So, the answers that I've seen so far, trying to summarise:
1) You will believe Biden will be the next president when enough electors are appointed to elect him. Okay, that seems fair. I think it's pushing it a bit late compared to previous elections (in 2016, 2012, 2008, etc., we seemed happy to trust projections earlier than that), but certainly the appointment of electors is a key milestone in the election of a president.
2) You will believe Biden will
legitimately be elected the next president after a full audit. Again, to me this seems like a high bar given that there was no requirement for such in 2016, 2012, 2008, etc., but fair enough. I suppose the next part of the discussion would be about why you think there is sufficient doubt about the result as to require an audit. What is it that makes
this election sufficiently suspect as to require an audit, whereas the last few elections were all clear?
(No, you don't actually need to tell me, I have read this thread and the Sietch fraud thread. I know the incidents you might bring up.)
3) You will believe there was no significant voter fraud only after a full and transparent audit. (And in one case, will never believe it because there's always
some fraud - that may be true, but I said
significant fraud for a reason.) I think my response to this is the same as my response to question 2. You didn't require anything like that in 2016, 2012, or earlier, so I think it then comes down to the argument that there is a good reason to suspect fraud for this election: that is, that 2020's election gives much greater cause for suspicion than the last few.
One person also asked me to answer the reverse, so I'd better do that. No asking questions that I'm not willing to answer myself!
Hypothetically speaking, what would need to happen in order for you to believe:
1) That there was election fraud?
2) That the vast majority fraud perpetrated by Democrats or their operatives?
3) The amount of fraud needed to be reported so it is enough to change the outcome of the election with SCOTUS?
1) Solid, non-circumstantial evidence of voting irregularities. I have had supposed instances of this brought to my attention before, and I've looked at these threads, but in my judgement none of it is sufficiently plausible to clear my threshold of reasonable suspicion. Almost all of the evidence that I have seen is either a misunderstanding of something innocuous or simply false.
2) See the answer to 1. After solid evidence of fraud is found, solid evidence linking it to the Democratic party. As above, I don't think any of the evidence of arguments I have yet seen in this regard have been convincing.
3) See 1 and 2. The answer is still, well, evidence.
To put it briefly, my case against election fraud is basically that my starting point is to assume no significant fraud (cf. 2016, 2012, etc.), and then to modify based on new evidence. As far as I can tell,
most claims of fraud are frivolous or false, litigation around fraud has
mostly been thrown out, and credible organisations like CISA
have made statements against fraud.
To this I would add three points.
The first is what Slate Star Codex
calls "the Basic Argument Against Conspiracy Theories". The Basic Argument is just that you can't run an operation that large in secret without anyone noticing. In order for a Democrat-run conspiracy to successfully flip the election, you'd need a truly massive nation-wide operation. It would need to have agents in multiple states, in independent state-run election organisations, from heads of bureaucracies down to local managers. You would need it to control not only Democrats, but also civil service bureaucracies at both state and federal levels. You would need it to control
Republican elected officials as well. You would need it to control or at least influence
almost the entire rest of the world, including
international observers and even
the Pope. You would need to somehow do all of this without anyone noticing, anyone innocently calling out an irregularity, without any bright-eyed young Democratic volunteer objecting and blowing the whistle, and for it to stand up. You might object that you wouldn't need to
control all of those people, just deceive a lot of them - but then you're positing an operation that can deceive every state and federal agency, Republican politicians and leaders, international observers, even people with strong reasons to prefer Trump's victory... but then somehow
can't deceive citizen journalists or the Trump campaign. That doesn't sound very plausible to me. So in short, the scale of the conspiracy that would be required to fix the election is immense and therefore very unlikely.
The second point I would refer to is simply Occam's Razor. The above paragraph suggests that election fraud is very unlikely, but it does not technically prove it's impossible. Sometimes very unlikely things happen. However, another possible explanation for what we're seeing is, well, that there was no fraud, that Trump is lying or indulging in wishful thinking, and those Republicans sticking by him are doing so out of fear for their electoral chances, especially in light of the Georgia senate races. It's less genuine belief in fraud and more
trying to walk a tightrope to preserve their electoral chances while dealing with an electorate with whom Trump has immense personal credibility. To me this alternative explanation seems more plausible. It requires no active conspiracy, it has far less in the way of moving parts, and, well, it's simply
in character for Donald Trump. Trump claimed that there was election fraud
in 2016, when he won. Trump has a well-established record of lying about observable reality if it flatters his ego, perhaps most famously with his inauguration crowds. It fits Trump's known pattern of behaviour that he would claim to have really won the election and that only fraud makes it appear otherwise,
no matter whether it was true or not. Put bluntly, it is his character. And character, as many conservatives used to point out
and some still do, is destiny. So if I balance two competing theories here - there was widespread fraud, Trump and his team are telling the truth, versus there was no significant fraud, Trump and his team are lying - I think Occam's Razor favours the latter.
The final point is more of a pre-emptive response to criticism. I included a lot of links in the above two paragraphs: Newsweek, Axios, The Independent, NPR, CNN. I have been told before that I put far too much trust in the mainstream media. I think there would be an argument against me that says that all these media outlets are untrustworthy: they might not be part of a conspiracy in a formal sense, but they are part of what Neoreactionaries
would call 'the Cathedral': a self-organising consensus of elite and media organisations that push progressive views. So none of the sources I cite can be trusted. Instead we should go to... who, precisely? OAN? Randoms on Twitter? If you go with this theory, even
Fox News must be now somehow part of the Cathedral, of the progressive consensus pushing lies. (I recall in this topic itself a dispute about whether the Murdoch press were liberal, globalist, or pro- or anti-Trump.) In response to this, well, obviously I can't prove that every media source is trustworthy, so instead I would put a different question out there. If every professional media source, from the BBC to Fox News, is so clearly wrong and untrustworthy... then how do you know that
any source is trustworthy? If everyone else in the world is being fooled by their media, how do you know that you're not being fooled, by OAN or Project Veritas or even just people on Twitter? If everyone is a liar, how do you know that your favoured sources aren't liars? To be clear, my position on this is not that all the mainstream media sources are unbiased. Of course they're biased: every source in the world has some bias, you have to take it into account, and indeed most media sources lean left. But there's a difference between acknowledging that bias and asserting that
everyone must be lying. I am taking the media with a grain of salt, but if you believe there's an omnipresent media agenda to lie to you, how do you know that
anything that's going on is true?
To put it another way, I think I have an idea of what it looks like when mainstream media are trying to push a line that is at variance with observed reality: the obvious example might be there were no riots mixed in with the Floyd protests. But in cases like that, you notice that even though it was trying to play them down, the media did in fact report on riots and violence. Basically, I think there are media narratives, sure, but there are limits: they try to put events in a certain light, but outright, massive-scale deception, on the kind of universal global level that would be required here, does not really happen.
So overall, in light of the visible evidence so far, I think it is far more likely that there was no significant fraud, Biden's election is legitimate, Donald Trump and his team are simply lying or self-deluding in a way that flatters Trump's ego, and those Republicans going along with it are mostly trying to preserve their electoral chances.
