A Philosopher's Blog

Philosophical Essays on Many Subjects

election

Crying Voter Fraud

by 7 Comments

Image Credit

After winning the electoral college and losing the popular vote, Donald Trump alleged voter fraud. He went on to promise a “major investigation” into voter fraud, which failed to support his claim. As it stands, there is no evidence of rampant voter fraud in the 2016 election.

It must be noted that absence of evidence need not be conclusive as evidence of absence—but those claiming voter fraud exists bear the burden of proof. After all, proving that fraud has occurred simply requires finding some evidence of such fraud. Proving that no voter fraud occurred would require analyzing every voter and vote—a far more burdensome task. To use an analogy, if someone claims that there is a monster in Loch Ness, it is up to them to find it. It is not up to others to scour every centimeter of the Loch to prove that it is not there.

Significant voter fraud is rather like the Loch Ness monster—despite the failure of extensive efforts to find it, people keep claiming to have seen it. The latest sighting (of voter fraud, not the monster) was by Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin. At this time, Bevin seems to have lost the election by 5,000 votes. In response he claimed, without proving evidence or answering questions, that there were irregularities in the election.

If such irregularities occurred, it would be a serious matter and call the integrity of the election into question. Unfortunately for the governor, no election official has offered corroborating evidence—the election seems to have been conducted properly. It could, of course, be alleged that every election official is in on the conspiracy or that only the governor can see hidden irregularities. However, the most plausible explanation is that the governor was not telling the truth. Kentucky will, however, recanvas the election results. If it does turn out that Bevin was right, then he should either be regarded as a lucky guesser or praised for having a special ability to discern fraud.

If Bevin’s currently unsupported claim turns out to be wrong, then it would be reasonable to accuse him of crying voter fraud. For those who value the American democracy, this tactic is problematic because it unjustly undermines faith in the election system and thus makes it ever easier for others who lose elections to use the same tactic and thus undermine democracy further. It thus becomes a cycle of corrosion. When the fraud is not real, some people will still believe that the failure to act against the fraud is more evidence of conspiracy and fraud, thus making it worse. While real fraud would be bad, it would be something that could be addressed and thus faith could be restored. To use an analogy, someone who is a hypochondriac can never be cured of an unreal disease. In contrast, if someone is sick, they can generally be cured.

It might be objected that while Republicans cry voter fraud, Democrats cry voter suppression (and other things). Are the Democrats not just as bad? The first reply is that even if the Democrats were falsely crying voter suppression, this would not entail that the Republicans were somehow right about voter fraud or that they would be in the right. To think otherwise would be to fall into a fallacy.

The second reply is that there is, unlike voter fraud, evidence of voter suppression exists. The obvious counter is to argue that all the sources that provide evidence of voter fraud are biased and hence either lying or deceived. The challenge is, of course, to provide evidence that the are in error. In some cases, the reasoning runs in a circle: such sources are wrong about voter suppression because they are biased; they are biased because they claim voter suppression is real. In other cases, there are just ad hominem attacks: the sources are liberal, so they are wrong.

There is, however, no need to rely on liberal sources for evidence of efforts to undermine democracy. The leak of a trove of data recently revealed that certain Republicans believed that adding a citizenship question would help unfairly shift power to the Republicans. Interestingly, recent research shows that the question might not have had the impact the Republicans hoped. But this hardly gets them off the moral hook. If someone thinks you are allergic to peanuts and tries to kill you by secreting peanut dust in your food, they are not off the hook if it turns out you are not allergic to peanuts.

To be consistent, I must also pre-condemn any misdeeds by Democrats that involve making false claims about elections that undermine democracy. Obviously, there must be reliable evidence that such claims have been made and that they are false.

My Amazon Author Page

My Paizo Page

My DriveThru RPG Page

Follow Me on Twitter

Impeachment or Election?

by 10 Comments

As the impeachment process plays out, the 2020 presidential election grows ever closer. Up until recently even many of Trump’s detractors asserted that because the election is so close, Trump should not be impeached. The infamous Ukraine call changed the view of some on this matter, but Trump’s defenders still use this argument. Some also argue that impeachment would overturn the 2016 election and thus should not be done. There are thus matters to be considered—whether impeachment should not occur when an election is close and whether impeachment wrongly overturns an election.

Image Credit

As Trump’s defenders rightly note, Trump was elected president. As his detractors note, he lost the popular vote by a large margin. The impeachment process could result in Trump being removed from office and one could claim that this would overturn the election. But this would be an error.

First there is the obvious point that impeachment is in the constitution and thus is intended to be an option—if the founders saw it as a wrongful overturning of elections, they would have presumably not included it. While the Republicans praise the wisdom of the founders when it matches their agenda of the moment, the founds were but men and could be wrong.

Second, the purpose of impeachment is to remove a person from office who has committed misdeeds that warrant removal. This is not to say that impeachment cannot be abused, but to reject impeachment because someone might abuse it would be analogous to rejecting criminal courts because they might be abused by some judge. It is not the process but the abuse of the process that would be a problem. If this Republican defense worked, then they would have just proven that they were wrong to impeach Bill Clinton and have shown that no one (even a Democrat) should ever be impeached in the future. I suspect that those advancing this defense of Trump would not apply it to Clinton or a future Democrat but I could be wrong about that—perhaps they have a strong and abiding commitment to the principle that impeachment is always wrong because the person being impeached was elected.

Third, an analogy can be used to show that this defense is flawed. If the principle is that when a decision is made by people to select someone for a position, that person should never be removed until the time comes to again select for that position, then no one should ever be fired, and no one should ever be divorced. This is clearly absurd.  Now, what about the upcoming election defense?

It could be argued that with an election coming up, the people should get to decide whether the president remains in office or not. One challenge here is sorting out a time limit for this. Trump has over a year left in his term, so if the defense holds now, then a president would be immune to impeachment for about 25% of their term. This seems odd. If the president is justly impeachable, allowing them a year (or even a month) to continue to engage in misdeeds seems wrong and harmful.

Consider the following analogy. Suppose that Hillary is hired by the board to be the CEO of a corporation. In her contract, she will be up for review in four years. Hillary engages in misdeeds, including efforts to corrupt the review process. Imagine that the corporation has a policy that allows such CEOs to be removed for bad behavior, but Hillary insists that terminating her before then would overturn the vote of the board, so she should be allowed to stay and to continue her subversion of the voting process and commit even more misdeeds. This is absurd and would merely allow her more time to commit crimes and work on unjustly keeping her position. The same holds true for Trump.

As another example, imagine a professor who is using their position to extort favors from students. They are caught, but the university says that since they are up for tenure review in a year, they should not be fired—this matter will be sorted out by the vote of the tenure committee. This is also absurd—even if the vote is coming up the next day, these misdeeds should be addressed. The same applies to Trump.

Thus, the election defense of Trump has no merit. This also holds true for any other president—even a Democrat.

My Amazon Author Page

My Paizo Page

My DriveThru RPG Page

Follow Me on Twitter

Should Political Candidates Accept Foreign Dirt?

by 12 Comments

During an interview, President Trump said that if he were offered damaging information on his political rivals from a foreign government he might accept it and not inform the FBI. Since Trump is Trump, he also asserted that he thought that in such a case a person should maybe accept the information and contact the FBI. Laying aside the problem of trying to determine Trump’s definitive position on this matter, there is the general question of whether political candidates in the United States should accept damaging information provided by foreign governments or foreigners.

Image Credit

From a legal standpoint, there is some debate about whether accepting such information would run afoul of election law. Foreign nationals are forbidden from providing contributions, donations, other expenditures or exchanging any “thing of value.” The problem arises because “thing of value” is vague. On the one hand, damaging information could obviously be politically valuable to a campaign and would thus seem to fall under the law. On the other hand, one could argue that while such information would be useful, it is not a thing of value in the same sense as money or providing advertisements for a candidate.

I think that such information should be considered a thing of value; this is because the law is aimed at preventing foreign interference in our elections and providing such information would be providing something potentially valuable (opposition research is expensive) that is aimed at interfering with an election. One could also make the sophist argument that since political spending has been ruled to be speech, then it would follow that political speech is also money—so providing political information would be the same as providing political money. This argument is, of course, easily countered by distinguishing between the “is” of predication and the “is” of identity.

I am certainly willing to listen to someone arguing against me and contending that if China’s intelligence agency provided Joe Biden with damaging information about Trump, then this would be legally fine. As far as resolving the legal matter, I suspect that there will court cases arising out of the 2020 election addressing it. But what of the moral issue?

One way to offer a moral defense of accepting such information is to argue that if the information is true and relevant to the candidate’s suitability for office, then the source is irrelevant. For example, imagine that a Democrat has rigged a primary so that she wins and the Russians hack into her email and find out about it. If this information is given to the Republican running against her and he uses it, this seems morally acceptable: the information is relevant and true. Obviously, knowingly using false or irrelevant information would be morally wrong. For example, imagine that a Democrat gets an email from Russian intelligence claiming that Trump runs a sex-slave ring out of the basement of a McDonald’s in Tallahassee and decides to use the information. Since it is not true, using the information would be morally wrong. Unless, of course, one could make a utilitarian argument about the ends justifying the means.

It can be countered that even if the information provided is true and relevant, it would still be wrong to accept it from a foreign power or national. Such an argument would be built on the idea that an election should be limited to the influence of citizens of the United States and that accepting foreign help contaminates the process. This could be seen as a matter of fairness analogous to that of sports: a football team would be wrong to accept a stolen playbook provided by fan. It can also be seen as a matter of integrity: the election is our business, not the business of foreigners. There is also the obvious concern of ongoing foreign influence; that a candidate would be indebted to foreigners or that they would have blackmail material to use against them.

Because of these considerations, I disagree with what Trump might have said. That is, I hold that accepting damaging information from a foreign power would be wrong and that such efforts should be reported to the FBI. I hold to this whether the information aids the Democrats or the Republicans.

My Amazon Author Page

My Paizo Page

My DriveThru RPG Page

Follow Me on Twitter

Congratulations, Mr. President

by 13 Comments

I am writing this on election day, so I do not know who has won. However, no matter who is elected I will still hold to these words.

Congratulations on your victory, Mr. President. You have a tough time ahead of you. We are still involved in war. While the economy has improved since 2008, people are still suffering. We can also expect trouble from Iran and other parts of the world.

As always, you can count on me to support you when I have a good, logical reason to do so. My commitment has consistently been to the good of the country and not to a particular political party or ideology.

Naturally, you can also count on me to be critical when I have good, logical reasons to do so. I am not mindlessly committed to a party nor in the thrall of a specific ideology. As such, when I have a legitimate disagreement I will make it clear in a rational and fair way.

I want you to succeed in bringing America out of the economic trouble that remains and I want you to lead us safely and boldly through the times of trouble that are sure to come.

I believe in America and I believe that we can work together to do what must and should be done.

Congratulations-enjoy your victory, for soon you must get to work.

Crist Goes Independent

by Leave a Comment

A cropped version of :Image:Charlie Crist.
Image via Wikipedia

Being a resident of Florida, I have been following the saga of Charlie Crist. Crist is currently governor of the state but wants to be a senator. A while back it seemed likely that Crist would secure the Republican nomination. However, as the Republican party began steering across the hard line and towards the Kingdom of No Crist decided on a more moderate course. He even accepted federal bailout money for the state.

His moderate leanings (which some claim were the results of pure politics rather than an ideological commitment to being a moderate) prevented him from passing the purity test. This resulted in his failure to secure the Republican nomination and his decision to switch to being an independent. This has created that rare American political beast: a three way race. Michael Steele has expressed his dismay over this and his remarks seemed to indicate that the way elections are supposed to work is that there is a Democrat running against a Republican (with the Democrat losing). Crist claims, of course, that he is doing this for the good of the people of Florida. The more cynical seem to be inclined to say that he is doing this for the good of Charlie Crist.

While I am always suspicious of the motivations of politicians, perhaps Crist does have a good point. Some pundits have pointed out that while Crist could not win the primary, he actually stands a chance in the general election. If this is true, then it makes sense for him to leave the Republicans and run as an independent. After all, if a significant number of voters want to vote for him, then he should have the opportunity to run.  Otherwise, the primary system would seem to serve to deny people the chance to chose the person they want and to give those who dominate a party that choice. Actually, even if most people would vote against him, then he should still have that opportunity-this is supposed to be a democracy, after all.

This situation does raise questions about the primary system as well as the two party system. As I see it, the current system actually limits democracy. I infer that this is exactly what it is supposed to do. As noted above, Steele seems to think that the race should be limited to a Republican and a Democrat (“The voters out there should be given a chance to have a clean call between the Republican nominee and the Democratic nominee, Congressman [Kendrick] Meek”). However, I do not think that these two parties have the right to claim a joint monopoly on the election. That is, to say the least, against the very notion of how a democracy should work.

While I am not a major Crist supporter, I do think that he should run as an independent. I am not just saying this because I tend to be a Democrat. Rather, I am saying this because I think that the two party system restricts choice and impairs our democracy.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Rebranding the Republicans

by 4 Comments

After their recent defeats, the Republicans are busy trying to figure out where they went wrong and how they can get back on the path to victory.

Based on what I’ve seen in the news, a popular view is that the Republican party strayed from its true conservative roots and this led to their downfall. This does have a certain degree of plausibility. After all, the Bush administration violated many of the classic principles of conservativism: small government, respect for basic rights, respect for the rule of law, and fiscal restraint. These violations led directly to many of the terrible problems we face now and these problems helped contribute to the downfall of the former ruling party.

Of course, it is also important to consider that people also chose the Democrats for positive reasons. That is, they voted Democrat rather than merely voting against the Republicans. As such, to capture such votes the Republicans would need to offer what the Democrats promised.

While there is reason to believe that a party can orchestrate its return to power (people often cite the Reagan era victory as an example of this), one very important factor seems to be the failures of the party in power. To be a bit cynical and to grossly oversimplify things, one party ascends as the other falls into decay. This decay often arises from the corrupting influences that the folks in power are exposed to. Naturally, those in power often fall victim to the arrogance and laziness that power can breed.

At this time, the Democrats are in power and Obama has promised America great things. This is, of course, a time of great optimism and hope. I believe that Obama will do his best to deliver and I hope that he will accomplish great things.

However, if history is any indication, the Democrats will eventually squander their victory, spiral into decay and thus open the door for the next Republican victory. Then it will be the Democrats turn to wait for the Republicans to go down the drain once more.

%d bloggers like this: