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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

Because voting is just a small part of Democracy. Democracies need strong and independent, judicial, law making and executive branches.

Voting itself is an averaging process, and you get the average of what ordinary citizen wants. It is hard to make people want good things for themselves without proactive investments in education and developing a population with scientific temper.

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> Democracies need strong and independent, judicial, law making and executive branches.

Yes, absolutely, but they also depend on a strong civil society beyond government. You need a media that's interested in and capable of investigative reporting, a layer of trade unions and professional associations, and a social layer that integrates people. The units larger than extended family and smaller than the country. And they need to be somewhat independent, not all run by the Party, nor all aligned along ethnic or religious lines.

You need people who believe their government is legitimate and that the mechanism of voting is valid.

You don’t see that anymore in America anymore for example, republicans across the nation believe that if there candidate loses, it must be voter fraud by either by one scheme or another. Shit, Trump himself still claims that he won the previous election.

2016 forgotten already.

Pretty sure everybody understood that trump won in 2016. There were questions about what happened during the campaign though .

In January 2017, several Democrats objected to the certification of Trump's win. See for example

https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-democrats-object-mor...

Seven house members. Vice President, entire Senate, and the rest of the House, told them to pound sand.

About as comparable as a housefly is to an elephant.

There was obvious voter fraud in the 2020 election.

The only question that should be disputed is if it was enough to sway the election.

No, there absolutely was not obvious voter fraud in 2020. That's the Big Lie.

You were saying?

https://www.reddit.com/r/electionfraud/comments/v85iy4/mind_...

I see your graphic posted by someone named jgreene777 on reddit and raise you a 72 page report prepared under the direction of eight prominent conservatives - people like retired federal judges, former senators, a solicitor general, an election lawyer, etc. [0]

This report looked at the 64 court cases and 187 allegations of election fraud in all 6 battleground states and documented the evidence showing that each and every claim of voter fraud by Trump's team was false, consistant with all the court rulings. You can scroll to any case you are interested in and read the details.

They found that there were many republicans who voted a straight party ticket except for their vote against Trump. This is consistent with the recent Wyoming primary results, where some 25-30% of republicans voted for the person in congress who is trying harder than anyone else to put Trump in jail.

The 2020 presidential election was most definitely lost by Trump, not stolen. I acknowledge that there are biased sources claiming otherwise, much to the detriment of our democracy.

[0] https://lostnotstolen.org/

> [...] and raise you a 72 page report prepared under the direction of eight prominent conservatives - people like retired federal judges, former senators, a solicitor general, an election lawyer, etc. [0]

Well, what's their reddit user names?

Thank you. This is a perfect example of the maxim that it is at least an order of magnitude harder to refute propaganda than it is to create it. Imagine how much time went into the reddit graphic, vs. this report. And on top of that it will hardly change any minds.

... a mind map?

What point exactly are you trying to argue by posting a mind map?

Delusional

There is likely some illegal voting in every election. The systems in place generally prevent any sort of wholesale vote manipulation though. It's rare when an election is close enough that a handful of votes could make the difference, and the 2020 presidential election certainly wasn't one of those.

Evidence points to it mostly being small-scale and largely accidental (e.g. someone has two residences and forgets they voted in one place earlier in the year, votes in second place later in the year, accidentally commits voter fraud).

When people with the motivation, mandate, and access, plus often full support of an entire state government, to find as much fraud as they can, go looking for it, that's typically all they find. A handful of cases, mostly accidental, not part of a big conspiracy or effort to swing the election.

Like when Kobach, a guy who'd made his entire political identity "voter fraud is rampant and super-serious" got clearance to go on a big crusade in Kansas. 6 convictions, mostly accidental, none part of a coordinated effort, mixed R and D (IIRC the cases actually leaned R, but small sample size, so either way, not that meaningful)

Rhetoric that it's a big deal (that stupid D'Souza "documentary"), but when they have to put up or shut up (i.e. take their evidence to the courts) there's simply nothing (meaningful) there.

It's mind blowing to me that generally intelligent people believe the biggest sore loser in American history. It's a huge danger to the future of our democracy and you all don't care. It seriously makes me want to cry in despair for the future.

I feel your despair, but from the other side. I don't know how anyone could watch the surveillance videos of Fulton county and not conclude their was voter fraud. It's absolutely mind boggling.

Those poll workers have had their lives ruined over allegations that didn’t stand up in court.

Separation between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government appears to be a good practice. However, the UK doesn't really have that: Parliament controls everything. And they seem to have a fairly stable and functional democracy.

In theory Parliament controls everything, but in practice the executive controls everything (because they control Parliament). The separation of powers that does exist is largely because of 'leakage' in Ministers' control of events. They can straightforwardly change the law, for example, but you need to change it before you do the otherwise-unlawful thing, not afterward. If you don't, the courts will nullify your actions. You can dismiss 'independent' quango heads quite straightforwardly, but it's politically expensive (and somewhat time consuming) to do so too frequently. You control the Parliamentary timetable, but there are a few gaps in it for opposition day debates and private members' bills. That sort of thing.

We do have a stable and functional democracy, though it's rather brittle against a bad-faith executive. One prominent theory is the 'good chap' model of government, which holds basically that the system is set up such that 'reasonable chaps like us' can govern well and with few constraints, but the flipside is that Johnson's impact was limited by his government's lack of competence, not by institutional constraints. That might be liberating or terrifying, depending on your views about good government.

The don't control monetary policy

So then the question becomes "why do many democracies not develop strong and independent, judicial, law making and executive branches, whereas others do?"

It might be other way round - if there are no independent, judicial, law making and executive branches and all the blah from the start, democracy has much lower chance of success. There will always be attempts to take hold of it and if the start is wrong, chance that someone will succeed is much higher.

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