Declare contributor Ben Ginsberg was one of a handful of experts in election law and administration that the New York Times surveyed for thoughts in advance of Election Day. One of the questions was: “What’s the biggest red herring — something people worry about that isn’t a big deal?” Ben’s response, as well as those of Jessica Furst Johnson (former general counsel to three national GOP committees), Parker Poling (former executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee), and Derek Muller (Notre Dame law professor and frequent Federalist Society panelist), are worth reading:
Ginsberg: That final election results aren’t reliable and that nonqualified voters are impacting those results.
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Johnson: Fear-mongering around the idea that the armed forces, the National Guard or ICE (or all of them) will interfere with the election.
Poling: When casual watchers of election results don’t understand that vote reporting is not linear — it’s not like a road race — and accuse the media or administrators of manufacturing votes.
Muller: That Speaker Mike Johnson will steal control of the House after the election. He won’t be speaker as of noon on Jan. 3.
Taken as a whole, the responses of those surveyed reflect the ongoing divide between digital reality and reality-reality. In the first, elections are perceived to have tons of vulnerabilities, based not necessarily on events in the real world but sensational characterizations of them, which in turn influence political behavior. In the second, of “reality-reality,” the vulnerabilities are the sensational characterizations themselves and the reactions to them — whether public opinion of institutional legitimacy or, to use that term again, (eventual) political behavior, such as presidential action.
Differences of opinion about the world as it “actually” is are as old as ancient Greek philosophy. But the issue here is whether to base a worldview on data such as the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Map or Declare’s Election Integrity Map, or to base it on assumptions about the unknown or unproven. To the first crowd, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts,” applies. To the second, it’s more like, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts — yet not all the facts can be known, and we assume the ones that aren’t prove our case, or at least provide us with the justification for ‘asking questions’ in perpetuity.” Tough sell there.