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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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The Proud Boy sentences being quite severe is on my mind today. 22 years for Tarrio who was not there on Jan 6. He does have text saying it was them who did it. A few others got in the high teens sentences who were there.

I will admit I respect the Proud Boys and agree with a lot of their statements. I do believe the 2020 election was stolen. The lack of a secret ballot thru mass mail-in voting violates every principle of Democracy. Without violating the secret ballot Trump would have easily won in my opinion. The Proud Boys official position from memory was a desire for a new election following Democratic principles. Seems fair to me. So I feel they are directionally correct even if they took things too far.

  1. The right won’t get equal treatment in the court. It seems like the key courts are in cities that are going to have unsympathetic juries and judges. If you flip these courts to rural areas then my guess antifa types are getting 20 years and Proud Boys 2 years. In rural areas they would have judges very sympathetic that the election wasn’t proper and their anger was justified in the same way BLM protestors get courts sympathetic that America is a racists nation.

  2. I think the left is making a mistake with these massive sentences. If they gave them a couple years I would feel it was fair as they went too far. But now I want them pardoned. If Trump pardons them as he should then it’s a slap in the face of the court decision. Delegitimizes the court to have the court decide these are really bad people deserving long sentences for overturning Democracy but then have the next guy release them. It feels very third worldish to me. With other lawfare attempts it seems as though any future POTUS should do mass pardons. I’m not sure how balance of powers can survive this.

  3. The punishment for Proud Boys seems to have some connection to the debates and Biden declaring them “white supremacists” and Trump telling them to “stand by and stand down” (which felt coded). It made it important these guys got long sentences to confirm that they are the bad guys because then a court confirmed what they told you. Same thing with Floyd officers and long sentences which confirmed that they were bad murderous cops. A jury convicted therefore we know it’s true.

  4. It’s another example of punishment for exercising your right to a jury trial.

I agree with Garrett Jones books “10% Less Democracy” and America would be better with less activision and less voting. But America looks more and more like a third word spoils system. Win you get the spoils, lose you go to jail. Which makes elections far more important.

Links aren’t important just sometimes people asks for articles.

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1172530436/proud-boys-jan-6-sedition-trial-verdict

https://apnews.com/article/enrique-tarrio-capitol-riot-seditious-conspiracy-sentencing-da60222b3e1e54902db2bbbb219dc3fb#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20(AP)%20—%20Former%20Proud,for%20the%20U.S.%20Capitol%20attack.

https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/1503603571

https://reason.com/2023/09/06/with-22-year-sentence-ex-proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-pays-hefty-trial-penalty/

Edit: Focus on the punishments and any results from the severity. I used a certain frame to put it in their view. We don’t need to discuss election legitimacy again.

Update: They released the offered plea deals. Basically 35-50% of sentences given out. All basically received double max sentence of plea deal. One of them is saying it violates his constitutional right to a jury trial and will appeal on those grounds. Which I believe is directionally correct but the whole system efficiency collapses without this work around. A much broader issue which would be nice to find a better solution.

https://twitter.com/rparloff/status/1699751415076266140?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

ll basically received double max sentence of plea deal.

Not quite. The plea deal specifically says that the Government can seek an upward departure (and the defendant can seek a downward departure).

More importantly, a comparison of the deal with the sentence is meaningless without assessing the strength of the case. Suppose the probability of conviction was 50%. If so, the offer of 50% of what they got is exactly the expected sentence, so there is no "trial penalty" at all. If the probability of conviction was higher, then the offer was great deal. If the probability was lower, then the opposite is true.

I don’t think that is what our constitution means like your playing a dice game. And take the expected value. The punishment is for the crime you are guilty of. Guilt or innocence is from a guilty plea or a jury conviction.

Yeah, expected outcome is absurd in this circumstance. Should someone who is 1% likely to have committed a crime have to serve 1% of the sentence? No, they're either guilty or innocent, and the whole point of the system is to find that out. It is admittedly broken at the moment, but only because we need somewhere around 10X the number of judges/clerks/courtrooms/prosecutors/defenders/bailiffs/police etc that we currently have. Not sure why no one ever seems interested in growing the infrastructure to match the population, but so it goes.

I believe you are correct. Atleast constitutionally. But I also don’t think 10x costs is worth it. And procedurally it would be a complete pain in the ass to prosecute small crimes.

As a middle ground I think 20-30% more time would be the best situation which is enough to get obviously guilty people to plea but small enough that the government can’t just leverage high sentences for pleas.

Should someone who is 1% likely to have committed a crime have to serve 1% of the sentence? No, they're either guilty or innocent, The issue is NOT whether they are 1% likely to have committed a crime. It is whether they are 1% likely to be convicted of the charges against them. Those are not at all the same; someone who is found to be 1%, or 50% or even 90% likely to have committed a crime is 100% likely to be acquitted.

the whole point of the system is to find that out. No, the whole point of the system is to determine whether the prosecution has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the person is guilty. And unlike "guilt" or "innocence", there is no black or white answer that question. The exact same evidence might be seen by one juror as crossing the threshold of reasonable doubt, but by another juror as falling short. That is particularly true given that many, of not most, trials are not whodunits, but whatdonits, and whatdonits are often all about the defendant's mental state: Did he intend to kill, or merely to injure? Was he in fear for his life, or not? And, to make things even more complex, some elements of some crimes and some defenses have no existence outside the judgment of a jury. For example, a person can successfully assert compete self-defense only if the jury finds that a reasonable person in his situation would have felt in fear of his life. Similarly, in Oklahoma, a person is guilty of reckless homicide if he acts with reckless disregard of the safety of others, which "is the omission to do something which a reasonably careful person would do, or the lack of the usual and ordinary care and caution in the performance of an act usually and ordinarily exercised by a person under similar circumstances and conditions." Again, what a reasonable person would do is purely the creation of the judgment of the jury, so it is impossible to say whether a defendant is "guilty" or "innocent" of that crime until a jury has ruled.

Right, which is why under the plea deal some charges were to be dropped, and some enhancements not argued at sentencing. The guilty plea would yield a different conviction than would a jury verdict.

You seem to be operating under the assumption that the plea deal reflects the "true" level of guilt, and that hence any punishment greater than the offer is unjust. But you have no basis for that assumption.

No I am not operating under that assumption. We have a constitution. It says you have a right to a jury trial. For other rights the government doesn’t get to coerce or charge you for them. There is no pay $100 for the right to free speech.

If these guys committed a very bad crime then they should be punished for those crimes. I’m not sure the government has a constitutional right to decide to negotiate on charges.

This is ability becomes much more of an issue with overcharging and all sorts of enhancements. These things have given the government the ability to use them as leverage to prevent jury trials. You just need to create statutes with big penalties to scare people into accepting whatever deal you offer. Which then takes away your ability to get a jury trial.

And yes of course jury trials aren’t practical. The founders didn’t imagine 4 month trials for a lot of the things. They likely saw smaller communities with simpler cases and a handful of witnesses.

But make no mistake the way our system works now has largely eliminated the right to a jury trial.

For other rights the government doesn’t get to coerce or charge you for them

Again, if you are framing the longer sentence as a "charge" for having a jury trial, then you are assuming that the sentence in the plea deal was the "correct" sentence.

I am not making that assumption. I never said the plea deal was the right sentence. Perhaps the plea deal should have offered the years of the guilty verdict. But as a right the government can negotiate around what they think is the right deal.

Somewhat uniquely it seems, I'm finding these events to be a white pill. So despite the complete abnegation of the right's political class to audit the 2020 election, its plebians showed up to carry the banner as far as they could. Of course they lost every possible tactical battle (no recount, no trump, were shot to death on tv, persecuted, humiliated, brutalized) they may have won the strategic war in terms of what could have possibly been achieved on that day to set the foundation for change.

First, the brouhaha of the protest forced the hand of the establishment into doubling down on the righteousness of an election where procedure was at best a complete aberration. The bodies are buried all over the place here, and many actors have credible knowledge that can tell you where to dig them up. In essence a now much larger faction of the left's power players are vulnerable to a special commission into election corruption. That's a completely legitimate superweapon that might not be picked up by yesterday's or today's congress, maybe not even tomorrow's either. But the threat of it is certainly a bargaining chip from here on out to encourage compromise. Just like how D's like to think out loud about court packing when they want to influence decisions.

Second, the official legal system now has blood on its hands too. Other means of control - riots, lockdowns, and mandates - were plausibly deniable from the court system's responsibility. Not so here; every obscure legal trick trotted out, every partisan and prejudicial comment is now on record. And now the face of this chicanery is a charismatic black man being held for decades on purported terrorism charges, but where its rather obvious even to causal international observers that he's more a political prisoner. Wait, haven't we seen this one already?

Finally, for as dumb as the right can be, it seems like they learned a lot from this action. They saw their enemy utilize their advanced weapon systems on what was at best a light expeditionary force. As an insurgent, you must not funnel into your opponent's strength. What those strengths are, and an instinct for the warning signs that indicate they are incoming is much better understood and communicated than it was before.

There's something that feels desperate and weak about the establishment response to Jan6 and Canadian truckers protest. Let's not get carried away and say we've got 'em right where we want 'em, just yet. But somehow, someway, a bunch of boomers, e-grifters and one or two shamans have made every branch of government in DC role around in the mud with them. I respect the great sacrifice many are now paying for to win this outcome and think their actions will be seen in the long view as extremely beneficial.

This is cope; you don't win by losing. The establishment(s) showed strength and ruthlessness with its response to January 6 and the Canadian trucker protest. You won't see major right-wing protests again in either country.

But there was no way a protest could "win" that day, the entire machine had already lined up behind a predetermined outcome. They could certainly have lost by going too far with the LARP but they didn't.

The main thing they could win is a public, well documented grievance. This has been difficult for the right because it suffers the death of a thousand cuts from third parties that can never be tied directly to the Dems. The grievance is useful when the system falls into crisis, it will naturally seek "reform" to reach a new equilibrium, and that involves the establishment feeding one of their factions to the crocodile, namely the parties responsible for the grievance. For example, an ordinary Joe might wonder "where did this new coronavirus come from?" as his life is completely upended in the Spring of 2020 (crisis). You don't want to answer that question, so you pull a grievance - "there are childrens bones under the school!" - feed some churches to the crocodile, reform, equilibrium, order restored.

This response to Jan6 has also created a highly useful as a Motte and Bailey: treatment of Jan6 prisoners and Fed infiltration is the motte, electoral corruption is the bailey. Vivek is now using this tactic: although he has not ventured into the bailey (AFAICT) he is establishing himself in a very reasonable and sympathetic motte.

Of course they lost every possible tactical battle (no recount, no trump, were shot to death on tv, persecuted, humiliated, brutalized)

It's actually even worse than that. Sometime not a long time ago, I think on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, George Bush Jr. gave a speech at the memorial site of the Flight 93 crash, and used that occasion to specifically condemn Ashli Babbit as a dangerous right-wing extremist terrorist, and with that she condemned and dishonored a woman who volunteered to the army after 9/11 because she wanted to answer his patriotic call to action. This means she was duped by, and driven into debt bondage by, and eventually shot dead by the Deep State, and she did all this in the belief that she was a patriot. This is where we're at. (I've heard this on a right-wing dissident podcast.)

This speech?

As a nation, our adjustments have been profound. Many Americans struggled to understand why an enemy would hate us with such zeal. The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability. And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.

That’s as close as he gets to calling her out. It’s vague enough that it could be referring to BLM riots, too! A rather vanilla call for unity.

I don’t think “hey, trashing government buildings is bad” makes for a very hot take. Especially not from the guy who ushered in our current security state.

It’s vague enough that it could be referring to BLM riots, too!

Due to the reference to the disdain for pluralism and defilement of national symbols, I say it's rather clear he's referring to J6. But anyway, thanks for digging up the primary source. It seems I was somewhat mislead, but only somewhat.

Bush chose to signal his loyalty to the powers that be over the impotent right wing. Given his potential status as a pariah, it was probably a wise, and entirely self-serving, action.

But I doubt it was necessary. Isn't he basically a pensioner who paints portraits of dogs as a pastime? Who was ever going to accuse him of being tied to J6 protesters in any way? What does he have to lose, or prove?

Social shunning. My impression is that most people in the big leagues would lose most of their social connections if they ever said or did something that goes against the grain too far. Money isn't really the focus for most when you're that high up, it's getting to sit at the Cool Kids Table 😎.

This is exactly my point: J6 got GWB to "disrespect the troops". Respect for troops was the single political legitimacy card that guy had left when he left office. And he just used it up...for that.

Think about British police in India, or Alabama police swinging their clubs in the 60s. Sure the police won physically. And yes the protestors had more sympathetic backing and portrayal in the media than MAGA does. But the major source of legitimacy for British rule in a colony like India was that their administrative services were considered far more restrained and civilized than anything a third world country like India could muster on its own. Gandhi's activism forced that frame to break, revealing savagery where cool competence was assumed by most of the public. Babbit likewise did something almost impossible, made the shooting on an unarmed white woman by a black guy the lead story on CNN for weeks (something there had been a lot of but never mentioned, or if so only briefly then memoryholed). And they had to figure out how to get their audience to cheer it on.

If you want a white pill: Babbit getting shot on the Capitol steps easily did one thousand times as much to advance her values then getting blown up in Kabul would have done.

I do not know whether the election was rigged or not. Has someone thought through the mechanism by which the election could be rigged on a sufficiently large scale?

However, one way or another, I disagree that Trump would easily have won a fair election.

He barely won in 2016. In 2020, he was no longer fresh and exciting, he just mostly repeated his 2016 campaign rhetoric. Plus the Democrats had had 4 years to attack him in the media. Plus he had failed to deliver on many of his promises. And then COVID did a lot to hurt the boost he would otherwise have gotten from the good economy.

In any case, instead of constantly trying to squeeze out narrow victories, maybe the Republicans could figure out how to put together a platform that would appeal to a greater number of voters, while also at the same time doing more stuff like what Musk has been to take away some of Democrats' domination of the media?

If they cannot do that, then I cannot think of any viable option for them other than secession. A coup would be very unlikely to work. Republicans do not have enough country-wide public support for that and federal law enforcement and the federal military are unlikely to back a coup.

He barely won in 2016.

At this point I really don't understand why people keep making this argument. Yes, technically you're right. On the other hand, he barely won against Hillary fucking Clinton! Surely we can notice the significance of that!

The significance being that he almost lost to an extremely unpopular opponent?

Everyone and their mother took it as evident that Hillary would win. I remember the TV reports. The various 'Trump will never win' compilations on YT alone are testament to this.

Sure, she absolutely was seen as a massive favourite to win. But that had less to do with her being popular, and much more to do with Trump being even more unpopular.

As this article from August 2016 says, she was the second most unpopular major party nominee in history - behind only Trump.

I didn’t exphim to win, but even the polls that had Trump losing were fairly close, and at least based on Social Media, should not have shocked anyone. The energy online was excitement about Trump where I never saw anything like that for Hillary. Ad in the rumors about her health and the rather ill-timed email investigation announcement and it’s not hard to figure out.

The 'Trump will never win!' compilations from left-wing media are no more prevalent than the '2020 Election was rigged!' compilations from right-wing media.

The media will get behind whatever narrative they are required to push in order to maintain the access and popularity required to keep their profits up. It should not be confused for data on anything.

Clinton was, indeed, a weak candidate, and the actual data-driven outlets like 538 gave her appropriately mixed chances.

The significance is that for many on the right (think of those who listened to Rush on occasion, but weren't necessarily Maga types), they'd prefer the constitution being changed for four more years of Bill Clinton over Hillary being elected. Far from being an asset, she was almost uniquely disliked.

How significant is it though? Most elections since 2000 have been pretty close, so saying that it’s somehow significant that Trump barely beat Hillary, when either party can get 45% in polls just for a block of wood baring their label.

I suspect it’s down to big data managing to dig deeply enough to predict and identify potential voters and messaging good enough to attract those likely red or blue voters with targeted advertising. The era of broad-based appeal ended with social media data mining and targeted messaging.

I say the 2016 election was different in that a) the 2000 and 2004 elections were between candidates who had roughly equal charisma (well, lack of it, really) and institutional backing b) the 2008 and 2012 elections were largely decided by the GOP candidates being cucky, plus also lacking institutional backing.

The 2008 election was determined by 1)the economy; and 2) the fact that the incumbent party had been in power for two terms. There was essentially no chance of the Republican candidate winning in 2008.

either party can get 45% in polls just for a block of wood baring their label.

Polarization is sufficient to explain this. There were a lot of Democrats who were utterly unenthused about Hillary Clinton (especially after the primaries) but held their noses to vote for her; likewise I know Republicans who voted for Trump despite disparaging him beforehand and drinking to dull the pain afterward. Many of them would have done so even if their other party had managed to put up a good opponent, because negative views of the opposing party as a whole just kept going up. (Is there any much more recent data than that 2014 Pew report? A quick hunt isn't finding me anything post-2016.)

I suspect it’s down to big data managing to dig deeply enough to predict and identify potential voters and messaging good enough to attract those likely red or blue voters with targeted advertising.

Does that explain the data? Those Pew graphs do seem to roughly show Democrats' polarization rising from the late 90s and Republicans from the early 2000s, which I guess is right around when I'd guess a significant fraction of Democrats and Republicans started getting their news from the internet. (at which point, who needs Big Data? people like to bubble themselves among sources they already agree with...) There are so many possible explanations, though, I think I'd need more than one piece of very rough evidence.

Polarización exists because the elites can better tailor their messages to appeal to one or the other ideology and since the advent of Cable have been able to do so in ways that effectively keep their own constituents from being contaminated even accidentally by opposing news or viewpoints. The Left uses sources like Vox, MSNBC, CNN and the New York Times to become informed. The Right uses FOX, Breitbart, OANN, and talk radio. The logic is much like a drug dealer. Hook people on condensed versions of their political opinions, crank up the potency, and have a voter for life. Plus, it allows for targeted advertising not only of candidates (the right candidates won’t buy time on CNN where very few of the right leaning voters get their news) but of organizations and products (for example Black Rifle Coffee as a “conservative coffee” meant to be a replacement for Starbucks).

In any case, instead of constantly trying to squeeze out narrow victories, maybe the Republicans could figure out how to put together a platform that would appeal to a greater number of voters, while also at the same time doing more stuff like what Musk has been to take away some of Democrats' domination of the media?

Well the domination of the media is the only thing keeping the Dems competitive as well. Its a problem that all solutions are slow, and now with the DOJ and FBI being institutionally captured, a reverse long march might even end up being illegal.

If the original long march succeeded despite having begun in the quite conservative time period of around WW2 and having faced obstacles like McCarthyism, legal segregation, and a fervently anti-communist CIA, then modern Republicans really have no excuse. What, are they just not as brave as leftists of 70-ish years ago were?

That is a mischaracterization of the post WW2 era. In that time the progressives already had an advantage and simply solidified it over the years. McCarthy never had much power (despite being correct).

When, in your opinion, was the most recent time period in which progressives did not have an advantage?

And how did they gain the advantage despite not having already had an advantage?

Probably the assassination of Lincoln marked the time where they gained a significant edge. They gained said advantage by assassinating a more prudent figure to tip the scales in their direction, then began a consolidation effort.

Before the revolutions of 1848, maybe.

What, are they just not as brave as leftists of 70-ish years ago were?

The original long march succeeded and plenty of the people who went on that long march are still around - and more importantly, they remember what they did and how effectively it worked. You may as well ask why modern militaries don't try to gift their opponents large wooden horses filled with hoplites - there are a lot of strategies which can work when the other side doesn't know what you're doing, but fail immediately when your opposition knows the trick you're trying to pull.

I think it succeeded for institutional reasons as well. The biggest strongholds are places where market forces don’t work, and it’s extremely difficult to remove people. University is a huge win because tenure makes it nearly impossible to remove ideological capture. You do not simply fire a woke professor. Likewise you do not simply fire a woke deep-state actor, or Hollywood writing team. Worse, since those in that kind of position are choosing their successors, they can select only other woke people for those roles.

I think for entertainment and education, the best option might well be parallel institutions. If those universities suddenly have to compete with schools that offer an excellent education and serious scholarship, they either adapt or die. If there are a thousand indie movies and tv shows and books that are well made, entertaining and not pandering to the woke crowd, then, again, it’s adapt or die.

Worse, since those in that kind of position are choosing their successors, they can select only other woke people for those roles.

They've actually gotten into teaching of the law as well, and they also like implementing codes of conduct and professional standards which make right wing political opinions grounds for termination or loss of credentials, as things like "voting for Trump" start qualifying as racism/homophobia/sexism. They're making sure that conservatives are completely cut out from prestigious roles/elite circles.

I think for entertainment and education, the best option might well be parallel institutions. If those universities suddenly have to compete with schools that offer an excellent education and serious scholarship, they either adapt or die. If there are a thousand indie movies and tv shows and books that are well made, entertaining and not pandering to the woke crowd, then, again, it’s adapt or die.

Absolutely agreed here. When organisations start becoming left wing political bodies they usually stop performing their original function in a satisfactory way, so there's a lot of room for competition as long as you can avoid getting crushed by the Cathedral.

I think on the second part of this, the internet provides an excellent work around. I can write a book, and print it as a PDF file and publish it on my website. I can make a video and host it myself. I can create an online university and offer courses in anything I find useful and important taught from a dispassionate intellectually rigorous perspective. Advertising and marketing might be an issue, but making content available isn’t.

I'd argue that, at least by the turn of the millennium, most right-wingers were aware of the long march and its immediate consequences, but were naïve enough to assume that the long-term consequences will not be significant. After all, at this point it's almost classic right-wing delusion to think that the kids will surely straighten themselves out in the end when they enter the job market and need to start toiling away, no matter how much leftist nonsense they were subjected to by their red professors.

I mean that does seem to be directionally correct- stably employed, married, homeowning millennials probably vote a lot like their gen x parents, the difference is that millennials are less likely to be those things.

That's not exactly what I had in mind, but that reads like a correct observation. My main argument is that, even as late as about 10-15 years ago probably, it was completely inconceivable for right-wingers that leftist culture warriors (indoctrinated by their long-marcher elders) will capture ideological control of big companies, and most segments of the private sector altogether.

I suppose it depends which right-wingers. Paleocons saw this coming a mile away. Gottfried published After Liberalism in 2001 which contains exactly such a prediction.

I do not know whether the election was rigged or not. Has someone thought through the mechanism by which the election could be rigged on a sufficiently large scale.

it would only have to be done on a handful of swing states

22 years..damn. the guess the silver linings are that he can get up to 6 years reduced through 'good time' and maybe halfway house and drug program, plus he already served some of his term pre-sentencing. And he will likely be sent to a low security prison. In other counties and historically, such a crime would be punished by death penalty or a similar or worse sentence, so it's not without precedent, but still seems unduly harsh.

The argument that the election was inherently flawed because mail-in voting somehow violated the principle of a secret ballot doesn't hold water and is made in bad faith by those who didn't like the outcome in 2020. Mail-in voting has existed in various states for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years, absentee voting has existed for longer, and no one I'm aware of made the argument that it was inherently flawed prior to 2020. Indeed, as late as the fall of 2019 PA's mail-in voting bill sailed through the state legislature with unanimous Republican support.

Claiming that mail-ins are suddenly unconstitutional to the point that we need a redo is a convenient argument to make if your guy loses the election and you're grasping at straws for some excuse undo the result, but let's not pretend that this is an argument based on principle. Would you be making this argument if Trump won?

It's also telling that 2020 is apparently the only election they care about. No one was protesting the 2021 off year elections for local judges and clerks, no one was protesting the midterms, no one was protesting the various special elections that have been held over the past few years, and I doubt anyone will protest this year's elections. Hell, there doesn't even seem to be much of a legislative push in red states to completely do away with mail voting, or any serious court challenges raising the secret ballot issue. It all comes back to Trump—shit only matters when he's involved. The entire system is rigged against him and him alone. I've always thought he was a narcissist but at this point I can't really blame him giving the number of people who do act like the world revolves around him.

This is pretty bold. I cataloged some history here with citations to quite a few international civil society organizations. The most difficult statement for your position came from OSCE in 2010, which is clearly both before the timeframe that you discovered this issue and from a European organization which couldn't give a shit about Republicans or especially Trump back in 2010:

Voting by secret ballot Voters should mark their ballots alone, in the privacy of a voting booth, and in such a way that the marked ballot cannot be seen before it is cast and cannot be later connected with a particular voter. Exceptions can be made only under specified conditions, such as at the request of voters who require assistance, e.g., disabled or illiterate voters. Any voting outside of a voting booth compromises the secrecy of the vote. The presence of more than one person in a voting booth should not be permitted, as it compromises the secrecy of the vote. Open voting or unlawful voting by proxies are violations of the secrecy principle. Arrangements for voting by members of the military and by prisoners should ensure their votes are secret and not subject to coercion.

People care about this. People across the political spectrum used to care about this. People across the political spectrum used to care about this all in agreement in basically all liberal democracies. There simply wasn't a controversy before, because we all agreed.

Ruining the secret ballot is bad. It also happens that ruining the secret ballot hurt Trump the one time. Trumpists are going to jump in because of the latter. We should all continue to agree on the former and not let reversed stupidity cause us to be also stupid.

I believe changing the rules of the game while the game is in progress, very much to the benefit of one party, constitutes cheating. I don’t much care if the cheating was sanctioned by Democratic dominated state courts and federal courts refused to weigh in because of standing.

Many dems believe 2016 was stolen; for the right, it's 2020. The problem is , recent elections have become too close and too high stakes. no one talks about irregularities or inconsistencies of the 1984, 1980, 1996, 2008, or 2012 elections, which were more overtly lopsided. Instead of either side occasionally running duds like Mondale, Dole, Romney, etc. the process of selecting candidates has become much more optimized and the nation more divided, overall, leading to closer elections in which refereeing and counting plays a more important role. This is going to get worse and people will continue to lose faith in the process, for both sides.

bad faith

What is 'bad faith'? Maybe, when someone uses poor arguments or selectively chooses facts to further a personal goal that isn't 'truth-seeking'. But does that require them to intentionally do so, or does it merely require them to fall into a pattern of doing so? The ... "election denier" ... operate in functional bad faith, not conscious bad faith. And they share that with most participants in political discussions. When someone reads an accusation of bad faith, they imagine they're accused of conscious bad faith, and then get upset that their genuine attempts to discuss aren't taken seriously.

Say you're arguing with a Christian about whether God exists. They make the usual arguments, that 'something caused the universe, so that thing must be God', 'humans are simply too complicated for evolution to create', 'the historical case for Jesus's miracles is undeniable', 'all logic needs axioms and thus has no grounding, so it must be grounded in something, which is God'. Yeah, these are all fallacious, some trivially so - 'thing that caused the universe' doesn't have to be spiritual or sentient, fossil and DNA evidence for evolution is overwhelming, history is replete with other strongly attested miracles that didn't happen. And, if you're approaching the question from a position of genuine intellectual inquiry, how is it possible to - not to make so many mistakes, everyone is mistaken about everything - but to make so many mistakes in the same direction? But if they're saying things that are superficially convincing and support their claim, whether or not they're accurate, it all makes sense.

Okay, but ... some of us have been fundamentalist christians or progressives in the past, and that's not what it feels like. You genuinely believe in what you're saying. You, initially, see your interlocutor as someone who's misguided but could be persuaded. Your mistakes come from lack of knowledge and cleverness, bad sources of information, a lack of discipline and carefulness in thinking, and all sorts of social and moral constraints. But if that's "bad faith", then most discussions people have are bad faith.

Okay, to you it's obvious that most vote fraud arguments are terrible, obvious enough to dismiss those making it as bad faith. I agree that the arguments are terrible, seemingly obviously so. But it's also obvious that the spirits of our ancestors don't inhabit their graves, that praying doesn't help people with medical problems, that freudian psychoanalysis is bunk, and that neither democrats nor republicans are evil moral mutants. Yet man, very intelligent people of the past or present whole-heartedly believed all of those, and made all sorts of tortured arguments for them. The fact is, understanding the complicated world and society we live in is just hard. Even in areas with better-than-average truth-seeking institutions and incentives, like corporations or universities, people end up with a lot of false beliefs. Take away the institutions and incentives, like in casual news/politics discussion, and people end up blabbing nonsense even in areas with no partisan divides. Then add Trump, who many Rs saw as the only guy on their side in Washington, losing an election, and they saw the usual weird events that happen in any large-scale social system as proof of election subversion.

Would you be making this argument if Trump won?

Most of them would not be. But they don't know that, in the same way that a preindustrial Muslim doesn't know they'd be Christian if they were born in Europe instead of the Middle East. And some of them still would, because mistakes don't go away if there's no tribal motive, they're just not amplified as much.

I'm not arguing that most of the fraud arguments are made in bad faith, regardless of how terrible I think they are; I'm arguing that this particular argument is made in bad faith. Republicans had no particular opposition to mail voting until Trump decided he could get some kind of advantage by making a big deal about it. This isn't some long-held Republican principle, it's a convenient argument to a self-serving end. That's where your Christianity analogy fails; I'm Catholic myself, and if a sincere Protestant wanted to have a conversation about faith with me I'd be happy to discuss it with them, even if their aim was obviously evangelical. But I'd be less happy if I found out they had recently converted because there was some personal advantage to them doing so that was wholly unrelated to their spiritual needs. I think people like Joel Osteen get a little too much flac from irreligious types because he seems like an obvious huckster. But I'm reluctant to join in on the dogpile because, despite his wealth, there's nothing in his past that suggests he isn't sincere. That, and I've actually listened to his sermons and it's obvious that his critics haven't because nothing he says is remotely objectionable. But I'd probably feel different if he were a twice-divorced advertising executive with a conviction for writing bad checks who became a self-ordained minister at the age of 40 after realizing that a combination of Billy Graham and Tony Robbins was a license to print money. And who also was a frequent visitor to tit bars and had been kicked out of every country club in the Houston area because he was too much of an asshole for the members to want to deal with.

Republicans had no particular opposition to mail voting until Trump decided he could get some kind of advantage by making a big deal about it.

Citation very much needed.

Maybe I'm just old but my recollection is that Republican opposition to mail-in ballots and demands for voter ID go back at least as far as the Clinton years.

In PA, Republicans passed the mail in voting law in 2019 (thus nothing to do with COVID) because they thought it would help their rural voters or because they wanted to get rid of straight ticket voting in exchange (depending on the representative in question).

This is what they said then:

"In late October 2019, the Pennsylvania General Assembly was preparing to pass a comprehensive voting reform package that included no-excuse mail-in voting. Republicans, who controlled both chambers of the Legislature, were happy that they had managed to eliminate straight-ticket voting as part of the legislation. Some Democrats, including state Rep. Mike Sturla of Lancaster, were miffed by this and so voted against what would become Act 77. But the Lancaster County Republican delegation to Harrisburg voted overwhelmingly in favor of the legislation (state Reps. Steven Mentzer and David Zimmerman voted against it). The legislation passed in the state House in a 138-61 vote (note 59 of the votes against were Democrats) , and was approved by the Senate in a 35-14 vote. (note the 14 votes against were all Democrats) The state House Republican Caucus website was almost giddy in its characterization of this “Historic Election Reform,” the “most comprehensive effort to modernize and improve Pennsylvania’s elections since the 1930s.” State House Majority Leader — now Speaker — Bryan Cutler, of Drumore Township, discussed the legislation in glowing terms. “This bill was not written to benefit one party or the other, or any one candidate or single election,” Cutler maintained. “It was developed over a multi-year period, with input from people of different backgrounds and regions of Pennsylvania. It serves to preserve the integrity of every election and lift the voice of every voter in the Commonwealth.” What was not to like? Reporting on the new law, CNN noted that it eliminated a “requirement that applicants for absentee ballots provide an excuse as to why they can’t make it to the polls.” “We never checked anyway,” said state Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, who’s now the Senate president pro tempore and is seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination. As Spotlight PA reported, Corman hailed Act 77 as the “most significant modernization of our elections code in decades.”"

and

In a column published in May 2020 in LNP | LancasterOnline, Kirk Radanovic, chairman of the Republican Committee of Lancaster County, wrote that “this new mail-in voting option in Pennsylvania will be a crucial tool for the Republican Party and candidates to succeed.” “Anyone can apply to vote by mail, without a reason or excuse needed,” Radanovic wrote, encouragingly. “If you think COVID-19 or the prospect of long lines will keep you from wanting to go to the polls on Election Day, then vote by mail. “Our state senators and representatives have worked to ensure the integrity of this process, including safeguards to protect your vote.” He pointed out that every “mail-in ballot includes a unique bar code that is used to match you and your ballot, a security safeguard.”

PA only expanded mail in voting because the GOP wanted it done, they had majorities in both House and Senate. Mostly it was Democrats who voted against it because they feared the loss of straight ticket voting would hurt them. The fact that barely a year later they were now saying the very law passed by Republicans was unconstitutional and left things open to fraud is you have to admit a little laughable.

There is shooting yourself in the foot and then there is shooting yourself in the foot and then saying:

"Act 77 also had the support of almost all of the Republican state representatives in the Pennsylvania House, including state Rep. Dan Moul, a Republican from Adams County who joined the lawsuit over the mail-in voting law in 2021 "So my bad. I should've checked the constitutionality of that big bill," Moul says."

It's either staggering incompetence or a scapegoat for the loss, but at least in PA, The Republican party were all for mail in voting..until they weren't.

This is not what I remember. Historically, the majority of mail-in ballots have been from military personnel, which heavily favor Republicans.

You're thinking overseas absentee ballots which before universal mail-in was a very different thing. Sometimes not even meaningful and not reported in pre-SOS verified vote totals since the total number of those ballots was often less than the margin of victory.

Republicans had no particular opposition to mail voting until Trump decided he could get some kind of advantage by making a big deal about it.

And yeah, structurally and functionally, "republicans" acts in bad faith. But "republicans" aren't a single entity that acts. For almost all individuals involved, what it feels like is: In 2016, mail-in voting is something you just haven't thought about much. Maybe you've done it, maybe you haven't, but you don't have a strong opinion on 'is it secure or not'. It's reasonable to not oppose something you don't know much about. Then, post election, you start noticing that the Deep State and Mainstream Media really have it out for trump, they'll say anything so long as it makes him look bad, and they'll even break procedure and law to go after him. In 2020, you notice democratic organizations are trying to help orchestrate and "fortify" elections, a lot of laws are changing, and suddenly there's 10x more mail-in voting than there was last year - so you interpret that as action against trump. Now post-election, and there are so many reports of dead people voting, ballot harvesting ... And when you google 'mail-in voting concerns', there are all sorts of pre-2020 articles from mainstream media that are suspicious of mail-ins! And when you compare that to today's rhetoric, the "same people" are suddenly claiming that mail-in voting is safe and secure. The most secure election ever! It just adds up. How is it my fault I didn't oppose mail-ins before when they just weren't as important?

All that exposition is to emphasize that it doesn't take conscious bad faith to get into a position that reasons in an obviously motivated way. It just takes careless and motivated reasoning, something all sides have in spades. When there are bad-faith actors involved, they're mostly people like Trump or media figures who'll advance an argument that gets views even if they know it's bullshit - all of the individuals who consume news and debate it online believe it. But I think those people aren't necessary ingredients, and what happens is more like - someone who's a bit manic and mad that the dems lost trump does some bad statistics with voting numbers, a twitter user reads a bunch of old news articles and posts screenshots of their headlines, leading to rumble videos and substack post about the awful thing the democrats did this time. And then credulous intermediaries excitedly consume those, believe them, and repost them to their followers. You could argue the intermediaries are being dishonest by not checking what they repost for accuracy ... but a more parsimonious explanation is they believe it as much as their followers do.

So the convenient changes in position come more from poor reasoning distributed across social networks than it does intentional bad faith.

I could buy that argument if it actually comported with the facts on the ground, but it doesn't. I live in Pennsylvania. In October 2019 the state passed a law authorizing mail-in voting. How many Republicans voted against it? Not a single one. Not Doug Mastriano, not all the other MAGA wannabes of whom there was no shortage of at that time. And the law was fairly big news at the time, and it was controversial. But the controversy came from a few urban Democrats who didn't like that it did away with straight ticket voting. Even in 2020, when the pandemic first hit and states were changing their laws, there was no clear partisan angle. The idea that the 2020 election was somehow affected by last-minute changes is one of the most pervasive pieces of misinformation out there, because it has enough of a grain of truth in it to make people accept it uncritically without considering the full implications. Yes, some states made last-minute changes to their laws. But the states that were at issue in the presidential election had already passed mail-in voting laws prior to the pandemic, and, other than Pennsylvania, had already conducted elections by mail. Some states changed the rules in 2020, but several of them did so through legislative action, which is no different than how laws are ordinarily passed. That leaves the states where mail voting was expanded by executive action, whether by the governor or the state board of elections. What states were these? Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, New Hampshire, and West Virginia. The only one of those that is close to being a swing state is New Hampshire, and it has a Republican governor. Kentucky has a Democratic governor, but no one is confusing it for a blue state. The rest are all as deep red as you can get. The point is that, as late as the spring of 2020, a lot of Republicans though expanding mail voting on short notice was a good idea. Then as soon as Trump starts running his mouth in the summer, every Republican who matters falls in line and talks about how this is suddenly a great security risk, as though The Donald was the only one wise enough to notice these problems. Sorry if I don't buy it.

The argument that the election was inherently flawed because mail-in voting somehow violated the principle of a secret ballot doesn't hold water and is made in bad faith by those who didn't like the outcome in 2020.

I didn't vote for trump and was happy with the 2020 outcome...

This was the first time such a system was used. There was good reason for doing so (covid) but I can understand people being critical of it. Immediately labeling it bad faith is unhelpful. Doing things like censoring statement comparisons from the 2016 and 2020 elections, makes me think they might have a point.

This kind of hubris is going to cost us another election.

I didn't vote for trump and was happy with the 2020 outcome...

I wonder if there is anyone who voted for Biden but thinks the election was stolen against trump

What would this prove aside from the existence of echo chambers?

How about actually engaging with the points someone is trying to make?

There have been multiple polls by Rasmussen (and others) who identify something like 30%+ of registered Democrats who answered "It's likely" to the statement "How likely is it that cheating by corrupt public officials prevented Trump from winning the Georgia election in 2020?" over the last few years (geez, it's already been almost 3 years since the 2020 election).

So, there are likely lots of people who voted for Biden who think the election was "stolen," i.e., that corruption/fraud/illegal ballots affected the outcome of the Presidential election in 2020.

I voted Biden, and while I don’t think the election was necessarily stolen, I do think the methods used in 2020 in particular make it insecure and therefore making fraud almost impossible to detect. And no democracy can survive if you have a method of voting where you cannot be sure that the results are real. I’m not going to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist.

A method that doesn’t allow for cross checking and auditing is simply not one that the public can trust completely.

Statistically, that person is present among every noticeably large gathering of minorities.

Actual neo-nazis probably fit the bill weirdly enough. Like that one guy recently interviewed that fought for Azov and voted Biden to support Ukraine.

Come to think of it, a lot of hardcore Marxists probably qualify as well.

I voted for Biden, but it was a close decision and one I now regret (even though I live in a state where my vote wouldn't have made a difference). I think it's more likely than not that the election wasn't stolen, but I'm not willing to dismiss the possibility out of hand, especially because Democrats consistently oppose efforts to make elections more secure, such as requiring ID or forbidding others from mailing in your mail-in ballot.

I don't have strong feelings about the result of the election (I'm not even American and I detest Trump) and I have long been a strong opponent of mail-in ballots, going back before Trump got into politics. The whole design of the voting system, from the rules against campaigning near where people are voting to the fact that you fill in the ballot out of others' view and you're prohibited from photographing your ballot, is to ensure that you can't prove to anyone who you voted for so that your vote cannot be bought or coerced. This is all thrown away by mail-in ballots.

This is a widely held position. My parents, who hate Trump and think he's a fascist who is trying to become a dictator and that January 6 was an attempted coup, strongly feel the same way.

The argument that the election was inherently flawed because mail-in voting somehow violated the principle of a secret ballot doesn't hold water

Thankfully, this is not the argument. The argument is that mail-in voting plus ballot harvesting makes it possible to engineer votes on a mass scale, after which there is no possible way to determine legitimate from illegitimate.

"owning the libs" has always been the primary motivating factor in Trump's continued support at the expense of other more "reasonable" and Blobby candidates.

This is so comically wrong that I do not think you have an accurate understanding of Trump or the resentment that he rode to the white house. A large portion of his base supported him because of his policies and they had legitimate reasons to do so. They continued to support him despite many of those policies not being implemented because they (correctly) saw that his efforts were being stymied by the GOP establishment, bureaucratic inertia and the machinations/conspiracies of the deep state (this is not actually controvertible given the text messages and statements that have been made public). Mass illegal immigration, lack of enforcement or punishment for gross financial crimes, encouragement of outsourcing - one of the huge predictors of Trump support is if you belong to the demographics that were actually harmed by these things which he swore black and blue to fight against.

If you're interested in an article on this, I highly recommend https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/

Instead of preserving precedent and the norms of a functional democracy that would have outlasted whatever damage Trump could've done within the law, the Blob lowered everything down to that of a struggling banana republic because of a shared delusion that democracy with Trump would be and was worse than a decrepit pseudo-Brezhnevian vanguard state without him.

It wasn't a shared delusion - Trump, if he wasn't hindered, would absolutely have made things substantially worse for the people who were in power. The policies him and his base wanted to enact would have been substantially better for the country as a whole (at least in my opinion), but substantially worse for the people who were in power. There was a lot of money to be made selling influence and favourable policies to the uber-rich, and Trump would have destroyed huge swathes of that system if he was successful. The people working so hard to defeat Trump were only doing so to preserve "democracy" in the sense that they understood democracy to be rule (and of course a constant flow of money and luxuries to them personally) by the PMC.

The same argument could be made against the Democrats had Trump won. And they did contest the election in 2016, except instead of mail-in ballots, it was the fault of the electoral college and immediate demands to have him impeached for the impertinence of winning. They pressured individual electors to become faithless and refuse to vote for Trump. Plus, you know, having people defacing public property with #notmypresident2016, but because it never proceeded to concerted overt action and power was successfully transferred, no one seems to remember it.

I have no doubt that democrats would have done something unseemly had trump won in 2020, and I’m open to arguments that they won by cheating, but the fact of the matter is that there is no evidence of democrats having tried anything like changing the actual vote totals or storming the capitol building, and that 2020 faithless electors were all protest votes anyways(nobody thought ‘faith spotted eagle’ would be the next president of the USA).

Look, the breakdown in civil norms and loss of public neutrality and inferno-like culture wars are like 85-90% the fault of the democrats, let’s not blame them for things they didn’t do(and which didn’t happen either).

storming the capitol building

Why should storming the capital building be any different than when rioters stormed the White House?

People constantly try to paint the Jan 6 protest as something extraordinary, when it was just the right wing seeing what the left had been doing for the past four years and deciding to use a tool that apparently works.

Don't blame the protestors for assuming good faith and not realizing that left-wing protests were being sponsored and applauded by the various institutions kicking around.

Why should storming the capital building be any different than when rioters stormed the White House?

I agree that rioters in general (and those rioters in particular) should be punished much more harshly than they have been, but there is a distinction to be made with Jan 6. In the case of Tarrio in particular, he didn't even storm the capital! But he did engage in a seditious conspiracy to overturn the election, and that's what he copped the 22 year sentence for.

The BLM riots, bad though they were, were not the exact same flavour of bad.

  • -11

I await with bated breath the Russia-gaters and 2016 faithless electors getting 22+ year sentences then.

‘Lying about your political enemies’ and ‘casting foreseeably meaningless protest votes in a way that is specifically foreseen by the constitution’ are not the same thing as interrupting official proceedings while making terroristic threats(which the J6er’s did, they were chanting ‘hang Mike pence’).

Yes, there’s too much focus on J6 and ‘our democracy’. But dissimilar things are dissimilar.

Yes, I should stop getting into specific comparisons because we have many resident lawyers who will gish gallop around with liberal § characters proving that case A is never exactly like case B. And they’re probably right but I simply don’t care. I have eyes that can see that the law is applied unequally and in one direction more often than not. So whatever § says is irrelevant to me because I view it as illegitimate.

There’s no correcting this within the bounds of “the law” because anything approaching effective dissent is functionally illegal, so I won’t pretend to care about the minutiae of “the law”.

I'm afraid "hang Mike Pence" is simply shorthand for "put Mike Pence on trial for a capital crime and execute him by hanging", so it's not a terroristic threat? Ridiculous? Sure. But no more ridiculous than claiming ordinary hyperbolic political chants are "terroristic threats". BLM protestors famously chanted "Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon", referring to police and not S. domesticus, and while distasteful that clearly wasn't a terroristic threat either.

There you go again - focusing exclusively on elements of an offence and acting like that's the offence in its entirety.

Let's get into the detail. Tarrio was found guilty of seditious conspiracy, 18 USC 2384, which says:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

So let's apply this to the 2016 faithless electors. Can we convict them of the same crime?

Two or more persons conspire? Yep, that threshold was met. They agreed on the scheme, and committed overt acts in the furtherance thereof.

In any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States? Definitely.

Conspire to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the Government of the United States? Nope.

By force prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States? Nope.

By force seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof? Nope.

Similarly, the Russiagaters do not fall foul of this statute.

So, whatever crimes they may have committed, they were not the same ones as Tarrio, and there is no reason to expect them to attract the same sentence - leaving aside that there are many reasons why two people convicted of the same offence may be subject to different sentences anyway.

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there is no reason to expect them to attract the same sentence

They will not attract any sentence. That’s the whole point.

More comments

Protest votes that would foreseeably do nothing except draw attention to some Native American activist and telling political lies are not the same thing.

that there is no evidence of democrats having tried anything like changing the actual vote totals or storming the capitol building

(1) Lying to create "Russia-gate," including lying to FISA courts in order to ensure that Trump campaign officials' phones were being tapped.

(2) Impeaching Trump over his attempt to investigate what we now know was actual quid-pro-quo corruption in which Ukranian oligarchs paid Joe Biden's son to have Joe Biden leverage U.S. foreign policy to prevent their prosecution.

(3) Rioting outside the White House including setting the next-door church on fire.

(4) Organizing 51 intelligence officials to falsely claim that the Hunter Biden laptop - which the FBI had possessed for over a year previously and knew to be genuine - "bore all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation" in a successful attempt to interfere in the 2020 election.

(5) Organizing social media censorship of stories connected to the Hunter Biden laptop.

and, actually most importantly for the 2020 election:

(6) funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars in ostensible "COVID-relief funds" through private donors to election officials in Democratic-controlled swing-counties, who then proceeded to use almost none of the funds for COVID-relief purposes, and instead used it to hire Democratic activists to run partisan get-out-the-vote operations, and in some cases effectively privatize the actual conduct of the elections themselves:

"Trump won Georgia by more than five points in 2016. He lost it by three-tenths of a point in 2020. On average, as a share of the two-party vote, most counties moved Democratic by less than one percentage point in that time. Counties that didn’t receive Zuckerbucks showed hardly any movement, but counties that did moved an average of 2.3 percentage points Democratic. In counties that did not receive Zuckerbucks, “roughly half saw an increase in Democrat votes that offset the increase in Republican votes, while roughly half saw the opposite trend.” In counties that did receive Zuckerbucks, by contrast, three quarters “saw a significant uptick in Democrat votes that offset any upward change in Republican votes,” including highly populated Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, and DeKalb counties."

Hemingway, "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections," Ch. 7

The quote from Hemingway is referring to work done by the FGA (link to all their "Zuckerbucks" pieces here, which if you look at the website, appears to be one of those dime-a-dozen orgs that just spits out low quality research, infographics, and political talking points (thinly disguised if not actual PACs).

And let me tell you, that quoted conclusion of yours insinuating a causal or even a loose mere correlation in Georgia between Zuckerbucks and Democratic vote counts is an absolutely atrocious case of statistical malpractice. Any real statistician looking at the data (if they even felt this approach was even capable of yielding a real/practical/trustworthy answer, which they likely wouldn't) would say that those kind of margins don't even begin to approach statistical significance. The original source is here, and maybe if I'm feeling spicy I will analyze it tomorrow properly to check, but right now my alarm bells are ringing. I'm pretty tired atm, so I might be wrong, but I think 41 counties getting money vs 118 not is going to have a detectable difference required that's much more than 2.3 points with any sort of decent statistical power.

The suppression of the Hunter Biden story and the plans outlined in in the TIME Magazine article show that the blob doesn't need to stuff ballots or change totals; they have (had?) enough power over the inputs to the voting system that such crass measures were unnecessary.

I recall reading a study which claimed that the (knowingly deceptive!) suppression of the Biden laptop story changed the outcome of the election. I don't think many people who say the election was rigged are talking about that specifically, but it absolutely was a relevant factor. At the same time, I think the accusations of rigged are going to come back in force given the blatantly political prosecutions with dates chosen specifically to interfere with his election campaign.

and no one I'm aware of made the argument that it was inherently flawed prior to 2020

So like Barack Obama in 2008? Or 2012? (when Democrats worried absentee voting would drive old-people votes which harmed them). Or Trump whining about it for months before the election as the scheme was being ramped up by executive fiat in explicit contravention to election laws across dozens of states? There are dozens of high profile examples over the last 2 decades and sooner who have discussed the inherent flaws in mail-in voting and how they're prone to fraud and coercion, part of the reason being the lack of secrecy which makes buying votes more feasible because the person can pay you as they take your ballot, verify what it says, and then give you your $50 target gift-card.

Each time mail-in or absentee voting legislation has been passed, this was discussed repeatedly with additional security requirements and conditions because of those concerns. 2020 saw mail-in voting explode in usage while at the same time most anti-fraud checks were ignored.

It's honestly pretty puzzling you're unaware of any of this.

Claiming that mail-ins are suddenly unconstitutional

No one is arguing mail-in voting is inherently "unconstitutional." What people are arguing is the fraud which was enabled by illegal election law changes (which is unconstitutional) and simply ignoring anti-fraud requirements, including the mail-in scheme, made it so the election outcome was legitimately in doubt, the only practical available remedy being a redo. The way elections are conducted in the US make them not meaningfully auditable even if all players didn't fight tooth-and-nail to restrict transparency.

We're not talking about millions of votes needing to swap, but ~40,000 in any of 5 different states, any of which would change the outcome if a single one did something as simple as requiring canvassing hundreds of thousands of votes which had no signed chain of custody receipts (and no election officials have yet been charged despite this being a crime in multiple states like AZ).

Would you be making this argument if Trump won?

If two people raced bikes all over France and then the loser tested positive for PEDs, do you think they should both get a do-over race or otherwise we're not talking about "principles"?

edit: you added the entire last paragraph and maybe some other changes after others had responded

No one was protesting the 2021 off year elections for local judges and clerks, no one was protesting the midterms, no one was protesting the various special elections that have been held over the past few years

So the protests in Arizona over that "election" and large ongoing legal battle over it just don't count?

The Federal Government is currently abusing laws made 150 years ago in response to the Civil War as well as stretching interpretation of other laws way past their breaking point in front of laughably biased "judges" and juries, to find and throw people in jail for a protest in DC in Jan 2021 in response to the election of 2020, and your response is because they don't come out in large numbers again after all of these people are having their lives destroyed and made examples of, is because they just don't care? Well, that's certainly something.

Do you follow election disputes/protests over "local judges and clerks," closely?

Well, at least you got in your jab to make this about trump and how he's just the worst or whatever.

To take your arguments one by one:

So like Barack Obama in 2008? Or 2012? (when Democrats worried absentee voting would drive old-people votes which harmed them).

I don't remember this. I do remember some kerfuffle where the Obama campaign sued Ohio because they passed a law giving the military three extra early voting days, and the conservative media tried to spin it as him trying to restrict military votes when the lawsuit sought to give the rest of the population the same early voting window as the military. Obama's been pretty consistent about "more voting, not less".

Or Trump whining about it for months before the election as the scheme was being ramped up by executive fiat in explicit contravention to election laws across dozens of states?

I clearly limited my argument to before 2020. And the states that ramped up mail-in voting by executive fiat weren't ones that were at issue in the 2020 election. Only 5 states changed absentee voting requirements through executive action—less than half a dozen, not dozens—and among them, three are clearly red states controlled by Republicans (Alabama, Arkansas, and West Virginia), one (Kentucky) is a red state with a Democratic governor, and one (New Hampshire) is left-leaning with a Republican governor. There was no clear liberal pattern here.

There are dozens of high profile examples over the last 2 decades...

I don't know about dozens, but I'll admit there are a few. But I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove. Everything involves tradeoffs. Suppose, for the sake of argument, it were conclusively proven that voter fraud could be eliminated entirely if we limited voting to polling places in major cities. The ultimate effect of this, of course, would be that the rural vote would be rendered entirely irrelevant and elections would have a decidedly partisan lean, probably to the point that our politics would realign entirely. If these now disenfranchised voters complained, I'd respond that people who find it too inconvenient to drive a couple hours to vote obviously aren't motivated enough to deserve any say in government, and people who can't afford the trip obviously don't have enough "skin in the game" to deserve a say in government. If the primary goal is the elimination of fraud, why wouldn't this be an ideal solution? We both know the answer to this question. The question isn't whether fraud exists, it's whether it has enough of a practical effect to make additional restrictions worthwhile.

Each time mail-in or absentee voting legislation has been passed, this was discussed repeatedly with additional security requirements and conditions because of those concerns.

No, it wasn't. I live in Pennsylvania. When mail-in voting passed in 2019 the biggest issue about the bill was that it also eliminated the straight ticket option, which led to some Democrats voting against it in protest. It otherwise passed unanimously, and was quickly signed by the governor. Every single Republican voted for it, including arch-election truthers like Doug Mastriano. I'm sure you can find some concerns if you look hard enough, but as someone who lived in the state, I don't recall it coming up once, and this is a politically diverse state with the largest legislature in the country. Similarly, in Michigan, the biggest criticism of Prop 3 wasn't that it expanded mail-in voting but that it was making something that should have been a legislative item into a constitutional one.

No one is arguing mail-in voting is inherently "unconstitutional."

I was writing this on my phone at work so I apologize. The OP said that it "violates every principle of Democracy", which I misinterpreted. Feel free to substitute the correct language.

We're not talking about millions of votes needing to swap, but ~40,000 in any of 5 different states

Well, no. Flipping one state wouldn't have been enough to turn the election in favor of Trump. At best he would have needed to flip two, provided they were Michigan and Pennsylvania. Realistically he needs to flip three. And if he goes the flip 2 route then he needs about 80,000 votes in PA and over 100,000 in MI, at least double the 40,000 you mentioned. What's the largest mail vote fraud scheme you can find? How about the average? Remember what I said about tradeoffs?

if a single one did something as simple as requiring canvassing hundreds of thousands of votes which had no signed chain of custody receipts (and no election officials have yet been charged despite this being a crime in multiple states like AZ).

Ah, yes, the old "the previous five audits we requested didn't find anything, but if we do a sixth one we're pretty sure the whole edifice will come crashing down because a televangelist saw something in a viral video that PROVES that Biden and the Democrats committed MASSIVE FRAUD by forging hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots under the cover of night but being too dumb to think of forging chain of custody receipts along with them". I'm sure the Kraken will finally be unleashed.

If two people raced bikes all over France and then the loser tested positive for PEDs, do you think they should both get a do-over race or otherwise we're not talking about "principles"?

Are the PEDs supposed to be a stand-in for fraud, or for mail-in ballots generally? If they're a stand-in for mail-ins generally, then they aren't a banned substance and there's no problem; you can't claim a race was unfair just because you don't like the rules. If they're a stand-in for fraud, then you do get to win the race, but I don't see what this has to do with the election—in one case you found actual evidence of cheating, and in the other you didn't, you just argued that the rules made it easier to cheat. What you're suggesting is more analogous to a race where PEDs are banned and your opponent never tested positive, but you want to rerun the race because you're pretty sure he cheated but can't actually prove it.

The Federal Government is currently abusing laws made 150 years ago in response to the Civil War as well as stretching interpretation of other laws way past their breaking point...

Well, what do you think a more appropriate charge would have been. If organizing a plot to take over the Capitol building in order to prevent the lawful transfer of power of a democratically elected president so that it will remain in the hands of the guy who lost isn't seditious conspiracy, what is exactly? What line do you think he needs to cross? And how is the jury biased? Unless you're arguing that he didn't actually do what the government said he did, there's no room for bias here. Jury nullification isn't something you can expect from any jury, and isn't something you should expect in this case unless you seriously think attempts to overthrow the government should be legal.

Do you follow election disputes/protests over "local judges and clerks," closely?

lol, I'm a lawyer. I deal with these people all the time, and yes, it makes a difference. I not only follow them closely, I follow them closely in counties and even states where I don't live and can't vote. If you want I can fill you in on the drama in West Virginia's First Circuit judicial retention election, or tell you about the recurring pissing match between the current and former Recorders of Deeds in Westmoreland County, PA.

others have linked plenty evidence disproving your claim that few cared about mail-in voting and how it's prone to fraud and coercion (secret ballot being part of it) before 2020

I don't know about dozens, but I'll admit there are a few. But I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove.

it's supposed to prove that people, including GOP, cared about this topic before Trump lost in 2020, the implication and claim of your comment

I clearly limited my argument to before 2020.

then this is a weird comment because your implication is Trump/supporters care because he lost, but Trump didn't lose in April of 2020 so bringing up examples of people caring before Trump lost would be pertinent to that implication

And the states that ramped up mail-in voting by executive fiat weren't ones that were at issue in the 2020 election. Only 5 states changed absentee voting requirements

are you using "mail-in" and "absentee" interchangeably here? various states do not use this interchangeably, but in any case this is simply wrong with an easy example being WI changed the interpretation of who could register and vote absentee based on a claim of "indefinite confinement" with the WI SOS giving illegal guidance about that topic

there are more examples but this isn't really my argument anyway; my comment isn't that Trump complained about "mail-in" only was ramped up, but about the "scheme," i.e., who could apply for ballots, how they would be sent out, how requests would be sent out, how they could be collected, who could collect them, how those requirements would be used, how they would be filtered, how signatures would be compared, etc.

No, it wasn't. I live in Pennsylvania. When mail-in voting passed in 2019 the biggest issue about the bill was that it also eliminated the straight ticket option, which led to some Democrats voting against it in protest.

You have lots of opinions and assertions about what PA is like given you live there, but when I spend effort looking at those assertions, what I find disputes your claim which makes me hesitant to bother again. Others have provided many examples of people, GOP included, complaining about how mail-in ballots are prone to fraud, coercion, and manipulation before 2020, so whether or not "every" time it's brought up it leads to a loud enough complaint for you to hear about it doesn't particularly affect that belief.

Given the clown-show that is election procedures in various parts of PA, I would agree maybe the increased fraud caused by mail-in ballots doesn't particularly matter and eliminating the straight ticket could affect more.

Well, no. Flipping one state wouldn't have been enough to turn the election in favor of Trump.

Yes, that's a good point. If Trump had flipped one state, I believe the other 1 or 2 would have followed which is why there was such a mobilization to prevent even one from flipping. Perhaps that's not the case.

What's the largest mail vote fraud scheme you can find? How about the average? Remember what I said about tradeoffs?

the "fraud," i.e., illegal ballots which were counted, in AZ, GA, WI, NV, were all larger than the difference in votes with PA being likely and MI being arguable but probably not; um, 10 illegal ballots on average, now what?; I did read and reply to your paragraph about tradeoffs

Ah, yes, the old "the previous five audits we requested didn't find anything, but if we do a sixth one we're pretty sure...

forging hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots under the cover of night

funny enough, the fraud scheme KRAKEN you think is so ridiculous also wouldn't be found by any of the "five audits" which you apparently think show no fraud occurred

or did you just not know how the "audits" were conducted? ballot recounts wouldn't catch your KRAKEN scenario

What you're suggesting is more analogous to a race where PEDs are banned and your opponent never tested positive, but you want to rerun the race because you're pretty sure he cheated but can't actually prove it.

what I'm suggesting is the argument of the people you're accusing of not caring about principles; those people believe they did find fraud

claiming there wasn't fraud/cheating/peds is fine, but then you're arguing over facts and not principles

lol, I'm a lawyer.

me too

I must be missing something, what part of being a lawyer means you necessarily follow election disputes over "local judges and clerks" around the country? This requirement was probably on that one day I missed in 1L Civ Pro.

Hold on. I grew up in Oregon, they have had mail in ballots for a very long time, and nothing yet has surfaced as a problem despite this worry of yours that vote-buying is possible.

I’m of the school of thought that the system is responsive enough that we can actually wait, yes actually wait until we start to see hints of an actual problem before taking action. Otherwise just let things take their normal course, that has a long history of decently functioning checks and balances.

That system, which involves judges sometimes making calls in cases that don’t allow for the full regular process to play out, due to time constraints and the nature of a national emergency, is a fine way to resolve things. Sometimes I think a few judges overstepped. That’s not okay to be upset about, but it’s also normal. Nothing was diabolical about it. And in fact despite the so-called massive weaknesses of how things played out, practically zero evidence of fraud showed up to court. Due process after the fact was followed, and that due process determined that most every allegation was either worthless or unsubstantiated.

Moreover, guess what? People in every state are still armed with democracy even now. Many but not all states have reverted parts of their covid changes. And in all states, if voters want to “tighten” (quote marks because it’s a misnomer, IMO) voting laws, they are perfectly free to vote to that effect and elect representatives who share their views to make or revert changes moving forward.

Classic example is Raffensburger in Georgia. Voters re-elected him with a significant margin. In other words, The People we’re perfectly happy with how the process went.

I didn't write this was only a "worry" about "vote-buying." The "worry" of others I described was how mail-in ballots are far more prone to various types of fraud and other concerns, one of which was "vote buying" tying the comment into the above about the importance of secret ballots in "democracy"; whether or not this is done through "vote-buying," isn't necessary, but there are more than enough "hints" of this happening with the target gift-card description not being something I made up but something which was alleged to have happened in Las Vegas, Nevada. The affidavit of which was collected as part of a filed election lawsuit.

Otherwise just let things take their normal course, that has a long history of decently functioning checks and balances.

How would you know whether or not these "checks and balances," are decently functioning? What do you think are the current "checks and balances"? Could you describe to us the apparatus which investigates this in Oregon? Could you detail for us some of the investigations they've done in Oregon? Do you know which, if any, of these "decently functioning checks and balances," were discarded or ignored in Oregon in the last few elections?

What is your level of knowledge about how the election system, i.e., registering, printing, sending, collecting, counting, canvassing, etc., for the state of Oregon?

practically zero evidence of fraud showed up to court

dozens of binders of sworn affidavits showed up to court in many states, but those affidavits and lawsuits weren't heard on the merits

and the "process," wasn't followed either, with an easy example being the district court responsible for expedited process in the Trump's filed election contest simply refusing to start the process, an appeals court dragging their feet and refusing to make the district court do the process, and then that lower court declaring the whole thing was moot because of Jan 6

Did you know that?

You keep using this word "due process," but what does it mean to you? "Due process" doesn't necessarily determine something on the merits, so making a statement about evidence which exists and was determined by a court to be "worthless or unsubstantiated" is simply wrong and evidences a lack of knowledge about this topic.

In the above example, the explicit process wasn't followed. So was that the "due" process? Or does it just not matter because Raffensberger was elected a year later anyway?

First, your specific reference to a Las Vegas lawsuit, as near I can tell, does not exist. There was this story? If that's it, the fact you are misremembering specifics that do not exist is concerning. If you mean that story, it was about a GOTV effort that offered a raffle entry to Native Americans for voting (only illegal if proof of voting is required to enter the raffle, something the news story doesn't really address) and perhaps gave gas cards to voters who were in remote locations (apparently, legal if the gas cards are used to go to the polls, so that one might be a question mark).

If vote buying actually occurred, much less if it occurred on a scale needed to actually tip an election, we would know about it. Conspiracies are easy to hide for a few people, for a few isolated cases. Conspiracies that are capable of actually tipping an election? Practically zero chance they are undiscovered.

As to the history of how the balances work: a simple google will lead you to the Oregon SoS page which will tell you:

In 2020, out of millions of votes cast, residents and local elections officials reported 140 instances of potential voter fraud. Of these 140 cases, four cases were referred to the Oregon Department of Justice and two of those are pending resolution. By comparison, in 2018 there were a total of 84 total reports of voter fraud. Two were referred to the Department of Justice.

So clearly they are on the lookout but consistently don't find much. Going farther back? "[T]he Division obtained 38 criminal convictions for voter fraud out of the 60.9 million ballots in Oregon elections cast over a 19-year period". Oregon has an extensive and well-tested system of voting by mail with very little history of issues of nearly any kind and nothing I have ever seen gives me any reason to think otherwise.

As to the legal process. Maybe you don't know how courts work? I am starting to genuinely wonder. Sometimes, a lawsuit is filed, and it's so obviously false, unsupported, or has such a disproportionate ask (or of course lack of standing/wrong jurisdiction) that a court declines to even consider it. This is not a random gut decision but a process involving often multiple hearings and submissions from lawyers. In these cases, even though nothing is publicly examined and goes through some sort of trial-like process, the judges certainly look at and study the submissions they receive. They then evaluate the submission on its merits. News organizations as well as citizens kept a close eye on these and virtually none of them panned out -- and huge majorities of people actually in the know and experts on election processes, when they actually examined these affidavits, almost always found them to be poorly researched, based on hearsay only, misunderstandings of legitimate vote counting processes, etc. All this to say, it's certainly due diligence (due process, if you want to get real technical, is a more specific term about individual rights, but I'm using it in the broadly acceptable and widely used sense of "to fully and fairly traverse the full normal procedures").

There's basically a mountain of reasons to believe that by and large the voting system works pretty darn well, and by that token I refuse to be drawn in to some off-topic epistemic debate. The whole thing just frankly reeks of cognitive distortion and confirmation bias on a massive national scale. That's why Trump never actually settles on a single list of reasons why the election was "rigged", because it wasn't evidence -> conclusion, it was "I feel like I won" -> "let's seize and publicly endorse any and all claims that match but the specifics don't matter because I am so sure I won"

There was this story?

No. You get a target gift-card if you allow your ballot to be collected.

If vote buying actually occurred, much less if it occurred on a scale needed to actually tip an election, we would know about it.

If only this were true, but it's not "hidden" you just didn't know about it.

a simple google will lead you to the Oregon SoS page

So clearly they are on the lookout but consistently don't find much.

Does this webpage constitute your understanding of all the questions I asked? If so, this doesn't inspire confidence you have any granular knowledge about these topics at all; In the few states I've worked politics in (not Oregon), the SoS/AG and other parts of the government do not have a good apparatus to catch voter fraud; they essentially just rely on local election officials to report things and they sometimes look into a few of them to make a show of it. Local election officials are not equipped to catch voter fraud; they rely on the legal requirements as to what constitutes a "legal ballot" to fight fraud. If those requirements are removed or simply ignored (as happened en mass in 2020), then you have destroyed the "checks and balances" you claim work well because they were ignored and not enforced.

that a court declines to even consider it

Courts didn't throw these lawsuits and contests out because they entirely lacked merit, but for lack of standing, mootness, etc. Lack of standing doesn't have to do merits of any particular substantive case, it's something which was dreamed up 100 years ago to enable courts to simply refuse to get involved. Mootness has to do with the wanted remedy being now impossible or the underlying conflict not mattering anymore. In some election cases such as the election contest in Georgia, it's because the lower court flat out refused to schedule a hearing despite it being required, by law, for them to do just that, and then once Jan6-20 rolled around they simply declared the contest moot anyway and discarded the case.

Judges and clerks do regularly look at the "merit" part of cases even when they dispose of them for the reasons I described above, however, that doesn't mean they "found" them to be lacking or however else you characterized it. In normal cases, this typically does influence judges into massaging or overlooking procedural errors. In a case like the election lawsuits and contests for an institutionally disliked President to "overturn an election," the strength of the merits has an inverse effect because Courts were desperate to simply not be involved. Again, Trump's GA election contest is a good example.

Given a situation where a litigant shows up to court with a lawsuit, the court tells them they're not the proper party to file the lawsuit, and doesn't allow them to present any substantive evidence in court, implying the underlying evidence is garbage because it "practically zero evidence showed up in court" is simply dishonest. There was a ton of "hints," and a ton of evidence, but the fact none of it "showed up in court" is a condemnation of the legal system and not a defense of it.

All this to say, it's certainly due diligence (due process, if you want to get real technical, is a more specific term about individual rights, but I'm using it in the broadly acceptable and widely used sense of "to fully and fairly traverse the full normal procedures").

that's not what "due process" means, especially "substantive" due process, and again, I specifically cited a case which didn't "fully and fairly traverse the full normal procedures"

when you use statements like these in direct connection to legal arguments, using a vernacular or general definition of "due" "process" is going to confuse who expect the word to be used in the legal definition (whose implication you're using to give more weight to your assertion)

and huge majorities of people actually in the know and experts on election processes, when they actually examined these affidavits, almost always found them to be poorly researched, based on hearsay only, misunderstandings of legitimate vote counting processes, etc.

"huge majorities" huh? How would you know? Have you looked at a single one?

There's basically a mountain of reasons to believe that by and large the voting system works pretty darn well

even if one were to believe this is true, and it is sadly not if you understand how elections happen and votes are counted in the real world in districts all over the country, the voting system "working pretty darn well" and still having enough failure modes to sway the results of very close elections, e.g., when the highest office in the land is decided on tens of thousands of votes across 5 states

refereeing in a football game can be pretty good generally, but one wrong call can decide the outcome of a game

your comments avoid specifics and want to talk about generalities and imply because of those generalities that the specifics don't particularly matter on net

and I think it's because you don't really know any of the specifics about the vote process, the vote counting, the fraud allegations, the filed election contests, the filed lawsuits, etc., you just sort of have a good feeling about it therefore people are wrong or something and I do not think proving any particular specific thing is going to dislodge this belief in you

is that accurate? What type and amount of evidence do you think would change your mind from "everythingisfine" to "maybe I don't know if it is"?

I looked at a non random but still what seemed to be adequate sampling of the actual court cases within a month or two or the election and in pretty much every case, saw nothing at all to indicate extensive fraud. This includes not just the allegations but also looking into the actual comments and rulings by judges in some of these cases. I did see a lot of fraud claims simultaneously disproved. Based on that sampling I concluded that the process seemed to be working just fine. Obviously it’s been a while and I feel little need to revisit that, especially given that every specific brought up in this site so far over the past few months when it’s come up has turned out to be hogwash. Classic example: this supposed target gift card scam. I can’t find anything at all about it on Google. Zero. And the fact that you still declined to provide a source is absolutely screaming at me.

Also, precedent beats speculation. We do have a great precedent for a disputed election! Bush vs Gore. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. I know people have mixed feelings about the results, but the very fact that a legitimate grievance went through the full process, strongly implies that the same will happen again to future legitimate cases. And that was escalated from a state, Florida, that was horrifically unprepared for a recount and had poor procedures in place. So not only have we a demonstrated court escalation even when local government process is poor, we have a lot of other states that took lessons and tightened things up in terms of more and better written and followed procedures and many other improvements.

Meanwhile a lot of the 2020 lawsuits had trouble finding lawyers to pursue them, much less expert witnesses who declined to participate in droves once they saw the “evidence”.

You looked at Trump's GA election contest, which I specifically mentioned 4 times now and you've seen no evidence of any fraud? It was filed "within a month or two" of the election, but you decided to avoid the election contests filed by the Trump campaign by lawyers representing Trump and the campaign? Gosh, if only I specifically linked this case, the one I've talked about 4 or 5 times, you'll read it then, huh?

Let's say I give you a link to the exact sworn affidavit where a person describes offering people at their apartment complex target gift-cards for unenveloped ballots, what will that change? If you're honest with yourself, it will change nothing and you'll have the same opinion as before just perhaps a slight admission of "okay there was vote-buying/fraud, but not enough to change the outcome and it's just this one incident" which is the motte and bailey game which is normally played here.

I've found people who write comments like yours who are unwilling to do the legwork and want to pick out one example, demand it be spoonfed linked to them, ignore other examples they could also easily find, and in the end they don't really care about the specific incident anyway. Again, there are thousands of affidavits attesting to "fraud" across the country. Have you read a single one?

We do have a great precedent for a disputed election! Bush vs Gore.

yeah? could you go ahead and describe the context of the lawsuit, who sued whom, what it was specifically over, what they sued for, what was done at the lower court level, and the issue which went up and down and up again?was it an election contest or not?

did the lower Florida court simply refuse to schedule the first hearing to start the process, i.e., specifically denying the process to the party filing?

the truth is you simply do not have granular knowledge about these topics or lawsuits

Meanwhile a lot of the 2020 lawsuits had trouble finding lawyers to pursue them, much less expert witnesses who declined to participate in droves once they saw the “evidence”

You can go watch the disbarment hearing going on right now, live, for one of Trump's attorneys John Eastmen to maybe understand part of the reason why this is the case; you can even watch his first witness, retired Supreme Court of Wisconsin judge, Michael Gableman give you a detailed account of what he found in his independent investigation authorized by the Wisconsin legislature into the 2020 election.

Enjoy!

More comments

I'd like to call this the "Just Democracy Fallacy": if politicians win an election, whatever they do must be what the people wanted.

A guy with the job to count votes comes under national scrutiny for if he counted them well or not. He's very publicly accused of counting them badly. He is up for reelection, now a known quantity to voters, and they can ditch him for someone who also claims he counted votes badly. He is chosen by a significant margin. The assumption is, therefore, that voters must agree that he actually counted just fine. That's a fair conclusion, given how public the whole process was and the wide news coverage.

In other words, I'm claiming the opposite: if a politician does something very public and very controversial, and then afterwards is reelected, then YES, the people either agree with the controversial thing or think it wasn't that big of a deal.

Don't forget that Brian Kemp's daughter's fiance died in a car bomb. Anyways, under the Just Democracy Fallacy, because Brian Kemp beat his primary and general opponents, this must mean voters agreed with everything he ever did.

Being fair to the argument though, we’ve never ever come close to this scale of mail-in ballots, many of them actually turned in by third parties, many of them from people who had just signed up to vote that year. There was little if any vetting of who was voting, whether they’d already voted in person, whether this person lived at the address in question (some states simply mass sent ballots to addresses of known voters and there are numerous reports of people receiving an official ballot for people who no longer lived at that address) whether this person was legally able to vote, was of sound mind, and so on. Even if those ballots happened to just go to eligible voters, there was little done in most areas to confirm that the person who filled out the ballot was actually the person it was sent to.

With that level of not caring, the optimal move is to collect the ballots sent to hospitals and nursing homes where you can get hundreds of “valid” ballots sent to people who are incapable of voting. Nobody will check to see if the person should be voting, nor that the signature matches the handwriting of a 90 year old woman. Or you could offer to send on missent ballots to the right addresses (and then simply vote yourself.

In most other elections, the process for mail in voting was extremely limited. You had to apply at least 90 days before the election, you had to provide a reason why you can’t vote in person, and provide proof that you are who you say you are. And once the ballot was sent in, it was matched to your signature. If it didn’t match, the vote didn’t count.

I think the issue needs to be addressed simply because it’s a way to game the system. It can be used but it needs to be secure enough that both the government and the public can be sure that those votes came from the people who’s name is on the ballot, that the person is actually eligible to vote, and those people only voted one time.

Moving forward, yes I think it’s great to make some adjustments.

But looking backward, it is grossly insufficient to just point out theoretical or principle based concerns. You need at least some actual evidence. To my knowledge, very little if any evidence suggests that the theoretical vulnerabilities you list actually were abused.

Plus let’s assume maybe not a worst case but a bad case: that a lot of old people had people vote for them because of mail ballots. Of course that’s bad in general terms and in principle. Statistically, talking about the effect, that’s still not much of an issue though because non-coordinated fraud tends to average out, quite frankly, and it’s hard to conceive of reasonable mathematical margins that would plausibly have swung the national vote using that kind of casual fraud alone.

The issue is that once you remove the security around the process, catching a cheat becomes very difficult. If I’m not allowed to insist that the signature on the ballot match the one on file, proving that this ballot isn’t cast by the person in question is very difficult. The only evidence available is the signature on the ballot and maybe the return address (which is stupidly easy to fake since it’s public record). Unless this person happens to turn up at a polling station unaware that there’s been a ballot cast in his name, what kind of evidence is there? To my mind this is like having a store that doesn’t track inventory, have cameras, or lock doors — then insisting that I provide proof of theft. But all the things that could be used to prove theft don’t exist. The doors are unlocked, so there won’t be evidence of a break-in. There are no cameras or staff to see someone taking things. And because there’s no inventory record, we can’t check to see whether anything is missing. Once you remove all the security, proving fraud is impossible.

How does it make you feel that, on election night 2020, several swing states simultaneously stopped counting ballots? How does it make you feel that Stacey Abrams and Georgia Relublicans signed a "consent decree" so that they literally would not collect the kind of evidence we might consider? How do you feel about ballot chain of custody?

Election night is long and pauses in the pace of reporting those results isn't that odd. AFAIK, pretty much all the states counted continuously after starting the process, and did not takes breaks (example). In other words, that's a false claim.

The consent decree didn't lead to any substantive change in policies other than notification about signature matching, and I'm not concerned overmuch about chain of custody in the sense that people can often look and see if their ballot was accepted, plus any deliberate vote-changing associated with those concerns sound wildly implausible. In terms of ballot harvesting, etc. I definitely think there's some good room for stricter laws, though I don't necessarily think for example we need to be too worried about family or close friends agreeing to physically drop off sealed ballots at drop spots as a convenience thing. Campaign affiliated people doing it as some sort of service? Bad. Generic GOTV for example making it easier for seniors to vote? I think that's fine but could use a bit of supervision or auditing or something to avoid abuse, but possibly fine.

22 years is a lot.

One would hope, for the sake of the 'right wing', that these events force right wing activists to smarten up and push the 'right wing' base towards more radicalism, distrust and pessimism towards the state.

But I think in reality this will just be seen as a failed circus act. Which people will want to quickly forget so the memory won't spoil the next circus troop coming to town.

One would hope, for the sake of the 'right wing', that these events force right wing activists to smarten up and push the 'right wing' base towards more radicalism, distrust and pessimism towards the state.

This is why the neoreactioaanty movement, for example, opposes activism. Lasting and effective change comes by changing power structures from within and sentiment outside. Activism only seems to work for the left.

Activism only seems to work for the left.

And even then it's only faux semblant. Popular victories like the civil rights movement are really just triumphs held in the honor of decades of legwork to infiltrate the institutions and change them from the inside.

that these events force right wing activists to smarten up and push the 'right wing' base towards more radicalism, distrust and pessimism towards the state.

Do that and you're asking to be buried under the jail like these guys. The message is "comply, because if you don't none of the boxes (soap, ballot, jury, cartridge) will save you; they are all in your enemies' hands.

Of all the boxes, the last one still hasn't been tried.

What the American right should take from analyzing this rationally is that no amount of legal or illegal remedy will ever be enough, submit to the reality that good government as they conceive of it requires at minimum a coup, and start plotting effectively.

If the punishment for dissent is the same as insurrection, there is no downside to the latter. And the powers that be know this which is why they immediately started purging the military.

No wistful demonstrations, no standing back and standing by. If any goals are ever to be met, then clearly one needs to start stockpiling weapons, making close connections, weeding out informants, subverting the military and planning for a violent confrontation.

It's either that or run your community away to another country that will protect you. But clearly, as demonstrated here, you will not get what you want by peaceful protest, votes or judicial review. Dissent is terrorism.

Your ammobox is still defined in its compliance to the state and discounts the success of prior defectors to the state.

The Amish pay no income tax. Why are they allowed to avoid the dues of the social contract so enforced on us, and how do we achieve that?

Get thee behind me, fedposter.

That strategy is stupid. Giving up on society and becoming an outlaw has to be one of the worst possible outcomes for your life. Dying in a ditch in Idaho buys you nothing. It buys your family nothing. It’s a waste of time and effort, and it’s only by rejecting such masturbatory romanticism that we as a species have ever accomplished anything.

At least if you emigrate, you can pretend to be doing something more productive than taking a giant, steaming shit on the commons.

Emigration is a perfectly valid strategy, worked for Jews, worked for Russians, worked for a lot of people. I say as much.

But it is just cutting your losses at that point. It means giving up on the idea that a red america will ever exist again, and becoming a client minority on your own terms rather than your enemy's. Preferable, but still a defeat.

I don't think all is lost for Americans to the degree that such a surrender is necessary. Europe is very much done but the Americans still have a great deal of rightward sympathy in their military, are very disproportionally armed, have salient legal rights that any government overreach would have difficultly navigating without issue and plenty of advantageous geography to hide in. If the ammo box is not to work there, where else?

There's no place to go.

Nick Land and the white men the RAF spit out seem happy in China. Many go for the Arab world and the Emirates which retain strong traditions and a designated proper place for outsiders of the book. Ukraine used to be a popular destination before the war. And South East Asia has entire economic loops built on western expatriates. But if more grandiose are your aspirations, you can go to Africa and stake your claim to whatever you are competent at and maybe get the high reward for high risk. Or wait for things to clear up in Ukraine and help reconstruction.

There are plenty of places to go. Much of the world isn't so bigoted as to detest competent white christian men of good character for the high crime of existing. You will not be home, and you will be an outsider, but negotiating the settlement of a minority community when you have useful skills and a work ethic is something as old as the world.

Yup.

Despite having gone through the very heart of the cathedral in my formative years I consider myself more resistant to the indoctrination than my parents are/were, than most of my peers are and than any part of my education. Whatever mutation of genes and memes created me, I believe it has to be nurtured, alerting the system to my presence will only cause an overwhelming immune response that is all but guaranteed to wipe me out. So I will attempt to nurture and grow this mutation, by genes or memes.

Going out in a blaze of glory is a winning scenario for the state. Your family line will be either eradicated or severely diminished. Your manifesto (or as they will call it "your hateful screed") will not be spread. The movies they will write about you will depict you as a desperate, ignorant loser.

You can't. The right knows this, too. State capacity today is large enough to make Stalin's ghost (or Honecker's) blush. Overthrowing the government of the United States by force of arms is impossible, and their ability to prevent subversion is unparalleled (largely because it's run by those who subverted it).

It's certainly difficult, but since the alternative is a slower but certain annihilation, you don't really have a choice.

I think you overestimate the strength of the regime because of your penchant for pessimism however. There are weaknesses.

There's two ways Red Tribe can go. One is annihilation via essentially forced assimiliation. The other is annihilation by annihilation. The best way they can resist is basically the Afghanistan way -- make areas ungovernable and uncontrollable until the government puts a concentration of force in that area. This leads to annihilation. The Afghans were able to hold out against the USs little pinky for 20 years. The Feds aren't going to get tired of trying to control the US, and they will have vastly more resources to do so. And Red doesn't have the culture to hold out, eating poorly, freezing, and screwing goats as their women defect to the winning side.

There's two ways Red Tribe can go. One is annihilation via essentially forced assimiliation. The other is annihilation by annihilation. The best way they can resist is basically the Afghanistan way -- make areas ungovernable and uncontrollable until the government puts a concentration of force in that area. This leads to annihilation. The Afghans were able to hold out against the USs little pinky for 20 years. The Feds aren't going to get tired of trying to control the US, and they will have vastly more resources to do so. And Red doesn't have the culture to hold out, eating poorly, freezing, and screwing goats as their women defect to the winning side.

On the other side, world's first superpower turning into Syria (or Russia 1917-1921 ) would be event shattering the whole world.

Collapse of world's reserve currency alone would have global apocalyptic consequences.

It is not granted that what remains of FedGov would in this situation have resources to subjugate whole interior of North American continent.

There is enormous number of fictional works depicting Second American Civil War, but they tend to gloss over such details (because this would make immensely grim and depressing read).

It wouldn't look like a civil war. It would look like large fairly-lawless areas; much like the inner cities during the crack epidemic, only not urban so less noticeable.

Do you really think that the US military is going to be capable of wiping out an actual "right wing taliban" in the heartland? US anti insurgency tactics are pathetically bad (how's Afghanistan doing? Iraq? Vietnam?) and they're going to be even less effective in the parts of the US where the most competent soldiers actually come from. How many Trump voters do you think are still in the military? At the same time, I don't think you realise how little resilience there is in domestic US infrastructure. The US military couldn't wipe out the Taliban after two decades of occupation, and you think they're going to be able to do the same back home when their infrastructure is substantially more vulnerable and the population they're wiping out is the single largest supplier of effective troops? An actual domestic insurgency, if it was justified by the Feds/deep state nakedly seizing power, would not actually be stoppable by the Feds in any way that matters.

Do you really think that the US military is going to be capable of wiping out an actual "right wing taliban" in the heartland?

Yes, but even if they don't, they don't have to. Like I said, the US proved it could hold though not pacify Afghanistan more or less with its little finger for decades. The Feds merely need to do the same to any ungovernable areas of the US until the people die off.

The US military couldn't wipe out the Taliban after two decades of occupation, and you think they're going to be able to do the same back home when their infrastructure is substantially more vulnerable and the population they're wiping out is the single largest supplier of effective troops?

They'll still have most of what was once Red on their side, because they're the Legitimate Government and that matters.

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they're going to be even less effective in the parts of the US where the most competent soldiers actually come from.

At best this is a trade. The military's logistical pipelines become an order of magnitude less complex, the terrain they're fighting in becomes less rugged and more familiar, and if they're eradicating freedom fighters they'll still have 50% of the population (bootlicking soy boys) out to rat on whoever shows up at a convenience store with a Gadsden flag patch.

Don't get me wrong, I think an armed resistance in the US would do better than many people think, but I think some of the optimism here is unwarranted.

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I think the left is making a mistake with these massive sentences.

The judge presiding over the case and deciding the sentences, Timothy Kelly, is a Republican and a member of the Federalist Society who was selected for his position by Donald Trump.

and a fair number of Republicans opposed Jan 6th too

Yeah the live reaction of my hardcore GOP Trump supporting Southern Baptist family watching it go down on TV went from initial sympathy for the Trump diehards when it was just a rally outside to "the guards should start mowing down intruders asap" when they started swarming into the capitol building, and the "Hang Mike Pence" stuff added more fuel to the fire.

Radicals at DOJ and FBI enact unprecedented surveillance and jail campaign for right-wing protesters they would never use against left -- but, really, when you think about it, the jidge is nominally a Republican, so, actually, they should stop hitting themselves.

I think the left is making a mistake with these massive sentences Rather odd to assign responsibility to "the left", given that the sentencing judge is a Trump appointee.

Why do you respect the Proud Boys? What statements do you agree with?

Being pro-male and pro-western civilization and fighting back against the forces that wish to harm those ideals. Being anti communists, anti-political correctness, pro-free speech, pro-markets.

They are against racism or classifying people by their race. The funny thing reading their Wikipedia page everything bad about them is quoting the ADL which is now itself under attack for being the bad people.

The thing is, Western Civilization has never treated attempted sedition lightly, historically speaking . Western values would be to put these people to death. Although the Civil War was an exception in that Confederate soldiers and generals were not punished, but although this was to help with the reintegration.

Same token Trump would have executed a few 100 over RussiaGate etc. Those things don’t happen now.

Wait, what happened with the ADL? Is it under attack by people other than the usual suspects?

Elon throwing his weight against it, with help of Twitter. Elon is arguably the most influential unelected , non-government person alive now.

Elon Musk, unless you think he counts as "the usual suspects".

It’s probably just the current thing but the mob of the same people have it as current target. Plus Musks jumped in and says he suing them for defamation for discouraging advertisers by saying twitter is promoting hate.

I think the left is making a mistake with these massive sentences. If they gave them a couple years I would feel it was fair as they went too far. But now I want them pardoned. If Trump pardons them as he should then it’s a slap in the face of the court decision. Delegitimizes the court to have the court decide these are really bad people deserving long sentences for overturning Democracy but then have the next guy release them. It feels very third worldish to me. With other lawfare attempts it seems as though any future POTUS should do mass pardons. I’m not sure how balance of powers can survive this.

Trump can't pardon them because Trump isn't president and is unlikely to ever be. By the time a Republican is allowed to take office again, they will be rotting in jail forgotten, and the "Republican" president will agree they should be in jail anyway. Part of the point of these sentences is to get across the message that opposing Democrats too vigorously is severely punishable. Of course if Trump did take office and pardon them it would be third-worldish, but it already is.

I assume you are writing this in the third-person of a true believer Democrat.

https://www.predictit.org/markets/3/President

I think these markers are semi-efficient and he’s at 32% win rate so unlikely is false plus some percent a different republicans wins.

Biden has the Democratic party, the universities, the newspapers and other media, the unions, the corporations, the urban organizations, and pretty much everything else behind him. The Republicans have nothing except what Trump managed to put together in 2016, and that's a lot weaker than it was even in 2020. The Democrats should win in a walkover.

Hilary had all of those as well and lost just the same.

Define democrats winning in a 'walkover' and conditional on Trump being the republican nominee I'll take the other side of that bet.

Hillary also didn't have institutional support locked in for vote harvesting machines and widespread court agreement that illegal or semi-legal last minute changes to procedure do not result in an election being re-done, it results is a suble finger wag and a shrug.

Hillary may have theoretically had them insofar as she was a Democrat but there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for her bordering on loathing. There's a reason she lost to Obama in '08 despite the sense of inevitability the party tried to create; the Democratic establishment either didn't learn that lesson or were pressured to ignore it due to the pervasive influence of the Clintons.

Biden isn't exactly the most inspiring candidate, but the only people who seem to despise him are the kind of people who wouldn't vote Democrat anyway. The only real knock against him is his age and aloofness. There are obviously attempts to paint him as corrupt, but they'll probably only damage him to the extent that Whitewater damaged Hillary. Basically, he isn't unlikeable the way Hillary was, and his policies are anodyne enough as to not scare away anyone who's actually paying attention. Trump's a much more divisive figure in that he actively insults anyone who doesn't kiss his ass, and who has no problem floating insane policy proposals only for his aides to walk them back later. Especially after the election nonsense and January 6, it's hard to see what his appeal is to the 2020 Biden voters he needs to pick up to win this time.

There are obviously attempts to paint him as corrupt, but they'll probably only damage him to the extent that Whitewater damaged Hillary.

I would argue that Whitewater and other corruption allegations actually damaged Hillary Clinton a lot.

The lack of a secret ballot thru mass mail-in voting violates every principle of Democracy. Without violating the secret ballot Trump would have easily won in my opinion.

This is silly. Ballot secrecy serves to stop a specific problem of coercion and bribery when voting, which were a big problem back in the Gilded Age but which are far less prevalent now. Ballot secrecy when voting by mail should be a concern to be addressed going forward, but you haven't provided any evidence it had a major impact on the 2020 election. This argument is like one from those right-wing blogs that assert (without evidence) that 30 million illegal immigrants vote and so we don't have real democracy.

Ballot secrecy when voting by mail should be a concern to be addressed going forward

Give me one single example proposal to "address" this. If you can't think of even one, I will have no faith that it will ever be "addressed". Instead, we should return to the global consensus of liberal democracies concerning what is a "core election-related international obligation" of States to provide free and fair elections.

I think some might argue that we never really left the Gilded Age, monopolies and all.

I think you're correct, but surely the current Democratic party line of "2020 was the most secure election ever but also let's not check" is a weak stance.

Ballot harvesting absolutely happens. I've seen it happen. How? In Washington state, you can print out a ballot if you lose yours. Campaign workers for Kshama Sawant, a socialist member of the Seattle city council, had a stand outside a grocery store where they were offering to "help" people vote with printed ballots.
They also offered to collect ballots for people and take them to a dropbox.

If you think that ballot harvesting isn't happening in (for example), the Somalian community in Minneapolis, you're being naive. It can happen in the US in 2023. It does happen in the US in 2023. Even when there is no organized fraud, surely people are "helping" their relatives, friends, and employees.

Did it sway the election? Almost certainly not. But there are legit problem with mail in ballots and these problems are not some quaint relic of the past.

Note: the example I cited was for a local recall election of Sawant, not a state or national election.

Ballot secrecy serves to stop a specific problem of coercion and bribery when voting, which were a big problem back in the Gilded Age but which are far less prevalent now.

Are you sure? Another thing associated with the Gilded Age is machine politics, which is supposedly just fading out in Chicago as of 2021: https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-prem-mike-madigan-chicago-machine-politics-illinois-progressives-20210305-cmh33nn2svbajlkk7ma6omo4ee-htmlstory.html

Given how the incentives are skewed, I predict that it will only take a few election cycles of widespread mail-in voting for coercion and bribery to become commonplace again. It will be implemented with plausible deniability a la Wells Fargo: swing-state campaigns tell their campaign workers to get out the vote, and pay them per ballot in their precinct of responsibility, multiplied by the percentage of the vote they win on election day. Campaign workers in turn will do the rest quietly and of their own free will, and will also have plausible deniability: "gift cards" for votes, no matter who you vote for, but we'll love you more if you vote for X. (The few campaign workers who step over the line and get caught will be prosecuted, but there will be no evidence of systemic fraud.) Frankly, I think we already had gift cards for votes in 2020.

This sort of thing could definitely become an issue in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if there was limited gift-cards-for-votes in 2020, but there is basically no evidence that it's widespread, at least not yet.

What would evidence of this look like exactly? I'm not a huge fan of most of the "election was rigged theory" but it seems to me that there's nowhere for any manipulation to blatantly show up if it did happen. The system isn't built to catch it.

Any evidence in favor of it will just show up as more irregularities than usual, each of which is explainable by itself.

Evidence could be of stuff like people claiming their employer/landlord or whoever else that's in a position of influence over them demanding to see them fill out their ballot. That, on a large scale. Given how US politics is dominated by toxic negative partisanship, people would be screaming absolutely bloody murder if they thought they were being coerced to voting for the other side.

My prior is that if employers and landlords had been pressuring people to vote in a particular direction, it would have been for trump, and that’s not even alleged.

So do all the people screaming absolute bloody murder about the fact that their mail-in-ballot was filled out and submitted without their knowledge (until they checked) count?

Now I have to admit that my experience may be somewhat unusual: I worked as an on-the-ground political activist for about a year during 2020, and was simultaneously working for a tier 2 news organization.

What this means is that I talked to a LOT of people (>10,000) about politics during that period spread over a very wide area of a purple state. For many, I was the only target they had to complain or yell about what was upsetting them, so they did.

Most common fraudish complaints I heard were:

  • People going to sign up for a mail-in ballot and discovering that their ballot had already been submitted.
  • Sending in a ballot early, but it never being received, and then having to vote in person anyway.
  • Ballot harvesters asking who they voted for before collecting ballots. (They would offer to collect them regardless. The fear is that they would put disliked votes into a "do not send" pile.)

Such complaints were primarily, though not exclusively, from Republicans, and almost exclusively those in and around Republican stronghold areas.

I heard these things many, many times, at least a couple hundred each. This combined with my own experience with activism (we were actively told to lie and commit crimes to convince people, though I did not ever do so) makes me extra suspicious of the more partisan campaigns.

There were only 2 cases where someone said they were pressured by their partner into voting for someone they didn't want to. Both seemed somewhat politically disengaged, and I discovered this only because I was like "oh, did you vote for Biden/Trump?" and they responded with "yeah, but not because I wanted to" and explained. They didn't seem particularly upset about it.

So, is that evidence, or does the hysterical screaming only count if it's for the exact reason you wanted?

This is such a motte and bailey.

Your discontent with the procedural flaws is perfectly defensible. Even though I disagree with your assessment of the impact, I understand why you and others would feel so strongly. But then you insist that it constitutes stealing. This is wrong on the merits; it is also grossly insufficient to justify the response.

Stealing is a crime. The “violations” of the secret ballot were, as far as I can tell, quite legal. Perhaps they shouldn’t be—I found the arguments in last week’s thread quite convincing. How do you intend to bring those about? Does it involve Proud Boys hanging around polling places, deciding when the vote seems adequately secured? How do you prevent them from democratically deciding who looks too Democratic to vote?

Trespassing is also a crime, along with conspiracy, incitement, and whatever else they tossed at the rioters. They definitely should be. Whatever you think about the un-democratic quality of mail-in voting, it cannot be as bad as throwing out a vote by force. That is the central example of how democracies get dismantled, and ours is right to forbid it.

Win you get the spoils, lose you go to jail.

Hardly. Lose and flip the table, threaten your lawmakers, and demand the result be thrown out until it favors you, go to jail. Which of those factors is load-bearing?

Imagine the counterfactual world in which this mob made it to the Senate and hovered over their shoulders until getting the proclamation they wanted. Do you think that results in a more stable, honest democracy? Do you think blatant intimidation is a winning strategy? That the media won’t mine this for footage of the most intimidating rioter hovering next to the frailest, most sympathetic Senator?

The best outcome is a special election with massive turnout as Democrats (rightfully) claimed election interference. The more likely outcomes involve partisan violence. People who were already inclined to burn courthouses in the name of justice are going to take away a different lesson:

Win you get the spoils. Lose, you get to try again, so long as you can threaten violence.

But hey, at least it’d be democratic.

How do you intend to bring those about?

The way that basically all liberal democracies agreed we should do it:

Voting by secret ballot Voters should mark their ballots alone, in the privacy of a voting booth, and in such a way that the marked ballot cannot be seen before it is cast and cannot be later connected with a particular voter. Exceptions can be made only under specified conditions, such as at the request of voters who require assistance, e.g., disabled or illiterate voters. Any voting outside of a voting booth compromises the secrecy of the vote. The presence of more than one person in a voting booth should not be permitted, as it compromises the secrecy of the vote. Open voting or unlawful voting by proxies are violations of the secrecy principle. Arrangements for voting by members of the military and by prisoners should ensure their votes are secret and not subject to coercion.

I’m not opposed to the concept of a secret ballot. I’m asking whether the OP expects to get there by threatening people into throwing out results he doesn’t like.

It sounds like a license to roll up and intimidate other proceedings, like the polls. In fact, that is the textbook example of seizing power.

I would like to know how he planned to avoid that.

I’m not opposed to the concept of a secret ballot.

You may not be opposed to it but I doubt your voting record would indicate that. So what is one supposed to do? Just let you win forever with the comforting knowledge that “at least netstack is not opposed to a secret ballot”?

Nope, I totally vote for election security wonks. I’d love to prove it to you, but unfortunately, I vote in person.

What is one supposed to do? I recommend trying the legal options. Make it a wedge issue. Stigmatize voting by mail, if you can’t ban it entirely. Here’s what we did in Texas.

Unfortunately I live in a state where my vote does not matter numerically. At least half our local-ish elections are uncontested or essentially uncontested (think Vermin Supreme-tier candidates).

Sure, I’ll vote for the only presidential candidate who at least has a reason to care about election security, it’s just that his opponents are desperately trying to throw him in jail…

Fair enough. I don't really ever pretend to have a great plan for getting any policy proposal implemented, even the obviously good ones. I hope y'all hammer one out.

If you found the arguments of a flawed election as with merits then what do you think they should do? Legal of course isn’t the same thing as Democratic. Putin is the legal ruler of Russia.

Reading your arguments makes me think they did the right thing. Block the transition of power and demand a new election under Democratic principles. Limited mail-in ballots. Long election hours due to COVID to avoid crowding but that allows everyone to show up and vote. The special election is exactly what the Proud Boys asked for.

I went with the strong version of the Motte because I too found those arguments persuasive and used it as a way to present their position.

That being said I wanted this discussion to be more focused on the criminal penalties which I do find excessive. And comparing them to penalties the left has received in their protests. Plus any future issues this has with making elections more important and balance of power issues between branches.

I don’t know who would win the special election. I think both sides would have large turnout.

Bear in mind I did say a couple years would be fair. I didn’t say I agree with everything they did.

Legislate it. Use those red legislatures and Senate committees. Collect evidence about how many votes are harvested, then rub it in during campaign season. Make anyone who hands their ballot over to a collector feel like a rube. Run sting operations and put those collectors in jail when they violate state laws.

My single voting issue is electoral reform. If a candidate makes a pitch for literally anything other than FPTP, they get my vote. The existing mechanism has robbed countless third parties and compromise candidates of representation. But it’s still better than rule by force!

We talk a lot on this board about dangerous precedent. Letting an interest group invalidate an election by storming the legislature is particularly bad. One big step closer to bringing out the guillotines or the gulags. The road to hell is paved by people who insisted they’d break the rules in service of an abstract ideal.

It doesn’t matter who would have won the special election. The cat would be out of the bag, and any sufficiently violent group would have a veto of electoral results.

I didn’t comment on the sentences because I didn’t want to go through sentencing guidelines today. My impression was that they were in line. Maybe other commenters will have better answers.

We talk a lot on this board about dangerous precedent. Letting an interest group invalidate an election by storming the legislature is particularly bad.

We allow protestors to storm government buildings and interfere with proceedings all the time with little or no legal response. This seems like special pleading to me.

Funny, I was thinking the exact opposite. It’s silly to demand justice for statue-toppling and courthouse-torching, then turn around and insist that the other guys were just being good citizens.

I’m not sure how many of the CHAZ folks ended up arrested or convicted, but I hope it was a lot.

... I realize that this was meant as an off-the-cuff response, but can you provide a single example of a statue-toppling or courthouse-torching person receiving a 15+ year sentence?

Actual burned-down cars or buildings arsonists, even when doing so killed people while trying to conceal /other/ crimes, aren't getting that sort of sentence. As far as I know, even where statute-toppling nearly killed someone, as far as I know no one was convicted and the people who were charged and assisted got a sizable settlement from a local government that fired the police chief that charged them before any serious attempt at trial. Actually literally-directly-murdering a teenager in cold blood at CHOP/CHAZ? 14 years

In theory, the guy who plotted to kill Kavanaugh could by statute get sentenced to literally anything, if the court case ever starts, but if I'm reading the sentencing guidelines probably maybe he'd get 14 years at the high end?

Obviously it's easy to draw a thousand lines such that each reference case is a class of one, and there's a million ways you can talk about how all those other protests that interfere with various proceedings are totally separate such that it's absolutely reasonable for them to end with an arrest and no charges ever being brought. But it's kinda hard to draw lines without making the Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy obvious.

And that's... kinda the issue. You can well say how much you hope that anything near this gets smacked down with a sledgehammer no matter who does it, but if you want to actually have a norm what matters is what people actually see happening, and the last time a progressive-themed group got hit hard for anything on this class involved a literal bombing, and even that ended up becoming a cause celebre.

That’s exactly the issue!

Why should we expect similar charges and sentences in these two scenarios?

One one hand, we have various obviously dysfunctional, obviously embattled city police departments. The bureaucrats who fund and control them are somewhere between uncooperative and actively hostile. They are pursuing chaotic, personal crimes.

On the other, we have the security apparatus of the most powerful country in the world. Its directing bureaucracy feels, for once in their lives, personally threatened. They also have a short list of high-profile suspects who carefully organized and documented their participation.

Which of these two do you think will be better at building a case?

It is unreasonable to expect a tragic accident among protestors to spawn comparable charges to a deliberate plan. It is impractical to compare the FBI’s resources and political will to those of random police departments. And it is irresponsible to insist that, when these vastly different scenarios yield any difference in outcome, it is proof of an insidious conspiracy.

Out of all these examples, the best intuition pump is the murder at CHAZ. Did Tarrio’s crime really deserve harsher sanction than an actual murder? I’m not sure. I can’t find information on his plea. His subordinates certainly didn’t earn such sentences. At best, it’s the old problem of utilitarianism, adding and distributing harms until our intuition complains.

But I think it’s telling that the murder—the most heinous crime which can be thrown at the feet of a BLM protestor—gets closest to your sharpshooter’s 15-year line.

I don’t believe for a minute that Trump supporters would be satisfied with 13-year sentences for the ringleaders. There is no line. Only the belief that there was an injustice, and a search for the facts which will best support it.

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Trivially, many of the cases I've highlighted were prosecuted by the federal government in federal courts by groups prosecutors that they were enforcing the law to the hilt -- at least until they developed sudden sympathies for arsonists and firebombers and people breaking up government meetings who Cared About The Community -- or had a clear federal nexus that could have been. This is most overt with the arson (in addition to the massive risk to life and limb) since the ATF claims jurisdiction over anything even slightly flammable where any component went through interstate commerce, and it's part of why I keep harping on the dramatically different focuses from 'good' causes to 'bad' ones, but it's not solely limited there.

Trivially, the cases I've highlighted tend to revolve around attacks against a person because those seem the only things that got prosecuted seriously at all; threatening or dangerous political protests riots stunts that interact with big-name politicians more often result in little more than an arrest, if even that.

Trivially, because we're supposed to not treat politicians as if they were humans++ who's least insult Matters while someone else's house or business getting burned down around them doesn't. Relatedly, because whatever extent interfering with legislative or other government processes might serve to close the gap in theory, in practice they're normally been allowed or even applauded by people who have since done a ton of very cautious line-drawing over severity (they didn't bypass metal detectors that didn't exist!) that fails to grapple with the absence of any serious punishment or even serious attempt to prevent repetition.

More seriously, paeans to a personally threatened bureaucracy on one side and an actively hostile one on the other are... kinda my point. A cross-country movement of bureaucrats across different entire levels of government running interference as their (often armed!) thugs intimidate political opponents, achieve unlawful ends, and are using that violence as justification for political demands and to limit their opponent's access to the public square kinda matters! A lot!

And for some strange reason all of these only come up in response. You hope that CHAZ/CHOP people got punished, but not enough to check before posting or even to have a good understanding of the depth of the problem for that one single case or why people might consider it relevant as a comparison for (stupid, ineffective, and dangerous) actions to overthrow the United States. It's not even limited to Trump or Trump-related, or BLM politics: I've pointed out (and been modhatted for pointing out!) when posters here went from considering mostly-peaceful-but-the-arsons-and-murders riots "not special" to literally supporting the declaration of martial fucking law over truck horns.

Now, because of that, I'm not allowed to go posting examples through your comment history, and hey, it's not like you had a just-before-exodus post talking about how this comparison only ever comes up as a gotcha from righties to lefties. Maybe I've missed something. But it becomes more than a little uncompelling when you yourself bring it up as your best, strongest example.

Why should we expect similar charges and sentences in these two scenarios?

I mean, you're the one that brought up CHAZ/CHOP.

I don't! Indeed, I've repeatedly predicted that some criminals will get the book thrown at them, and others will get sudden bursts of prosecutor sympathy, and while I've not always been correct -- I'm still surprised Kyle Rittenhouse didn't end up with further gun-related charges, and while Dominick Black did, that they didn't result in direct jail time -- it's been surprisingly accurate as an indicator. I'm not surprised that no one knows what exactly happened with Grosskuetz's CCW permit, and I'd wager cash money the only thing we find out before the statute of limitations passes is the one situation where the ALCU will commit to defending a gun owner.

Or, for a different direction, I'll point to the Hammond case. To save you a click, the Hammonds were accused of starting a fire on the other BLM's land, under the auspices of clearing brush but possibly to cover up poaching of deer. It grew out of hand, someone could have gotten hurt, yada yada. The Hammonds were, by all reports, stellar defendants, accepting both guilt and responsibility early on to simplify the case at the earliest moment; as a result, they received a sentence of a couple months for a federal arson case, even if one that didn't burn down a police car, part of a historic chapel, or a police district office.

That'd be a wonderful counterexample, except the sentence was found appalling and appealed by the DoJ, which found that case -- not the Molotov Lawyers actively encouraging people to take further weapons and burn the system down, as soon as Trump got distracted, not any person convicted for burning the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, often while also stealing body armor, weapons, and ammunition -- required a terrorism enhancement with a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.

This was not a case that threatened the DoJ bureaucrats, nor had long-term broad ramifications: it simply was convenient. And the others weren't. Even and especially from your theory that one side faced a unified front from the Department of Justice to enforce the law to the hilt, while the other had a bunch of bureaucrats running interference, what it says is worrying.

((And then the people who protested that in a stupid way, without any serious threats to the important bureaucrats... well, they didn't all get serious sentences, but that's because one of them got fatally shot, and the prosecution of some of the ringleaders was so hilariously and incompetently aggressive in pursuit of a long-ass sentence that it managed to hinge of a fat fucking fib it actively hid from the defense and court. Most of them 'only' got a year or two, tots normal stuff the DoJ must be trumpeting everywhere after every dumbass leftist occupation interferes with federal employees.))

Instead, when I talk about this stuff, I get requests to do statistical analysis on unavailable data to Prove Mathematically that this is real bias and not just the selection that no one seems willing to even try to find counterexamples.

I don’t believe for a minute that Trump supporters would be satisfied with 13-year sentences for the ringleaders. There is no line. Only the belief that there was an injustice, and a search for the facts which will best support it.

Beyond my normal frustration with the impressive tolerance for sudden claims your entire political opposition is both unpersuadable and has no line...

Thankfully, in addition to Trump supporters, we also have parts of the population with both working eyeballs and working brain cells, who can also notice that one group of rioters with empty-headed slogans about overthrowing the United States government wasn't that big a deal short of actual literal murder (and even that received a significant downward deviation from the sentencing guidelines at the request of prosecutors), and one of them was so dangerous that they needed almost twice the guidelines sentence for the crime.

They might find a lot of arguments much less persuasive were they not being inundated with evidence against them.

Why should we expect similar charges and sentences in these two scenarios?

Because some people are still stupid enough to maintain a belief in equal protection under the law.

It is unreasonable to expect a tragic accident among protestors to spawn comparable charges to a deliberate plan.

A massive amount of the popular consensus against the Jan 6th protesters was secured through coordinated lies about the death of Officer Sicknick, which was in fact a tragic accident, but was presented for months as a deliberate murder in order to demonize everyone who attended the protest. Likewise, there is zero reason to describe the chaotic destruction of public property, which was without doubt deliberately planned, as a "tragic accident". People did dangerous, stupid things on purpose, and fucked a person up so bad they nearly died. If I rob a bank and fire a bunch of rounds to keep the cops' heads down, and one of those bullets hits a kid in the gut, that's a crime, not a "tragic accident".

But of course, as this as in all things, framing is everything.

And it is irresponsible to insist that, when these vastly different scenarios yield any difference in outcome, it is proof of an insidious conspiracy.

No, it isn't. We have ample evidence that the authorities play favorites in their enforcement of the law. Having seen that evidence, it is no longer reasonable expect us to grant them the benefit of the doubt when outcomes differ. Maybe you're right, and partisan motives have nothing to do with it this time. But they burned the trust required to accept that explanation, and nothing was done, and so the trust is no longer a viable option.

I don’t believe for a minute that Trump supporters would be satisfied with 13-year sentences for the ringleaders.

Trump supporters don't see riot organizers getting 13-year sentences for approved riots. Why would they accept 13-year sentences for this riot? The correct sentence is a night in jail to polish the radical credentials and arrange good photo-ops, and then a polite release.

You're thinking of the Angela Davis track, where one conspires in an armed attack on our lawful institutions resulting in multiple murders, which leads to tenured positions at premiere educational institutions. Easy mistake to make.

More comments

I've looked into this before, and so far as I can tell, while many were arrested, nobody was ever charged with anything.

One person was eventually charged with attempted murder in relation to the numerous shootings and attempted shootings by numerous people. No serious effort appears to have been made to identify or apprehend the rest of the shooters.

Forty something were arrested following the final unlawful assembly order, and given wrist slaps of zero actual impact.

One man pled guilty to second degree murder for one of the shootings, and sentenced to 14 years.

The fact that J6 protestors/rioters/insurrectionests are being given far longer sentences than actual murderers and rapists is one of the many reasons i have lost all faith in American government and legal systems.

I think there were a couple dozen overnight arrests associated with it being forcibly cleared out, but no actual charges or convictions.

So I don't think the claims of unfair application of justice are baseless. But I also see the remedy to be actually taking control of government processes and using them to punish lawbreakers, rather than becoming the party of lawlessness.

A major point and purpose of these instances of unfair application of justice is to make it impossible for the opponents of those now in charge to take control of government processes, by severely punishing anyone who is too loudly an opponent of the regime and thereby discouraging others from opposition.

The "party of lawlessness" may be bad, but the "party of those who continue respecting institutions which have been suborned to be used against them" is just stupid.

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