Role of the Ballot Vs Framework Part 1

Innovative arguments (read: new ways of cheating) tend to trickle down from college debate to high school debate over a period of years. One of the most recent to trickle is the concept of the "role of the ballot". In most debates I've seen teams have handled this by either ignoring it or treating it as a framework style argument. Both of those tracts ignore a bit of subtle nuance that is at play.
What is framework? I would like to draw a distinction between two concepts: the decision frame and the meta frame. In any choice about action, what shoes to wear, what car to buy, what girl to ask out, there is a decision frame. The decision frame is a criteria that is most important in a given situation. You may select shoes that look cool but are uncomfortable, and you may also select a chair that is comfortable and ugly. In those 2 instances you chose different frames: fashion and comfort. Decision frames are often contradictory in that manner. A meta frame is a bigger picture that guides a person or interaction between people. If you get into an argument with your parents about your curfew and they say it is dangerous for you to stay out late, they are using a security frame. When you continue to argue and they say "because I said so", they are now appealing to the meta frame: that they are your parents and in a position of authority.
In debate, the argument most commonly referred to as "framework" is about what the rules of debate are: the affirmative has to defend a topical plan, the negative can't critique representations etc. These are all appeals to the meta- frame: general principles that guide debate. They don't tell you how to make individual decisions like should the gag rule be repealed. For that you need a decision frame. Arguments about the role of the ballot are basically an attempt to make an explicit decision frame. This is not exactly a new technique. Since the beginning of time debaters have said X impact is the most important, sometimes referring to it as a "decision rule" or d-rule. Morality arguments are probably the most prevalent example of this. Role of the ballot claims take this one step further. A morality claim says you should do X regardless of the potential negative consequences because it is morally right. It says ignore all consequences. Role of the ballot claims are much sneakier in that they don't say ignore all consequences, but normally say ignore a particular type of consequence, namely the one the other side is focusing on. Let's look at some examples.
There was a college topic that called for the elimination of the death penalty. A major reason we have the death penalty is essentially political: the majority of Americans support it and so politicians keep it in place. Naturally, this makes the politics disad a natural against the end the death penalty aff. So teams that read the death penalty aff and argued the death penalty was bad for consequentialist reasons would argue that politics disads should be ignored because the role of the ballot should be to to ignore political expediency. Essentially that consequences do matter and are important, but the most likely negative consequence of our plan should not be considered. The strategic utility of this kind of argument should be self evident.
On the college China topic the affirmative had to pressure China to improve its human rights situation. Many teams argued that whether or not this would make China angry with the United States should not be relevant in our decision making process because to not advance human rights out of fear that China won't "like" us anymore is morally bankrupt. They would tailor their argument so that it was only a rejection of the US-China relations disad (the biggest DA on the topic) and thereby try to make the disad go away while also trying to avoid "morality bad" style arguments.
So basically the strategic utility of the Role of the Ballot is to get away with some minimal cheating (making selected arguments disappear) while avoiding the pitfalls of outright cheating (framework arguments, kritiks of morality, linking to utility good style arguments etc).
So while a framework argument may say "we don't defend the plan, you get no disads", a role of the ballot argument says the much more reasonable "we will defend the plan, but X should be considered irrelevant because".
That's the thing about the evolution of cheating. Natural selection picks the kinds of cheating that most seem like they are in fact not cheating. A form of cheating camouflage if you will. Role of the ballot is an evolution that attempts to avoid the framework debate by making a surgical cheat instead of a blunt instrument cheat.
As the negative, if you don't prepare a different kind of argument to deal with this new kind of cheating you will most likely lose. Logically there is no clash between the affirmatives role of the ballot decision frame and your debate has rules meta frame(work) argument. In essence, there is no link. Maybe you have been in a situation before where you knew the other team was cheating but just couldn't explain why. I know I have, and it is very frustrating. What you need to do in that situation is not fall back on generics, but instead try and think of a well reasoned and specific argument about why what the affirmative is doing is bad, a process we will walk through in part 2.
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