I was thinking last night…the thread title is:
But the hypothetical is:
So in one, the action taken is engaging in the fraud, but in the other, the action is turning the box in and not engaging in fraud. So just to be clear, my “I wouldn’t do it” answer was in response to the first question. 
Can I write in my name on all the ballots for a local election so I can ditch my janitor job, though?
Hmm. I’m not sure that that follows, but I’ll listen.
I know that I would like to think that I would “do the right thing” and all that, but I cannot say with certainty what I would do. Given the proper polarization, the choice is easy. What is not easy is understanding in advance what I think the proper polarization would be that would cause me to burn the box.
There is no moral principle that I hold which is so absolute as to be immune from reasonable violation. In many cases, there is no rule I have in place for moral principles which enable me to suggest with certainty when I will or will not violate them (i.e. find it moral to do otherwise).
The 2004 election was not such an election, that much is certain. I would have to have lost a lot of faith in not only the American population in general but in the political process itself before I would burn the box, and I don’t believe that the polarization of the race for the American presidency would indicate one way or another such a loss of faith.
Fraud you say!?!.. really? gosh, someone oughta look into that. Was there ever a thread about that?
I’d turn it in to the proper authorities. I agree with Churchill.
Of course it depends on the candidates, but if I really preferred one candidate over the other and knew there would be no repercussions…
Burned.
It’s probably largely a power thing. In 50 years I could look back at my life and know (for better or worse) that I held MAJOR influence over the course of human history. I’d probably write a book.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the proper polarization”, but if you look at my first post to this thread (#18) I think I said pretty much the same thing. In the post you quoted, I did not mean to imply that it would never be proper to interfer with an election-- just that if someone is willing to sanction opportunistic tampering, they are hypocritical not to sanction premeditated tampering.
No, because picking a key district is still only one of many variables that would determine whether tampering would be successful. For example, one might successfully intimidate voters in Ohio - enough so to turn the Ohio vote to your candidate, but the tamerping might still be rendered moot if Florida went to the other candidate. In the hypothetical from the OP, you (the janitor) have perfect knowledge and are aware that trashing the ballots will guarantee your candidate the victory.
I understand (and agree with) your point, which I think is that if one is willing to tamper in reactive ways by throwing a box of ballots away, then one should be willing to tamper in proactive ways - like intimidating voters. My point is that there are a lot of pragmatic or selfish reasons why someone might be willing to tamper using one method, but not another. Anonymously throwing a box of ballots away is very different from intimidating voters, slashing tires, or even assassinating the opposing candidate. All of them are forms of tampering, but they each have varying levels of personal risk and probability of success.
I just mean I cannot say at this moment what two presidents would have to be running for me to burn the box. But 2004 wasn’t it.
I realized this was your contention. What I don’t see is why the two are necessarily connected. Is first degree murder the equivalent of manslaugher?
Or a more interesting question. Suppose your voting strategy is, “Vote as if my vote was the one that would make the difference,” i.e., vote as if there were a tie and you were the tie-breaker. Is thinking like that the equivalent of burning the box?
Would there be a legal difference between the action proposed in the OP and election tampering that had been planned in advance?
I don’t see how if could be. You are free to vote anyway you wish or not at all. But you are not free to tamper with other people’s votes.
As far as I know, no. But of course, that is not what you said, and it was not the issue I thought I was addressing.
Then what did you mean with the comparison to murder/manslaughter if not the legal difference between the two?
Point is, I think that the 2000 election is a case where the GOP leadership demonstrated that getting the “right” person elected was a lot more important to them than adhering to democracy. When getting the “right” guy elected becomes more important than democracy any more, you’re not living in a free country any more. And that is when I discovered that I hated the GOP. Before that they were merely wrong, bad policies, bad ideas, etc., but I didn’t hate them. Now they’re fucking evil. Enemies of democracy itself.
Just that premeditation does seem to make a difference. I don’t feel that “preplanned election tampering” is the logical end of “burning the box,” and I’m just wondering what makes you think it is. That’s all. 
Preach it, brother, preach it. Before the election I felt differently, but now I say, preach it! I truly want every American to hear this nonsense. You should be the new leader of the DNC.
Put it on a billboard, schedule a Dixie Chicks concert, get Michael Moore to make a documentary. Don’t let the dream die, brother! Let the American people hear it.
Honest answer to the OP is that I’d probably burn it IF I felt as passionately about politics as people like Evil Captor do. That is, if I honestly thought one candidate was truly evil and the other truly virtuous. But I can’t imagine ever being that naive.
If I had stones, I’d take the ballots, put them in a safe-deposit box or bury them somewhere. I’d give sealed directions to two people in the event of my untimely demise or imprisonment. Then I’d go to the president-elect* with a ballot, a photo of the box, and a quite reasonable list of requests.
Hey, now there’s a movie for ya.
*getting to him would be the hard part, I’ll grant.
Of course there is. The two actions don’t have the same consequences. Hence, anyone holding a consequentialist moral view can make a principled distinction between the acts.
The obvious difference is that, according to the OP, there is no chance that your action will ever come to light. Hence, your action will have no effects whatsoever except for altering the final outcome. Active disruption of the election, however, is entirely likely to have other consequences, such as fueling contraversy, polarizing politics to ill effect, increasing lack of faith in the political process, etc., all of which could have long term effects far more devastating than the “wrong” candidate winning the current election, and hence tipping the balance against active disruption but not burning the box.
In the hypothetical, I’d burn the box. I don’t think the hypothetical is plausible, however. Thousands of missing votes from a polling station should be detectable upon comparison between the vote count and the voter list. “No one would ever know” is not ever going to be a sure thing in real life.
Your point has some merit, although I would think that the consequences of “1000s of people dead” weighed against the consequences you outline (eg, polarizing politics) would make those differences insignificant. (Note that I said “no significant difference” not “no difference”.)
But if it makes the situtation clearer, lets assume you could disrupt the election in a premeditated way w/o being detected. Yeah. that’s almost impossible, but so is the assumption in the OP. This is Bricker’s thread, so he may have his reasons for putting that in the hypothetical, but to me it clouds the issue. We’re suddenly not talking about the importance of politics, but simply whether one could get caught or not. Since there is NEVER a real life situation in which one KNOWS one won’t be caught, I don’t see how that type of situation tells us anything about real people in real circumstances.
Thousands of deaths are bad, sure, but how bad would it be for democracy to fail in the US? How many deaths would that lead to? Now, this single act wouldn’t likely lead to an armed uprising, but if it got out it would contribute to undermining the means by which we’ve managed to (mostly) avoid bloodshed over political disagreements for the past few centuries. Most consequentialist moral views fully recognize that predicting the future is fraught with error, and hence recommend following rule of thumb principles except when you’re damned sure that breaking them won’t result in more bad things than good, and in this particular case I don’t think there’s any good way to predict what the long term downside might be. Hence, caution is recommended, at least if we’re talking about a real world case.
Now, if you’re going to rig your own hypothetical with a similar get out of jail free clause, then I’ll agree that there’s no difference between the two acts. But rigged hypotheticals like this aren’t particularly illuminating. It’s easy enough to invent one which will result in any particular moral approach recommending something we reflexively think shouldn’t be done.
The Janitor started doing wrong when he examined the ballots. That by itself is willful election fraud. Everything that comes after and all the politics are sideshows, and self-delusion. If you count the ballots in the first place, you are committing a violation of law, and an assault upon the fundamental tool of democracy, the secret ballot.
Being an effective criminal doesn’t alter the fact that you are a criminal.
Yell loudly for the officials who should have safeguarded this box. Take their names, and make them get the police before you relinquish the box. Yell long and loud to anyone who will listen about what happened. Anything else is election fraud, and you know it from the first moment.
“He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche ~
I’ve been concerned about honest and valid elections for 50 years. I became involved in registering voters and then was an inspector at many of our California elections.
When I worked on campaigns it was important to me that whether I won or lost, I needed to know the numbers from my precinct to use for the next election. When the balance of numbers started to not jibe, I realized there was a flaw in reporting the numbers. It soom became obvious that people were registering to vote and were not citizens or even residents in the area. This became apparent to me in 1964 when LBJ received more votes in Texas than there were in the districts. Yep! the votes came from the cemetaries but it was too late and most of us felt he would have won had it been a legal election.
I saw a ton of fraud in 1996 in Florida and again in 2000. The people of Florida were not too concerned with this fraud until Bush was appointed President and then they went crazy. I did some research and discovered that Immigration and Naturalization Services had no up-to-date data base of the new American citizens so anyone could send in a registration form and vote. Apoarently most American elections are not valid and after this last one in 2004, I decided never to vote again.
It was impossible that 60 million Americans would vote for G.W. Bush! If they did, then I have lost all respect for the American public in general. I’m old and gray and take pride that in my lifetime of involving myself in the elections, I saw the best of it. I had always hoped that 1964 was a fluke! Well, I was wrong.
I have been a dedicated Republican since Ike but never in my wildest dreams could I imagine a man of Bush’s substance ever winning the gold ring. I left the party when his father began touting a one world order and haven’t voted GOP since. No wonder our country has lost its integrity!!! Fraudulent voting is just the tip of the iceberg.
Ok, so far it seems that the argument is whether your honor is worth more to you than the election of your candidate.
However, there’s one more possibility that you guys haven’t touched on yet. If the ballot box is unlocked, open or otherwise revealing its contents to you, it has been illegally tampered with. If you turn in the box, you’re suddenly the prime suspect in an election tampering case - and when tempers flare justice runs short. While the election of the wrong guy isn’t likely to wreck your life, spending his entire administration in prison is almost guaranteed to.
Now, if I didn’t KNOW what the contents of the ballot box but could GUESS what they were, it might be a little different. If, instead of the box being open, the box is simply from a precinct in a demographically very unfavorable precinct, then it becomes a bit harder. At this point, I’d stop and think for a few seconds. Is the election of the wrong guy going to cause me ruinous harm? If I were a Jew in Nazi Germany I’d have a match in the ballot box inside of five seconds. If the major issue is whether we start a war that would require lots and lots of cannonfodder and I were of military age, the box would be at the bottom of the river.
However, if these ballots were probably going to decide Bush versus Gore 2000, I’d turn them in. If they were probably going to decide Bush versus Kerry 2004, I’d pawn the decision off on someone else - specifically a local police chief. If he’s a Democrat, he faces the same ethical dilemma I have and there’s a good chance he makes the wrong decision. If he’s a Republican, he might face suspicion of electoral fraud - and remember, when justice is partisan it isn’t justice anymore.