“Well, they did it in Hawaii in 1960. They had an alternative slate,” Watters countered. “It’s fine. It’s been done before. And the other thing is, like, why can’t you just ask Mike Pence to do that? Mike Pence said no.”
I hadn’t heard of that, so I looked it up:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presidential_election_in_Hawaii
That was Kennedy vs Nixon, and there were important differences vs the shitshow that happened in 2020/2021:
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after the first full count, Nixon was ahead by just 147 votes, but there were legit math errors in the count
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nobody invoked fraud claims to justify the recount, but they just wanted the count to be accurate.
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the full retabulation couldn’t finish by the safe harbor deadline, so everyone agreed to certify both slates of electors. One slate wasn’t done on the sly.
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just before Congress counted the votes, they affirmed that Kennedy actually won, and the Republican governor air-mailed his certification to Congress.
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Both slates were presented to the Vice President, and he got unanimous consent from the Senate to accept Kennedy’s slate and ignore Nixon’s.
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That VP was Nixon himself!
Richard Millhous Nixon himself, with more integrity than Donald Trump…
It is all about having a thin veneer of reasoning, no matter how wrong, it always is. So now they can advance to the next wrong thing with this new justification in their toolbox.
I’ll say it again, but you can have a look at basically any position held by modern conservatives, anything, and it always end up being very wrong, based on paper-thin arguments. This is how they ended up with their own alternative reality, one very wrong conclusion at a time, wrapped in a thin argument. Conservative don’t care to look pas the conclusion, some are in it for themselves, but I think most are just morons.
Exactly, and all you have to do is look to this thing in Hawaii, and compare it with what is going on now.
While I’m sure that there were some in Hawaii who wanted to StOp ThE cOuNt while their candidate was leading, there seemed to be a genuine desire to find the true outcome, and a recognition that the problems were due to error and not fraud. (This was their first Presidential election since becoming a state in 1959). Then, when the outcome became apparent, all sides acknowledged it, even the side that lost. (But it should be noted that Hawaii’s 3 EC votes would not have made a difference to the outcome, and maybe Tricky Dick would have done something different if it had.)
The modern Conservative movement is rudderless, it has no direction other than amassing power and subjugating people who dont agree with them. (And that’s more than my opinion; they never bothered to make a platform in 2020 other than shouting “America First!”). Anyone who acts with the same integrity as the Republicans in Hawaii back then would be immediately called “RINOs” and have a ton of fundraising aimed toward a primary opponent. They would be accused of “helping the enemy”, even though we’re all Americans here, whether we’re model Conservatives or not.
So Hawaii was a TOTALLY different case for a few different reasons:
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By the time the electors needed to be submitted, they legitimately DID NOT KNOW who won the election. So they submitted two slates of electors, one for Kennedy, one for Nixon, with the proviso that only the slate for the winner should be counted when the tabulation happened in early January.
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BOTH slates formed in the Hawaii '60 election were official slates chosen by the state. They weren’t just a made up slate selected by god knows who.
