Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

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> how would you discern conspiracists from realists that tell it like it is? > Would Twitter by OK to ban people complaining about stolen elections in some Latin American country

This seems to suggest that because we can't always tell facts from lies, we must never act on information as being factual. That to me just seems wrong.

> Would Twitter by OK to ban people complaining about stolen elections in some Latin American country (where we can all agree that they might very well be stolen)?

They indeed were (e.g. Maduro in Venezuela is a recent one). I hope Twitter doesn't ignore such situations. There will always be a need for biased and subjective action.

> There has been no shortage of actual stolen elections and/or election fraud worldwide (and one would presume, in the US historically).

One should be really careful when talking about election fraud, to not confuse widespread systematic outcome-changing fraud (which is extremely rare) from instances of fraud (which is almost universal in any election but usually doesn't matter).

The recent presidential race was won by extremely narrow margins with a few cities (Atlanta, Philadelphia, Phoenix, etc) effectively determining the outcome.

Given that, why does the fraud have to be widespread and systematic in order to be valid? Also, why silence or dismiss even the smallest amount of fraud? It definitely matters regardless of which party/politician benefits.

The thousands of votes required would require more than isolated cases of individual voter fraud at least. I’d say several thousand in a single state is both widespread and symptomatic. And importanly there are no indications of that.

So, ignore evidence of fraud (including eyewitness testimony from dozens of witnesses sworn under oath) because you and others summarily deem it not widespread or systematic?

However, Congress spends years investigating sketchy, anonymous claims about Russian interference in 2016 elections?

> So, ignore evidence of fraud

Who is ignoring evidence? Courts?

> because you and others summarily deem it not widespread or systematic

"and others" includes every court presented with such evidence. As luck would have it, those weren't courts that could be said to be exactly "hostile" to the administration either. That would have been problematic.

I'm not trying to claim there is no substantial evidence of fraud. Anyone who has that evidence is free to present it in legal processes. If it has any merit, there could even be a case. There has been no such examples. That means either a) there was no significant fraud, b) there was fraud but it left no evidence, or c) there was both fraud and evidence but courts across the country rejected it because they are hostile to the administration. Which one do you suggest happened? Or put more clearly: what should happen before you believe a)?

Not one eye witness has been in, under oath, in front of a US Federal Judge and claimed they saw voter fraud. It has all been in hotel conference rooms. When the judge has asked for evidence they essentially get a shrug of the shoulders from Rudy G.

Actually, the margins weren't that small except for in Georgia and Nevada. And no, it wasn't down to those cities. Those cities voted about the same as they did in the last election. What changed was the white suburbs. They flipped just enough. Interestingly though, the white suburbs were not the target of accusation of cheating. I wonder why...

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