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I want to talk about how we talk about elections and what’s acceptable for whom to say. Over the weekend, when I was discussing Trump and the reaction to him from the broadly construed left, I told someone that I just genuinely don’t understand the perspective that he’s a “threat to democracy”. Since my interlocutor is on the same page as me with regard to January 6, they didn’t go down that easy and well-trod road, but instead brought up something from before the 2016 election that really rubbed them the wrong way, that they thought from an otherwise neutral perspective was unacceptable behavior, and that’s the way Trump speaks about his acceptance of electoral results. We have a shared recollection of him saying that he would only accept the results if they were fair, but now that I’m sitting down, I want to make sure I know exactly he said:
I don’t think this is a cherrypicked example either, instead being a clear articulation of a position that I think Trump has consistently espoused with regard to both the 2016 and 2020 elections, that he will only accept the results of the election if he thinks they were legitimately free and fair (which may well require his victory for him to agree things were on the up and up). The person I was discussing this with thinks this is a terrible way to speak about elections because of the damage caused to trust in institutions by having your highest political officers saying that they really don’t know whether it’s a fair election or not.
I have previously articulated at some length why I think the 2020 election was an absolute mess and why I think the de facto elimination of secret ballots calls all American elections into question. Nonetheless, I have to admit that having a Presidential candidate express the same sentiment is destabilizing. The question I bump into is whether it’s incumbent on the speaker to be the one trying to stabilize things if they truly believe that the election is going to have highly questionable results. As a general matter, I think it would be best for candidates to not deliberately increase the level of uncertainty about a result; if you basically agreed to the rules and security procedures and thought they were fine, you should assure the public that their votes will determine who wins and you’ll win or lose on the merits. But what if you don’t think the election is even close to fair? What should you say? Let’s try a few examples to think about:
As I describe in the link above, the 2020 election was a mess, with large numbers of ballots cast illegally and laws changed at the last minute. If I were running and believed that, what should I say about it? I don't actually know if it materially impacted the results, but I would be pretty pissed off if my opponents pulled these kinds of stunts in my election.
If I were running in an Illinois state-wide election in 1982 and there turned out to be over 100,000 fraudulent votes just in Chicago, do I still have to just play along with the crooked machine?
Should all Russians agree that Putin was fairly elected this Spring? While his margin might be implausible, he probably is popular, so why stir up pointless turbulence?
Paul Kagame is making Rwanda great again and won 99% of the vote in 2017. His opponent offered him the high praise of saying, “but so far in this election no one in our party has been killed or imprisoned or harassed and that means at least some progress” which was presumably both stabilizing and good for his personal health. Can’t beat that!
Aside from the specific considerations, where at some point an election moves from sincere disagreement about the quality to obviously crooked, there seems to me to be a game theoretical problem with unqualified agreement that there are no concerns about the election. If I repeatedly state that the election is free and fair, am I not limiting my ability to challenge the results if it turns out I was wrong and it’s crooked? Is the game theoretically optimal choice not saying that you’ll see how it goes and assess accordingly? Setting aside problems with Trump’s honesty and bombast, I have trouble with the idea that one should offer such a concession to an opponent that they don’t think is actually a good-faith actor.
But really, I do get the point. Most American politicians don’t talk about issues with the electoral process, favoring stability over personal gain, with the added element of it being likely that they’ll be punished electorally if they attempt to defect from that equilibrium. How should politicians talk about their confidence in elections that haven’t happened yet?
I've added emphasis to a question that I see as a disgusting example of linguistic trickery. I don't know the name for this trick, I'll provisionally call it Schrodinger's Context.
The question is being asked ahead of the election. How absolute is absolute? What if Dominion program their machines to ignore Republican votes and the Democrats win with 100% of the votes counted? Clearly there has to be some limit, at which one notices that the vote is rigged and one rejects the result. So absolute isn't to be interpreted in the most literal way possible; there is an implicit context and that context contains limits on the extent of electoral anomalies the the candidate is expected to tolerate.
The context is not spelled out. It is just understood that the election will be basically honest. But, if after the vote, some amount X of fraud gets discovered, that is like Schrodinger opening the box and discovering that the context was really about accepting the result if there is ≤ X amount of fraud.
I think the traditional context goes like this:
Politicians get to campaign hyperbolically. They can rile their base by saying that the Chinese are building car factories in Mexico and these cars will flood the American car market causing job loses among American auto-workers. Politicians are allowed to describe the these jobs loses as a bloodbath as if the Mexicans themselves will flood across the border, armed with machetes, and hack the American auto-workers to death in a literal bloodbath. No, it is just job loses, no actual blood spilled, but the hyperbolic rhetoric is allowed. "Every-one" knows not to take it literally.
"Every-one". There is a problem here. There is always some-one who gets over excited and attempts electoral fraud, thinking that they are the good guy, because they are averting a literal blood bath. Hyperbolic rhetoric is permitted, and the cost of this is that some people are not quite right in the head and break the rules on counting the votes because the hyperbole wound them up to the point of madness.
So the traditional context has two more parts. First, a few nutters attempting electoral fraud doesn't invalidate an election. It can be literally true that some Democrats cheated, and yet perfectly reasonable that Donald Trump concede the election. Second, there is a gentleman's agreement that rival politicians police their own side and try to prevent electoral fraud in their own cause. If a Democrat cheats, fellow Democrats call them out, and a Democrat Attorney General prosecutes. That is the quid pro quo for Trump conceding despite a small amount of fraud.
That is my understanding of the traditional context. I think current problems are due to the gentlemen's agreement breaking down. If a few nutters are committing electoral fraud, well, smirk Donald Trump should still concede, without asking "how much?" and without expecting Democrats to police their own side.
If it's true that Democrats are cheating, then, as someone generally opposed to the Democratic Party, I have two responses:
Republicans should not concede illegal results
If this is uniquely democracy-destroying, and unacceptable, then: Republicans need to cheat harder.
Since in many ways (2) is worse than (1), I'm skeptical of any argument that supposes that conceding a rigged election is the healthy and adult decision.
I'll throw a bit of a wrench in this.
This process usually helps the Republicans. 2020 is a bit of an exception.
Let me explain what I'm talking about here. I've been interested in this subject since say, 2000-ish, when I came across some local articles talking about how local civic groups (generally red coded) were actually paying to upgrade local voting systems. And then the whole Bush V. Gore thing happened, and shit hit the fan and it got ugly. But it got me interested in the subject regarding Margins of Errors, and their effect on elections.
The short version is that MoE rates differ based on different forms of voting, and this difference I believe can swing close elections. I also argue, again, that generally this process helps Republicans.
What happened in 2020? Truth be told, I think both sides just played lawfare more than anything, and the Democrats won in such a way that may have swung the election. Trump wanted to discredit the mail-in votes, Biden wanted to maximize their counting. So you had a situation where the way a lot of Democratic voters were voting, actually was a way that ended up having a much lower Margin of Error than what it normally would have, because they were maximally counting all votes.
I don't believe there are any good guys in all this, to be clear.
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