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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 ar

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 There are (outdated, but still) campaign financing laws designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the candidate apparently broke.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.

rayiner 2y ago
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.
- perihelions 2y ago
  - "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")
  - afthonos 2y ago
    I actually think the electoral college is a solution to a problem so obvious to anyone living then that no one really thought to name it: validating an election. It’s 1789, and you’re designing a voting-based system. You’ve decided each state gets votes proportional to its population in the presidential election. How do you validate that the result you got from Georgia, two weeks’ travel from NYC, is trustworthy? Seals? They can be tampered with. What about special messengers? Someone could impersonate them. Solution: send dignitaries that can vouch for each other. The elite of neighboring states is likely to know each other, and you establish a chain of trust up and down the coast. Great! Except these are people with better things to do than to be errand boys. There has to be something in it for them. Solution: they get to cast the final ballot for President. They are electors. (This is a theory that I have not validated at all, to be clear.)
    - ANewFormation 2y ago
      An adjacent point is that states are free to run their elections as they see fit with relatively few rules. For example most states have a winner-take-all result for presidential elections where a guy who gets 51% of the vote get 100% of the 'seats', so to speak. But that's not necessary - Maine and Nebraska, by contrast, have proportional systems, where they split their vote proportionally. So how to interpret the results from one state could be quite different (and potentially subject to rapid change) even if you know the results were genuine. So the results of states always would need to be converted, by the states, into e.g. 15 final votes. So the electoral college emerges quite naturally in this context.
      - Tyrannosaur 2y ago
        Slight correction- Maine and Nebraska do not have proportional systems; they both use the Congressional District Method. Each congressional district votes plurality for an elector, and the 2 remaining electors go to the statewide plurality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College#Congressional_district_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
    - 2y ago
- stouset 2y ago
  And yet we still have laws surrounding what constitutes fair participation in the election. If those laws are grossly violated and the candidate wins… then what? “Sorry nothing we can do” just means you’re a sucker if you follow the rules. All the last decade has shown me is that democracy is far more fragile than any of us really realized. Populations are frighteningly easy to mislead and misinform en masse. Enough voters to swing most elections vote primarily on vibes more than anything resembling a coherent or informed political philosophy. Drought caused food prices to rise? Better kick out the current guy. Random weakening of our biggest trade partner’s currency causing lower prices of goods? The current guy is a genius!
  - rayiner 2y ago
    > All the last decade has shown me is that democracy is far more fragile than any of us really realized. Populations are frighteningly easy to mislead and misinform en mass This is absolutely the wrong lesson to take away from the events of the last decade. The whole point of democracy is that we don’t have a priestly class that gets to impose their views by fiat, like the Brahmins of ancient India.
    - stouset 2y ago
      I’m not saying what we have isn’t an improvement on that. But it’s also maybe uncomfortably closer to that than we’re willing to admit to ourselves. And it is terrifyingly fragile. Spread the right kind of vibes and misinformation and you can get enough of the population to believe anything. Hell, upset enough people and they’ll start to do it themselves. We’ve already seen several countries essentially vote themselves into dictatorships based on misinformation. This may have been a near miss.
gwervc 2y ago
> 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. No influence doesn't exist in any country. In France during the first elections Macron was elected, he was pushed heavily by the media. In 2016, almost every news outlet in the country were vocally against Trump. Those are example of "state-actor" level influence on elections, but somehow it's supposed to be fine because it was supporting the "good" candidate. Democracy in unironically in danger, but not for the reasons often voiced. So people and factions try more and more to impose what is the supposed correct outcome of elections or the definition of democracy.
- data_maan 2y ago
  There are levels to influence. Macron and Trump were widely recognized as candidate before the election. This guy in Romania was at 5%, no one knew who he was, then suddenly he's at 20+%. That's next level. You think that having bad press, as Trump had, was bad - that's not true at all, there is no such thing as bad press. The fact that the media in the US all went against him was just a freebie for Trump in terms of exposure. Here, on the other hand, no media outlet reported on him, which is very different - yet mysteriously he got 20% from TikTok alone. So yes, it's good to remove him.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Second guessing an election result based on handwaving like this is completely insane. You do not have a functional mental model of how and why elections work.
    - anonzzzies 2y ago
      Yeah, luckily I don't live in the US where you get a crazy billionaire to fund a certified madman into office, both clearly for money and power reasons that have nothing to do with 'the people' and then let that be valid. No thanks.
      - 2y ago
fsckboy 2y ago
seems like a bit of a leap from There are...campaign financing laws designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the candidate apparently broke to the results were "likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign"
- danicriss 2y ago
  I'm surprised all the discussions here missed an obvious point, even if it's implicit and not explicitly stated: the shady support this candidate had was the only support he had He's declared 0 campaign spending. For all we know, the only way he was promoted was by a swarm of foreign-controlled accounts bypassing TikTok's own anti-swarming policies, knowingly or not. The growth in his account was not organic. He had practically zero other exposure to justify his growth Accepting him as president is tantamount to Romania accepting a president chosen by someone very high up in another state. That, for me, is Romania becoming a puppet state of that power, be it Russia, China or both working together No, thanks, I'm happy with a borderline legal decision by Romania's Constitutional Court. There were enough red flags in the way this candidate conducted himself for his case to not stand as precedent if a legit candidate is challenged in the future for minor (and even maybe significant, but not exclusive) foreign support
somenameforme 2y ago
Flip the actors and imagine how you might feel. Imagine in Hungary if Orban was defeated by a radically pro-NATO, pro-EU guy. And then courts in Hungary ruled that said person was unfairly promoted by Google, Instagram, et al. And so the election had to be completely redone. And then some reason was found to exclude this individual from the next election (as will certainly happen here, or he'd probably just win again). There would be 24/7 headlines about tyranny, disregarding democracy, and more. The US would be leading the charge with sanctions against Hungary if not outright "regime change", and the EU would likely even begin working on motions to remove them from the EU. Yet when the wrong candidate wins a democratic vote, suddenly everything is entirely different. The 'rules based order' becoming a joke is precisely why anti-establishment candidates are winning everywhere.
- zpeti 2y ago
  Nicely said. The problem here is the message clearly resonated and people voted for him. Yes, he might have had help in spreading that message, but the message still landed and people chose him. To now say that the election was invalid when people actually chose him is extremely risky. My guess is it will reinforce a lot of narratives about how evil the west and the USA is. This will only make things worse, and will put the winner in an even stronger position.
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    >The problem here is the message clearly resonated and people voted for him. Indeed, that's what a lot of the middle upper class urban Romanians with corporate jobs don't understand, that a lot of the people, especially the older less educated ultra conservative ones, resonated with him and his message so they voted for him. TikTok didn't hypnotize and mind control them to vote for him, they stil had free will, they just like his message the most. Sure his message was full of lies and pandering but that's every single politician. Do we discard the democratic process because someone undesirable by the educated middle upper class won by majority? Then what's the point of democracy? You keep repeating elections till your preferred candidate wins?
    - 2y ago
tsimionescu 2y ago
There are many steps between "no scrutiny" and "overturn the entire months long electoral process two days before it was supposed to end based on hearsay". The right thing to have done here was to let the process continue, have the fascist investigated by the relevant authorities for his likely crimes regardless of whether he won or not, have him stand before a judge, and convict him - and, if he had won, have Parliament suspend him and strip his immunity so that this can all happen. We have laws and established legal frameworks for all of this. The CCR can't just overrule all other procedures and base its decisions on hearsay.
okasaki 2y ago
This 'state actor' stuff only comes up when it's someone you don't like. Is Ukraine being influenced by a state actor? Is Israel? Is Taiwan?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mountainstar 2y ago
[flagged]

rayiner 2y ago

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.

perihelions 2y ago
- "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")
- afthonos 2y ago
  I actually think the electoral college is a solution to a problem so obvious to anyone living then that no one really thought to name it: validating an election. It’s 1789, and you’re designing a voting-based system. You’ve decided each state gets votes proportional to its population in the presidential election. How do you validate that the result you got from Georgia, two weeks’ travel from NYC, is trustworthy? Seals? They can be tampered with. What about special messengers? Someone could impersonate them. Solution: send dignitaries that can vouch for each other. The elite of neighboring states is likely to know each other, and you establish a chain of trust up and down the coast. Great! Except these are people with better things to do than to be errand boys. There has to be something in it for them. Solution: they get to cast the final ballot for President. They are electors. (This is a theory that I have not validated at all, to be clear.)
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    An adjacent point is that states are free to run their elections as they see fit with relatively few rules. For example most states have a winner-take-all result for presidential elections where a guy who gets 51% of the vote get 100% of the 'seats', so to speak. But that's not necessary - Maine and Nebraska, by contrast, have proportional systems, where they split their vote proportionally. So how to interpret the results from one state could be quite different (and potentially subject to rapid change) even if you know the results were genuine. So the results of states always would need to be converted, by the states, into e.g. 15 final votes. So the electoral college emerges quite naturally in this context.
    - Tyrannosaur 2y ago
      Slight correction- Maine and Nebraska do not have proportional systems; they both use the Congressional District Method. Each congressional district votes plurality for an elector, and the 2 remaining electors go to the statewide plurality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College#Congressional_district_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
  - 2y ago
stouset 2y ago
And yet we still have laws surrounding what constitutes fair participation in the election. If those laws are grossly violated and the candidate wins… then what? “Sorry nothing we can do” just means you’re a sucker if you follow the rules. All the last decade has shown me is that democracy is far more fragile than any of us really realized. Populations are frighteningly easy to mislead and misinform en masse. Enough voters to swing most elections vote primarily on vibes more than anything resembling a coherent or informed political philosophy. Drought caused food prices to rise? Better kick out the current guy. Random weakening of our biggest trade partner’s currency causing lower prices of goods? The current guy is a genius!
- rayiner 2y ago
  > All the last decade has shown me is that democracy is far more fragile than any of us really realized. Populations are frighteningly easy to mislead and misinform en mass This is absolutely the wrong lesson to take away from the events of the last decade. The whole point of democracy is that we don’t have a priestly class that gets to impose their views by fiat, like the Brahmins of ancient India.
  - stouset 2y ago
    I’m not saying what we have isn’t an improvement on that. But it’s also maybe uncomfortably closer to that than we’re willing to admit to ourselves. And it is terrifyingly fragile. Spread the right kind of vibes and misinformation and you can get enough of the population to believe anything. Hell, upset enough people and they’ll start to do it themselves. We’ve already seen several countries essentially vote themselves into dictatorships based on misinformation. This may have been a near miss.

gwervc 2y ago

> 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. No influence doesn't exist in any country. In France during the first elections Macron was elected, he was pushed heavily by the media. In 2016, almost every news outlet in the country were vocally against Trump. Those are example of "state-actor" level influence on elections, but somehow it's supposed to be fine because it was supporting the "good" candidate. Democracy in unironically in danger, but not for the reasons often voiced. So people and factions try more and more to impose what is the supposed correct outcome of elections or the definition of democracy.

data_maan 2y ago
There are levels to influence. Macron and Trump were widely recognized as candidate before the election. This guy in Romania was at 5%, no one knew who he was, then suddenly he's at 20+%. That's next level. You think that having bad press, as Trump had, was bad - that's not true at all, there is no such thing as bad press. The fact that the media in the US all went against him was just a freebie for Trump in terms of exposure. Here, on the other hand, no media outlet reported on him, which is very different - yet mysteriously he got 20% from TikTok alone. So yes, it's good to remove him.
- rayiner 2y ago
  Second guessing an election result based on handwaving like this is completely insane. You do not have a functional mental model of how and why elections work.
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    Yeah, luckily I don't live in the US where you get a crazy billionaire to fund a certified madman into office, both clearly for money and power reasons that have nothing to do with 'the people' and then let that be valid. No thanks.
    - 2y ago

fsckboy 2y ago

seems like a bit of a leap from There are...campaign financing laws designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the candidate apparently broke to the results were "likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign"

danicriss 2y ago
I'm surprised all the discussions here missed an obvious point, even if it's implicit and not explicitly stated: the shady support this candidate had was the only support he had He's declared 0 campaign spending. For all we know, the only way he was promoted was by a swarm of foreign-controlled accounts bypassing TikTok's own anti-swarming policies, knowingly or not. The growth in his account was not organic. He had practically zero other exposure to justify his growth Accepting him as president is tantamount to Romania accepting a president chosen by someone very high up in another state. That, for me, is Romania becoming a puppet state of that power, be it Russia, China or both working together No, thanks, I'm happy with a borderline legal decision by Romania's Constitutional Court. There were enough red flags in the way this candidate conducted himself for his case to not stand as precedent if a legit candidate is challenged in the future for minor (and even maybe significant, but not exclusive) foreign support

somenameforme 2y ago

Flip the actors and imagine how you might feel. Imagine in Hungary if Orban was defeated by a radically pro-NATO, pro-EU guy. And then courts in Hungary ruled that said person was unfairly promoted by Google, Instagram, et al. And so the election had to be completely redone. And then some reason was found to exclude this individual from the next election (as will certainly happen here, or he'd probably just win again). There would be 24/7 headlines about tyranny, disregarding democracy, and more. The US would be leading the charge with sanctions against Hungary if not outright "regime change", and the EU would likely even begin working on motions to remove them from the EU. Yet when the wrong candidate wins a democratic vote, suddenly everything is entirely different. The 'rules based order' becoming a joke is precisely why anti-establishment candidates are winning everywhere.

zpeti 2y ago
Nicely said. The problem here is the message clearly resonated and people voted for him. Yes, he might have had help in spreading that message, but the message still landed and people chose him. To now say that the election was invalid when people actually chose him is extremely risky. My guess is it will reinforce a lot of narratives about how evil the west and the USA is. This will only make things worse, and will put the winner in an even stronger position.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  >The problem here is the message clearly resonated and people voted for him. Indeed, that's what a lot of the middle upper class urban Romanians with corporate jobs don't understand, that a lot of the people, especially the older less educated ultra conservative ones, resonated with him and his message so they voted for him. TikTok didn't hypnotize and mind control them to vote for him, they stil had free will, they just like his message the most. Sure his message was full of lies and pandering but that's every single politician. Do we discard the democratic process because someone undesirable by the educated middle upper class won by majority? Then what's the point of democracy? You keep repeating elections till your preferred candidate wins?
  - 2y ago

tsimionescu 2y ago

There are many steps between "no scrutiny" and "overturn the entire months long electoral process two days before it was supposed to end based on hearsay". The right thing to have done here was to let the process continue, have the fascist investigated by the relevant authorities for his likely crimes regardless of whether he won or not, have him stand before a judge, and convict him - and, if he had won, have Parliament suspend him and strip his immunity so that this can all happen. We have laws and established legal frameworks for all of this. The CCR can't just overrule all other procedures and base its decisions on hearsay.

okasaki 2y ago

This 'state actor' stuff only comes up when it's someone you don't like. Is Ukraine being influenced by a state actor? Is Israel? Is Taiwan?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

mountainstar 2y ago

[flagged]