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As opposed to the dumb people who spent 4 years claiming the last-but-one presidential election was stolen, you mean?

capitalsigma 4y ago
I never heard that claim. Only "the electoral college is a bad system" or "voters were influenced by Russian propaganda." Never "votes were impacted by direct fraud."
- sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
  There were fraud claims on the fringe just after the 2016 election. The evidence was sparse. It didn't take long for even those pretty angry about the election to realize fraud probably didn't happen, and if it did it was at too small a scale to meaningfully affect the results. Unfortunately in 2020 the fringe became the GOP mainstream, treating equally soft claims as fact.
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    No, it wasn't "on the fringe". Note that this poll was taken in 2020, a full four years later. "Seventy-two percent (72%) of Democrats believe it’s likely the 2016 election outcome was changed by Russian interference, but that opinion is shared by only 30% of Republicans and 39% of voters not affiliated with either major party." https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/april_2022/democrats_still_believe_russia_changed_2016_election https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gen...
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
      By fraud I mean actual voter fraud. As in, effort was made to cause invalid votes to be counted or valid votes to not be counted. Russia absolutely did and continues to push propaganda into elections in the USA and elsewhere. That's not really in dispute at this point so I'm not surprised it polls that high. Got a poll that shows similar numbers for fraud? I would be genuinely surprised to see that.
      - Turing_Machine 4y ago
        There were many claims that voters were illegitimately purged from the rolls, which is pretty much the equivalent. I should actually note here that I didn't vote for Trump, either time, nor did I vote for Clinton or Biden. I just hate hypocrisy.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      > it’s likely the 2016 election outcome was changed by Russian interference That sounds like a perfectly reasonable claim with evidence that supports it, paralleled by other elections in other countries as well; quite obviously very different to what was discussed above.
- bdowling 4y ago
  In 2019, Hillary Clinton, in a CBS News interview, called Trump “illegitimate”, claimed that Trump “stole” the election, and accused him of voter manipulation, including “hacking”. 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...
  - gcanyon 4y ago
    I don't think she means what you think she means by "hacking." I think she means this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-...
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  Then you weren't listening. People were screaming "Russia stole the election" from Day 1, not "just voters were influenced by Russian propaganda". You're spinning.
- notdonspaulding 4y ago
  In terms of claiming the results of the election is illegitimate, "voters were influenced by Russian propaganda" instead of "votes were impacted by direct fraud" seems like a distinction without a difference to me. https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-election-160716779.html https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi... In 2020, Hillary Clinton was still casting aspersions regarding the outcome of the 2016 election, sowing discontent about the electoral college, preparing Democrat voters to ignore the results until Joe Biden was declared the winner. Portraying this game as if it's only being played by one team does not help restore any trust in the federal election process.
thedorkknight 4y ago
I live in a liberal city and didn't hear this from anyone. The was initially a decent bit of "not my president" attitude, but just in a philosophical sense, and even that petered out pretty fast.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  Hillary Clinton herself claimed that the election was stolen and that Trump was an "illegitimate President". But she doesn't count as "anyone", I guess?
  - thedorkknight 4y ago
    She'd count as one single individual, yes. Thankfully a far cry from the amount that the comment above was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32940684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32940684
e40 4y ago
Did you hear that from Fox News? Because I never heard it once.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  Then you weren't listening. Note the quote above from Hillary Clinton herself.
  - costigan 4y ago
    Stolen is a vague word. If there's evidence she believes there was sufficient fraud to have changed the result, I would be interested. If she was referring to the stolen Podesta emails and Comey's statement right before the election, then those things happened. You may think those things didn't matter, but it's no surprise she does. And then there's the whole storming the capital thing she didn't do.
    - gcanyon 4y ago
      I think Clinton was referring to this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-... In other words: not saying that there was actual fraud sufficient to change the election, not saying the election was "stolen" in the sense people seem to be saying here.
  - e40 4y ago
    Nah, that's not the same. Stolen by foreign influence is very different than what the 2020 nuts have claimed. How many court cases did they lose? How many times were they asked to produce evidence and came up with ... nothing?
jacobolus 4y ago
The last-but-one presidential election was affected by various states illegally throwing large numbers of legal voters off their voter rolls, but it’s impossible to say whether it would have made enough difference to alter the outcome, and there’s no convincing evidence votes were directly changed. (It would be a good thing to have a verifiable paper trail for every election; in some parts of the USA it is impossible to effectively investigate any alleged shenanigans.) The bigger problem in that election was Russian-intelligence-stolen (and possibly tampered with) documents being released to the press in the lead up to the election in coordination with the Trump campaign (with the FBI keeping its investigation of that secret), and then the FBI director making an unprecedented and (we found out only afterward) unsupportable statement attacking Clinton immediately before the election, after being pressured into it by a handful rogue FBI agents who were friends of Trump’s campaign threatening insubordination. And perhaps the biggest problem of all, an entirely too credulous mainstream media who didn’t put those developments in context, leaving voters to draw mistaken inferences, and giving oodles of free airtime to Trump’s rallies without making any effort to dispute outright lying in real time.

I never heard that claim. Only "the electoral college is a bad system" or "voters were influenced by Russian propaganda." Never "votes were impacted by direct fraud."

sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
There were fraud claims on the fringe just after the 2016 election. The evidence was sparse. It didn't take long for even those pretty angry about the election to realize fraud probably didn't happen, and if it did it was at too small a scale to meaningfully affect the results. Unfortunately in 2020 the fringe became the GOP mainstream, treating equally soft claims as fact.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  No, it wasn't "on the fringe". Note that this poll was taken in 2020, a full four years later. "Seventy-two percent (72%) of Democrats believe it’s likely the 2016 election outcome was changed by Russian interference, but that opinion is shared by only 30% of Republicans and 39% of voters not affiliated with either major party." https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/april_2022/democrats_still_believe_russia_changed_2016_election https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gen...
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
    By fraud I mean actual voter fraud. As in, effort was made to cause invalid votes to be counted or valid votes to not be counted. Russia absolutely did and continues to push propaganda into elections in the USA and elsewhere. That's not really in dispute at this point so I'm not surprised it polls that high. Got a poll that shows similar numbers for fraud? I would be genuinely surprised to see that.
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      There were many claims that voters were illegitimately purged from the rolls, which is pretty much the equivalent. I should actually note here that I didn't vote for Trump, either time, nor did I vote for Clinton or Biden. I just hate hypocrisy.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    > it’s likely the 2016 election outcome was changed by Russian interference That sounds like a perfectly reasonable claim with evidence that supports it, paralleled by other elections in other countries as well; quite obviously very different to what was discussed above.
bdowling 4y ago
In 2019, Hillary Clinton, in a CBS News interview, called Trump “illegitimate”, claimed that Trump “stole” the election, and accused him of voter manipulation, including “hacking”. 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...
- gcanyon 4y ago
  I don't think she means what you think she means by "hacking." I think she means this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-...
Turing_Machine 4y ago
Then you weren't listening. People were screaming "Russia stole the election" from Day 1, not "just voters were influenced by Russian propaganda". You're spinning.
notdonspaulding 4y ago
In terms of claiming the results of the election is illegitimate, "voters were influenced by Russian propaganda" instead of "votes were impacted by direct fraud" seems like a distinction without a difference to me. https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-election-160716779.html https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi... In 2020, Hillary Clinton was still casting aspersions regarding the outcome of the 2016 election, sowing discontent about the electoral college, preparing Democrat voters to ignore the results until Joe Biden was declared the winner. Portraying this game as if it's only being played by one team does not help restore any trust in the federal election process.

thedorkknight 4y ago

I live in a liberal city and didn't hear this from anyone. The was initially a decent bit of "not my president" attitude, but just in a philosophical sense, and even that petered out pretty fast.

Turing_Machine 4y ago
Hillary Clinton herself claimed that the election was stolen and that Trump was an "illegitimate President". But she doesn't count as "anyone", I guess?
- thedorkknight 4y ago
  She'd count as one single individual, yes. Thankfully a far cry from the amount that the comment above was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32940684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32940684

e40 4y ago

Did you hear that from Fox News? Because I never heard it once.

Turing_Machine 4y ago
Then you weren't listening. Note the quote above from Hillary Clinton herself.
- costigan 4y ago
  Stolen is a vague word. If there's evidence she believes there was sufficient fraud to have changed the result, I would be interested. If she was referring to the stolen Podesta emails and Comey's statement right before the election, then those things happened. You may think those things didn't matter, but it's no surprise she does. And then there's the whole storming the capital thing she didn't do.
  - gcanyon 4y ago
    I think Clinton was referring to this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-... In other words: not saying that there was actual fraud sufficient to change the election, not saying the election was "stolen" in the sense people seem to be saying here.
- e40 4y ago
  Nah, that's not the same. Stolen by foreign influence is very different than what the 2020 nuts have claimed. How many court cases did they lose? How many times were they asked to produce evidence and came up with ... nothing?

jacobolus 4y ago

The last-but-one presidential election was affected by various states illegally throwing large numbers of legal voters off their voter rolls, but it’s impossible to say whether it would have made enough difference to alter the outcome, and there’s no convincing evidence votes were directly changed. (It would be a good thing to have a verifiable paper trail for every election; in some parts of the USA it is impossible to effectively investigate any alleged shenanigans.) The bigger problem in that election was Russian-intelligence-stolen (and possibly tampered with) documents being released to the press in the lead up to the election in coordination with the Trump campaign (with the FBI keeping its investigation of that secret), and then the FBI director making an unprecedented and (we found out only afterward) unsupportable statement attacking Clinton immediately before the election, after being pressured into it by a handful rogue FBI agents who were friends of Trump’s campaign threatening insubordination. And perhaps the biggest problem of all, an entirely too credulous mainstream media who didn’t put those developments in context, leaving voters to draw mistaken inferences, and giving oodles of free airtime to Trump’s rallies without making any effort to dispute outright lying in real time.