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Comment by JMTQp8lwXL | Hacker News Reader

You are mis-stating the assertion.

The Government said that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election. They didn't say it changed the results.

That's not at all what people were screaming for the past four years. Even if Russian "meddled" in the US elections, so did Boeing, BASF, Microsoft, Facebook, Northrop Grumman, Softbank, YCombinator .. anyone who bought a fucking ad or funded one campaign.

What the Russian/2016 narrative really was: Americans are too stupid to make up their own minds and fall for propaganda. There has been a four year campaign to condemn every single Trump supporter as some kind of racist, white supremacist Nazi, and it's been big media and big tech (FOX/MSNBC/CNN/YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/NYTimes/etc.) that's literally been pouring petrol on the American people and the world.

Believe it or not, there's a whole host of laws around and against foreign involvement in American elections, going back basically forever. Comparing Boeing and Russia is pretty ludicrous.

I am curious what these laws are, and what constitutes involvement. Am I allowed to comment on American elections even if I am not American?

A lot of people here are talking about interference, which sounds like a very nefarious thing. But in reality, what they mean by 'interference' is just posting on the internet about why one candidate (let's be real, probably Trump) is better.

The two big categories in my mind are foreign campaign contributions (usually misdirected through others, so sometimes also fall out as fraud and money laundering charges) and failure to register as a foreign agent.

As a reminder, both of these categories have seen grand jury charges and subsequent guilty pleas by Trump associates. These have often paired nicely with 'lying to prosecutors' charges, which help clarify that they knew they were up to no good...

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1886-indictment-giul...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn#Investigations_a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Indictments_and_...

> Americans are too stupid to make up their own minds and fall for propaganda.

Don't we see history examples of lots of people falling for propaganda? Germany 1930-s comes to mind.

Godwin's Law and you're done.

But baring that, how do you know which side is propaganda? Is it FOX/CNN/MSNBC or is it Newsmax/DailyWire/NYPost/Blaze/Crowder? Which side is the propaganda and which is the capitol T Truth?

Well, there are facts which are either hard to argue or everybody is agreeing upon, like the public presentations of politicians. Given those facts, sometimes - not always - it's a matter of values to choose sides.

It's not always easy, yes. But still critical thinking goes a long way.

Godwin's Law can be used as a tool to suppress valid comparisons. Don't fall for that.

I worked in Dem political tech. The Russian Troll Farm/Cambridge Analytica/social ads scandal is mostly noise and no signal. But you’re missing something important: Russian state sponsored hackers spearfished and stole data from the RNC, DNC, and the Clinton circle. They deliberately released the latter two and withheld the first. Those releases don’t define the entire election, but they had a demonstrable and empirically validated impact on voters. Those deliberate and asymmetric releases probably changed the outcome of the election.

Russia really did interfere in that election and you’ve ignored this crucial fact.

> Those deliberate and asymmetric releases probably changed the outcome of the election.

How is it possible to draw a causation from the releases to the election outcome? I am curious if there are academic studies to support this claim.

That’s not very accurate and makes a lot of unproven assumptions. They found that an old, disused RNC domain from years prior was compromised. There’s no reason to believe they withheld anything material, and even if they did, it’s not really relevant. All they did was show the public authentic emails. If anyone actually changed their vote based on having additional facts, which I doubt happened in any significant way, then it was for the right reasons.

If your wife-to-be was having an affair and this was dumped before the wedding day, would you be mad at the hacker, or at your partner? Blaming Russia for showing truth never made any sense to me. Are we to believe that the process has more integrity when we cast our votes with less information?

You are absolutely, factually incorrect. Your opinion is also unfortunate, to equate adversarial nation-state "meddling" with domestic corporate campaigns, though the latter is also woeful.

That Trump was elected is a harbinger of American decline, that so many people think his persona, "intellect" and view on leadership are worthy of consideration as leader of this country. It's an indictment of our electoral and voting systems, that any good faith Republicans felt they "had" to vote for such an awful leader in order to avoid the centrism of a Democratic administration.

But I don't think every Trump voter is a racist nazi. I think they were just okay with Trump being an awful human being and a terrible leader, so long as they could prevent poor people from getting health care or acknowledging climate change.

>That's not at all what people were screaming for the past four years.

Why would you feel the need to lie about something so clearly untrue? I'm sure you can find a group of people on the internet somewhere that might have made this claim, in the same way that you can find people claiming the earth is flat.

But this fabrication that everyone was claiming Russians hacked the votes is just nonsense.

No, Democrats said Russia hacked the election results. For example Neera Tanden, Biden's OMB appointee, the President of a major liberal think-tank: https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/817744398939197442

Trump claimed that "Voting machines were not touched" by Russians in the 2016 election. Tanden said that was a "lie." The media massively amplified claims of Russian election hacking that never panned out: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-electi.... They played fast-and-loose with terminology, saying that "Russia hacked the 2016 election" when they meant that Russia hacked and leaked DNC emails. (Part of the problem here is that the media has taken to regurgitating Democratic talking points. Saying "Russia hacked the 2016 election" is a clever way for an Democratic activist to describe what happened, but its misleading when that same "hacking" terminology is used by the media.)

Nalder said that, without impeachment, Trump would "rig" the 2020 election: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-08/nadler-sa...

And people believed them. Even as of 2018, 66% of Democrats believed that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President": https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

The comment to which you're replying said "the government" didn't claim Russia tampered with the results. You can't rebut that with a cite of Neera Tanden, who was not in the government.

The 2 parties govern the US, for better or worse. The good faith interpretation allows for more than the official press releases (eg Trump talking points), which are presented to be in dispute.

Fair point, I read "Democrats" rather than "Government."

I'm going to gently push harder, because I don't think you can reasonably compare what angry Democrats said and did in 2016 to what's happening in 2020. Nobody attempted to overturn any state's electors. The sitting Democratic president didn't directly lobby state governors and state house speakers to decertify results. For that matter: Democrats didn't deliberately fuck up tabulation processes to sow chaos to exploit later in the month.

There were many calls by Democrats for faithless electors to flip to Clinton.

See, for example, #UniteForAmerica video plea https://youtu.be/0z0iuWh3sek

They then spent the next few years making up conspiracy theories and trying to delegitimize his election. I’d gently suggest that there are no clean hands here, and what Dems did 2016-2019 was sufficiently reprehensible.

You've met my example of the outgoing administration lobbying state legislatures to overturn their own votes with a hashtag.

You said, “Nobody attempted to overturn any state's electors.” I thought you might like to know that is not true.

I posted a video which calls for exactly that in 2016. It’s a pretty amusing piece of history actually.

To her credit, “Clinton’s team and the Democratic National Committee have steadfastly refused to endorse the efforts spearheaded by a group of electors in Colorado and Washington state.”

NY Mag wrote a piece on the eve of the electoral vote documenting the extent of the harassment campaign, including hundreds of thousands of emails, hate mail, and death threats. Of course it also mentions Russia.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/12/final-push-to-sway-e...

Whatever argument you think it is we're having, you win. My point is that the 2016 Democrats and the 2020 Republicans aren't comparable, and that's obviously true.

A Youtube video, fantastic! Yet you'll blindly compare that to physical threats of violence that we continue to see over and over which have been instigated by misleading or false statements from our sitting President?

Nor did nearly twenty Democratic-controlled states sue in federal court to overturn the results of the election, as just happened today!

Do you think such an action could ever be justified? What kind of evidence would you need in order to consider proceeding down such a path? Thousands of affidavits, tens of thousands of documented illegal votes, video evidence of illegal ballot counting?

You left out Spyder and his SpiderFoot scan indicating that Iran was voting directly in the election using its access to Dominion voting machines. How could this not reach SCOTUS?

Hah. I have no illusions that SCOTUS will take up the case. I personally think it still pales in comparison to the “pee-pee dossier” that Clinton cooked up to frame Trump.

Trust the plan, Q is coming!

I follow politics pretty closely and this is literally the first time I've heard that anyone was alleging Russia actually hacked voting machines or switched votes. I had only heard about social media disinformation and social media disinformation campaigns.

I also never really heard many assertions that any of this was significant enough to have likely swayed the election.

Russian "collusion" was the primary topic on twitter for most neoliberal pundits and party consultants in 2017

As someone who followed things fairly closely at the time, that's not true. There was talk of meddling with voter rolls, but changing of votes was basically not discussed and was quickly dismissed.

Well, that was found to be absolutely true. Just look at the emails released by Don Jr. himself.

They planned to meet with someone who they believed to be working for the Kremlin in order to get dirt on their opponent.

So I think you're right in the literal sense, but rainer is accurate in the sentiment.

The media used the word 'interference' in an exaggerated and nefarious context, and they didn't seem very interested in clearing it up. Election interference--without context--is usually taken to mean vote interference.

Like many things, it isn't an outright lie. But I do think it was misleading. And while you might not have been mislead, enough people were--as evidenced by that poll.

My reading of Tanden's tweet is that she's rebutting Trump's first sentence, not the second. Ie, Asserting that Russian hacking (in the form of releasing sensitive emails) was plainly sufficient to flip 70 kVotes (Donald Trumps cumulative margin in the states over the tipping point) and ignoring the question of whether "voting machines [were] touched".

Trump's second sentence clarifies and elaborates that the first sentence is referring to voting machines.

So what? I ask this very specifically because you're applying precisely the same rhetorical device that Tanden is.

Even if they meant Russian hacking influenced people enough to flips 70k votes, that's still unsupported conjecture worded in way that strongly implies actual hacking of votes.

Calling it 70k votes makes it sound small, but its more like 1% of voters. 1% of voters making their mind up based on TRUE stories about inside baseball at the DNC? Unrealistic. I bet 99% of voters couldn't even tell you what the emails were about.

And that's without considering the negative affects of the Democrats attacking Trump for being in bed with Russia, which probably cost him votes too.

Neera was clearly saying that she believes that Russia’s actions affected the election results.

Trump made two distinct and unrelated claims in that tweet. One claim was a lie, one was true. You dishonestly pretend there is only one claim. Neera was not addressing the true claim about voting machines being touched.

Trump has a habit of mixing in things he’s not accused of and running on them to acquit him of the things he is accused of. He consistently did it by attacking nonexistent and unprovable accusations of “collusion” (an imprecise term that is not a crime one can be charged for) when the actual investigations, hearings, and findings centered on Russian interference and any of the campaign’s coordination of it. This includes direct communication with Assange as well as the Trump Tower meeting over Magnitsky Act sanctions.

Your NYT article, in opposition to your stated conclusion, addresses infiltration attempts related to voting and voter registry systems, not the DNC hack.

Nadler’s claim is only unbelievable if you memory-hole Trump’s attempt two months ago to start another misinformation and character-smear campaign against Hunter Biden. The impeachment hearings specifically addressed and exposed the early stages of this campaign.

66% of democrats in that poll are wrong, so we agree there.

This documentary got nominated for tons of awards. And it heavily insinuates that the election was stolen/cheated and the outcome could have been different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Hack

"Meddled" is such an ambiguous term and we are part of an international community.

Using such loose terminology, couldn't you accurately say dozens of nations meddled with the majority of federal US elections in the past 50 years?

If you disagree, what do you think the function of AIPAC is?

Yes, including Iran, so what's your point? A bipartisan commission found overwhelming evidence of a widespread, organized, and coordinated effort from several foreign agencies to spread misinformation during both the 2016 election and the 2020 election. What term do you want to use besides "meddling" then?

Would be great if they used a term that correlates to a specific crime. "Meddling" is pervasive and legal, so accusations of meddling seem like propaganda from the intelligence community.

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