good tweet from the Dilbert guy...
The most entertaining (and therefore most likely?) outcome of the Trump indictments would be putting the American election process on trial and showing the country we don't have a reliable system for knowing who won ANY election.
How hard would it be to convince one or more jurors an election MIGHT have been rigged? I could convince all twelve in five minutes and I wouldn't need any charts or data to do it. Don't believe me? I'll demonstrate here.
Fact: Any system with lots of participants, complexity, and high stakes will become corrupt over time. That is true of every observed human-made system since the beginning of recorded history. The only mystery is WHEN the corruption happens. For example, we know Congress is influenced by the military-industrial complex, and we know the financial markets are increasingly rigged for the big players. Every complex human-made system of high value becomes corrupt over time, no matter what kind of controls are in place. There has never been an exception. That's because bad actors have an incentive to peck away until they find a hole to crawl through.
We can't know for sure if any particular election -- such as 2020 -- was rigged. But we can know for sure the current design of our election systems guarantees rigging at some point. And we can know for sure that the voting results for 2020 violated historical patterns so drastically any reasonable person would have some questions. A reasonable person can believe the 2020 election was fair, but ask yourself how much of your opinion is influenced by your patriotism and wishful thinking about how things should be?
Trusting an American election requires trust in the party that brought you the Russia Collusion Hoax, the Hunter laptop hoax, and about 20 others. Would that cast of characters hesitate to rig an election if they could get away with it? Remember, no one was arrested for any of the hoax behavior.
President Trump has lived in the real world of business and politics for longer than most of you have been alive. He knows how the real world works. He has seen it from the inside. His instincts told him the election was gamed in some way. How much of your own money would you bet that Mr. Trump's instincts about the election are wrong? Would you bet everything you have? In order to find Mr. Trump guilty, you have to bet against his experience in spotting sketchy behavior, and you have to believe all 50 states ran clean elections in the context of no other complex, human-made system of high value ever being entirely clean.
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The most entertaining (and therefore most likely?) outcome of the Trump indictments would be putting the American election process on trial and showing the country we don't have a reliable system for knowing who won ANY election.
How hard would it be to convince one or more jurors an election MIGHT have been rigged? I could convince all twelve in five minutes and I wouldn't need any charts or data to do it. Don't believe me? I'll demonstrate here.
Fact: Any system with lots of participants, complexity, and high stakes will become corrupt over time. That is true of every observed human-made system since the beginning of recorded history. The only mystery is WHEN the corruption happens. For example, we know Congress is influenced by the military-industrial complex, and we know the financial markets are increasingly rigged for the big players. Every complex human-made system of high value becomes corrupt over time, no matter what kind of controls are in place. There has never been an exception. That's because bad actors have an incentive to peck away until they find a hole to crawl through.
- Our elections are not fully auditable.
- We don't see the computer code for the machines.
- We don't know if mail-in ballots were discarded before reaching the drop box.
- We don't know if any bad actors hacked any part of it.
- And we certainly don't know if there are innovative ways to rig an election that have not yet been discovered.
We can't know for sure if any particular election -- such as 2020 -- was rigged. But we can know for sure the current design of our election systems guarantees rigging at some point. And we can know for sure that the voting results for 2020 violated historical patterns so drastically any reasonable person would have some questions. A reasonable person can believe the 2020 election was fair, but ask yourself how much of your opinion is influenced by your patriotism and wishful thinking about how things should be?
Trusting an American election requires trust in the party that brought you the Russia Collusion Hoax, the Hunter laptop hoax, and about 20 others. Would that cast of characters hesitate to rig an election if they could get away with it? Remember, no one was arrested for any of the hoax behavior.
President Trump has lived in the real world of business and politics for longer than most of you have been alive. He knows how the real world works. He has seen it from the inside. His instincts told him the election was gamed in some way. How much of your own money would you bet that Mr. Trump's instincts about the election are wrong? Would you bet everything you have? In order to find Mr. Trump guilty, you have to bet against his experience in spotting sketchy behavior, and you have to believe all 50 states ran clean elections in the context of no other complex, human-made system of high value ever being entirely clean.
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