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Comment by shiado | Hacker News Reader

74 million voters. This is not going to play out well. There's really no coming back from this moment, the technocratic elite have changed American democracy forever. Edit: I mean this in the way Snowden tweeted yesterday, it will be interesting how this plays out for better or worse, but it is a monumental policy shift that will be a date marked in history books.

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You say this like its the first time Americans have had to learn to live with having lost a federal election. Half the country is disappointed every four years. Starting to make concessions to terrorists because they got really upset after being lied to repeatedly makes no sense.

There is a difference between disappointed and storming a goverment building to stop the offical event required to make it offical. That difference is a lot of anger. Honestly, I don't think America has seen this before. Not even with the war of independence, that was kind of difference since it was about not getting a vote and not that the vote didn't matter.

What are you suggesting by "the vote didn't matter?" Just because they might believe Trump's lies about the most recent election doesn't mean their emotions are justified.

> What are you suggesting by "the vote didn't matter?" Just because they might believe Trump's lies about the most recent election doesn't mean their emotions are justified.

I believe, they believe the election was rigged. Justified or not, it doesn't stop them from doing stuff.

Isn't the remedy to that to show them less of the guy who's been lying to them? How will allowing him to continue lying and myth building avoid further violence?

You could also have investigated voter fraud. You know, the whole reason why they came there to protest in the first place. That's an option. You will likely dismiss it because you've been told that there is no voter fraud, but dismissing something doesn't actually address it. Nothing about the objections brought up when states like Pennsylvania were being reviewed was actually addressed by the so-called winning side.

I wonder why Kris Kobach keeps coming home empty handed from his fishing trips

1) Why would it be necessary to investigate where there has been no evidence to show that an investigation is even warranted? Where does the line get drawn?

2) Even if they did investigate it clearly wouldn't work. These conspiracies are self sealing - lack of proof is itself proof. If you're capable of rigging an entire election, then of course you will be able to do it without leaving any evidence.

There is nothing to investigate. Did you read any of the affidavits filed with the so-called "fraud" lawsuits? There were election observers complaining that they saw lots of military ballots for Biden, which is proof of fraud because they "knew" military members were "supposed" to vote for Trump. There was another observer who complained that he saw an Asian person working the polls, which was proof that the CCP had infiltrated the elections. The lawsuits were just hundreds and hundreds of pages of conspiratorial nonsense like that. The lawyers filing these things are QAnon cultists.

How do you "investigate" allegations like that? If you've really fallen for this scam then you have been thoroughly brainwashed by the far right internet.

Everyone came forward with whatever they thought was suspicious, but we're at the point now where things that even sound like "voter fraud claim" are automatically dismissed.

Take for example, this: https://mapthefraud.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DATASCIENC/pag....

If the thousands of votes here were fraudulent, the quantity is sufficiently high to assume that some organization is trying to interfere with the election. If there is an organization capable of creating thousands of fraudulent votes in this instance, then what instances are we unaware of that the same organization is also involved with.

I'm not asking for a 2-year investigation based on allegations of a pee pee video recorded in a Russian hotel, I'm just asking for:

"Republicans opposing Wednesday's electoral count have one proposal to deal with the controversy — that Congress delay action for 10 days so an "emergency" electoral commission can audit the results and investigate voter fraud claims in the contested states."

https://www.npr.org/sections/congress-electoral-college-tall...

Spurious speculation does not qualify as evidence under the burden of proof you would need to delay a Constitutionally mandated certification. You're explicitly calling for throwing away the Constitutional process.

They had 2 months to litigate those claims, why do they need 10 more days? After 10 days are they going to invent more nonsense claims and then insist they need more time? Delay the inauguration indefinitely?

> Take for example, this:

More crank garbage. The voting histories of every voter are public domain, if you think there are more votes than voters why are you trying to scrape some random web portal through questionable methods instead of checking the voting records directly?

If this allegation were really credible can you point me to a lawsuit filed by an by a plaintiff with standing (e.g. Trump or another Michigan candidate who allegedly had the election stolen from them, NOT some 3rd party QAnon crank) that presents this allegation to a court? If no such lawsuit exists why do you think that is the case? Maybe because no competent lawyer wants to destroy their reputation by arguing obviously fake conspiracy theories in front of a judge?

The people that lived through the American Revolution would strongly disagree with you that the current situation is worse.

I didn't say it was worse or better, just that it's not the same.

There was a little matter of the Civil War that might deserve some of your attention.

> I don't think America has seen this before

I think that says more about how boring & peaceful the late twentieth century was. The number of people old enough to remember more interesting times is declining quickly.

As a sidenote, this is probably why our Covid response has been so awful. We have no real living memory of a collective calamity.

Half of the Union literally seceded because it didn't like the winner of the 1860 presidential election.

That...is a pretty revisionist take on the civil war. More popular is the opinion that the south wanted to perpetuate chattel slavery for economic gain, masquerading beneath ‘states rights’.

I mean, damn, there’s a reason Buchanan is said to have caused the war—and it’s not that he just happened to have been president before Lincoln.

I didn't mean to imply slavery wasn't the motivator - but the trigger was the election of a (moderate-ish) anti-slavery president from an anti-slavery party, who explicitly called for the end of admitting new slave states to the Union. Secessions all happened between Lincoln's election and his inauguration, and the declarations of causes almost all cited Lincoln's election as proof of Northern anti-slavery intent.

Similarly, the refusal to accept Trump's loss is rooted in deep gulfs on identity and to a lesser extent on issues. I don't think you can separate the end-of-the-world paranoia from attitudes on BLM, for example.

All the rally goers are not terrorists anymore than everyone who was at a BLM protest is Antifa.

We’ve got to be very careful here not to paint all of MAGA with that brush because that ends in a dark, dark place.

The oligarchs are laughing in the background as the divide and conquer strategy is working quite well.

So many servile people ready to give up liberties here because they want to punish the other, refusing to understand the implications of how such systems will be turned on them some point in the future.

All? No. But some? Hell yes!

Even when ‘leftists’ protest at congress, they go through metal detectors and demonstrate peacefully—no window smashing, no theft, no overrunning security lines. Trumpists on Wednesday literally hung nooses from trees and killed a cop.

Wisconsin says hi!

Also not like 5 congressmen were shot of anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_sho...

The issue is the right feels underrepresented in the MSM, so they move on to alternative media which are echo chambers, which leads to things like these riots, and the response from the left creates further segregation and more echo chambers. Both sides remain confident they are completely, 100% in the right, because each is living in their own universe. This feedback loop has been going on for a while now and right now it's just going crazy.

> which are echo chambers

I mean, let's be honest here. There is a lot of good journalism in MSM; just about everything reported on from leaks and "anonymous" sources leading up to the Mueller report was later confirmed in the report or by first-hand witnesses(the matter-of-fact stuff, not necessarily the conclusions). Buutttt... CNN still has their "outrage" segments and echo chambers..

You’re almost close at the end there. The echo chamber of the MSM is worse because it has an air of legitimacy afforded by a history of journalism that doesn’t exist anymore. Once great institutions like NYT and NPR are scant more than propaganda arms for the left’s authoritarian communist regime. And you guys don’t realize you’re part of the echo. IMO the left is no different from us, we’re all trying to navigate this strange post truth world.

Neither accepts that it’s not just the other side distorting reality; both are oblivious to their own distortion.

> the left’s authoritarian communist regime

> you guys don’t realize you’re part of the echo

> we’re all trying to navigate this strange post truth world

I see what you did there, do you?

Hopefully you see what you did there as well.

Makes sense to me in the context of an assault on speech. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> authoritarian communist regime

Breitbart is leaking.

But honestly, care to elaborate? I'm genuinely curious.

NPR? I think that at a certain point you might realize that it would be worth taking a step back and reevaluating your information diet. When you accuse NPR of being a propaganda arm for the left's "authoritarian communist regime" is probably about that time. Way past it, in fact.

I'm really not sure where the whole communist thing came from, anyway. Go to the far left of the Democratic Party and you are still pretty far to the right of communists.

If you think that NPR is close to a balanced outlet, I'd venture you're unfortunately the one off. I wouldn't call them communist for sure, but more times than I can count they've shocked me with partisan or incorrect reporting.

What is your idea of a balanced outlet, then?

None! I wouldn't claim any outlet is. Read from many sources, from all over the spectrum, build a model of each ones moral foundations, find reporters who seem to be in it for good reasons and model them. There's no bastions of reliable news, just you vs a stochastic void of political claptrap, your only hope is to Thompson Sample the widest set of half-popular sources for nourishment.

This is related to another point that's been floating around in my head for a while. The amount of effort involved in just trying to get a balanced view of our political situation is insane, and few people are willing to spend that much energy. But even though few see the whole picture, most have very strongly held political opinions. This naturally tends towards echo chambers which is obviously really bad if you're in a democracy which vitally depends on everyone being well informed.

I think this is mainly because we set the wrong incentives, for example outrage drives clicks which drives ad money, though we can also throw evolution some shade for lacking foresight when it made outrage such a strong emotion and gave us a tendency towards reaffirming our own views.

In any case, I don't know how to solve it, and it's certainly not a new problem (I guess it's been a thing since democracy is a thing), but it seems the web amplified it a lot, to the point where I think it's to blame for our current political division.

> authoritarian communist regime

That's where you completely lost me. Yet another person who doesn't know what communism is and just uses it as a blanket, non-sense label for leftists.

Literally the biggest cable news channel in America represents their views 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. What in the world are you even going on about?

This is countering my point how?

RWNJ media is the MSM

My surprise that this acronym is even a thing aside, do you actually buy this?

Even if you do, the right pretty obviously doesn't agree, and you don't have to look far for evidence. If they wouldn't feel like they're represented unfairly in the MSM, they wouldn't keep complaining about fake news and the MSM in general.

Talk radio and the Murdoch empire are a large part of the MSM.

You have basically just repeated your previous point.

> the technocratic elite have changed American democracy forever

The president has spent weeks trying to delegitimize the results of a democratic election, culminating yesterday by inciting a mob to de-rail the ratifying of the results, but it’s the banning of said president from a social media site that has changed American democracy forever. Right.

It appears to me that there is a huge electorate that is disgruntled and has felt that the people in power have ignored it for too long. If such a large number of people have actually vandalized Congress (didn't they do something like this to the Michigan Statehouse) to make their displeasure known, then they must genuinely feel that the normal method of registering protest, i.e., voting, has ceased to function for them. The overall smug and condescending tone of the mainstream and social media barons and the professional class only exacerbates this feeling.

How many of us here has had to face years of despair because of job loss, and loss of social standing due to globalization and corporate greed? Do we have any genuine hope (and more importantly, need) of understanding this 74 million?

How do you suggest we do that without disrespecting the far greater number of Americans who voted in good faith in a free and fair election for Joe Biden? Democracy makes losers of us all once in a while, we need to learn to live with it.

It's obvious that most of the people who voted for the losing side did not show up at the protest. An even smaller fraction breached the Capitol Building.

It's interesting that you say that Biden voters feel disrespected because Trump voters protested something in the way they did. When BLM protesters vandalized (mostly poor or middle-class people's) shops, do you think it was reasonable for non-BLM people (most Trump supporters) to be outraged? If not, therein lies the problem.

BTW, there were violent riots when Trump was elected president, including in Oakland, Portland etc.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Oakland_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Portland,_Oregon_riots

Perhaps I should rephrase, what are the specific policy goals you would like to see that could be pursued to help restore faith in the electoral process?

I think if there is a move to radically improve the transparency of voting no matter the method, it would restore confidence in the electoral process. Vote by mail was the main culprit, and it is easier to game voting by mail than in-person voting. So people have valid grounds to doubt the validity of elections, particularly because margins were thin (as they almost always are, but they arouse much greater suspicion when an unprecedented number are voting by mail). That is a process that each state needs to undertake, which is easier said than done. As with the covid response and vaccine administration, federalism shows its structural deficiencies again.

How is voting by mail "easier to game"? You just seem to be repeating talking points. I don't think you have any actual solutions, because you don't have any actual issues identified.

Judging by the overall tone of your comments, you don't have any actual intent of engaging in any sort of discussion. I will try nevertheless.

Mail dumping, interception and modification of ballots, just plain errors in ballots or failure to mail them (these last two are not in the 'game the ballot' category, but they do happen with mail-in balloting) all occur in almost every election. Even if they do not materially change election results, they affect the perception of the legitimacy of results. The perception is as important as the reality of the process. Any law that helps improve the perception should be welcomed.

> Mail dumping, interception and modification of ballots, just plain errors in ballots or failure to mail them

Did any of this actually happen?

> ...they do not materially change election results...

So... what’s the problem again?

These deficiencies have a clear cause: Donald J. Trump.

I would bet Federal bureaucracy would have hampered say a Clinton response, but Trump refused to lead, take even the most basic federal action, and he basically doesn't care beyond testing numbers affecting his election. He specifically withheld supplies and support to D states until 'they have to treat us well' e.g. be a sycophant on tv.

Maybe voters would have confidence in mail-in-voting if Republicans & Trump didn't spend a year attacking it and spreading politically motivated lies.

VBM is secure and many studies have shown there is very very little fraud.

My state Colorado has been sending ballots to almost every voter for years and it works. A Republican SOS helped craft and refine the system.

used by like something 94% of our voters, clearly trusted and used widely on both sides. Notice it doesn't get attacked by legitimate Republicans here

https://www.5280.com/2020/05/no-fraud-isnt-rampant-in-colora...

I used Vote By Mail myself and I also agree various studies and articles that say that fraud doesn't materially affect elections. But why shouldn't steps be taken to improve VBM transparency and voting transparency overall to restore confidence in the process regardless of method? "Works", "Works Transparently", "Works Verifiably" are all different degrees of transparency that imply different levels of confidence, right?

What are some steps to make it more transparent? That critically both protect secret ballot and not suppress the vote?

Republicans have been ruthlessly effective here and there are plenty of laws that are passed under the guise of 'anti-fraud' but really are to suppress the vote usually in favor of southern Republicans. Copy of license, very very restrictive rules on who can request a ballot, reducing drop off locations etc Same playbook for a century, different rules

> non-BLM people

I strongly suggest you stop and think for a bit about what this means.

This refers to people who chose not to protest on the streets. Not sure what you're taking exception to here.

I chose not to protest on the streets but I would still consider myself a BLM person

Those 74 million people were quick to taunt the other side for being disappointed in losing the 2016 election, they like to wave flags that say 'fuck your feelings' as some weird badge of pride. Why again are we supposed to be understanding of them? Perhaps they are, in fact, just jerks and it's okay to say so.

Was that before or after many high-level Democrats and Celebrities denounced Trump and committed to resistance on Nov 3, 2015.

4+ years of no-quarter given raging against Trump has set the tone for the future of America. I don't think anyone is going to like that future.

So it was only in 2016 that the opposition party decided to drag their feet in any way possible? Not 2010? And it was only in 2016 that the tone was set for America, not when the current sitting president was raging for years about how the previous president was not a real American citizen?

Grab a mirror. This has been building for a lot longer than 4 years.

If the Left didn't want the Right to be mean to them maybe they shouldn't have called them nazis and deplorables.

Pretending Obama wasn't born in America is pretty deplorable

Ruining a teenager's life because he smiled as someone screamed in his face was pretty deplorable. We could do this all day but his point is that Americans have to grow up and start respecting each other.

I'm always struck by how fast the rhetoric shifts when one side loses a big election. How quickly we care about everyone being civil, and respecting one another, when we are no longer holding the position of power.

I find this comment interesting simply because it's the exact opposite of my FB feed. People there accuse leftists of calling for civility now that they have won, when they haven't been civil until this moment (their words, not mine)

I guess that's the beauty (maybe not quite the right word...) of two large groups of people attacking each other. The odds are good that if you look, you will find someone on the other side saying exactly what you want to record them saying.

A majority of registered Republicans have told pollsters they believe Obama wasn't born in this country many times since at least 2012. How many Democrats care about the outrage incident you cite, using empirical evidence?

Out of curiosity what event are you refering to?

I can step in: Covington High School student

Bearing symbols that represent the depression of Jews in Germany, symbols that have been banned there, is being Nazi.

I think both sides have a problem with assuming everyone on the other side fits a single mold. Apparently that mold fitting the more radical elements of the other side.

Actually, one of the magical things Trump did was prey on a lot of individuals individual desires while getting them to ignore all the stuff he promised to others that they don't agree with.

But anyway, just because you voted for somebody doesn't mean you agree with them on everything. That's as true for the left as it is the right.

So you're basically saying that we should behave like them and wave 'fuck your feelings' flags as well.

> understanding this 74 million

You believe you have no hope of understanding nearly half of all voters? You think 74 million people all think the same?

The 74 million are mostly conservatives. I don't think they are all the same, but as a group they do have at least a few defining issues that they agree on?

Sure, but don't believe that as American's there are a few defining issues they agree on along with just about everyone else in the country? Don't you think there are many things they don't agree on?

Heck, GOP got jack-all done in the first two years because they apparently don't agree all that much.

>It appears to me that there is a huge electorate that is disgruntled and has felt that the people in power have ignored it for too long

They literally had 4 years of their president sitting in the oval office, during 2 of which they controlled the legislature as well. If they felt ignored by the people in power, then it was THEIR people that THEY elected that were ignoring them. And, apparently they were not dissatisfied with them because they by and large voted for them AGAIN in 2020.

>then they must genuinely feel that the normal method of registering protest, i.e., voting, has ceased to function for them

No, let's just call them what they are: sore losers.

You've been using the site primarily for political battle and breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. We ban accounts that do those things, and have asked you several times in the past to stop, so I've banned this account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

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

There have been closer elections in recent history. Why are you giving this particular one such outsized proportion?

You didn't see this sort of reaction in 2000, and that was far far closer.

And to be clear, this election was 306 to 232. That is considered a landslide in my book (meaning my 40+ years of living). And in percentages, you can see just how poorly Trump performed in this election - 51.4% to 46.9%. 2000 was 47.9% to 48.4% (technically a negative 0.5% difference).

So I think your argument is completely disingenuous.

> Why are you giving this particular one such outsized proportion?

> You didn't see this sort of reaction in 2000

I think you found the reason? When exactly have we seen such a reaction before?

Maybe you could actually say something, instead of expecting us to guess...

When have we seen the loser's followers violently storm the Capitol to stop the certification of the election's votes? Never in the US.

This isn’t about closeness at all. It’s about ~half the country actually believing that the election was rigged. That doesn’t have precedent as far as I know.

That's too bad. They're wrong. And using violence is not the answer.

To be fair, the other half of the country believed that the previous election was thrown by Russian interference.

And to be really fair, half of the country believed neither of those things. There are plenty of people who voted for Trump who believe that he lost fair and square, and ditto Hillary voters in the previous election.

It's been interesting to watch Trump signs vanish a few at a time with each post-election milestone. Most people seem to accept the results even if their lines are different.

> It’s about ~half the country actually believing that the election was rigged.

I think it's more accurate to say that a percentage of people believe they will benefit by repeating claims that the election was rigged.

It's difficult to truly believe that an election was rigged, by the other side, when your side was ultimately responsible for its administration.

Half the country doesn't believe that. Source?

My bad, should’ve done the research.

In a mid December CBS news poll, “82% of Trump voters say they do not consider Mr. Biden[‘s win] legitimate.” The vast majority of trump voters isn’t the same thing as half the country.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-most-feel-electio...

I think it's telling though that the one question that's very narrowly scoped in interpretation(in that first batch about who won etc), the question about what should happen if the electoral college votes for Joe Biden, has 51% of Trump voters saying that Trump should concede.

Seems like most voters were still holding out while there was some hope of a viable legal route to contest the election. But a majority of Trump voters, at the time of the poll anyway, made a clean break from contesting the election after the electoral college vote.

> You didn't see this sort of reaction in 2000, and that was far far closer.

Just a comment on this point, I see two huge differences:

1) Gore conceded. On 13-Dec 2000. Trump only just "conceded", and still called it rigged, stolen etc. It makes a big difference when the leader concedes.

2) Technology has totally change the landscape in the last 20 years. There are now plenty of spaces on the Internet, huge echo chambers, allowing people to share posts and fuel each others hatred, spread misinformation, organise and mobilise.

How how the times change. Gore conceded. Then withdrew it. Then later conceded again. Up until 2000, it was pretty unprecedented. Some rather spicy events.

2020 obviously blew it all out of the water though.

> the technocratic elite have changed American democracy forever

You keep blaming tech companies for the poor actions of the adults using it and it doesn't make sense.

Maybe the solution is to use 21st century tools for democracy in 21st century. Issue based open voting, flexible mechanism of vote delegation, and ability to trade votes to reach compromise can fix what social media have broken https://voteflux.org

Curious, do you think all 74 million people are actually outraged? A lot of people voted republican because of libertarian views, not because they support Trump specifically. A lot of them also don't believe the election was rigged. The capitol riots that occurred this week have also swayed more people away from the conservative party. Trump still has millions of supporters but I think that number is tricking down given the recent events.

Polling shows ~50% of Rs say that it was rigged. So not all, but that’s a big number.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll/half-of...

Trump is the one who chose twitter. No position on the planet has more choices to spread a message to an audience than the POTUS. Twitter owes Trump nothing. He broke their rules and faces the consequences. One politician being banned on social media sites is not a sign of the technocracy subverting democracy; it’s a sign that no one is above consequences of their own actions.

American democracy was changed long before this. (see: southern strategy, freeing of slaves, allowing women the vote...)

In a book about how the Trump era changed democracy, this would merit a paragraph or two at most.

I doubt it’s as big as you say. Watch interviews with normal Trump voters (ie, not the meme-lords and q nuts), and they have expressed a pretty high degree of frustration with his Twitter habit for most of his presidency. Given how long Twitter has put up with the obvious abuse of the latitude they uniquely gave him, a lot of people may be grumpy but will understand. Had they done this years ago and NOT given him such exceptional latitude, then you’d probably have seen much larger blowback.

Additionally, even those who voted for him likely voted _against_ the other candidate rather than _for_ Pres Trump. His approval ratings have never been high, and are lower at this point in his term than any other recent President except Pres Carter.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

45% of Republicans support the actions at the capitol https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

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