This is a bad take and lots of people are already saying why but let me illustrate with a true story. I spend a lot of time reading a very specific set of right wing blogs - those associated with science fiction writing (for reasons that don’t matter at this point...
One of those blogs has stated without any sign of irony or attempt to actively deceive or intentional hyperbole that they believe 75% of Dem votes are fraudulent. This is a reluctant Trump voter who sees themselves as libertarian - not an ‘alt-right’ blog per-se...
This extraordinary claim gets zero pushback from followers. It’s an excepted axiom in their worldview to the extent that they think the only reason Dems win urban areas is because voter fraud is easier there. They honestly think the majority of US is much more rwing than it is...
So every Dem victory is then seen as *evidence* of fraud. A dem wins and that CONFIRMS their view that fraud must be widespread & blatant. The only way they will think an election wasn’t won by fraud is if the GOP win. The only way to break the ‘cycle’ is GOP winning forever...
If the Dems win in a GOP controlled state, despite all the odds against them, that doubly confirms in this mindset that the Dems defrauded. You can’t defuse that by NOT talking about fraud or stolen elections. It’s like trying to convince somebody a triangle has 4 sides...
I don’t know if the high-ups in the GOP think the same way of just cynically exploit this as a way to justify cheating & voter suppression but the outcome is the same: the GOP will be supported by its base when the GOP cheats.
To return to the beginning: I began reading this specific blog during the Puppy Debarkle around the Hugo Awards. The same logic was applied to those. The Pups ‘knew’ there was cheating because stories they didn’t like kept winning...
The actual voting process is extraordinarily transparent & well documented & fraud resistant (even more so now). That didn’t matter because the ‘proof’ of the ‘fraud’ was the ‘wrong’ stories winning because only a tiny proportion of people could possibly like ‘those’ stories...
When DragonCon started the Dragon Awards the pups endorsed them even thought the voting system was easily gamed & had zero accountably because the ‘right’ books won. That’s how they ‘knew’ that the voting was legit!
It’s an iron clad piece of anti-reasoning. You aren’t going to shake it by appealing to the integrity of the system! The Hugos implemented a new nomination system that actually structurally would have helped the pups if they had continued to participate...
But they didn’t because, again, they ‘knew’ the new system must be an evil trap to exclude them. (This wasn’t just ignorance, there were enough numerate senior Pups to follow how it worked & see how it could benefit them, if only they looked)...
That’s not an argument AGAINST boosting the actual integrity of voting systems - just that it won’t convince the right that the left isn’t cheating. We can only do that by losing...which is obviously a very bad option.
