the issue of voter fraud, even years after the decree was lifted and despite significant motivation and resources on their side. Somehow (again, unsure how) the consent decree about polling observer behavior had ramifications that extended well beyond to other arenas, and crippled the RNC's ability to litigate, investigate, or otherwise advocate against voter fraud. Simultaneously, institutions that would also have a strong interest in investigating voter fraud (such as law enforcement, or other republican organizations) abdicated their responsibility for some unknown reason. Of course, I'm setting aside the underlying assumption that only democrats engage in voter fraud.
I anticipate I'll be accused of a misleading summary. If so, it would be useful to know which step exactly is erroneous. For now I'll just refer you back to atelier's comment that kickstarted this thread.
Just to be clear, you mean “years” as in two years, because (as I already noted) the decree was lifted in 2018 and the only national election since then was in 2020.
If you were in the business of genuine persuasion, I suppose that this is where you would reveal your extensive experience with poll-monitoring and ballot challenges. Then you could explain in detail how it’s actually really easy to get tens of thousands of volunteers mobilized and adequately trained in two years or less to coordinate doing that across thousands of decentralized voting precincts. To really put a bow on it, you’d be sure to take into account the fact that a substantial plurality or even outright majority of these precincts underwent dramatic administrative changes immediately before that election due to (read: on the pretext of) the Covid pandemic, many of which served to make those very activities far more difficult, if not practically impossible.
You will be accused of a misleading summary because you gave a misleading summary. I hope that the above helps to show why.
You haven't contradicted my summary, but instead just doubled-down on the assertion that it was impossible to investigate voter fraud because the RNC was really left helpless (setting aside other people with an interest in investigating voter fraud, like law enforcement and whatnot). You can chalk it up to a deficient theory of mind on my part, but I don't understand who finds these excuses persuasive. It comes across as calcified helplessness.
I have given reasons why you’d expect the RNC to lack the relevant capacities at the time(s) in question, none of which you’ve given arguments against. You simply double down on the assertion that the RNC or others really must have been efficacious, without evidence, ipse dixit.
"We don't know if bigfoot exists because my cryptozoologist uncle has been in prison for the last 30 years."
"Aren't there other people that can look for bigfoot? Maybe park rangers or something?"
"My uncle really is in prison. He can't look for bigfoot from behind bars."
"Ok fine but you haven't explained why your uncle is pivotal in the hunt for bigfoot! What stopped other people from looking for bigfoot? Assuming he exists of course."
"By now I've clearly established that my uncle has not been in a position to conduct any scouting trips for bigfoot, none of which you've even tried to dispute. Good day sir!"
Your problem was both that I was supposedly saying the RNC was helpless and not accounting for other interested parties. You said exactly that in your last reply. Now you’re acting as if you never said anything about the RNC and it was always exclusively about the third parties. That’s dishonest.
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