The losers are left with their evidence, and the winners, echoed by all the institutions that do not want to admit there could be such serious problems with American democracy will, by conflating "evidence" with "proof," declare that their evidence doesn't exist, and they are just sour-grapes "conspiracy theorists."
You can't make these complaints the day after the election, the day after your side loses. You will be seen, with reason, as not really interested in election integrity but only in protecting your candidate. That is what is said right now, and I agree, about the Republican election challengers and the January 6th protestors, most of whom were wrapped up in a foolish cult of personality with Donald Trump and just wanted to keep him in power. Neither he nor the Republican Party cared a whit or did anything about election integrity until two months ago.
Yup, just like the Democrats, who complained about "stolen" elections when their candidate lost in 2000, 2004, and 2016, but did nothing about it for twenty years. Apparently, people are stealing elections left and right, and neither the Republicans nor the Democrats do anything that makes them other than opportunistic hypocrites on this issue. If you have an electoral system where that keeps happening, and you keep letting it happen, well, then, you just don't care that much about which party wins, and whether people's votes are cast and counted fairly--you know, all that democracy you say we have here and our soldiers "bring abroad." Any party or politician who is serious about such things will have to work on them consistently, in all the years between elections.
How much time and energy over the past twenty years did the Democrats muster to focus on the Electoral College, the only thing that "stole" two presidential elections from them. Too busy with Russiagate.
Now, the Democrats and their allied media are creating a new template for dealing with election complaints from the losing side: Punish anyone who even says anything like what Boxer, Pelosi, and Hillary have said about the possibility of an election being "stolen" or "illegitimate." Declare there can't be a problem. Try to force people to shut up about it. Have everyone who does keep talking about it deplatformed and fired, if not arrested and charged with "sedition" and "domestic terrorism."
Having lost 13 seats in congress, the Democrats, with AOC in the lead, make the argument that any congressperson who expressed doubts about the election is engaged in seditious conspiracy to overturn an election, and therefore we must overturn their election! That logic will go over well with those 75 million voters the Democrats think are too stupid to notice how phony it is, though perhaps not as well as with those who are so smart they can convince themselves it isn't. It's just the ticket for "democratically" stopping the hemorrhaging of popular support from the increasing number of voters who despise what they see as the Democrats' sanctimonious hypocrisy.
(By the way, one of the points of suspicion in this election is precisely the anomalously high number of voters in crucial swing states, who only voted for Biden and not for down-ballot Democrats.)
That the Democrats, and even some people to the left of them, think that such measures will a) work to restore democracy, b) never be applied to them, and c) won't, with reason, cause an enraged backlash in the name of democracy, is a mark of how farcical American political thinking is, well across the board.
To be clear, my considered opinion on whether the Republicans' complaints about this election are valid is that I do not know, and I seriously doubt most of the people rejecting them out of hand know either. I have not looked into them in any depth and I'm just not going to, as I suspect is also the case with most of the people rejecting them out of hand.
That's not just because I don't care very much about which right-wing liar actually won, and it's certainly not because I don't think the issue is important. I have been haranguing about the importance of election integrity since 2012 (here, here, here), and think a transparent, trusted voting process is an indispensable element of any polity that wants to be democratic, and that the left should be at the forefront of fighting for it.
Nor do I refrain from going into the weeds on this because I think it's crazy to suggest that 42,000 votes in three states could have been manipulated. I do know that is child's play. And though I can't say I know, from the various challenges and the rebuttals I have seen, I doubt that all the significant allegations have been refuted. Most of the attempts to present non-dispositive but suspicious evidence were simply declared false and censored because they were not proof. I also doubt the challengers could meet the high bar of indisputable proof necessary to change the result.
(By way of farcically blundering political tactics and unintended consequences, we might notice that the result of January 6th was that the Republicans were not able to present their case in Congress, and the result of the Democrats impeaching Trump is that he will now have the chance to present that evidence publicly in the Senate trial.)
What's worse than the impossibility of rectifying significant fraud after the fact is the lack of political will to find and rectify the systemic problems that would be revealed, whether they would change the outcome or not.
I mean, really, what are we arguing about? What democracy? We have an electoral system with multiple arcane, opaque, and inconsistent procedures, designed and known to enable error and fraud, in which the person who got millions more votes sometimes loses. And instead of addressing that, we argue and riot over a few tens of thousands of votes in special places that actually determine the winner. Not only do we not have what could be respectably called a "democracy," we cannot even think (or fight) about it. It's like having a car with a constantly failing engine and transmission, and all you repeatedly argue about is whether there was enough air in the left front tire. Farcical.
Nobody noticed, but Mitch McConnell gave away the game when he opposed the Republican challenge to the vote because, he said, picking at it risked putting the Electoral College in focus, and without the anti-democratic Electoral College--the actual source of ridiculous outcomes and attendant arguments--the Republicans couldn't win a presidential election. Could it be that the Democrats, who also refuse to go after the Electoral College, agree with McConnell on the imperative of preserving what in his and their understanding is the single biggest impediment to their electoral success, and to actual one-person-one-vote democracy?
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