I’ve written a lot about the 2020 stolen election claims. 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
This specific controversy really highlights my issues with some of the LessWrong/SSC/adjancent sphere's reluctance to weakman others. In the case of the Republican Party, it just so happens that the weakman case is the one endorsed by >50% of the relevant population....
... is what I was writing until I got to your link to your weakman post on the same issue.
Maybe it's the Canadian in me, but I have no clue how your largest political party went off the rails so hard. Then again there's more than enough to mock on our side so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I find weakmanning to be an annoying objection because it depends entirely on whether the contours are agreed upon. The objection is also largely irrelevant in 1v1 arguments. This might be a good Trembling post!
Is there a steel man case for “the election wasn’t ‘stolen’ and there is no evidence of concerted voter fraud, but the mass and late breaking adoption of vote by mail created significant voting security risks that cast a greater-than-typical uncertainty on the accuracy/validity of 2020 results compared to previous elections?”
If so, have you written about it or would you consider doing so?
I’m not on the Trump conspiracy side, but I generally think we don’t do enough to secure elections and that we were particularly unprepared for the election-in-pandemic situation of 2020.
I've looked at a bunch of cases and written about them across various comments online, and potentially some of it made it to this substack.
There's a persistent narrative about "last minute changes" but it's really difficult to nail down specifics, or at least the ones that would've mattered. Aside from a couple of exceptions (I'm working completely off memory here so some details may be off) my overall impression is that a lot of the legal interpretation over the disputes could have reasonably gone the other way. I remember one dispute had to do over how to apply the criteria for when a voter is entitled to an absentee ballot and whether the phrase "indefinitely confined" applied to covid quarantine. Reasonable people could disagree on the rule, but it's not clear whether a different rule would've had a practical impact.
In terms of easier access to mail-in voting, the biggest complaint about Pennsylvania was as a result of a voting bill passed by Republicans in 2019, but no one complained about it until Trump lost.
A huge number of Democrats believed that Donald Trump (or Russia) stole the 2016 election, and for a while it was fashionable to claim Trump was an illegitimate president and even that one day justice would be served by annulling his presidency, thereby doing a ctrl-v on all of his wicked actions as president. Magical thinking like this happens because the president has way too much power and congress is increasingly (and embarrassingly) useless every year, and so every election becomes the “most important” and so on. We’d be better off with a parliamentary system if we intend to keep being this polarized.
It's true that a sizeable number of people believed that Russia literally hacked voting machines to tilt results in favor of Trump, and a significantly greater number believed that Trump was "illegitimate" to varying degrees of meaning. The Russia plant theories were very dumb indeed, but there's no equating it to the lunatic depths that MAGA election deniers plumbed into.
Yeah, sorry if that sounded like an equivocation from me. There may have been a lot of blue anon crazies on cable TV and newspapers, as well as from the mouths of high profile politicians who knew better but couldn’t help themselves, but it does not compare to what I saw the last time I visited the deep south. There were bumperstickers and truck graphics about how Biden is illegitimate and the election was literally stolen, etc. There is a brazenness to making this refusal-to-accept politics so public that I think we’ll see repeat regardless of who wins in November or whenever it is that we have ballots counted. Before it was just a handful of sore losers but now both sides are saying the other guy will destroy “democracy.” Exciting things to come.
Yes, it's a problem and not one easily squared. People are using the same vocabulary (e.g. illegitimate) to talk across dimensions and the inevitable result is confused antagonism.
I haven’t paid a ton of attention to this topic but I also find it interesting, maybe for similar reasons. What do you think of the claim that the election wasn’t stolen but the “election stolen” crowd is directionally pointing at a series of completely legal moves that add up to an unfair advantage?
No, solely based on the mechanism of action. If someone is either delusional or highly credulous, there's no reason to expect them to accidentally be correct at a rate higher than chance. If someone has the mental faculties to discover earnest concerns about unfair advantage, they should have the faculties to identify loony allegations.
There's also the risk of motivated reasoning. I'm much more likely to take seriously a concern about fairness from either a Biden or independent voter. When it's coming overwhelmingly from Trump supporters, it's reasonable to wonder that what they're actually mad about isn't fairness but that their candidate lost.
Not too well-studied in this topic myself, but my gut reaction is that if we go too far down that road it ends with Democrats pointing out that if we're going to complain about structural advantages then maybe we should notice that the last time the Republicans won the popular vote it was to reelect George W Bush.
What does it even mean to have an "unfair advantage" in an election? Elections are popularity contests and fairness is subjective.
Maybe part of the election denial as an expression of people feeling like elections were unfair though. It is obviously true that most media gave Trump negative coverage and plenty of powerful groups used legal means to oppose him. But whining about fairness seems childish and subjective so they make up unfair things that are actually illegal. This launders their opinions into factual claims.
This is pretty common with politics. Do you feel like Obama, the Harvard law professor that spend part of his childhood in Indonesia, doesn't have a life you can relate to? Why not say that he's lying about his entire life story and was actually born in Kenya? Do you think that Trump is a crass petty pervert that is betraying America? Well, that's all very subjective but if you insist that he's being blackmailed by Russians that videotaped him with peeing prostitutes? Now you're asserting an objective claim.
Agreed, there's no consensus on what exactly counts as "fair". The perennial dispute between dems and reps over how much to expand/restrict the franchise is the best illustration.
Not really related, but I think one of the reasons Trump supporters are so convinced that the 2020 election was stolen is the increasing polarization and information-bubble-isolation of our world. They can’t possibly imagine that anybody would have voted for Biden; they don’t know anybody who did (or would admit to doing so openly), they aren’t seeing any pro-Biden memes in their social media feeds. Biden can’t possibly have won fairly, from their point of view.
I think bubble-isolation is a serious problem but it's not a satisfactory explanation for why Trump supporters should maintain such a stringent attachment to this particular theory about the election. A lot of the stolen election claims were insane on their face, so even if someone consumed nothing but a highly selective media coverage, some obvious red flags should've been raised. If isolation explained it, then we should expect similar derangement from Biden voters who are just as likely not to know voters from the other side.
More to the point, in spite of every possible organizational and institutional advantage other than incumbency and a Trump campaign that was disorganized to the point of imbecility, Biden was able to wheeze to victory only two weeks after polls closed.
"The claims kept getting increasingly desperate and unhinged, like testing Arizona ballots for bamboo to see if they were sourced from China ..."
Big LoL. Somewhat in passing, I'm reminded of a book and Atlantic article by Kurt Andersen, "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire" -- highly recommended:
You're right -- hadn't thought of that -- 2017 article! 👍🙂
Though maybe it was a general comment, but still -- sign of the times and all that. Which are getting rather "sticky" -- I'm reminded of a scene from Hunt for Red October where Captain of US aircraft carrier says "This business will get out of control...and we'll be lucky to live through it."
I think I'll put on my tombstone "died waiting for 2020 massive vote fraud evidence".
Sadly, there is no place left for the sane.
This specific controversy really highlights my issues with some of the LessWrong/SSC/adjancent sphere's reluctance to weakman others. In the case of the Republican Party, it just so happens that the weakman case is the one endorsed by >50% of the relevant population....
... is what I was writing until I got to your link to your weakman post on the same issue.
Maybe it's the Canadian in me, but I have no clue how your largest political party went off the rails so hard. Then again there's more than enough to mock on our side so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I find weakmanning to be an annoying objection because it depends entirely on whether the contours are agreed upon. The objection is also largely irrelevant in 1v1 arguments. This might be a good Trembling post!
Is there a steel man case for “the election wasn’t ‘stolen’ and there is no evidence of concerted voter fraud, but the mass and late breaking adoption of vote by mail created significant voting security risks that cast a greater-than-typical uncertainty on the accuracy/validity of 2020 results compared to previous elections?”
If so, have you written about it or would you consider doing so?
I’m not on the Trump conspiracy side, but I generally think we don’t do enough to secure elections and that we were particularly unprepared for the election-in-pandemic situation of 2020.
Well, my memory turns out to be pretty good. Here's the motte thread where I looked into PA's Act 77, Wisconsin's "indefinitely confined" case, and a random GA case: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/p0vo1u/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_august_09_2021/h9lbvkd/
I also wrote about a dispute in Pennsylvania over whether faulty ballots should be rejected or given an opportunity to be "cured" here: https://ymeskhout.substack.com/p/fire-the-kraken
I've looked at a bunch of cases and written about them across various comments online, and potentially some of it made it to this substack.
There's a persistent narrative about "last minute changes" but it's really difficult to nail down specifics, or at least the ones that would've mattered. Aside from a couple of exceptions (I'm working completely off memory here so some details may be off) my overall impression is that a lot of the legal interpretation over the disputes could have reasonably gone the other way. I remember one dispute had to do over how to apply the criteria for when a voter is entitled to an absentee ballot and whether the phrase "indefinitely confined" applied to covid quarantine. Reasonable people could disagree on the rule, but it's not clear whether a different rule would've had a practical impact.
In terms of easier access to mail-in voting, the biggest complaint about Pennsylvania was as a result of a voting bill passed by Republicans in 2019, but no one complained about it until Trump lost.
A huge number of Democrats believed that Donald Trump (or Russia) stole the 2016 election, and for a while it was fashionable to claim Trump was an illegitimate president and even that one day justice would be served by annulling his presidency, thereby doing a ctrl-v on all of his wicked actions as president. Magical thinking like this happens because the president has way too much power and congress is increasingly (and embarrassingly) useless every year, and so every election becomes the “most important” and so on. We’d be better off with a parliamentary system if we intend to keep being this polarized.
It's true that a sizeable number of people believed that Russia literally hacked voting machines to tilt results in favor of Trump, and a significantly greater number believed that Trump was "illegitimate" to varying degrees of meaning. The Russia plant theories were very dumb indeed, but there's no equating it to the lunatic depths that MAGA election deniers plumbed into.
Yeah, sorry if that sounded like an equivocation from me. There may have been a lot of blue anon crazies on cable TV and newspapers, as well as from the mouths of high profile politicians who knew better but couldn’t help themselves, but it does not compare to what I saw the last time I visited the deep south. There were bumperstickers and truck graphics about how Biden is illegitimate and the election was literally stolen, etc. There is a brazenness to making this refusal-to-accept politics so public that I think we’ll see repeat regardless of who wins in November or whenever it is that we have ballots counted. Before it was just a handful of sore losers but now both sides are saying the other guy will destroy “democracy.” Exciting things to come.
Yes, it's a problem and not one easily squared. People are using the same vocabulary (e.g. illegitimate) to talk across dimensions and the inevitable result is confused antagonism.
I haven’t paid a ton of attention to this topic but I also find it interesting, maybe for similar reasons. What do you think of the claim that the election wasn’t stolen but the “election stolen” crowd is directionally pointing at a series of completely legal moves that add up to an unfair advantage?
No, solely based on the mechanism of action. If someone is either delusional or highly credulous, there's no reason to expect them to accidentally be correct at a rate higher than chance. If someone has the mental faculties to discover earnest concerns about unfair advantage, they should have the faculties to identify loony allegations.
There's also the risk of motivated reasoning. I'm much more likely to take seriously a concern about fairness from either a Biden or independent voter. When it's coming overwhelmingly from Trump supporters, it's reasonable to wonder that what they're actually mad about isn't fairness but that their candidate lost.
Not too well-studied in this topic myself, but my gut reaction is that if we go too far down that road it ends with Democrats pointing out that if we're going to complain about structural advantages then maybe we should notice that the last time the Republicans won the popular vote it was to reelect George W Bush.
What does it even mean to have an "unfair advantage" in an election? Elections are popularity contests and fairness is subjective.
Maybe part of the election denial as an expression of people feeling like elections were unfair though. It is obviously true that most media gave Trump negative coverage and plenty of powerful groups used legal means to oppose him. But whining about fairness seems childish and subjective so they make up unfair things that are actually illegal. This launders their opinions into factual claims.
This is pretty common with politics. Do you feel like Obama, the Harvard law professor that spend part of his childhood in Indonesia, doesn't have a life you can relate to? Why not say that he's lying about his entire life story and was actually born in Kenya? Do you think that Trump is a crass petty pervert that is betraying America? Well, that's all very subjective but if you insist that he's being blackmailed by Russians that videotaped him with peeing prostitutes? Now you're asserting an objective claim.
Agreed, there's no consensus on what exactly counts as "fair". The perennial dispute between dems and reps over how much to expand/restrict the franchise is the best illustration.
Not really related, but I think one of the reasons Trump supporters are so convinced that the 2020 election was stolen is the increasing polarization and information-bubble-isolation of our world. They can’t possibly imagine that anybody would have voted for Biden; they don’t know anybody who did (or would admit to doing so openly), they aren’t seeing any pro-Biden memes in their social media feeds. Biden can’t possibly have won fairly, from their point of view.
I think bubble-isolation is a serious problem but it's not a satisfactory explanation for why Trump supporters should maintain such a stringent attachment to this particular theory about the election. A lot of the stolen election claims were insane on their face, so even if someone consumed nothing but a highly selective media coverage, some obvious red flags should've been raised. If isolation explained it, then we should expect similar derangement from Biden voters who are just as likely not to know voters from the other side.
More to the point, in spite of every possible organizational and institutional advantage other than incumbency and a Trump campaign that was disorganized to the point of imbecility, Biden was able to wheeze to victory only two weeks after polls closed.
"The claims kept getting increasingly desperate and unhinged, like testing Arizona ballots for bamboo to see if they were sourced from China ..."
Big LoL. Somewhat in passing, I'm reminded of a book and Atlantic article by Kurt Andersen, "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire" -- highly recommended:
https://archive.ph/prYcS
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
https://www.amazon.ca/Fantasyland-America-Haywire-500-Year-History/dp/1400067219
Kind of amused to note that the Atlantic article is prefaced with a cartoon of sorts which references the "rigged" election.
Prescient!
You're right -- hadn't thought of that -- 2017 article! 👍🙂
Though maybe it was a general comment, but still -- sign of the times and all that. Which are getting rather "sticky" -- I'm reminded of a scene from Hunt for Red October where Captain of US aircraft carrier says "This business will get out of control...and we'll be lucky to live through it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZuMe5RvxPQ
When one is up to one's arse in alligators it helps to remember that one DID set out to drain the swamp ... 😉🙂