> Al Gore presided over the meeting in 2001. He overruled these objections because no senator joined them
> Senator Barbara Boxer [...] joined Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones [...] lodge a formal objection to Ohio’s electoral votes. The objection compelled Congress to spend two hours in debate
Two hours in debate! You're really comparing that?
(There was no vote in 2000 or 2016, so that isn't true)
You can form whatever opinion you like on the merits of the objections, but the end result is the same. In three separate elections this century there were Democrats in Congress who voted against certifying the election results.
You can hand wave it away as much as you like. The facts will remain. It’s on the voting record.
No, there weren’t. The only votes on objections to an electoral tally prior to 2020 in this century (counting 2000 as “in this century”, to avoid ambiguity) were in 2004.
In 2000 and 2016 there were no votes, because votes only occur after the count is stopped for debate on an objection, which only occurs when a legal objection is filed, which (1) must be in writing, and (2) must be signed by both a Senator and a member of the House of Representatives.
In 2000 and 2016 some members of the House engaged in floor stunts proposing objections which were not signed by a member of a Senate, which resulted in no debate or vote as they were ruled out of order because, well, they were out of order.
> You can hand wave it away as much as you like. The facts will remain. It’s on the voting record.
Yeah, the voting record is against you here, so you probably want to stop waving your hands in its general direction.
> there were Democrats in Congress who voted against certifying the election results
Right, and one of them was a two hour debate.
You'd be gullible enough compare that to not supporting a campaign of bad-faith lawsuits across states that were clearly not based in voter fraud (and usually dismissed as a result). The most specific thing they have in common is "members of Congress voted."
Details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
Contrast this to 2020, where there were 86 lawsuits after the election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related...
Are you talking about something other than the Beneford's law stuff or the lead changing overnight in places that count in-person votes before they count mail-in votes or that finish counting rural areas before they finish counting urban areas?
Do you have any reasonable explanation for the above? Mine is that all the evidence was hearsay and even Trump and Republicans knew it wasn't credible, he just did that to get this campaign to make even more money by fooling people, and for political gain.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-fundra...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/trump-rea...
This is as incorrect a statement as one can possibly make. Multiple lawsuits did look at evidence (Law v. Whitmer, Bowyer v. Ducey, and King v. Whitmer, for example), and the evidence submitted was found to be far from sufficient to support the complaint.
> not just dozens, of sworn affidavits that certify that fraudulent activities were witnessed
I just don’t understand why the fixation on the number of affidavits. The quantity of affidavits is rather meaningless on its own; it’s the quality that is far more important. There’s a good reason why defendants have won despite submitting far fewer depositions and/or affidavits in relevant cases: because ultimately it’s the quality of evidence that matters, and a few high-quality depositions/affidavits are worth more than an ocean of inadmissible fluff.
> I have looked at even just some of the evidence and just alone the statistical data indicates extremely strongly that at least something was clearly wrong that would cause any good faith and rational person to at least want to look further at the data.
What analyses did you look at?
And that also begs the question: did you look further into the analyses? Because most, if not all, the ones I’ve seen tend to either fall apart as soon as one takes a closer look (e.g., 700+% turnout for a nonexistent county/township), are incomplete (Dr. Ayyadurai’s analysis), or are rather meaningless (the statistical analysis submitted in Texas v. Pennsylvania).
> how is it that of the bellwether districts that have all, for the last 10 presidential elections essentially all gone to the winning candidate … both Democrat and Republican … all but two went to Trump this time.
Because such correlation is not causation. They’ll be right right up until they aren’t.
Same thing with statements like “Republicans need Ohio to win”. There’s no inherent reason why that must be the case, so when it isn’t you can’t draw strong conclusions from that.*
You're comparing that to Bush v Gore?!
Trump and his attorneys falsely asserting widespread election fraud in public statements you should not want.
> The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot. [1]
The courts essentially decided the cases have no merit to rule on.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/121120zr_p86...
She also said this summer Biden shouldn't concede under any circumstance.
There's dirt everywhere if you look for it.
The crux of the issue isn’t how much time they wasted it’s the fact that they objected to a legitimate election.
Google needs to grow a pair and take a stand. But they won’t because it was never about that in the first place.
There weren’t any objections even technically filed. There were attempts to offer objections that didn’t meet the legal standard, which were ruled out of order.
If you mean the recount and associated lawsuits, then, no, that didn’t either. Bush won both before and after that.
Now, if you slice apart some subset of the recount/lawsuit process apart from others, you can say that, but that’s a rather artificial definition, and, anyway, there is a difference between lawsuits over who should be certified in a state and throwing out a state’s electoral votes in Congress.
How so?
For 2000 in particular, the objections differed massively from the 2020 objections on every one of those points.
This is not good and we've seen what it can lead to with the capital riot.
This is false. There were no votes against certifying in 2000 or 2016. (For there to be a vote, there must first be an objection signed by at least one member of each house.) An objection so raised triggers a debate in each house, after which there is a vote in each house.
In 2000 and 2016, no objection meeting the requirement was filed, so there was never anything for anyone to vote on.
In 2004 one objection was raised to Ohio’s votes with the required signatures (and that case was a very different thing than the 2020 one; the group of objectors — Senator Barbara Boxer and a number of members of the House — explicitly stated at the time that the purpose of their objection was to have the debate and draw attention to the issue of electoral reform, not to overturn the results; and they weren’t part of a broader movement headed by the defeated candidate painting the outcome as illegitimate.)
Let's "raise the bar" of debate.
The topic of the post is career / financial implication of voting against the certification of elections. I think fleshing out exactly what that means is an important part of the "debate", as you say.
I don't think pointing out that Democrats voted against certification in 2004 is a defense of what Trump and the Republicans did in any way. I think its an important clarifying point in deciding how we want to treat voting against certification.
Crying whataboutism is a very tempting way to avoid nuance. I see a lot of people propose dramatic, sweeping action. When the consequences and implications of those actions are brought up, everyone cries whataboutism.
> We should defund all politicians who vote against certification
> Voting against certification is a normal thing that people from both parties have done, maybe we should come up with better criteria?
> How dare you bring up $PartyA, I only want to talk about $PartyB
> I think its an important clarifying point in deciding how we want to treat voting against certification.
> Crying whataboutism is a very tempting way to avoid nuance. I see a lot of people propose dramatic, sweeping action. When the consequences and implications of those actions are brought up, everyone cries whataboutism.
Two things: #1) I pretty much agree with you. #2) Aren't you avoiding nuance when you employ rhetorical devices like "everyone cries".
(FWIW, I'm not decrying "whataboutism" above, I'm tone-policing. It's also an odious practice, and I feel a little low and preachy doing it, but WTF, let's go ahead and try to have the nuanced and informed conversion if we can, eh, yo?)
I feel like it's on all of us to take a deep breath and step back from the drama. We have shared values and common ground. Instead of shouting on Twitter and in the streets, let's talk.
FWIW I know of a few formal methods for communication that seem to hold promise, I'll mention NVC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication ) and E-Prime ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime ).
The Trumpist attempt to overturn the election was doomed electorally and legally, but it was presented to the voting base as a very real effort. Congressional republicans were going to go to congress and fix this fraudulent election.
And it was all a lie. Everyone involved knew it was a lie. And eventually a mob stormed congress because of that lie.