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Comment by Ancapistani | Hacker News Reader

The fact that a single company has this much potential influence on US elections is the real issue here. The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.

If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.

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> The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.

Yeah that's a nice thought, but it ignores a whole lot of recent evidence to the contrary.

Half the country feels the way you do. The other half felt that way for the past four years.

If centralized ownership is an issue, we should all work together to fix that. If the issue is the party affiliation, then it isn't an issue at all.

Half the country is wrong. I agree that centralized ownership is a problem regardless of party, but putting on both sides blinders is not the answer.

In that case, do you agree a one-party state, run by Democrats, would be "correct"?

The "correct" setup is a loyal opposition during time out of power.

In the absence of that, a one-party state is probably better than a two-party state in which one party is actively trying to burn the system down.

You're talking about the mostly peaceful protesters who tried to burn down the Federal building in Portland for over 200 nights, right? Sedition and insurrection.

> tried to burn down the Federal building in Portland for over 200 nights

If you're pissing your pants in fear of people who fail to do something 200 nights in a row, I'd argue that says a lot more about you than it does them.

When did HN become so bad at false equivalencies?

Can I say Singletons are not recommended but also agree that there are contexts where it's an "okay enough" option? Singetons are never the "best option" in modern software, but it's not the "worst" in every case either.

Now, filling your code base with incorrect calculations: pretty much always a bad idea.

In the context of election security, absolutely.

After the wild amount of disproven claims made by republicans about election security, I don't trust them at all.

That’s two reductive and poor arguments. Both sides fallacy doesn’t fly in 2025.

Voting machine anxiety for lack of a better term has been a presence for some time and isn’t a partisan issue. What is a partisan issue is President Trump’s baseless allegations re the election he hasn’t acknowledged losing in 2020.

Party affiliation is absolutely an issue with respect to Marvel villain parody that the modern Republican Party has become. I can’t read the article because Substack, but if the new owner is in fact a MAGA guy, (and this isn’t just drama) that’s a big problem.

archived version: https://archive.is/xvdh0

Did Dominion have a party affiliation? I would assume we just went from neutral party affiliation to strong party affiliation, not from one party to another.

The discussions I've seen on the right certainly indicate that they believed Dominion to be affiliated with the left.

As for the reality, I can't say. I've not done the legwork to have an informed position.

So it didn’t move from one party to another

Dominion didn't, but it became a focus of blame by Trump for the 2020 loss, and so to MAGA it became, like all enemies, part of the Radical Left.

If only the other party owned intolerable influence over the machinery that counts the votes, we'd be safe!

If only a neutral party had that influence.

What leaves first? The neutrality or the influence?

> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.

No? I wasn't upset about it for the past decade, not only because I didn't know about it, but because I wasn't even concerned about it. Ten years ago US democratic institutions and norms were not being challenged and neither party seemed particularly intent on transitioning the country to one-man rule. During the second term of Obama, Biden, and even the first term of Trump (until he lost) democracy was not under attack.

Well those things that were true 10 years ago are no longer true now, so I can change what I get upset about. Jan 6 changed this country, unfortunately.

I hate to be the one to point this out, but Republicans have been aggressively gerrymandering districts for multiple decades. While the goal of doing so may have not been to have a dictator, as it appears to be now, I can assure you that their intent in doing so was not to promote representative democracy.

I’m already aware of that. I don’t love gerrymandering, but it’s categorically different IMHO. Gerrymandering is an abuse of the system, but it is still working within the system.

That’s in stark contrast to the current, mainstream Republican ideology which dictates that if Republicans lose, then the election must have been “rigged,” which is more like burning the whole system to the ground.

Once you’re comfortable openly and actively disenfranchising voters, and you get away with it, it is a small step to start whining all the time about how the system is rigged against you to try to ramp up your efforts to further disenfranchise voters. Burning the system down doesn’t just happen overnight. It happens slowly and starts with ‘working within the system.’

I disagree with your analysis for a variety of conceptual reasons, but the proof is in the pudding: we’ve been gerrymandering districts for a couple hundred years and I don’t think it ever threatened a peaceful transition of power. So what, it’s like a hundred years per “small step?”

The fact that gerrymandering isn't prohibited by law is just astonishing.

Well it’s easy to understand why legislatures elected by a Gerrymandered map are not motivated to fix it.

Also not trivial to design a law against it. Most common solution seems to be use of independent commissions, but commissions can also be “independent” in name only.

an independent and officially non-partisan commission is imperfect, but will at least have constraints on it in that it needs to appear independent, unlike the brazenly partisan way things work now.

Are State elections also badly affected by gerrymandering?

I have only ever seen examples of it at the Federal Election level, so wondering if your first point is actually completely accurate. (I believe the States themselves control the "maps" but forgive my ignorance if not)

The states control both maps, the district map which determines the population eligible to elect the US Rep for a given district, and a separate district map (with more and smaller districts) that determines the population eligible to elect the State Rep for a given district.

Both are a problem. The latter just means that the State Congress can be artificially heavily tilted vs one party or the other.

It's not at all astonishing, since those who write the laws benefit from the gerrymandering. Even if a legislature passed a law forbidding gerrymandering, future legislatures could reverse it. If the party in control of the legislature is corrupt, then that is exactly what we should expect.

Gerrymandering should be prohibited by the courts, but the current SCOTUS in its great wisdom ruled that courts must remain silent on the subject.

>> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.

Thanks for the finger wagging - great motivation there. I mean if you live in a country where these things are actual serious problems, you're no longer living in a democracy. I have doubts that ownership of the voting machine company is truly a problem - though it certainly doesn't look great.

>you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.

I have been. What's next?

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