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Comment by kurthr | Hacker News Reader

No, in person voter fraud is well studied and considered so uncommon that it is a red herring. If it were truly considered a problem then mail in ballots would require some proof that the correct person voted. That's the low hanging fruit for vulnerability of voting, why isn't it fixed? You can't even catch the perpetrator! Because rural voters who support them would scream, they don't care about fixing the gaping security hole.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/12/16767426/...

1) has identity politics has been shown to be such a loser for republicans? 2) since more people voted for Hillary than Trump, is "universal" loathing actually a problem for presidential candidates?

Roy Jones won 6/7 districts and lost the popular vote. Pretty much the definition of gerrymandering, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/13/how-d...

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Saying that someone won the popular vote but not the election is identical to saying that someone won in the more densely populated area but lost in the more sparsely populated areas. It don't prove gerrymandering, which is the intent to arrange voting districts to manipulate elections. The intent is the key here and not the result.

Having seats allocated by area rather than population is an very old tactic to unify a large number of small provinces into a single nation. Rural voters votes need to still feel like its worth to vote, even if they are outnumbered by 10 to 1 to the voice and needs of the more populated areas. Similar how people view voting of third-party to be a wasted vote, so is it believed that people in low population areas would feel if election was purely based on the popular vote. This is not the definition of gerrymandering, but rather policy that is designed to prevent splintering of nations and civil war.

Did Roy Jones or his party rearrange the district to orchestrate a election win? If so then that is gerrymandering. If not then the idea of having voting districts rather than popular vote is really just the trade that happened a long time ago between low and high populated areas being applied to all levels.

For reference, the previous commenter was talking about AL's 7 congressional districts. US congressional districts are defined based on population (they're suppose to be equally sized intra-state).

>has identity politics has been shown to be such a loser for republicans?

Pretty much, which is why they didn't really do it. Trump stole from Bernie's playbook - if you take his last few ads as a representative sample - they pushed the class warfare angle pretty hard - starring Lloyd Blankfein, ironically enough.

That played really effectively off Hillary's "business as usual ; government is hard ; I work hard" angle, and was probably responsible for her losing Michigan - not exactly a state that has done well out of the status quo or the trade deals she championed.

>2) since more people voted for Hillary than Trump, is "universal" loathing actually a problem for presidential candidates?

Yes, because the numbers that stayed home in disgust outnumbered both candidates. Voter turnout is what killed Hillary's chances, not "white supremacists" or "fake news" or whatever, and that voter turnout was because she was such a thoroughly loathed individual - which was actually largely her doing.

Re: 2 - that's an inaccurate way of representing it. Hillary had an 0.1% difference in voter turnaround relative to Obama in 2012. What actually won the election for Trump was (a) the distribution of votes across the landscape and how that translates to Electoral College votes and (b) demographically speaking, white people (at every income level).

What exactly is your point about white people?

Are you claiming this is about racism? If this was a race issue, the black man would've lost (instead he won both times) and the white woman would've won. Or am I missing something?

Demographic analysis != racism

Stating demographics != analysis

Pointing out that "white people won Trump the election" does not really mean anything to me. Which is why I asked for clarification from OP. I feel like I'm supposed to understand some veiled inference, but I'd rather OP explicitly say what they mean.

That's always what the Dems are claiming these days.

Though, if you dig deeper, economic distress (which correlates to race) is was the real mover.

Or, to put it as Bill Clinton once did just before he won an election, "it's the economy, stupid".

> Are you claiming this is about racism? If this was a race issue, the black man would've lost (instead he won both times) and the white woman would've won. Or am I missing something?

I don't claim either side of that question, but I just have to say that your statement is patently false.

Hypothetically all racists could vote one way, and still lose an election (or turn the tides), depending on the size of that group.

If all white people in the US had voted for McCain instead of Obama, Obama would've lost. Literally impossible for there to be any other outcome.

Well, that statement is only relevant if you assume that all white people are racists, which I think is absurd.

That was my point.

What is the point of saying "white people won Trump the election" if your underlying presumption is not "all whites are racist".

My last mail in ballot was rejected because the state of Texas thought the signature on the ballot and the signature on the envelope didn’t match.

So much for my scribble sig.

> Roy Jones won 6/7 districts and lost the popular vote. Pretty much the definition of gerrymandering

No, it's a common consequence of the fact that partisan leanings aren't uniformly distributed that will be able to occur in almost any situation where districts aren't artificially drawn to compensate form that fact, which even most proposals to use blind algorithms for districting wouldn't do.

Now, in the case of Alabama, it's absolutely the case that the Congressional districts are the result of a partisan gerrymander, but simply the fact that a party can lose a statewide vote while winning in the vast majority of districts doesn't prove that; the way democratic voters are often hyperconcentrated in urban centers makes that quite plausible, especially for a Republican statewide loss, without gerrymandering.

Which is why we need to eliminate FPTP for House elections, not just limit the ability to.deliberately distort districts.

>since more people voted for Hillary than Trump, is "universal" loathing actually a problem for presidential candidates?

Evidently so seeing as getting the most votes in total isn't what was required to win.

Well, exactly, my point is that you could be loathed by more people and still win!

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