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Notes -
The Colorado Supreme Court holds:
[recent related discussion, slightly older]
The Colorado Presidential Primary is scheduled for March 5th, for both parties. As the decision notes, January 4, 2024 is "the day before the Secretary’s deadline to certify the content of the presidential primary ballot)"; while the matter is open to further stay should federal courts intervene, such an intervention would itself determine at least the state presidential primary.
How are the procedural protections? From the dissent:
And the other dissent:
and
Did the Colorado Supreme Court provide a more serious and deep analysis of the First Amendment jurisprudence, at least?
There are interpretations here other than that of the Russell Conjugation: that stochastic terrorism is limited to this tiny portion of space, or perhaps that shucks there just hasn't ever been some opportunity to worry about it ever before and they're tots going to consistently apply this across the political spectrum in the future. They are not particularly persuasive to me, from this expert.
Perhaps more damning, this is what the majority found a useful one to highlight : a sociology professor who has been playing this tune since 2017.
If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot. But that's not a metaphor I pick from dissimilarity.
You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. We're just warming up here, the election race has barely started! There's a whole year of this to go, and that's just until the election is "over".
Some obvious predictions:
Trump will be the Republican nominee.
Trump will not take office next year.
This will, again, be the "most secure election ever".
A year from now, public trust in the election, the courts, the media, the federal bureaucracy, and the federal government will be significantly lower than it is now. The pattern will hold for subsequent elections.
[EDIT] - To put it more plainly, the point of this isn't to keep Trump off the ballot. The point is that this is a way to hurt the outgroup without getting in too much trouble. If it actually keeps Trump off the ballot, fantastic. But the actual value is the incremental reduction in probability of an effective Trump administration, verses the predicted cost, which I'd imagine is perceived as negligible. What you are seeing here is Blue Tribe's institutional dedication to picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And why not? Look at all these free pennies!
... I think this is insufficiently cynical/paranoid/worried.
As you say, the point is to do things perceived as hurting the outgroup without predicted cost of getting in too much trouble. But the people doing the perception and prediction are vast, and not all are wise or farseeing.
This doesn't matter! Trump didn't win Colorado in 2016, he didn't win the primary in Colorado in 2016. Even if it continues to the general election, there's no path to the White House that turns on Colorado. The standing and jurisdiction issues make this specific sort of challenge restricted to Colorado and a couple other (similarly unimportant) states, and the timeline means that even if someone started today to try to reflect the same processes backward, it wouldn't be able to hit for 2026, nevermind 2024.
But that's the sort of analysis that's somewhere between spherical-cow and infinite frictionless plane, assuming that one's enemies and even own side have not animating factor of their own. But the pebbles vote is the avalanche.
I linked to the past discussion on Baude and Pualsen's paper, not just because it's relevant, but because the court here endorsed its logic in the context of judicial review. But Baude did not limit to judicial review. Instead, their paper holds that every officer of the United States or state government with any power to review ballots has not just a power but a responsibility to unilaterally reject a Section-Three disqualified candidate. And that's the explicit text!
So to avoid further escalation, we do not merely need that every court and judge eventually deny or reverse this one ruling, but that everyone with the power to act on this chooses to put down particularly tempting and shiny weapon. Indeed, by the plain text of this decision, even if SCOTUS stays matters explicitly, the Colorado Secretary of State retains the power to reject ineligible candidates, as simple as can be. It's just the Secretary of State's determination, then, rather than being explicitly prohibited by court mandate from including Trump on the ballot. Unless and until a court issues an order explicitly requiring otherwise, there's only the often-broad limits of their powers under state law -- in the hands of people who can now, quite accurately, argue in the face of future lawsuits that they were not violating clearly established law. And that will remain the case after the primary, after the general election, and even after the election has been counted. In every state.
There's reason I compare this to the independent state legislature theory.
I was hesitant to talk about this publicly, for the same reason that I've been hesitant to talk about some of your drone stuff privately, even though it's a very interesting and important topic. But where there was a minor risk that public conversation might at least go different directions than Baude and Paulsen's papers, if not larger ones, a court case going to SCOTUS overwhelms any risk I or we could present.
I don't think people are stupid enough to try this, even with 50 Secretaries of State and a few thousand relevant electoral officials. It doesn't take many snake eyes, and I've been wrong before, though.
Oh, hell. That is definitely worse than I expected.
And that’s not even the worst part! There’s implications to the Baude argument that even today I’m totally unwilling to post in public clear text, even past what’s already happened and is being discussed.
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And we have our first
moronvolunteer!.More options
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I still can't get over the American Pravda aspect of this. Why not just say, "yeah, it wasn't great, but Covid was a tough time and we did our best"? Would anyone have thought worse of election officials and leadership if they did so? The ridiculous claim that it wasn't just good, but actually the bestest and most beautiful election ever just serves to further undermine trust in institutions. Insisting on phrasing it that way feels more like point deer, make horse than a literal claim about the quality of the election.
This and a handful of other threads over the last couple months have got me thinking about doing another Inferential Distance post on "trust" and "credibility" because it's becoming increasingly clear to me that there are a lot of people who seem to think that it's something that can somehow be arbitrated or imposed. The New York Times is a "Credible Source" because [reasons]. Appeals to academic consensus are "credible" because [reasons].
The idea that credibility and trust are resources that can be acquired, expended, and undermined just doesn't seem to factor into liberal thinking.
They believe, apparently correctly, that they have a set of institutions sufficient to manufacture and maintain credibility indefinitely no matter what they say, as long as they back each other up. The NYT can say whatever it wants and it will be credible -- just ask NPR, CNN, the Washington Post, whatever nonprofit NYU just spun up, etc. Whatever Fox News (or the New York Post or the Washington Times) says is "not credible" because "Faux News". The ground truth is too hard to reach and so never enters into it, at least for a majority of those paying attention at all.
This is exactly what I'm talking about.
You and I clearly have fundamentally different (and functionally incompatible) understandings of what the word "credibility" means.
What does credibility mean to you?
What I'm getting at is that to answer that question is an effort post in itself because it is clear that my concept of "credibility" is very different from that of many other posters.
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If it's published in the NYT, a sufficient number of people will believe it or act as if they believe it. That's "credibility".
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I don’t know, when Burger King changes their french fry recipe, do they say it’s pretty good or do they proudly announce that it’s “the best ever” even if it’s a minor change in oil made for cost saving reasons? It seems extremely standard for every change made by some organization to be ‘the best ever’, because the alternative is that it isn’t the best ever, which means there’s been a decline. Yeah, perhaps service declines during coronavirus were inevitable across the board, but they weren’t usually advertised as such. Who can forget major hotel chains announcing that they were now only changing sheets every other day to ‘fight climate change’ or ‘reduce the spread of covid’ rather than to save money?
The processes changed, sure, but to have officials go on TV and say yeah we’re pretty sure it’s going to be a fair election but it might not be the fairest yet seems unlikely, even if the political climate isn’t as heated as it was in 2020.
To go with that analogy, I would say that the public is more like Burger King's board of directors or shareholders than they are like the customers. If the new King Kong burger fails then the CEO might not make a commercial about how much it sucks but when he talks to the owners of the company he should be honest about the fact that a hamburger made out of gorilla meat was a misstep for both culinary and PR reasons. The public is not an external group for election officials to spin things to, but are instead the main stakeholders that the officials are working on behalf of.
I get that that's not how it actually works and I don't expect anything but ass-covering from them, but I still think it's fair to criticize them for it.
Fair enough, I don’t disagree. I think a lot of government is interesting in that voters are theoretically both the shareholders and customers.
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Domino's explicitly admitted that their pizza sucked. I found their advertising compelling and thereafter purchased Domino's pizza for the first time in a long time. It was true, they did make it better!
Sometimes, it's actually better to just tell the truth, if for no reason other than establishing credibility.
Still sort of think the low end delivery stuff sucks. I think I prefer grocery aisle pizza over Dominos plus relatively cheap to fix them up and add flavor (garlic, jalepenos etc) to your own taste.
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I think that still fits with her narrative. They only admitted it sucked after they changed it. They didn't say their new pizza sucked
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It’s probably based off some narrow technical claim from an agency that is true. For example I’m guessing the number of electronic voting machines with no paper trail has decreased. So if you have a bunch of things you have been trying to improve and they have all improved since the last election and are the best they have ever been then you can claim it is the most secure ever. There might be other things that you don’t measure that have been going in a negative direction but because they aren’t part of the improvement plan they don’t exist.
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Pedantically, assuming "next year" means 2024 this would be true even if Trump wins. The President does not assume office until January the year following the election (2025).
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Trump can also not take office due to legitimately losing the election.
"Legitimately" according to who? I am sure that no matter how Trump is prevented from taking office, it will be entirely legitimate according to the New York Times and Blue Tribe generally. There will definately be wild accusations of election fraud. I'm going to wager that many of those accusations will be provably false, and none of them will be provably true. @ymeskhout will definately continue his series of impeccably accurate posts documenting these arguments and their lack of validity, as he should.
But it seems to me that the election is already illegitimate, and it will simply grow more illegitimate as this batch of escalations accumulate and ripen in the public consciousness. The gamesmanship has swamped any legitimacy the process might have had, and that trend will accelerate over time as the escalation spiral evolves.
What fraction of an electoral college vote is this novel legal theory worth, in practical terms? What fraction was it worth for the Press to systematically lie about the Hunter Biden Laptop story? What percentage was it worth for the FBI to assist in coordinating that lie? For the FBI to illegally spy on a presidential candidate? For Blue Tribe and the Democratic party to actively encourage and provide cover for large-scale, organized political violence? And so on, and on, ad nauseum.
Nor is there a remedy for these breaches, and the only available response is to find an escalation of your own. There is no agreement between the sides on what the rules actually are, no unified scale to measure escalations objectively. There will never be an agreement that what the other side did was justified by one's own side going too far; it's Russell Conjugations all the way down. Even if there were, the other side would simply agree and then add another escalation for good measure. When Red Tribe starts bombing things and murdering judges, no Blue is going to point to Ayers and Davis and say "well shucks, you got us there". It's going to be different, because it's always different when the outgroup does it. And likewise for Red Tribe, of course.
They won't, though. Red Tribe is just going to quietly go extinct.
Blue tribers keep saying this, but it's also the blue tribers who are the ones facing a "fertility crisis" not the red. As a general rule, if a couple has two or more kids the question is not "do they go to church?" it is "what church do they go to?"
Increasingly it’s what synagogue or mosque they go to, and that’s only amplified in Europe.
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The blue tribe reproduces memetically, not genetically. As long as they control the schools and the media they can keep converting red children into blue adults.
How many red tribers do you know that don't own a television set, homeschool their children, forbid their kids from watching modern movies, and advise their daughters against going to college? Hardcore fringe Christian fundamentalists, maybe. Everyone else is perfectly happy to send their offspring to Caesar for their education, then make a Pikachu face when they come back as Romans.
Not in a rational bio-determinitsic world they don't. Funny how quickly the narrative changes once it becomes a threat to blue egos.
As for the rest aggressively vetting any movie or show before letting their kids see it and some level of home or private schooling describes the vast majority of parents I know.
Like I said, 2020 opened a lot of eyes and I suspect that the growing recognition of this fact is why we've seen so much batttle-space preparation around the topic of home-schooling and school choice.
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Then some of those kids either go to college, or go to a larger city, and become blue tribe, or some sort of lib (and by lib, I mean not a Red Triber who thinks they're a super oppressed group of people who need to commit violence to survive. They still might vote for Republican's, but they just grill and don't care if their neighbors are gay.)
As long as Red Tribe kids have Youtube or any sort of access to the global Internet, we can win them over, even by such simple things as, "oh hey, the people I were told are terrible human beings who must be destroyed seem normal and have some of the same interests I do," aka, why random beauty bloggers on Youtube who are lesbians probably did more to advance gay marriage among say, rural Nebraskans under 25 than any politician, school, or normal form of entertainment.
...and they wont make any grandkids.
Meanwhile the future will continue to belong to those who show up.
Also, projecting much?
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Where do you think so many new Blue Tribers come from? Red Tribers hand their kids (especially daughters) over to them from K-16.
It's a bit early to tell, but I don't think they do. 2020 opened a lot of eyes and is a big part of why "school-choice" has become such a nakedly partisan topic.
And then they re-elected the Loudon County school board this year. Turns out that the media just has to play down the unpopular things Democrats are doing and eyes close right back up.
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Biden's poll numbers are shocking. I know: don't put too much faith in polls and it's pretty early to start counting. But, Biden's numbers are really shit. Trump might actually win.
That'll be a wild ride. But of course, many Democrats will work hard to """secure""" the election in a way that resembles a conspiracy between media organizations, federal law enforcement and major tech companies to prevent Trump from winning.
It is entirely possible that votes for Trump will be adjudicated invalid in multiple states.
It is entirely possible that the "controversy" over his eligibility will result in a significant shift in voter behavior against him.
It is entirely possible that he will be in jail come election day.
It is entirely possible that the "controversy" over whether he should or should not be in jail will result in a significant shift in voter behavior against him.
It is entirely possible that he will be murdered between now and election day.
Little things add up.
Agreed on all points. Something as little as poll numbers shifting in a few swing states as we approach the election will flip the results.
I'm just against people easily dismissing Trump having any chance of victory. If the election were held today and people voted strictly by poll approval ratings, Trump would probably win. I get that is not a very strong statement, but it isn't nothing. He's not obviously going to lose.
He has better odds than the election he won.
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