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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>they did it with the intention of overturning elections:

>[...] to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States,"

The actual election fraud allegations are probably spurious, but regardless we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself. The badness comes from inappropriate access to the data, not trying to find evidence of fraud.

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> but regardless we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself

The only rational viewpoint is to assume everything this administration does is in bad faith, until proven otherwise.

In the legal realm, journalist and legal analyst Emily Bazelon analyzes the legal "presumption of regularity" which has been trashed by the current administration.

How many allegations of fraud need to be taken to court and dismissed before it’s no longer conceivable that this is a good faith non-partisan search for evidence of fraud?

>The actual election fraud allegations are probably spurious

Sure, and my point is that we shouldn't apologize for people deliberately "investigating" bogus allegations on the grounds that investigating legitimate allegations is a good thing.

>Sure, and my point is that we shouldn't apologize for people deliberately "investigating" bogus allegations

But I'm not "apologizing" for them? I'm pushing back on OP's phrasing of "they did it with the intention of overturning elections". It's possible to push back on some person's criticism of [bad guy] without being accused of "apologizing" for [bad guy].

From my original comment:

>we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself

See also my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734439

You said "The badness comes from inappropriate access to the data, not trying to find evidence of fraud." I disagree. I think that a blatantly bad faith partisan investigation demanded by a politician who stands for gain and executed by public servants would be bad even if they didn't inappropriately access this data. Both things are bad and would be still be bad independent of one another.

>I think that a blatantly bad faith partisan investigation

Sounds like you agree with me, because you're still not objecting to my original premise of "we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself". You might think "bad faith partisan investigation" is bad, but not the act of trying to overturn elections itself.

You explicitly applied it to this investigation, saying the investigation itself was not bad. If you intend to weaken your claim to "not all conceivable investigations of election fraud are bad," then yes, I agree, but that's such an extraneous comment that I would question the intent of including it.

>You explicitly applied it to this investigation, saying the investigation itself was not bad.

I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion given what I wrote was:

>we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself

We don't have to examine every situation in the theoretical. We can pay attention to context. These are not good faith actors, they are not seeking the truth.

Right, I'm not trying to argue that the actions in this case are praiseworthy, only that the OP is misidentifying the source of the badness. That's important, because if we establish a pattern of "overturning elections are bad", then that will come back to bite us when there actually is a legitimate reason for overturning elections.

>but regardless we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself.

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