Comment by BuyMyBitcoins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BuyMyBitcoins | Hacker News Reader

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>“The election is not suspect and the end results (Nixon won) are not going to change. It was settled decades ago.”

From my point of view, “settled” does not mean the issue has been decisively proven or disproven. More often than not I see “settled” as meaning “nothing can be done about it”. Especially in terms of fraud and organized crime.

If you really dig into the 1960 election there are a ton of discrepancies and oddities that were investigated by partisan committees or had suspects end up having all charges against them dropped. In the 1948 Senate example, the SCOTUS case about the discrepancies was not taken up on jurisdiction grounds. So in that sense, no true ruling was ever made about the challenges in the case. But it is considered “settled” all the same.

>”In 1990, Robert Caro said, "People have been saying for 40 years, 'No one knows what really happened in that election,' and 'Everybody does it.' Neither of those statements is true. I don't think that this is the only election that was ever stolen, but there was never such brazen thievery." Caro said that Johnson was given the votes of "the dead, the halt, the missing and those who were unaware that an election was going on"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_United_States_Senate_el...

I've read about plenty of this, all of that is completely normal. Every election people will try to game the system. It happens. We deal with it on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes we do a better job than other times. It's not fundamentally different from any other social system.

>does not mean the issue has been decisively proven or disproven

Yeah you're technically right but the point is: that doesn't matter to the election. It's of historical interest only, you can't use it to try to prove that an election didn't happen the right way because our system doesn't work like that. Elections aren't decided based on an investigation that happened 60 years in the future, if that was the case then we could never have an election because we'd have to wait 60 years for the results.

>” Elections aren't decided based on an investigation that happened 60 years in the future, if that was the case then we could never have an election because we'd have to wait 60 years for the results.”

That’s not quite what I’m getting at. The reason why I’m pointing to these 60+ year old elections is because people aren’t as emotionally charged about those elections in particular.

Elections can indeed be decided in the here-and-now, but the integrity questions still remain. That’s the key.

I feel like too many people are declaring the suspicions as moot and settled without actually looking taking the time and effort to investigate fully and properly. Emphasis on the fully and properly, because in the historical examples as well as the more recent examples, I see investigations being dismissed along partisan lines or because the courts did not want to get roiled in a constitutional crisis or a political revolt.

>but the integrity questions still remain.

For those previous elections? No, they don't. The elections themselves are settled. You are asking questions about something different which is future elections, that's an entirely different question and it's a mistake to conflate them entirely with past elections.

>I feel like too many people are declaring the suspicions as moot and settled without actually looking taking the time and effort to investigate fully and properly

I really wish you would stop coming at it from this angle, it's not a productive way to look at things. The suspicions are moot and are settled by the courts. That is a fact. The elections are over. No amount of investigation is going to change the results of those past elections. No matter how many more people you get to investigate this, it isn't going to change it. An investigation could change future elections, but we would only know about that if an investigation was conducted during the period of time when it's legally allowed to happen.

And just to make it clear, there is nothing wrong with having suspicions about holes in an electoral process and discussing what we can do about it. Where you going into bad territory is when you slip in things like "there are open integrity questions" and "the election needs more investigation and isn't settled" and other things that are sowing doubt about the validity of the whole process. In the best case, those statements are misleading, and in the worst case, they're completely false. We may not like that some concerns are dismissed for partisan reasons but you're leaving out how in a lot of cases, that is completely legal and is the system working as intended. I'd love to fix this too but engaging in this type of rhetoric on social media is not going to help there.

>” I really wish you would stop coming at it from this angle, it's not a productive way to look at things. The suspicions are moot and are settled by the courts. That is a fact.”

If there’s election fraud going on, it literally does not matter because they found a way to get away with it.

All suspicions are moot. The system has been designed to be investigation-resistant and I just have to accept that. Because, again, it is literally settled and utterly futile to look into these things.

It’s also a vicious cycle. It’s pointless to investigate past elections, and upcoming elections - if contested - won’t be investigated because all the past elections turned out just fine. We didn’t go looking for fraud, and we know that our elections have virtually no fraud because we didn’t find any.

The practical effect is, no matter what vulnerabilities and exploits can exist in our elections, none of that matters because you’re not allowed to look into it.

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