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Comment by colpabar | Hacker News Reader

> what safeguards to we have

We have the government and mainstream media and big tech all telling us that it's totally impossible for anything like this to happen and penalizing us for talking about it.

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It's not that it's impossible, but that it's just not cost-effective, and even if it does happen, it's not happening at a scale that would affect even a statewide election let alone a national election. Why go through all the effort (and risk) to modify Joe Smith's vote from Team A to Team B when Team B can just buy advertisements, write newspaper op-eds, spam social media, saturate the news cycle, take over talk shows, and otherwise propaganda thousands of Joe Smiths across the whole region into voluntarily voting for Team B?

We need evidence of security or evidence of insecurity. No evidence is not conclusive either way, that's the problem.

Bullshit. You’ll know when your election is routinely rigged and there’s rampant fraud. Been there and it’s difficult to hide even if you don’t have an independent media.

Doesn’t mean I agree with the election system in the US. You need both real and perceived trust in the election system. You also need very high participation. Both are essential. You can’t just keep throwing hurdles and then let only those who’re willing to pass the test to vote. You need more booths - way more - if you want to get rid of mail-in ballots so people can walk to their center and not stand in line for long hours. You have to go issue voter id cards door to door, if you want to enforce id restrictions. You can’t just do one and not the other. That’s just exclusionary. Similarly, if you want faster results you need electronic voting but you also need paper trails for validation. The way results stay unknown and media organisations “call” the elections is absurd. You need official results to come out in under a few hours after all elections are closed. It’s just not right to announce Florida while California is still voting - that’s undue influencing IMHO. The US can fix it all. I do admire how it all seem to mostly work in spite of all these issues.

You're straw-manning the comment you're replying to. They're talking about a lack of "safeguards", and you're replying by denying "rampant fraud".

tralene's comment is talking about safeguards. Their comment was substantive, linked to a WSJ article about deficiencies in elections.

The comment 8ytecoder is replying to is the comment by colpabar. Their comment alleges ... some shadowy conspiracy by government, mainstream media and big tech.

Right. I agree that the US has a lot of blatant deficiencies that they can resolve. Countries all over the world learnt how to do democracy from the US. Many have surpassed them in conducting free and fair elections. US is far behind there. But, like I said, it’s still mostly democratic and that amazes me.

The main safeguard of the American election system is thousands of seniors who donate their time and patriotism and enthusiasm for the process into making sure things go well. They typically take things very seriously and are rather robust, as the system is designed to bring in party representatives as well as these wise watchdogs. Most important actions have eyes and consent from every involved stakeholder. In some states, is a genuinely impressive example of distributed processing and consensus.

The same folks that need 1/4 inch thick glasses to read 18 point font on a piece if A4 paper?

Yeah, there's never been any conspiracy between those three entities. Whatever you say!

The safeguard is the enormous scale of the U.S. election.

Flipping the 2020 election would’ve required 44,000 votes to have been different, and that’s with perfect knowledge of all the other votes that would be coming in.

> The US can fix it all.

Well I think part of the issue is that the US (as in the federal government of the United States) cannot fix it all, because each state makes its own election rules. So for instance the federal government can't say "All election results will be released only after the very last ballot in Hawaii is cast", each state has to independently agree to only release their state's election results after a certain time that all states agree upon.

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