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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 think the probability that outright election fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 election is very low.
Per Wikipedia, the very close states were Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, with a total margin of some 40k votes.
But that does not suffice for Trump in a tie, because both chambers of Congress went to the Democrats (House by 222 to 213 seats).
So either you would need larger scale fraud in Pennsylvania or Nevada, or argue that the election fraud also affected the (typically heavily gerrymandered) House outcome.
Trump's behavior does not correspond to someone who had very specific allegations (which he could then take to the supreme court, a la Bush vs Gore), but instead paints the picture of a man-child throwing a tantrum because he did not like the outcome of the election, per Wikipedia:
I am all for making the voting results more robust, but I also recognize that the US has a long and proud tradition of disenfranchisement, so anything which makes it harder to vote will be understood in that vein, and might even be intended that way.
Trump had very specific allegations; the election challenge in Georgia lists many specific allegations about illegally counted ballots with supporting evidence in specific areas which dwarf the difference in vote totals for the state.
the GOP had control of the Senate post 2020 election which lead to Senate runoffs in GA which is a different election in 2021 with a different electorate
the results show a close split election; arguing that because Democrats only lost 13 seats in the House but held it and got to runoffs over getting to a tie in the Senate (decided by the VP which is what this accusation is about in the first place) means it's very unlikely there weren't >40,000 illegally counted ballots in AZ, GA, WI, etc., isn't a strong argument
first, this statement is in the context of illegally recorded confidential settlement conference in the context of a filed election contest in the state of GA which was then edited and leaked
second, he gave lists of where illegally counted ballots are likely to be and wanted the state of GA to simply look at the them and find the illegally counted votes in the specific areas he already identified
good lord is wikipedia just complete trash, although it's trash because it's parroting the approved "journalists" which are even worse
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