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Comment by crondung | Hacker News Reader

That's cool and all, except everyone in that country had 2 sim cards with 2 numbers. They don't have free long distance over there, nor are plans for cheap text+data the same plans as cheap calls. So I take this information to mean this poll was useless.

Everyone who voted could vote twice, and felons and kids voted too.

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Unless you’ve got some info to show that the distribution of people with 2 sims, or with kids, isn’t the same across different voting populations across the country, what you’re pointing out is irrelevant to the ratio of votes between the candidates, and only pertinent to the absolute numbers.

You raise an interesting point here:

Who has the burden of proof here? Should disparity in SIM card ownership be proven? Or the fact that they are evenly distributed be proven? Few things in life are evenly distributed, disparity is the norm!

Wait, how is felons voting a bad thing?

Probably from the US, they didn't sign the human rights treaty and are a bit.. underdeveloped at that front.

On the human rights front? Compared to most of the rest of the world they are extremely developed. At least free speech is protected which is more than can be said for most common of Europe now.

Can you share some examples of large infringements on freedom of speech that happened in well developed European countries?

Given the examples of police brutality related to protests that I've seen in the US just this year I doubt you'll be able to provide any examples that are more worrying than that.

The UK’s insane libel laws are a good example.

Do you have any specific examples that show how insane they are? Because the US also has libel laws.

Simon Singh was successfully sued by the British Chiropractic association for pointing out they are quacks. (Edit to add: I just checked and he appealed a point of law successfully and then they withdrew — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Chiropractic_Associati... — but as I understand it such a case would be laughed out of a US court.)

Although I'd agree with the general point that whilst America has good theoretically human rights, the EU is better at actual rights (and in particular, rights against corporations).

But overall UK probably still ranks as treating its basic citizens with better decency than the USA due to healthcare access among other things.

You will be hard pressed to find an index that aims to measure Human Rights where the US scores better than the main European countries such as Germany, UK, France, Italy, Netherlands etc.

Press Freedom Index [1]: Nope Human Rights Scores & Human Rights Violations [2]: Nope and nope

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index [2] https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights

> are a bit.. underdeveloped at that front

Nice euphemism. Yes, it is one the areas where America is truly a backward nation. Here's hoping we can finally correct the systemic issues undermining our representative democracy and can thus have a more progressive government come 2021.

I hope for that as well, it is quite hard to watch for everybody with a heart. In fact this empathy/pain might be the only reason I'd even bother to formulate my response..

> That's cool and all, except everyone in that country had 2 sim cards with 2 numbers.

This is not true. Some people have multiple SIM cards, but it is not even remotely close to "everyone". Based on numbers that I found, multiple SIMs have around 30% people.

Sure but both sides could do that right?

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