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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

I think it will make it far easier to manipulate dumb people. The same 30% (?) of the people who think the last US Presidential election was stolen. These people will be easier to whip into a frenzy. I worry this will increase the likelihood of violence, above what is already happening.

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(as a non-american) I don't think it was stolen, but the whole "vote via mail" thing made me really suspicious

> the whole "vote via mail" thing made me really suspicious

Why? Mail-in voting is hardly unique to the US; what made you suspicious?

quite unique for my country (Russia). Though they recently started to do some remote "blockchain-based" voting in Moscow, which is widely considered to be a fraud

I mean.. most things blockchain are.

I think most people outside Russia (and some inside it) consider all Russian elections to be fraudulent.

that's not the point. The point is, we don't have voting by mail in Russia and I think it help to observe how fraudulent the elections are.

It really is nothing to be suspicious about. Full vote by mail had already been the norm in some US states for years, and most states allowed for it in specific circumstances. The infrastructure, laws, etc., were already there, they just needed to be expanded. Expanding it has always been in the national conversation, it has just been a matter of figuring it out and priority.

So when a global pandemic occurs and we're trying everything we can to isolate and socially distance, that priority changes real quick. People get talking and problems get solved.

Of course, sore losers will complain about anything to justify their loss, and this "new thing" was a prime scapegoat. It was also well known ahead of time that the mail in votes would be largely Democratic (because COVID was VERY politicized and democrats were more likely to follow quarantine guidance and therefore vote by mail). So when the votes came in, they pointed to that imbalance and called it "fraud".

Besides all that, there's no reason to be more suspicious of mail-in ballots than in-person ones. In-person, you mark a paper ballot and then put it in a stack... which then gets mailed somewhere else. If someone is going to be changing mail-in ballots, then they're already in a position to be changing regular ones as well (and every election security professional will tell you that paper ballots are more secure than electronic ones).

It's true that the one who counts the votes matters and this doesn't change with mail voting / in-person voting

The one advantage of physical voting I can think of is the ability to just be close to voting station on voting day, counting people who go in there, asking people (who are willing to share) for whom did they vote. This allows to independently check if fraud exists.

Exit polls are notoriously inaccurate. Given the level of fraud thus far demonstrated (minimal) there is zero likelihood of "checking" by exit polls.

The issue with mail-in voting is that you can be influenced by your family because it's not done in a secret booth, but it doesn't appear to lead to mass voter fraud.

(A few people have been charged with voting their spouse's ballots.)

As opposed to the dumb people who spent 4 years claiming the last-but-one presidential election was stolen, you mean?

I never heard that claim. Only "the electoral college is a bad system" or "voters were influenced by Russian propaganda." Never "votes were impacted by direct fraud."

There were fraud claims on the fringe just after the 2016 election. The evidence was sparse. It didn't take long for even those pretty angry about the election to realize fraud probably didn't happen, and if it did it was at too small a scale to meaningfully affect the results.

Unfortunately in 2020 the fringe became the GOP mainstream, treating equally soft claims as fact.

No, it wasn't "on the fringe". Note that this poll was taken in 2020, a full four years later.

"Seventy-two percent (72%) of Democrats believe it’s likely the 2016 election outcome was changed by Russian interference, but that opinion is shared by only 30% of Republicans and 39% of voters not affiliated with either major party."

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gen...

By fraud I mean actual voter fraud. As in, effort was made to cause invalid votes to be counted or valid votes to not be counted.

Russia absolutely did and continues to push propaganda into elections in the USA and elsewhere. That's not really in dispute at this point so I'm not surprised it polls that high.

Got a poll that shows similar numbers for fraud? I would be genuinely surprised to see that.

There were many claims that voters were illegitimately purged from the rolls, which is pretty much the equivalent.

I should actually note here that I didn't vote for Trump, either time, nor did I vote for Clinton or Biden.

I just hate hypocrisy.

> it’s likely the 2016 election outcome was changed by Russian interference

That sounds like a perfectly reasonable claim with evidence that supports it, paralleled by other elections in other countries as well; quite obviously very different to what was discussed above.

In 2019, Hillary Clinton, in a CBS News interview, called Trump “illegitimate”, claimed that Trump “stole” the election, and accused him of voter manipulation, including “hacking”.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...

I don't think she means what you think she means by "hacking." I think she means this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-...

Then you weren't listening. People were screaming "Russia stole the election" from Day 1, not "just voters were influenced by Russian propaganda". You're spinning.

In terms of claiming the results of the election is illegitimate, "voters were influenced by Russian propaganda" instead of "votes were impacted by direct fraud" seems like a distinction without a difference to me.

https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi...

In 2020, Hillary Clinton was still casting aspersions regarding the outcome of the 2016 election, sowing discontent about the electoral college, preparing Democrat voters to ignore the results until Joe Biden was declared the winner.

Portraying this game as if it's only being played by one team does not help restore any trust in the federal election process.

I live in a liberal city and didn't hear this from anyone. The was initially a decent bit of "not my president" attitude, but just in a philosophical sense, and even that petered out pretty fast.

Hillary Clinton herself claimed that the election was stolen and that Trump was an "illegitimate President".

But she doesn't count as "anyone", I guess?

She'd count as one single individual, yes. Thankfully a far cry from the amount that the comment above was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32940684

Did you hear that from Fox News? Because I never heard it once.

Then you weren't listening. Note the quote above from Hillary Clinton herself.

Stolen is a vague word. If there's evidence she believes there was sufficient fraud to have changed the result, I would be interested. If she was referring to the stolen Podesta emails and Comey's statement right before the election, then those things happened. You may think those things didn't matter, but it's no surprise she does. And then there's the whole storming the capital thing she didn't do.

I think Clinton was referring to this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-...

In other words: not saying that there was actual fraud sufficient to change the election, not saying the election was "stolen" in the sense people seem to be saying here.

Nah, that's not the same.

Stolen by foreign influence is very different than what the 2020 nuts have claimed. How many court cases did they lose? How many times were they asked to produce evidence and came up with ... nothing?

The last-but-one presidential election was affected by various states illegally throwing large numbers of legal voters off their voter rolls, but it’s impossible to say whether it would have made enough difference to alter the outcome, and there’s no convincing evidence votes were directly changed. (It would be a good thing to have a verifiable paper trail for every election; in some parts of the USA it is impossible to effectively investigate any alleged shenanigans.)

The bigger problem in that election was Russian-intelligence-stolen (and possibly tampered with) documents being released to the press in the lead up to the election in coordination with the Trump campaign (with the FBI keeping its investigation of that secret), and then the FBI director making an unprecedented and (we found out only afterward) unsupportable statement attacking Clinton immediately before the election, after being pressured into it by a handful rogue FBI agents who were friends of Trump’s campaign threatening insubordination.

And perhaps the biggest problem of all, an entirely too credulous mainstream media who didn’t put those developments in context, leaving voters to draw mistaken inferences, and giving oodles of free airtime to Trump’s rallies without making any effort to dispute outright lying in real time.

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