The Claremont Institute’s American Mind writes,
But the 2020 election is not over. The fight has just begun. This is the moment that decides everything. Everything is now at stake. Republicans must rise to the occasion. This means rallies and protests as well as investigating and ensuring that this election was lawful.
The first sentence is true. The election will be over when each state has, according to its laws, declared a winner. It is not over as I write this, and it probably will not be over when it goes live.
But when each state has declared a winner, the election will be over. It should not be litigated and re-litigated. And by no means should people take to the streets.
I certainly agree with President Trump that legal votes and only legal votes should be counted. But each state has a process in place for making that happen. That process does not involve “rallies and protests,” and I strongly believe that it should not.
I would be happy to see a commission established to evaluate and fix the American electoral process. To have a meaningful impact, the commission would have to be bipartisan and arrive at findings by consensus. I am not saying that would be easy.
In theory, a commission could find that the process in 2020 was so broken that the “wrong” candidate became President. But there is no provision in the Constitution for an electoral college “do-over,” so the result would stand.
For me, the most important part of elections is that the transfer of power should be peaceful. The Democrats were wrong to scream “Russia!” and to attempt to remove President Trump via impeachment, and I think less of them for doing so. If Biden is declared the winner and then the Republicans scream “Fraud!” for months on end, I will think less of them.
I know all the comebacks to this. The stakes are too great! We know that Biden won by fraud (as if you personally have evidence for that claim that would convince a neutral observer)! We can’t let them get away with it! Those arguments do not sway me. If we replace the electoral process with a litigation war and street demonstrations, the resulting banana republic will be worse than anything that the Democrats implement in office.
By the way, I though that Scott Sumner’s use of the term “banana republic” in recent months was over the top. But when I read the linked article, I could not help but see the aptness of the expression.
Bruno Maçães said something similar
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/what-is-happening-in-america
Sorry, Maçaes is pure entertainment like Tyler Cowen.
In his brief article, he quotes himself (he wants to sell his books) and writes
“In the American liberal tradition, the office of the president is placed under strict constitutional limits created in order to constrain power and ambition. Once entertainment takes over, once politics becomes genre, all this is bound to change. If the purpose is to develop the kind of conflicts and drama that keep an audience hooked, limiting what each contestant can do is the last thing you want. Normalcy, regularity and procedure become hindrances to success. Contestants in a reality show are always told to be themselves, which means, the most extreme version possible of themselves. This is what Trump set out to be.”
I agree with his first sentence. I fully agree with it. But then he wants to explain Trump and he introduces the idea that Trump is pure entertainment (yes, Maçaes knows a lot about entertainment). Thus, his second sentence starts with “Once entertainment takes over,…”. No. Trump took advantage of the lack of strong candidates in the Republican Party (remember the idiocy of John McCain in 2008 and the cowardice of M. Romney in 2012) and rather than running as an independent like Perot, he realized that he had to rely on the Party to win. He wanted power and despite all the obstacles to his presidency he has been –for good and for bad– a very consequential president for conservatives –much more than Obama for progressives. Indeed, progressives hate Trump because he stopped the avalanche they promised.
Another characteristic of a banana republic is that the outcome of elections cannot be distinguished from fraud. It does not seem coincidental that the same places with entrenched Democratic political machines have the same late sets of votes that swing their states the same way in election after election after election.
I don’t recall electoral process improvments being on the Trump agenda.
Arnold, you write
“If we replace the electoral process with a litigation war and street demonstrations, the resulting banana republic will be worse than anything that the Democrats implement in office.”
Please tell me the details of each of the two alternatives. Litigation and protests today will have lower costs than civil war later –when the time comes for people like you to say no to radical leftists empowered by the Biden-Harris administration.
Yes, Banana Republic. Thanks for posting your thoughts.
Venezuela, 2 decades ago the richest S. American country, elected Chavez in 1999. Fairly. But he changed the laws and election practices so that the voters couldn’t get rid of him. That’s what Dems will do if unopposed now.
America, in the recent past, has shown how to create fair elections.
After Bush’s Iraq invasion, they had free, fair election. All voters went to the polls, voted, once only, with fingers getting inked. Some Iraqi’s no doubt were unable to vote, being sick, being away, being handicapped. Not perfect, but fair and very difficult to corrupt. This Iraq election process would be an improvement over the USA 2020 process.
The ease and convenience of e-voting, and mail-in voting without even the hassle of absentee voting pre-registration, means it’s much easier to vote AND much easier for the gov’t to commit fraud. (It was quite easy for me to vote from Slovakia; easier than ever before.)
The Democratic deep state, in many states very deep, is too often corrupt. All Americans should be outraged that the processes for voting are being corrupted so as to allow the deep state gov’t chosen candidate to win.
If we replace the electoral process with a litigation war and street demonstrations, the resulting banana republic will be worse than anything that the Democrats implement in office.
In other words, even if the Dems cheated and stole the election, Republicans should just “get over it”. The Dems have already replaced the hard-to-cheat process with an easy-to-cheat process, and they have been cheating.
I think a litigation war is better than accepting the cheating; and peaceful street demonstrations in the thousands. And the focus should be on ending (hugely reducing) the possibility for corrupt gov’t to have fraud in an election.
Unlike “systemic racism”, ending fraud in elections is actually feasible, altho whatever anti-fraud process is made is unlikely to be as easy and convenient for the voter as lazy mail-in. (I had just read the article before you linked to it!)
Peaceful demonstrations, not violent like the Dems do.
Fighting real injustice is the good fight. Most Americans do not like injustice.
The likely endgame? Trump wins PA, but Biden is declared the winner, and after all lawsuits, Biden becomes president.
The demonstrations now are part of the preparation for Yuuuge 2022 Rep wins in the House, plus constant joking about how the Dems support cheating.
Dems support cheating in elections.
Dems support Kamala who was cheating with married Willie Brown to get started.
Dems support Biden’s family, cheating with Ukraine and China.
Dems support the Clintons, both Slick Willy who was frequently cheating with women, and illegal emailer HR Clinton, who enabled the cheating; and the Clinton Bribery Foundation.
Dems support IRS illegally targeting groups they don’t like.
Dems support FBI illegally spying on candidates they don’t like.
Dems support character assassinations of judges and politicians they don’t like.
etc.
Plus, it will be seen how the Dems try to turn the irrational Trump-hate against various other Reps who are more HEE acceptable, and these redirection attempts will be part of a backlash against them.
Lots of potential silver linings in having Americans see how the Dems have been cheating. But they’re potential. And involve lots of work.
How did other corrupt governments lose power? Massive street demonstrations. Americans need to be reminded that Dems aren’t the only ones who can demonstrate.
It’s a real loss for America to elect a Pres. Biden because of successful cheating.
Arnold;
We have now the obvious outcome of the votes already cast. Despite ongoing riots in Portland, voters did not sufficiently repudiate the Biden-Harris ticket to demonstrate that ‘protests’ and ‘rallies’ were not the way to conduct electoral affairs. ‘A pox on both their houses’ is not an effective response to the riots and looting; and intimidation. So far, we aren’t seeing that level of violence on the other side, but it’s no great insight to expect escalation.
The game theory speaks clearly, unfortunately. There is no stable, high-reward solution to the simple formulation of the prisoner’s dilemma. Having both sides stuck in ‘defect’ is the inevitable outcome.
The inevitable can nevertheless be delayed. The USA has many more years to add to its nearly 250.
Twenty years after the “hanging chads” election, and we still don’t have a voting system that can deliver a trustworthy result on election day.
That is the real scandal, and I don’t think it is irrational to believe this was done intentionally to facilitate fraud.
For example, does anyone really believe the 89% voter turnout in Wisconsin? This is clearly an anomaly that demands some sort of explanation.
BTW, on a personal level, I am perfectly happy with a Biden win and a Republican senate. I like gridlock.
Lysander, the 89% turnout figure comes from using a different denominator than has typically been used in the past (eligible voters vs total population). Wisconsin’s turnout is not an aberration this year when the same denominator is used.
Thanks, Alcibiades.
Politifact has a nice explanation:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/05/donald-trump-jr/no-wisconsin-voter-turnout-did-not-jump-67-2016-89/
Turns out that sometimes the denominator is “registered voters” and sometimes it is “eligible voters,” but obviously you need to use the same denominator to make comparisons.
Here is an example of “registered voters: in the denominator:
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/04/texas-voter-turnout-democrats/
Define “we”, please? It seems that Florida has addressed the issues they had with corrupt and inept county election officials and dubious transparency. They were the poster child for disfunctional elections, and some simple and common sense procedural reforms led to rapid, fair, and transparent vote tabulations in 2020.
Pennsylvania has a grand tradition of horribly corrupt elections in Philadelphia, Scranton, and some other areas, and this year they instituted ludicrously inept mail voting procedures with frequent rule changes and a dubious state supreme court ruling, none of which addressed preexisting flaws or added to the credibility of Pennsylvania’s rickety system. Decision makers in PA, as in some other states, have selfish incentives to avoid clarity and transparency in voting systems.
Lysander replied earlier that “Twenty years after the ‘hanging chads’ election, and we still don’t have a voting system that can deliver a trustworthy result on election day.” That is true in some or many states but, ironically, the state where the hanging chads were a problem in 2000 completely reformed its electoral system in 2001 and now is a model for the rest of the states. See former Governor Jeb Bush’s (R-FL) op-ed in today’s (11/7/2020) WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-florida-became-americas-vote-counting-model-11604703732
Under the Constitution, each state has the authority to legislate its own electoral process. Thus, I believe, rather than a national commission to study the problem or to establish national standards, this issue might best be left to the Uniform Law Commission (www.uniformlaws.org) to establish model laws on the matter, letting each state decide whether to adopt such models (as they may modify). Florida’s electoral law might serve as a starting point.
I rather like the little online essay “Yugoslavia’s warning to America” by John Schindler, who used to have a blog called XX Committee (“Double Cross Committee”).
It can be found through the wayback machine. Perhaps I will post a link later. I have found it in the past. For me, finding orphaned essays with wayback machine is non-trivial–how badly do I want to read the damn thing once more?
The abandonment of Schindler’s 20committee blog was a minor vexation to me, personally, as some of the things he wrote there were pretty good. His Observer columns seem to still be online.
Describing what America might become, in our dystopian future, is hard. Many people don’t have enough models. Just as every politician somebody doesn’t like gets called “Hitler,” countries to be lamented get called “Banana Republics.”
I’m grateful for Prof. Kling’s efforts in keeping this blog going. I don’t always agree, but it’s good to read somebody a little dispassionate and usually off-tempo from the news cycle.
Cheers!
Found it.
Essay by John Schindler. Dated 2 March 2015
Fragments that I like turn up in the middle. To quote a few paragraphs in succession:
“Yugoslavia was a very diverse country, ethnically and religiously, and the divisions between groups were real and serious. Unlike 21st century Americans, Yugoslavs were under no illusions that “diversity is our greatest strength” — they knew the opposite was the truth — and the Communists went to great lengths to keep ethnic peace by banning what we would term “hate speech” while mandating that the official doctrine that Yugoslavia’s diverse peoples really loved each other deeply be placed at the level of quasi-religious dogma.
“Rewriting history, to show certain ethnic groups as victims and others as perpetrators of race-based crimes, took its toll, since Yugoslavs knew this was too simple, and was being used as a political weapon by the authorities. Aggressive “affirmative action” in education and employment — Belgrade termed it the “ethnic key” — was another perennial sore-spot for many citizens, since ethnic status and ties often mattered more than competence. Needless to add, this hardly helped the economy either.
“When the Communist monopoly on power began to wane in the mid-1980s, as across Eastern Europe, and the Yugoslav media began taking on taboo topics, nothing was more discussed than ethnic politics and their messy history. It quickly became a firestorm. To cite the most damaging example, around 1985 the Serbian media began reporting violent crimes committed against Serbs by Albanians in Kosovo, which was a majority-Albanian province that enjoyed self-government under Tito’s system.
While Albanians did commit crimes against Serbs, the opposite was also true, yet the Belgrade media focused on the former while ignoring the latter. Accounts of rapes of Serbian women — some real, many imagined — served to whip up nationalist fervor. The press, with Serbia’s Communist Party increasingly behind them, since they realized that nationalism was a powerful motivator for potential voters, indulged in regular accounts of lurid Albanian crimes against Serbs.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20150304194558/https://20committee.com/2015/03/02/yugoslavias-warning-to-america/
“I certainly agree with President Trump that legal votes and only legal votes should be counted. But each state has a process in place for making that happen. ”
what do you do when the state authorities DON’T follow that process?
do you accept results that were dictated by the states democratic party in gross violation of the process?
Sure, in PA, for example, the state supreme court needs its wings clipped. Make a priority of it, perhaps? Start thinking ahead to the next election and future elections? Was electoral integrity a priority for you 2, 4 or 8 years ago? Did you really not notice what happened in Florida in 2000?
you miss the point
if the state apparatus isn’t following the rules
and in at least 3 us states they don’t
then how does changing the rules help?
We just had a Presidential election. The country revealed where it is politically. I don’t see how anyone is going to see a short term path forward for a progressive leaning agenda in America. Trump may have lost, but the Democratic party came away smarting too. Progressives did not come away from this election feeling validated. We will probably have divided government and that is good. It is now obvious the country will not consent to going down a progressive rabbit hole.
I’d also argue that Trump’s usefulness to his own causes has been exhausted. He is unstable, and it wouldn’t have been good for anybody for him to continue. If he leaves now, he has changed perceptions and revealed a certain critique of American governance. If he stays, he will take these things too far.
The accusations of cheating and fraud are sad. We have a 50 separate state systems designed and administered by human beings locally, not centrally. We should take responsibility for that, and accept that it won’t be flawless, but it came off better than we had a right to expect.
The accusations of cheating and fraud are sad. We have a 50 separate state systems designed and administered by human beings locally, not centrally. We should take responsibility for that, and accept that it won’t be flawless, but it came off better than we had a right to expect.
Disagree. I think we can do much better.
See: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-us-inability-to-count-votes-is
I completely agree we can do much better, but we never really have so far. Given our political structure, that requires a great deal of civic work we haven’t done.
We have the system we deserve right now, and given how much of it depends on human behavior, it did come off better than we had a right to expect. Any human system can be declared corrupt, and there are always flaws to be uncovered to cast doubt.
Sorry, for the past 4 years I have been laughing at Never-Trumpers. They have been trying to get rid of Trump but not to join the new Dem-Radical coalition.
I always remember when in the early 1950s, famous European tightrope walkers tried to walk the tightrope between the top of our city’s Municipality Palace and a high stage in the center of the square. My eldest brother and I liked to bet about which side of the rope they were going to fall. It was good entertainment and at the end of the show, we were happy that both of us had lost. But that was all. We walked back home and quickly started to fight about our toys. Our fights escalated as we became older.
I wish well to all Never-Trumpers. Have a nice day. Please be careful, it’s hard to walk a tightrope.
“I’d also argue that Trump’s usefulness to his own causes has been exhausted. He is unstable, and it wouldn’t have been good for anybody for him to continue.”
Rather, as has been amply shown, the entire tenured, sinecured, fat-cat elite is unstable and malignant.
“We should take responsibility for that, and accept that it won’t be flawless, but it came off better than we had a right to expect.”
If that’s case, what sort of apocalypse did you expect? Looks to me like your country and electoral system is basically dead at this point.
“Progressives did not come away from this election feeling validated.”
I don’t know. How did they responded to losing with the last four years, culminated in the burning of our cities.
If that’s how they respond to losing, god help us if they win.
I think progressives are lost. I also don’t think the “center left” can stand up to them where it counts. The losses to Reagan and Nixon were HUGE. Enough to make Clinton/Blaire really sit down and think this through. Trump wasn’t enough.
Some people on the right might look at this and say “Trump coalition and 2016 with white men is a winner” and try to do Trumpism competently. But it’s four years before that and they better be better at countering fraud.
Politics ain’t beanbag. The time for all-out escalation on this matter was February of 2017, at which time Trump and his supporters should have been willing to go to the maximum legal edge with political hardball and lawfare to insist on the immediate implementation of root-and-branch overhaul and a completely new regime for a secure and trustworthy election process always and everywhere.
Every time the administration has attempted such brinksmanship it turned out to be bluffing has ended up backing down with nothing to show for it, and if you can’t be bothered to stand up for something even when your own neck is on the line, then you deserve to lose.
That this wasn’t “Grand Strategic Objective Alpha” to be accomplished in the first 100 seconds of any brief, rare period of GOP power after a century of abuse and mischief is why the epitaph on the stupid party of beautiful losers’ tombstone is simply, “Unserious”.
I think you can make a pretty good argument that the GOP benefits from the current distributed system with all its messy local control more than Democrats do.
You may very well be correct, but if you take the lid off, what the GOP is doing “benefiting from the current distributed system” is consuming social capital by first converting it into political capital and spending the latter on pork for themselves and on ineffectual posturing for their voters.
I get it, and it is frustrating. But it is also part of our checks and balances political architecture.
The grimy human element of it is assumed. We don’t get anyone behaving perfectly, but this architecture prevents national level corruption and maintains an imperfect, but workable equilibrium.
Conservatives should understand this, and want to conserve this tension because it has worked for generations. Sure, its ugly, but we used to respect the fact that human beings can’t act perfectly, and we need to work with that.
That’s the immaturity of the Trump coalition. They like to say they are conservatives, but they want to break everything. They want nothing to do with checks and balances. Everything is a disgrace. Everything is unfair.
We can do better, but we also want to keep the checks and balances. It will be difficult.
If you call consuming the intangible social (trust, civic engagement etc.) and human capital of half of the country “the grimy human element” and “checks and balances political architecture” then you don’t really get it. And if you also expect conservatives to acquiesce in that from basically sentimental reasons… Maybe you remember Tucker Carlson’s segment from January or February about families, where he said that markets are a tool and worshiping tools is idiotic? Well, “checks and balances” are also a tool. If it’s broken and no longer checks and balances what you consider important, it should be fixed or replaced, not treated as a holy object to prostrate oneself in front of.
Tom DeMeo, you point to the immaturity of the Trump coalition and mischaracterize what this coalition is about. It’s a coalition against the progressives (many Dems and their new comrades, the radical leftists) who have been taking over too much power and money from the deplorable. It’s a coalition against progressives but also against people like you that support and enjoy the new attempt to exploit the deplorable. You may think they are losers, but the 2016 election showed how much the progressives and their armies of useful and useless idiots regretted some loss of power and money. Progressives and supporting idiots will continue fighting so don’t be surprised that the deplorable now are ready to fight back. Anyway, the idiots will be canceled by their masters as soon as they open their mouths to complain about the masters.
For an example of the maturity of your masters, read this tweet by someone that you used to claim she was a conservative Republican but now is a WP columnist:
https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1324792225260253184?s=20
You will have to learn to shut up.
The election of the Presidency by an electoral college was a dubious proposition from the start: a last moment compromise justified and rationalized after the fact in Hamilton’s Federalist #68 in which he states “The immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station and acting under conditions favorable to deliberation…”. But the thing about Hamilton is that he favored creating an American monarchy and he didn’t even understand that state legislatures, not the people, would choose the electors. The reality In Philadelphia was that the framers had run out of options and were eager to get to a swift compromise solution. The result was a mess as revealed in the election of 1800 which required the 12th Amendment to fix. All this is explained clearly in Robert A. Dahl’s excellent book “How Democratic Is the American Constitution?”
The rejected Virginia Plan providing for the election of the President by Congress appears in hindsight to have been a superior alternative. The alleged benefits of separating the executive from the legislature branch have proven illusory and are in any event far outweighed by the obfuscation of accountability.
The current USA constitution produces garbage government. So by all means pretend there is nothing fishy going on in Philadelphia, Wisconsin, and Michigan: we can see what unquestioning servility brought the people of Venezuela. Because without the willingness to demand a modern authentically democratic constitution USA/Venezuela-style governance is here to stay.
edgar, the first Argentinian constitution was written by just one person (Juan Bautista Alberdi). He wrote it around 1850 in Valparaiso, Chile, where he was exiled. He adapted the U.S. constitution to a new country that was still in a civil war (the Caudillos were finally defeated in 1861 and Alberdi’s Constitution approved in 1853 was finally effective). It’s the only I know it was written by just one person. All others I know were written by a committee and negotiated among members and with outsiders. The point is that today all constitutions are the outcome of negotiated processes and therefore they are hardly consistent with any particular set of principles a person may have.
I suggest you paying attention to the process that is now starting in Chile: by the lastest account “the committee” will have at least 155 members plus around 30 members representing the descendants of Chile’s pre-Columbus population plus other members that are still being discussed.
I salute the noble people of Chile who give the world an example worthy of emulation. I have no doubt that the new Chilean constitution will be wholly superior to the current USA constitution.
In the meanwhile I continue to study the great example of the Levellers. Endlessly fascinating. Per Wikipedia:
“The Levellers were a political movement during the English Civil War (1642–1651) committed to popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, equality before the law and religious tolerance. The hallmark of Leveller thought was its populism, as shown by its emphasis on equal natural rights, and their practice of reaching the public through pamphlets, petitions and vocal appeals to the crowd.”
I hope this is sarcasm, but with Poe’s law it’s hard to say.
edgar, good luck with your push for reforming the not-so-perfect USA constitution. I’m glad you know so much about history.
In the meantime, if you don’t want to waste your time, I recommend reading
https://pjmedia.com/columns/megan-fox/2020/11/05/how-to-fix-our-election-system-in-4-easy-steps-for-dummies-n1127092
and push for Megan’s proposals.
Those seem like reasonable proposals. They may be ineffective, however, without properly maintained voter registration rolls. Wisconsin, for example, is exempt from federal law requiring maintenance of the rolls due to a loophole for states with same day registration. Add a 5th, 6th and 7th step: 5. eliminate same day voter registration; 6. Document and audit votes purported to be cast by voters on the inactive voter rolls, and; enforce existing federal law on maintenance of voter registration rolls.
Why didn’t they steal election in 2016 then? Not enough time to prepare? Margins were close in states that would’ve tipped it. The Biden lead in Pennsylvania this year looks bigger than many of the Trump leads 2016?
And why had trump not taken action over last 4 years to stop this? If in fact this is deep state, his inability to prevent this with four years in power renders him unsuitable for the job in and of itself. Disgraceful if he can’t prevent a pathetic dem run inner city from perpetrating this type of fraud.
I think you have been sleeping for the past 4 years. First, you don’t understand what a system of checks and balances implies for the President. Second, you ignore how many of Trump’s policies have been rejected by the courts, distorted by executive agencies, and manipulated by controlling agencies. Third, you ignore the failed attempts to overthrow Trump and the high price he had to pay to deflect them. Fourth, you ignore the resistance of some Republican senators and representatives to Trump, just because he was not part of the party’s old guard.
– I have not ruled out the possibility that Trump was allowed to win in 2016 because enough power brokers saw a need to do something about China, though I put substantially less than 50% weight on this.
– Trump is not good at detailed execution. It’s been clear for years that that job will have to fall to a future Republican leader, or possibly a patriotic Jacinda Ardern-style liberal. This isn’t just about being “stymied by the courts/agencies/etc.”. George W. Bush famously pretended to be dumber than he actually was to appeal to more voters; he was quite intelligent and rational on the job (even though I despise a fair bit of what he did). To some degree, Trump wasn’t pretending.
Maybe it had to be this way: this part of the job pretty much requires an ability to understand and lead groups of HEEs. Anyway, what’s done is done.
– The hostile elite has spent the last four years desperately trying to delegitimize Trump’s agenda (outside the stop-helping-China component). This election was their last stand, and they lost even though Trump also lost. I don’t rule out the possibility of a small amount of relevant fraud, and it’s of course worthwhile to improve the integrity of the system in the future, but assuming the Republicans retain control of the Senate, any such fraud would not have changed the big picture.
Specifically, as long as the Democrats are blocked from fundamentally changing the electorate with a large increase to low-skill immigration, the pursuit of excellence should remain safe in America.
“I know all the comebacks to this. The stakes are too great! We know that Biden won by fraud (as if you personally have evidence for that claim that would convince a neutral observer)! We can’t let them get away with it! Those arguments do not sway me. If we replace the electoral process with a litigation war and street demonstrations, the resulting banana republic will be worse than anything that the Democrats implement in office.”
Good points and as of this writing odds are he did not win by fraud. But they are threatening to pack the court. That’s a Rubicon.
For everyone to accept the state’s word is a completely irresponsible demand, and would certainly make us a banana republic. The symptoms we have seen — observers denied access, big batches of ballots all for one side being sneaked in at night — are exactly the kind of red flags that make any reasonable person believe fraud is very likely and demand a full forensic audit.
If the system is not robust enough to allow that audit to happen, then the system is broken and must be fixed yesterday. Sweeping our valid doubts under the rug accomplishes nothing except to put you in league with the cheaters.
What I really don’t get is the downside.
You do the audit, and it turns out fraud was minimal at best and that Biden won fair and square. Great! The system isn’t corrupt and (aside from a few QAnon-ers) we can all have some confidence in it.
Conversely, you do the audit, and you find all sorts of fraud and it changes the outcome. Great! We will have made sure that an illegitimate outcome didn’t happen.
Before the election you stated, in essence, that you thought it didn’t matter who won. Now, you state that you don’t really care who wins and only care that there is a peaceful transfer of power. I mean, we could have a peaceful transfer of power without the election nonsense at all. China has peaceful transfers of power for a long time now.
I’d pose a question. If fraud happened, would you prefer it wasn’t found? Would a noble lie be preferable?
I don’t know if fraud happened or not, but it doesn’t seem an outlandish claim. Would a “commission” find that fraud? I trust such a commission about as much as I trust “fact checkers”, on both bias and competence grounds. I wouldn’t trust a judge ruling on something like this either (is there a judge in the country that doesn’t want Trump gone).
And even “legal” votes might be “illegitimate” votes if the law is ridiculous enough in letter or interpretation. A bunch of ballots with no postmark dumped at 4am a day late for one candidate with a bunch of names from some Dem inner city ward. Were they in on time? Did the person on the ballot actually fill it out? How do you prove anything after the fact if it’s a secret ballot? You can’t interview these people.
It’s like affirmative action, it’s illegal under the constitution, it was illegal in CA in 1996, it once again remains illegal in 2020, and yet its rampant and increasing while passing legal challenges.
One could easily indict Trump for not being prepared for this. He tweets and hopes someone does his homework for him. If he cared he’d have people on the ground looking for this stuff, would have challenged laws and rulings in advance, I really doubt he has.
But it will be a problem for the next person too.
“If we replace the electoral process with a litigation war and street demonstrations, the resulting banana republic will be worse than anything that the Democrats implement in office.”
Eh. I’m not so sure. I have colleagues at work and members of my family who genuinely believed for years that Trump did something to ‘steal’ the election (e.g., colluded with Russia on Clinton’s emails scandal) and was not the the legitimate President, and some stood in (somewhat rowdy but actually peaceful) public demonstrations too. It was slightly comparable after Bush v Gore. This was all quite childish and silly and paranoid, but frankly of a piece with the more general degeneration of our public life and political discourse and also, until BLM, not a big deal at all. The constant and fraudulent investigations were a bigger deal, but still not all that significant compared to real political turmoil, crisis, and upheaval like an “X-Spring”.
I expect we will get four years of the other half of people insisting Biden and the Democrats stole the election with no way to definitively resolve the matter and it will likewise not be a big deal.
I think your expectations are wishful thinking. First, you are underestimating how much the failed attempts to overthrow Trump hurt Trump’s ability to govern. In the first two years, Trump had to spend too much time dealing with the DOJ nest of criminal lawyers. (BTW, remember what happened to Mike Flynn –a victim of Obama’s personal revenge). Robert Mueller knew from the very beginning that it was a coup attempt. In the second two years, after losing the House because of the delay in the Mueller investigation, Trump has had to deal with his enemies directly –yes, the House became a nest of criminal politicians. And remember that the press and social media have been promoting and supporting those failed attempts. I challenge you to find a similar experience in the political history of your country.
Second, you are ignoring the pandemic and how all levels of government responded. It was not enough that the House failed to impeach Trump just at the beginning of the pandemic. I hope you remember what happened the first few days in mid-March when Cuomo needed Trump’s help and recognized he got it, but then the D-Party decided full war against Trump’s approach. I hope you remember what happened in the great NYC area and who was responsible for killing the old people, how much the D-Party committed itself to lockdowns just to challenge Trump, and how much Fauci and his staff worked against Trump. Thanks to Trump the lockdowns failed to impose a much larger cost to your country. And please don’t tell me how many people are dying daily in your country and how many are being treated as new cases or considered infected or hospitalized. If you want to discuss the data, I’m ready, but please bring me your best analysis of the relevance and reliability of the data.
Third, you ignore the collusion between the D-Party and the radical left. Their purpose is to grab power and eliminate all the opposition. I laugh at the idiots that think cancellation can be excused because of the victims’ offensive words. Yes, keep your good manners, and nothing will happen to you. You can ask Macron how difficult is to appease people that don’t share your values.
Your expectations assume that Trump was the problem and once gone his deplorable will be fine, the pandemic will end soon and China will not let a new virus escape, and the barbarians will keep their promises and won’t cancel their D-partners. So Biden will restore normalcy. Wow.
This might be a bitter pill for some to swallow, and I’m very sympathetic to that, but….Trump is going to legitimately lose the election once all of the legally cast ballots get counted. The path on litigation and fraud investigations in several states to flip dozens of electoral votes is just not going to happen. How much political capital do you want to spend doing this when the odds are so stacked against us? Do Republicans even know how to protest in the streets?
Perhaps it’s time to start the grieving process and move on from there? There were many huge victories for Trump conservatives like myself and centrists to celebrate from Tuesday and I prefer to focus my attention there.
And, at this point, I’m more curious to see what Trumpism 2.0 looks like without Trump at the helm.
Feel free to pushback if you disagree. Perhaps I’m being premature? Or maybe there is a strategic value in litigation and protests?
It depends on what they find and what changes are made to the electoral process. I’m not in a position to make that call. But someone paying more attention might be.
Trump probably isn’t the one to do that successfully, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. If you let fraud happen in one election, it’s hard to stop it the next one.