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Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important. Unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should be punished severely. Politicians who basele
by pclowes 4mo ago
Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important.
Unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should be punished severely. Politicians who baselessly erode confidence in elections without providing timely evidence should be ineligible for political office at least and potentially tried for treason.
- readthenotes1 4mo agoDoing such is probably as old as elections. Without going too far back, https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/factchecking-clintons-voter-suppression-claims/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/factchecking-clintons-vote...
- rayiner 4mo agoFaith in elections is a two-way street. The election system must also be fully transparent, minimize the degree to which voters must trust election administrators, and keep records that would allow evidence of voter fraud to be detected. You can’t punish people for not providing evidence if you’ve designed an election system that fails to keep the information that would allow anomalies to be detected.
- mulderc 4mo agoMy states system is very transparent and has many systems for detecting fraud but people on the right claim otherwise and they are either ignorant of how it worked or just lying.
- tmp10423288442 4mo agoWhat’s your state?
- mulderc 4mo agoOregon
- afavour 4mo ago> The election system must also be fully transparent It should not be fully transparent. I should not be able to look up who you voted for. That should be private information. With that caveat in mind, to my eyes the election system we have is doing exactly what you’re saying it should do.
- vitally3643 4mo agoThat's not what transparent means here.
- pclowes 4mo agoYou want to campaign on improving election security and transparency (hopefully without being misleading about all of the systems already in place and the security, statistical analysis, and auditing already done)? Go for it. That is very different than claiming fraud without evidence.
- rayiner 4mo agoThe problem is that Americans, including our political class, are innumerate: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mara-gay-gets-dragged-doing-170030795.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mara-gay-gets-dragged-do.... They react to things based on gut feelings, not mathematical analysis. To them, isolated incidents, anomalies, and irregularities—which always exist—are “evidence” of stolen elections, without proof that those anomalies were significant enough to alter the outcomes. Let me pick an example that hopefully isn’t controversial. I was in Iowa in 2019. Mayor Pete got on stage and credited Stacey Abrams’ claims that she had won the 2018 georgia gubernatorial election. Those claims were based on isolated incidents of people who say their voter registrations were wrongfully deleted. That kind of story hits people in the gut. But people are really, really bad at evaluating mathematically whether such incidents could have materially changed the outcome in an election that was won by 50,000 votes. Election security must similarly operate on the gut feeling level. Look at the video of how they do things in Taiwan: taking out each vote and holding it up for everyone to see. Was it in response to evidence of people cheating? It’s to impress upon people the appearance of a system that is transparent and difficult to corrupt. It’s gut feeling weighed against gut feeling. People must be so impressed by the obvious security of the election system that they dismiss the inevitable anomalies as immaterial.
- baggy_trough 4mo ago[flagged]
- bediger4000 4mo agoVoter ID does little to help there, since ballots aren't (and should not be) tied to a specific voter. Faith in tabulators, voting procedures and doing risk limiting audits help more.
- afavour 4mo agoI think you’ve spent a little too long huffing right wing media glue. There are valid arguments against voter ID requirements. Primarily that not everyone has ID. Any push for voter ID should be paired with a comprehensive program to aid folks in registering for a valid ID. And yet it rarely is, because the aim of voter ID laws is to disenfranchise eligible voters, rather than clamp down on voter fraud. Voter fraud being something that has never been proven to have any effect on electoral outcomes. There has never been any proof any single election in the US has had its result changed because of voter fraud. It is a made up scandal.
- baggy_trough 4mo ago[flagged]
- afavour 4mo agoSo, like I said in my previous comment, any moves to require ID in order to vote should be paired with comprehensive programs to make sure ID is free and easily available to all eligible voters. You haven’t considered why it isn’t? > recklessly casual I say again: there's absolutely no evidence that fraudulent voting has come anywhere close to changing the outcome of an election. Or had any statistical relevance at all. And there are a lot of people looking for that evidence.
- baggy_trough 4mo ago[flagged]
- dawatchusay 4mo agoThis and a comment under it start with the exact same sentence. “Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important.” There’s something wrong here and it makes me doubt HN
- morkalork 4mo agoDon't worry, various governments around the world are working hard to ensure online communities can only be accessed with ID verification. Will that ease your doubt in the future?
- phs318u 4mo agoThat’s not what I’m seeing. pclowes starts off the comment you quoted (“Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important”), then rayiner responds with “Faith in elections is a two-way street” and engages with pclowes point by providing a broader perspective. They are not “the exact same sentence”.