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Comment by capitalsigma | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

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 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-...

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.

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