6 ms·

It is crazy to see how well he knows his base and how to get them to rally close to an election. Making them think everything is a liberal bias against them, an

by jjuel 6y ago

It is crazy to see how well he knows his base and how to get them to rally close to an election. Making them think everything is a liberal bias against them, and if they don't vote for his big government agenda they will receive a big government agenda. This is just one more way for him to get his base to believe everything he says versus people who actually prove what he says is a lie. He wants state run media and social media just like China. As much as he talks about hating China he would love to be China.

sp332 6y ago
And this is specifically on a tweet calling the validity of the election into question. It's blatantly wrong, but he needs his base to believe him when he says the election is rigged.
- cheeseomlit 6y ago
  Mail-in ballots make it much easier to commit voter fraud, I don't see how anyone could possibly argue to the contrary. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/pacei-voterfraudcases.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    [citation needed; editor rejected source as unreliable]
  - freshpots 6y ago
    A Heritage Foundation paper from the White House website. What a reputable source.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/review-trumps-many-unsubstantiated-allegations-voter-fraud/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/review-tr... Many states already do mail-in ballots and they're much more secure than the sketchy voting machines currently in use: https://qz.com/1783766/these-voting-machine-security-flaws-threaten-election-2020/ https://qz.com/1783766/these-voting-machine-security-flaws-t...
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    If you actually skim that document, the vast majority are simple single-vote "pleaded guilty to the charge of knowingly voting while ineligible" scenarios. They had to go back twenty years to find a thousand of these, out of billions of votes cast during that period.
  - mythz 6y ago
    It's got nothing to do with voter fraud which is another conspiracy tagline for his base to hang their propaganda on. His whole intent is to make it harder to vote and reduce voting % as much as possible in order to amplify his rabid base votes who will move heaven and earth to vote and keep their racist dear leader in power. This isn't news to anyone, he's openly said Republicans would never be elected again if it was easier to vote.
  - AshleyGrant 6y ago
    So you're telling me that The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, set out to prove how rampant an issue voter fraud is (as this is a seeming tent-pole of Trump's push to delegitimize any election that goes against him) and they came up with a whopping 1,285 cases across the entire US? What I see is that they've proven that voter fraud is not a problem in the United States. And, by extension, that there is no problem with mail-in-balloting leading to voter fraud. Looking at two states that only vote by mail, they have 27 cases of voter fraud in THE LAST TWENTY YEARS. Voter fraud, whether in person or by mail, IS NOT A PROBLEM. It's simply Trump working to sow the seeds of insurrection should he lose in November.
  - sp332 6y ago
    "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!" The claim is not that it's easier to commit fraud. The claim is that allowing vote-by-mail compromises the integrity of an election. That's why it's important to show that voter fraud is quite rare (your link includes cases back to 1990 at least) and has a fairly high chance of being detected. Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah conduct elections entirely by mail. Trump voted by mail!
  - alistairSH 6y ago
    Trump himself votes by mail, as does most of his family. Should we throw out their votes as well?
  - lowbloodsugar 6y ago
    Well I read that document you've provided as strong evidence that mail in voting is safe. You've sourced a document that is from the "mail voting is unsafe" team, and they've only been able to find a very few number of such cases, spanning thirty years (it goes back to 1990 at least), and almost all of those cases were caught before the votes affected the outcome. Can you maybe explain your thinking? Have you done the math? The document you reference is absent of impact analysis, even vague on the numbers. 1,071 incidents but how many actual votes? How many votes were actually cast? How many were caught before they were counted? Let's take Alabama. 14 reports, but actually first four are all the same incident. So 11 reports. Not off to a good start there. Nine of the remaining were single instance voting. Two were a conspiracy. One conspiracy was caught, in 1994 when it occurred, but is labeled as "Disposition: 2005", which I initially assumed meant that they were caught in 2005, and had gotten away with it. But in fact they were caught at the time because they submitted 1,400 votes in a county of 7000 people. The one that got away with it was caught at the time, and earned the role of a city commissioner of a city of 68,000 people. And yet the person was elected anyway, despite the evidence. So you've got "14" incidents, that are really only 11, and only 1 that got away with in a small city election where even they were caught yet allowed to win. So with just this one state, of the 14 claimed, there was only 1. So for 1071 that's 76. Over 30 years. There are 20,000 cities in the usa. So ~600,000 elections of all sizes they found 76 instances of successful fraud, and only in non-state-wide elections. And that's just me spending thirty minutes with your primary document. What's interesting is that the Heritage Foundation didn't publish that math. Didn't get into detail.
- RandomTisk 6y ago
  What was blatantly wrong about it?
  - camccar 6y ago
    Nothing. Facts don’t matter Only feelings. His tweet hurt our feelings
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Mail-in ballots don't generally increase the instances of election fraud. All of the "what ifs" have been investigated in the states that have had general-populace mail-in for years and been found not to occur in either (a) numbers that sway the election or (b) numbers distinguishable from in-person fraud (which is usually of the form "person not eligible to vote, but voting office screwed up and granted them a card" or "person moved and failed to notify election boards of the relocation; voted in the wrong district").
    - RandomTisk 6y ago
      Every election has at least one story of rampant incompetence and/or outright fraud where one person is able to alter hundreds to thousands of votes. For elections where it can literally be 50.2% to 49.8%, it can make all the difference.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        Rampant incompetence isn't the same as fraud, and one would still have to make the case that we lose hundreds of envelopes more often than we have an entire data-store go missing (or, for that matter, than we have a fleet of digital voting machines crash and deny access to the polls to face-to-face voters for hours).
        RandomTisk 6y ago
        Then the tweet wasn't 'factually incorrect' as was claimed, perhaps unsubstantiated given past performance isn't a guarantee of future performance but certainly election security is nothing to turn a blind eye to.
- frockington1 6y ago
  Hasn't the other side been #NotMyPresient and throwing a tantrum about the validity of the last election? Trump is not a trailblazer in this regard
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    (a) imagining there's one "other side" is a fallacy. There are multiple interest groups. Some more aligned with the President and his administration, some less. (b) you'll have to be more specific about what you mean, but the "tantrum" I've heard is that the system as set up over-represents land over people, not that the result is illegitimate. A legitimate result in a badly-crafted system is materially different from claiming the process as designed is compromised.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    I'm observing from the outside (read: the other side of the Atlantic), but my understanding is that people who say #NotMyPresident do it because of either a) a perceived lack of shared values between them and the president or b) in reference to him losing the popular vote, like several other presidents before him.
  - raziel2p 6y ago
    "The other side" has been pointing out how broken the electoral college is, not claiming that Trump is president on illegal grounds.
    - mydongle 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23329443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23329443
  - alistairSH 6y ago
    There's a massive difference between... 1. Questioning whether the Electoral College (and its tendency to devalue votes in some states) has a place in the modern US. 2. Questioning whether the election itself is completely rigged (via fraudulent votes). #1 is the question many liberals have been asking. #2 is thee claim that the entire GOP has been making for years, despite their own investigations never turning up more than a few individuals voting fraudulently (but never systematic fraud perpetrated by the political left, as they claim).
hn_check 6y ago
"It is crazy to see how well he knows his base" There's a very loud contingent of his base right here on HN. Weren't all of the nuts supposed to have migrated to Gab or whatever? They stay on Twitter because they seek legitimacy, and know that if they're all together the critical mass of idiocy would be overwhelmed and they would be seen for what they are. Instead you have the fake PhD lady, guy who pisses in his own mouth, and the liar-in-chief all debasing Twitter in an unending torrent. The internet is decentralized. These people can go elsewhere.
brodouevencode 6y ago
Welcome to politics, where the rhetoric is made up and truth doesn't matter.
gameswithgo 6y ago
It isn't that he has a special insight into his base, he is just willing to abandon any sense of truth or decency to flame it. That is what is remarkable about him.
- TrackerFF 6y ago
  One can hate or like Biden, but he put it perfectly: This is a prostitution of the presidency. Nothing more, nothing less. Republicans are willing to look away, and let Trump run rampant, if it means that they'll get their part in return (judges, etc.) Trump, in turn, will say anything. He has no restrains, and knows this - he can say absolutely anything, and no-one within will do or say anything. Right now, the presidency (for Trump) is a case of survival. He needs to remain in power, in order to escape whatever civil charges he'll face. For his own sake, Trump should have never ran for Presidency. He hates his job, and got lost in his own ego.
  - calvinmorrison 6y ago
    Dude you sound delusional
    - TrackerFF 6y ago
      Well, has Trump learned his lesson?
      - zentiggr 6y ago
        Is he even capable of learning after all this time practicing The Art of the Lie?
    - aerovistae 6y ago
      which part of that is delusion?
- busymom0 6y ago
  > any sense of truth The very "fact check" twitter claims to have done is wrong. I have provided sources in my previous comments.

by jjuel 6y ago

sp332 6y ago

And this is specifically on a tweet calling the validity of the election into question. It's blatantly wrong, but he needs his base to believe him when he says the election is rigged.

cheeseomlit 6y ago
Mail-in ballots make it much easier to commit voter fraud, I don't see how anyone could possibly argue to the contrary. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/pacei-voterfraudcases.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  [citation needed; editor rejected source as unreliable]
- freshpots 6y ago
  A Heritage Foundation paper from the White House website. What a reputable source.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/review-trumps-many-unsubstantiated-allegations-voter-fraud/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/review-tr... Many states already do mail-in ballots and they're much more secure than the sketchy voting machines currently in use: https://qz.com/1783766/these-voting-machine-security-flaws-threaten-election-2020/ https://qz.com/1783766/these-voting-machine-security-flaws-t...
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  If you actually skim that document, the vast majority are simple single-vote "pleaded guilty to the charge of knowingly voting while ineligible" scenarios. They had to go back twenty years to find a thousand of these, out of billions of votes cast during that period.
- mythz 6y ago
  It's got nothing to do with voter fraud which is another conspiracy tagline for his base to hang their propaganda on. His whole intent is to make it harder to vote and reduce voting % as much as possible in order to amplify his rabid base votes who will move heaven and earth to vote and keep their racist dear leader in power. This isn't news to anyone, he's openly said Republicans would never be elected again if it was easier to vote.
- AshleyGrant 6y ago
  So you're telling me that The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, set out to prove how rampant an issue voter fraud is (as this is a seeming tent-pole of Trump's push to delegitimize any election that goes against him) and they came up with a whopping 1,285 cases across the entire US? What I see is that they've proven that voter fraud is not a problem in the United States. And, by extension, that there is no problem with mail-in-balloting leading to voter fraud. Looking at two states that only vote by mail, they have 27 cases of voter fraud in THE LAST TWENTY YEARS. Voter fraud, whether in person or by mail, IS NOT A PROBLEM. It's simply Trump working to sow the seeds of insurrection should he lose in November.
- sp332 6y ago
  "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!" The claim is not that it's easier to commit fraud. The claim is that allowing vote-by-mail compromises the integrity of an election. That's why it's important to show that voter fraud is quite rare (your link includes cases back to 1990 at least) and has a fairly high chance of being detected. Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah conduct elections entirely by mail. Trump voted by mail!
- alistairSH 6y ago
  Trump himself votes by mail, as does most of his family. Should we throw out their votes as well?
- lowbloodsugar 6y ago
  Well I read that document you've provided as strong evidence that mail in voting is safe. You've sourced a document that is from the "mail voting is unsafe" team, and they've only been able to find a very few number of such cases, spanning thirty years (it goes back to 1990 at least), and almost all of those cases were caught before the votes affected the outcome. Can you maybe explain your thinking? Have you done the math? The document you reference is absent of impact analysis, even vague on the numbers. 1,071 incidents but how many actual votes? How many votes were actually cast? How many were caught before they were counted? Let's take Alabama. 14 reports, but actually first four are all the same incident. So 11 reports. Not off to a good start there. Nine of the remaining were single instance voting. Two were a conspiracy. One conspiracy was caught, in 1994 when it occurred, but is labeled as "Disposition: 2005", which I initially assumed meant that they were caught in 2005, and had gotten away with it. But in fact they were caught at the time because they submitted 1,400 votes in a county of 7000 people. The one that got away with it was caught at the time, and earned the role of a city commissioner of a city of 68,000 people. And yet the person was elected anyway, despite the evidence. So you've got "14" incidents, that are really only 11, and only 1 that got away with in a small city election where even they were caught yet allowed to win. So with just this one state, of the 14 claimed, there was only 1. So for 1071 that's 76. Over 30 years. There are 20,000 cities in the usa. So ~600,000 elections of all sizes they found 76 instances of successful fraud, and only in non-state-wide elections. And that's just me spending thirty minutes with your primary document. What's interesting is that the Heritage Foundation didn't publish that math. Didn't get into detail.
RandomTisk 6y ago
What was blatantly wrong about it?
- camccar 6y ago
  Nothing. Facts don’t matter Only feelings. His tweet hurt our feelings
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Mail-in ballots don't generally increase the instances of election fraud. All of the "what ifs" have been investigated in the states that have had general-populace mail-in for years and been found not to occur in either (a) numbers that sway the election or (b) numbers distinguishable from in-person fraud (which is usually of the form "person not eligible to vote, but voting office screwed up and granted them a card" or "person moved and failed to notify election boards of the relocation; voted in the wrong district").
  - RandomTisk 6y ago
    Every election has at least one story of rampant incompetence and/or outright fraud where one person is able to alter hundreds to thousands of votes. For elections where it can literally be 50.2% to 49.8%, it can make all the difference.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      Rampant incompetence isn't the same as fraud, and one would still have to make the case that we lose hundreds of envelopes more often than we have an entire data-store go missing (or, for that matter, than we have a fleet of digital voting machines crash and deny access to the polls to face-to-face voters for hours).
      - RandomTisk 6y ago
        Then the tweet wasn't 'factually incorrect' as was claimed, perhaps unsubstantiated given past performance isn't a guarantee of future performance but certainly election security is nothing to turn a blind eye to.
frockington1 6y ago
Hasn't the other side been #NotMyPresient and throwing a tantrum about the validity of the last election? Trump is not a trailblazer in this regard
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  (a) imagining there's one "other side" is a fallacy. There are multiple interest groups. Some more aligned with the President and his administration, some less. (b) you'll have to be more specific about what you mean, but the "tantrum" I've heard is that the system as set up over-represents land over people, not that the result is illegitimate. A legitimate result in a badly-crafted system is materially different from claiming the process as designed is compromised.
- majewsky 6y ago
  I'm observing from the outside (read: the other side of the Atlantic), but my understanding is that people who say #NotMyPresident do it because of either a) a perceived lack of shared values between them and the president or b) in reference to him losing the popular vote, like several other presidents before him.
- raziel2p 6y ago
  "The other side" has been pointing out how broken the electoral college is, not claiming that Trump is president on illegal grounds.
  - mydongle 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23329443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23329443
- alistairSH 6y ago
  There's a massive difference between... 1. Questioning whether the Electoral College (and its tendency to devalue votes in some states) has a place in the modern US. 2. Questioning whether the election itself is completely rigged (via fraudulent votes). #1 is the question many liberals have been asking. #2 is thee claim that the entire GOP has been making for years, despite their own investigations never turning up more than a few individuals voting fraudulently (but never systematic fraud perpetrated by the political left, as they claim).

hn_check 6y ago

"It is crazy to see how well he knows his base" There's a very loud contingent of his base right here on HN. Weren't all of the nuts supposed to have migrated to Gab or whatever? They stay on Twitter because they seek legitimacy, and know that if they're all together the critical mass of idiocy would be overwhelmed and they would be seen for what they are. Instead you have the fake PhD lady, guy who pisses in his own mouth, and the liar-in-chief all debasing Twitter in an unending torrent. The internet is decentralized. These people can go elsewhere.

brodouevencode 6y ago

Welcome to politics, where the rhetoric is made up and truth doesn't matter.

gameswithgo 6y ago

It isn't that he has a special insight into his base, he is just willing to abandon any sense of truth or decency to flame it. That is what is remarkable about him.

TrackerFF 6y ago
One can hate or like Biden, but he put it perfectly: This is a prostitution of the presidency. Nothing more, nothing less. Republicans are willing to look away, and let Trump run rampant, if it means that they'll get their part in return (judges, etc.) Trump, in turn, will say anything. He has no restrains, and knows this - he can say absolutely anything, and no-one within will do or say anything. Right now, the presidency (for Trump) is a case of survival. He needs to remain in power, in order to escape whatever civil charges he'll face. For his own sake, Trump should have never ran for Presidency. He hates his job, and got lost in his own ego.
- calvinmorrison 6y ago
  Dude you sound delusional
  - TrackerFF 6y ago
    Well, has Trump learned his lesson?
    - zentiggr 6y ago
      Is he even capable of learning after all this time practicing The Art of the Lie?
  - aerovistae 6y ago
    which part of that is delusion?
busymom0 6y ago
> any sense of truth The very "fact check" twitter claims to have done is wrong. I have provided sources in my previous comments.