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Comment by alistproducer2 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone with half a brain knows that these purges are designed to advantage a side not protect the system. I read an article the other day that stated that some America's voting system had essentially been compromised on many levels. It made me think about why so many of our polls have, in the last few years, been so off the mark. Now I'm beginning to think it's not because the polling models suddenly don't work. It is quite possibly something more nefarious than that.

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Yeah, I remember the outrage when the original Diebold hacking announcement was made in the Bush Jr era. The concerns in that were never addressed and doubtless things have simply since got worse.

If Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election, they could bring some of their engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud.

> Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election

I'm still surprised by the anger for this. For the purposes of the viewer, Google and Facebook are effectively media companies. By that measure, all media companies bias elections heavily during election cycles. This is done both with content and well as paid advertising.

But to "make amends" for something sounds as if their influence is either unprecedented or morally wrong. Perhaps the argument is that the bias from international influences was wrong. Something else entirely?

I suppose i fail to see where the real complaint here is. What behavior or lapse triggered these accusations?

> if their influence is either unprecedented

It is. That's the entire point of the "filter bubble" argument that is coming up some 8-10 years old now.

There are some (poor, outdated, ineffective) checks and balances on the use of traditional media for political advertising. The new media successfully lobbied to be even excluded from those. Additionally, a lot of people who are not in this business were surprised about the extent.

>"But to "make amends" for something sounds as if their influence is either unprecedented or morally wrong."

I think we're too early in Mueller's investigation to definitively be able to say whether their influence was morally or legally wrong, or whether actions of employees/executives of those companies were morally or legally wrong.

What does the fact that they don't do so, tell you?

>If Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election.

Since when has Google wanted to make amends for biasing the election? Aren't we quick to forget Eric Schmidt was all in on attempting to bias the election in the direction he wanted. Timshel/THE GROUNDWORK are and were nothing more than tools for the DNC to manipulate the electorate

Does Fox News bias the election? Should it be required to make amends?

Do you think it has more, or less influence then a 100K spend Facebook ad campaign by Russia?

Way less obviously there are laws to help prevent foreign actors from injecting money and influence in to our elections. Which is why there are bipartisan congressional hearings on an unprecedented attack.

I understand that this is illegal. What I don't understand is why domestic manipulation of elections isn't. Eric Schmidt and Rupert Murdoch don't have the interests of the US in mind any more then Putin does.

Just because it's quite precedented doesn't make it right.

Nevermind the US government, and its agencies manipulating elections throughout the world going on 70 years

>domestic manipulation of elections

You mean campaigning?

Rupert Murdoch isn't himself running for president, but it's pretty clear that he is trying to manipulate the election into a particular outcome.

All the same arguments for why Putin's involvement should be illegal can also be levied against him.

> engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud

Simple, don't use fancy electronic voting machines. There's really no benefit.

That isn't a systemic solution and this is a systemic problem.

It's not a "the engineering isn't sufficiently sophisticated and cutting edge" problem.

Everyone wants in on the exiting problem solving portion of the the issue, few people are willing (or have the time available) to sit in on the vote process and procedure oriented bureaucratic election bodies, even fewer still are allowed to be appointed onto the boards that aren't vetted by the major parties.

"A side". Lets call a Republican a Republican. Same for gerrymandering. If you can't win fairly, win at any cost.

Pretty much. I highly suspect the shit security of the voting system is by design, not some 'accident.'

The 2016 polling models were pretty good, or at least, as good as they are usually[1]. The problem is, it was a very close race by electoral college standards. Trump ultimately won by 80,000 votes in three states in an election with 136m votes cast[2]. So the 'deciding' votes were just 0.06% of the vote total.

I think we can have it both ways. Voter suppression is being done and we have statistical heats in competitive races due to how poorly designed the Electoral College is. This mix is pretty tough to work with.

Probably more reason to abandon the Electoral College outright. The popular candidate lost even though she have 3m more votes. How can pollsters be expected to work properly with such an irrational system? How can they predict where .06% percent of a vote will swing spread across three competitive states?

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-state-of-the-polls-...

[2] http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-election-came-down-to-7774...

It would take a Constitutional Amendment to get rid of the Electoral College. That’s 2/3rd of both houses of Congress and 2/3rds of the State legislatures.

Better to call a third Constitutional Convention.

There is another way to get a similar effect.[1]

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

has something changed since a bunch of ladies got a constitutional amendment passed banning everyone's favorite beverage and the federal government's main source of income?

say what you will about the temperance movement, they made shit happen.

Lawrence Lessig is trying to challenge not the Electoral College directly but the winner-takes-all way of selecting electors in court, arguing that the Bush v Gore precedent of equal protection taking precedent over the states right to run elections as they see fit should apply also to the winne-takes-all selection of electors.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-time-has-come-reform-the-e...

I have no idea what the chances of success are, but it's an interesting argument.

The unfortunate irony is that 2/3 of state legislatures will never vote to abolish the electoral college in favor of the popular vote, because a vast majority of states get relatively more voting power than they would with the popular vote, since every state gets a minimum of 3 electoral votes no matter how small their population is. This comes at the expense of the few most populous states (e.g. California), which are severely disenfranchised.

I wonder if we will ever see an effort to exploit this by having the ruling party start splitting the states friendly to them into multiple smaller states in order to get more electoral votes and more senate seats on their side. It seems that creating a new state requires a 2/3 majority in both houses and the signature of the president [1], so this seems unlikely to come into play any time soon.

[1]: https://people.howstuffworks.com/new-state-in-us.htm

My own state of Vermont has signed on to this [1] particular proposition, so no, not every tiny state demands that it have a voice disproportionate with its size.

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

Hawaii, too.

If the electoral college did go away, I wonder if it would end up actually increasing the animosity between the coasts and 'fly over country'. Fair or not, the current system does appear to serve as a bit of a pressure relief valve. Allowing things to escalate to the level where the urban/rural divide becomes so great that one or both sides decides it's time to break the country apart is unlikely to have a better outcome than the last time we arrived at this point, even if on a different path and for different reasons.

I agree. The media seems to mainly focus on voter purging and whatnot when it tends to favor the GOP, and not looking much at the other side. But it's happening with Democrats, too. The elites must know about how vulnerable these systems really are, and they're using it to their advantage.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/city-board-elections-admits-it-bro...

...do you realize that the story you linked to explicitly involved purging Democratic voters? This really isn't a "both sides do it" problem.

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