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

I think the far more interesting question is under what circumstances you would burn the box. Clearly there are some political circumstances that demand resistance in many forms, including armed. To use an argumentum ad absurdum, a person who ran on a platform of immediatly launching full-scale nuclear strikes against all similarly armed nations (thereby guaranteeing the destruction of virtually all life on earth) should not be permitted to take office, even if democratically elected, and burning the box in this case would be justified. Many posters have stated that the election of an openly genocidal regine (e.g., Nazis) would also justify burning the box.

I can think of no situation in which I would simply burn the box and then move on with my normal life. If the “bad guy” is bad enough to mandate burning the box secretly, then he’s bad enough for me to already be involved in some major form of organized resistance, whether armed or peaceful (and presumably including active election tampering, if practical).

On the other hand, a lower threshold of “badness” is required, IMO, to mandate burning the box publically, as a form of political protest (for which I should necessarily be willing to bear the concequences). Again, anything that would mandate this would almost certainly mandate already having been involved in at least peaceful resistance to the opposition.

The most recent election certainly did not warrant either armed resistance or fraud. It did (IMO) warrant protests and other peaceful actions of resistance. (Most, if not all, major elections can probably be said to warrant some degree of this, whichever side you’re on.) Did it warrant deliberate, nonviolent obstruction of the electoral process (such as publically burning the hypothetical Box O’Ballots would entail)? I’m not prepared to make the case that it did, and I’m enclined to believe it did not, but I would not dismiss out of hand claims to the contrary.

If I were an American in the post-World War II United States (which I am), I’d turn in the box. I have a conscience, and it bothers me if I don’t obey it.

I suppose if I were the Jew in Nazi Germany (as Malodorous said), I’d probably take the box as an “if I don’t do this I may end up in the gas chamber” rationalization, but life-threatening conditions aside, my conscience would bother me.

I would throw the box away.

Oh, I would never dream of saying something like that in the mass media. The gucks aren’t fitted well for nuance. They’d hear “hate Pubbies” but not WHY. So I’ll stick with the Web for such pronouncements, thankyewverymuch.

This disturbs me. I would burn the box in 1932 Germany because it would be the right thing to do. It wouldn’t matter if I was Jewish or not. Are you suggesting that if you were a Christian in Germany in the 30s, you’d have gone along with the Nazis? You’ve already admitted you’d violate your moral principles to save your own life. (At least that’s what it looks like to me.)

This actually happened, sort of. Janitors found two sealed boxes of ballots in the University of Michigan student union the morning after the election. You can imagine the demographics of the voters whose polling place is smack dab in the middle of this campus–you don’t have to examine the ballots to know how the vote went. Not that this was a decisive state, of course.

However, the ballots had already been counted (that’s how it happens in our county, you don’t “send them over” anyplace) and the boxes were sealed. It was still a pretty big screwup, though. The poll workers should have recorded every seal number in the poll book, so the missing numbers would have been noticed at the clerk’s office when it was all turned in. They didn’t do that. Despite that, the clerk should have noticed that they were reporting xx number of ballots but weren’t turning in a sufficient number of ballot boxes to hold that many.

I suspect that a recount is impossible under these circumstances (seal numbers not recorded, ballot boxes not guarded for numerous hours), but nothing the janitors did with those boxes (burn, tamper with, throw out, whatever) could have swayed the initial outcome.

The peril of burning the box, it seems to me, is that if you get caught, folks’ faith in democracy is undermined, and that can lead to all kinds of horrors.

If you don’t get caught, I don’t see where any actual person suffers any actual harm.

In the hypothetical, I know I won’t get caught. I burn the box.

However, the hypothetical is sheer hypthetical: there is no way that in reality I’d know that I wouldn’t get caught. And getting caught is potentially much more disastrous than even the deaths of a thousand people–not disastrous just to me (which is an insignificant disaster), but disastrous to the future of democracy. I can think of no real-world situation in which I’d burn the box.

Daniel

The persons whose votes were not counted suffer harm. They just don’t know it.

The candidate who got more votes but loses the election suffers harm; he just doesn’t know it.

Valid points. I should say, then, that the harm they suffer is nothing like the harm suffered by the people who would die by the hand of the Wrong President.

If these parties do find out that they suffered harm, then there’s the potential for far worse harm, as I see it.

Bricker, let me turn it around to you. You’ve already answered the question–but would you answer it the same way if, for example, the Wrong President was campaigning on a position of placing homosexuals in concentration camps? Are there any circumstances under which you’d find the Wrong President’s position so egregious that you’d be willing to commit this illegal act in order to prevent the Wrong President’s ability to carry out the plan?

Daniel

You know, come to think of it, I did think that janitor in Ohio looked an awful lot like George W. Bush…

**Daniel[/b[, I’d like to know your answer to the question you just posed to Bricker. Is people’s supposed (and perhaps misguided, given the situation of the hypothetical you posed) faith in democracy worth the murder of thousands of people (or more). What if you knew the concentration camps were death camps?

Watergate probably did more to damage people’s faith in democracy in this country (the US) than any other event in modern history (though LBJ’s disasterous escalation of the Vietnam conflict may rank a close second). Should Watergate (or our failure in Vietnam) have been downplayed by the opposition and the media in order to preserve our faith? Should Woodward and Bernstein have told Deep Throat “Not interested?” And would the burning of the box (if revealed) by a rougue janitor damage people’s faith in the system, or simply the fact that a box of completed balots was left unsecured and unaccounted for? The latter is the sort of event that happens regularly (and worse), so whatever damage it would entail would seem to be done.

I’m confused: given that I said I’d commit the undetectable fraud if I thought a thousand people might die in a war, of course I"d commit the fraud in the example I posed to Bricker.

Frankly, I think I’d make a great dictator for the world. But I ain’t gonna get a chance to do that, and I sure don’t want somebody like David Duke to get to be a world dictator. Democracy is the best means possible for me to prevent Duke from getting his dictatorship; the price I pay is that I don’t ever get to be dictator.

Democracy is not an end; thwarting democracy is not in itself a great evil (certainly a lesser evil than allowing a single person to die unjustly). However, thwarting democracy in a way that emperils the future of democracy is a terrible evil, and must be weighed very carefully against the potential good it’d cause.

In my counterquestion to Bricker, I might well burn the ballots even if there was a small risk of my being caught.

Daniel

You did? My appologies if I’m just missing the blindingly obvious, but I can’t find where you said that.

(I’m sure I’ll see it as soon as I hit submit!) :smack:

Post 87, my first post in the thread:

Daniel

I don’t think so. I would rather rely on the checks and balances of the country’s legal system over my extra-legal determination. If the President ran on a homosexuals-in-concentration-camps platform, and was in such a razor-thin win position that my ballot box would tip the scales, I’d rely on the fact that fully half the country was opposed to his plan, and that would supply the necessary impetus for the legal system to do its job and thwart his plan.

Interesting. I hope I’m not Godwinizing here, but it does seem that Hitler’s rise is the ultimate test of this philosophy: knowing what you know now, would you have committed fraud to prevent Hitler’s rise to power?

If so, is it the scope of Hitler’s atrocities that distinguishes the cases?

Daniel

I don’t know.

Before the Gentle Reader faints dead away, let me assure him that I am no fan on the Third Reich. But “knowing what I know now” stretches into 2005. The results of WWII - the research that propelled man to space, developed antibiotics, computers, changed the geopolitical face of America and Europe… I’d be changing all that. I’d be changing more than the six million lives Hitler slaughtered - and for the better or worse, I have no idea. Certainly I’d be erasing lives; there would be people alive now that would never be born, and others that would be born and live that didn’t. I have no idea what changes would be better, and what worse. So knowing what I know today, I believe I’d let Hitler continue, as odious a proposition as that was.

A better question is: it’s 1940. Knowing what I know now of 1940, would I have prevented Hitler’s rise to power by sabotaging the Nazi party victory in the Reichstag elections of 1929?

Yes. And it’s not only the scope of Hitler’s atrocities that distinguishes the cases - it’s the fact that I would know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that whatever checks and balances the German government had won’t work – that Hitler’s party’s 1929 victory was the beginning of a set of actions, legal and illegal, that would end with Hitler in total control.

Your qualification of the question is fine; I revise the question to that.

What level of risk would you be willing to take that the checks and balances won’t work before you’d commit the fraud? Or is it a decision that you’d make on an ad hoc basis? Or would you never commit the fraud if there were even the remotest chance that the system might prevent the atrocities?

Daniel