Pulverizing the election dead horse into paste

I’ve written a lot about the 2020 stolen election claims.¹ This is a beat I randomly fell into in response to watching otherwise extremely intelligent conservatives decompensating in real time. I described the Gish gallop that was obvious from the beginning on Nov 5, 2020, and I sounded resolutely doe-eyed back then:

Again, voter fraud is possible, and depending on the specific mechanism, even plausible. But ideally you would be open to stress testing your beliefs. I know that emotions are running high and many of us are rapidly revising our priors and maybe staying up all night participating in the virtual mayhem at play. But at the very least, try to falsify your concern before adopting it wholesale. If your suspicion passes the gauntlet, all the better for you, and I’d genuinely would love to hear about the salient ones you think survive scrutiny.

That was the high-water mark because at least at the beginning you could entertain a range of theories and honestly present them as plausible. It only got worse afterwards as the search for the next for-real-this-time-i-swear allegation didn’t abate, and the dessicated husks of claims discarded without ceremony just kept piling up.

Around that time I was about a year into having started my solo legal practice, and I admit that many stories were gloriously entertaining and affirming to me. If I ever had any doubts whatsoever about my own legal acumen, all I needed to do was read about the latest election fraud claim that made it to court and Thank God for Mississippi.

There’s the Trump campaign lawyer who had to admit in court there were a “non-zero number” of poll observers in the counting room. Lawyers filing affidavits from randos who earnestly believed that “elite units of the National Guards” were secretly scanning ballots for a laser watermark. The once-luminary Rudy Giuliani losing his law license for flagrantly making shit up in court. And definitely my favorite was Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” and its absolutely bizarre and inexplicable typographical errors. I’m not even talking about her legal claims here, but things like misspelling the word ‘District’ in two different ways on the cover page, a random paragraph that turned into one long string of characters because all its spaces got deleted, or the study she attached that somehow ended up in landscape orientation and cut off the bottom third of every page.

POV: Your federal lawsuit is off to a spectacular start

The claims kept getting increasingly desperate and unhinged, like testing Arizona ballots for bamboo to see if they were sourced from China, or Mike Lindell’s very sad “election cyber symposium”.² My theory for what was happening has not changed from early on:

Trump is an egotistical narcissist whose public persona is built on an incapacity of ever admitting a loss. So in order to save face, he has spent months claiming election fraud on the off-chance he actually loses. He managed to hoodwink enough of his gullible followers (who are already susceptible to Q Anon conspiracies) to believe this, and they serve a significant enough of a voting block to move elections at the margin, so other Republicans have essentially been forced to play ball and continue the charade for fear of retribution from Trump.

To make it absolutely fucking crystal clear, debunking one stolen election allegation does not allow you to conclude that all stolen election allegations are bunk. This would not logically follow. However, it is perfectly reasonable to presume that after an endless parade of baseless allegations, whatever allegation pops up next is also baseless. But that’s only a heuristic, not a definitive conclusion.

Surprisingly, my writing on this beat is what has generated the most ire. The anger is clearly salient but because the criticism is void of substance, I don’t have any charitable explanations for it. The modal complaint is that I’m “weakmanning” stolen election claims by drawing attention to verifiable buffoonery, except the problem with this allegation is that it’s used as a gerrymandered No true Scotsman dodge.

Here’s what I mean by that. The two topics I explicitly had in mind when writing about “weakmanning” were gender identity and the 2020 stolen election claims, because this rhetorical trick is prevalent in both. An illustrative example is how Piers Morgan’s self-identification as a black lesbian was rejected as “absurd”. Ok, but why? You can’t designate a list of “legitimate” gender identities without being accused of the inviolable sin of gatekeeping, but unlimited and unrestricted self-ID means that Piers Morgan is indeed a black lesbian. The only solution here is to retain full discretion on what is or isn’t absurd.

Of course, this is completely arbitrary. On the stolen election claims, you can get broad consensus that it’s unfair and a waste of time to trawl through Facebook posts looking for MAGA nobodies to laugh at. I accept that, but beyond that it’s near-impossible to get someone on the denier side to sketch out what is or isn’t fair game for critique. Trump is the main character in this saga, and the baseline allegation to compare against is that 3 to 5 million votes were cast in the 2016 election and zero of which went to him. Ok so maybe it’s unsportsmanlike to expect something coherent and grounded in reality from someone who says so much crazy shit, but then who’s left? I’ve deliberately limited my critiques to focus on those pursuing somewhat-serious legal action but there’s no shortage of hilarious garbage in that trough.

Just like gender identity, the essence of this tactic is to wield full control over the critique parameters, turning it into a cudgel that labels any valid critique as a weakman that is by definition inherently unworthy of attention.

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The genesis of this post is because True The Vote (TTV), the group that provided the data and the allegations outlined in the Dinesh D’Souza 2000 Mules film purporting to document extensive election fraud in Georgia, has admitted to a judge that it doesn’t have evidence to back its claims. This isn’t just some fringe group, the film was by virtually any measure the most popular and talked about exposé into stolen election claims. It was watched by millions of people and received widespread media coverage and promotion within conservative media, and also was extensively endorsed by Trump (for what it’s worth) and continued to be regularly cited by politicians and other stolen election believers. You can read their canned response to each request directly:

TTV has no such documents in its possession, custody, or control.

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.

I have a theory about TTV’s election fraud claims. I know it might sound crazy at first but I think it precisely explains TTV’s behavior: they’re lying.

I know, I know, how gauche of me! 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 (wait for it) 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 are only so many words in the thesaurus to describe just how much of a joke this has been. There’s absolutely nothing ambiguous about TTV showing up to court and flatly admitting it doesn’t have the evidence for the bombastic claims it made. The most straightforwardly effortless explanation is that they were lying about their claims! What else could you possibly need?

The typical pattern this discourse plays out is that virtually everyone who still has a reaching grasp on sanity will do everything in their power to avoid substantively responding head-on. The playbook is to avoid arguing in favor of Hugo Chavez’s ghost overloading the Dominion Voting algorithm through Italian satellites or whatever, and instead to just change the subject to something else entirely, usually about how some election rules were unfair. And again to be clear: electoral integrity and general fairness is a perfectly legitimate topic! The problem is when the subject change is used as cover to sanewash the crazier claims. There is an inverse relationship between how defensible and how consequential an allegation is. It’s why there’s a seesaw oscillation between “literally millions of fake ballots were cast for Biden” and “one guy in Nevada filled out his dead wife’s ballot”. Classic motte & bailey.

I’m aware, this subject matter is objectively a waste of my time. Unfortunately this constellation of beliefs remains deeply consequential and isn’t just relegated to some obscure fringe. The Republican party has enshrined it into a shibboleth required for admission, and affirming Trump’s electoral delusions is the screening mechanism for remaining within the sphere. I think it’s bad when a major political party is either pretending to be or is actually afflicted by delusional psychosis, but reasonable minds can disagree I suppose.

1. For a comprehensive(?) list of everything I wrote on this topic:

11/05/20 - Election Fraud Gish Gallop

11/06/20 - Invalid Ballots Crossing the Stream

11/08/20 - Don't Wear a Nametag When Robbing the Place

11/12/20 - Secret Laser Watermarks on Ballots

11/22/20 - Fire The Kraken

11/23/20 - Trump Sort of Maybe "Concedes"(?)

11/26/20 - The Kraken Has Finally Arrived

11/27/20 - Why The Kraken Fails Legally

12/03/20 - Losing Elections to Spite Your Face

12/03/20 - Simplest Argument Against Election Fraud Claims

12/14/20 - Trump's Lawyers Are Also Part of the Election Conspiracy, Apparently

12/17/20 - Dominion Winding Up Hard Against Powell

01/01/21 - QAnon & Election Fraud Theories Have Finally Fully Merged

01/01/21 - The Increasingly Bizarre State of Election Fraud Litigation

01/04/21 - In Search of the Missing 11,780

01/09/21 - Conspiratorial Acrobatics

01/12/21 - Trump's Finale (Note: this aged very poorly!)

03/24/21 - Dominion Hammer Finally Drops on the Kraken

05/31/21 - No, The Census is Not "Proving" Election Fraud

06/25/21 - Apparently You Can Lose Your Law License For Flagrantly Lying Who Knew

08/13/21 - The Bottomless Gullibility Pit of The Stolen Election Crowd

08/19/21 - "please ignore the stolen election claims that make us look bad"

08/27/21 - Kraken Down!

06/27/22 - Congressional Committee to Investigate the Obvious

11/13/22 - Selfish Reasons to Let Felons Vote

03/06/23 - Fox News' Audience Capture Problem

2. The tiresome excuse that the reason stolen election claims failed so spectacularly in court is because courts refused to look at the evidence is just flat out unambiguously false. This commendable compilation by half_pizzaman is just one of a litany of others.