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We're going to hit a breaking point soon on faith in elections. We have poll workers refusing to work due to threats to their safety. We have an increasing numb

We're going to hit a breaking point soon on faith in elections. We have poll workers refusing to work due to threats to their safety. We have an increasing number of candidates and elected officials who believe the last election was stolen in positions to override actual election results. We have an increasing number of people who want to "police" the polls (this one troubles me the most). And of course there's been a huge increase in restrictive and oftentimes convoluted voting laws that are going to confuse the hell out of people and result in many votes not being cast or counted. We already have the majority of one party believing the last election as stolen despite a comprehensive lack of evidence. It won't take too many more people until a clear majority simply stop believing any election results are valid.

46756e 4y ago
The stolen election thing is very dumb, but people forget the same argument was made in 2016 with Russia “hacking the election” with no evidence found.
- runnerup 4y ago
  And the same argument was made over the 2000 elections against Diebold in Ohio and Florida. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
  - ajross 4y ago
    Not by major thought leaders or elected representatives. That was a popular conspiracy theory among the too-connected internet left. The problem in the modern world is that you have elected republicans and talking heads on FOX News saying the same thing to millions of believing partisans.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    That doesn't allege that hacking happened; it alleges (and demonstrates) that voting machines at the time were really shittily secured.
- standardUser 4y ago
  There is plenty of evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, to the point where it's impossible to say they did not with a straight face. Just because it wasn't directly "hacked" doesn't mean there was not overwhelming evidence of interference. But in the end, very few people considered that election "stolen".
  - whiddershins 4y ago
    If Russia can be said to have interfered in the 2016 election, a literal cabal (their words not mine) certainly ‘interfered’ in 2020. https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      > They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. An information campaign and a disinformation campaign are hardly the same.
    - standardUser 4y ago
      Domestic groups and individuals are expected to be involved in elections. Foreign ones, by law, are not. An obvious difference and I doubt you're unaware of it.
    - babypuncher 4y ago
      Providing voters with accurate information about how and where they can cast their ballot is not the same as buying ad space on Facebook to run ads with doctored images and outright false information.
      - mgkimsal 4y ago
        > false information Can we normalize just saying "lies" when things are lies?
    - 4y ago
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  Not sure I'd say 'no evidence' at all. It wasn't "hacking" in a technical sense as much as "social media hacking" - bots, trolls, huge numbers of lies spread via memes, etc. Some (much?) of that was traced back to Russia, IIRC.
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    Attribution is notoriously hard. Also, general propaganda pretty much to be expected. It's the same thing in the last election, it's absolutely expected that some people did commit voting fraud and that some votes were counted wrong. The big question is the scale of the operation and whether it impacted the results. It appears to me that the opinion people have is very related to how much they like the result.
    - mgkimsal 4y ago
      We investigated 'russia' election interference allegations. Some 'interference' was found, largely pushing down HRC and aiding (even if indirectly) Trump. We investigated claims of 'stolen election' (Arizona, other states) and found marginally more votes for Biden in subsequent recounts. Even if that had been reversed, the numbers would have not have been impactful. Other investigations in the last few years have turned up smatterings of 'voter fraud', and it usually seems to be Trump supporters voting fraudulently. My opinion is that we've always had small bits of 'bad' votes (intentional or not), but with continued drumbeats on that topic, it's motivating some Trump supporters to commit fraud in an effort to try to balance out what they believe (wrongly) to be 'the other side' committing fraud. I had a friend die on Election Day 2020. He'd cast an early ballot. I often think of him when we get these refrains of "dead people voting!!! it's fraud!!!". I do not know if his vote was counted or not (I assume it would have been) - this was in southeastern PA, so there may have been some recounts that removed ballots like that???
- ajross 4y ago
  > same argument was made in 2016 By who? A handful of internet nutjobs, surely. No one in a position of power or influence ever claimed that the election results were fraudulent in the sense that today's elected republicans are straight up claiming. (What was claimed, and largely substantiated, was that one campaign appeared to be coordinating closely with Russian interests during the campaign. And indeed people were upset by that. But again, that's not a claim about the election.)
  - seneca 4y ago
    > By who? A handful of internet nutjobs, surely. No one in a position of power or influence ever claimed that the election results were fraudulent This is 100% revisionist history, and a typical ploy to try to excuse bad behavior. 'Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election' https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      The full paragraph has a lot more nuance: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-rodham-clinton-trump-is-a-corrupt-human-tornado/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-rodham-clinton-trump-is... > "No, it doesn't kill me because he knows he's an illegitimate president. I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used – from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did," she said. ("Hacking" here refers to the undisputed hacking of Democrats' internal emails, not the voting machines. https://apnews.com/article/technology-europe-russia-hacking-only-on-ap-dea73efc01594839957c3c9a6c962b8a https://apnews.com/article/technology-europe-russia-hacking-...)
      - onionisafruit 4y ago
        I’m not sure it’s entirely undisputed. Some people think it was leaked by a Bernie supporter who worked for the DNC and wanted to expose them rigging the primaries against him.
- duxup 4y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "hacking the election". Attempts to influence the election existed. But that phrase specifically, I'm not sure exactly what you mean.
- phailhaus 4y ago
  Mueller's report explicitly said that it found extensive interference by Russia, and that Trump and his team "expected to benefit" from it. The conversation wasn't about "hacking the election", it was about "collusion" in the run-up.
- clint 4y ago
  How can you say there was no evidence found of Russian interference in the 2016 election? There was, in fact, a startling amount of evidence uncovered and made public.
- adamj9431 4y ago
  I admit I'm biased, but I don't remember this. I do remember concerns that Russia had interfered with the election, which is was found to be true (see Mueller report, Cambridge Analytica, etc.) There were also less well founded concerns that Trump himself was not only helped by but actually colluding with the Russians, which all evidence points to being false. Most importantly, Hillary Clinton conceded the election the next day, as did Al Gore in 2000 once it was clear he didn't have a path to victory. Both pledged to support the victor. Trump hasn't done that, two years on.
- acdha 4y ago
  Can you provide citations? The claims which dominated mainstream coverage were not about hacking the election system itself but interference with things like social media campaigns or hacking the DNC’s email service to mine for PR dirt, which is by now well-documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20... Please identify specific people and times for any claims - I’m sure you can find some nut on truthout.org claiming that the GRU hacked voting machines but that’s not the same as a lie becoming the most important GOP litmus test leading to a violent assault on the U.S. Congress trying to prevent the election process from being accurately completed.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  Nobody with real power suggested Russia actually hacked the 2016 election. Hilary Clinton conceded the election, and she certainly didn't send an army of crazed supporters to take over the capitol in a poor attempt to overturn the results. We didn't have Democratic governers and Attorneys General suing to overturn the results of their own elections. In 2016, Russian hackers hacked both the DNC and GOP, and selectively released information collected from the DNC in order to hurt their ongoiong campaign. Russian actors also ran interference campaigns on social media. These are all established facts. They are also not allegations of fraud, simply pointing out that these actions quite possibly had an impact on the outcome of the election. What Republicans have been claiming for almost two years now is that Democrats have committed outright election fraud. They have accused Democrats of everything from tampering with voting machines to ballot stuffing to throwing out Republican votes, and they make all of these accusations without a shred of evidence. Many Republicans in office today have taken the hard stance that Joe Biden was not elected President.
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  Yeah, Russiagate is QAnon for liberals.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    Then how do you explain the Mueller report (authored by a Republican prosecutor, who was appointed by a Republican DAG, who was nominated by a Republican President and confirmed by a Republican majority Senate); and the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference (chaired by a Republican Senator with a majority of Republican members), both concluding that Russia, in fact, interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump; and that the Trump campaign, at best, passively welcomed this help, but at worst actually invited and facilitated it?
mgkimsal 4y ago
Don't forget people getting arrested for registering to vote.
- tamaharbor 4y ago
  Source?
gigatexal 4y ago
Yeah. I know. I’d almost just let Trump have another 4 years if we could just restore faith in democracy and see our elected officials compromise across the isle more. And for QAnon to never have happened. Too many folks with guns believe that nonsense.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  You think more Trump would help? He’s the one who started pushing the stolen election idea before votes even started. He’s a danger to democracy.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    > He’s the one who started pushing the stolen election idea before votes even started. Omitted from your statement is that he first did this in 2016. He was prepping a "the election was stolen from me" claim at that time when it looked like he might lose, but when he ended up winning, he still claimed voter fraud had occurred. He said he would have won by more if NH hadn't been stolen by illegal immigrants who were sent via bus to cast fraudulent votes. He started a commission to find evidence of that, and it dissolved after it couldn't make any progress (because no such fraud existed). This was a footnote in 2017 many people have forgotten, but it presaged 2020.
  - itbeho 4y ago
    By your logic, Hillary Clinton is also a "danger to democracy". https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-election-160716779.html https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi...
    - vlunkr 4y ago
      I'm good with that.
      - itbeho 4y ago
        I'm good with that too :)
babypuncher 4y ago
> We already have the majority of one party believing the last election as stolen despite a comprehensive lack of evidence. This is the part that gets me. I don't know how anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see this behavior and then still support the people perpetrating it.
- desindol 4y ago
  It’s easy everyone you interact with thinks the same and your perception gets skewed to believe your bubble represents the whole population.
  - rektide 4y ago
    And the voted out president does everything in their power to delegitimize the process.
- toomim 4y ago
  When you don't understand them, that's how you know you're in a bubble. Try getting out and talking to them.
  - zcw100 4y ago
    "So what has you so upset?"....."Comet Ping-pong pedo ring, contrails, Q, where we go one we go all, derrrrr" Nope, coming in loud and clear, not a bubble problem.
    - onionisafruit 4y ago
      Is that a conversation you had or a summary of what you’ve read about your political opponents on the internet?
      - 93po 4y ago
        I think we all know the answer to this
linuxftw 4y ago
- ModernMech 4y ago
  What you're alluding to as nefarious are bog-standard practices and results that have been true since elections have been a thing. It's been true in every election that the full count takes maybe a week or more to fully tally. During this period, of course people go home and sleep. The counting has always paused and resumed. And given your complaint about inaccurate tallies, why would you want tired people counting 24/7, when they would make more mistakes? Likewise, the recount total always differs by some margin. That's because counting to large numbers is actually hard. It's not like counting to 10 where you arrive at 10 every time. Counting to a 160 million is error-prone and the results are never 100% the same for any number of innocuous reasons. > Finally, there was extra-legal processes of voting introduced with very little oversight The most hilarious of which was Pennsylvania, where PA Republican state legislatures introduced those changes, and then complained about them after the fact when their candidate lost! That just goes to show me the complaints are disingenuous, and wouldn't have materialized had their candidate won.
  - linuxftw 4y ago
    > What you're alluding to as nefarious are bog-standard practices and results that have been true since elections have been a thing. It's been true in every election that the full count takes maybe a week or more to fully tally. During this period, of course people go home and sleep. Maybe this is acceptable to you, it isn't to me. That's a system that's ripe for abuse. > That's because counting to large numbers is actually hard Nobody should be counting extremely large numbers of ballots. That's why there are smaller voting precincts (curiously, some areas decided to do away with this system because putting everyone in once place was safer for covid...). It should also be possible to know, prior to tallying outcomes, how many ballots were cast in each location. That number should be immediately transmitted, and the total in each race should be no more than that number. I'm confident Disney world can tell you how many customers entered their park on a given day, it's not rocket science. So, it doesn't really matter to me what the outcome is, it matters what the process is. If I was designing a software system that had the level of controls the election system had (even without considering the electronic portion of the system), I would be escorted out of the building for incompetence. If someone says there's 'no evidence of cheating' that's because the system isn't designed to collect the evidence. In fact, it's barely a 'system' with a 'design' whatsoever.
glitcher 4y ago
I would also add gerrymandering the voting district boundaries to the list of things eroding confidence in the election process.
- seneca 4y ago
  The term gerrymandering, let alone the practice, goes back to 1812. No one alive lived in a time that it didn't exist or has even met anyone who did. It's an unsavory practice, but it's not some new thing contributing to the decline of trust in institutions.
  - comrh 4y ago
    That's assuming the scope and effects of gerrymandering, and that the public understanding of gerrymandering, remained constant, which is a big assumption.
  - asdff 4y ago
    You exist right now at a time when gerrymandering doesn't exist, for certain offices. Governors race for example.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      And so you can see the difference it makes vs non-gerrymandered races. A big, big difference.
      - NoGravitas 4y ago
        Yes; It's not uncommon for the gubernatorial race to be highly competitive in a state where one party has a solid lock on the state legislature, for example.
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    The last 20 or 30 years (i.e., the last 2 or 3 redistrictings) have seen the use of increasing amounts of data and computation to produce more accurately and more optimally gerrymandered districts. It's fundamentally the same practice that goes back to 1812, but the details actually matter in a quantitative sense.
asdff 4y ago
There's two Americas happening when it comes to voting it seems. In one you have this sort of thing going on. In the other America, voting couldn't be more trivial. I have a 10 day window to show up at the polls if I really want the in person experience, and my ballot is mailed to me no matter what in the first place weeks before its due. I can drop it off in any ballot box or even a mailbox will do. The big question is, would the outcomes even change with more access? Districts are highly manipulated to guarantee political outcomes no matter who votes, even in blue states this is true, at all levels of representative government. My extremely blue city council even gerrymanders their council districts to entrench political dynasties. Plus you have Prop 22 which has proved that an informed vote is not easy to come by among the public, and money buys policy.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > The big question is, would the outcomes even change with more access? I'd suggest the efforts to reduce access - limiting early voting, dropboxes, etc. - imply the Republicans believe this to be the case.
  - asdff 4y ago
    One theory could be that they had to do that initially to capture a state and have a power majority when redistricting comes up. Once its gerrymandered sufficiently, there is no way that they'd ever let it be uncaptured. You can let everyone vote but their vote is useless, if you've slivered the population into chunks that stymie voting power of blue votes against a swath of red voters. Ohio is already like this in many ways, blue cities held hostage by a state captured by the GOP. You have, e.g. the 9th district that takes a sliver of Cleveland and extends over 100 miles down a strip of rural coastline (1). This is the district that Dennis Kucinich (D) used to handily win until maps were remade by republicans and it extended out from Cleveland like the tentacle of a giant squid. https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/why-ohios-congressional-map-unconstitutional https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/why-ohios-congressio...
- themitigating 4y ago
  What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?" Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, referencing legal standing. “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” said Michael Carvin, the lawyer defending the state's restrictions" In Supreme Court, GOP attorney defends voting restrictions by saying they help Republicans win https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/supreme-court-gop-attorney-defends-voting-restrictions-saying-they-help-n1259305 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/supreme-court-gop...
citilife 4y ago
- standardUser 4y ago
  - throwawayhx 4y ago
  - citilife 4y ago
    > Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum... > No, there was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/hillary-clinton-doing-now-2020/616668/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/hillary... Status on Clinton election challenges https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/voter-intimidation-democrats-clinton-230857 https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/voter-intimidation-de... Her literally saying the election was stolen [from her] -- https://rumble.com/v1fnkh1-despicable-democrats-hillary-clinton-claimed-2016-election-was-stolen-anoth.html https://rumble.com/v1fnkh1-despicable-democrats-hillary-clin... There's a lot more.
yucky 4y ago
>We already have the majority of one party believing the last election as stolen despite a comprehensive lack of evidence. On the other hand, I'm old enough to remember the election in 2000 and still to this day there are people convinced that election was stolen despite evidence. In fact, were it not for 9/11 I'm sure the protests over that presidency never would have stopped. I guess I shudder to think what would be required to unite this country again then..
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Strictly speaking, the Supreme Court did steal that by forbidding Florida to count any more ballots.
  - yucky 4y ago
    As much as I detested Bush, this isn't exactly accurate as it relates to the election being stolen. First, the suing parties only wanted to count ballots in the 4 counties they had the biggest advantage in, so it would have only generated more confusion and delays than recounting the entire state. Second, full recounts were later performed and in every recount he ended up with more votes than Gore. You can't keep counting forever or you end up with nobody as president since Clinton was term-limited, and ultimately the decision turned out to be correct. So the people saying that election was stolen are just as much election deniers as the J6 crowd.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      There is no constitutional time limit on when election results have to be complete. They have very frequently in the past taken much longer. At the time of their ruling, the SC did not know how the final count would turn out. They did not want to know. I.e., the majority on the SC was completely OK with the idea of having stolen the election.
      - yucky 4y ago
        Do you have any evidence to support that claim? The issue was the suing party only wanted to recount 4 counties that they had the biggest advantage in - what is a legitimate reason for that? Also, there are limits base don when the electors are required to meet, and the President was term limited. There is no legal way for him to have remained in office beyond the expiration of his 2nd term.
irrational 4y ago
National mail in voting would solve some of these issues. No polls? No policing the polls or poll workers.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  That does depend on honesty of unobservable USPS activity. So it's not obviously better. Even with USPS honest, people opening the envelopes need policing.
  - irrational 4y ago
    Well, it’s called mail in voting, but they actually have locations around town where you drive up and drop them into a locked box. There are also boxes set up at the library and other places. You can mail them in, but we feel better about dropping them into the box while out and about doing other things.

46756e 4y ago

The stolen election thing is very dumb, but people forget the same argument was made in 2016 with Russia “hacking the election” with no evidence found.

runnerup 4y ago
And the same argument was made over the 2000 elections against Diebold in Ohio and Florida. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
- ajross 4y ago
  Not by major thought leaders or elected representatives. That was a popular conspiracy theory among the too-connected internet left. The problem in the modern world is that you have elected republicans and talking heads on FOX News saying the same thing to millions of believing partisans.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  That doesn't allege that hacking happened; it alleges (and demonstrates) that voting machines at the time were really shittily secured.
standardUser 4y ago
There is plenty of evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, to the point where it's impossible to say they did not with a straight face. Just because it wasn't directly "hacked" doesn't mean there was not overwhelming evidence of interference. But in the end, very few people considered that election "stolen".
- whiddershins 4y ago
  If Russia can be said to have interfered in the 2016 election, a literal cabal (their words not mine) certainly ‘interfered’ in 2020. https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. An information campaign and a disinformation campaign are hardly the same.
  - standardUser 4y ago
    Domestic groups and individuals are expected to be involved in elections. Foreign ones, by law, are not. An obvious difference and I doubt you're unaware of it.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    Providing voters with accurate information about how and where they can cast their ballot is not the same as buying ad space on Facebook to run ads with doctored images and outright false information.
    - mgkimsal 4y ago
      > false information Can we normalize just saying "lies" when things are lies?
  - 4y ago
mgkimsal 4y ago
Not sure I'd say 'no evidence' at all. It wasn't "hacking" in a technical sense as much as "social media hacking" - bots, trolls, huge numbers of lies spread via memes, etc. Some (much?) of that was traced back to Russia, IIRC.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  Attribution is notoriously hard. Also, general propaganda pretty much to be expected. It's the same thing in the last election, it's absolutely expected that some people did commit voting fraud and that some votes were counted wrong. The big question is the scale of the operation and whether it impacted the results. It appears to me that the opinion people have is very related to how much they like the result.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    We investigated 'russia' election interference allegations. Some 'interference' was found, largely pushing down HRC and aiding (even if indirectly) Trump. We investigated claims of 'stolen election' (Arizona, other states) and found marginally more votes for Biden in subsequent recounts. Even if that had been reversed, the numbers would have not have been impactful. Other investigations in the last few years have turned up smatterings of 'voter fraud', and it usually seems to be Trump supporters voting fraudulently. My opinion is that we've always had small bits of 'bad' votes (intentional or not), but with continued drumbeats on that topic, it's motivating some Trump supporters to commit fraud in an effort to try to balance out what they believe (wrongly) to be 'the other side' committing fraud. I had a friend die on Election Day 2020. He'd cast an early ballot. I often think of him when we get these refrains of "dead people voting!!! it's fraud!!!". I do not know if his vote was counted or not (I assume it would have been) - this was in southeastern PA, so there may have been some recounts that removed ballots like that???
ajross 4y ago
> same argument was made in 2016 By who? A handful of internet nutjobs, surely. No one in a position of power or influence ever claimed that the election results were fraudulent in the sense that today's elected republicans are straight up claiming. (What was claimed, and largely substantiated, was that one campaign appeared to be coordinating closely with Russian interests during the campaign. And indeed people were upset by that. But again, that's not a claim about the election.)
- seneca 4y ago
  > By who? A handful of internet nutjobs, surely. No one in a position of power or influence ever claimed that the election results were fraudulent This is 100% revisionist history, and a typical ploy to try to excuse bad behavior. 'Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election' https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    The full paragraph has a lot more nuance: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-rodham-clinton-trump-is-a-corrupt-human-tornado/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-rodham-clinton-trump-is... > "No, it doesn't kill me because he knows he's an illegitimate president. I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used – from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did," she said. ("Hacking" here refers to the undisputed hacking of Democrats' internal emails, not the voting machines. https://apnews.com/article/technology-europe-russia-hacking-only-on-ap-dea73efc01594839957c3c9a6c962b8a https://apnews.com/article/technology-europe-russia-hacking-...)
    - onionisafruit 4y ago
      I’m not sure it’s entirely undisputed. Some people think it was leaked by a Bernie supporter who worked for the DNC and wanted to expose them rigging the primaries against him.
duxup 4y ago
Depends on what you mean by "hacking the election". Attempts to influence the election existed. But that phrase specifically, I'm not sure exactly what you mean.
phailhaus 4y ago
Mueller's report explicitly said that it found extensive interference by Russia, and that Trump and his team "expected to benefit" from it. The conversation wasn't about "hacking the election", it was about "collusion" in the run-up.
clint 4y ago
How can you say there was no evidence found of Russian interference in the 2016 election? There was, in fact, a startling amount of evidence uncovered and made public.
adamj9431 4y ago
I admit I'm biased, but I don't remember this. I do remember concerns that Russia had interfered with the election, which is was found to be true (see Mueller report, Cambridge Analytica, etc.) There were also less well founded concerns that Trump himself was not only helped by but actually colluding with the Russians, which all evidence points to being false. Most importantly, Hillary Clinton conceded the election the next day, as did Al Gore in 2000 once it was clear he didn't have a path to victory. Both pledged to support the victor. Trump hasn't done that, two years on.
acdha 4y ago
Can you provide citations? The claims which dominated mainstream coverage were not about hacking the election system itself but interference with things like social media campaigns or hacking the DNC’s email service to mine for PR dirt, which is by now well-documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20... Please identify specific people and times for any claims - I’m sure you can find some nut on truthout.org claiming that the GRU hacked voting machines but that’s not the same as a lie becoming the most important GOP litmus test leading to a violent assault on the U.S. Congress trying to prevent the election process from being accurately completed.
babypuncher 4y ago
Nobody with real power suggested Russia actually hacked the 2016 election. Hilary Clinton conceded the election, and she certainly didn't send an army of crazed supporters to take over the capitol in a poor attempt to overturn the results. We didn't have Democratic governers and Attorneys General suing to overturn the results of their own elections. In 2016, Russian hackers hacked both the DNC and GOP, and selectively released information collected from the DNC in order to hurt their ongoiong campaign. Russian actors also ran interference campaigns on social media. These are all established facts. They are also not allegations of fraud, simply pointing out that these actions quite possibly had an impact on the outcome of the election. What Republicans have been claiming for almost two years now is that Democrats have committed outright election fraud. They have accused Democrats of everything from tampering with voting machines to ballot stuffing to throwing out Republican votes, and they make all of these accusations without a shred of evidence. Many Republicans in office today have taken the hard stance that Joe Biden was not elected President.
NoGravitas 4y ago
Yeah, Russiagate is QAnon for liberals.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  Then how do you explain the Mueller report (authored by a Republican prosecutor, who was appointed by a Republican DAG, who was nominated by a Republican President and confirmed by a Republican majority Senate); and the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference (chaired by a Republican Senator with a majority of Republican members), both concluding that Russia, in fact, interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump; and that the Trump campaign, at best, passively welcomed this help, but at worst actually invited and facilitated it?

mgkimsal 4y ago

Don't forget people getting arrested for registering to vote.

tamaharbor 4y ago
Source?

gigatexal 4y ago

Yeah. I know. I’d almost just let Trump have another 4 years if we could just restore faith in democracy and see our elected officials compromise across the isle more. And for QAnon to never have happened. Too many folks with guns believe that nonsense.

vlunkr 4y ago
You think more Trump would help? He’s the one who started pushing the stolen election idea before votes even started. He’s a danger to democracy.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > He’s the one who started pushing the stolen election idea before votes even started. Omitted from your statement is that he first did this in 2016. He was prepping a "the election was stolen from me" claim at that time when it looked like he might lose, but when he ended up winning, he still claimed voter fraud had occurred. He said he would have won by more if NH hadn't been stolen by illegal immigrants who were sent via bus to cast fraudulent votes. He started a commission to find evidence of that, and it dissolved after it couldn't make any progress (because no such fraud existed). This was a footnote in 2017 many people have forgotten, but it presaged 2020.
- itbeho 4y ago
  By your logic, Hillary Clinton is also a "danger to democracy". https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-election-160716779.html https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi...
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    I'm good with that.
    - itbeho 4y ago
      I'm good with that too :)

babypuncher 4y ago

> We already have the majority of one party believing the last election as stolen despite a comprehensive lack of evidence. This is the part that gets me. I don't know how anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see this behavior and then still support the people perpetrating it.

desindol 4y ago
It’s easy everyone you interact with thinks the same and your perception gets skewed to believe your bubble represents the whole population.
- rektide 4y ago
  And the voted out president does everything in their power to delegitimize the process.
toomim 4y ago
When you don't understand them, that's how you know you're in a bubble. Try getting out and talking to them.
- zcw100 4y ago
  "So what has you so upset?"....."Comet Ping-pong pedo ring, contrails, Q, where we go one we go all, derrrrr" Nope, coming in loud and clear, not a bubble problem.
  - onionisafruit 4y ago
    Is that a conversation you had or a summary of what you’ve read about your political opponents on the internet?
    - 93po 4y ago
      I think we all know the answer to this

linuxftw 4y ago

ModernMech 4y ago
What you're alluding to as nefarious are bog-standard practices and results that have been true since elections have been a thing. It's been true in every election that the full count takes maybe a week or more to fully tally. During this period, of course people go home and sleep. The counting has always paused and resumed. And given your complaint about inaccurate tallies, why would you want tired people counting 24/7, when they would make more mistakes? Likewise, the recount total always differs by some margin. That's because counting to large numbers is actually hard. It's not like counting to 10 where you arrive at 10 every time. Counting to a 160 million is error-prone and the results are never 100% the same for any number of innocuous reasons. > Finally, there was extra-legal processes of voting introduced with very little oversight The most hilarious of which was Pennsylvania, where PA Republican state legislatures introduced those changes, and then complained about them after the fact when their candidate lost! That just goes to show me the complaints are disingenuous, and wouldn't have materialized had their candidate won.
- linuxftw 4y ago
  > What you're alluding to as nefarious are bog-standard practices and results that have been true since elections have been a thing. It's been true in every election that the full count takes maybe a week or more to fully tally. During this period, of course people go home and sleep. Maybe this is acceptable to you, it isn't to me. That's a system that's ripe for abuse. > That's because counting to large numbers is actually hard Nobody should be counting extremely large numbers of ballots. That's why there are smaller voting precincts (curiously, some areas decided to do away with this system because putting everyone in once place was safer for covid...). It should also be possible to know, prior to tallying outcomes, how many ballots were cast in each location. That number should be immediately transmitted, and the total in each race should be no more than that number. I'm confident Disney world can tell you how many customers entered their park on a given day, it's not rocket science. So, it doesn't really matter to me what the outcome is, it matters what the process is. If I was designing a software system that had the level of controls the election system had (even without considering the electronic portion of the system), I would be escorted out of the building for incompetence. If someone says there's 'no evidence of cheating' that's because the system isn't designed to collect the evidence. In fact, it's barely a 'system' with a 'design' whatsoever.

glitcher 4y ago

I would also add gerrymandering the voting district boundaries to the list of things eroding confidence in the election process.

seneca 4y ago
The term gerrymandering, let alone the practice, goes back to 1812. No one alive lived in a time that it didn't exist or has even met anyone who did. It's an unsavory practice, but it's not some new thing contributing to the decline of trust in institutions.
- comrh 4y ago
  That's assuming the scope and effects of gerrymandering, and that the public understanding of gerrymandering, remained constant, which is a big assumption.
- asdff 4y ago
  You exist right now at a time when gerrymandering doesn't exist, for certain offices. Governors race for example.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    And so you can see the difference it makes vs non-gerrymandered races. A big, big difference.
    - NoGravitas 4y ago
      Yes; It's not uncommon for the gubernatorial race to be highly competitive in a state where one party has a solid lock on the state legislature, for example.
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  The last 20 or 30 years (i.e., the last 2 or 3 redistrictings) have seen the use of increasing amounts of data and computation to produce more accurately and more optimally gerrymandered districts. It's fundamentally the same practice that goes back to 1812, but the details actually matter in a quantitative sense.

asdff 4y ago

There's two Americas happening when it comes to voting it seems. In one you have this sort of thing going on. In the other America, voting couldn't be more trivial. I have a 10 day window to show up at the polls if I really want the in person experience, and my ballot is mailed to me no matter what in the first place weeks before its due. I can drop it off in any ballot box or even a mailbox will do. The big question is, would the outcomes even change with more access? Districts are highly manipulated to guarantee political outcomes no matter who votes, even in blue states this is true, at all levels of representative government. My extremely blue city council even gerrymanders their council districts to entrench political dynasties. Plus you have Prop 22 which has proved that an informed vote is not easy to come by among the public, and money buys policy.

ceejayoz 4y ago
> The big question is, would the outcomes even change with more access? I'd suggest the efforts to reduce access - limiting early voting, dropboxes, etc. - imply the Republicans believe this to be the case.
- asdff 4y ago
  One theory could be that they had to do that initially to capture a state and have a power majority when redistricting comes up. Once its gerrymandered sufficiently, there is no way that they'd ever let it be uncaptured. You can let everyone vote but their vote is useless, if you've slivered the population into chunks that stymie voting power of blue votes against a swath of red voters. Ohio is already like this in many ways, blue cities held hostage by a state captured by the GOP. You have, e.g. the 9th district that takes a sliver of Cleveland and extends over 100 miles down a strip of rural coastline (1). This is the district that Dennis Kucinich (D) used to handily win until maps were remade by republicans and it extended out from Cleveland like the tentacle of a giant squid. https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/why-ohios-congressional-map-unconstitutional https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/why-ohios-congressio...
themitigating 4y ago
What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?" Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, referencing legal standing. “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” said Michael Carvin, the lawyer defending the state's restrictions" In Supreme Court, GOP attorney defends voting restrictions by saying they help Republicans win https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/supreme-court-gop-attorney-defends-voting-restrictions-saying-they-help-n1259305 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/supreme-court-gop...

citilife 4y ago

standardUser 4y ago
- throwawayhx 4y ago
- citilife 4y ago
  > Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum... > No, there was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/hillary-clinton-doing-now-2020/616668/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/hillary... Status on Clinton election challenges https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/voter-intimidation-democrats-clinton-230857 https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/voter-intimidation-de... Her literally saying the election was stolen [from her] -- https://rumble.com/v1fnkh1-despicable-democrats-hillary-clinton-claimed-2016-election-was-stolen-anoth.html https://rumble.com/v1fnkh1-despicable-democrats-hillary-clin... There's a lot more.

yucky 4y ago

>We already have the majority of one party believing the last election as stolen despite a comprehensive lack of evidence. On the other hand, I'm old enough to remember the election in 2000 and still to this day there are people convinced that election was stolen despite evidence. In fact, were it not for 9/11 I'm sure the protests over that presidency never would have stopped. I guess I shudder to think what would be required to unite this country again then..

ncmncm 4y ago
Strictly speaking, the Supreme Court did steal that by forbidding Florida to count any more ballots.
- yucky 4y ago
  As much as I detested Bush, this isn't exactly accurate as it relates to the election being stolen. First, the suing parties only wanted to count ballots in the 4 counties they had the biggest advantage in, so it would have only generated more confusion and delays than recounting the entire state. Second, full recounts were later performed and in every recount he ended up with more votes than Gore. You can't keep counting forever or you end up with nobody as president since Clinton was term-limited, and ultimately the decision turned out to be correct. So the people saying that election was stolen are just as much election deniers as the J6 crowd.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    There is no constitutional time limit on when election results have to be complete. They have very frequently in the past taken much longer. At the time of their ruling, the SC did not know how the final count would turn out. They did not want to know. I.e., the majority on the SC was completely OK with the idea of having stolen the election.
    - yucky 4y ago
      Do you have any evidence to support that claim? The issue was the suing party only wanted to recount 4 counties that they had the biggest advantage in - what is a legitimate reason for that? Also, there are limits base don when the electors are required to meet, and the President was term limited. There is no legal way for him to have remained in office beyond the expiration of his 2nd term.

irrational 4y ago

National mail in voting would solve some of these issues. No polls? No policing the polls or poll workers.

ncmncm 4y ago
That does depend on honesty of unobservable USPS activity. So it's not obviously better. Even with USPS honest, people opening the envelopes need policing.
- irrational 4y ago
  Well, it’s called mail in voting, but they actually have locations around town where you drive up and drop them into a locked box. There are also boxes set up at the library and other places. You can mail them in, but we feel better about dropping them into the box while out and about doing other things.