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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

Surely the burden of proof is on those making a claim of election interference? Elections are designed to be reliable and there haven't been reports of previous elections being "stolen", so I would think that reasonable evidence should be provided if people want to push the idea that an election was interfered with.

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There is no burden of proof required to assert a hypothesis. This is how none of truth nor science nor security operate. There is evidence gathering activity which supports or undermines, strengthening or weakening a hypothesis. Ideally, one dispositive form of evidence affirms or denies a hypothesis. It is not difficult to find historical precedent of election fraud, but in any case, other claims are weak evidence.

> There is evidence gathering activity

These are recounts, audits, and security guards. No recounts deviated by that much, even the massive Arizona recount found no significant deviation.

> It is not difficult to find historical precedent of election fraud

Please provide that. The evidence AFAIK is counted as essentially "parts per million", it is so small. Meanwhile there are a variety of safeguards, audits, verifications & recounts.

The null hypothesis in this case I don't believe would be "fraudulent election", so it is a claim.

This is true, if you're billing your hypothesis as a hypothesis. The problem is that prominent Republicans billed their "election was stolen" hypothesis as a fact, claimed to have boatloads of evidence in order to convince the public, and then never published that evidence.

In the aftermath of this clearly deceptive behavior, they've maintained the support of Republican voters who still believe the lie despite none of the evidence ever being released.

It's one thing to claim something is true and that you have evidence, then release the evidence and find out that it's insufficient to win in court. It's another thing entirely to make a claim, say you have overwhelming evidence to support it, and never release any evidence at all. In the former case, maybe you got overzealous or maybe you were dealing with an unsympathetic judge. In the latter, the only rational way to interpret the situation is that you were intentionally misleading your audience.

> There is no burden of proof required to assert a hypothesis. This is how none of truth nor science nor security operate.

In the scientific world, a hypothesis that has no evidence is treated with skepticism.

In the rest of the world, it gets treated as fact, even as evidence against the claim pours in.

Why do you say something is treated as fact? For example, are either the ‘cheating’ or ‘no cheating’ hypotheses verifiable in any productive regard? There may be confusion between “absence of evidence” versus “evidence of absence.”

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