Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

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Assuming you are referring to the USA, are you claiming people have not been able to campaign for political positions and vote for their candidates for decades? Because that is the definition of "democratic elections" (except for the electoral college nonsense in the US and 2000 presidential elections).

Otherwise, your complaint is more about voters either being too stupid, too disinterested, or not having enough time participate in the democracy. Which is a problem, but real life comes with constraints and it isn't really easy to solve all of these by snapping one's fingers.

Claiming that there has been widespread election fraud when elections have been, by and large, free and fair, is anti democratic. Obviously, there have been issues with disenfranchising certain people's votes, making it harder for them, blah blah, but it had been trending better and better and access to information had been getting better and better.

It also might just be possible that people are too tribal and simply can't comprehend all the complexities of the world to make good voting decisions.

Much of that is intertwined.

The biggest key imo is captured media (and more recently, social media), which has indeed been happening for decades. This leads to uninformed voters and manufactured arguments, groupthink, and tribal narrowmindedness, allowing the two parties of capital interests to remain dominant. Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking, hence the race to the bottom where only capital interests win. The primary process is a complete joke where the dominant parties have full control over it and blatantly manipulate it (or skip it entirely like we saw recently), and running under a third party is suicide.

However, don't be fooled into thinking we just need >2 viable parties, as the same fundamental problems can easily scale if the other sources of corruption (media) remain. We see this in the UK etc.

Election fraud itself is probably not a very big factor in most cases. With all of the above, it doesn't need to be.

>Voters cave too easily to the "lesser of two evils" thinking

This is just a mathematical fact of first past the post elections.

I also don’t buy the captured media claim. Broadband cellular internet has allowed everyone instant access to basically all available information. If people choose to consume nonsense, that is an inherent problem with the people. Good information is literally a click or tap away, but people prefer the tribal stuff.

> This is just a mathematical fact of first past the post elections.

The degree of it is not.

> Good information is literally a click or tap away

No it isn't.

Yes, and while I do believe foreign and domestic bad actors are ever present online, a whole lot of misinformation is enabled by people who blindly accept anything posted on the internet as fact (my mother has ranted to me about a distant relation who continually posts the most outlandish things on Facebook; personally I don’t use any of Meta’s social networks to avoid that sort of thing, and, bar Marketplace, the last time I looked at Facebook proper was to do a data export during COVID lol). Though don’t get me wrong, social media companies have done terrible things, but supposedly “open” platforms have also tended towards misinformation and extremism (yes that one, and that one too, and the many others like it, none are blameless).

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