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> One side says that it is totally secure, basically 0 fraud, most secure election in history Additionally, the sides have completely flipped. Utterly bizarre.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Not bizarre at all. It's BS, but it's not bizarre. Politics has become trench warfare. Everything is a battle to the death to keep the other side from gaining an inch anywhere. And, as is often the case in warfare, truth is a casualty. Both sides will say absolutely anything to keep anyone from thinking that the other side has a valid point. It's advertising, but without any truth-in-advertising laws. Or, if you prefer, it's propaganda. Any relationship to the truth is purely accidental.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  The true casualty is America’s credibility abroad. In pretty much every capital, embassy, boardroom, etc… it noticeably declines year on year. Even the Brits don’t take anything at face value anymore.
  - anon291 2y ago
    Our credibility has been suddenly made synonymous with how willing we are to go to war on behalf of other countries . We are not But I think any attack on an American force will get you a quick lesson on our credibility, which, as an American, is all I really care about. Similarly economically, good luck not participating in the American markets.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      I really don’t want to burst your bubble… but do you not realize this is seen as a joke abroad? e.g. In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and executives are rushing to wine and dine people who literally celebrate the defeat of ‘American force’ in public, on the record, every year. They treat even a random third secretary for some party committee 100km from Hanoi much much better than the 90th percentile upper middle class American household in the Bay Area… Edit: And I’m not even going to talk about Eastern Europe or the Middle East, it’s really too harsh to put into writing.
      - rightbyte 2y ago
        Hanoi? Are you refering to pulling out of Vietnam made the US seem like a joke? Or that the locals are wrong to celebrate that?
        MichaelZuo 2y ago
        What exactly are you confused about? It seems pretty clearly spelled out.
        rightbyte 2y ago
        It just seemed so absurd wanting American diplomats to be salty about the Vietnam War. Like, the Vietnam War. I don't even know where to begin.
        MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Uhhh… you might need to work on your reading comprehension skills, or are you projecting something on to me? Why would I be ‘salty’ about anything anyone does in Hanoi? It seems clear that many people in Hanoi are benefitting enormously, which is pretty much a total positive, except for some possibility of inducing corruption elsewhere.
        rightbyte 2y ago
        > In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and executives are rushing to wine and dine people who literally celebrate the defeat of ‘American force’ in public, on the record, every year. I read that as that your are implying that the American diplomats should take the Vietnamese celebrating their independence as an insult versus the American diplomats. This further implies that the American diplomats should be salty concerning the Vietnam War, to not lose face or something.
        MichaelZuo 2y ago
        I am not an American diplomat…???
- arp242 2y ago
  This is the kind of boring "both side-ism" that I just don't understand. I have no great love of either party, but one side is openly speculating about all sorts of things that cannot be described as anything other than outright authoritarian, and the other party ... is not. And no, some disagreements on free speech or the 2nd amendment or whatnot is not even close. And no, "oh, he's not really serious about it" doesn't fly either. And with one party transformed in the Monster Raving Loony Party, the other one can't do anything else but push its own agenda through when it can, so compromise becomes rarer and rarer. And it's not just Trump – remember the madness and obstructionism of the Obama years? And yes, there have been times the Democratic party could have done better. No doubt. But it's absolutely not a "both sides" issue.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    The issue in question was truth, not authoritarianism. Specifically, the issue was truth about election security. The point was that both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose, and "most secure election in history" when they win. More generally: In the current election, Harris isn't the firehose of lies that Trump is. She isn't a shining beacon of truth, either.
    - arp242 2y ago
      "Most secure election in history" was a superlative I'm not happy with either, no. But the core of it is correct: there is no evidence of wide-spread fraud. The core of the other side is outright lies and fraud, rooted in nothing more than one person's narcissism. Equating these two is just bizarre. "Murder, arson, and jaywalking". Or something like that. And "both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose" is just not true. There have been a few disagreements over the decades of course, some more reasonable than others, but nothing like 2016 has happened in recent history, from either party.
      - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
        > there is no evidence of wide-spread fraud. Agreed. There were 60+ court cases, but not evidence of fraud. > The core of the other side is outright lies and fraud, rooted in nothing more than one person's narcissism. Also agreed. > Equating these two is just bizarre. I wasn't. > And "both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose" is just not true. There have been a few disagreements over the decades of course, some more reasonable than others, but nothing like 2016 has happened in recent history, from either party. I presume you mean 2020, not 2016. Yes, nothing like that has happened in recent history... until next week. But speaking of 2016, I remember a large number of people (including Hillary) saying that Hillary "really won" because she had more votes than Trump did, as if the Electoral College was not a thing. I recall seeing it, here on HN, over and over, for months, that Trump wasn't "really the legitimate president". No, nobody actually tried to do anything. Obama didn't tell states to send fake electors to the House for the vote. He didn't have a "demonstration of love and respect" or whatever Trump is currently trying to paint January 6th as. So that's better. Months of talk is better than 60 court cases, fake electors, and attempting to physically prevent the vote in the House. Since you seem to keep mis-reading me, I'm going to say that again, more clearly: The two are not comparable. And yet... the "it's not legitimate because our person lost" was still there as a definite idea. The idea wasn't election fraud - it was that the Electoral College had thwarted the will of the people, and therefore the election was somehow illegitimate. Never mind that we had rules in place, and we followed the rules, and under the rules that were in place, Hillary lost. But no, "it's not legitimate". Nobody ever took it as far as Trump did. But both sides de-ligitimatize the other side's victories, if only verbally. (Again, "only verbally" is better than attacking the Capitol. But it's not as close to "we'll see you in four years" as I would wish.)
willcipriano 2y ago
Notice the Cheneys and John Boltons of the world also have seemed to flipped with them.
- anon291 2y ago
  I am happy to say, I've never been on the side of a Cheney. Go me!
  - sethammons 2y ago
    I find that unlikely. They are very publicly voting D this round. So that implies you are voting R, but that means you likely voted R with Bush. Did you vote against Bush but for Trump?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - anon291 2y ago
      Yes. My family was heavily democrat during the Bush years. Attended protests and the whole thing against the war. Around the time of Obama the family kind of split, and some of us were skeptical (mainly due to illegal immigration and social issues) but some of us liked the health care stuff. Then with Trump, basically everyone got on board. There are a lot of us. I don't really relate to the Bush GOP at all, and am not even sure what they have in common with the modern one other than some vague tax cuts (democrats do that too every once in a while though, so this is hardly some great conservative idea). I'm happy to see the Bush GOP completely gone. Today's GOP feels much more like the democrat party of the 2000s, which is what I grew up in. Much more working class. More 'rough' around the edges. Anti-corporate, etc (most fortune 500 companies and workers support the democrats, based on donation numbers) For me the big national issue has always been a refusal to fight unnecessary wars. I admire that Trump started no new wars or engagements (he continued the existing ones, including some escalations, but I'm not a radical pacifist). For me, that alone seals the deal. I just don't believe in fighting stupid wars. I don't care about threats and I don't care about targeted military intervention. I'm not fighting forever wars, where they send boys my age to die (most of whom happen to lean conservative anyway). What a grift. If the Cheneys in the world want to fight wars, I recommend they grab their guns and go!
unethical_ban 2y ago
Good thing we fixed the hanging chad issue. Did Republicans anywhere try to "secure elections" in a way that didn't involve curtailing voting rights? Improving voting machines, systems, counting, etc. in a way that partisan leadership couldn't mess with? Georgia, I predict, will be a shitshow this year.
- brandonmenc 2y ago
  I live in one of if not the most critical county in the entire country this election. It's going to be insane here. This week alone we've had Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Tim Walz stumping here. https://newrepublic.com/article/187597/pennsylvania-election-most-important-county-2024 https://newrepublic.com/article/187597/pennsylvania-election...
  - callc 2y ago
    I’m in the opposite scenario - my vote will not matter since my county/state is not close to 50/50. It’s a laughably depressing system. I think (without any supporting evidence) the national election system was designed to fit to the standards of transportation and communication 200+ years ago. It was actually feasible to vote per state then send one dude on horseback to DC to cast the vote for the whole state. That’s an OK system for the time. But the fact that each state is given an approximate weight for its vote (electoral college system), is evidence to how we are trying get to something that looks like a nationally counted winner take all election. We’re just doing it terribly. If we fixed these issues then election campaigns couldn’t just focus on swing states and ignore everyone else. The game theory would then shift to just needing to convince a majority of all voters to vote for you.
    - sethammons 2y ago
      Should there be no balance between state size? California always determining the president and ensuring Montana and Rhode Island are never campaigned in?
      - 2y ago
tzs 2y ago
Before 2020 the only allegations of significant fraud or other shenanigans I remember were immediately after elections and were dropped shortly afterwards when no evidence could be found for them. Note that the Bush/Gore election issues were not allegations of fraud or any intentional shenanigans. The issue there was a badly designed ballots and/or badly designed voting machines that let to a large number of spoiled ballots due to people voting for more than one candidate or not marking any candidate, and in one major county led many voters to mark a candidate other than the one they intended to mark. All the controversy there after the election was how to resolve those problems. Some, like the infamous "hanging chads" could in some cases be resolved by hand examination of the ballot, but there would often be some ambiguity so that would not be without controversy. Others, like the "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach County did not lead to any physical problem with the ballot but the design of the ballot led many voters to vote for a candidate other than the one they intended to vote for. That was a completely novel failure mode and the system had no procedure for dealing with it.
- brandonmenc 2y ago
  What I meant was, the security of electronic voting machines in general. Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among software people that closed source electronic voting machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking. We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question Dominion." Whether or not an election has actually ever been hacked at the voting machine level is a separate conversation.
  - chrisco255 2y ago
    Hasn't every other type of computing system been hacked? These systems are so insecure they're leaking passwords on the internet and smart people somehow still believe they've never been tampered with. Trillions of dollars on the line and ability to shape policy for the most powerful economy and military on planet earth but for sure, there's never been any hacks even though we're openly leaking passwords and social security numbers on the internet.
  - acdha 2y ago
    > Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among software people that closed source electronic voting machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking. We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question Dominion." We didn’t, you’re just grossly over-simplifying a couple decades of history. In the 2000s, there were some very bad electronic voting systems which did not maintain paper records or printed receipts which which were never validated. That lead to tons of criticism – and better designs. In 2020, nobody said “how dare you question Dominion” because the whole point was that we _don’t_ trust Dominion and use systems which are designed to be verifiable and the results had been independently checked multiple times.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

Not bizarre at all. It's BS, but it's not bizarre. Politics has become trench warfare. Everything is a battle to the death to keep the other side from gaining an inch anywhere. And, as is often the case in warfare, truth is a casualty. Both sides will say absolutely anything to keep anyone from thinking that the other side has a valid point. It's advertising, but without any truth-in-advertising laws. Or, if you prefer, it's propaganda. Any relationship to the truth is purely accidental.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
The true casualty is America’s credibility abroad. In pretty much every capital, embassy, boardroom, etc… it noticeably declines year on year. Even the Brits don’t take anything at face value anymore.
- anon291 2y ago
  Our credibility has been suddenly made synonymous with how willing we are to go to war on behalf of other countries . We are not But I think any attack on an American force will get you a quick lesson on our credibility, which, as an American, is all I really care about. Similarly economically, good luck not participating in the American markets.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    I really don’t want to burst your bubble… but do you not realize this is seen as a joke abroad? e.g. In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and executives are rushing to wine and dine people who literally celebrate the defeat of ‘American force’ in public, on the record, every year. They treat even a random third secretary for some party committee 100km from Hanoi much much better than the 90th percentile upper middle class American household in the Bay Area… Edit: And I’m not even going to talk about Eastern Europe or the Middle East, it’s really too harsh to put into writing.
    - rightbyte 2y ago
      Hanoi? Are you refering to pulling out of Vietnam made the US seem like a joke? Or that the locals are wrong to celebrate that?
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        What exactly are you confused about? It seems pretty clearly spelled out.
        rightbyte 2y ago
        It just seemed so absurd wanting American diplomats to be salty about the Vietnam War. Like, the Vietnam War. I don't even know where to begin.
        MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Uhhh… you might need to work on your reading comprehension skills, or are you projecting something on to me? Why would I be ‘salty’ about anything anyone does in Hanoi? It seems clear that many people in Hanoi are benefitting enormously, which is pretty much a total positive, except for some possibility of inducing corruption elsewhere.
        rightbyte 2y ago
        > In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and executives are rushing to wine and dine people who literally celebrate the defeat of ‘American force’ in public, on the record, every year. I read that as that your are implying that the American diplomats should take the Vietnamese celebrating their independence as an insult versus the American diplomats. This further implies that the American diplomats should be salty concerning the Vietnam War, to not lose face or something.
        MichaelZuo 2y ago
        I am not an American diplomat…???
arp242 2y ago
This is the kind of boring "both side-ism" that I just don't understand. I have no great love of either party, but one side is openly speculating about all sorts of things that cannot be described as anything other than outright authoritarian, and the other party ... is not. And no, some disagreements on free speech or the 2nd amendment or whatnot is not even close. And no, "oh, he's not really serious about it" doesn't fly either. And with one party transformed in the Monster Raving Loony Party, the other one can't do anything else but push its own agenda through when it can, so compromise becomes rarer and rarer. And it's not just Trump – remember the madness and obstructionism of the Obama years? And yes, there have been times the Democratic party could have done better. No doubt. But it's absolutely not a "both sides" issue.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  The issue in question was truth, not authoritarianism. Specifically, the issue was truth about election security. The point was that both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose, and "most secure election in history" when they win. More generally: In the current election, Harris isn't the firehose of lies that Trump is. She isn't a shining beacon of truth, either.
  - arp242 2y ago
    "Most secure election in history" was a superlative I'm not happy with either, no. But the core of it is correct: there is no evidence of wide-spread fraud. The core of the other side is outright lies and fraud, rooted in nothing more than one person's narcissism. Equating these two is just bizarre. "Murder, arson, and jaywalking". Or something like that. And "both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose" is just not true. There have been a few disagreements over the decades of course, some more reasonable than others, but nothing like 2016 has happened in recent history, from either party.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      > there is no evidence of wide-spread fraud. Agreed. There were 60+ court cases, but not evidence of fraud. > The core of the other side is outright lies and fraud, rooted in nothing more than one person's narcissism. Also agreed. > Equating these two is just bizarre. I wasn't. > And "both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose" is just not true. There have been a few disagreements over the decades of course, some more reasonable than others, but nothing like 2016 has happened in recent history, from either party. I presume you mean 2020, not 2016. Yes, nothing like that has happened in recent history... until next week. But speaking of 2016, I remember a large number of people (including Hillary) saying that Hillary "really won" because she had more votes than Trump did, as if the Electoral College was not a thing. I recall seeing it, here on HN, over and over, for months, that Trump wasn't "really the legitimate president". No, nobody actually tried to do anything. Obama didn't tell states to send fake electors to the House for the vote. He didn't have a "demonstration of love and respect" or whatever Trump is currently trying to paint January 6th as. So that's better. Months of talk is better than 60 court cases, fake electors, and attempting to physically prevent the vote in the House. Since you seem to keep mis-reading me, I'm going to say that again, more clearly: The two are not comparable. And yet... the "it's not legitimate because our person lost" was still there as a definite idea. The idea wasn't election fraud - it was that the Electoral College had thwarted the will of the people, and therefore the election was somehow illegitimate. Never mind that we had rules in place, and we followed the rules, and under the rules that were in place, Hillary lost. But no, "it's not legitimate". Nobody ever took it as far as Trump did. But both sides de-ligitimatize the other side's victories, if only verbally. (Again, "only verbally" is better than attacking the Capitol. But it's not as close to "we'll see you in four years" as I would wish.)

willcipriano 2y ago

Notice the Cheneys and John Boltons of the world also have seemed to flipped with them.

anon291 2y ago
I am happy to say, I've never been on the side of a Cheney. Go me!
- sethammons 2y ago
  I find that unlikely. They are very publicly voting D this round. So that implies you are voting R, but that means you likely voted R with Bush. Did you vote against Bush but for Trump?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - anon291 2y ago
    Yes. My family was heavily democrat during the Bush years. Attended protests and the whole thing against the war. Around the time of Obama the family kind of split, and some of us were skeptical (mainly due to illegal immigration and social issues) but some of us liked the health care stuff. Then with Trump, basically everyone got on board. There are a lot of us. I don't really relate to the Bush GOP at all, and am not even sure what they have in common with the modern one other than some vague tax cuts (democrats do that too every once in a while though, so this is hardly some great conservative idea). I'm happy to see the Bush GOP completely gone. Today's GOP feels much more like the democrat party of the 2000s, which is what I grew up in. Much more working class. More 'rough' around the edges. Anti-corporate, etc (most fortune 500 companies and workers support the democrats, based on donation numbers) For me the big national issue has always been a refusal to fight unnecessary wars. I admire that Trump started no new wars or engagements (he continued the existing ones, including some escalations, but I'm not a radical pacifist). For me, that alone seals the deal. I just don't believe in fighting stupid wars. I don't care about threats and I don't care about targeted military intervention. I'm not fighting forever wars, where they send boys my age to die (most of whom happen to lean conservative anyway). What a grift. If the Cheneys in the world want to fight wars, I recommend they grab their guns and go!

unethical_ban 2y ago

Good thing we fixed the hanging chad issue. Did Republicans anywhere try to "secure elections" in a way that didn't involve curtailing voting rights? Improving voting machines, systems, counting, etc. in a way that partisan leadership couldn't mess with? Georgia, I predict, will be a shitshow this year.

brandonmenc 2y ago
I live in one of if not the most critical county in the entire country this election. It's going to be insane here. This week alone we've had Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Tim Walz stumping here. https://newrepublic.com/article/187597/pennsylvania-election-most-important-county-2024 https://newrepublic.com/article/187597/pennsylvania-election...
- callc 2y ago
  I’m in the opposite scenario - my vote will not matter since my county/state is not close to 50/50. It’s a laughably depressing system. I think (without any supporting evidence) the national election system was designed to fit to the standards of transportation and communication 200+ years ago. It was actually feasible to vote per state then send one dude on horseback to DC to cast the vote for the whole state. That’s an OK system for the time. But the fact that each state is given an approximate weight for its vote (electoral college system), is evidence to how we are trying get to something that looks like a nationally counted winner take all election. We’re just doing it terribly. If we fixed these issues then election campaigns couldn’t just focus on swing states and ignore everyone else. The game theory would then shift to just needing to convince a majority of all voters to vote for you.
  - sethammons 2y ago
    Should there be no balance between state size? California always determining the president and ensuring Montana and Rhode Island are never campaigned in?
    - 2y ago

tzs 2y ago

Before 2020 the only allegations of significant fraud or other shenanigans I remember were immediately after elections and were dropped shortly afterwards when no evidence could be found for them. Note that the Bush/Gore election issues were not allegations of fraud or any intentional shenanigans. The issue there was a badly designed ballots and/or badly designed voting machines that let to a large number of spoiled ballots due to people voting for more than one candidate or not marking any candidate, and in one major county led many voters to mark a candidate other than the one they intended to mark. All the controversy there after the election was how to resolve those problems. Some, like the infamous "hanging chads" could in some cases be resolved by hand examination of the ballot, but there would often be some ambiguity so that would not be without controversy. Others, like the "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach County did not lead to any physical problem with the ballot but the design of the ballot led many voters to vote for a candidate other than the one they intended to vote for. That was a completely novel failure mode and the system had no procedure for dealing with it.

brandonmenc 2y ago
What I meant was, the security of electronic voting machines in general. Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among software people that closed source electronic voting machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking. We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question Dominion." Whether or not an election has actually ever been hacked at the voting machine level is a separate conversation.
- chrisco255 2y ago
  Hasn't every other type of computing system been hacked? These systems are so insecure they're leaking passwords on the internet and smart people somehow still believe they've never been tampered with. Trillions of dollars on the line and ability to shape policy for the most powerful economy and military on planet earth but for sure, there's never been any hacks even though we're openly leaking passwords and social security numbers on the internet.
- acdha 2y ago
  > Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among software people that closed source electronic voting machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking. We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question Dominion." We didn’t, you’re just grossly over-simplifying a couple decades of history. In the 2000s, there were some very bad electronic voting systems which did not maintain paper records or printed receipts which which were never validated. That lead to tons of criticism – and better designs. In 2020, nobody said “how dare you question Dominion” because the whole point was that we _don’t_ trust Dominion and use systems which are designed to be verifiable and the results had been independently checked multiple times.