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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.”
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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