The Martian Perspective

One of the useful big picture ideas I remember picking up from Moldbug is that one should strive to understand the present in the way that a historian of the future would understand our time. That is, suppose you were living on Mars in 200 years time, so not only would the events not affect you, but all the players are dead and gone, as are the countries and institutions they represent.  Maybe even 500 years. The ideal is to imagine a space sufficiently distant that you don't even feel you have an intellectual dog in the fight, rather like an atheist trying to understand the 30 Years War between Catholics and Protestants. You just want to understand the truth, having gotten to the point where none care whether it prevail or not. 

This is always an aspirational ideal, of course. You never really know what the future historian will think (in part because they have seen the end of the story, and you haven't), but also because intellectually it's very hard to fully escape the present tense. For one thing, you can never have our hypothetical atheist's indifference when you're actually on the receiving end of things (put an atheist back in time to the middle of the 30 years war, and suddenly they will have to care about religion, or at least act like they do). But there's also a sheer difficulty in perspective. It may be that nothing in the past five years even makes their list of stuff to bother about. It may be that nothing in your whole lifetime does! (You should be so lucky). 

So while this perspective is hard, if you at least aim at this, you are likely to get a better sense of the actual importance of events than if the idea never even occurs to you. And the sense of what might seem important on a 200 year time line may be vastly different to what the newspapers are covering today. It might be something the average person isn't paying any attention to at all (like developments in AI, for instance). But it also might be events from the present that take on a bigger significance than people at the time realize.

For instance, by now, most of you have probably watched the famous video of Hu Jintao being gently but firmly escorted out of the Chinese Communist Party Congress

When Americans watch this video, they have a clarity of vision as to what is going on. A former president is frogmarched out of the room, publicly, by the current president, to God knows what fate. While it may be overblown, the cynical presumption is that he'll end up like Tank Man, never seen again.

It's worth noting that there's an alternative reading of all this, that Hu Jintao is kind of senile and either was, or was threatening to, wander awkwardly off script. And, hence, that escorting him out was actually an embarrassing loss of face to everyone involved, rather than a deliberate political flex. 

But one thing is for certain. Supposing he in fact gets charged and convicted of corruption, for taking bribes back in 2005. The average American will view this as almost entirely incidental to the important facts in the video above. Did he take some kind of bribe during his presidency? Almost certainly. Is that what this is actually about? Not on your life. If he gets charged instead with tax evasion, or murder, or covid violations, would that change anyone's perspective on the matter? Not at all. What he gets charged with is irrelevant. Whether he even broke the law is basically irrelevant. They certainly will not spend much time digging into the details of the allegations. This is a naked power consolidation. This was also considered in America to be big news for what it revealed about China, and how power works there.

So far so good. 

So what does the average American make of this:

FBI searches Trump's Florida home as part of presidential records probe

PALM BEACH, Fla., Aug 8 (Reuters) - Former President Donald Trump said FBI agents raided his Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday and broke into his safe in what his son acknowledged was part of an investigation into Trump's removal of official presidential records from the White House to his Florida resort.

The unprecedented search of a former president's home would mark a significant escalation into the records investigation, which is one of several probes Trump is facing from his time in office and in private business.

Is this the same thing as what happened to Hu Jintao? Is it a related thing? Is it a totally unrelated thing?

You'll have to decide for yourself. 

And the answer that lots of Americans come to is that, well, you see, this is actually about the crucial issue of violations of the Presidential Records Act, something that they had literally not heard about until August, but now think is an essential lynch-pin of our whole form of government. It's actually part of a large legal campaign against the former president on all sorts of fronts. 

Which is to say, they look at this and see only the things he's been charged with, from which we need to have a serious debate about whether he did or did not breach said Act. They don't at all see any bigger picture here. The Hu Jintao perspective, for want of a better term, is completely and utterly absent. 

(It is worth pondering whether the average person in China, to the extent that they know about the Hu Jintao story, view it as the mirror image of the Trump story - he obviously broke some important law that the papers will no doubt tell us about soon.)

But for the Trump story, if the average American does chance to see a bigger point, such as if they're a Fox News Republican, they'll probably just see one more example of the outrages of the Democratic Party, and are apt to list the above event alongside every other regular complaint about how the country is run, from illegal immigration, to woke trans activism in schools, to black lives matter leading to defunding of the police. Or, if they're on the left, one more aspect of the corrupt contempt for the democratic process by the Republicans, like Voter ID laws and the January 6th protests. 

What might the historian of 200 years' time make of this story? Well, here's one perspective. 

The single biggest fact in favor of American democracy, and democracy in general, is not that it selects wise leaders, or leaders who are legitimate in the eyes of the public, or anything like that. The primary thing in its favor is that it allows, nominally, for smooth transitions of power. Within the current sclerotic regime, of course, which outlaws all kinds of views and actions. And if you push it too far, like the South found out in 1865, you'll be crushed militarily. But within the operating envelope that the system is meant to work in, nobody has to be playing for keeps. Because while your guy may be in today, their guy may be in tomorrow, and you're stuck in a repeated game. So you have strong incentives to play nice.

Which is to say, for 230 years, America has had an unwritten gentlemen's agreement that former presidents are allowed to live out their lives in peace. It didn't matter if they were magnanimous and disappeared from public life, like George H. W. Bush. It didn't matter if they decided to run leftist alternative foreign policy missions, like Jimmy Carter. It didn't even matter if they were impeached for potential crimes, like both Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson. Nixon is the classic here. Sure, Gerald Ford pardoned him for Watergate. But what's the chances that this was the only law he broke during his presidency? That an aggressive Carter White House couldn't have found something else to charge him with, after enough digging? No, that just wasn't how things were done. Former presidents get to live their lives in peace. Even Jefferson Davis was held only for two years, never ultimately charged, and allowed to live out the remainder of his days as a free citizen.  

That agreement is now gone. 

To which the dumb but common answer is that Trump's actions are so flagrant that they breached the agreement first. 

The nature of gentlemen's agreements is that the finer details aren't always written down, so this is hard to say for sure. But to judge this, you need an estimate of what the baseline level of past violations of the same kind might be. And there's decently strong evidence that this kind of thing is pretty common. What Trump did looks, to me, not nearly as bad as what Hillary Clinton did with her janky private email server while Secretary of State. Or, to take another example, we know that Sandy Berger, a Clinton advisor, was convicted of stealing documents from the National Archives after Clinton's term was over. What do you think the probability is that he was the only member of the Clinton White House to have breached some kind of records law, if the FBI were sent around to raid everyone else's house too?

In other words, to me, this looks more akin to Putin's charges against Boris Berezovsky  In that case at least, was he guilty of the illegal things they said he did? Absolutely. Did this distinguish him from any other oligarch? Not at all. The real crime, which everyone knows, was challenging Putin's power.

In the case of Trump, I really don't know what the sacred text of the Presidential Records Act requires, and whether Trump's actions may be in violation of it. For the purposes of the argument, I am entirely willing to believe he is in breach of it. He does not strike me as a stickler for detailed record-keeping, nor a scrupulous adherent to all kinds of process laws (he's a former New York real estate developer, for crying out loud. If you think there's a single one of them who's never broken any fiddly laws that they thought were getting in their way, buddy, I don't know what to tell you).

But my strong sense is that this is about as relevant as the question of what exactly Hu Jintao is charged with. Former presidents are simply not raided and arrested like they're some run of the mill citizen who fell afoul of a slightly too aggressive Assistant DA. Charging them is everywhere and always an explicitly political act. Especially in this case - can you imagine the Martian historian in 2222 opining about the crucial question of records storage? I can't. I think they'll say that this was part of an obvious longstanding campaign against Trump by whatever term they'll give to what we unsatisfactorily refer to as "the Deep State".

Why do I say this?

Because the FBI already was illegally wiretapping the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, before Trump was even elected! They procured the ridiculous Christopher Steele dossier, presented it to a FISA court, lied about where it came from, and used it to wiretap Trump advisor Carter Page. Nobody went to jail over that, of course. 

Is this the same thing? Is it a related thing? Is it a totally unrelated thing?

I think the argument for "totally unrelated" is absurd. So we're only left with the question of how related they are. And even if one forms the view that this time, Trump's actions really were terrible and illegal, we see the same ferocious politically targeted persecution even when there was no crime. Even when he was still just a private citizen.

This is not a "Can you believe the injustice?" post. Politics is usually ugly, nasty and stupid, and people at high levels play it seriously indeed. This is certainly not a "those disgraceful Democrats!" post. As MiddleEarthMixr savagely put it: "And how’s that working out for ya, imagining if the roles were reversed?"

Fifteen years ago, maybe even ten, I probably would have written something along these lines. But I am long past such perspectives, and no longer find them remotely useful. They are the furthest extreme from the Martian historian's creed.

Rather, this is merely to note that whether you are a fan of democracy, or whether you view it as absurd and past its use-by date, there is a serious reading that the whole campaign against Trump is a dangerous escalation and breach of prior norms, from which further counter-escalations seem likely. 

One of the advantages of living in 200 years time is that events that might be half a lifetime apart are easy to draw threads between, in a way that isn't quite as apparent at the time. It is altogether too easy to imagine future wikipedia articles that read something like this:

The Great Unravelling: 1970 - 2035

The term "the Great Unravelling" was first used by historian Michael Wallesteimer in the early 22nd century to describe the series of sequential breaches of previous unwritten political norms, in a cycle of escalation and counter-escalation that lead to an increasing distrust between the Democrats and the Republicans, and eventually the Great Breach of 2032 (Main Article). Wallesteimer defined the key events as not just those which were political advances by one party, but specifically changes that would subsequently be re-used by opponents afterwards.  Subsequent historians have disputed the original Wallesteimer list, both in terms of charting an original first course, and which events justify inclusion. But the general pattern is now broadly agreed to represent the increasingly fractious civic breakdown. The original Wallesteimer list is:

-The Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade. This not only set off a large component of the culture war, but set a new standard in deliberate misreading of constitutional texts for political aims. Robert Axelford disputed the inclusion of this, noting that the court cannot be said to be explicitly part of the political apparatus at this time. But it paved the way for the increasingly Republican Court to overturn both all racial preferences in Wichita State University v Connors, and substantive portions of the administrative state in Rothstein v Gibbons, which even if more textually defensible, were viewed by the left as extreme judicial activism. 

-The Senate refusing Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination. Up until this point, presidents had mostly gotten their Supreme Court nominations uncontested. This marked a discontinuous shift after which the vast majority of appointments became politically contentious, leading to the eventual packing of the court in 2026.

-The Kenneth Starr investigation. This set the precedent of open-ended Special Prosecutors targetting sitting presidents - "starting out investigating dodgy land deals in Arkansas, and ending up investigating blow jobs in the White House", in Anthony Reichenford's phrase. Special Prosecutors would be later used both against Scooter Libby, and by President DeSantis against speaker of the House Alexandria Occasio-Cortez.

 -The Clinton Impeachment. This set the precedent of impeaching presidents over pure process crimes, where there was no other underlying crime (in this case, perjury over testimony regarding sexual relations, when such sexual relations were not otherwise a crime). This was reciprocated when Donald Trump was charged and later convicted of violations of the Presidential Records act, something Trump described at trial as "chicken shit".

-The Trump Russiagate FBI wiretap. This set a precedent of explicit use of the permanent civil service and law enforcement to target a presidential campaign. This violation is considered more notable because of the lack of crimes uncovered by the campaign, which were significantly less than the wiretaps themselves. While the Republicans never succeeded in reciprocating via law enforcement, the subsequent politicization of the military by President Carren in 2031 is viewed as a counterescalation. 

-2020 Election Fraud. Wallesteimer described this as a "shadow breach", because its gravity was only fully appreciated after the fact during the audit of 2025. It is more viewed as part of a continuum of increasingly flagrant election fraud, eventually on both sides, that marked a further step in breakdown in belief in democracy. Relative to the other steps, this was considered more of a notional marker apparent in hindsight than a structural break, but was important additionally for its role in triggering the obvious breach of the January 6th protests. 

-The January 6th protests. While these are now viewed as chaotic and unstructured "acting out" without any serious risk against regime security, they established a precedent that the losing party in presidential elections would respond with mass protests, then with small scale violence, then ultimately with complete insurrection. 2016 is noted as the last of the "peaceful election transitions era". 

-The Arrest of Donald Trump. This ended the famous "gentlemen's agreement", as Wallesteimer described, that former opponents now out of power would be left alone. He viewed this as the most serious escalation, and an important step towards the arrest of President Carren and the Insurrection of 2034. 

You will need a little imagination to visualize what other future events might make the list. But the history of late Republican Rome offers some possible guidance. 

Or put it this way. Suppose that you were Ron DeSantis. How much would you have updated your belief that, if you got elected president, that you or your family would end up in jail if you lost power?

DeSantis is a smart guy. I'm not sure he would think the answer is yet "high". But it's certainly a fair bit higher than it was a year ago, and a lot higher than it was seven years ago.

Indeed, one might easily imagine the conclusion of the chapter above:

As Wallesteimer described the atmosphere in the mid to late 2020s, "From here on out, both parties' leaders began to suspect that if they lost power, they were liable to lose their freedom, if not their lives. After reaching this conclusion, they began to justify their own escalations as being a necessary precaution against the presumed intentions of their opponents. This in turn justified those opponents in their own beliefs, and their own escalations. Once such beliefs became widespread, democracy was not long for this world." 

Last Thoughts on Voter Fraud

Winston Churchill once observed that a good definition of a fanatic was someone who can’t change his mind, and won’t change the subject.

On the subject of voter fraud, I like to think that I meet neither arm of the test.

On the first part, I feel like I’m definitely open to having my mind changed, but not many people engage with the better evidence on the subject, so I don’t often hear good arguments to the contrary. Then again, every fanatic on every topic feels the same way, so perhaps this doesn’t distinguish me very much.

But I can at least make sure I don’t fall foul of the second arm. Few things in this life, even if true, are worth driving away those near and dear to you, having friends of long standing view you as some crank and lost cause obsessive. My twitter feed the past month has been that of a single issue kook, which has gained me a lot of new followers, but I never really wrote to build a large audience, and definitely wrote for the sheer joy of being able to say whatever was on my mind, not for advancing a single cause.

To know if you’ve started to become viewed as a crank, you have to listen to the silences – the friends that don’t respond to your whatsapp messages when you send them something on the subject, the people on twitter who used to engage that you haven’t heard from for a while. You don’t have to change your beliefs about the election because others don’t agree with you, but you do need to value your audience, especially when they are friends and loved ones.

In finance, most trades are essentially neutral – if you buy a stock, and nothing happens, you stay flat. However, a famous trade in foreign exchange is the carry trade – borrow in low interest rate currencies, and invest in high interest rate currencies. There, if nothing happens to the exchange rate, you win (on the difference in interest rates). This term, “carry”, gets used broadly to describe any such trade with this property, where you win by things staying the same. An anti-carry trade is thus the opposite. If nothing happens, you lose.

Since the Wednesday morning after the election, it has been quite clear that Biden had a strong carry trade, and Trump had an anti-carry trade. Something fairly large had to happen to change the answer. The Supreme Court case with Texas was my last bet on what that something large might be. Related to my post earlier this year on how Republicans can’t get their appointed judges to stay conservative, the answer was depressing, if not surprising. The number of ways the outcome can change at this point is small, most of them would be highly alarming if they occurred, and not many of them seem to hinge upon a great new empirical analysis of voter fraud being written by me.

So having written much on the subject, this is my coda to the past month’s thinking, at least for the time being. Like the Dylan poem to which the title is an homage, it’s not that the issue is suddenly dead, it’s just a way of collecting one’s thoughts and drawing a line under a chapter that seems to be coming to a close. I will probably have more to say on the subject, like every addict, but the time for being a single issue author is passed. Please bear with me even if you feel heartily sick of the subject. I have spent an extraordinary amount of time thinking about these issues over the past month, and I feel confident I may yet be able to tell you something new, the things that at least I didn’t know before I started out. Without further ado, they are as follows.

The average American believes three things about voter fraud in his country.

First, he believes that there is very little of it, perhaps almost zero, and certainly not enough to swing an election.

Second, he believes that if there were a reasonable amount of it in general, he would have heard about it, from experts on the subject.

Third, he feels that if any single election had been fraudulent, said experts would be able to identify such fraud and bring it to light before it was able to decide the election outcome.

I am not going to have much to say about the first point, at least not directly. I suspect that by this juncture, the number of people who haven’t made up their mind about this is very small. My firm belief is that one’s priors on this should be quite wide, but that’s another subject.

Rather, I want to convince you that the second point, and especially the third point, are wrong.

While I don’t want to inflate my credentials here, I am one of those fortunate people (or unfortunate, depending on perspective) whose skills and training puts them in a good position to actually be able to empirically study the question of voter fraud. There are few academic papers on the subject that I would not back myself to be able to read and understand.

I have spent almost the entire past month digging into various ways of trying to find voter fraud. Much of that work has been out of the public eye, and not all of it was ever released officially to anyone. This is how data digging works – you do a lot of analysis for everything you actually write, in the “measure twice, cut once” manner.

And I can tell you, as someone who’s hunted very hard for it – voter fraud is extremely difficult to prove using only public data, whether it actually happens or not.

To which you might immediately think – that’s because there isn’t much voter fraud!

On the contrary. It is not at all difficult to find extremely alarming and weird anomalies in election data.

A good working definition of fraud is “wrong data entered for malicious reasons”. The big challenge is that a good working definition of data errors is “wrong data entered for innocent reasons”.

The extremely hard part is thus not finding anomalous and suspicious patterns in the data, but proving with certainty that these arise due to malicious intent. Moreover, one has to rule out every possible innocent reason these errors could arise, where the functional form of errors is allowed to be incredibly vague. Further still, the counties and election officials are given almost every single benefit of the doubt. Moldbug is right on this point. The sovereign is he who determines the null hypothesis.

One can very easily find loads of extremely suspicious things in the data.

One can find 169 updates in the New York Times county-level election update data where the vote count in one category (in-person or absentee) actually decreased in an update. Here is one of the most suspicious, in Montgomery County, PA which still hasn’t been well-explained. You have not even heard of the remaining 168. Here’s the count by state:


    state |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
         AL |          1        0.59        0.59
         AR |         12        7.10        7.69
         AZ |          5        2.96       10.65
         FL |          3        1.78       12.43
         GA |         24       14.20       26.63
         IA |         20       11.83       38.46
         ID |          1        0.59       39.05
         IN |          1        0.59       39.64
         KS |          2        1.18       40.83
         MA |          1        0.59       41.42
         MI |         21       12.43       53.85
         MS |          1        0.59       54.44
         NH |          1        0.59       55.03
         NJ |          4        2.37       57.40
         NM |          1        0.59       57.99
         NY |          3        1.78       59.76
         PA |          9        5.33       65.09
         SC |         30       17.75       82.84
         TX |         11        6.51       89.35
         UT |          1        0.59       89.94
         VA |         15        8.88       98.82
         WI |          1        0.59       99.41
         WV |          1        0.59      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------

Several of the disputed and contentious states are heavily represented – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania. But so are places you haven’t heard of. Arkansas. Virginia. Iowa. South Carolina.

(By the by, through my various digging, Virginia is my bet for “state with the most election fraud in 2020 that you never read about”, and not just because of the metric above)

Look at how much work went into the analysis of Montgomery PA, which covered one of these data points, trying to rule out every possible innocent explanation, and showing additional evidence that points to fraud. Do you think anyone is digging that much into the remaining 168? The NYT data can be downloaded in a bunch of places, and it's not hard to find these updates. I've looked at them, about half of them are quite small, less than 100 votes. Some of the rest look like a single set of ballots being reclassified from one category to another. But even after taking out all of these, there's a large number of these where frankly I have no idea what's going on, and I doubt you would either.

One can find vote updates that look like colossal outliers in terms of the fairly intuitive rule that updates can be either large, or unrepresentative, but not generally both. Here’s a long analysis of this. The most suspicious, in Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia (surely a coincidence with the states identified on the metric above!), also came in the middle of the night, and were large enough to swing the election. The defenders argue that this is all just normal absentee votes. At least for Milwaukee, one can also find corroborating evidence in suspicious patterns in down-ballot races too, that at least don’t fit simple stories about mail ballots.

But suppose you don’t believe the New York Times data. That could all just be errors! Indeed. Couldn’t it all.

One can find 58 Pennsylvania registered voters born in the year 1800, 11 born between 1801 and 1899, and 25 born in 1900. Admittedly, these particular cases are more likely just errors - if this is voter fraud, it’s the stupidest form ever, since it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb. But it proves beyond any doubt that errors in this data do not get checked or corrected anywhere. And indeed, these implausible years of birth are in fact the mere tip of the iceberg of suspicious patterns in birthdays, which follow much more notable patterns indicating fraud involving round numbered days of the month and months of the year, plus month distributions that are too smooth. These patterns consistent with fraud are related to counties voting for Biden, including at record levels.

Or suppose you don’t believe statistics at all. You insist on hard evidence! In Wayne County, MI, you can find totally normal scenes from election night, like them boarding up the windows in the vote counting center to stop observers even seeing in. In Fulton County, GA, you had the insane spectacle that on election night, election officials sent all the observers home, telling them that counting was over for the night. In the press, dubious accounts were circulated implying that a burst pipe was the cause, although it turns out that may have been from that morning, or may not have happened at all. In any case, an hour later, they started counting again, with no observers in the room, using ballots in suitcases under a desk that had been delivered at 8:30am that day. Oh, and all this was caught on video. As part of this, you can also watch the officials scan the same set of ballots multiple times.  As has been noted before – if this were happening in a third world country, the State Department would declare it presumptively fraudulent. This isn't an exhaustive list. This is the ones I managed to remember and write down, while working furiously on other things over the whole period, and where the main allegations were actually caught on video. If you go through everything alleged in affidavits in lawsuit, many are much more shocking, though also harder to verify.

My point is not that you should believe this absolutely nails down fraud, let along how widespread you should infer the fraud to be based on these incidents. My point is to emphasise how difficult the task is, even if there were actually fraud. Fraud would look exactly like this. People switching votes back and forth to swing a total, or deleting inconvenient votes from the count. Bringing fake and colossally unrepresentative ballot dumps in during the middle of the night. Registering tons of fake voters to flood in mail ballots. Counting happening in secret after observers are sent home under false pretenses. Reports coming in from whistleblowers in affidavits.

But how sure are you that these aren’t just data errors in very noisy data? That someone incorrectly entered a vote total in a database, and later corrected it? That patterns in absentee ballots, while highly weird, represent odd preferences of mail-in voters? That the ballots in Georgia were all scanned regularly, and that the machine will never count ballots twice if they’re scanned twice, and that there’s not some innocent mixup as to why everyone was sent home? That the witnesses in the lawsuits were confused about what they saw?

If every benefit of the doubt is given to the other side, what's the chances you can ever overcome them all?

Suppose, like a number of readers, you are in the category of someone who still isn’t convinced. There’s some weird stuff going on, sure, but it doesn’t rise to the level of “fraud may have decided the election result”.

Three good questions to ask are the following.

1.      What kind of voter fraud do you have in mind?

2.    What evidence would actually convince you that there might have been this kind of voter fraud?

3.     What data is actually available, and based on this, how likely is it that this evidence might ever conceivably be discovered?

The first question, as it turns out, is actually the most important. Because fraud comes in many different types, and the likelihood of catching them varies enormously.

The most egregious type is to make up election returns out of whole cloth. In this version, the vote totals are plucked from someone’s head, and don’t correspond to any actual ballots or button presses in the real world.

This type is actually the most likely to get caught. Totally fake numbers leave lots of traces that can be studied by things like digit analysis via Benford’s Law. Only the most basket case third world countries do this. I think one can say with high certainty that, at the conservative end, this does not occur very often in US elections, and I would wager strongly in America does not occur at all.

The next category of obvious fraud is when some dictator reports winning 99% of the vote. Like Theodore Dalrymple observed about propaganda in communist countries, this kind of election is not actually meant to convince anyone, but rather to humiliate them, to insist on obvious lies and dare them to say differently.

But even here, most of the argument about fraud is already at the level of a smell test. Suppose you had to prove statistically that it was impossible that these election results in Cuba or Syria were genuine. How exactly would you do it? I suspect you’ll find it’s a lot harder than you might think. Bear in mind, in 2020 the “Norristown 2-2” precinct in Montgomery County had reported mail-in votes up to November 10^th where Biden had won 98.7% of the two-party vote, across 150 votes. Please tell me how you plan to show that this number is genuine, yet Assad’s 88.7% of the vote is not. Not by digging up the raw ballots (though even here, if Assad can produce his fake ballots, you may still be out of luck). From your computer, which is what nearly all of us have had to do.

Or put it differently. Suppose that Assad in Syria decided to rig the elections, but instead of generating insane levels of support, he decided to replace all the genuine ballots with fake ones that showed him getting support levels between 60% and 71%, with turnout at 70% of the electorate. He has total control of the vote counting process.

You know this is bullshit. But that’s not the question. How would you go about proving it?

Almost anything below the first two cases – making up numbers whole, or 90% vote shares – is actually extremely difficult to prove, even if it’s occurring. I mean, he kicked out the observers, which is pretty bad. But so did Fulton County, GA, and kept on counting.

Let’s take some scenarios more likely to actually occur in the US.

You are an election official who is not being closely monitored. There is a list of eligible voters in your precinct. Suppose it is a normal year, with relatively few absentee/mail ballots. You have hidden a genuine ballot box of pre-filled in ballots, with genuine ballot papers, that you know contains 1000 votes total, of which 97% are for your candidate. All registered voters in your precinct are on a list, and get crossed off as they come in. You wait until polls close, and you can see the list of everyone who hasn’t voted. You cross 1000 names off the list, and bring in your pre-filled in box of ballots, mingling it with the main ones.

How do you propose to identify that in the data? If you had periodic updates, you can maybe find batches that look really anomalous, sure. That’s what this analysis did! And this one! The scenario wasn’t exactly the same, but it was similar. Did you find it sufficient proof?

In this particular variant, every voter is a genuine, registered voter. Every voter votes exactly once. Every ballot paper is a genuine ballot. Every vote corresponds to a ballot paper that can be counted and re-counted. No ballot gives any indication it was not cast by a genuine voter.

Let us agree on this much. Unless you catch the person in the act, this will be flat out impossible to detect just by looking at final election results. I actually don’t know how you’d prove it with any other data either. Don’t believe me? Propose a test. I’m all ears. I have heard stories from campaign operatives that this actually happens, I didn’t think up this idea myself.

But I’m not here to convince you to believe those stories. Suppose one accepts, as indeed you’re told, that there is no evidence of this kind of voter fraud. It’s true. There broadly isn’t. Now, ask yourself, what’s the signal to noise ratio of this kind of lack of evidence? If there were no voter fraud of this kind, we’d expect to find no evidence. If there were voter fraud of this type, but we lacked any realistic ability to catch it, we would also expect to find no evidence. So the lack of evidence tells us almost precisely zero one way or the other.

Especially germane to the current election, there are many types of fraud involving mail ballots. It is much easier for a person to send in mail ballots for someone else, than to turn up at a polling station and claim to be five different people of different ages. This mail then gets handled by postal workers, with a crazily weak chain of custody, from the same people that lead to your Amazon packages being stolen with reasonable frequency. This leads to a number of stories you can find for the search string “ballots found in the trash”. Meanwhile, signature verification on potentially fraudulent ballots got greatly weakened in 2020 in many of the key states, just as the number of mail ballots increased massively, as described in the Texas lawsuit. A discussion I had with a campaign operative (which I haven’t been able to verify, so I’m just reporting the claim, not asserting it) said that in Arizona, once the signature was verified on the envelope, the envelope got thrown away, making it impossible for anyone to verify after the fact what it said.

Don’t think about “was there fraud”. I’m not interested in the question of haggling over the specific details here of what precisely happened in each place, and you can make up your own mind on that. Rather, I care much more about the question of “if there were fraud, would it have been caught?”

And here’s the crazy part, if you’re sure that election fraud in general would have been caught. 2020 is actually the single best year in history to catch election fraud. Because unlike in the past, we have periodic snapshots taken by internet amateurs of the update of counts scraped from the NYT website, rather than just the final tally. We can also download a ton of stuff from the internet.

For most past elections, we can get final vote counts at the precinct level if we’re lucky, or the county level more likely. Votes by candidate. That’s it. You want to go back and find out if the 2016 election was fraudulent, that’s basically the overwhelming extent of the data you’ve got to work with. Oh, and four years later, that data is still riddled with errors, because it has to get kludged together from 3300 odd counties, with vastly different reporting systems.

Tell me what kinds of fraud you are confident you can identify from those numbers. Not just you, but “the experts” who study this stuff.

I understand enough about this data to know that while there are clearly some tricks one can do if one is clever, there are large and fundamental limitations to how much fraud you can ever hope to identify from this kind of data.

And that’s it. That’s basically what you’ve got. Or you can hope that someone does something dumb and gets caught in the act. But is that the state of the art strategy? How many would slip through the net for each one that gets caught, like in Fulton County GA? Not that anything is going to happen to the people in Fulton County, which also is quite revealing. In a year, I predict fairly confidently it will be one more rumored and then forgotten local story, and the videos will eventually disappear. Along those lines, if more evidence does come to light, you certainly can't publish them on Youtube, no matter what you find from here on out, as they've said that their policy is to delete all such videos. Big tech has spoken! The matter is closed. There is no evidence of voter fraud, and also, you had a total of four weeks to come up with any of it, before the verdict is entered for all time. 

I think there is a strong case to be made that, for many types of fraud, catching them is extremely difficult.

And so almost the entire question comes down to one of priors. We have no reasonable hope of actually identifying it from the data. Most people are sure it is extremely rare. I am not. The evidence demanded to budge their priors is enormous. That evidence will never be found, whether there is fraud, or whether there is no fraud.

And so finally, we get to the last question. Even if fraud could be caught, eventually, somehow, with enough time and analysis and manpower, would it be caught in time?

Reader, prepare yourself, because the next sentence may be shocking to you. 

The Trump campaign, in many respects, was not very well organized.

But I have come to have enormous sympathy for the sheer scale and difficulty of the task in front of them, even if they were well organized.

A campaign is not a permanent organization, but a bunch of operatives coming together for a particular period and task. I suspect, and it accords with the few anecdotal discussions I’ve had with people who’ve worked on them, that most presidential campaigns are a shitshow at the best of times, but some candidate has to win, so we assume after the fact that their campaign internally must have been great, when it probably wasn’t.

So what happens after the dubious election returns start coming in in the dead of night on Wednesday after the election?

You have a small staff. Most of it is lawyers and political operatives, not statisticians and data scientists. Everyone is absolutely frazzled. You are trying to put out a thousand fires. You are trying to coordinate dozens of people and teams. Everyone is demoralised and worrying about their employment future, since most were working on an implicit promise of employment in the administration if they won, which is now looking unlikely. You are trying to keep track of ten thousand different leads and reports coming in from all over the country. Half of them will be straight up wrong, either bogus third hand accounts, or claims from someone genuinely concerned but insufficiently skeptical and not probing into alternatives. Avoiding this is actually quite hard, to be honest. When one really wants to find fraud (or indeed any empirical result) it is psychologically difficult to then switch gears to convincing oneself of all the ways the hypothesis could be false, and then trying to find evidence of that.

Of the other half of the leads, perhaps 80% will be plausible, but either inconclusive, or admitting of multiple interpretations. Of genuine ones, they may be contained in a two hour video that’s not very well explained, and you don’t have time to watch the whole thing. They may be written down in some long technical piece that you don’t have the training to follow entirely, or which doesn't explain clearly what its doing. Even if you think it seems legit and you understand what it’s doing, you have to take a gamble that it’s not a coding error or bad data cleaning or some other screwup. They may be some anonymous whistleblower that you have to spend resources to try to find out if they’re fake or well-intentioned, if they’re right or wrong, if their claims are provable or unprovable.

Now, you have to figure out, can I get this in an affidavit? Is this author willing to go public? Will this convince a judge? Can I get an expert witness to testify, assuming a judge is even interested in hearing evidence, which often they're not? As far as I can tell, the statistical analyses I liked the most were all written pseudonymously. It is not a surprise that they didn’t find their way into the major lawsuits. The Williams professor who did a god damn confidence interval for the Matt Braynard analysis got dragged in the papers by his utterly contemptible colleagues. The chances that they would do this if he’d computed a confidence interval for literally any other survey in history are zero. Are you surprised that more people aren't signing up to put their professional reputations on the line for what's almost certainly a Hail Mary, and which won't even benefit them personally?

But even if you can find an expert willing to go public, how long do they have to generate such a report? You need to scramble to scrape and download the data straight away from lots of sources, and start analyzing it. Find the weird anomalies, dig into them, try to figure out which ones might be errors. Think of different ways to test them. Think of different data you might get that would corroborate this. Manually do more gathering, and cleaning, and merging. Think of which things might rise above the metric of “dubious” to “very hard to explain with anything other than fraud”. Run the results. Double check the results. Triple check the results, because if you start making false claims, you’ve actively hurt the cause (and you’ll feel like a total fool and fraud). Start writing the results up. Refine the writeup to make it less jargon-y. Try to balance the tension between “easily accessible to public readers”, “understandable to smart but busy and innumerate lawyers” and “detailed enough to withstand public scrutiny by hostile experts or readers”. Also, there’s dozens of different investigative angles you can take. Each one takes a few days or a week to look into, let alone write up, let alone actually get published. You’re pulling 80 hour weeks, but even so, there’s not many weeks you have. How many such analyses can you write? Meanwhile, you're working against the clock without knowing quite what the deadline is for "too late to matter", but you know it can't be very long. 

Now, consider the media environment you are operating in, if you are the Trump team. The same media that in 2016 was willing to report uncritically every breathless allegation of Russian interference, that was willing to circulate as evidence a single anonymous dossier of allegations about Trump and treat it as a basis for campaign wiretaps and impeachment, now is loudly insisting that a) the race is over, and b) “experts assure us there is no voter fraud”. Meanwhile, on the rare occasions they do report on the matter, they only focus on the most ludicrous witness statements and the most easily debunked claims. These are sure to circulate widely, so that by the time previously open-minded readers get around to seeing actual good evidence, they’re largely exhausted and cynical, and often won't even read it.

Partly for the fun of trolling, and partly just as an experiment, I started asking the Montgomery County twitter account, and its commissioner in charge of the election, Ken Lawrence Jr, why it was that their county looked so crooked on multiple dimensions, both in terms of having the most suspicious vote update in America, and the third most suspicious set of voter birthdays among Pennsylvania counties. They never answered. I tried poking newspaper reporters from multiple papers. Most didn’t bite. Ross Douthat, to his credit, linked to the Montgomery piece, admittedly in a one-liner in his NYT article on how weird it is that these kooks believe in conspiracy theories. I asked him in multiple places – have you, or any other journalist, actually just asked these guys in Montgomery County what their explanation is for it? Even just to get a response on the record? No dice. Nobody was interested. Hell, I couldn't even get a response out of the Pennsylvania Republican Party twitter account!

I didn’t really expect anything different, so my demeanour was mostly one of trollish entertainment, rather than disappointment. But at the end, even I found myself more cynical than I expected.

If you are Republican, and alleging voter fraud by the Democrats, the media will be actively opposed to you at every single step. How could they not be? These are the same people that have been writing about how Trump was Hitler for the past four years. Does any reasonable person expect them to voluntarily start digging into stories that might make Trump actually get another four years, when they can just turn a blind eye and end it all? Besides, if they start being called a voter fraud truther, it will be disaster for their career.

There is one more piece of the puzzle worth noting.

How many people do you think there actually were working on this, total, over the past month? At least on the data side?

The average person probably assumes that there must have been thousands of highly paid professionals working on it.

I estimate that the number is perhaps 40 at the high end, and maybe as low as 20. (If the sides had been flipped, it would definitely be more, perhaps a lot more, but I don't know). I’d estimate that nearly all of them were volunteers juggling other full time jobs. I personally knew about ten of them working on analysis, and there were a number of other excellent people helping enormously with data gathering and processing. 

That's it. That's the full extent of resources around the world that have gone into investigating from a statistical point of view whether the 2020 election may have been decided by fraud. With the time and resources available, it's remarkable we found as much as we did.

At least personally, I never really expected to change the outcome. The task was basically impossible, but damn it, we worked until the end anyway.

This is all one can ever do. 

To live not by lies, as Mr Solzhenitsyn put it.

And to fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, as Mr Kipling put it.

To the ten, and to all those I know who helped  in the effort – friends, it was a true honour and pleasure to work with you.

Evidence Suggesting Voter Fraud in Milwaukee

 I posted a version of this on twitter, but a) the writing format there is so ugly, and b) who knows how long that thread might last. So here it is for the record. 

I’ve been looking at the vote counts within Milwaukee, and there’s suspicious patterns in the data that need explaining. Proving fraud is difficult, but there’s a lot of irregularities here that point in that direction. First, the tl;dr, then the main analysis.

1. Democrat votes started increasing massively relative to Republicans after Tuesday night counts. This can’t be accounted for by explanations like heavily Democratic wards reporting later. When we look at the changes *within wards*, 96.6% of them favored the Democrats.

2. Democrats also improved massively against third party candidates, whereas Republicans and third party candidates showed similar changes to each other. Since there’s little incentive to manipulate third party counts, this implies that the big change after Tuesday night is in Democrat votes, not in Republican ones.  

3. When we compare different down ballot races, we find that Democrat increases within each ward were larger in races where the Democrat candidate was initially behind in the overall race on Tuesday night – that is, relatively more Democrat votes appeared in races where they were more likely to alter the outcome.

4. This result is easy to explain by fraud, but is much more complicated to explain by other explanations like Democrats mostly voting by mail. Most such theories predict all Democrat candidates should benefit in equal proportions within a ward, not that more votes come in exactly where they’re most needed.  

Ward-level vote counts are from the Milwaukee County Clerk at 7pm last night  and the archived version from the count as it stood on election night . 

This idea came from Spotted Toad, who’s been doing great work on this too. I’m looking at Presidential, Congress, State Senate and Assembly races. One way to look at what happened is to compare the percentage increase in votes for Republican Candidates versus Democrat candidates within each ward after election night.

For instance, suppose the Democrat candidate vote total went up 200% from initial counting to Thursday night. How much did the Republican vote total go up? If the distribution of votes before and after is the same, the percentage gains for each group should be similar, regardless of who was ahead.

This is very different from the normal reason where candidate totals in the entire state might change as counting goes on, as different reports come in from other parts of the city. That just shows that wards differ from each other. Rather, we’re testing whether the *same ward * should continue to find the same distribution of votes before and after Tuesday night. 

In other words, if the before and after distributions were the same, as votes come from the same pool, you’d expect that half the time, the Republicans got a slightly unlucky draw in the early votes, and end up improving their position (regardless of whether they ultimately win or lose). And roughly half the time, the Democrats should increase their votes by more. 

What actually happens? The Democrat candidate vote increases relative to the Republican candidate a crazy fraction of the time. The variable in question is percentage increase in Democrat vote totals for that ward (that is, the percentage change from Tuesday night to Thursday night), minus percentage increase in Republican vote totals. 

So a value above zero means that Democrat totals went up more than Republicans in that ward/race. A value of 500 means that the Democrats went up 500% in excess of the republicans (e.g. D votes grew 600%, R votes grew 100%). Here’s a graph of the histogram. 

You see an enormously right skewed distribution –tons of large gains for Democrats, very few gains for Republicans. Not only do Democrats very often increase more than Republicans, but when they do, it’s often by a colossal amount. 

Out of the 1217 ward/race combinations with non-missing early votes for both parties, 1037 saw relative increases for the Democrats, 37 saw relative increases for Republicans, and 143 were ties. Excluding the ties, the D “win” fraction here is 96.6%.  A remarkable feat!

Depending on how you assign ties, if this were a 50/50 coin (i.e. D and R were equally likely to gain relative to the other), the probability or p-value for this is between 10^-147 and a number Excel just lists as “0”.

So, this proves incontrovertibly that something about the count skews crazily towards the Democrats after 2am Wednesday. But it doesn’t prove what it is. Maybe they counted different types of ballots or something, but only starting at 4am. 

However, there’s one thing we can test – from which party’s votes is the weirdness coming from? We can answer things by looking at vote changes for other candidates – third party races, write-in candidates etc. 

We can be virtually certain that nobody is bothering to manipulate the vote totals for fringe, no-hope write-in candidates. These form a great placebo group – what might you expect the changes to look like for a group where nobody is manipulating the totals?

So let’s do the same thing as the earlier graph, but compare each part with “Miscellaneous”, which because the count is small, I aggregate together. I also limit the sample here to cases where there’s at least 5 votes for “Misc” in that ward by 2am Wednesday, to make sure that this isn’t coming from rounding (e.g. if you have only 1 vote, the minimum increase is 100%). 

What are we predicting to find? Well, if it’s the Democrat total that’s being wildly inflated, Democrats should also be increasing relative to Miscellaneous. Meanwhile, if Republicans are just being counted as normal, then their changes should look similar to the Miscellaneous Group.

And that’s basically what we find. First, Democrats vs Miscellaneous. Visually, the picture looks even more crazily skewed than the previous one. In terms of counts, Democrats improve relative to Miscellaneous in 520 ward/race observations. They tie 89 times, and Miscellaneous improves in relative terms just 3 times. That’s not a typo.

This corresponds to p-values between 10^-73 and 10^-177. The fraction of Democratic “wins” here (520/523), excluding ties, is a ludicrous 99.4%. 

So how do Republicans compare with Miscellaneous? It turns out that while they’re not exactly the same, they’re far, far more similar to each other than either is to the Democrats . Other than a few outliers (because “Miscellaneous” has very few votes in total, remember), the distribution is fairly symmetric around zero. 

In terms of counts, Republicans improve relative to Miscellaneous 179 times, Miscellaneous improves 251 times, and there are 74 ties. As a result, which p-value you get here depends enormously on how you allocate the ties. Give them to M, and it’s 10^-11. Give them to R, and it’s 0.55, or almost exactly chance (253 vs 251). 

Excluding ties, the R “win” percentage is 41.6%. So under some measures, they look slightly worse, but this ends up being affected by questions of rounding and the small vote totals for M. What’s incontrovertible is that D looks wildly, wildly different from either of them.

This is exactly what the null would predict, if votes before look like votes after. So this *does* roughly hold, but only when comparing Republicans vs Miscellaneous. This story is also inconsistent with the driver being something Trump did, like telling all his supporters to vote in-person. If so, why do changes in Miscellaneous votes look about the same? The important difference after Tuesday night, whatever you think it is, is coming on the Democrat side.

So maybe you’re wondering – are there reasons other than fraud that the ballots might be different before and after? If the ordering is random and they’re drawn from the same pool, no. But if each ward counts different types in a different order (those at 9am versus 4pm, or in-person versus mail-in), then this could happen. 

Whatever is making the vote distributions different before and after, it’s a factor that’s overwhelmingly just impacting Democrats, not Republicans. If you think it’s about in-person versus postal voting, you have to hypothesize that Republicans look kind of similar to Miscellaneous in this respect. This is possible, but not nearly as obvious. 

But there’s another more important aspect we can test here. In particular, if some of these Democrat increases are due to fraud, we would expect that the increases should be larger *when the fraud is more likely to impact the race. And since these include lots of down-ballot races like State Assembly Representatives, we have quite a lot of variation here. 

Sometimes the Democrat is way up after early counting, at which point it doesn’t matter much if they post big relative gains after that. But if the Democratic candidate is down early on, jacking up the total becomes much more important. I’m assuming that if the Party wants to rig votes, they’d also like to win as many races as possible for the least amount of rigging.

In other words, the comparison is now between two different races at the same ward. A Democrat voter comes to the ballot box or mailbox, and sees a number of races. For some, like President, it’s going to be a close call. For others, it might be a heavy favorite for the Democrat. 

The voter is a Democrat, so presumably he’s inclined to vote Democrat for both. We can compare within a given ward which of the two races showed bigger improvement for the Democrats in that particular ward after Tuesday night. 

Sure enough, the increase in Democrats relative to Republicans (the variable in our first histogram) is significantly higher when the Democratic race-wide vote share is lower during the early counting. In other words, within each ward, late vote counts break more heavily to Democrat in exactly those races where the change in votes is likely to affect the result.

How big is this effect? Well, one way to measure it is to see how many races it impacted. There were 8 races where Republicans were ahead on a two-party basis on Wednesday morning. By Thursday night, half of them had flipped to Democratic. By contrast, there were 19 races where the Democrat was ahead, and not a single one flipped to the Republicans. 

And again, let’s recall what we’re observing here. It’s not that the races flipped because suddenly wards that were known to be heavy Democrat strongholds started reporting in. Rather, more votes started coming in for Democrats relative to the ratio that was coming in for that exact same ward the previous night. Moreover, within each ward, the votes also skewed more for races that the Democrats looked like they might lose. 

Importantly, this finding is surprisingly hard to explain with the commonly cited reasons for Democrats pulling ahead overall. For instance, one of the claims is that mail-in ballots are counted late, and these are more heavily Democrat. In general, this doesn’t explain why within the same ward, some races later skew Democrat more than others.

The key part is that for each voter, the decision to take a mail-in ballot is common to all races. In other words, a single voter can’t vote for some races by mail, and others in person. So if your claim is that the overall skew to Democrats is a mail ballot effect, most versions of this explanation predict that all races should be equally affected.

To simplify the logic, consider a stylized example where all Democrats and Republicans vote straight ticket. More Democrats vote by mail, and these are counted late.  This would predict that Democrats overall would improve, but the expected improvement is the same for all races, regardless of whether the Democrat is ahead or behind. 

More ballots come in Democratic, they each vote for every Democrat, so all Democrats increase in the same percentage terms. This isn’t what we find. In the data, within a ward, the important races go up more than the unimportant races.

And this prediction, that all races should be equally affected, holds for a lot of other variations too. Does the answer change if every Democrat voter has a 90% chance of voting for each Democratic candidate, if this attitude is the same between Democrats who vote in-person versus those who vote by mail? No. The increase should be the same in all races.

The answer doesn’t even change if Democrat voters in general can’t be bothered as much voting for shoo-in candidates, and only cast their votes for tight races. As long as this instinct is the same in Democrats who vote by mail and those who vote in person, there should be no difference across races in how much they break late towards Democrats.

What you need is something complicated. Democrat voters can’t be bothered voting for candidates they like but who they know are going to win anyway, AND this instinct is somehow larger in Democrat voters who vote by mail than those who vote in person, AND there has to be a larger share of mail voting by Democrats overall. 

This may sound like a confusing and complicated explanation. And it is! That’s kind of the point. We’re now a long way from the simple explanation that Democrats vote more by mail. It’s not impossible, of course, and we can’t rule it out. There are other variants on this story, but if you think this is all about mail-in ballots, there has to be some difference *within Democrat voters* who vote by mail versus in person.

In other words, the bare fact is that races swung much more towards Democrats exactly for those races where the Democrats were down on Wednesday early morning. To explain this with mail-in ballots needs a very complicated story. To explain it with fraud needs a very simple story – you commit fraud more where the fraud matters more. 

This is why the evidence suggests fraud to me, but your mileage may vary here. I’ve tried very much to stick to the facts, because I don’t have any special ability to interpret the numbers above. Whatever is going in is crying out for explanation, and the simple alternatives don’t do it. To me, it looks pretty suspicious. 

A final question worth pondering. What should our null hypothesis be here? When we say “there’s no evidence of it”, we’re claiming “no fraud” as the null hypothesis. But as I’ve argued (by metaphor), the system of vote counting is so rickety and broken that this is an incredibly difficult null to justify. 

A metaphor for the likelihood of voter fraud, for people who insist that it's a conspiracy theory, or there's no evidence of it.

Suppose Amazon wanted to know how many packages it had. Packages were kept in warehouses all over the country. The system was different in every warehouse.

Some people need to move packages around, and there's a list of who is allowed to do that in each warehouse. But if you go in and say you're that person, nobody checks. If someone else has already done that for you when you arrive, you just get another package.

Some packages get driven around by people in their own cars, some get moved around by the post office, some by volunteers or low paid government employees, and in each case they're largely unmonitored - there's no clear record of which ones left or arrived.

Packages are, by common consent, valuable for people to take. But nobody investigates closely what happens in each place, and very rarely are package thieves caught.

For what package system other than "votes" would this be considered a reliable and acceptable system?

For what important corporate outcome, if you proposed this setup as a manager, would you not be fired?

If someone told you there was no evidence of package fraud, how plausible would that claim be?

I find the possibility of voter fraud entirely plausible, and that belief has nothing to do which party you think is doing it. At a minimum, I feel strongly that this possibility needs to be investigated more seriously than it is, given the evidence above.

The Dog That Didn't Bark

As with many things in life, it's hard to notice the things that aren't there, but should be.

I remember my own personal experience of a number of US elections. The way I used to characterize them was that once every four years, people who ordinarily got along with each other pretty well had to scream at each other for a whole year, over things that neither of them could have any control over. Then the election would pass, and people would mostly get on with their lives.

There was also the inevitable rolling back of the start of the election cycle ever sooner. It kind of became like Christmas in the Anglosphere outside America - without Thanksgiving as a hard constraint on when the celebrations could start, you'd see Christmas decorations going up in November, then in October. Elections worked the same way. The buzz, then the party debates, then the primaries, then more party debates, then the conventions. Lord, how I hated the conventions. Just ghastly cliches aimed at true believer rubes. And then the presidential debates themselves, perfectly triangulated to sound compelling to 103 IQ midwits tuning in, sure that they'd learn important things about policy in America to help them make up their mind. I couldn't watch any of them, from either party, for more than a few minutes without feeling like I was being marketed to in a very obvious fashion, on the assumption that I was a moron.

When Trump got elected, there was a very temporary deflating on the left, which lasted about a day, mostly due to shock and disbelief. Then it geared up into protest (protesting an election outcome while professing to still believe in democracy? what does that even mean?), and finding a way to impeach him before he'd even taken office. 

And then, the rancor, normally limited to the election run-up, just became 24/7 in perpetuity. If Trump getting elected created a ton of schadenfreude on the election weary outer right, at some point the whole thing started to mostly be draining. All shared goodwill in America seemed to be eaten up by it. 

So given all this, I was utterly dreading the 2020 election.

And yet, here we are, less than three months out from the election, and instead there is... nothing. You could be forgiven for forgetting most days that it's actually going on. The level of energy devoted to the election itself is insanely low. There is a lot of energy about black lives matter protests, which you can take as a surrogate get-out-the-vote for the left. But there is almost nothing about the election itself.

To take a simple example - how many "Biden for President" signs do you see around your neighborhood? I'm in a pretty blue area, and the answer is approximately "zero".  

Crucial, basic questions remain unanswered. Will people be voting by mail? Will polling booths be open? Who knows! 

I don't pretend to know for sure what's going on there, but there are a few aspects to consider.

One is that this is strategic, a decentralised media strategy to conceal the extent of Joe Biden's mental decline, and just hope that dissatisfaction with Trump will carry the day. 

This might work to a certain extent, but I just don't think they could ordinarily help themselves. There's just too many juicy stories, too much power floating around, too many opportunities to land some exclusive injuring one's political enemies.

It's possible that Covid is just drawing too much of the energy away. But I think this hypothesis pretty much died around May, when the George Floyd protests kicked in in earnest. At that point, nobody in America even pretended to give a damn about Covid, and once that seriousness passed, it was very hard to get it back again. So I don't think there's a sense that Covid is so deathly important that we can't possibly consider mundane matters like who the president will be in three months' time.

My best guess, however, is is related to this paper. If your area had rain on the day of the initial tea party protests in 2009, you had significantly lower vote share for Republicans at the 2010 midterms. In other words, the whole monstrous circus of all the election theatre spectacle actually serves to get people fired up. Covid may not be considered important enough to drown out all other news, but it is important enough to stop tens of thousands people getting crammed into stadiums to host political rallies, or put in auditoriums to listen to presidential debates. Could you host the debate over zoom? Of course you could. Just like you can play NBA games to empty stadiums. Yet for some reason, nobody wants to watch either one. 

Every in-person event that drove the presidential news cycle is canceled. Take that away, and it seems the media just doesn't know what to do. How do you get people fired up? It turns out, it's quite hard. 

A final related aspect that's missing, which is probably even harder to spot, is the absence of lots of casual workplace conversations with people who might be of political opinions. If there's a person in America not heartily sick of zoom calls with anyone other than close friends and loved ones, I'd be surprised. Nobody's turning up to get into pointless arguments with friends and acquaintances, and so the whole cycle of disagreement, fury, righteous indignation, and seeking out new people to vent to / agree with / disagree with is also broken. 

All of this means that my priors on what's going to happen this election are probably wider than in any one I can remember. The most important thing is not the issues, or even the candidates. It's the bizarre, de-energising atmosphere the whole thing is taking place in, and whose voters end up being less lethargic on the day. On that question, I have no idea. 

What, Exactly, Do You Want?

(The inspiration for this post comes from here, and from a coffee conversation with The Grinch, who asked me the subject line bluntly during a political discussion.)

It seems prudent to break the subject into three discrete questions, all of which might on their own be considered variations on the subject line, but which are, on reflection, very different.

1. What are the problems of modernity?

If you take people on the right, either outer right or mainstream right, and ask them what are the specific problems with modernity, you will get a surprisingly uniform and well-agreed-upon list of problems. The most ardent reactionary and the most mainstream Republican will probably not actually disagree very much on what are the particularly wretched aspects of life in contemporary America. Open borders. Welfare moochers. Criminals not being punished. Endless propaganda against straight white Christian males. You get the idea.

This is worth pondering. The things which trouble us are a substantial cause of agreement.

2. What would be your ideal solution to fix those problems?

If you took the same range of people, and asked them what kind of governing arrangements they would prefer, they might give you quite different answers. Normie conservatives want a return to the constitution as understood in 1950, or 1920, or 1850, or what have you. Further right republicans might want the authoritarian capitalism of Lee Kuan Yew, or the colonial administration of British Hong Kong. Reactionaries might want an absolute monarch, or Moldbug's sovereign corporations. 

And yet, among the more thoughtful ones, even if they disagreed on exactly what was their preferred model, they would probably also take any other right-winger's governing arrangements over the status quo, if it could actually be achieved. In other words, we might haggle over the ordering, but any of them would likely be an improvement. If agreeing to this were all it took to get it to actually happen, we'd have a reasonable shot at all being on board.

3. How do we get to there from here?

A.K.A. What should we actually do about all this? And on this question, people come to all sorts of answers. I think the reason is that nobody really knows. I tend to believe the Moldbug point that activist strategies are a disaster for the right (see, for instance, Charlottesville). But this is very different from knowing what will work, or even might work. I don't honestly have a great idea, but I'm working on it. When it comes to things like voting, we can't even agree on which direction the sign goes.  

To see how wild the divergence can be between the first point (agreeing on current problems) and the third (what to do to concretely improve things), consider the following description of leftism. See if it rings true:

Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general.

But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types.

Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

Sounds pretty reasonable, right?

So what do you think the guy who wrote this proposed to do to fix this problem?

As it turns out, the completely bonkers answer was to send home made bombs to try to blow up a random computer store owner, geneticist, biologist, computer scientist, and a bunch of others. The quote is from the Unabomber manifesto. He's actually one of the few exceptions to point 2 - I wouldn't actually prefer to live in his entirely pre-industrial-revolution society, even if I can agree on some of what has been lost. It's actually worth reading, if for no other reason than the whiplash disconnect between the quite incisive observations he makes about the problems of modernity, and the absolutely insane things he did that made him famous:

Step 1. Send home-made bombs to random people who do things somehow associated with modernity

Step 2. ????

Step 3. Profit!

Step 4. Worldwide revolution where technology is abolished. 

That said, I think the widespread agreement on point 2 is, in many ways, equally surprising. Because it's not obvious that we should necessarily find some kind of consensus improvement just because we dislike the status quo. And moreover, it suggests that there actually might be something common to all these alternative governing arrangements that would make them an improvement. Why exactly, do we all instinctively support a lot of each others' solutions?

I think there is a value in trying to condense down a description of what it is at a high level we want. Partly, this is because even if one dislikes voting, one can't get around having to convince people somehow. Maybe not the general public, maybe just the elites. Fine. But also as an important intellectual exercise of understanding what the actual problem with the status quo is. What is it that unites Singaporean authoritarianism, British Hong Kong, absolute monarchy, and sovereign corporations, but isn't present in modern democratic states?

The shortest answer I have, which I think can be given in a lot of different settings without offending people, is this.

Well-defined and secure property rights in the state itself.

You want to know what I want? That's what I want.

Who owns the state? And in whose interest is it to be run? Not some b.s. answer like "the people". Which people, specifically, and in which proportion? What exactly is the decision-making process? How are the cash flows going to be distributed?

That's what's so appealing about sovereign corporations. Not only is there one answer, but everybody knows that answer, and everybody pretty much has incentives to continue to respect that answer. Who owns Microsoft? Not "the people", that's for sure. And in a sense, does it matter who specifically owns Microsoft? Not really. What matters is the structure and the incentives. If the shares all changed hands tomorrow, would you expect Microsoft to act very differently? No. The shares will change hands tomorrow, and you won't even bother to think about it when you load up Windows.

But if we all agree that Lee Kuan Yew owns the state, or that the British Civil Service with their well-defined system of promotions and personnel owns the state, or that Louis XIV owns the state, that's probably fine as well. If they really truly own it, they probably will have sufficient incentives to run it decently well. They might screw it up - this is why I generally prefer sovereign corporations to absolute monarchy, because regression to the mean and bad genetic draws periodically produces fools at the top. But if they do, they'll be hurt themselves, which probably gives them incentives to hire or consult someone who understands statecraft properly.

A completely well-defined and secure set of state property rights is probably itself a Platonic ideal that can't actually be achieved. Specifying exactly why the individual soldier or policeman carries out the order in every situation, or where exactly the King/CEO's advisors come from, will always be thorny. But we can probably still rank order different arrangements in terms of approximate stability and agreement on state ownership.

Why do we want well-defined and secure property rights in the state?

Because a stationary bandit is better than roving bandits. 

When you have one bandit, you get expropriated efficiently. When you get multiple bandits, it turns out like the descriptions in one of the War Nerd podcasts of what it was like to have armies coming over your area during the Thirty Years War. Even if they were just passing through, they had to resupply. So they'd come by, steal all your grain, use your furniture as firewood, perhaps rape a daughter or two, and then camp for the night. Then a few months later, another army would do the same, except they'd be annoyed that the first guys had taken most of the good stuff.

Strikingly, in Brecher's recount, it made surprisingly little difference whether the army was notionally friendly to the country in question, or notionally hostile. Either way, you were getting everything taken. It didn't matter if they were taking next year's seed grain, or you didn't have enough to survive the winter. That's your problem.

Such accounts also show the risk of being hyperbolic. In modernity, we aren't getting randomly mobbed as a society in anything like the way peasants were in the Thirty Years War. Why not?

Well, in the modern west what we have isn't several groups of roving bandits. That indeed would be worse. When the bandits are entirely an outside force, and one that will only be here temporarily, you get absolute catastrophe, and they'll take everything. Rather, we have internal banditry by unstable coalition. None of the bandits are individually strong enough to rob you, but collectively they are. The good news is, the bandits are part of the society themselves, so they're here for a while at least. The other good news is that they (so far, and on average) view their coalition as kinda sorta stable  - enough that they can exploit semi efficiently the various groups they eating. And, so far at least, they're smart enough to figure out a way to do that. This is why modern America is grim in many respects, but you'd never confuse it with Mugabe's Zimbabwe, or a the Holy Roman Empire when the Swedish army paid a visit. In a modern context, neither stable coalitions not semi-intelligent leaders exist, for instance, in modern South Africa. Unsurprisingly, it's rapidly going down the toilet. My predictions on that have been correct for as long as I've been writing. If any of my readers are working for the South African tourism board, I suggest the slogan "See it before it's gone", or if you're more optimistic, "See it before it gets worse".

It's still approximately the same group on top over time, or at least there's a fair degree of overlap, which is why the modern west isn't a total disaster. But who exactly is on top, and who is getting more of the spoils, and who is at risk of being cast out altogether - those things are much less stable.

Hence the need for endless political propaganda, because the coalition needs to signal out-group hatred to keep itself together. Hence the ever shifting potpourri of fashionable causes competing for attention, because the relative ownership stakes in the coalition aren't well defined. Hence the endless insistence on public assent to obvious lies, because you need credible litmus tests to determine loyalty. Hence the need to keep bringing in foreign electoral ringers, because some of the important organs of power are still laundered through our four year American Idol contest, and there's the risk that some of the yokels might get uppity.

The best summary of the theoretical solution to all this is still Moldbug's first post on Formalism. Find out who already owns the state, and give it to them officially. That way you only have one hard problem to solve (find out who owns the state), not two (expropriate the existing owners and give it to some new set of stable owners)

The problem is that we have no idea how to define properly who owns the state, because the answer keeps changing. There's also a problem that people who think they should own the state but currently don't may not assent to formalising the current ownership arrangements. And overconfidence makes everyone think they'll get more in the next round of coalition rearranging.

But a whole lot of us instinctively seem to see the appeal in systems where that problem has been solved somehow. Anyhow. King Charles II, Emperor Bill Gates, or the dispersed shareholders in the Disney Company. It doesn't matter much to me. I'll take any of them.

So we're still somewhat back at the problem of point 3. How do we move towards a system where property rights in the state are well-defined?

I don't know, exactly.

But at least I have a more concrete idea of what I'm aiming at, and what might achieve it, rather than having to split the difference between Catholic Integralism and Sovereign Corporations.

And it's phrased at a sufficiently high level of generality that you can say it at a dinner party and not immediately get thrown out.

Maybe that's something. Maybe it's not.

Nobody said point 3 would be easy, or even solvable at all.