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> the left is... manipulative when it comes to voting to the point when half of the country does not believe in elections I disagree with essentially everythin

> the left is... manipulative when it comes to voting to the point when half of the country does not believe in elections I disagree with essentially everything you're saying, but how on Earth can you write that with a straight face? I mean, five seconds on Google gives me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump#2016_Presidential_election_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Dona... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump#Voting_by_mail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Dona... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump#2020_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Dona... Many elected Republicans are still lying about the election results. How is that 'the left' being 'manipulative when it comes to voting'? Not to mention the slew of disenfranchisement policies being drawn up by Republicans at the moment. > The right simply does not exist in the institutional level at this point, all they can do is whine about excesses of the left Erm, what "left" are you referring to? US politics is a battle between Pepsi vs Coke https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020

tekknik 6y ago
> Many elected Republicans are still lying about the election results. So we have voter IDs and secure voting? Did you miss the part about lack of confidence in voting? If we don’t have voter IDs how is the right lying? Or are you just trying to reaffirm the narrative?
- EGreg 6y ago
  Because having voter IDs is not the only or even the main thing that the right — a very vocal minority of the right, by the way — had an issue with. There were a lot of conflated FUD about voting machines doctored videos shipments of empty votes observers turned away disappearing ink The funny thing is that Trump’s own appointed people, including Krebs who we cite here a lot, but also Barr and others admitted that there was not nearly enough evidence of fraud to overturn any election result in any state. And even funnier is how FOX and NewsMax debunked themselves and now chase the My Pillow CEO and others off their show for suggesting there was voting machine fraud — because they got cease and desist letters and warnings. https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/02/03/newsmax-mike-lindell-2020-election-orig.cnn-business https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/02/03/newsmax-mike-... After all, this is really easy to check. The irony for me was Texas suing the other states and then West floating a trial baloon to secede from the union (great form, West!) because they accused the other states of vote manipulation... this from a state that works hard to close HUNDREDS of poll places in Democratic areas ahead of the election to keep the state voting Republican, in blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act (neutered by the supreme court). And no one sues Texas in federal court for that. For Republicans, mail-in ballots were the end-run around their extensive efforts to close polling places and require voting IDs and other ways to tip the balance in their party’s favor. If people can just vote from home then all that effort to drive an hour and stand in a long line will be unnecessary! So they aren’t being totally honest about their FUD being nonpartisan either.
  - tekknik 6y ago
    The second dem to tell the right what the problem they have is. When are you people going to open your ears? You think ignoring the problem will work?
    - EGreg 6y ago
      I just want to be clear – I said it is a small, vocal minority on the right. Most of "the right" rejected the MAGA conspiracy theories and stopped supporting the FUD. As I have pointed out, even a lot of the mainstream right-wing media has started to "deplatform" people who continue speaking about this "problem". The Supreme court and other courts have thrown out 98% of all the cases, after applying rules of standing and evidence [1]. After all that money came in to campaign promising to "fight for every LEGAL vote to be counted", Giuliani never even applied to the supreme court. A lot of it seems to have been about taking in massive amounts of money (up to 1 billion dollars) from faithful Trump voters via the campaigns. Giuliani distanced himself from Sidney Powell who actually wanted to go to the supreme court, seemingly in order to not share the large sums of cash coming in from MAGA supporters. Also, I am not "a dem". You assume too much. And btw, many people on the right, including social conservatives and fiscal conservatives, are also very critical of the Republican leadership. Here is far more information about why[2]. 1. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-pennsylvania-elections-us-supreme-court-5cc6aee8c328c7bb1d423244b979bcec https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-pennsylvan... 2. https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-believe-Republicans-are-evil/answer/Gregory-Magarshak https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-believe-Republicans...
      - tekknik 6y ago
        Again, if you’re focusing on the lawsuits you’ve missed the point. Are you aware there is an extreme left bias online? Knowing that, and today’s extreme cancel culture can you explain why you’re not seeing more people talk about this? Even here on HN these posts have support, until dems downvote it beyond the upvotes. There’s that bias! Meanwhile in actual face to face conversations people can’t stop talking about it. Some have given up out of desperation but pointing to lack of media culture and deplatforming does nothing but support the claims and issues i’m pointing out.
- tzs 6y ago
  > So we have voter IDs and secure voting? We don't have voter ID checks at the actual polling place for casting your vote, but we have signature checks and comparisons of who purported to vote with who is actually registered to vote at that polling place, and there are checks and verification involved in getting to that point. This is sufficient to catch any double voting or voting as someone else that occurs at sufficient scale to be above the normal error rate. The allegations still being made about election fraud by some Republicans have nothing to do with people double voting or voting as someone else. They are that election workers slipped in extra pre-filled ballots, or that they ran Biden ballots through the tabulating machines multiple times, or that the machines were programmed to switch votes, or that there are statistical anomalies in the vote totals or counting that could only be there due to fraud. Every one of these is based on one or more of the following kinds of things: 1. There is simply no way, they say, Trump could possible have gotten less votes than Biden. There must have been fraud. (Variation: Trump got more votes in 2020 than Obama got in 2008 or Clinton got in 2016, so how could he lose? Completely ignoring that voter turnout was a lot higher in 2020) 2. Someone seeing something and misunderstanding it. E.g., one of the prominent claims of running ballots through the tabulating machine multiple times was actually an election worker before the count started running a test ballot through multiple times. That's part of the standard pre-election test and setup procedure that the manufacturer's instruction call for before each election. The person who saw it happening was a volunteer who had skipped the training session where they covered that. 3. Taking things out of context. E.g., surveillance video purporting to show extra ballots being sneaked in to a counting area overnight, where we see someone pull boxes out from under a table and remove a bunch of ballots and start counting them. We do indeed see that. But if you obtain the whole video instead of that short clip, you see that those boxes contain the ballots that were being counted when it was time for the counters to take a break. They put the uncounted ballots in their standard ballot storage lock boxes, put the boxes under the table, took their break, came back, retrieved the ballots from the boxes, and resumed counting. All completely normal. 4. Ignoring the recounts. The machines alleged to have switched Trump votes leave a paper trail. The hand recounts from the places where this switching is alleged to have occurred match the machine count. 5. Misunderstanding statistics. E.g., claims that first digit distributions of candidate totals across districts or counties not following Benford's law is proof of fraud. The mistake here is that Benford's law only applies to certain kinds of samplings of certain kinds of distributions. The distribution of population and of votes across districts or counties in most areas is not the right kind for this. 6. Ignoring that in-person election day votes are counted in many areas before mail-in ballots are counted. (Indeed, in some Republican controlled states, they have passed laws preventing election officials from starting to count mail-in ballots until the polls close). Combine this with COVID in many "rural red, urban blue" states, where in-person urban voting often means long crowded lines at polling places, and you had a much higher percentage of urban voters going to mail-in voting than is usual. On top of that, Democrats on average were more likely to take COVID seriously, further shifting mail-in votes to be more likely to be from Democrats. Result: in effect those states ended up counting Republican ballots first, then Democrat ballots. And so of course Trump was ahead in the evening, and then Biden got most of the later counted mail-in ballots, which mostly came from the large urban areas. None of that has anything whatsoever to do with voter ID.
honkdaddy 6y ago
Do you recall in 2016 when the mainstream left told Americans (without any factual basis) that Russians had hacked and stolen the election? That Trump was "Not Our President" and never will be? The only difference between that lie and the one peddled by Trump and the ilk is that the GOP was confident (delusional?) enough that they brought it to the Supreme Court.
- jeromegv 6y ago
  There's a big difference between partisans doing that, and an actual president claiming the election is stolen for months, asking his supporters to march on the Capitol to deny the rights of voters to have their vote confirmed, calling state officials to ask them to "find votes", etc. You said it, they brought all of that to courts, which means it was entirely supported by the full establishment of the party, not just a fringe part of it. The fact you can't even see the major difference makes me think you are clearly looking at just one side.
  - honkdaddy 6y ago
    But it wasn't a fringe part of it, that's the precise problem. On May 16, 2017, Nancy Pelosi tweeted "Our election was hijacked. There is no question." Is Pelosi considered a fringe part of the Democratic Party now?
    - headhuntermdk 6y ago
      The left didn't storm the capital
    - chriswarbo 6y ago
      I think that's an apples-to-oranges comparison (no pun intended). It would be fairer to compare the Democrats' allegations about Russia to the Republicans' allegations about China, i.e. accusations that Biden is anywhere between a useful-idiot-for to an outright-puppet-of the CCP. AFAIK the Democrat position has been that, for both elections, the voting/counting mechanisms have withstood targetted attacks by state actors, and in both cases gave overall tallies which correspond to the electorate's choices, within an acceptable margin of error (I'm stopping at the tallies, to avoid the separate debate regarding the electoral college versus the popular vote). Some Democrats also allege foreign interference with the electorate's choices, through widespread misinformation and propaganda. As an extreme example, fewer people may have voted for Trump if Russian troll farms weren't claiming that Clinton harvests child organs (or whatever Q-adjacent bullshit was spreading around Facebook at the time). It's perfectly consistent to make that claim, whilst also claiming that those lie-induced Trump votes were subsequently collated and counted correctly towards the totals. AFAIK the Republican-led investigation found the Democrats' position to be essentially correct, that there were targetted attacks on infrastructure, and misinformation/propaganda attacks nudging the electorate towards Trump. No evidence of collusion was found, i.e. that Trump was working for foreign adversaries, or foreign adversaries were working for Trump, or they were coordinating ahead of time. That would (of course) have been even worse, but the lack of (evidence of) such collusion doesn't make the idea of foreign adversaries weaponising US voters for their own ends any more palatable. In short, choosing positions/policies/rhetoric that is useful to adversaries is not itself criminal; it could simply be naivety or coincidence. Yet knowing that a candidate's positions/policies/rhetoric is useful to adversaries would be pertinent information for voters.

tekknik 6y ago

> Many elected Republicans are still lying about the election results. So we have voter IDs and secure voting? Did you miss the part about lack of confidence in voting? If we don’t have voter IDs how is the right lying? Or are you just trying to reaffirm the narrative?

EGreg 6y ago
Because having voter IDs is not the only or even the main thing that the right — a very vocal minority of the right, by the way — had an issue with. There were a lot of conflated FUD about voting machines doctored videos shipments of empty votes observers turned away disappearing ink The funny thing is that Trump’s own appointed people, including Krebs who we cite here a lot, but also Barr and others admitted that there was not nearly enough evidence of fraud to overturn any election result in any state. And even funnier is how FOX and NewsMax debunked themselves and now chase the My Pillow CEO and others off their show for suggesting there was voting machine fraud — because they got cease and desist letters and warnings. https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/02/03/newsmax-mike-lindell-2020-election-orig.cnn-business https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/02/03/newsmax-mike-... After all, this is really easy to check. The irony for me was Texas suing the other states and then West floating a trial baloon to secede from the union (great form, West!) because they accused the other states of vote manipulation... this from a state that works hard to close HUNDREDS of poll places in Democratic areas ahead of the election to keep the state voting Republican, in blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act (neutered by the supreme court). And no one sues Texas in federal court for that. For Republicans, mail-in ballots were the end-run around their extensive efforts to close polling places and require voting IDs and other ways to tip the balance in their party’s favor. If people can just vote from home then all that effort to drive an hour and stand in a long line will be unnecessary! So they aren’t being totally honest about their FUD being nonpartisan either.
- tekknik 6y ago
  The second dem to tell the right what the problem they have is. When are you people going to open your ears? You think ignoring the problem will work?
  - EGreg 6y ago
    I just want to be clear – I said it is a small, vocal minority on the right. Most of "the right" rejected the MAGA conspiracy theories and stopped supporting the FUD. As I have pointed out, even a lot of the mainstream right-wing media has started to "deplatform" people who continue speaking about this "problem". The Supreme court and other courts have thrown out 98% of all the cases, after applying rules of standing and evidence [1]. After all that money came in to campaign promising to "fight for every LEGAL vote to be counted", Giuliani never even applied to the supreme court. A lot of it seems to have been about taking in massive amounts of money (up to 1 billion dollars) from faithful Trump voters via the campaigns. Giuliani distanced himself from Sidney Powell who actually wanted to go to the supreme court, seemingly in order to not share the large sums of cash coming in from MAGA supporters. Also, I am not "a dem". You assume too much. And btw, many people on the right, including social conservatives and fiscal conservatives, are also very critical of the Republican leadership. Here is far more information about why[2]. 1. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-pennsylvania-elections-us-supreme-court-5cc6aee8c328c7bb1d423244b979bcec https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-pennsylvan... 2. https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-believe-Republicans-are-evil/answer/Gregory-Magarshak https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-believe-Republicans...
    - tekknik 6y ago
      Again, if you’re focusing on the lawsuits you’ve missed the point. Are you aware there is an extreme left bias online? Knowing that, and today’s extreme cancel culture can you explain why you’re not seeing more people talk about this? Even here on HN these posts have support, until dems downvote it beyond the upvotes. There’s that bias! Meanwhile in actual face to face conversations people can’t stop talking about it. Some have given up out of desperation but pointing to lack of media culture and deplatforming does nothing but support the claims and issues i’m pointing out.
tzs 6y ago
> So we have voter IDs and secure voting? We don't have voter ID checks at the actual polling place for casting your vote, but we have signature checks and comparisons of who purported to vote with who is actually registered to vote at that polling place, and there are checks and verification involved in getting to that point. This is sufficient to catch any double voting or voting as someone else that occurs at sufficient scale to be above the normal error rate. The allegations still being made about election fraud by some Republicans have nothing to do with people double voting or voting as someone else. They are that election workers slipped in extra pre-filled ballots, or that they ran Biden ballots through the tabulating machines multiple times, or that the machines were programmed to switch votes, or that there are statistical anomalies in the vote totals or counting that could only be there due to fraud. Every one of these is based on one or more of the following kinds of things: 1. There is simply no way, they say, Trump could possible have gotten less votes than Biden. There must have been fraud. (Variation: Trump got more votes in 2020 than Obama got in 2008 or Clinton got in 2016, so how could he lose? Completely ignoring that voter turnout was a lot higher in 2020) 2. Someone seeing something and misunderstanding it. E.g., one of the prominent claims of running ballots through the tabulating machine multiple times was actually an election worker before the count started running a test ballot through multiple times. That's part of the standard pre-election test and setup procedure that the manufacturer's instruction call for before each election. The person who saw it happening was a volunteer who had skipped the training session where they covered that. 3. Taking things out of context. E.g., surveillance video purporting to show extra ballots being sneaked in to a counting area overnight, where we see someone pull boxes out from under a table and remove a bunch of ballots and start counting them. We do indeed see that. But if you obtain the whole video instead of that short clip, you see that those boxes contain the ballots that were being counted when it was time for the counters to take a break. They put the uncounted ballots in their standard ballot storage lock boxes, put the boxes under the table, took their break, came back, retrieved the ballots from the boxes, and resumed counting. All completely normal. 4. Ignoring the recounts. The machines alleged to have switched Trump votes leave a paper trail. The hand recounts from the places where this switching is alleged to have occurred match the machine count. 5. Misunderstanding statistics. E.g., claims that first digit distributions of candidate totals across districts or counties not following Benford's law is proof of fraud. The mistake here is that Benford's law only applies to certain kinds of samplings of certain kinds of distributions. The distribution of population and of votes across districts or counties in most areas is not the right kind for this. 6. Ignoring that in-person election day votes are counted in many areas before mail-in ballots are counted. (Indeed, in some Republican controlled states, they have passed laws preventing election officials from starting to count mail-in ballots until the polls close). Combine this with COVID in many "rural red, urban blue" states, where in-person urban voting often means long crowded lines at polling places, and you had a much higher percentage of urban voters going to mail-in voting than is usual. On top of that, Democrats on average were more likely to take COVID seriously, further shifting mail-in votes to be more likely to be from Democrats. Result: in effect those states ended up counting Republican ballots first, then Democrat ballots. And so of course Trump was ahead in the evening, and then Biden got most of the later counted mail-in ballots, which mostly came from the large urban areas. None of that has anything whatsoever to do with voter ID.

honkdaddy 6y ago

Do you recall in 2016 when the mainstream left told Americans (without any factual basis) that Russians had hacked and stolen the election? That Trump was "Not Our President" and never will be? The only difference between that lie and the one peddled by Trump and the ilk is that the GOP was confident (delusional?) enough that they brought it to the Supreme Court.

jeromegv 6y ago
There's a big difference between partisans doing that, and an actual president claiming the election is stolen for months, asking his supporters to march on the Capitol to deny the rights of voters to have their vote confirmed, calling state officials to ask them to "find votes", etc. You said it, they brought all of that to courts, which means it was entirely supported by the full establishment of the party, not just a fringe part of it. The fact you can't even see the major difference makes me think you are clearly looking at just one side.
- honkdaddy 6y ago
  But it wasn't a fringe part of it, that's the precise problem. On May 16, 2017, Nancy Pelosi tweeted "Our election was hijacked. There is no question." Is Pelosi considered a fringe part of the Democratic Party now?
  - headhuntermdk 6y ago
    The left didn't storm the capital
  - chriswarbo 6y ago
    I think that's an apples-to-oranges comparison (no pun intended). It would be fairer to compare the Democrats' allegations about Russia to the Republicans' allegations about China, i.e. accusations that Biden is anywhere between a useful-idiot-for to an outright-puppet-of the CCP. AFAIK the Democrat position has been that, for both elections, the voting/counting mechanisms have withstood targetted attacks by state actors, and in both cases gave overall tallies which correspond to the electorate's choices, within an acceptable margin of error (I'm stopping at the tallies, to avoid the separate debate regarding the electoral college versus the popular vote). Some Democrats also allege foreign interference with the electorate's choices, through widespread misinformation and propaganda. As an extreme example, fewer people may have voted for Trump if Russian troll farms weren't claiming that Clinton harvests child organs (or whatever Q-adjacent bullshit was spreading around Facebook at the time). It's perfectly consistent to make that claim, whilst also claiming that those lie-induced Trump votes were subsequently collated and counted correctly towards the totals. AFAIK the Republican-led investigation found the Democrats' position to be essentially correct, that there were targetted attacks on infrastructure, and misinformation/propaganda attacks nudging the electorate towards Trump. No evidence of collusion was found, i.e. that Trump was working for foreign adversaries, or foreign adversaries were working for Trump, or they were coordinating ahead of time. That would (of course) have been even worse, but the lack of (evidence of) such collusion doesn't make the idea of foreign adversaries weaponising US voters for their own ends any more palatable. In short, choosing positions/policies/rhetoric that is useful to adversaries is not itself criminal; it could simply be naivety or coincidence. Yet knowing that a candidate's positions/policies/rhetoric is useful to adversaries would be pertinent information for voters.