Reality On Political Races And Voting

October 30, 2024 by Karl Denninger

Ed: This shouldn't have to go on the -NAD side.  It does, however, because both political party activists will try to report it as "arguing for violence" even though it does no such thing.  The root of that problem is that current law permits entities like Facebook and Google to have back-door APIs and take reports they have no duty to disclose to you as to who filed them, they can and do act on same via either robotic or simply "oh its from a trusted source thus its true" basis and they have no duty to disclose specifically what they object to in the complained-about work.  Any such refusal or obfuscation should void Section 230 immunity; if you're going to grant publisher and provider immunity then they should be required to be "pass through" entities when it comes to complaints much as is the case for a DMCA complaint, and if they don't -- not on subpoena, but originally -- they lose their protection entirely.  But that's not the world we live in.

A politician's job isn't simply to win.

It is to win by a sufficient margin that the inevitable cheating, which occurs in every election, is insufficient and if the losing side tries to cheat by enough to actually change the outcome it will exceed the level of plausible deniability among the general population.

Claims that we have "secure" elections and that "every vote counts and none do that are invalid" are always false.  That has never been true -- not here in the United States or anywhere else.  Simply put there is always an incentive to cheat and people always will because people respond to incentives.

But there is also a margin of plausible deniability.  If you win by enough to overcome that then cheating in a sufficient amount to change the outcome runs the risk of an immediate uprising by the losing side.

If your "win" is within that margin then the outcome can be changed and while many will say something like "Not my President" because they believe you cheated, whether you did or not, you still lost from a standpoint of the opposing party supporters because you failed to do the essential job of exceeding that margin even though you gained the office.

You may not like this fact but it is a fact.

The reason you can't cheat in an unbounded amount is that there is a level of cheating at which people will revolt.

I'm not talking about a few lone crazies deciding to do crazy things either -- I'm talking about revolt in the real sense of the word.  Despite the bluster and bullshit by law enforcement and people like our current AG they know damn well there is exactly nothing they can about it other than submit if it happens.

Its simply math -- there are about 1 million sworn officers of all sorts in the United States but some 240 million adult Americans.  If 10% of half (the losing side) decide they're not going to put up with that shit that's 20:1 or worse odds against the cops and they either stand down or every one of their families, they themselves and everything they own is destroyed.

Nobody goes to war at a 20:1 manpower deficit and survives it when your side is embedded in their homes and property among those you're trying to defeat.  If you try that you lose everything including your life and everyone in every law enforcement position from the lowly meter maid on up damn well knows it.

Now there are nations where such acts (e.g. 10% swings by cheating) do happen and people get away with it.  They are places where the people have been formerly disarmed as one key element, or there simply really isn't more than one person on the ballot even though there might be (e.g. where there's no such thing as a secret ballot.)

But America is not such a place and incidentally the 2nd Amendment is the reason we're not such a place -- and why we had damn well better never do anything to get rid of it.  That implicit threat must always exist as it is the "hard stop" on corruption of the franchise and thus is essential to the continuation of a peaceable society.  If it falls then civil war in some form or fashion becomes inevitable and we must never allow that.

So here's reality coming into the last week before the election: Both side's job, if they wish to claim not just victory but legitimacy, is to win by enough that nobody can reasonably question the margin of victory as it is outside the boundary of any reasonable claim of cheating.

Because yes, there will be cheating just as there always has been in every single election.

You're supposed to make the case well enough, as a candidate, that your margin is outside the realm of plausible deniability.

That is a political candidate's actual job.

We'll see if either of the two on the ballot pull that off.