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Comment by anth_anm | Hacker News Reader

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Why is it clearly rigged? The article doesn't even have any allegations of fraud to report on?

Well, the government-controlled media pushed pretty hard for a "yes" vote. That's unfair, but it's less than vote fraud.

The examples in the article sound like the vote count was reasonably accurate. (When someone against attends the vote count at their precinct, and says that it was 400 for, 25 against, and the official total says 86.85% for, that's probably an un-finagled tally - unless the ballots were stuffed before the count.)

Alternatively, coercion:

"Dissidents, who were divided between those who advocated a ‘no’ vote and those who called for abstention so as not to legitimize a process they deemed a fraud, reported a few incidents across the country of members being temporarily detained or harassed."

Yes, I saw that. Presuming that it was "a few", I assumed that it hadn't affected the vote much.

I mean, it still shouldn't happen at all. But you could detain a million people and it wouldn't be the cause of an 85% yes vote among 8 million people.

Closed governments can more easily manufacture consent than open ones. In open societies, it costs a lot more, but the victims gladly pay for it. But manufactured is manufactured, either way.

The article says citizens can (and did) monitor vote counting? What more openness do you want?

You haven't lived under a closed government, and it shows. Here's what happens in Russia (a far more "open" government, because it only controls like 90% of their press and not 100%) during elections. Citizens "can and do" monitor vote counting. The very same citizens (mostly government employees such as local administration officials, schoolteachers, municipal employees, etc) also engage in ballot stuffing, count rigging, and multiple voting, to the point where the vote percentages rounded up for the officially sanctioned candidates show up as prominent spikes on vote count distribution. I.e. if there's an "understanding" that the "right" candidate should get 80% of the vote, they round it up to pretty much exactly 80% by subtracting votes from other candidates. And if that doesn't work, the government controls the very electronic system ("GAS Vybory") which computes the final tally.

You can even see evidence of all of the above on Youtube, but nobody gives a shit, because nobody believes anything can be changed. Heck, most people don't believe anything _should_ be changed, because aside from the brief period in the 90s (of which the US "cured" Russia by directly and openly helping Yeltsin secure a win in a runoff election), that's the way it's always been there.

Heck, with the recent ballot-related shenanigans in Broward County FL and elsewhere, I'm not sure everything is 100% sanitary with this stuff in the US either anymore.

And in case the downvote brigade thinks I'm making this up:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=russia+ballot+s...

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-meddling-in-1996-russian-el...

The article literally cites a dissident who did monitored counting; not some stooge. The dissident didn't even allege there was ballot stuffing.

I have no doubt that vote stuffing happens in Russia and many other countries, but that doesn't mean it's happened in this election.

I can 100% guarantee that in any such elections all of the aforementioned "irregularities" happen on a massive scale. If you believe that an autocratic government is going to yield power peacefully, you're beyond naive.

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