The Lies that can Undermine Democracy

There really is a threat of out-of-control baseless indignation, which won't be addressed by sober debate. That's not what happened this month, and I don't see a return to that any time soon.

That doesn't mean I advocate suppression. But I definitely believe people need to be taught about cognitive biases in school.

Isn't this what has happened with Trump? He said the election was a fraud, he hasn't been able to provide any evidence at all, and no (IIRC) people responsible for election security have said that there was fraud. Yet Trump continues to say that there was election fraud. At that point it is a lie.

In fact, I'd say the opposite of your argument: calling lies "mistaken beliefs", specially when they came from politicians with an agenda, is what allowed to create different realities for different groups and what is undermining democracy. Giving attention and importance to inaccurate facts and then debating the reality of facts gives people the impression that both sides are actually reasonable, when in reality one's true and the other's false. Climate change is the best example of this: for some reason, politicians and other figures have been allowed to say that they "didn't believe in climate change" and managed to move a matter of scientific fact to a matter of opinion.

When you let lies go unaccounted and presented as "beliefs", you allow liars to create their own alternate realities. People don't have to know the truth, just believe whatever their group leaders say. And once the realities of different groups are separate enough, truths stop mattering and it just matters who do you follow.

Attack the person does very little for you except in a purely emotional venue. It can actually make things much much worse, particularly when there are already strongly held beliefs involved. All it does is further polarize an issue in peoples minds and make it more likely that they will hold faster to their beliefs. (i.e. the attacker reinforces the mistaken belief in the attacked's mind and makes them even less likely to respond to a logical argument.) That's how you turn loud voices into a dangerous situation and do it fast. (In other terms, that's how you turn an argument/discussion into a fight). This is true in pretty much every context.

https://fs.blog/2014/10/the-ten-golden-rules-of-argument/#:~....)

This happening so frequently shows to me that he provides information in bad faith and when something seems like either a misconception or a lie, its looking pretty clearly that the intent is to manufacture a separate reality that is conveniently aligned with his goals. To put it simply, the intent is to deceive and that is the very definition of lies. Using lies to manipulate the media is propaganda.

I don’t think this a good approach.

It takes real effort to refute a bad faith untruthful claim, but just it takes a single breath of air to make one. Lies scale better than the truth. And the people making bad faith arguments know this.

Maybe ridicule isn’t the answer but it’s something more than just facts and truth. Perhaps shame?

1. I still believe that lies started the legitimate belief. E.g. republican leaders like Trump lied about election fraud, convincing many that a problem exists which does not. Perhaps we might call that propaganda, or disinformation. So if we are to address the source of this problem, we cannot avoid the root lies which started the whole thing.

2. I believe that many have found it exceedingly difficult to refute the arguments of some of these folk, simply because they often do not approach these conversations in good faith. There is certainly a personality cult around Trump which many have been sucked into. It's not as simple as just "convincing" a cult member that they are logically or empirically wrong.

Is it acceptable for someone to be a cult member? Sure, absolutely. One can believe whatever they wish, as is their right. The problem happens when these beliefs become mostly violent and criminal. From what I gather, many have been taking this propaganda and turning it into a campaign to execute political leaders.

My take on the current problem is that people and companies are distancing themselves from the violent aspect of the far-right movement. This includes websites which are radicalizing people (Parler), and the leaders who are incentivizing the behavior (Trump). I find this a good thing -- these are sources of the lies.

No one is throwing people in jail for believing the election could be more secure. This does not prevent someone from having questions about the election, or conversations about it with people around them. It's not going to get you banned from reddit, or hackernews. Maybe you'll get downvoted because the questions (from my point of view) have been very thoroughly answered and debunked at this point, so to not know that might demonstrate that you haven't done much research on the topic, or are just ignoring the answers.

Calling the average voter-fraud-believing American a liar is obviously counterproductive. But that's not the same as a politician who should know better and doesn't appear to be operating in good faith.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related... uhidential_election?wprov=sfla1

If they call for, and plan violent action based on their beliefs? If they begin taking violent action based on their beliefs?

A lie is a lie, and at some point the responsibility falls on the person making the false statement, even if they truly believe it.

(One of the worst results of this situation is that many of the poor, rural people believing the lies have real problems and need help. But they aren't going to get it because of the politics. On the other hand, their actions have gone beyond debate and form a real threat to our society.)

As for refuting arguments, I'm a big believer in that, but so many people cannot change their minds, regardless of the evidence, partly because people telling lies have told them that the only honest person is the liar.

That people farther away from the origin point come to believe these untrue things does not make the original lies anything other than lies.

On a small scale, it may be true that countering a mistaken belief with facts and reason is helpful--though a lot of research suggests that's not the case even one at a time--but on the large scale, lies must be called out as lies, and letting them stand leads only to repetition and widespread belief.

Had there been a better job done of calling out and suppressing the lies at the stage they were still only lies, it's possible we would have much less mistaken belief.

Also, the idea that most people are suffering from "mistaken belief" rather than being aware they are lies strikes me as naive, but that's a matter of opinion.

Facts have been shown not to change people's minds:

* https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/words-matter/201810/...

* https://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/05/alternative-facts

* https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-say-they-ve-figured...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

If anyone was truly interested in resolving this conflict the talk would be about how to reach consensus and peace between the extremes. But no, it's this constant self-congratulatory stream of "news" and opinion pieces as if they've invented something completely novel.

Notice I said the extremes. The radical postmodernists are just dangerous as gun-yielding rednecks.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

From that perspective the flags are understandable.

unless you're a politician, it makes little (rational) sense to join a party (yes, it affords voting in primaries in some places, but that's little consolation, since the primary candidates are whittled down by party insiders in the first place). voters should largely be independents, but identity and signaling are such strong attractors to humans.

We could even see 18th-century pamphleteering again as ideas seek to escape the zampolit.

Free speech is a libertarian ideal. The libertarian right and libertarian left both support free speech.

What you're seeing is the rise of the authoritarian left.

> According to their analysis, which was published online as early as Dec. 24, time-series election data shows Trump’s votes were decrementing in various counties instead of increasing as they do normally.

> At least 30,593 votes were allegedly removed from Trump as result, including 17,650 votes in Dougherty County, 7,008 votes in Dodge County, and 5,935 votes in Putnam County.

This is by simple analysis of time-series data that was posted to public sources like the New York Times. There was an open-source repository on Github with the analysis, but it has since been removed. I regret not downloading a copy.

[1] https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/theres_evidence...

The lack of standing was only a single component, Judges did see what "evidence" the suits had they found it uncompelling in addition to lack of standing. Below is the ruling from one of the Arizona cases:

"The judge ruled that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing; their fraud allegations were vague and implausible, and their evidence was unreliable or irrelevant."

If they had a smoking gun, I have confidence my various news sources would be telling me. I make sure to keep a healthy dose of conservatives and sane anti-establishment types in my media bubble, and I trust them to tell me the truth on that kind of thing.

The kind of sources I'm talking about here are Saagar from Rising, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald etc.

Another claim about the voting machines is that they were fed extra ballots. For example, a poll worker said they saw another poll working repeatedly running a set of ballots through one of the machines.

Sounds bad, right? It turns out that part of the testing to verify machine are working is to run test ballots repeatedly through machines in a test environment not connected to the live environment. That is what the worker was witnessing. That this would happen and is a normal part of the process was covered in a poll working training session that that poll worked had not bothered to attend.

There were claims of Republican observers not being allowed in to observe in Pennsylvania. That is in fact true--some observers were not allowed in. That was because there was already the maximum legally allowed number of observers, split equally among Democrats and Republicans.

There were claims that a bunch of ballots were smuggled in, in Pennsylvania if I recall correctly. There was even a short video from surveillance cameras showing boxes of ballots being taken out from under a table and opened and added to the queue to be counted.

But if you looked at the full video, you'd see that those were ballots that had been in the queue to be counted, and when it was time to take a break from counting had been placed in the official ballot storage containers, locked, and stored under the table. All the purported proof of fraud video clip showed is the normal resumption of counting after a break.

There was a claim based on a worker reporting a bunch of mail in ballots being counted that did not have signatures on the ballots. True--but in the state the signatures were on the envelopes, not the ballots themselves. The procedure, which was carried out, is that workers open the outer envelope, take out the signed inner envelope, check the signature on the inner envelope, and if it matches the on file signature, open the inner envelope, remove the ballot, and add it to the queue of ballots to be counted.

Pretty much everything being offered as evidence of fraud has been like that--people seeing normal procedures that have been used without controversy and accepted by both parties for ages, not understanding them, and saying it must be fraud.

There have been claims not based on fraud. Most notable is Wisconsin, where plaintiffs claimed that the election officials had misinterpreted the state's election rules and had been conducting elections in an invalid way.

The state Supreme Court agreed with that one, and Wisconsin will have to change its procedures. But the court refused to throw out the election because Wisconsin had been using that procedure for years (it was actually put in place by Republicans about a decade ago). They were not going to take the extraordinary step of invalidating the entire election (and it would have to be not just the Presidential election...it would have to be every election in the state, and arguably past elections too). And they were especially not going to grant the plaintiffs' request to just throw out the election in counties where Biden won but leave it standing were Trump won.

As far as courts not considering the evidence goes, much of that seems to be based on the idea that since the cases have not gone to trial the court must not have looked at the evidence.

For some of the cases that is correct. If plaintiffs don't have standing, or the court does not have jurisdiction, the court will dismiss the case without looking at evidence. Plaintiffs can go refile in an appropriate court.

But for the cases where the plaintiffs did have standing and filed in the right court, the court will examine the evidence as part of considering defendant's motion to dismiss. If all you've got is vague accusations rather than concrete evidence, you aren't going to get very far.

It is one thing to say in a press conference that you have a ton of concrete evidence that you are going to take to court. When you actually get to court, you have to present that concrete evidence in your civil complaint. They have tended to either not do that, or the evidence will obviously not be admissible at trial--often it has been hearsay, or hearsay of hearsay, or even more levels of hearsay than that.

> This is keeping me up at night, feeling like the whole exercise of democracy could be a total sham, and possibly always was.

It might help to consider this. Many of the judges tossing out these cases have been staunch conservative judges appointed by Trump, picked by Trump and McConnell specifically because they could be counted on to reliable issue solidly conservative rulings. Yet plaintiffs have done no better with them than they have done with liberal judges.

To believe that they are all in on some sort of election rigging requires believing that the people rigging the election are vastly powerful. They can pretty much ensure any election outcome they want. But then you have to explain why this all powerful group forgot to rig things so they would get a solid Senate majority too.

I'd like to try to address the first bit there, and maybe ask a question on the second.

Warning: I am not a lawyer.

----

First up: "the actual evidence was never properly examined in court"

This depends very heavily on what "properly examined" means. There's absolutely no question that evidence was filed in several lawsuits, so it's definitely seen by both the judge and defendants. The evidence has also been explicitly mentioned in rulings, so there's no question it was at least considered by the judge. For example, take Law v. Whitmer, from Nevada [0]:

> The Court nonetheless considers the totality of the evidence provided by Contestants in reaching and ruling upon the merits of their claims.

> Contestants offered Mr. Baselice to opine on the incidence of illegal voting in the 2020 General Election based on a phone survey of voters.

> The Court questions Mr. Baselice's methodology because he was unable to identify the source of the data for his survey and conducted no quality control of the data he received.

> Contestants offered Mr. Kamzol to opine that significant illegal voting occurred in Nevada during the 2020 General Election, based on his analysis of various commercially available databases of voters.

> The Court questions Mr. Kamzol's methodology because he had little to no information or supervision over the origins of his data, the manner in which it had been matched, and what the rate of false positives would be. Additionally, there was little or no verification of his numbers.

> ...

> As reflected herein, the Court finds that the expert testimony provided by Contestants was of little to no value. The Court did not exclude consideration of this evidence, which it could have, but gave it very little weight.

This wasn't the only case where the evidence was explicitly examined; Bowyer v. Ducey from Arizona [1], and King v. Whitmer from Michigan [2] are also cases where the evidence is explicitly called out in rulings (and there are probably others as well).

So the evidence was definitely examined in at least some cases; what a "proper" examination would entail, I don't know.

Another thing to note is that courts generally have rules about what evidence is considered admissible; evidence that doesn't meet certain standards (e.g., hearsay) generally cannot be used in a lawsuit. Even expert testimony may be excluded if it doesn't meet the standards used by the court (e.g., Federal Rules of Evidence, Rule 702 governs expert testimony). In other words, it's not enough to just have evidence; the evidence needs to meet certain quality thresholds. The plaintiffs can complain that their evidence wasn't examined, but if it's not good evidence that's really on them.

One last thing is that one also needs to consider whether further examination would even matter. If your lawsuit is deficient enough that the outcome is obvious early in the proceedings, it makes no sense for a judge to order discovery, evidentiary hearings, etc.

----

Next: "the cases were mostly dismissed on issues of legal standing."

The thing is that cases can be dismissed for multiple reasons. If a case is dismissed both for standing issues and on its merits, does that count as "just" a dismissal for issues of standing?

The other problem here is that, at least on the federal level, courts are only allowed to hear specific suits ("cases" and "controversies"). This has been interpreted to include standing; in other words, a federal court can't skip standing just because it wants to see the case move forwards.

Standing for state courts is determined based on each state's laws, so it isn't really feasible to give a blanket description, but suffice to say, if a state's laws say that a plaintiff must establish standing, and a plaintiff fails to do so, the court must dismiss the case.

----

> Electronic voting has always been criticized, so I don't know why this year should be any different. But that just seems worse, that potentially decades' worth of elections could have been tampered with if any of those Dominion claims are true?

One thing to note is that it's usually purely electronic voting that gets the most criticism. The voting machines in the most contested states all had paper trails, which generally alleviates the worst of the criticism.

----

[0]: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/...

[1]: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/...

[2]: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/...

Edit: Add missing cite

Read about the Beer Hall Putsch, about how it was characterized by contemporaries, about it's efficacy, and it's not totally unreasonable to say, "Is this a modern version of that event?"