I appreciate the details, but ultimately I still don't buy it. The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves. Yes, they were likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign. But they still have agency, they liked what they were being presented with, and made the final call themselves on who to vote for.
That's not what's being disputed and I completely agree with your sentiment. The issue is that electoral campaign law was not respected and thus the elections were not considered "free and fair", but tainted by this shady candidate.
I feel this is kind of stretching the phrase "free and fair". The election e.g. in Venezuela earlier this year was not "free and fair" because the votes simply weren't counted and made-up tallies were published. This is not what's happening here. Here, there is no doubt that people wanted to vote a certain way and the votes were accurately counted to reflect that.
You don't get to use your own definition of the phrase "free and fair" here. Romanian law prescribes that political campaigns need to be transparent in source and funding. They weren't, as per the Romanian court. End of discussion.
Yes, I do.
By your argument if a country (e.g. China?) outlaws competing political parties then the rubber-stamp single-party elections are “free and fair” because they are in accordance with law. In general the whole point of a “free and fair” election is that the government can’t just change the law and rules to get the result it wants. There is an independent notion of “free and fair” election that is rightly independent of country specific law.
Just like the umpire at the tennis match can grant victory to player X, and then take their title away when the doping tests come back.
His electoral campaign posts weren’t marked as electoral material. As a voter I thought they are not paid but true opinions of journalists/ influencers that I respect. It turns out that they were actually paid and not marked properly. So he broke the rules. Now I am going to change my vote.
People will vote for Hitler if you dress him nicely and make him seem to care for your personal problems (Trump die that really well).
The thing is - in a fair election media scrutiny applies to all candidates. This guy flew under the radar, so media couldn't expose him. Therefore it wasn't a fair choice people were given because the mainstream candidates all received significant more scrutiny.
I don't even think you need to dress that person nicely. The film "Look who's back" had an actor in the role of Adolf Hitler talk to random people in the street in unscripted sequences. He readily pulled them over to his side by relating to their everyday problems.
As crazy as the premise is of Hitler getting inexplicable transplanted into the 21st century, the film manages to demonstrate the appeal of these dangerous populists.
I'd argue that if you accept that the results were "likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign" then the means by which they achieved their objective are not above scrutiny. Elections are a mean for obtaining as fair (that is, unbiased) a measure as possible of the "true" will of the people, and yet we're starting from "yes, the sample has been altered maliciously, but...".
There are (outdated, but still) campaign financing laws designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the candidate apparently broke. If the courts throw their hands in the air and say "whelp, what can you do?" they would be setting the precedence that foreign election interference is only wrong when you lose.
Of course, the analysis rests on fair authorities trying to do good which is a high bar to clear. But letting a cheater get away with it in plain sight doesn't seem fair either.
Who scrutinizes the result? If the people actually voted for that candidate, they won’t trust anybody to look behind the outcome to assess whether it was “fair” or not.
I feel like a large swath of the developed world has forgotten why we have elections. We do it because we don’t trust each other, we don’t agree what’s “fair,” etc. So we establish elections as a way of resolving disputes between people who don’t trust each other. It’s exactly like software security. You create a minimal trusted kernel—the machinery of voting and counting the votes—and then build decision making off the forced consensus generated by the elections.
If there was anybody whom everyone trusted enough to second guess the elections, to look at voters’ motivations and fuzzy ideas of fairness you wouldn’t need elections.
- "If there was anybody whom everyone trusted enough to second guess the elections, to look at voters’ motivations and fuzzy ideas of fairness you wouldn’t need elections."
Lawrence Lessig (well known to HN for his open source law work) proposed that the US Electoral College was created with the purpose of second-guessing elections. (He didn't like the outcome of the 2016 one and was trying to rationalize mechanisms of overturning it).
Lessig:
- "The framers believed, as Alexander Hamilton put it, that "the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the [president]." But no nation had ever tried that idea before. So the framers created a safety valve on the people's choice. Like a judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not — the people's choice. Electors were to apply, in Hamilton's words, "a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice" — and then decide. The Constitution says nothing about "winner take all." It says nothing to suggest that electors' freedom should be constrained in any way. Instead, their wisdom — about whether to overrule "the people" or not — was to be free of political control yet guided by democratic values. They were to be citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-constitution-lets-the-electoral-college-choose-the-winner-they-should-choose-clinton/2016/11/24/0f431828-b0f7-11e6-8616-52b15787add0_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-constitution-let... ("The Constitution lets the electoral college choose the winner. They should choose Clinton")
I agree. he can be prosecuted for not reporting his spending probably, but as long as he didn't ship boatloads of fake ballots it doesn't warrant cancelling the election. the authorities should put a stop to the interference, and if the interference to influence was his advantage, the 2nd round, without interference, would have him lose. Just let the people vote.
I still believe that the main "problem" was that the front runner party that has been in the 2nd round for 10s of years and which has the prime minister as the candidate, didn't make it to the 2nd round. Someone wanted this fixed. Obviously the prime minister who was 3rd in the 1st round made declarations in support of the ruling.
"but as long as he didn't ship boatloads of fake ballots it doesn't warrant cancelling the election."
Why do you think you can decide for romanians? They made their voting laws - he violated them. They sort it out.
Say he violates voting laws and becomes president as a result. Do you get a situation like in the USA where the police just say “well, you won so all crimes are effectively expunged,” or do you have the even more insane situation of the president being prosecuted for violating electoral laws during his campaign?
I lack the willpower to go down the rabbit hole of how bad this guy was. On the political front, on the science front, on the logical consistency front.
After 2 weeks of frantically trying to convince people not to vote for him, I am exhausted and just want a good night's sleep.
Someone should document the amount of absolute insanity that the candidate was and maybe then you'd get it. I just feel relief at this point.
> I lack the willpower to go down the rabbit hole of how bad this guy was. On the political front, on the science front, on the logical consistency front.
We're in the same place in the US.
> After 2 weeks of frantically trying to convince people not to vote for him, I am exhausted and just want a good night's sleep.
How many of us felt after the US election.
I never thought I would say this, but this guy was, honestly, way way worse than Trump. Not to diminish your torture. But it was off the charts insane. Like... A compendium of conspiratorial beliefs.
In a broader sense, the exhaustive storm of BS is deliberate: When the people are too damn tired to care about which story is really true, it changes the playing field to favor whoever is willing to tell the most-pleasing lies.
Under this framework, what if you simply bribed people to vote for your candidate of choice: e.g. Here's 20 euro, vote for this guy.
You could still say "The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves."
But this doesn't really pass a smell test for what we want democracy to look like.
Similarly, if you live in a country and you see billions of dollars poured into your election advertisements from USA, Russia, China, etc, you'd be like "wtf are we even sovereign?"
While they did have agency, what if they were also lied to? These campaigns to say nice things about a candidate usually come with equally strong campaigns to lie about their rivals. It could all be lies, there could be nothing redeemable about the candidate. We saw similar in a recent election in another country that I'm not going to mention specifically. This is exactly how fascists gain power.
The problem is that lies are common, and sadly, accepted in politics. What was the last time you saw a candidate who didn't lie in their platform?
I know that people like Trump or Georgescu are in a different league in this respect, they lie more and in a more unhinged way, but it's hard to draw a line and say that their votes are don't legitimate becuase their voters were lied to, while probably voters for other parties are putting hope in promises that will be unfulfilled as well.
> voters for other parties are putting hope in promises that will be unfulfilled as well.
Okay, I'll get specific now. In the US this typically isn't because the Democrat candidate lied, it's because of obstruction from the right-wing. Sure, Biden promised to cancel student debt, but he was met with obstruction at every step from the right-wing. That isn't a lie from Biden, but the lack of results is what we get when voters believe the right-wing obstructionist liars telling them that student loan forgiveness is evil. So then people call out Biden for somehow "lying" about forgiving student loans, and then don't show up to vote for the Democrat in the next election, because "they are liars".
True, but in Spain we have had governments with absolute majority from both major parties, and they still lied, and I think most European countries can say the same.
'And those with the deepest pocket shall win, amen'
There are reasons why there are rules on how to influence voters (campaign), actually, despite voters having absolute 'agency'. There are problematic influences you know, considered problematic by the society.
You could say the same about people who voted for Brexit, who after the fact when they came to learn what it would actually mean said they would've never voted for it if they knew the implications. But alas, the United Kingdom was on the receiving end of a similar (dis)information campaign. Yes, the people technically knew which candidate they were giving their vote for, but no, they did not know what that candidate actually stood for.
You are saying a candidate that breaks the law pursuading others to vote for them should still be elected?
How do you have agency when influenced.
You act based on information. If someone controls your information, then they control your choices. This is most obvious in cults.
I can appreciate the viewpoint that the election campaign laws don’t make sense or are in some way unfair as a basis for advocating against such laws.
But Romania has laws regulating election campaigns. Is your point of view that that Romanian courts should not enforce those existing laws?
The laws regulating campaigns have specific penalties outlined for those that disobey them. Election authorities have broad authority to enforce those laws unilaterally during the campaign, without even getting the courts involved, such as having ads taken down immediately, fining those that didn't follow labeling requirements, and so on. People can be charged and convicted for disobeying these laws, through the regular court system.
There is also a law for how the vote results are to be tallied, when they can be recounted, and in what conditions the recount can lead to a do-over of the election (specifically, the law says that only if widespread fraud of a nature that could have changed the order of candidates). The law also mentions when this do-over would take place (the second next Sunday after the decision is taken, which must be within two weeks of the suspect vote itself).
However, no law in Romania stipulates that an election is to be entirely canceled, from the beginning steps of candidate registration before their campaigns, if one candidate disobeyed campaign finance laws and/or electoral ad labeling laws and no one caught them in time.
This response, while correct technically and in sentiment, is why democracy is more vulnerable to influence from a dictatorship than vice-versa.
Ultimately, electoral laws exist and have a purpose. If the law was broken, then it must be investigated and the tainted election must be re-run. These laws are designed to prevent exactly what is alleged to be happening, so it is not a case of misusing power.
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> If the law was broken, then it must be investigated
Yes, of course.
> and the tainted election must be re-run
No, not at all. First because there is no law that even mentions this possibility - courts should not get to invent rules and regulations.
Secondly because there is no time to take correct decisions of this nature during the short election cycle, and ensure that evidence is properly gathered, rights are respected, and so on. The standard of evidence used to take this decision is barely good enough to charge someone.
> The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves
They got brainwashed into the vote. The other parties had very weak candidates, some with a bunch of corruption issues that the press raved about just before the election. The others are just weak and unprepared, even the second runner up, a former journalist who's currently a mayor in a small town. This surprise candidate is no different, but he has an empty discourse that strikes a chord with many frustrated voters, without screaming or being hysterical, much like that Stoianaglo guy in Moldova. Of course, it's all mumbo jumbo, the guy is either deluded or a mythomaniac. People are fed up, most of them have given the current establishment a hate no-confidence vote, which Russia has speculated mainly with bots on Tiktok. It was quite easy for them to do so given that the inept Romanian politicians also set the dates of both presidential and parliamentary elections over the course of two weeks.
Have you not been following in the past few years about how susceptible the human mind is to disinformation and manipulation? You fake a positive belief field around a person and a huge number of us flip to align with that perceived crowd. You might disagree for yourself, or want it to be different, or hear people claiming otherwise, but we are very vulnerable to the effect of being surrounded by genuine sentiments (of very marginal perspectives) that have been boosted to appear majority.
Do you disagree with the above?
If these forces are so powerful, why don’t both sides use them and cancel each other out? It seems like people only invoke these explanations when their side loses, when they win it’s because the voters accepted true and good arguments.
It may seem that, but I invoke it bc it aligns with adversarial desires of hostile states (Iran, China, Russian). I assume some proportion of fake humans are part of any system sowing cultural discord, left or right.
The international consensus is that trump sows international discord with USA's allies. I agree. My analysis has nothing to do with right vs left or sides here
Is it possible the election itself was also "influenced" in a more direct manner? (Where the psywar aspect would serve merely to legitimize the result, rather than create it.)
I love the cognitive dissonance at play here
I think this comes down to a very simple question: Is one open to entertain the notion that well crafted messages targeted through algorithmic platforms can drive people to change behavior.
As an ex Facebook person let me offer this thought:
Either advertisement works or it doesn’t. Looking at my past paychecks and stock price of all tech advertisment giants, I have my opinion.
I think it’s preposterous to think that political choices / votes somehow are in a different category for people than all the other things advertisements are run for.
If medical ads work (why would we regulate them) to “manipulate” or convince people to act or spend against their own self best interest, then why would political ones not work.
And in many countries political ads are allowed and are regulated and have massive ad spend. We shouldn’t spend and regulate now if we didn’t think they’d work, would we.
And the debate is not new. I was at FB for Cambridge analytics and saw the damage mitigation first hand - along with the weird conclusions that no harm was done.
Which is the same we see every time a big tech company announces they banned foreign adversaries running influence campaigns and found no evidence they had any impact.
So we have Schroedingers ad product here - highly effective when the ads are official, as measurable via the ads manager, but totally hapless and ineffective when it’s not run by an allowed source.
Romania is a great one minute past midnight wake up call for western democracies to resolve this cognitive dissonance and get off their high horse of humans being selectively able to resist an industry that has mastered manipulation through scientific a/b testing for decades.
Resolving that doesn’t mean getting rid of the notion of free will … one merely need to remember that people’s ability to make decisions is constrained by the data available to them and their ability to make sense of that data.
And time spent on platform and activity - active or passive collection of data - is the constraining factor there. The channels of information are changing and passive absorption is vastly outpacing active informing at a pace most politicians do not comprehend.
The latest ofcom report in the UK shows a 25% increase (1h) of time spent on phones - the vast majority of which is either video social media platforms - in one year!
Maybe 2016 the effect wasn’t strong enough yet. But it’s 9 years of a/b testing down the road, a rise of aggressive engagement video platforms and political podcast influencers and a pandemic later and in the last year alone we’ve seen a massive change in engagement patterns and where people get their data to sensemake reality from.
You need some basic rules for what's acceptable in elections, or otherwise the winning tactics will be things like threatening or bribing voters. You won't capture the genuine will of the voters if that's going on.
He very clearly broke the law. We could debate the severity of the violation, but it's certainly enough to make you ineligible to run many places.
The law is about what he is spending. If I go and pay for ads on my own initiative, he doesn't need to declare it just like Basescu didn't declare all the stuff NGOs paid for him back in the days.
EDIT: I do find it impossible for him to spend 0 on it though. You have to travel from A to B (at the very least)
My question in these events is, so why not investigate it and block the running BEFORE the vote? People only care about illegal hiding of funds post elections? Why even let it go on if you can get evidence so quickly just after? In these 6 days what came out that wasn't out say, 10 or 20 days before voting day?
> The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves.
> Yes, they were likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign.
That's not how democracy works, and as a matter of fact, how the human brain works.
You can't make informed decisions when state actors are working day and night to make you go against your own interest.
That's exactly why we have regulations like public campaign spending, radio/TV quotas, &c. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than the alternatives? Most likely
State actors are always working day and night to make you go against your own interest. This happens in every election.
The question is: who gets to decide which are nullified and which are not?
> That's not how democracy works, and as a matter of fact, how the human brain works.
> You can't make informed decisions when state actors are working day and night to make you go against your own interest.
It is possible for a brain to do, but it is not common because almost everyone thinks based on heuristics, like you are doing.
It is highly analogous to the rise of science's influence on beliefs and thinking styles in the physical realm, but a different realm. We remain in a sort of dark ages in this regard.
Modern mass social media is a hyper-optimised, hyper-targeted psychological howitzer that would make Goebbels or Bernays blush. It's more than just "an influence".
Ffs I search for cake recipes on YouTube and my suggested videos are infinite hours of the local far-right guy ranting about gypsies and nepalis. Of course it has an effect, of course such one-sided avalanche of propaganda skews and manipulates things. This is obvious and also empirically verified.
I stress this: one-sided. It's not even so much as all the boomers (and impressionable kids) being fed this propaganda for hours on end, it's that it's the only thing that they are fed. Listening to 30 tiktoks in a row of the guy ranting about gypsies and the EU would not be so bad if at least it was followed by some tiktoks giving an opposing views, or exposing that guy's shady business deals and how he pockets millions in taxpayer money! But we all know echo chambers are more lucrative than balanced views....
In other words, democracy is under serious attack and if we think it's worth savibg, we will need to find robust counter-measures against these methods.
It's not a new idea that this is a serious problem: demagogues were recognized in the Antique.
This is like saying that people deceived by false advertising should have to keep what they were tricked into buying.
Massive election interference should nullify the election. Obviously the evidence bar is high here, but you can't have someone flout election laws and have outside state interference and just shrug you shoulders.
The correct course of action is to take the case to the highest court and get them to make a ruling. They decided a do over because the election is too flawed to continue.
If this guy can run again and isn't wrapped up in a criminal case, maybe they will vote for him, but at least now they have far more information than they did before.
In a lot of countries there are rules, for instance limitations in terms of spending or similar time on air for all candidates. I don't know whether that's the case in Romania, but it is completely possible to rule an election out even if people voted "freely". I know that typically doesn't apply to the US, but there's a world outside of it
> they liked what they were being presented with, and made the final call themselves on who to vote for
This assumes they were presented with accurate information and a proper understanding no?
Otherwise it's just manipulation? So wouldn't you want to have safeguards in place to make sure as a voter, you are not deceived?
Wow, this is a worrisome comment because it reveals a huge misconception of the Free & Fair election process.
Elections aren't about defrauding people - you're framing the electoral process as "people have agency to make an X on a voting card, and it doesn't matter what happens until then".
There are laws for elections for some reason. If you're defrauding people, it doesn't represent agency, it represents that people are misinformed.
Thats like saying older member of family transferring all of his equity to Asian Pig farm also had agency and decided for himself. He liked what he saw being presented with, and made the final call himself on who to give his lifesavings to.