Voting Battles Head to Court

We’ve already seen record early turnout this election cycle. Our hosts have three major takeaways ...

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We’ve already seen record early turnout this election cycle. Our hosts have three major takeaways from the surge: 1) It means the polls are more likely to be accurate (the registered voter number is likely to reflect the actual voter number), 2) It means that we’re going to see interesting shift in how both candidates’ spend time on the campaign trail before Tuesday, 3) It means we have a record number of absentee ballots, which will lead to a concomitant surge in election litigation. In the hopper for the rest of today’s podcast: judicial oaths of office, turnout in swing states, and election litigation galore (with a close look at Wisconsin and Pennsylvania!)

Show Notes:

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  1. Avatar photo
    Chany Ockert

    Could you talk about this editorial in an upcoming Advisory Opinions or French Press?

    https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/november-web-only/trump-election-politics-church-kingdom.html

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  2. Avatar photo
    Silvertide

    To Sarah and David.

    I just wanted to say thank you. This has been a tough year and while I most definitely don't always agree with you, as I'm a pro choice, West coast, liberal with a negative attitude towards organized religion, you're podcasts have been enlightening and enjoyable during these tough times. So thank you and please keep up the good work.

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  3. Joe Curtis

    Sorry David, Sarah is correct.

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  4. Curtis

    I'm here for David's achievement! By Sarah's definition, setting a personal best or a world record wouldn't qualify as an achievement since they are not likely to be repeatable.

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    Emily

    Ok, I know that votes are a partisan thing, but VOTING is an American thing. Having party politics driving restrictions on options for safe voting, or the decision to not count the late arriving absentee ballots, is just very ugly to me.

    Maybe the reason that Justice Kagan isn’t joining with Kavanaugh in laying down some kind of marker to stop counting votes is that, given the lower court’s finding of the potential disenfranchisement of 100k people who tried diligently to cast their vote according to the rules they were given, she believes laying that marker is unconstitutional.

    Of course the lawyers argue for their clients’ best interest, and that is obviously very partisan. But in Justice Kagan’s dissent the foremost concern is the right of citizens to vote and have it counted in the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic. This might have been to the detriment of the party that confirmed her, but should be absolutely irrelevant to the court who those late arriving votes favor. I think she’s the one who’s got her finger on the pulse of the founders’ intentions with this one. #countthevotes

    Also, I’m new to reading the Supreme Court opinions (which I never actually thought I would do before this podcast made the subject interesting to me), but Justice Kagan sounds furious to my untutored eye. She mentions Kavanaugh by name 6 times. Is that as unusual as it seems like it should be? Or am I just reading it totally wrong?

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  6. Frank Pepp

    What's the website with running totals of absentee/early ballots?

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    1. Frank Pepp

      Found it! https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html

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  7. Avatar photo
    Caleb Bell

    To be fair, regarding Sarah's point on Trump's visit to Nebraska's Second District, it sits immediately across the river from Council Bluffs, Iowa where the president has a pool of potential Trump voters who leaned his direction in 2016 and could again swing in his direction in 2020. Therefore, while Trump's visit to NE-2 may suggest that he feels the need to lock that district down as a path to victory, it could also suggest that he's trying to hit two birds with one stone, so to speak, in visiting a competitive Nebraska district and Iowa, which is in play.

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  8. Marshall Thompson

    TLDR: The consensus of the philosophical work on action theory says Sarah is right and David is wrong.

    Luckily we don't need to appeal to unsubstantiated linguistic intuitions to resolve this 'accident' vs. 'achievement' debate. We can instead appeal to professional philosopher's unsubstantiated linguistic intuitions, along with some methodologically suspect survey data, to resolve this debate! (Also, this is perhaps the only time my dissertation work in action theory will be relevant to anyone outside the field, so that is exciting!)

    The standard treatment of these cases come from the work of Al Mele. Take this discussion of his:

    "If, under normal conditions, a basketball player with a 90 percent success rate on free throws tries in his normal way to sink a free throw and tosses the ball directly though the hoop, most people would say, I believe, that his sinking that free throw was an intentional action. Now consider my uncle Joe, an athletic blind man. Joe sinks about 2 percent of his free throws. Suppose that, under normal conditions, he tries in his normal way to sink a free throw during a contest with me and tosses the ball directly though the hoop. Did Joe intentionally sink the shot? I conjecture that most people would say No."

    This conjecture, which was first extensively defended in Mele's 1994 piece coauthored with Paul Moser, was later backed up by extensive linguistic survey data.

    Malle and Knobe, for example, found that most people impose a doxastic condition on intention and a skill condition intentionality.

    In case the baseball example is too distantly related, we can consider an example of Mele's that deals directly with golf:

    "Although there are no lotteries in Lydia’s state, there is a weekly million-dollar contest for amateur golfers. Contestants pay a dollar for the privilege of taking a single shot at making a hole in one from a distance of 180 yards. Lydia has never hit a golf ball, but, desperately wanting to become a millionaire and thinking that there is a remote chance that she will make a hole in one, she enters the contest. She has seen golf on television, and she estimates her chances of holing her shot at about one in a million. As Lydia eyes the ball, she deliberates about how she might achieve her goal of making a hole in one, giving special attention to what club to use. She selects a three wood, lines up the shot, and then swings hard, with the goal of making a hole in one and winning the big prize."

    If we suppose Lydia makes her shot, most agree the shot was not made intentionally. (Those action theorists following along at home, Mele is a Davidsonian causalist, but if you like your action theory of an Aristotelian variety, note that Elizabeth Anscombe's knowledge condition is going to give rise to similar skill conditions, see her discussion of chalk towards the end of Intention.)

    So, at a minimum, the main philosophical work would say David's closest to the pin was not intentional because it was not explicable in terms of skilled execution. This is significant because most agree that intentionality is a minimum condition on achievement (and it was a negative condition in David's first definition of accidental).

    That said, we can also look at philosophical work done on achievement directly. A 2010 articled published in Think addresses this subject directly:

    "Clearly, however, success does not suffice for an achievement, since success can be attained in all kinds of ways, not all of them suitable for bona fide achievements. In particular, one can be successful through brute luck – e.g. as when all of one’s competitors in a sprint race succumb to injury – and in such cases being successful does not constitute an achievement. There is a related point to be made here, which is that achievements involve the exercise of the relevant abilities. That is, your abilities should be playing a role in enabling you to be successful, rather than the success in question being due just to blind fortune. Winning the sprint because you are the fastest person in the field is part of what constitutes the relevant achievement; winning the race as the slowest person in the field, albeit the only one who doesn’t pull up with an injury, doesn’t come close. So achievements involve both successes and the exercise of one’s relevant abilities." (Pritchard)

    For David's 'closest to the pin' to constitute an achievement, on this rather plausible account, then, it would have to be explicable in terms of David's relative skill in relation to other Golfers, and not explained by the sheer number of times he has been in the running for closest to the pin throughout his life.

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    1. Stripes

      Wow, thanks, that was entertaining and enlightening. I *think* I have grasped the gist of your argument, but as a non-philosopher I'm going to have to read it again :)

      Enjoy that rare dissertation relevance moment to the hilt!

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  9. Stephen Nielson

    So it was just announced that Trump is now going to be in Rome GA on Sunday. That seems like pretty panicked news for Georgia from the Trump team.

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    William Miller

    Until she said it was a cheerleading cheer, I thought she was starting off the Bone Thugs-n-Harmony song and was impressed.

    https://open.spotify.com/track/4o2UcMhDLHpi09m8esAVqT?si=9gLpV5X1TsS14AZr4v7EaA

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