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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

It's not necessarily the actions, but the perceived intent by "the other side" that is important. Events become provocation draws provocation draws backlash, etc etc.

I'm a fairly liberal person, but it doesn't take an inhuman amount of mental gymnastics to look at riots, anti-police sentiment, etc, and see a coordinated hostile agenda. I am lucky that I get to talk to both hardcore right and hardcore left people regularly, and they both tend to follow logical interpretations to inevitably polarizing and unhealthy conclusions. Both are not living in current reality, they are projecting their beliefs about the other side's agenda based on what they see on the news, and saying "I don't want to live in that world".

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> It's not necessarily the actions, but the perceived intent by "the other side" that is important.

We should regard "perceived intent by the other side" as most important, and there's no way that dishonest actors could weaponise that? No risk of concern trolling, double standards or phoney outrage?

Are you not paying any attention at all to modern politics?

What am I supposed to think about the intent of the other side when they're trying to get a legitimate election result overturned to support their preferred presidential candidate? Who isn't living in reality here? This is not a far left position, and it's not the left that is driving FUD about US election integrity.

You're supposed to recognize that many of your positions look equally bizarre and scary to the other side, and conclude that to a significant degree this is a gap in understanding rather than a gap in morals.

Yes, but what matters most is not how my beliefs appear to the other side, but whose beliefs are closest to the truth. I have little control over what other people believe, but I have some control over what I believe, and I strive to be rational and realistic and follow the truth.

That depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve. If you want to move beyond self satisfaction and actually effect change, you need to be concerned with how your message is conveyed.

What are your beliefs for?

>That depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve. If you want to move beyond self satisfaction and actually effect change, you need to be concerned with how your message is conveyed.

This is a conflation. Trying to be rational is valuable independent of what message you have. Messaging is secondary. When messaging becomes primary, the truth suffers, and freedom dies. I'd rather be self-satisfied and correct than highly influential and wrong. The latter is far more dangerous.

I recall a scant four years ago when many on the left were suggesting that the electors be faithless electors to get Clinton in office. After all, she won the popular vote, right?

"What am I supposed to think about the intent of the other side when they're trying to get a legitimate election result overturned to support their preferred presidential candidate" indeed?

"Many on the left" meaning every Democratic senator and congressperson, and the Democratic president himself too?

What, you think Obama and the Clintons would have minded terribly if it turned out that way?

Anyway, we're not shifting the goalposts to the leaders, we're talking about the people, which is the subject of the article. The people of the left were completely down with the faithless electorate concept, whoopie!

And somehow you missed this point. Which leads me to a question: why? Perhaps you didn't hear about it. Perhaps you forgot it. Maybe you brushed it aside. Or maybe you recalled it and decided it wasn't worth mentioning. Each of these are mechanisms through which people are steered.

You accuse the far right of doing something that the far left was doing just four years ago, and still you have thought yourself objective, but it doesn't work.

You can find people of any background who will spout contradictory rhetoric. I don't think you're making this argument in good faith. 2016 was a whole lot closer than 2020, and Clinton conceded and there was no serious calculated attempt to overturn the election results by either the public at large, or people who had any power to do so.

Equating that with what's going on now does not seem like an argument made in good faith.

I was hanging out in lefty circles in 2016; the faithless electorate idea was wildly popular, as was the "the popular vote should win." These were the last hope for many who were previously so confident.

It's true that the popular vote should decide the presidency but unfortunately it doesn't in the US. It's a bad sign that we keep electing presidents who didn't win a majority of the popular vote. Nonetheless, we have to follow the rules and processes in the Constitution until we get the opportunity to change them.

The popular vote should win is still popular on left. In large part because both Clinton on Biden won popular vote.

And partly because they don't count as real Americans in popular rhetoric and are getting increasingly ressentful about that.

>The people of the left were completely down with the faithless electorate concept, whoopie!

Well, I certainly wasn't, and I contest that this belief was widespread within the left, but without evidence one way or another we're not going to resolve this aspect of the disagreement. What I do know is that no significant number of people with political positions and political power used that power to throw the election results into doubt, as Mitch McConnell and GOP congresspeople are now doing.

I don't think Obama would have supported it as he called Clinton urging her to concede early on election night.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307536-obama-urged-cli...

Admittedly, I wasn’t following as closely in 16, but I really don’t remember much of this coming from authorities at all. Was it senators and Ms. Clinton herself? Because that is what is happening this year

Maybe you overlooked a multi-year investigation and failed impeachment over the notion that the president in collusion with Russia interfered with the '16 election?

The impeachment succeeded but the senate refused to even investigate so he wasn't convicted.

This has gotten extremely off topic, and in the worst direction: generic, tedious, partisan flamewar. You posted 41 comments moving the thread in this undesirable direction. Could you please refrain from doing that here? The more threads go in this direction, the more off topic for HN they become.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not disagreeing with you, I respect your views and feelings and the importance of the issues. But HN's mandate is curious, thoughtful conversation about topics of intellectual interest. When the thread gets reaches this degree of fiery political minutiae, it has left that far behind. In fact it's at the far end of the solution space from ontopicness.

One could argue that the electoral college (and in the past, Senators elected by state legislatures) was intended to be a circuit breaker or hurdle to prevent grossly unqualified candidates from reaching office. I challenge you to find a candidate that was less qualified and more dangerous than Trump.

Yes, we can simultaneously recognize that the Electoral College was intended to stop candidates like Trump, while also accepting that once it actually voted for Trump, he was in fact the legally and constitutionally legitimate President.

Right. But then none of that ever happened.

And Meanwhile, Clinton admitted defeat and Obama invited Trump to while house as every other president before. And Obama cooperated on power handover. Was not threatening to fire people for cooperating with new President.

You really can't bothside this.

I agree they are being sore losers, but you should think that they are exercising the legal rights they are entitled to in order to challenge what they perceive to be irregularities in the process. If irregularities are found (which they probably won't be) then cases should be heard by the courts. If they are not, Trump should ultimately concede or be forced from office.

Be patient and let the process play out in a legitimate way.

Nobody's saying they don't have a right to challenge irregularities, but many government officials say this was the most secure election in American history and deny any evidence of systemic fraud: https://apnews.com/article/top-officials-elections-most-secu...

I agree it was a secure election. What I mean to say is that this is a perception issue. There is a belief along many on the right that elements of the civil service, the media, and the educated classes are strongly biased against Donald Trump and would like to undermine him. To be honest, they are probably right (although I would argue that the bias is warranted given Trump's abysmal job performance). They therefore think that the left would try to undermine the electoral process to remove Trump at all costs and that their intent is fundamentally malicious. The way you deal with this problem is through transparency and patience. You allow Trump unencumbered access to the largely republican courts and if any irregularities exist Trump is allowed his day in court. Once that is over, you then say we have dealt with you in good faith and you can see we weren't trying to screw you over. We now expect the same from you. This gives you the moral high ground and makes you look reasonable. If Trump refuses to cooperate you can then say he is breaking the law and remove him.

There will be some on the right that will never be convinced that this election was legitimate, but this pacifies the more reasonable people on the right. Trying to kick the Republicans while they are down , chastising them them for using legal means to fight the outcome of the election, or engaging in grievance politics just further reinforces the perception that the left isn't operating in good faith.

Remember once all of this is over we still have to live with these people.

> Trying to kick the Republicans while they are down , chastising them them for using legal means to fight the outcome of the election, or engaging in grievance politics just further reinforces the perception that the left isn't operating in good faith.

You're getting this backwards. The legal means are not there to fight the outcome of the election, they are there to make sure every vote is counted properly. This is a subtle but important difference: nobody denies that there may be minor and insignificant improprieties in this election, as there are whenever a country of 300 million people votes. What is being denied is that there was whole-scale interference with the election system. I'm fairly confident that they will not be able to convince a court that there was, but that doesn't make it ok that they are filing lawsuits on no evidence. People being upset about an election outcome is no reason to ignore the reality of this situation.

> I'm fairly confident that they will not be able to convince a court that there was, but that doesn't make it ok that they are filing lawsuits on no evidence.

I agree and so do the courts which is why this problem will likely solve itself if you just let it play out.

I'm not arguing doing anything more than letting it play out and reporting accurately on what's going on. You seem to think we shouldn't be discussing it as such. I think it's important to talk about what they're doing, because it's poisonous to our democracy.

Trump was not prevented access to court. He and his prior are however not allowed to make public claims about fraud unopposed. The patience you suggest would lead to public that hears what he says, but does not hear about claims being bogus.

The kind of pacification you call about is not something Trump or republican party awarded to anyone last 4 years. They enjoyed to trigger libtards. There was no patience I could detect.

What you suggest does not work, because it demands one side to follow norms that other side does not have to follow.

There is no real right to file frivolous lawsuits (which the lawyers know in their hearts are frivolous, let's be abundantly clear), that is a complete myth.

I never said there was. The lawsuits that have been frivolous have been swiftly thrown out by the courts so frivolous lawsuits are largely a non-issue.

That's wrong. Frivolous lawsuits made with the intent to overturn a legitimate election result may be legal, but they're incredibly dangerous for the health of our democracy.

The probability of a frivolous lawsuit succeeding in such a way that it could overturn the results is literally zero. Frivolous suits are not legal, the courts have identified and nullified all frivolous lawsuit attempts so far, and they have signaled that they will not be tolerated. If Trump wants to bring frivolous suits then it only makes him look less legitimate in the eyes of everyone and bolsters the case for forced removal if need be. These events really don't pose any danger to our democracy. The danger to our democracy occurs when you allow one side to build a narrative that the election isn't legitimate and that one side (the left) is refusing to even hear out the right when they claim a lack of legitimacy.

Give them their time and then we can all move on.

So to clarify, you're agreeing that the GOP is trying to overturn a solid election result, but you think the left poses a greater danger to democracy, because they are talking about what the GOP is doing? If we're sitting next to each other reading books and you start yelling about how I just hit you and stole your wallet, I'm not in fact required to hear you out on that if I did not just hit you and steal your wallet.

> So to clarify, you're agreeing that the GOP is trying to overturn a solid election result, but you think the left poses a greater danger to democracy, because they are talking about what the GOP is doing?

No, I don't think this and never said anything like that. I believe the right ultimately poses the greater danger in this context. What I am saying is it's very obvious what Trump wants to do: he wants to build and support a narrative that this election is illegitimate. He wants to do it through stoking resentment against the left and center and suggesting systemic bias. We resist this by calmly saying that we as a nation are committed to fair elections, and we agree that we need to investigate any cases of impropriety that he can find in courts which are independent (and if anything are largely friendly towards his party).

If he fails to discover any issues, we say we cooperated fairly / openly, he failed to produce evidence of impropriety, this suggests the process was fair, and now we can move on. What we don't do is scream that he's wasting our time, that Republicans are assholes, that they're trying to undermine democracy, and that this whole process is bullshit. If we do, it allows Trump to say "SEE?! I told you they are biased against us! What are they trying to hide??? Why are they so impatient?!" It hands him the ammunition to build the narrative that there has been a conspiracy. If there was no conspiracy, why is the left so impatient and hostile? Why are they trying to subvert the process? Politics isn't just about facts it's about feelings and opinions. At the end of the day we want Republicans to accept the results willingly, and in my opinion that's best served by being calm and patient in our dealings with them rather than by being angry or impatient. This is a lesson the left generally fails to grasp: screaming at people and calling them assholes is not a particularly effective way to get them to agree with you.

The most effective thing we can do is allow Trump et al to burn themselves out.

>At the end of the day we want Republicans to accept the results willingly, and in my opinion that's best served by being calm and patient in our dealings with them rather than by being angry or impatient.

The thing is, most Republicans already accept the result. And I'm not saying the whole process is bullshit! Nobody is saying that. It is pretty bad that we can have an election with the popular vote won by five million and counting and have the result disputed, but that's mostly orthogonal to this situation.

The country has voted. The election is still in progress. There are allegations of malfeasance and even fraud that need to be investigated and adjudicated. This has been true in many previous elections. The rule is to count every legal vote and only legal votes.

Once this all plays out, and it will in the near future, then we can determine the "legitimate election result", per the Electoral College.

Should Biden continue to prevail, I'm not expecting any significant unrest. Unhappiness, yes, but that is normal.

>There are allegations of malfeasance and even fraud that need to be investigated and adjudicated. This has been true in many previous elections. The rule is to count every legal vote and only legal votes.

There are allegations by enormously unscrupulous people which have as yet been completely debunked by the courts and labeled by government officials as misinformation attempts: https://apnews.com/article/top-officials-elections-most-secu...

"And if there are legitimate problems to be found, they will be, the coalition declared. Its statement said that all of the states with close results have paper records, which allow for the recounting of each ballot, if necessary, and for “the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. ... Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.”

That's right.

> What am I supposed to think about the intent of the other side when they're trying to get a legitimate election result overturned to support their preferred presidential candidate?

You should think the same way about this as you do about the "russia hacked the election" cries about how the 2016 election was illegitimate.

I don't ever recall hearing that Russia hacked the election, not even in internet memes.

Russian interference however in the 2016 election is well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20....

The impeachment vote could have been easily avoided if Trump had come out and denounced Russian meddling and let the investigators do their jobs.

The NYT has a URL and web page dedicated to russia election hacking: https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/russian-election-hacking

Let's hypothetically assume that Trump was ahead in the counts right now. Would Biden concede? Hillary Clinton is on record as having said "under no circumstances" concede the election. Would Biden's team not be looking at their legal options to challenge the result? Would Biden supporters not be losing their minds on social media, news media, and in the streets?

This was a very partisian election, in which half the country was not going to be happy with the result. I don't see a smooth acceptance of the outcome regardless of how it comes out.

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