Winning = Cheating for Some, I Guess

I guess I'm obsessed with elections and gerrymandering this week. Here's a tweet thread that explains something I didn't know. It's by someone who goes by the name Camestros Felapton. who blogs, mostly about science fiction as far as I can tell, here.

It starts out with Camestros reponding to a tweet linking to a Slate story called Why Democrats should not call the Georgia governor’s race “stolen.”

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 Democratic 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 accepted axiom in their worldview to the extent that they think the only reason Democrats win urban areas is because voter fraud is easier there. They honestly think the majority of the U.S. is much more right-wing than it is, so every Democratic victory is then seen as *evidence* of fraud. A Democrat wins and that CONFIRMS their view that fraud must be widespread and 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 Democrats win in a GOP-controlled state, despite all the odds against them, that doubly confirms in this mindset that the Democrats defrauded. You can’t defuse that by NOT talking about fraud or stolen elections. It’s like trying to convince somebody a triangle has four sides...

I don’t know if the high-ups in the GOP think the same way or just cynically exploit this as a way to justify cheating and 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 [given each year for science fiction and fantasy writing]. The same logic was applied to those. The Pups ‘knew’ there was cheating because stories they didn’t like kept winning.

The actual [Hugo] voting process is extraordinarily transparent and well-documented and 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.

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 and 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.

It's pretty common to talk about epistemic closure and people living in bubbles, whether media-created or otherwise. This is a good example. I like to keep in mind the idea of falsifiability when figuring out what I believe in the world. (In order for something to a fact, it has to be possible to prove it false through observation or testing.) Whether there is voter fraud or not is clearly a falsifiable question, yet the people Camestros describes have instead transformed clear evidence against its existence into reflexive support for their previous belief.

The human brain is amazing.