Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

I'm a reasonable person. I don't believe in conspiracy theories. I see no evidence that this election was tampered with or that Joe Biden's win was anything but legitimate.

Almost every proclamation from the Republican Party and Donald Trump has no merit and will not hold up in court.

HOWEVER.

I, and many ones like me, have spent the last 4 years worrying that Russian interference would only increase in this election. We have observed the Republican party do NOTHING to protect the integrity of the US elections, and we could only assume they were doing so out of an express knowledge that any interference would be beneficial to them.

Just in OCTOBER, FBI officials said "Russia’s hackers appeared to be preparing to sow chaos amid any uncertainty around election results", and the now fired Christopher C Krebs said "Russian hackers recently obtained access “in a couple limited cases, to election jurisdiction, an election-related network," [1]

The universal expectation was that Russian interference would be to help Donald Trump because he has been much weaker on Russia than any president that ostensibly cares about freedom and democracy would be.

But Donald Trump lost. Does that mean that there was no electoral interference? Surely not. Surely, there was. The most likely explanation is that the sheer number of Biden voters overwhelmed any Russian meddling (if only because it was focused on the wrong states like Ohio and Florida which didn't end up mattering).

But now, the tables have turned. "Electoral interference" is no longer the rallying cry of the Left to explain why Trump won. It's now a rallying cry of the Right to explain why Trump lost.

Which means that now to protect democracy, reasonable-minded people find themselves proclaiming that the Election was the most secure in history and all discussion of fraud is a conspiracy theory.

This is deeply messed up and uncomfortable, and is the fault entirely of the post-truth Trump Cult that works backwards from the outcome they want to have rather than any reality.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/russia-electi...

> Which means that now to protect democracy, reasonable-minded people find themselves proclaiming that the Election was the most secure in history and all discussion of fraud is a conspiracy theory.

There's much screaming about fraud, with no evidence for it, and a large helping of misinformation. (People complaining about dead people voting is a great example of this. Someone casting an early ballot, and dying before November 3rd is an example of a dead person voting... But not of election fraud.)

If we're going to blame the Russian boogieman for the milk going sour, have you considered that maybe their election interference mostly consists of casting doubt on the election's results? Or of the 2016 playbook of spreading alt-right propaganda?

Sure, anything is possible, and maybe Santa Claus is real, but if you want right-thinking people to listen to you, you need to find evidence. So far, the evidence for wide-spread, systemic fraud has ranged from 'non-existent' to 'withdrawn when asked to swear on it under oath' to 'completely rubbish'. That doesn't stop the losing party from throwing a temper tantrum, and refusing to accept the results.

Thank you for putting into words what I've been feeling. Uncomfortable is great way to describe the lingering questions I have.

- What was the extent of Russian interference in 2016? Was it just media manipulation or did it go further to also include voter fraud and hacking of election systems?

- How much did that interference contribute to Trump's win in 2016?

- If the prevailing notion for the last 4 years was that nothing was done to fortify election integrity, shouldn't we have expected to see similar or greater interference from Russia in 2020?

- If there was Russian voter interference in 2016, and nothing was done to fix that in the last 4 years, how much trust should be put in CISA's statement of no evidence of manipulation?

- Is this just a perfect example of the uncertainty about our democracy that Russia intended to instill all along?

> Does that mean that there was no electoral interference? Surely not.

There is plenty of 'rigged election' fear to go around, for sure. Donald Trump overperformed expectations in both 2016 and 2020, so it would be just as rational for Democratic voters to wonder if someone had their thumb on the scale as it is for Republican voters to feel that way because he lost.

Personally I don't think it's very easy to meddle with our elections and I think any discrepancies are likely to be innocent mistakes. I don't doubt that foreign governments play games with us, but I expect they limit themselves to social media manipulation and not actually trying to muck with the voting process.

"The side I identify with is lying and acting disingenuously, but it's the fault of the side I don't identify with, who I am sure do bad stuff like the behavior I admit we're doing."

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