Be Very Skeptical of Stolen Election Claims | Hacker News Reader

Be Very Skeptical of Stolen Election Claims

vox.com

31 pointskushti55 comments

A prior article from a legitimate news source, New York Magazine, saying that the claim was raised as a possibility by leading experts in the field, was for some reason suppressed from HN's front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13018675

@sctb or @dang - I'm not suggesting some conspiracy, but perhaps an algorithm or process needs to be tweaked. In any case, I hope the other article can also be 'freed' to be seen by everyone.

EDIT: Currently this comment has 1 point, is 13 minutes old, yet is somehow at the very bottom of the discussion. C'mon guys; that feels like an inconsiderate, combative response to a reasonable question. Why not just be open about it and make a comment?

Ok, please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13024781.

Thanks.

> But he argues that since hacking is possible, it’s simply prudent to conduct a recount in close states where there’s a paper trail, which is reasonable enough.

I think this is key. We should be skeptical of stolen election claims, but we should also be skeptical of claims that the election wasn't stolen. If recounting is straightforward to do and it addresses the very real concern that the count was tampered with, why not do it? Even if there was no tampering, it's very harmful to democracy to allow reasonable doubt to persist as to whether the vote counts were legitimate.

The issue here is there isn't evidence to support the investigation into the allegations. Everyone can make the hacker bogey man a defense, but the truth is while hacking does happen, the way in which the voting systems are designed it's less likely to have been hacked through exploiting voting terminals. It's more likely that the registration of voters would be manipulated. I would argue that's why the Clinton campaign hasn't been aggressive with it, they haven't met the threshold of reasonable doubt.

Off topic, I wish people and their passions had been put to work during the elections on both sides. It's all been yelling at each other over superiority and whatever else is the hot ticket button of the day. If people would take the energy and focus on a micro level, working within their communities to make change, we'd be a better country for it.

- not directed at previous poster, just tagging on commentary.

> Off topic, I wish people and their passions had been put to work during the elections on both sides. It's all been yelling at each other over superiority and whatever else is the hot ticket button of the day. If people would take the energy and focus on a micro level, working within their communities to make change, we'd be a better country for it.

>- not directed at previous poster, just tagging on commentary.

The problem is everyone "knew" HRC was going to win...

I would agree with you 30 years ago, but today I doubt it would matter. People believe what they want to believe and now they can just consume the news they want.

If people want to believe conspiracy theories and fake news, that's up to them. If we can't convince a reasonable impartial observer that our election results are almost certainly valid, then we've got a serious problem.

Being skeptical is generally good but I am afraid that the US is more and more eroding trust in their democracy. Most people think Congress is corrupt, a lot of people think that most elections since 2000 were rigged, or they think Obama is not even eligible to be president, now they think Trump is illegitimate because he didn't win the popular vote.

I think this is a very dangerous path. When people have no faith in established institutions this creates a big opportunity for an authoritarian that "cleans up" the system.

at the risk of opening a can of worms, why is obama ineligible for the presidency?

I think he meant to say that people think Obama is ineligible (birther claims).

Correct. I better change the post before I get down-voted.

The short answer was because people did not want him to win. The supposed issue was his nation of birth, thus the 'birther' term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_consp...

People believe he is born outside the country, also that he is a Muslim and has an agenda to destroy America.

I've spoken to people who seriously believe he's a secret Muslim born in Kenya. The fact that our president-elect spent years pushing this completely fabricated lie to further his own ends didn't help.

Trump was a minor player in that rumor; it was pushed by many in the GOP and in right-wing 'news' organizations.

For that matter, it originated among Hillary supporters in '08.

Once Trump finally dropped the birther lie in September of this year (seriously, he spent 5 years trumpeting that lie) he came up with the new lie: Hillary started it. Neither Clinton nor her campaign ever publicly questioned Obama's citizenship or birthplace.

I agree; I never posted anything to the contrary.

Whatever people's partisan feelings, surely Trump has established a track record that what he says is relatively very unlikely to be true. The above statement comes from Trump.

No, it doesn't. As far as I can tell, Trump claimed HRC (or her campaign) originated the myth. This is different than her supporters, which is my claim. [This article][0] supports my point.

[0]: http://www.factcheck.org/2015/07/was-hillary-clinton-the-ori...

... with "born in Kenya" being the relevant part. Muslim has nothing to do with it, secret or not.

I'll give you a neutral answer for a neutral question.

You must be American-born to be eligible for president. With the exception of the "(truly) first generation Americans" which could be citizens since nobody was yet natural born [0].

This is what the birth certificate controversy/conspiracy [2] was about. Obama's father [1] is Kenyan so there was some belief he was born in Kenya, not a "natural born US citizen" and thus illegible for position as the POTUS.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen_clause

[1] It might be his mother, but I remember it being his father. It's one of the parents, but not both.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_consp...

As a matter of constitutional law, natural-born citizen is kind of undefined. If he had been born outside the US, the would have had dual or even triple citizenship at birth which would seemingly also qualify.

Right...undecided in courts, but my (naive) reading of it would mean that you have to be a citizen from the moment you leave the birth canal. It doesn't seem like it should matter where exactly you were born...if your American parents were vacationing in Bermuda for 1 week when you were born prematurely, that means you can't run for president 35+ years later?

Ted Cruz, a Canadian, was almost nominated as the Replubican candidate. Clearly, a large number of people feel that the definition of natural American citizen is a bit more flexible then that.

That's exactly in line with my statement. His mother was an American - it shouldn't matter where he happened to be born.

IMO, there is growing dissatisfaction with a system whose outcome is in opposition to the popular vote on a regular basis. It's not a question of playing by the rules, but a more fundamental will of the people question.

The problem with our system is it's so open to manipulation. If for example some of those tech hubs relocated to Florida they could dramatically change election outcomes. And the idea that moving voters is this important really defeats the entire concept of democracy.

Then people should try to strengthen the system. It can't be that hard to have a voting system that works reliably. Lots of counties are able to do that. Instead it's just an excuse for another endless controversy.

The election already showed that there is a desire for a strongman. If that trend continues people will at some point happily vote for a dictator that will abolish all the rotten democratic stuff.

Gerrymandering, lack of house/senate seats for DC, even the 2 senators per state, are all kind of baked into the process. I don't see how we can 'strengthen' things without at a minimum changing the constitution and frankly good luck with that. So, at best people are trying to insure a rigged system operates as intended.

Anyway, I don't think an unbiased look at the vote suggests a strong desire for a strongman. Losing the popular vote may not be particularly meaningful as people obtain in very blue or red states because it's kind of pointless. However, polling suggest he revived a lot of votes in opposition to Hillary instead of for him.

PS: It's going to be really interesting when he is up for reelection, but that's not going to somehow fix the system.

Tyranny of the majority is a major concern for democratic systems, hence the many protections against it. A system based on pure population majority is no less manipulable, you would end up seeing candidates campaign hard in the ~25 most dense cities and ignore the rest of the country.

First off, most Americans live in city's, but rural voters would still be just as valuable as anyone else. So, the real change is removing extra power from people who only got it from accidents of history. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Second, having rotating senate elections, many votes requiring more than 50% to pass, and lifetime appointments to the supreme court are all designed to hold back a pure majority.

PS: I would suggest national proportional representation to the house, and instant runoff elections for the senate and president, with senate boundary chosen by a fixed public algorithm.

That's because tyranny of the minority is typically not a major concern for democratic systems... Except in the United States, because it happens so damn frequently. In no other country does the opinion of ~2% of the population (Swing voters in swing states) take precedence over everything else.

Your response completely ignores, for example, the rural California vote. Those people don't live in dense cities, but their opinions are completely ignored, because they don't live in the right state.

Alternatively, why not double down on avoiding tyranny of the majority? Make a native American's vote count as ten white votes, make an African American's vote count as three white votes... The justification for it is about as good as making a Wisconsin farmer's vote count for that of three California farmers.

Except in this case, rural CA voters ultimately got what they wanted, since they on average supported Trump over Hillary.

Also, if we went to a national popular vote, would their concerns be more likely to be heard? Or would the candidates just rally at LA/SD and SF/SV?

They would have also gotten what they voted if elections were done away with, and Trump were announced a winner by fiat. That doesn't make it a good system.

There are two problems for them.

1. Unequal distribution of EC votes.

2. State-based winner-take-all distribution of EC votes.

Yes, their concerns would be far more likely to be heard with the elimination of #1, and #2. They can be completely ignored because of #2, and even if they couldn't be, then due to #1, there are better places to focus on.

Under a popular vote system, with the margins for victory as they are, nobody would be able to ignore the rural vote, as a whole. Right now, that is exactly what happens - it is ignored - except in a handful of states (Which, strangely enough, receive an overwhelming amount of federal subsidies - it's no accident that ~75% of farming subsidies go to only 10% of farmers.)

> In no other country does the opinion of ~2% of the population (Swing voters in swing states) take precedence over everything else.

It doesn't here, either. In order for it to "take precedence", it has to be the swing 2% - the 2% in the middle. That is, if the 98% of the country voted differently, a different swing 2% would be where the election swung.

This is like saying there is growing opposition to the World Series, because sometimes the team that scores the most runs over the course of the series ends up losing.

Well, guess what - no team is trying to maximize their total run count. They are trying to hit 4 wins. Everything from day 1 would be conducted differently if each candidate was trying to maximize total vote count.

> Everything from day 1 would be conducted differently if each candidate was trying to maximize total vote count.

I agree. However, when people are dissatisfied with the current system they want change not just a different leader. Which IMO is why the president flip flops all the time. People talk red vs blue states but look back to 1900 and the trend is all over the map: http://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/

PS: 1964 - 1972 is almost shocking.

Possibly apocryphal anecdote: The Trump campaign, knowing the they were never going to get any electoral votes from CA, instead spent resources in CA having volunteers there work phonebanks that called voters in states that were in play.

> I think this is a very dangerous path.

To the contrary, I think that the erosion in trust is based on information technology giving us citizens a better view of how the sausage is - and always has been -made. Thus the erosion in trust is a very logical and appropriate response.

The solution is not regaining our trust in a inherently flawed system, but innovating away from the flawed system to something better.

Good luck coming up with an inherently non-flawed system. Whatever you come up with will have exactly the same problems.

Well, Obama did botch his public oath both times, but I guess that doesn't count? (I'm not from the USA, btw.)

Do you mean when Chief Justice Roberts read it incorrectly, and then Obama decided to graciously _follow his incorrect lead_ instead of saying something different?

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=roberts+obama+oath

What I don't understand is when Gore lost even though he obtained the popular vote, why didn't the Dems from that day on push for the change? Now they're crying[0] again and it's just stupid. This is possible because of the way our election system works. Don't like it? Change it!

[0] Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Trump fan. Nor was I an HRC fan.

They did push for change. [1]

What is left now, is to primary the hell out any Democrat that doesn't support it.

The left would benefit by looking at how the Tea Party solved the problem of losing the Presidency, Senate, and Congress.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

"A reform of the Electoral College system would require a Constitutional amendment, and to get a Constitutional amendment passed, it’s necessary to have support from two-thirds of the House and the Senate, or two-thirds of state legislators. That’s an incredibly difficult task, and the Republican party currently holds a majority in both the House and the Senate and state legislators, making it quite unlikely to happen. After all, the party in power has little incentive to change the system that got them there in the first place."

Republicans will pretty much never go for it. They are required to get it passed

The solution is to get a time machine, go back to 2008 when the Republican party was on the decline ("a regional rump party, confined to the South") and make the change from a position of power.

Alex Halderman's blog post [1] (mentioned in the update of the vox piece) is a interesting read. He argues that a paper trail is an important independent check on election results, and that it should be checked as a matter of principle, instead of not using it at all.

[1] https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-wa...

I agree: the results should be audited in as many elections as possible, as a matter of course. I don't mean to be paranoid, but this should be a normative check on less than ethical actors.

The act of physically counting ballots in community halls by people that care about participating in democracy is something lost with all electronic everything. The count used to bring people together in an event that you could watch or help out in. Many eyes ensured the count was good. Plus the hours would be late evening, so the count passed as a sociable event to some extent, certainly something would happen so not a dull evening.

We should have a paper count for the community aspect even if the vote disappoints those concerned, e.g because it is between a spokesperson for the arms trade and a reality TV host.

How is asking for a recount because number don't seem to match up anything other than skeptical?

I'll give one of the study author's some credit for chiming in - following media wind up, mind you - regarding interpretation and pointing out that the deviation is completely reasonable when considering erroneous poll numbers being used for comparison. Which, I think, is a very worthwhile position to take because of, ahem, how generally off the polls were this time around. Those swing state numbers weren't even close to reflective of the majority of polls, IIRC, by Nov. 9.

Do you have any data on how well the polls did?

According to FiveThirtyEight, national polls did pretty well, while state polls had more problems - but he doesn't say how many or how bad the problems were.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-per...

...

Theoretically, if a scientific survey says one thing and a reported vote count says another, how do you know which is wrong (or are both wrong)?

The claim has been made by the losing side in every election since Bush II in 2000. I take it as a sign of a widening gulf between political factions.

Landslide elections are far less prone to this. Close elections are closer to a coin flip where small changes may swing an election.

Ex: Few people doubted Obama's first election as it was very clear. The vocal minority wanted to question if he was eligible in the first place, not the outcome.

You can see clear election 'influence' just look at the number of voting machines vs. voters in different areas and the lines this creates. Even pole closing times have a significant impact. People try to get so close to the line so often there are often court cases about this stuff. The core question is; have we gone from vote suppression to direct tampering, and the odds seem very high that this occurs in some places. Impact on national elections is harder to demonstrate.

PS: And no I don't think there was a clear winner for this election, but IMO getting within spitting distance of a win is generally good enough. If 0.1% of voters change the outcome then the populace is just undecided.

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