Item — HN Reader

Amazing how the different parties have such diametrically opposite views… if it wasn’t so serious it would be comical. In the last 24 hours I’ve heard the following from a republican and a democrat: “obviously we know they tampered with the election. It’s proven”

I’m aware of the “stop the steal” and dominion nonsense from the right. But what hard evidence exists that the Republican Party rigged the 2020 election?

5 comments

Limits on ballot drop-offs that mostly affect urban, democrat leaning counties: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/27/politics/texas-supreme-court-...

Destroying equipment the USPS would use to handle the unusually large number of mail-in votes: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/21/politics/usps-mail-sorting-ma...

All coinciding with a large, engineered, split in pandemic cautiousness about attending in-person voting stalls between the two main parties. There are more examples, gerrymandering is a decades-long one, but most of what I've read & heard about 2020 was about forcing people to wait in long lines or vote in person when that would favor one party over the other.

I'm with you on the other things, but outside of the Maine, Nebraska, and the historical quirk that is two Dakotas, gerrymandering can't have a direct effect on presidential elections.

The 'direct' effect qualifier is important though -- gerrymandering state-level elections to the point where a population can be discouraged from voting would very likely have a top-line Presidential election impact too.

Most people claiming republicans "rig" elections tend to mean gerrymandering, ensuring long waitig times in predominantly D neighborhoods, banning people from giving those in line water and so on. Mostly things that are legal (at least by the letter of the law). Not sure I'd call that "tampering" though.

But of course the last hail mary was to have the fake electors and all that. People will literally do prison time for that. And "tampering" might be part of the description of those crimes somewhere.

For the most part, when Democrats talk about this sort of thing, they mean legal but undemocratic or counter-majoritarian tools like the electoral college, not having enough polling places, limited voting hours, voter purges, etc.

I try to push back on using the word "rigged" for these things because A) Just describing the actual things is equally convincing and B) It normalizes that kind of verbiage in political discourse, whereas I think it's definitely better that such verbiage remain kooky. Not endorsing it, just observing a common sentiment.

There is no meaningful evidence that the election was rigged by any party. That's why nobody has brought any forward.

Plenty of violations of the law (e.g. illegal campaign overspending) happened in the open and are publicly acknowledged to have happened. (Also things like abuse of state-of-emergency laws that were legal but could be argued to be "rigging" - many of the regimes we think of as despotic are maintained through legal means)

Violations of campaign laws absolutely happened, by all parties, just as they happen every election. That doesn't address the point, though. The point is -- where is the evidence that the outcome of the election was rigged?

I don't think anyone's claiming that the results were fully determined ahead of time, just that illicit methods were used to nudge them by a few crucial percentage points. I'm not claiming it happened, but it's plausible - certainly laws were violated, and presumably those violating those laws did so because they thought it would advantage their party/candidate.

Unequal per-person weighting in our systems of representation can be demonstrated with nothing but a copy of the Constitution.

Sure, and I agree that the election system in the US undemocratic to the point of being arguably corrupt. But by "rigged", what most people mean is "manipulated in a way that isn't legally allowed". There's no evidence that this happened to any meaningful degree.

If you look at the gerrymandering court cases you'll see that proposed districts get ruled illegal very often. If you think of "the law" as a boundary independent of individual judges then after factoring in human imperfections this shows there must be a number of districts whose layout is against that idea of the law but got through anyways. It's stretching philosophy to say that but arguments on the democratic/legal basis of democracy/law itself are never simple.

Here are multiple instances of Republicans committing or attempting voter fraud in 2020:

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-government-and-poli...

https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/republican-mail-b...

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/12/13/3-residen...

Good but small anecdotal counts without large scale proven “rigging”. Bad yes, but let’s not get carried away