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This is an incoherent pair of sentences. What function does having a paper trail or bipartisan autiding have except for helping to establish that the reported vote count is true and accurate (or it's degree thereof)? A paper trail will not make someone accept an election as legitimate, if they are not interested in obtaining (or respecting, as a process for determining who wins) the factual truth of the vote count.
"You aren't going to convince anyone the election was legitimate by arguing and evaluating specific factual claims". Quite right! It was clear in 2020 and even more clear now, that most who believe the election was stolen did not come to that belief through a sober consideration of the facts.
It's not incoherent at all it is the core of what I mean when I bring up "the contested environment". The purpose of having documented chains of custody and witnesses from both parties involved in the process is so that when irregularities do occur, Side A can tell Side B "Ok, but your guy signed off on it. If you have a problem with the count, you should take it up with them". "Truth" and "Accuracy" are secondary concerns.
The point I'm trying to make here and the point that yourself the OP, @2rafa, @SwordOfOccam don't seem to be grasping is that onus of proof is not on the losers to provide evidence of illegitimacy, the onus is on election officials to convince the losing party that they lost fair and square. See my above reply to @FiveHourMarathon.
No, it's incoherent. There is literally no point in having audits or paper trails if there is not an objective measure of who wins an election. In our actual reality, the organizing principal we use is, " the guy with the most votes wins" (to first order). Even the steal crowd universally couches their arguments in terms of stolen votes, vote counts, counting processes etc. factually, the number of counts matters, because that is the agreed upon standard.
Someone can always in principle defect from the process, but that is not particularly interesting since anyone can always defect from any process. In that case, the losing party should be honest and say, "I don't like this outcome, so fuck you I won't respect it" rather than endlessly engaging in claims of irregularities in the administrivia.
This doesn't logically follow from what you wrote above. Granting we have a mutually agreed upon process (as you say), even if it has no contact with any objective truth or measure, if party A has a concern, they should be able to point to some irregularity in the paper trail. That is it's whole reason for existing, by your own argument. If they think the process itself is unfair, they can always point to a specific attribute of the process. If party A just sits back and says, you know what, this seems fishy, why don't you bring me another rock and maybe that will assuage concerns, there's no reason why that should shift the burden of proof at all.
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There is no onus on anyone. Nobody has to do anything, or prove anything. You do not have to convince anyone, and nobody has to convince you. I'm sure the United States will survive in some form without the people who have decided (not without justification )that they don't like the society that has slowly developed and evolved over 250 years. But then I have to wonder what exactly you think you're doing.
But there is. Just because you've chosen not to believe in it does not mean it is not there. This is exactly what I'm talking about when I go on about "contested environments", "the Leviathan-shaped hole", and liberals treating the relative peace and prosperity of societies like the US and EU as an inevitability rather than something that has to be actively maintained.
It is easy for someone who's only ever known peace to forget just how much ruin there is in a nation.
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I don't think that is the job of election officials. Especially having been one such election official. That is way too high level a thing for random local government workers to be worrying about. Their job is to organize the election in line with whatever budget, rules and laws apply in their location. They don't have the time or expertise to be trying to decide what will look legitimate or not. That is done by the politicians setting what rules and laws they need to follow.
If Michigan wants 134 observers of each party and passes a law, then when the election officials deny more people getting in and that looks like they are hiding something, that is not on the election officials. When people are filming through the windows and the city attorney tells them to cover the windows in case some of the ballot information is visible, that isn't on the poor schlubs getting paper cuts inside.
Legitimacy is built way before that point. The fact several hundred people were trying to get in prior to that situation shows that the legitimacy was in question BEFORE the election actually happened. Election officials can't do anything about that.
Then, as @Walterodim and others have observed below, we have a serious problem.
I think there are people that have such responsibility, but if the PA legislature passes a mail in voting for all law, or Michigan passes a no more than one observer per party per board law, then it isn't up to the election officials to not carry out the wishes of the duly elected representatives of the people. Even if they think it will look really bad from a legitimacy point of view. it simply isn't their remit to override laws like that.
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And my point is that Donald Trump is a sore loser who was never going to accept that he lost “fair and square”. What do you think it would take to convince Trump he lost fair and square? This is the pivotal question in this debate, since most of Trump’s supporters will take his opinion on the matter.
Irrelevant because it is not Donald Trump the individual you ultimately need to convince but a plurality of the people who voted for him.
Those people’s views are in substantial part dependent upon Trump. If he had accepted defeat in 2020 we wouldn’t be having this conversation because his supporters would almost all have fallen in line with his views.
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I agree that election officials have a responsibility to affirmatively defend the integrity of the elections they manage. The problem is that some election skeptics are implacable and immune to evidence. They believe the only legitimate outcome is when their preferred candidate wins, and so they see a loss as presumptive evidence of fraud and they'll work backwards and credulously repeat whatever theory happens to be convenient to their narrative. It's a big problem but I don't know how you're supposed to reason with delusional people.
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I grasp your point.
What you don’t grasp is that you’re calling for a near-impossible standard when dealing with bad faith or illogical actors.
No one can convince Trump about the true size of a crowd, let alone the outcome of an election. Even when he wins.
For any level of effort to show it was fair and square, the conspiracy theory can go a level deeper. Our elections are not perfect and improvements should be made, but don’t pretend that can meaningfully shift present vibes on the right.
Examining specific allegations is the only reasonable response, but people uninterested in reason won’t be persuaded that the lack of evidence means they should downgrade their conspiratorial confidence.
It's disingenuous to claim that lack of evidence proves something when one of the complaints is that ervidence collecting was made very difficult.
It’s disingenuous to claim evidence collecting was made very difficult when that’s not the case, when the TTV case involved refusing to show claimed evidence, and where every case of presented evidence I’m aware of, like the cyber ninjas, was a laughable attempt.
The continued lack of evidence proves that the claims made remain unjustified. It doesn’t prove nothing happened, but it does strongly suggest a pattern of BS artists making stuff up and credulous people believing whatever feels right to them.
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