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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.
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.
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.
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