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Comment by bellyfullofbac | Hacker News Reader

I share your view of the situation, but it is fucking frustrating that "the other side" including the person you replied to probably will keep seeing it the way he described, even after you writing this explanation...

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There is a lot of whataboutism in society lately. The what about in this case are the many posts claiming the 2016 election was fraudulent, stolen, etc... While I personally understand the differences (the 2016 election really was stolen, but the 2020 election was not), I also understand why others do not agree and instead see both claims of election fraud as sour grapes, consistent with similar claims of election fraud from every close election in American politics in the past century. Dangling chads?

The claims about the 2016 election being stolen had no more factual basis than the claims about the 2020 election. Amazingly, there was even a supposed proof that the 2016 election was stolen circulating where, if you understood why the supposed election theft couldn't have worked as advertised, it was really obvious that the author knew this too and was pushing a narrative he knew was bullshit. The real difference is that the mainstream press and big tech supports the party that won in 2020 but opposes the one that won in 2016, so the idea of election theft was lent credibility by them for one and discredited for the other in ways completely unfounded in actual evidence.

I think some of what you say is widely debated but it is disappointing that those who advocated better election security after 2016 did a 360 in 2020 and decided the same systems are now infallible. Election security shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Wholly suboptimal.

I’m the person, and I don’t see these things as one or the other.

The election results questioning thing is a totally different topic but it doesn’t change the fact that people literally attempted to claim Trump wanted an insurrection and Twitter could have continued to flag things with their “election results” blurb rather than pulling the entire post.

I think we all can see what the common denominator is here... why not allow both the condemning of violence and lawlessness as well as the ability to “trust but verify” on election results?

Mitt Romney said “an audit won’t satisfy them only telling them the truth will” only nobody to this day even knows the truth yet, the best we can say is that we aren’t sure, and that leaves it open for either side to say they are sure about their angle.

Describing "This was a fraudulent election" as "trust but verify" is incredibly disingenuous.

Why? I just removed the Trump salesmanship hyperbole from the statement, the meaning is the same.

In what world is "this election results were fraudulent" interpretable as "we should trust but verify the election results"?

Alleging fraud is an explicit lack of trust.

I mean he’s just saying what he believes, he could be very well be right, we don’t know.

In my opinion a complete lack of trust should be the default stance when it comes to voting, we should ideally not have to trust anyone or anything for this.

> I mean he’s just saying what he believes, he could be very well be right, we don’t know.

Except he is NOT right and we DO know. The election was NOT rigged or stolen from him. He lost. Plain and simple.

Oh? How do you know? We’re still waiting on ballot audits in 4 counties, until they actually happen NOBODY knows. Saying otherwise is just dishonest.

He spent months telling people that their country was being stolen from them when what's really happening is the country is moving on. He lied and he lied and he lied some more. He told them that if they didn't fight for him they wouldn't have a country and then he told them we need to go together to intimidate our lawmakers. Of course he didn't have the balls to march alongside them but he literally spent months feeding the anger, formed that particular crowd, and pointed them towards congress.

I was watching the entirety of the events through streamers cameras from start to finish. Were you?

Yep, I even went down and checked it out on because I live near DC. I think lying is a strong word, saying that “you won’t have a country” is true but I think he’s talking about due to long term effects of bad policy, not literal country stealing (which makes no sense).

We also know that people have cheated in elections since the dawn of time, in the US it’s typical for each party to just ignore it for the sake of moving along, in this case we found a guy who didn’t care about towing party lines so he decided it was a hill to die on.

Right or wrong if anything he revealed some massive flaws in the system and if voting is as important as people say then it’s probably a good thing to be aware of and scrutinize.

Remember, he could be right, it came down to a mere handful of counties where the results were never able to be verified, and to this day the local officials have been blocking attempts to audit, even after judges ordered it or subpoenas were issued. Maricopa county audit is happening soon I think.

We have no reason to suspect the election was anything but generally fair outside of small scale issues like the fellow who tried to vote for trump with a ballot obtained for his dead mother in law. Trump told tens of thousands of verifiable lies. Lying is exactly the correct word for what he did throughout his presidency and beyond. Almost every election could come down to a "handful" of counties if you selectively pick the most populous counties you lost, make up a tally that would result in victory, and then declare fraud must have taken place to achieve that fictional number.

By that logic any tennis match between an excellent player and a terrible one could be said to have been decided by a handful of mistakes and declaring without evidence that those calls were made badly.

The election was fairly lost by a huge margin of the electorate and a substantial EC vote margin. Trump is both a traitor to our country and a liar and you should stop apologizing for him.

Are you joking? There’s a shit load of reasons to question the election results. We have just as much reason to trust them as we have to doubt them because they went entirely unverified in the counties that had irregularities. And no, it wasn’t lost by a large margin, it came down to questionably small margins in only a handful of counties.

Imagine a vote tally machine with a 60% failure rate (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-815/163875/2020...), that means 60% of the time a single human being decided which candidate the ballot went to. Or how about this: https://postimg.cc/wtBWQpXw

All they needed to do was audit the ballots, it wouldn’t have even taken long. The reason lawyers did their best to block these audits was because they knew it was possible for them to lose if the audits went forward.

This is very much not about Donald Trump.

What counties are you referring to that had irregularities and were not audited that would have changed the outcome of the election?

Maricopa AZ, Fulton GA, Detroit... did you look at any of the links I posted?

This is pretty pointless because people have already made up their mind that there’s nothing there and nobody would ever lie or manipulate a count to “save the country from Hitler”, when in reality we still don’t know if that happened or not because everyone with the ability to check agreed not to check. I am not claiming to know there was enough fraud to swing it, just that they never confirmed there wasn’t, they just took the word of the local officials that the counts were correct. To me, that’s absolute insanity, and how anyone who is pro-democracy would support that is beyond me.

The Maricopa audit is happening soon, so that should be interesting. And the Fulton ballots were ordered by a Judge to be turned over a few weeks ago, but the local officials are appealing to block the audit!

Fulton GA conducted a hand recount, along with the rest of GA, the numbers matched the tallies from the voting machines.

Maricopa's is also the third audit to be pushed through by the local Republican party. It's just performative, wasteful spending at this point.

Presumably they are trying to block further meandering political theatre because there has been sufficient process in place and its abnormal to be attempting to re litigate an election that wasn't even close almost 6 months after its lost.

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