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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19679 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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Yes! The point is, more than the Lizardman Constant truly believes that there was fraud, when our system only works when we all agree that voting is fair and honest. Both sides need to bend over backwards to make sure that everyone has faith in our elections because that is the only way we keep the ship running.

It's significantly more than the Lizardman Constant. Rasmussen in 2023 had 32% of Democrats believing it was very likely that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election (13% "somewhat likely"). 62% all voters for very/somewhat. Now, before someone jumps on me, that's "affected", not "the election was stolen". But this loss of faith is a serious problem, and no amount of socially enforced outgroup-blaming or ostrich-heading among Respectable People will change that.

This assumes that it's a both-sides problem, when the root issue is that Republican (and even more specifically Trumpist) political elites have found it useful to raise bad-faith claims of vote fraud. This renders attempts to satisfy their concerns largely pointless: the only way to convince their followers will be to convince their leaders, and their leaders know what they are saying isn't true.

Democrats also reject the legitimacy of elections, though with less concrete explanations of what would make them more comfortable with them.

For Trump, it was Russian Collusion. Bush was "Selected, not Elected.". In smaller elections there are complaints about voter suppression. Locally there was a big kerfuffle that State funding got pulled to send out extra busses to bring people to poll locations on Election Day.

These comparisons are laughable. One off comments, random local issues, and material complaints about voting access are being compared to a top-down campaign by the Republican Party's elite.

One off comments that lead to an impeachment?

Notably, Stacey Abrams also claimed that her 2018 gubernatorial election was Stolen (I will, in fairness to both her and Blake Masters' mysteriously broken voting machines, say that having partisan Secretaries of State overseeing elections seems insane to me).

As if democrats don’t make bad faith claims about elections all day long.

Yep. And maybe the SAVE act isn't the right solution.

But its the one that's actually being offered.

I've said that I would actually be okay with the death penalty for anyone caught fabricating some large number of votes.

The system is THAT important to maintain faith in it.

And I also suggest sanctions for trying to overturn an election based on spurious claims of fraud, since that also undermines faith in the system.

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