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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

Let's grant that for the moment . Doesn't it then follow that the candidates must ALSO have to convince enough people their objections are legitimate?

Where a candidate demanded that they would only accept the election as legitimate if every single ballot of 200 million or so was tracked from source to counting, then no election is ever going to satisfy them because it is just not feasible for zero errors or mistakes to be made at that scale while keeping to the idea of a secret ballot. Similarly, a candidate demanding his opponent accept the legitimacy of the election when only 5 votes were cast all of which happened to be in said candidates handwriting is asking too much.

In other words, just as the election has to be seen to be legitimate, the objections to said legitimacy must themselves have to be seen as legitimate (as in must be convincing). If you cannot convince enough of the electorate that your objections are legitimate then by exactly the same logic you are using, the objections themselves have no force. If no-one believes the election was stolen, then it was not stolen for these purposes.

Given that around 70% of people do not think the election was stolen, and they are the majority, then wouldn't that suggest the objections themselves have been found wanting in the very court of legitimacy you are talking about?