The Trump section makes a few assumptions that aren’t defended. They might be right, they might be wrong, but even the most basic counterarguments aren’t addressed.
First, you call questioning the election “overthrowing democracy,” which implies that questioning it wasn’t in any way justified. What’s your prior that an election is sound? This is a genuine question; I’m not sure what’s appropriate. Many, many elections throughout human history have been various degrees of rigged. I have no idea what prior to use, and I have no idea what level of fraud/questionable behavior occurs every election, so it’s hard to analyze both the prior and the update. That said, you’re ascribing bad faith to anyone questioning the results, when most of those truly believe the democratically chosen vote was different. Rigged elections that the media covers up are an equally valid way to abolish democracy, and you provided just as much defense of that claim as you did of yours (none).
If anything, what happened with Gore and Bush in ’08 was more egregious than this, and that didn’t destroy the republic, at least not to the point of property rights vanishing. Contested elections are par for the course for as long as we’re using this ridiculous half the people hate every president system.
Second, you act like leaving NATO is authoritarian in some way. If anything, leaving NATO would create more decentralized control over the globe, not more centralized control of it. If it weren’t for NATO, Ukraine and Russian wouldn’t be at war right now. I could be wrong about those things, but that’s not the point. The point is that, if you want to change the mind of someone like me, this claim about the US being in NATO being universally good has to be defended.
Third, your reference to “despite having a minority of the popular vote;” are we still doing this? Why should California and New York City govern the entire country? The electoral college is a necessary compromise for making the bad system of voting a little less bad.
Lastly, there’s a very visceral reaction on the “new right” to race based ideology. So much of Trump’s support comes from what we’ll call the “Joe Rogan Internet” (and offshoots like Jordan Peterson, Daily Wire, etc), and that entire apparatus is extremely sensitive to and against racial superiority ideology. So perhaps far-righters in the US could swing some sort of class based change up, instead of using race, the way the communists did, but far-right racially motivated ideology has so little power in the US it’s laughable.
Again, I’m open to having my mind changed on any of these. The issue is that they’re cruxes, and they weren’t addressed in the piece at all.
Many, many elections throughout human history have been various degrees of rigged.
Some amount of messiness here and there isn’t the same as systematic rigging on the scale that leads to a straight up different result. The more important question is: why would this specific election have been rigged, and where did Trump and his supporters draw their belief that it was specifically rigged while, say, the one Trump won had been fair and square?
And the answer is, there was no special evidence that this one election was any different from the others. Only one candidate loudly proclaiming that if he won, it was fair, and if he lost, it was rigged, because of course he had to win. That doesn’t seem the most epistemologically sound or falsifiable basis for belief. It’s kind of absurd to start asking “ok but how do we know it was not rigged?” when no one usually even thinks about it being rigged, the elections keep having reasonably alternating winners, with the candidate of the opposite party often winning against the one that is presently holding power, and the only thing drawing attention to this specific election is that the candidate who lost expected to lose and pre-emptively said that if he lost it had to be because the other side was cheating.
Given that the election wasn’t a stand out in any way, given that Trump’s own people in the end couldn’t really do much to prove their claims despite trying their hardest while still being the party in power, I think it’s reasonable to assign a high probability to the 2020 election being roughly as fair as any other in recent US history. If there’s one election in memory that could in fact have actually suffered from this problem due to how close it was, it was the Bush/Gore mess in 2000, and Gore conceded that one.
It was the mechanism and order of the counting which differentiated this election from others. The counts continued long into the night, and into the following days. It was the first election with substantial mail in voting, adding many new attack vectors for fraud.
At about 2am on election night, Trump was a −190 favorite, so not huge, but definitely expected to win. It was certainly unlikely that there were enough votes in the deep blue areas that had yet to be counted to swing the election, although it was no where near prohibitively unlikely.
Then there were the tens of anecdotal reports of various fraudulent or suspicious behaviors at polling and counting sites. To determine what update, if any, these provide, we’d need to know the base rate for them: would there be this many reports for any election where there was sufficient scrutiny? It’s very possible, but it’s also possible this one really was worse.
So those are the updates. Again, it’s unclear how large they are, but they are there.
I can’t think of a position I hold for which the election being rigged/sound is actually a crux, other than “I think 99% probability the election was sound is too high,” which is why I objected. As far as “roughly as fair as any other election,” it’s possible, but as the first election with widespread mail in voting, it’s certainly reasonable that it wasn’t.
I do want to stress though, I really don’t care whether or not the election was rigged. What I’m interested is where people get these really high priors that elections are sound and fair. Everyone is assuming a base rate of rigging that is so low so as to ignore everything that transpired.
It seemed like the second we started actually looking at the election mechanics, there were fraud reports and suspicious activity everywhere, and now I have no idea what to make of election integrity as a whole. There seem to be tens or hundreds of relatively trivial attack surfaces, and especially in non-federal elections, where voting and counting take place in far fewer locations, and far less people vote, it seems very likely some results are fake.
but as the first election with widespread mail in voting, it’s certainly reasonable that it wasn’t
This seems to me like it depends on how mail in voting actually works (never mind that this wasn’t the result of any particular plan, it just happened randomly due to COVID, which also explains perfectly well the difference in use of mail vote between Democrats and Republicans).
What I’m interested is where people get these really high priors that elections are sound and fair. Everyone is assuming a base rate of rigging that is so low so as to ignore everything that transpired.
Personally, my priors come from the fact that both sides have an interest in not letting the other rig it, and that there is enough mix of powers and interests throughout the system that I don’t think any actual serious, systematic rigging would go through. Look at actual well known examples of rigged elections and you’ll usually find systems in which the rigging was blatant but still the side doing it got away with it because they could resort to physical violence and held all the relevant keys to power. If one or another jackass in a specific place had someone throw away some voting cards odds are something similar that benefitted the opposite side happened elsewhere. It’s mostly noise. The question is if there was an organised effort to rig it in one specific direction, and if there is evidence of it, and I just don’t see it. Absent which my prior is, as I said, merely “as fair as any other election”, which doesn’t imply perfectly fair, but reasonably enough not to warrant that sort of extreme behaviour, which is far more threatening of democracy if employed lightly.
Bush and Obama governed almost identically, despite the “heated” election between Obama and Romney/McCain. It seems like what we have is essentially a uniparty with two WWE faces for the public, and they execute mostly Kayfabe performances that all lead to the same outcome in the end.
It appeared, from the media reaction to Trump, that the uniparty was actually threatened by him. This is why I think it’s more likely in this election, rather than previous elections, that there was more of an effort to rig on one side than there was on the other.
I do find myself confused: Trump himself seems relatively incompetent, and his first term didn’t seem all that threatening to the establishment (despite the rhetoric). Even with this confusion, though, I still think the difference between Trump and “Republican candidate X” is significant.
Also, I intentionally didn’t refute your point about “as fair as any other election.” I completely understand that idea; no one here is claiming nothing nefarious ever happens, it’s just a matter of degree and impact.
The Trump section makes a few assumptions that aren’t defended. They might be right, they might be wrong, but even the most basic counterarguments aren’t addressed.
First, you call questioning the election “overthrowing democracy,” which implies that questioning it wasn’t in any way justified. What’s your prior that an election is sound? This is a genuine question; I’m not sure what’s appropriate. Many, many elections throughout human history have been various degrees of rigged. I have no idea what prior to use, and I have no idea what level of fraud/questionable behavior occurs every election, so it’s hard to analyze both the prior and the update. That said, you’re ascribing bad faith to anyone questioning the results, when most of those truly believe the democratically chosen vote was different. Rigged elections that the media covers up are an equally valid way to abolish democracy, and you provided just as much defense of that claim as you did of yours (none).
If anything, what happened with Gore and Bush in ’08 was more egregious than this, and that didn’t destroy the republic, at least not to the point of property rights vanishing. Contested elections are par for the course for as long as we’re using this ridiculous half the people hate every president system.
Second, you act like leaving NATO is authoritarian in some way. If anything, leaving NATO would create more decentralized control over the globe, not more centralized control of it. If it weren’t for NATO, Ukraine and Russian wouldn’t be at war right now. I could be wrong about those things, but that’s not the point. The point is that, if you want to change the mind of someone like me, this claim about the US being in NATO being universally good has to be defended.
Third, your reference to “despite having a minority of the popular vote;” are we still doing this? Why should California and New York City govern the entire country? The electoral college is a necessary compromise for making the bad system of voting a little less bad.
Lastly, there’s a very visceral reaction on the “new right” to race based ideology. So much of Trump’s support comes from what we’ll call the “Joe Rogan Internet” (and offshoots like Jordan Peterson, Daily Wire, etc), and that entire apparatus is extremely sensitive to and against racial superiority ideology. So perhaps far-righters in the US could swing some sort of class based change up, instead of using race, the way the communists did, but far-right racially motivated ideology has so little power in the US it’s laughable.
Again, I’m open to having my mind changed on any of these. The issue is that they’re cruxes, and they weren’t addressed in the piece at all.
Some amount of messiness here and there isn’t the same as systematic rigging on the scale that leads to a straight up different result. The more important question is: why would this specific election have been rigged, and where did Trump and his supporters draw their belief that it was specifically rigged while, say, the one Trump won had been fair and square?
And the answer is, there was no special evidence that this one election was any different from the others. Only one candidate loudly proclaiming that if he won, it was fair, and if he lost, it was rigged, because of course he had to win. That doesn’t seem the most epistemologically sound or falsifiable basis for belief. It’s kind of absurd to start asking “ok but how do we know it was not rigged?” when no one usually even thinks about it being rigged, the elections keep having reasonably alternating winners, with the candidate of the opposite party often winning against the one that is presently holding power, and the only thing drawing attention to this specific election is that the candidate who lost expected to lose and pre-emptively said that if he lost it had to be because the other side was cheating.
Given that the election wasn’t a stand out in any way, given that Trump’s own people in the end couldn’t really do much to prove their claims despite trying their hardest while still being the party in power, I think it’s reasonable to assign a high probability to the 2020 election being roughly as fair as any other in recent US history. If there’s one election in memory that could in fact have actually suffered from this problem due to how close it was, it was the Bush/Gore mess in 2000, and Gore conceded that one.
It was the mechanism and order of the counting which differentiated this election from others. The counts continued long into the night, and into the following days. It was the first election with substantial mail in voting, adding many new attack vectors for fraud.
At about 2am on election night, Trump was a −190 favorite, so not huge, but definitely expected to win. It was certainly unlikely that there were enough votes in the deep blue areas that had yet to be counted to swing the election, although it was no where near prohibitively unlikely.
Then there were the tens of anecdotal reports of various fraudulent or suspicious behaviors at polling and counting sites. To determine what update, if any, these provide, we’d need to know the base rate for them: would there be this many reports for any election where there was sufficient scrutiny? It’s very possible, but it’s also possible this one really was worse.
So those are the updates. Again, it’s unclear how large they are, but they are there.
I can’t think of a position I hold for which the election being rigged/sound is actually a crux, other than “I think 99% probability the election was sound is too high,” which is why I objected. As far as “roughly as fair as any other election,” it’s possible, but as the first election with widespread mail in voting, it’s certainly reasonable that it wasn’t.
I do want to stress though, I really don’t care whether or not the election was rigged. What I’m interested is where people get these really high priors that elections are sound and fair. Everyone is assuming a base rate of rigging that is so low so as to ignore everything that transpired.
It seemed like the second we started actually looking at the election mechanics, there were fraud reports and suspicious activity everywhere, and now I have no idea what to make of election integrity as a whole. There seem to be tens or hundreds of relatively trivial attack surfaces, and especially in non-federal elections, where voting and counting take place in far fewer locations, and far less people vote, it seems very likely some results are fake.
This seems to me like it depends on how mail in voting actually works (never mind that this wasn’t the result of any particular plan, it just happened randomly due to COVID, which also explains perfectly well the difference in use of mail vote between Democrats and Republicans).
Personally, my priors come from the fact that both sides have an interest in not letting the other rig it, and that there is enough mix of powers and interests throughout the system that I don’t think any actual serious, systematic rigging would go through. Look at actual well known examples of rigged elections and you’ll usually find systems in which the rigging was blatant but still the side doing it got away with it because they could resort to physical violence and held all the relevant keys to power. If one or another jackass in a specific place had someone throw away some voting cards odds are something similar that benefitted the opposite side happened elsewhere. It’s mostly noise. The question is if there was an organised effort to rig it in one specific direction, and if there is evidence of it, and I just don’t see it. Absent which my prior is, as I said, merely “as fair as any other election”, which doesn’t imply perfectly fair, but reasonably enough not to warrant that sort of extreme behaviour, which is far more threatening of democracy if employed lightly.
Alright I see one crux here.
Bush and Obama governed almost identically, despite the “heated” election between Obama and Romney/McCain. It seems like what we have is essentially a uniparty with two WWE faces for the public, and they execute mostly Kayfabe performances that all lead to the same outcome in the end.
It appeared, from the media reaction to Trump, that the uniparty was actually threatened by him. This is why I think it’s more likely in this election, rather than previous elections, that there was more of an effort to rig on one side than there was on the other.
I do find myself confused: Trump himself seems relatively incompetent, and his first term didn’t seem all that threatening to the establishment (despite the rhetoric). Even with this confusion, though, I still think the difference between Trump and “Republican candidate X” is significant.
Also, I intentionally didn’t refute your point about “as fair as any other election.” I completely understand that idea; no one here is claiming nothing nefarious ever happens, it’s just a matter of degree and impact.