site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25680 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/worried-meta-decision-allowing-2020-election-denial-ads/story?id=104985165

So Meta the parent company of Facebook and instagram is now allowing users and advertisers to post claims about election fraud in the last election but not the soon to be held 2024 elections. I’ll lay my cards out here and say I’m personally a skeptic of the claims that the 2020 elections were stolen. I don’t see why that should prevent other people from making such arguments.

But my question for you guys is whether these claims are going to really erode trust in future elections. To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened and instead opted for the COVID style full court press of “nobody should bother to take it seriously, and if you do it’s clear that you’re falling for misinformation.” To me nothing erodes trust faster than an official response of “nothing to see here.”

I will evade this whole discussion by provuding a little bit of the outside view of Slovak resident. And my opinion is that US election conduct seems to me amazingly unsafe and to the core untrustworthy. As a reference, I served in election committee in Slovakia and it is against the law for spouses to go into the voting booth together with possibility of one spouse coercing the other to vote as they want. We do require ID with photo for voters to vote in a specific place they are assigned based on their address and the paper ballot is handed to you against your signature. If you want to physically vote elsewhere in the country because of travel, you have to ask for specific one-time voting ID that enables you to be manually added to some other voting list. You may also ask to vote via mail but you have to register 52 days before voting and ask for the ballot to be mailed to you, this is specifically for people who vote from abroad. And to be fair I am against that as well although only around 2% of votes were delivered by mail.

All votes are paper based, they are counted by actual people in voting committee on the spot and ballots are safely transported from thousands of voting places by police. Recently my friend and I had a thought exercise of how to commit voter fraud and we could not find a theoretical way of doing it properly. The voting system is highly decentralized, vote counting is watched by regular people who can take a photo of paper document of voting count for each election place and then cross-check it with official website of central voting committee. In fact many parties have representatives in election committees who send them those voting counts so politicians have some idea about election results even before official ones are announced. Elections are highly trusted and with good reason, vote results are known within hours of closing polling places - in the past we had a party that did not get to parliament by just couple of hundreds of votes and nobody disputed that result. Say what one may about my country but elections are airtight.

The comparison with US electoral system - especially for presidential elections where each state does shit their own way is laughable. You have mass sending of ballots and mail-in voting percentage in 30%+ range. You have ballot harvesting, you have strange centralized ballot counting with computers. You have no voting IDs in many places, you have gerrymandering, you have situations where precise election results are not known for days or weeks. And of course elections are often very competitive where literally thousands of votes can decide the next president as far back as 2000 Florida vote recount kerfuffle - I cannot blame anybody who thinks that those elections were stolen one way or another. From where I stand, the US elections to me look closer to this scene from Gangs of New York compared to elections I know in my country. And amazingly instead of trying to make US elections more trustworthy it seems that the they are continuously getting less and less legitimate, while shouting how pointing that out is antidemocratic. And I understand that there are reasons for why things are the way they are with all the aforementioned nitpicks. But the end result is still shitty and untrustworthy election system that is at least prone to election fraud conspiratory thinking if not actual outright fraud.

What about an official response of various detailed audits? The latter of those made some people really upset, too. There was an immense incentive to find fraud, and Republicans do hold power in a number of states.

I think it's very defensible to say that the coof was used as an excuse to institute measures around the election that overwhelmingly benefited one side over the other. That in a year without the coof, the election might well have gone differently. Does this constitute stealing an election? Possibly, possibly not. I think it does at the very least constitute putting a thumb on the scales, though.

Insofar as anything else happened, it was most likely locally coordinated by activist types, not actual party apparatus, and is therefore probably difficult to prove. It also probably happens all the time.

But the only reason why easy postal voting benefitted the Democrats was because fear of COVID-19 had become a partisan issue. Pre 2020, both parties said, and acted as if they meant it, that easy postal voting benefitted Republicans (Raffensperger's letter to Congress defending the integrity of the Georgia elections pointed out that the Georgia legislature originally adopted postal voting on demand on a Republican party-line vote).

Had there been no pandemic, the large number of Democrats who voted postally because they were afraid of catching the virus at a polling station would have voted in person, the postal vote would have skewed slightly Republican the way it always does (because of military votes), and "the election is invalid because not enough Democratic postal votes were tossed on technicalities" would not have figured in the Gish Gallop.

"We deserved to win the election because Democrats were too afraid of the coof to go out and vote" was an argument that might have worked in front of the right GOP-appointed judge, but it wasn't going to work with the American people, and the Trump campaign didn't run with it.

But the only reason why easy postal voting benefitted the Democrats was because fear of COVID-19 had become a partisan issue. Pre 2020, both parties said, and acted as if they meant it, that easy postal voting benefitted Republicans

This is news to me. I assumed that because the only two states where Democrats win among white men also practiced universal vote-by-mail that the opposite was true.

What was the example of large-scale vote-by-mail being beneficial to republicans? And does your assertion also mean that Oregon and Washington would be more Democrat dominated in the absence of universal vote-by-mail?

I maintain that universal vote-by-mail has been and will always be beneficial to Democrats over Republicans.

Republicans in PA in 2019 opened up mail in ballot access because it would help turn out in rural voters who had to travel long distances to a polling place. They did this in 2019, before Covid.

If they thought it would always be a benefit to Democrats then they would probably have not done that. Once it did, some of the very same Republicans who passed it, lobbied for it to be declared unconstitutional.

For whats its worth, your opinion is the conventional wisdom, that it helps Democrats over Republicans. Whether that would have been the case in PA absent Covid and it becoming a direct partisan issue, I guess we will never know.

Republicans in PA in 2019 opened up mail in ballot access because it would help turn out in rural voters who had to travel long distances to a polling place. They did this in 2019, before Covid.

Could see it being kind of an odd catch 22 where Republicans are more likely to get legitimate mail-in votes where people are either too old, too remote or overseas in order to vote whilst the mail-in voting demographic amongst the Democrats would be more about people who simply can't be bothered participating in the typical voting process.

To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened

They did though, there were plenty of state level election officials like Raffensperger who went through point by point on at least some of the issues, and many claims literally had their day in court were addressed by the courts. A big problem though was that the election fraud claims were a massive gish-gallop so it was hard both to refute everything, and to take the overall claims of fraud seriously. The people claiming fraud really should have coalesced around one or two of their strongest allegations that 1) were well-evidenced, and 2) could have made a material impact in the results for at least one state.

many claims literally had their day in court.

This is rewriting history. The vast majority of cases were dismissed for lack of standing, and no evidence was ever heard. There was no fact-finding mission or hearing. The press declared that Biden won, all questions were treated as ipso facto ridiculous, and what debate there was was contained to (censored) conversations on Facebook and Twitter.

OK, if you want to quibble about what "had their day in court" means, sure, my statement would be more accurate if it read as "were addressed by the courts" (before being dropped/denied/withdrawn).

I'd then turn around and say you're rewriting history by implying these cases didn't get a similar legal treatment to any other lawsuit.

You do realize that’s not a quibble? It goes to the very heart of your argument.

My main argument was that the gish-gallop claims were falling on their own merits. That hasn't changed.

Thank you. These claims have not been judged on their merits, the people raising them have been judged on their standing.

And then after the fact, courts are unwilling to do anything about it anyway, so they judge that there can be no relief, either.

It’s not just courts. You have to explain why various investigative authorities and prosecutors, including in conservative locales, either declined to pursue various theories or tried to and couldn’t find good evidence.

The simple reason is that no one could find good evidence and various courts rejected bad attempts.

Trump lost the popular vote both times after consistently polling that way.

Trump lost the popular

But he is white, so there is that.

I’m never moved by people like Raffensperger. If there was fraud, it means he failed! There is an incentive for him to not look closely. And quite frankly, some of the denials that came from his office (at least live — haven’t looked retrospectively) were inconsistent with the truth.

I don’t know there was fraud. My belief is it was impossible to know and unless you had proof Biden needed to become president.

But it was “weird” and we shouldn’t be encouraging “weird” elections. We used to count elections within hours of the polls closing. Why can’t we do that again?

He did have the President—and half the country—telling him it was his job to find the fraud. But of course, it was their job to tell him to find it, so clearly they must have been sandbagging, or they would have convinced him to flip! It’s perverse incentives all the way down.

I think when the hypothesis is tried over and over again, both in and out of court, and no one manages to present a smoking gun, that’s evidence against. Reasoning that one of the suspects had incentives not to cooperate isn’t enough.

But holding him up as proof (ie the guy who oversaw the election is a Republican and therefore it was on the up and up) isn’t the convincing argument people think it is.

It ought to be convincing in that generally Republicans want Republicans to win, and so allowing a plot against Republicans to succeed in a GOO-controlled state is not what we would expect.

Trying to counter that baseline assumption with “but if it happened they’d want to cover it up to avoid blame for the failure” is cope. There was intense scrutiny and if evidence existed it was going to come out in all likelihood, so risking being blamed for a cover up was a bigger danger than uncovering the devious plot by the outgroup.

It ought to be convincing in that generally Republicans want Republicans to win, and so allowing a plot against Republicans to succeed in a GOO-controlled state is not what we would expect.

Only if you consider Trump a neocon, when in reality he is more outsider to the whole political scene than anything.

Your comment is a pretty good example of why I've mostly stopped trying to debate people who claim election fraud. It goes something like this

Them: "There was widespread fraud in this election! "

Me: "There's not really any compelling evidence to that effect..."

Them: "Well, OK, but do you really trust them not to commit fraud in some other way? As proof, here's a laundry list of sins my outgroup has committed to prove how biased they are..."

Your comment isn't a perfect analog but it's pretty close. Most specific claims crumble into a generalized disdain of the outgroup upon deeper scrutiny.

But it was “weird” and we shouldn’t be encouraging “weird” elections. We used to count elections within hours of the polls closing. Why can’t we do that again?

Part of this was terrible mail-in voting rules where they only started counting long after the votes had come in, and part of it was an illusion since individual states have dragged their counting in almost every election, it just didn't matter since the elections weren't that close in the first place, so nobody really cared if Obama won Indiana in 2008 on election night since it wouldn't have made a difference.

But I generally agree that elections should be counted a lot faster. It was clear that many on the right fringe saw the delayed count as dead-to-rights evidence that the Deep State (or whoever) was rigging things and were just playing for time. States should do everything in their power to ensure the election can be confidently called within a day.

But it was “weird” and we shouldn’t be encouraging “weird” elections. We used to count elections within hours of the polls closing. Why can’t we do that again?

because the results need to be "fortified" to "save" democracy from itself.

Why do you think they didn't look into it? My memory of the time was detailed debunkings of every individual claim being widespread all over the place.

Admittedly they may have been more widespread in my progish filter bubble, maybe the opposing side never saw them.

Also, your link only says that advertisers won't be able to say future elections are going to be rigged, afaict. Where are you getting that users won't be able to talk about it?

There were some debunkings; some of the debunkings (eg re Fulton county and the “water main” story) were “debunked” which means they weren’t at all.

But my question for you guys is whether these claims are going to really erode trust in future elections.

Of course they are, because many of them are verifiably true. For example, my progressive County Clerk says that tons of voters that are adjudicated incompetent are voting illegally. This is, presumably, a product of a poor system and genuine mistakes being made, at least in most cases, rather than a marker of stolen elections and open corruption. Nonetheless, the fact that it's trivially true and everyone knows it completely undermines the official position that 2020 was the "most secure election ever". Tons of illegal and slipshod methods were used, black-letter law was violated in the name of Covid safety, and the election was generally a mess. That doesn't mean it was stolen, but it does mean that the people who say that it was actually a beautiful and perfect election are either lying or completely incompetent. If they said, "wow, that was pretty bad, but there were extenuating circumstances and we'll do better next time", that would be believable, but the promise instead is increasing "voting rights" by further liberalizing rules around mail-in ballots. The fact that people don't say that this was bad and we should return to normal election rules greatly shifts me in the direction believing claims of stolen elections.

There's a pretty substantial motte-and-bailey here; the motte is "local elections officials in a few blue counties, most of which are controlled by political machines, routinely ignore the actual letter of the law in administering elections, by enough of a margin to swing close statewide elections". As far as I can tell, this is pretty much true. It's at least potentially true, although unproven, that this was behind Trump's 2020 Georgia loss, and certain 2022 contests(Harris county judge is one I'm like 80% sure of).

The bailey is "the 2020 election was rigged like Russian elections and Trump actually won by large margins". As far as I can tell, to the extent that this statement is falsifiable, it's falsified.

local elections officials in a few blue counties, most of which are controlled by political machines, routinely ignore the actual letter of the law in administering elections

This is true everywhere, including red counties. It's far less likely to be due to any nefarious action than because we have a decentralized election administration mostly run by amateurs. Personal anecdote: in my home county (which leans quite red) in 2020, there was a precinct that had zero provisional ballots cast (extremely unusual, threw up red flags). When this was investigated, it was not due to any intent to defraud but because the staff there (all Republicans) didn't understand the procedures for provisional ballots.

Yeah, but I can't do anything about other people's bailey and it's not one that I really ever stake out. Meanwhile, people insist that the motte is also wrong and that believing that there's quite a bit of shenanigans is a conspiracy theory that should be silenced (see, for example, the OP story for this thread). If I could get people to just admit that there's a lot of shady shit going on, but that we can't know the exact amount because the procedures are poor, we could at least talk about the best approach going forward. Instead, I can show someone that our own clerk here says that a bunch of people voted illegally and then we'll basically just do the SpongeBob Patrick meme when it comes to whether we should improve election security.

Yeah, it’s frustrating that most discussion of voter fraud gets drowned out in Trump’s gigantic exaggerations of a narrative that isn’t true to begin with.

There’s a kind of incoherence to ‘stolen election’ claims that I dislike, in that they’re almost always made by people who assume that the permanent bureaucracy / deep state / powers that be / white supremacist patriarchy / Russia / etc means that Our Guy can win but still lose anyway.

If the deep state can have its way even when /ourguy/ wins, then why does it also need to rig elections? Either elections don’t matter because the President has no power, or they do matter because the President actually has a lot of power, but Trump just failed to do anything with it.

I’m convinced the stolen election narrative was profoundly damaging to the Trumpist right and GOP more generally in the US. What is more demoralizing than suggesting that ‘they’ will win even if you come out to vote? Or even, if you take the theory further, that they ‘allowed’ Trump to win in 2016 knowing, presumably, that they could control him or prevent him from doing anything they didn’t want him to?

The stolen election narrative was strategically moronic. It exists solely to assuage Trump-the-man’s ego, and spread because the modern US right is in large part a Trump personality cult, so various operatives, media figures etc wanted to do their best to remain on his good side. A single shout out or mockery from the oracle of Mar a Lago can make or break a career, so playing to his ego was so important they forgot strategy to claim that Donald actually did win for real.

(I think all US elections involve some low-level corruption, rigging and machine politics, but that broadly the most popular candidate in the majority of the country - pursuant to minor discrepancies in popular vote subject to the unique dynamics of the EC system obviously - wins).

If the deep state can have its way even when /ourguy/ wins, then why does it also need to rig elections?

It seems as though you've constructed two strawmen so that you can comtrast them against each other, find both theories wanting, and come to a middle "reasonable" position. There can't be a deep state, because then it wouldn't make sense for them to rig an election. -- Well, what are you implying? That there is not an unelected bureaucracy that resisted all of Trump's signature policies while he was president?

If you concede that machine politics and corruption already exists, you're basically making the 2020 fraud argument, except assuming, magically, that it doesn't happen at a presidential level, because, I guess, that would be uncomfortable to think about.

Isn’t there something between omnipotent and feckless? The deep state has some power and can influence outcomes on the margin. The president has some power and can influence things on the margin.

I’m convinced the stolen election narrative was profoundly damaging to the Trumpist right and GOP more generally in the US. What is more demoralizing than suggesting that ‘they’ will win even if you come out to vote?

I think you have a bad model of the American conservative view of electron fraud, or how long it's been a concern. "Margin of fraud" and "margin of cheating" were recognizable slogans in 2002-2006, and they weren't new then. Regardless of the merits of those arguments either then or now, they were successfully used at length as an voter motivation tool before 2021.

If the deep state is really as powerful and good at working in shadows as some people think, why is Trump even still alive? Couldn't such a powerful organization manage to kill him in some way that looks like a plausible sudden health failure of some kind? More kinetic means such as arranging a car accident would be too likely to draw outrage from his supporters, but what if he just suddenly had a heart attack or something? I don't know how possible this is to achieve medically, though.

but what if he just suddenly had a heart attack or something? I don't know how possible this is to achieve medically, though.

Absolutely possible. The 1975 Church Committee hearings revealed the CIA made a heart attack gun that worked by silently firing a small frozen needle of concentrated shellfish toxins at the victim. It would melt upon piercing the skin, leaving no trace, and cause an immediate heart attack.

The KGB had a similar heart attack triggering weapon that worked by spraying a puff of cyanide gas into the victim's face.

Didn’t they test this on mythbusters?

The gun is definitely real, the director of the CIA brought one of the guns into the congressional hearing.

https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/17/archives/colby-describes-cia-poison-work-he-tells-senate-panel-of-secret.html

At the four minute mark in the video below they pull it out and start examining it. It's built along the lines of a 1911 handgun and has an electric powered mechanism instead of using gunpowder, with what looks like a some kind of pneumatic system chamber where the hammer would go and a compact scope, according to the director firing almost silently and hitting targets with a variety of dart types at 100 yards or meters. They had both shellfish toxin and cobra venom derived compounds.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4703553/user-clip-cia-director-william-colby-church-committee-shellfish-toxin-dartgun

At the four minute mark in the video below they pull it out and start examining it. It's built along the lines of a 1911 handgun and has an electric powered mechanism instead of using gunpowder, with what looks like a some kind of pneumatic system chamber where the hammer would go and a compact scope, according to the director firing almost silently and hitting targets with a variety of dart types at 100 yards or meters.

This story doesn't pass the sniff test- hitting targets at 100 yd with a handgun? Come on.

From what I can find, tranq pistols can have an effective range up to 40 meters. That's firing an entire syringe. I wouldn't be surprised at being able to achieve 100 meters with a much, much smaller dart.

Also worth considering that range would likely be an engineering goal for a CIA heart attack gun. They aren't really focused on achieving range in typical dart pistols, because that would never be needed.

They tested if you could shoot bullets made out of ice (and meat, and a few other exotic materials) from a normal gun and they didn't work. I don't know if they tested any sort of purpose built ice dart gun (potentially pneumatic?) so it's hard to say if the concept as a whole is "busted."

And of course the Bulgarian ricin umbrella used to assassinate a Bulgarian dissident in London.

I don’t think the ‘deep state’ such as it is cares that much about Trump. The media class does, because Trump sells papers, gets views, and because they don’t really understand how things work. But is the average Treasury Dept official terrified of a second Trump term? I doubt it, they probably don’t want it to happen but I don’t think they expect whatever some The Atlantic columnist predicts to occur.

But is the average Treasury Dept official terrified of a second Trump term?

Average FBI agents were reduced to tears during the first one, if you believe their text messages.

Because he's worth more to them alive than dead.

How so?

By preventing the emergence of a Republican candidate who might be better able to challenge them.

Was the GOP about to challenge the deep state before the rise of Trump?

No, but now that Trump has shown that's a viable path to electoral victory, there are others who would take up the challenge. But Trump occupies that niche now.

f the deep state can have its way even when /ourguy/ wins, then why does it also need to rig elections?

That's like asking "if you have a password, why do you also need any other security measures?".

Security is multilayered, because each level is not perfect on its own. So is corruption.

My point was that the 'motte' of 'they can rig elections' is pretty absolute. Putin doesn't need a 'back up' plan 'in case' the vote totals come out wrong, because the vote totals won't come out wrong, it isn't even a question.

My point was that the 'motte' of 'they can rig elections' is pretty absolute. Putin doesn't need a 'back up' plan 'in case' the vote totals come out wrong, because the vote totals won't come out wrong, it isn't even a question.

And yet he still needs to have elections. Surely simply suspending elections would be the true motte?

But even then, why suspend elections when one could simply cancel them, or not offer them in the first place? would that be the true motte?

I think that many of the methods used to secure Trump's defeat in 2024, a number of which preceded the actual race, were both efficacious and illegitimate. Do you disagree?

I think it’s likely that some low level corruption / rigging occurred on both sides as is the norm in American politics, but it’s unlikely it’s impact can be fully quantified and there’s limited evidence it secured Biden’s victory. And I think there was a major effort by the majority of the American ruling class to (as various things about ‘securing (or fortifying) the election’ suggest) strongly discourage Trump support, encourage Biden support, and establish favourable conditions on the ground for Biden in terms of covid rules, voting by mail etc. I also think Trump was almost uniquely unpopular as President and would most likely have lost even without any illegal actions, as far they occurred.

And I think there was a major effort by the majority of the American ruling class to (as various things about ‘securing (or fortifying) the election’ suggest) strongly discourage Trump support, encourage Biden support, and establish favourable conditions on the ground for Biden in terms of covid rules, voting by mail etc.

Do you think such actions are legitimate, as distinct from legal? That is, do you think that people on the other side should accept outcomes secured through such methods?

I also think Trump was almost uniquely unpopular and would have lost even without any illegal actions, as far they occurred.

Do you likewise think his unpopularity was arrived at by legitimate means?

Do you likewise think his unpopularity was arrived at by legitimate means?

No, I think it likely a result of his longstanding poor character and reputation coupled with a failure to accomplish most of what he promised his voters once in office.

That is, do you think that people on the other side should accept outcomes secured through such methods?

I am yet to be convinced the other side don’t do the same thing themselves.

I am yet to be convinced the other side don’t do the same thing themselves.

You are unconvinced that there is no effort by a majority of the ruling class to strongly discourage support for Blue candidates, encourage support for Red candidates, and establish favorable conditions on the ground for blue candidates in terms of impactful process mechanisms? That the security services illegally spy on Blue candidates, or pushing or suppressing rape accusations against blue and red candidates as partisan inclination requires? Or encouraging and selectively prosecuting widespread political violence? Can you give some examples of equivalent illegitimacy?

And again, I emphasize that I'm not claiming any of this is even illegal, much less prosecutable. I'm asking you your assessment of the sum total of the political game: Do you think the other side is well-advised to play a game that operates, in aggregate, in the way we observe?

Would it be fair to say that you consider "legitimacy" as the output of a process? If so, to the extent that this process can be observed or understood, what percentage of control would you say Blues have, roughly speaking?

More comments

If the deep state can have its way even when /ourguy/ wins, then why does it also need to rig elections? Either elections don’t matter because the President has no power, or they do matter because the President actually has a lot of power, but Trump just failed to do anything with it.

I don't see this being a frequent claim or model for people to hold, other than the most blackpilled. My own mental model is that the bureaucracy has a strong preference in elections and will do what it can to stall executive action if those elections don't go their way, but that these are not effects with infinite explanatory power.

If the deep state can have its way even when /ourguy/ wins, then why does it also need to rig elections? Either elections don’t matter because the President has no power, or they do matter because the President actually has a lot of power, but Trump just failed to do anything with it.

Because it's easier to promote their agenda with a compliant figurehead than not? Because it expends less resources to get your way without a fight than with one? Because whatever the odds that you'll be able to roll a defiant president, they aren't 100%? Because rigging the election is the first line of defense, followed by bureaucratic defense in depth? Because making sure your ideological enemies appear to be defeated publicly by popular vote is an important aspect in demoralizing them? Because winning is nice, but lapping your opponent is even better?

I've never seen such an incurious or thought terminated argument here before in my life.

So why did they let Trump win in 2016, when a moral victory was much more powerful than simply re-electing him in 2020? If your response is ‘they tried with Comey/Russiagate/leaked tapes, but they failed’, then that invalidates a substantial part of your own argument, since it suggests that their methods do not extend to actual rigging, or that their own internal evaluation of the projected result was so poor that they’re likely too incompetent to do so.

Again, the excuses don’t make sense. Rigging isn’t the first line of defense, it’s the absolute defense. If you can rig, you rig, and you win by default. There need be no backup plan for rigging because if you can manipulate the actual votes themselves all of that stuff is unnecessarily upstream. Putin doesn’t have a backup plan “in case he loses the election” because by definition he has ensured this is an impossibility because that is what ‘rigging’ means. You might reply saying ‘well, even Putin / Sisi / etc still wants to remain popular, so propaganda and ‘campaigning’ is important, even if just to maintain kayfabe’. And sure, that’s true. But they don’t do it ‘to win’.

So the same question for US presidential rigging allegations must always be levied. Do you believe that [faction] has actual control over vote counts? That is what rigging means. Can you declare yourself or your man victor or not on an absolute basis? If you can, you can rig an election; if you can’t, you’re merely capable of playing the kind of dirty tricks that are the norm in the politics of every nation.

So why did they let Trump win in 2016

They simply didn't take him seriously and left the election insufficiently fortified due to hubris. This was not a mistake they repeated in 2020, which is why you see much more heavy-handed manipulation, right up to the phantom pipe burst in Atlanta and restarting counting at 4am in major Democrat cities just in time for their majority Democrat poll workers to start counting without their supposed opposition observers present.

Do you believe that [faction] has actual control over vote counts?

I believe that they can stall the counting until they find enough votes, if they're prepared ahead of time. There's a limit to the scale of fraud, and so the scale needs to be determined ahead of time.

If you can, you can rig an election;

This is just splitting hairs over wordplay. If you'd like to use the euphemism instead of the pejorative, then so be it, but there isn't the distinction you're trying to make.

I agree with you broadly but you are overstating your case. It is perfectly consistent to state that factions have a limited ability to steal elections.

One dynamic you see in historical studies of stolen elections is that there are typically both honest and stolen locales, and the stolen locales vary in their willingness to lie.

In the famous and well studied cases of LBJ in Texas, rotten boroughs varied. From precincts where voters were handed $5 and a shot of tequila before voting in person, to places where voters were marched in by shotgun wielding ranch foremen and instructed who to vote for, to precincts where the ranch owners dropped off the identical filled ballots of all their employees, to precincts where no one seemed to show up to vote but all the registered voters were recorded as voting, to precincts where votes were filled out in alphabetical order for people who didn't live there or had died years ago.

In LBJ's first Senate campaign, he made use of all these methods as did his opponent, but LBJ announced his results first, and his opponent was able to steal enough extra votes to win. In his second, LBJ did not make that mistake again, and stole more aggressively and at the last minute, but still one by a tiny margin after tapping all his resources.

It's perfectly possible to say that faction can rig an election between a set margin, but not outside it.

The problem is that this isn't claimed by most election truthers, and certainly not consistently.

I agree with you broadly but you are overstating your case. It is perfectly consistent to state that factions have a limited ability to steal elections… It's perfectly possible to say that faction can rig an election between a set margin, but not outside it.

For sure, and I actually say as much in my reply to WalterOdim here.

It’s very likely (and of course historically proven) that low-level functionaries involved in the political process in various counties across the US engage in forms of corruption up to and including Actual Rigging (meaning actually manipulating vote totals). And it is true that, in an incredibly close election, this could serve (and has served) to elect one candidate over the other. I’m very sceptical that the ‘deep state’ or indeed any DC bureaucrat is involved in that kind of action, I think it’s ground-up and low level, and I think supporters of both parties engage in it. But it happens, and I think it’s important to acknowledge it.

But this isn’t the typical claim. The narrative from hardcore Trumpist rigging claimants isn’t typically that Trump almost legitimately lost but that he actually won a tiny number of additional ballots (or local Democrats added extra Biden votes) on a tiny scale in one Georgia county. It’s that a huge conspiracy prevented their candidate, who was supposedly vastly more popular, from winning nationwide by a huge margin. The question ‘do you concede that, even if you’re correct about those ballots, Trump could very easily (and almost did) fully legitimately lose the 2020 election, and if he did actually win, he won by a tiny amount?’ is the telling one here. As is (and this is even more important) ‘did something beyond the low-level hum of corruption that has been a feature of American democracy since 1776 occur specifically to prevent Trump from being re-elected?’.

If you can rig, you rig, and you win by default.

Rigging makes much less sense as a model than nudging. These are close elections, coming up with ways to move the needle by a few thousand votes in swing states makes a big difference. Methods for doing so don't even need to be that obviously corrupt, simply taking actions that increase voting propensity for the least competent voters through things like ballot harvesting and pushing those either right up to or slightly over the boundaries of legalities make a difference. The people doing this aren't going to feel like they're doing something awful, they're just helping people vote to try to stop fascism. Sure, my uncle is no longer mentally competent to vote, but I know he would have voted for Biden, so I'll just help out a bit and get that ballot sent out for him.

I pretty much completely agree with you here. But this kind of (actual) rigging, which is essentially pushing your guy over the edge in a neck-and-neck race by adding 10,000 votes in a critical county is a different assertion to the idea that the deep state or whoever can decide they want their guy to win no matter what. That’s a poor explanation of what I’m trying to say, so forgive me, but I guess the idea is that there’s pretty clearly a scale of ‘actual’ rigging.

So at the far end there’s obviously the fact that even Putin could theoretically be so unpopular that he couldn’t fake ‘win’ an election, and this is presumably very near to (or really the same thing as) the point at which he’s overthrown. And then there’s the most limited kind of ‘real’ rigging, where two candidates are neck and neck and a tiny number of votes in the right places can shift things while staying fully plausible. So can the deep state have prevented Bush from winning? Could they have prevented Reagan from winning? What’s the threshold, is it only if their guy almost won but for a few rurals in a swing county somewhere?

This is important because in the latter case the defeated party accusing the opposition of rigging is acknowledging that even if their allegation is true they were very, very, almost vanishingly close to legitimately losing the election. I don’t think this is an academic distinction at all, it’s very important. There’s a huge difference between saying that you won by a huge amount but the enemy rigged the whole thing, and saying ‘well yeah we actually only very nearly almost lost, and really it was a coin toss in a tiny county in Georgia but it actually landed on heads and they lied and said it landed on tails’.

This isn’t to trivialize it, or even to say that the Georgia accusation in particular wouldn’t count as ‘rigging’ were it true. But I do think there’s a Motte and Bailey here, or even a Motte and Bailey within a Motte and Bailey about the power of the deep state.

So can the deep state have prevented Bush from winning?

There's a half-decent case that Gore's attempted recounts were an attempt to do this. In practice, asking the friendly partisan leadership of the most friendly partisan voting precincts to make sure they didn't miss any ballots sounds a lot like "find me some votes" with a veneer of respectability to it, which is effectively what the (partisan) ruling on Bush v. Gore found, specifically that different recount standards in different counties violated Equal Protection.

I think the fundamental problem with Florida 2000 was that the election was so close (on the final official result, a 537 vote margin out of 6 million votes cast), the punch card voting machines were so bad (1000-2000 difference in the final margin depending on how you adjudicated the chad), and there was so little experience of adjudicating close elections, that there was no "true winner". Given that handling ballot papers in order to recount them can affect the status of the chad, it is entirely possible that it was physically impossible to identify the true winner (based on the state of the chad at close of polls) even if there had been a generally-accepted set of rules for chad adjudication.

The rationale of Bush vs Gore was that the SCOTUS ruled, correctly, that Florida in 2000 was technically incapable of counting a close election in a constitutionally sound way in the time available between close of polls and the Electoral College deadline. The media-funded recount would go on to determine that Florida in 2000 was technically incapable of counting a close election at all. The remedy in Bush vs Gore was for the justices to decide, on a partisan party-line vote, to throw out one unconstitutional vote tally (the partial hand recount requested by Gore and granted by the Florida Supreme Court) and replace it with another (the machine recount from 3 days after the election, plus some initially rejected military postal votes that were probably-legally cured). This was ugly, but it wasn't "stealing an election" because there was no effective election to steal. The election held on polling day had failed to reach a result and given the timetable the Presidency was necessarily going to be decided otherwise than by an election.

If Florida 2000 had been a close Senate election, it could have been re-run. (As a famous UK example, the Parliamentary election in Winchester in 1997 was re-run because the final tally after multiple recounts was a margin of 2 votes out of about 60,000, and there was a margin of error of about 10 votes due to a faulty punch used to stamp ballot papers). But you can't do that in a Presidential election.

There was a similar problem in 2020. Some of the allegations Trump made were straightforwardly silly (like the Dominion voting machines conspiracy theory), and some could be debunked relatively quickly (like the suitcases of ballots in Fulton County, which turned out to have been storage boxes of correctly-handled ballots which had been on CCTV throughout the process), but some (like the "pristine ballots" which came up elsewhere in this thread) could not have been adjudicated to the standards required to convince sceptics in the time available. An honest attempt to adjudicate the 2020 election in State courts in the time available would have required the Trump campaign to focus on a small number of key issues with the best evidence of malpractice and sufficiently high numbers of votes involved to affect the outcome, the Secretaries of State to provide detailed responses on those points, a trial courts to review the results quickly, and an appeals court to slap down any time-wasting and just tell the parties to get on with it. But the Trump campaign didn't want that and it doesn't look like anyone else, with the possible exception of Raffensberger, did either. If Sidney Powell had been trying to get the Kraken lawsuits tossed on technicalities in order to set up a political argument, she could hardly have done better. And if Trump had trying to get his prima facie serious allegations of fraud lost in the middle of a Gish Gallop of crap, he definitely couldn't have done better than he did. And even if that serious, disciplined adjudication had happened (for the avoidance of doubt, it should have done, and didn't), there would still have been thousands of right-wing "citizen journalists" complaining that their pet allegation had not been adjudicated, as long as they had a ready audience.

One of the straightforwardly good things the revised Election Count Act post-2020 does is that it extends the deadlines for States to adjudicate their own elections by removing the schedule padding originally needed for messages to get between the State Capitols and Congress on horseback.

But the Trump campaign didn't want that

Thinking about this, I think I am ready to bite this bullet.

On the balance of the publicly-available evidence, the Trump team in the aftermath of the 2020 election was not trying to get the election adjudicated in their favour - unsurprisingly, because after PA turned out to be beyond the plausible margin of fraud, getting the election adjudicated in their favour required them to flip all three of GA, AZ and WI, which was a very long shot. The tactics the Trump team were using were designed to throw enough shade on the integrity of the election that some other pro-Trump actor in the system (State legislatures in purple states with gerrymandered Republican majorities, the Republican majority on SCOTUS, Mike Pence, a pro-coup faction in the military, or an armed mob of conservative citizens) would toss out the election results and "who is inaugurated on 20th January 2021" would be decided otherwise than by an election.

Likewise, I agree entirely with this. One additional distinction I want to draw that I personally adhere to, but that doesn't seem to be the position of most election "deniers" is that I don't think the cheating is mostly the proverbial deep state conspiracy, I think it's about dispersed efforts to push, bend, and break rules among people that don't need some grand organizer to tell them which way they should go. One important result of this position is recognizing that this is not a one-sided grand conspiracy and that Republican officials and individual actors likely engage in a great deal of cheating as well. To the extent that the permanent bureaucracy in DC interferes, I think they do so via media and social media manipulation rather than direct cheating.

One analogy that I often think of for these things is officiating in sports. If you lose, even if the officiating was objectively bad, it's almost always because you weren't good enough and didn't put it out of reach of your opponent. You can say you got screwed by a call, but ultimately, you just gotta do better. You can think the rules are stupid and that underthrown passes resulting in interference calls (or mass mail-in voting with no meaningful ID requirement) is ridiculous, but those were the known rules of the game. Change them next time, try to get them right, but it's still going to come down to how you play rather than just being completely robbed. That said, if you definitely got screwed and your opponent keeps insisting that everything was completely fair, and in fact was the best officiated game that's ever happened, it's entirely reasonable to feel some animosity towards them.

One additional distinction I want to draw that I personally adhere to, but that doesn't seem to be the position of most election "deniers" is that I don't think the cheating is mostly the proverbial deep state conspiracy, I think it's about dispersed efforts to push, bend, and break rules among people that don't need some grand organizer to tell them which way they should go.

The "deep state conspiracy" part of it is the general unwillingness of the actual upper-level state and federal officials to seriously do anything to prevent the low-level rigging that advances their party interests. If rigging happens and investigators slow-walk inquiries, evidence is "accidentally" disposed of, and prosecutors sit on their hands, what recourse actually exists?

Because it's not as simple, theoretically, as having national control of how the votes are counted. It would be a series of compartmentalized prospiracies limited by their preparation. Take, for example, the ongoing litigation in Fulton County Georgia. The allegation is that 150,000 unfolded, machine marked, "mail in" test ballots, all for Biden, were inappropriately counted. Presumably these were manufactured to test the machines, and then set aside. It's been stuck in courts for years at this point, and as progress is finally being made to unseal the ballots, which the state was ordering to preserve, it's lawyers are quitting and it appears the ballots may have been "lost".

The margin if victory for Biden in Georgia was about 12,000 votes. And here in lies the logistical conundrum, if this was a fraudulent election. 150,000 fake ballots allowed for too many witnesses during the recount efforts. People noticed. It's been kept in the courts for 3 years, and now it looks like the state destroyed the evidence, so they win in the end. But every time you pull a stunt like that, there is the risk of it not working. Of it not being enough. Of there just being too many people seeing it. You cannot reduce the risk of failure to 0%. At least in our system.

Because, in counties where paper trails of machine counted ballots are supposed to still exist, you would be limited to what extent you can rig the vote by logistics like that. In counties without a paper trail, then all bets are off. Thankfully those days are almost over.

A quick check of the right wing alt-media site you link to shows that even they are not claiming that there were 150,000 test ballots improperly included in the count. 150,000 was the total number of postal votes in Fulton County - we can reasonably assume that most of these were legitimate, particularly given that the overall percentage of postal votes in Fulton was close to the statewide average. Nor does the article say that the ballots were lost - it says that Fulton County explicitly says they are not lost, but that one specific right-wing citizen-journalist doesn't believe them.

The actual lawsuit filed by Favorito, a conservative activist and 9-11 conspiracy theorist (the lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign didn't run on this point) is based on an affidavit by Susan Voyles, who saw one batch of 107 "pristine" postal ballots in a box of 8 batches. If you assume that Voyles only looked at one box of ballots to find this batch and therefore that roughly 1/8 of the postal ballots were dodgy, then you get the "possibly 10-20,000 fraudulent votes" alleged by Favorito. And the specific box of votes identified by Voyles was reviewed, and there were no irregularities. So the premise of the Favorito lawsuit is that Voyles misremembered the box number, and that a bunch of randos should be able to go through 150,000 votes to find the needle in the haystack. FWIW, the reason why it has come up again is that the standing issue has finally been adjudicated in favour of Favorito after two trips up and down the appeals hierarchy.

But the important point here is how easy it is to create a Gish Gallop of hinkiness. We have one poll worker claiming (under oath, admittedly) to have seen 107 votes that looked a bit wrong (an argument so frivolous that Trump's lawyers wouldn't touch it), being blown up to 150,000 fraudulently counted test ballots alleged on this forum. And apart from Voyles, who (being under oath) was careful not to allege any specific irregularity, all the amplification was done by randos. There are hundreds of more or less frivolous complaints about the election being exaggerated in thousands of places, and because they get vaguer as well as bigger online, it can take hours to find out what the allegation even is, let alone to rebut it.

a conservative activist and 9-11 conspiracy theorist

I'm so tired of this oxymoron. The new right is not "conservative" in any meaningful sense. Conspiracy theorists are not, essentially, "conservative" in either ideological predilection or demeanor. Trump is not and has never been "conservative." Maybe I'm just being pedantic over a term that has specific meaning to me, but while it is true that a lot a previously self-identified "conservatives" have become something else, what that is can hardly be called "conservative." Maybe the same applies to "liberals," to some extent.

I mean it's only America that uses the label "liberal" to mean "left-leaning." Elsewhere in the world it means something right-leaning. "Classic liberal" is an attempt to reclaim the term, and I personally say "center-left" and "progressive" when I'm referring to what are commonly referred to as liberals.

Theoretically, there can be right- and left-liberals, who disagree about say the level of traditionalism and government involvement in the economy. "Conservative" in a US context used to refer to right-liberals, but now on both the Right and Left there are powerful illiberal/post-liberal strains.

And here is a good example of how flippant and lazy people can be when dismissing fact patterns too damaging to the world view they've bought into.

It wasn't one poll worker, is was several. Going off the filing, Judy Aube, Robin Hall, Susan Voyles, Barbara Hartman all noticed these suspicious ballots. Bridget Thorne testifies that the test ballots were not generated according to procedure and were not quarantined correctly.

But you know what, one of us is going to be right or the other in the fullness of time on this one. Hopefully. Either people will be allowed to view the ballots, or they'll get "lost" at this point. At least that's how it's looking. And once the ballots are looked at, putting aside however it's judged, because I doubt a judge at this point is going to invalidate the 2020 Georgia results, we should see if these uncreased, machine printed, test ballots were in those lots of ballots. At least, I'm hoping so. There could still be ambiguities where we just get the state investigating itself and declaring they did nothing wrong, not allowing any 3rd party to view the ballots, and not using a methodology that would address the specific concerns raised. For example, just counting them again as is and getting the same count. Or going through them again and verifying that yup, they were properly filled out ballots.

But I am, perhaps naively, hopeful we get a definitive answer on this one.

I'm skeptical. Favorito has had access to (low-quality) scans for some time even before the case was first mooted and not been able to present any convincing evidence that direction that could persuade me, and on the other side I don't think there's much he could present that would persuade the typical public.

Well I can see why these low quality images would make it impossible to present convincing evidence. Doesn't look like they pick up creases, nor display the marks in sufficient resolution to determine if they were by hand or by machine with any confidence. Jesus, the first digital camera I got in 2004 had a better resolution than those scans. I know it's the government, but how did they even find technology that terrible?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats