Would you engage in undetectable election fraud, if it meant the right candidate won?

Great Debates
1

So here’s your chance. You’re the janitor cleaning up the precinct in the key battleground state. You know that this state will decide the election, and the vote counts for each candidate are close, but the right guy is ahead by a razor-thin margin.

You’re happy, not just because you voted for the right guy, but because the wrong guy will continue a war that’s getting innocent soldiers and civilians killed, is unfriendly to the environment, hostile to reproductive rights, and is sponsored federal legislation that will cripple the gay rights cause.

-OR-

You’re happy, not just because you voted for the right guy, but because the wrong guy will gut our military, help destroy the institution of marriage, reverse tax cuts, and appoint judges that will take “Under God” out of the Pledge and keep abortion clinics in business.

-OR-

You get the idea.

Anyway, as you’re sweeping up, you discover a box of ballots, mistakenly not sent over for counting.

It’s a couple of thousand ballots, and they’re mostly for the wrong guy.

Suddenly, you, Mr. Janitor, can select the next President of the United States. No one knows this box is here; if it goes out in the dumpster with the rest of the trash, no one’s the wiser. If you take it home and burn it it your fireplace, no one would know.

If you turn this box in, the wrong guy gets elected. If you trash it, the right guy wins.

What do you do? And since this is in GD for a reason that transcends an IMHO poll – WHY? Sure, it may be wrong to burn the box – but think of all the good that you’ll be doing! Literally saving soldiers’ lives! -OR- Literally saving unborn babies’ lives!

2

No, I wouldn’t do it. Supposedly, when Churchill was informed that he was losing the first post war election while taking a bath. He had just played a major role in saving Britain and the world from Hitler and had every right to be bitter, but his response was characteristically classy: “There may well be a landslide and they have a perfect right to kick us out. That is democracy. That is what we have been fighting for. Hand me my towel.”

3

I do the right thing and turn the box in. I might be aware that the other side might be cheating as well, but I can forgive them for cheating more that I can forgive them for making a cheater out of me.

4

Of course I wouldn’t. People get the government they deserve; if they vote for the wrong candidate, then they’ll get the chance to see exactly why he’s the wrong candidate.

If my issue with the “wrong” guy is that he’s infringing on the rights of others and imposing his will on them, then by invalidating other people’s votes, I would become just as guilty and would have lowered myself to his level.

5

Why are you separating your definition of “the wrong guy” and “the right guy” from the problem you state, by using them as givens rather than part of the question? What *are * your definitions, anyway?

Here’s a hint. In a democracy, “the right guy” to win is the one chosen by the most voters under the rules. No more, no less. The right thing to do is to turn the box in. One might think that obvious, but apparently it is not. Apparently the last 2 US elections are still troubling you somehow?

How would you make the opposite case?

6

I should answer my own question:

I’d turn in the box. As much as the thought of doing otherwise might tempt me, in the end I couldn’t handle the lie and the knowledge that I was taking the votes of the people away.

I might well write the President-elect a letter telling him that I turned in his ballot box, even though I was against his policies, and that he might consider that the opposition gave him this election… and maybe that consideration might guide his decisions a bit over the next four years.

But I’d turn in the box.

7

It seems easy to make the opposite case. Soldiers are dying in Iraq, as are Iraqi civilians. The right guy will get us out of there. The wrong guy will up the death toll even more. The right guy will protect the environment; the wrong guy will poison it.

Now, those considerations might not be enough to sway you. But this election is statistically a tie. In fact, perhaps the popular vote has gone to my guy, but the electoral vote is favoring the wrong guy. By destroying the box, I am giving effect to the will of the majority of the people. (I know I added a factor in here that wasn’t in the OP).

8

I’d turn in the box. Personal integrity, respect for democracy, etc.

(Now, if I could somehow manipulate the election so that I became president–nay, EMPEROR!–of the United States, my anwer might be different. Waterloo II, here we come!)

9

The box is a lot more than a bunch of ballots, now that it has been found outside of the control of the authorized election procedures, and officers. They have at the very least failed in a very dramatic way to fulfil their office. (Both major parties had officials involved, by the way, and both had to fail, or conspire to allow this box of ballots to be “lost.”)

Can the ballots be counted now? That is a decision for a court, and the local, state, and national elections committees to decide. At least criminal negligence has occurred, perhaps criminal conspiracy. I would call both party election committees and the commissioner of elections himself, to report the ballots, and personally assure myself that no one else gained access to them without bipartisan legally culpable election officers had custody, and both were under direct observation of the police.

I would also make sure that everyone in the world heard about this, and that a criminal investigation was initiated, and all those involved were prosecuted.

By the way, I would not have looked at enough ballots to determine who would have benefited from these particular votes. I would have looked only enough to find out that these were actual ballots. Then I would have sealed the box, and I would not surrender control until I was sure that police, and elections committee officials shared custody.

It’s my Constitution, too.

Tris

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” ~ Mohandas K. Gandhi ~

10

I would, of course, turn in the box. But in the minutes before I find the right person to whom to turn it over, is it OK to be just a little tempted to cause a repeat of the 2000 election, but in the opposite direction, just to see if the GD threads from late 2000 and early 2001 repeat themselves in a Spock-with-a-goatee kind of way? :wink:

11

According to your personal criteria for voting, which, perhaps to your surprise if not consternation, are *not * more or less valid than anyone else’s. You’re begging the question, which may be why it “seems easy” to you.

To press on: You’ve made it exuberantly clear in other threads that you consider your political views to be objectively validated by the number of people who share it with you. The objectivity aside, that is what an election is. If more people disagree with you than disagree, by your own standard you’re objectively wrong, and your candidate is objectively the wrong guy, and by your own standard you should turn the box in. If you, like most of us, were to dismiss a claim of objectivity, it would become clearer to you.

You don’t know that that’s the case. You do know what the rules of the election are, though. All you’ve done is reduce the legitimacy of the election, and degraded democracy itself, both by declaring your own views more valid than those of all the other people whose ballots are in that box, and by taking it upon yourself to ignore the rules that everyone else has agreed to.

Is this thread somehow an attempt to rationalize your support of the GOP’s refusal to allow all the votes to be counted in 2000?

12

[quote=manhattan]
Your gloating is just a bit premature, don’tcha think? One thing you should have understood from all those earlier threads is that many of us, even on your side of the partisan divide, take democracy itself more seriously than any particular election result. If you don’t understand that, or scorn such naivete, more’s the pity.

13

If it were 2004, I’d turn in the box. I don’t like the other guy (in my case, Bush), but I’m not so sure that he’s the worst choice that I’d put my judgement over the democratic system.

At the risk of Godwinizing this thread though, it’s worth noting that far worse people have won elections then Kerry or Bush, including Nazi candidates in Germany during the 30’s, Milisovich, various pro-slavery/segregation candidates in the US, etc.

If I found a bunch of Strom Thurmond ballots in the 50’s, they might find themselves in the trash can. If I were a Jew in Germany during the 30’s, throwing away Nazi ballots would practically be self-defense. It might not be the right thing to do (ends not justifying the means and all), but I still think I’d do it.

14

You turn in the box. You have no idea what’s in it, and there’s no guarantee that turning in the box will change the outcome.

The arguments regarding fraud in the 2000 election in FL where convicted felons were denied voting (which is proper according to FL law), where was the guarantee in the first place that ALL of those votes, or even a majority, would have gone for Gore?

If the box were found in a precinct that swayed heavily rep or dem, then the box would have no net effect. IF the box were found in a well-mixed precinct, changes are that the box is more likely to contain the same percentage as the rest of the district. There is only an outside chance that the box could actually sway the entire election, so in good conscience, you turn in the box.

15

No, you’ve looked in the box. You know there are over 1,000 votes for your guy in there, net. And the margin of victory for the other guy is less than that in your state. And your state is the key to the national election; whoever wins it, wins all.

16

It wasn’t so much that the felon list kept felons from voting, it was that there were a lot of mistakes on the list which kept non-felons or felons that had had thier rights restored from voting. Suspicions were raised that these mistakes were purposeful because some claimed blocks of people that voted heavily dem (read blacks) were overrepresented while those that voted Repub (Cubans) were under represented. Don’t want to hijack this thread, but I’m sure you can search out some old threads on the subject as to the veracity of these claims.

Well, it’s a hypothetical. We’re supposing that the election is close enough that these votes could make a difference and your in a county where the votes are almost certain to swing one way or another. It’s worth noting that this isn’t completely pie-in-the-sky as almost exactly this happend just a few weeks ago in the Washington state governors race, changing the outcome of that election.

17

No, because that sort of thing is what turns democracies into banana republics ruled by “democratically elected” strongmen. It’s a short-term gain leading to a long-term disaster. I’ll leave it to the Banana Republicans.

18

And there you’ve hit on the crux of the matter. The people always have the right to overthrow the government if they so choose. And each of us has to make that decision ourselves. Your Nazi example is a good one (although it’s not exactly like Hitler got elected to be DICTATOR… that came afterwards). Taking arms up against your government is no more noble than diddling with an election result. And if a truly evil government came into being thru a democratic process, both would be justifiable. I think you’d have a hard time justifying the Strom Thurmon scenario, but again it has to be a personal decision.

19

That’s just one more thing you did wrong, then.

20

How did I look in the box? Aren’t the boxes locked? Was the lock broken? Why would I think that this one box would be the only evidence of some either negligence or malicious intent?

My assumptions are that there is no apparent tampering and that I can walk away from the box as if I had never disturbed it (no fingerprints). Most likely that is what I would do. My rationale would be
A) I’m the janitor. My job is clean the trash out of the building. This is not trash and therefore falls out of the scope of my duties.
B) I might suspect that these are votes that would turn the election against my candidate, but I do not know that. Even if I know that these alleged votes are against my candidate, I am not privy to the actual counting process. For all I know these votes are exactly where they are supposed to be.
C) Even if because of my inaction the true winner was not given his due, it is not a travesty. Approximately 50% of the voters wanted the other candidate anyway. It’s not like 75% of the voters voted one way, but 25% of the voters got to make the decision.