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True The Vote, the group behind the wildly popular "2000 Mules" film that purported to document extensive election fraud in Georgia, has admitted to a judge that it doesn't have evidence to back its claims.
Y'all know I love my hobby horse, even if it's beaten into an absolute paste, and I admit at having ongoing puzzlement as to why 2020 stolen election claims retain so much cachet among republican voters and officials. TTV has a pattern of making explosive allegations of election fraud only to then do whatever it takes to resist providing supporting evidence. TTV has lied about working with the FBI and also refused to hand over the evidence they claimed to have to Arizona authorities. In Georgia, TTV went as far as filing formal complaints with the state, only to then try to withdraw their complaints when the state asked for evidence.
The founder of TTV was also briefly jailed for contempt in 2022 because of her refusal to hand over information in a defamation lawsuit where TTV claimed an election software provider was using unsecured servers in China.Edit: @Walterodim looked into this below and I agree the circumstances are too bizarre to draw any conclusions about the founder's intentions.I have a theory I'm eager to have challenged, and it's a theory I believe precisely explains TTV's behavior: TTV is lying. My operating assumption is that if someone uncovers extensive evidence of election fraud, they would do whatever they can to assist law enforcement and other interested parties in fixing this fraud. TTV does not do this, and the reason they engage in obstinate behavior when asked to provide evidence is because they're lying about having found evidence of election fraud. It's true that they file formal complaints with authorities, but their goal is to add a patina of legitimacy to their overall allegations. TTV's overriding motivation is grifting: there is significant demand within the conservative media ecosystem for stolen election affirmations, and anyone who supplies it stands to profit both financially as well as politically. We don't have direct financial statements but we can glean the potential profitability from how 2000 Mules initially cost $29.99 to watch online, and the millions in fundraising directed towards TTV (including a donor who sued to get his $2.5 million back). There's also a political gain because Trump remains the de facto leader of the conservative movement, and affirming his 2020 stolen election claims is a practical requirement for remaining within the sphere.
I know this topic instigates a lot of ire and downvotes, but I would be very interested to hear substantive reasons for why my theory is faulty or unreasonable! I believe I transparently outlined my premises and the connective logic in the above paragraph, so the best way to challenge my conclusion could be either to dispute a premise, or to rebut any logical deduction I relied on. You could also do this by pointing out anything that is inconsistent with my theory. So for example if we were talking about how "John murdered Jane", something inconsistent with that claim could be "John was giving a speech at the time of Jane's murder". I would also request that you first check if any of your rebuttals are an example of 'belief in belief' or otherwise replaying the 'dragon in my garage' unfalsifiability cocoon. The best way to guard against this trap would be to explain why your preferred explanation fits the facts better than mine, and also to proactively provide a threshold for when you'd agree that TTV is indeed just lying.
I'm excited for the responses!
Edit: I forgot I should've mentioned this, but it would be really helpful if responses avoided motte-and-bailey diversions. This post is about TTV and their efforts specifically, and though I believe stolen election claims are very poor quality in general, I'm not making the argument that "TTV is lying, ergo other stolen election claims are also bullshit". I think there are some related questions worth contemplating (namely why TTV got so much attention and credulity from broader conservative movement if TTV were indeed lying) but changing the subject isn't responsive to a topic about TTV. If anyone insists on wanting to talk about something else, it would be helpful if there's an acknowledgement about TTV's claims specifically. For example, it can take the format of "Yes, it does appear that TTV is indeed lying but..."
I don’t know why people discount the fact that Trump isn’t coming to “they stole the election from me” from some kind of neutral position. Trump is a historically, notoriously thin skinned man who lashes out at a lot of criticism and almost compulsively responds to it (eg tweeting @ minor columnists, celebrities or TV hosts who criticized him). The default assumption should be that he’s never going to accept that he lost fair and square, and will claim fraud. A lot of Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen believe it because he said so. Expecting this to be some kind of intellectual debate is ridiculous. Biden stole the election because Trump lost, and because Trump can’t lose and can’t believe he could lose. The evidence must then be obtained, as a secondary process.
This is why ‘stolen’ can mean many things, from hacking electronic voting machines and stuffing ballot boxes to planning protests (ie the ‘fortify the election’ meme) and engaging in the same dirty tactics that have been the norm in American politics for almost 250 years.
People who believe the election was probably stolen based on intuition: will you rescind your claim if Trump wins this year?
Amazing. It's as if four years of arguing about the 2020 election have left no impression on you, and you've made yourself totally impervious to what the other side actually believes. Vote counting stopped in several swing states simultaneously in the dead of night? Mail-in irregularities? Pandemic rules? Ballot "curing"? You must not have heard. I suppose, then, the only rational hypothesis is that everything other people believe is silly.
All that stuff is well within the bounds of the entirely regular corrupt shenanigans that have occurred in every US election since the 18th century. Do you really think 1992 or 2012 were “more fair”? They weren’t.
Yes, exactly! The kinds of crooked shenanigans that potentially stole the 2020 election are not unprecedented conspiracies, but historically normal and well-documented. Thank you!
My point, then, is that the specific conservative hysteria over 2020 was because Donald Trump specifically couldn’t accept that he lost (whatever the ‘rules of the game’), not because historically unprecedented corruption occurred. This is the country of Tammany Hall, of Chicago machine politics, of comical gerrymandering, in that context 2020 just doesn’t feel special.
We accept that election-rigging happens, now we're just debating the specifics.
It is more difficult to change an election at a national level than at a local level, and not every election is "rigged". But it's not unprecedented to speculate about rigged presidential resulrs: 1960, 2000. It's a well-documented historical fact that LBJ manufactured tens of thousands of votes in his 1948 Senate election. Tammany Hall and the Chicago machine, as you suggest, are known. So it is possible!
A brief: election rules were changed in many states for the pandemic in 2020 which made it easier to generate mass quantities of mail-in ballots. On election night, when Trump was ahead across several swing states, and had already won presumed-bellweathers Ohio and Florida, vote counting stopped. Suddenly, when counting resumed, Trump was irrevocably behind. Mail-in ballots comprised the difference. Attempts to segregate or eliminate these ballots were regarded as an unjustified conspiracy theory, even though to this day chain of custody basically does not exist for any of them. If you had all the ballots in front of you and wanted to attempt a recount, you could not prove that every ballot actually came from a legitimate registered voter.
At this point, it's fine if you just don't want to believe anything, I can't make you believe in my priors. But making everything about how you think Donald Trump has a thin ego isn't really much of an argument. (It's not as though the other politicians of DC are known for their thick skins.)
We accept that dirty behavior (which may be described as ‘rigging’ if you prefer, although I would limit the use of that term to Anschluss-referendum-type ballot stuffing / just making up numbers) is a perennial feature of US elections and that there was nothing special or unique about 2020, then?
That is the key claim. No democracy is free of corruption or dirty electoral behavior of the type we’re discussing. So ‘2020 was rigged’ proponents face a simple choice - either they accept and argue that every US election ever has been ‘rigged’ by their standards and America is not and has never been a democracy OR they admit that what happens to Trump in 2020 was nothing out of the ordinary and he should accept that he got played and stop whining about what happened to everyone else happening to him.
Which is it? Trump’s thin skin is relevant because it stops him doing what almost every other victim of dirty behavior in US electoral history ultimately did, which is take the L.
Sure, that sounds reasonable.
This is silly catastrophizing. That crooked behavior exists in every election doesn't mean I need treat all elections as equally crooked. There are clear and obvious theories for what made 2020 especially dirty: the mass expansion of unverifiable mail-in ballots! The simultaneous count stop in several swing states! These are elements unique to the 2020 election. Being suspicious of them does not require me to declare that every election must have been stolen, or to commit to some silly prediction about crooked behavior in the future.
If you imagine that Trump could have had it rigged against it and should have conceded anyways, I find this silly again.
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This is a false binary. One can accept that attempts to attack electoral integrity are common and also think that 2020 was an unusually compromised election that was compromised by a series of deliberate policy choices. It wasn't the first severely compromised election and wasn't the worst (see Illinois in 1982 for a truly absurd display of how bad a sufficiently corrupt set of officials can encourage), but it was actually very bad anyway.
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