Anyone who denies the legitimacy of democratic elections is an enormous threat to the nature of democracy and should not be given large political power.
And aside from that - pretending fraud isn't real or is an impossibility in an American election is incredibly naive. That's like saying Chicago can't have gun violence. Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly.
Sure there's no problem with that. But that's not what Trump and his team did.
Trump claimed there was fraud so loudly not because he wanted to find actual fraud (which he had no reason to believe existed), but because he wanted people to be very concerned with the idea the election was potentially fraudulent. He wanted people to be concerned with this idea because it legitimized his true motivations - he wanted power for himself.
Trump's team didn't actually want to find fraud; no, their goal was to create an environment of suspicion about fraud, but they had absolutely no intention whatsoever to prove their case. We know this because in all of the 60+ court cases they brought, they never alleged fraud, let alone attempted to prove it. If they did, they would have revealed they had zero evidence for their claims. Of course for this reason, they lost every single case (except I think an early PA case that didn't even relate to claims of fraud).
And it needs to be said that the elections were investigated. Georgia investigated every claim made by the President, and found none of them credible. If Trump were genuinely concerned with finding fraud and simply questioning the results of the election, he would have been satisfied with their process. But the process didn't end up with him winning Georgia, so he wasn't satisfied, to the point that he threatened Georgia elections officials with prosecution when they refused to overturn his loss there.
So yes, when it comes to elections generally, they should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly. But we must also say in the same breath that we cannot let disingenuous concerns about "election integrity" actually undermine elections. That's a problem too, which has demonstrably lead to a coup attempt and violent insurrection. So I would say "voter fraud hysteria" is actually a worse problem than voter fraud itself, which is proven to be rare and hasn't caused any coups or insurrections.
You'll need an industrial grade lube to get a slope that slippery.
> And aside from that - pretending fraud isn't real or is an impossibility in an American election is incredibly naive. That's like saying Chicago can't have gun violence.
Nice and a strawman too.
> Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly.
Ballot counting is watched by representatives of both parties. Neutral third parties agree that systemic voter fraud is unlikely to be happening at scale, and we do try to catch the dumbasses that try to cheat on an individual scale fairly easily. We can also add a false equivalence to your rapid fire fallacies.
"Questioning" an election is not the same thing as decrying fraud and trying to convince courts to overturn the results when you have no evidence of fraud.
It's quite another to go to a court, not because you have evidence, but because you want to avail yourself of their power to overturn the election by making some convincing argument. Or, short of that, to use the context of a court battle to give a patina of legitimacy to otherwise baseless accusations and FUD (lawyers are great at making bullshit sound convincing in a lawsuit).
That's what the Trump team did, and those are not the kind of people we should be letting near power (those who show an eager willingness to use institutions corruptly).
"No, ban the vocal disbelievers from social media, and ban their candidates from participating. Or imprison them."
Were you not alive for Bush v. Gore ? All of us on the left denied the legitimacy of that election, loudly, repeatedly, and I don't remember that being considered an "enormous threat to the nature of democracy".
Virtually every other institution has lost credibility in public opinion polls. Why should elections be any different? The losing side will always cry foul, as they have for multiple elections now: 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2020. It is tempting to look the other way, when the one you voted for happened to win.
Dems response to this was not good in my opinion. There is obviously a large population of voters that believe that fowl play is happening in elections, instead of working to increase transparency - there are a lot of things we can do like increased auditing or coming up with a more open way to verify votes - they doubled down and are attacking those who are asking questions. These are fellow Americans, they should not be demonized, we should work to improve election integrity and openness, increase everyones' confidence in election integrity.