I hate the narratives around voting security in the US. One side says that it is totally secure, basically 0 fraud, most secure election in history, etc etc. The other side claims that the election was completely stolen from them by voting machines.
Neither of these claims is right. Personally, I doubt the election was stolen. I know of a handful of cases of voter fraud both anecdotally ("My mom [in a retirement home] told me to vote for McCain, but I know she really wanted to vote for Obama, so that's what I put.") and numerically[1].
I would not be surprised if one or two of the very razor thin House district elections in 2020 experienced enough fraud to flip the decision. This doesn't mean that I believe all of the Dominion voting system hack nonsense or anything like that. I just think only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Before 2020 the only allegations of significant fraud or other shenanigans I remember were immediately after elections and were dropped shortly afterwards when no evidence could be found for them.
Note that the Bush/Gore election issues were not allegations of fraud or any intentional shenanigans. The issue there was a badly designed ballots and/or badly designed voting machines that let to a large number of spoiled ballots due to people voting for more than one candidate or not marking any candidate, and in one major county led many voters to mark a candidate other than the one they intended to mark.
All the controversy there after the election was how to resolve those problems. Some, like the infamous "hanging chads" could in some cases be resolved by hand examination of the ballot, but there would often be some ambiguity so that would not be without controversy.
Others, like the "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach County did not lead to any physical problem with the ballot but the design of the ballot led many voters to vote for a candidate other than the one they intended to vote for. That was a completely novel failure mode and the system had no procedure for dealing with it.
What I meant was, the security of electronic voting machines in general.
Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among software people that closed source electronic voting machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking.
We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question Dominion."
Whether or not an election has actually ever been hacked at the voting machine level is a separate conversation.
Hasn't every other type of computing system been hacked? These systems are so insecure they're leaking passwords on the internet and smart people somehow still believe they've never been tampered with. Trillions of dollars on the line and ability to shape policy for the most powerful economy and military on planet earth but for sure, there's never been any hacks even though we're openly leaking passwords and social security numbers on the internet.
The Help America Vote Act passed in 2002, adding important mandates such as a hand-recountable paper trail for every electronic voting machine. Concerns predating that mandate were a very different beast than the unfounded claims one party is making now.
> Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among software people that closed source electronic voting machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking.
We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question Dominion."
We didn’t, you’re just grossly over-simplifying a couple decades of history. In the 2000s, there were some very bad electronic voting systems which did not maintain paper records or printed receipts which which were never validated. That lead to tons of criticism – and better designs.
In 2020, nobody said “how dare you question Dominion” because the whole point was that we _don’t_ trust Dominion and use systems which are designed to be verifiable and the results had been independently checked multiple times.
Did Republicans anywhere try to "secure elections" in a way that didn't involve curtailing voting rights? Improving voting machines, systems, counting, etc. in a way that partisan leadership couldn't mess with?
I’m in the opposite scenario - my vote will not matter since my county/state is not close to 50/50.
It’s a laughably depressing system. I think (without any supporting evidence) the national election system was designed to fit to the standards of transportation and communication 200+ years ago. It was actually feasible to vote per state then send one dude on horseback to DC to cast the vote for the whole state. That’s an OK system for the time.
But the fact that each state is given an approximate weight for its vote (electoral college system), is evidence to how we are trying get to something that looks like a nationally counted winner take all election. We’re just doing it terribly.
If we fixed these issues then election campaigns couldn’t just focus on swing states and ignore everyone else. The game theory would then shift to just needing to convince a majority of all voters to vote for you.
Should there be no balance between state size? California always determining the president and ensuring Montana and Rhode Island are never campaigned in?
I am not convinced states should be the decider of president, rather than the people.
Besides, in your example, neither of those states matter anyway. Why should Pennsylvania be so important, merely because the electorate seems evenly split between the two major parties?
Not bizarre at all. It's BS, but it's not bizarre.
Politics has become trench warfare. Everything is a battle to the death to keep the other side from gaining an inch anywhere. And, as is often the case in warfare, truth is a casualty. Both sides will say absolutely anything to keep anyone from thinking that the other side has a valid point.
It's advertising, but without any truth-in-advertising laws. Or, if you prefer, it's propaganda. Any relationship to the truth is purely accidental.
I really don’t want to burst your bubble… but do you not realize this is seen as a joke abroad?
e.g. In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and executives are rushing to wine and dine people who literally celebrate the defeat of ‘American force’ in public, on the record, every year.
They treat even a random third secretary for some party committee 100km from Hanoi much much better than the 90th percentile upper middle class American household in the Bay Area…
Edit: And I’m not even going to talk about Eastern Europe or the Middle East, it’s really too harsh to put into writing.
Uhhh… you might need to work on your reading comprehension skills, or are you projecting something on to me?
Why would I be ‘salty’ about anything anyone does in Hanoi?
It seems clear that many people in Hanoi are benefitting enormously, which is pretty much a total positive, except for some possibility of inducing corruption elsewhere.
> In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and executives are rushing to wine and dine people who literally celebrate the defeat of ‘American force’ in public, on the record, every year.
I read that as that your are implying that the American diplomats should take the Vietnamese celebrating their independence as an insult versus the American diplomats.
This further implies that the American diplomats should be salty concerning the Vietnam War, to not lose face or something.
You said something that he found unclear (so did I). He asked for clarification. You refused to give it. And now you mock his reading comprehension? Since at least two of us couldn't be sure what you meant, maybe you should work on writing less cryptically.
Also, site guidelines call for charitable interpretation. When someone asks you to clarify, assume they need it clarified.
Why do you believe your opinion on this or that is more relevant than other passing readers? Is there some novel argument your preparing?
Since the comment in question doesn’t have a negative score currently and some time has elapsed, passing readers combined have already decided in a more credible way than a single individual can.
I'm confused. You're upset that America has made peace with Vietnam and treats its diplomats to courtesy state dinners and such? Who cares?
The Cold War ended almost 30 years ago. I don't live in the past. I look forward to a glorious future, where we can even work with dirty commies. If the people of Vietnam don't like their government, they should feel free to overthrow it.
This is the kind of boring "both side-ism" that I just don't understand. I have no great love of either party, but one side is openly speculating about all sorts of things that cannot be described as anything other than outright authoritarian, and the other party ... is not. And no, some disagreements on free speech or the 2nd amendment or whatnot is not even close. And no, "oh, he's not really serious about it" doesn't fly either.
And with one party transformed in the Monster Raving Loony Party, the other one can't do anything else but push its own agenda through when it can, so compromise becomes rarer and rarer. And it's not just Trump – remember the madness and obstructionism of the Obama years?
And yes, there have been times the Democratic party could have done better. No doubt. But it's absolutely not a "both sides" issue.
The issue in question was truth, not authoritarianism. Specifically, the issue was truth about election security. The point was that both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose, and "most secure election in history" when they win.
More generally: In the current election, Harris isn't the firehose of lies that Trump is. She isn't a shining beacon of truth, either.
"Most secure election in history" was a superlative I'm not happy with either, no. But the core of it is correct: there is no evidence of wide-spread fraud.
The core of the other side is outright lies and fraud, rooted in nothing more than one person's narcissism.
Equating these two is just bizarre. "Murder, arson, and jaywalking". Or something like that.
And "both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose" is just not true. There have been a few disagreements over the decades of course, some more reasonable than others, but nothing like 2016 has happened in recent history, from either party.
Agreed. There were 60+ court cases, but not evidence of fraud.
> The core of the other side is outright lies and fraud, rooted in nothing more than one person's narcissism.
Also agreed.
> Equating these two is just bizarre.
I wasn't.
> And "both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose" is just not true. There have been a few disagreements over the decades of course, some more reasonable than others, but nothing like 2016 has happened in recent history, from either party.
I presume you mean 2020, not 2016. Yes, nothing like that has happened in recent history... until next week.
But speaking of 2016, I remember a large number of people (including Hillary) saying that Hillary "really won" because she had more votes than Trump did, as if the Electoral College was not a thing. I recall seeing it, here on HN, over and over, for months, that Trump wasn't "really the legitimate president".
No, nobody actually tried to do anything. Obama didn't tell states to send fake electors to the House for the vote. He didn't have a "demonstration of love and respect" or whatever Trump is currently trying to paint January 6th as. So that's better. Months of talk is better than 60 court cases, fake electors, and attempting to physically prevent the vote in the House.
Since you seem to keep mis-reading me, I'm going to say that again, more clearly: The two are not comparable.
And yet... the "it's not legitimate because our person lost" was still there as a definite idea. The idea wasn't election fraud - it was that the Electoral College had thwarted the will of the people, and therefore the election was somehow illegitimate. Never mind that we had rules in place, and we followed the rules, and under the rules that were in place, Hillary lost. But no, "it's not legitimate".
Nobody ever took it as far as Trump did. But both sides de-ligitimatize the other side's victories, if only verbally. (Again, "only verbally" is better than attacking the Capitol. But it's not as close to "we'll see you in four years" as I would wish.)
I find that unlikely. They are very publicly voting D this round. So that implies you are voting R, but that means you likely voted R with Bush. Did you vote against Bush but for Trump?
Yes. My family was heavily democrat during the Bush years. Attended protests and the whole thing against the war. Around the time of Obama the family kind of split, and some of us were skeptical (mainly due to illegal immigration and social issues) but some of us liked the health care stuff. Then with Trump, basically everyone got on board.
There are a lot of us. I don't really relate to the Bush GOP at all, and am not even sure what they have in common with the modern one other than some vague tax cuts (democrats do that too every once in a while though, so this is hardly some great conservative idea). I'm happy to see the Bush GOP completely gone. Today's GOP feels much more like the democrat party of the 2000s, which is what I grew up in. Much more working class. More 'rough' around the edges. Anti-corporate, etc (most fortune 500 companies and workers support the democrats, based on donation numbers)
For me the big national issue has always been a refusal to fight unnecessary wars. I admire that Trump started no new wars or engagements (he continued the existing ones, including some escalations, but I'm not a radical pacifist). For me, that alone seals the deal. I just don't believe in fighting stupid wars. I don't care about threats and I don't care about targeted military intervention. I'm not fighting forever wars, where they send boys my age to die (most of whom happen to lean conservative anyway). What a grift. If the Cheneys in the world want to fight wars, I recommend they grab their guns and go!
This is a wild amount of both-sidesing in a case where one side has evidence and the other is literally an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory at a scale where you could not keep the secret.
Most secure in history is (in my state) is correct. There are more pointless safeguards than have ever existed. If you were willing to go with the results of any election pre 2020 then you should be overjoyed at how much more "secure" the process is. That's the point that's being made, the amount of provable voter fraud that bypasses the checks and is only discovered after the fact is nil
The article you cited is literally the system working. There's 11 million people in Ohio, the number of illegal registrations is several orders of magnitude less than the lizardman constant and they were nonetheless caught.
Including the safeguards where observers are safely kept away from the counting! There were a lot of irregularities in 2020. The supreme Court recently said Pennsylvania should not have counted some of the ballots it did in 2020 (policy change by secretary of state vs legislature).
For lack of standing or lack of ability to relieve yes. Courts aren't going to question a presidential election. That doesn't mean we can't look at the videos of observers being banned, the facts of now-declared-illegal extra-legislative policy changes, the timings of various ballot drops etc.
Opinions aren't formed on court cases. That's why in 2020, more than half of Democrats thought the election was irregular. It's remarkable to me because this is one of those issues where polling says voters of both parties agree, but the media insists that there's nothing there. That's crazy
>That doesn't mean we can't look at the videos of observers being banned, the facts of now-declared-illegal extra-legislative policy changes, the timings of various ballot drops etc.
My impression is that there were a bunch of "this seems sus" allegations, but all the popular ones have been discredited. What are the most credible examples (ie. of actual malfeasance going on, rather than merely "this seems sus") that you can provide?
Yeah it’s just a polite retelling of the crazy Trump nonsense that was laughed out of court by every judge who looked at it and the rest is just misunderstandings from casual election observers who refuse to do one iota of research about how things work.
The accusations are always vague as well since each time you zoom in on one it’s completely anodyne but you need the distance to keep up the specter of something nefarious.
I guess for me personally I don't deny that Joe Biden won the contest as performed. I just question the contest themselves. After all, if made up my own election law and ran an election, and declared my candidate the winner, no one would listen to me, but that's what happened here, which we know based on scotus's interpretation of whether secretaries of state can change rules the way they did in Pennsylvania.
I am going to take a guess as to what the GP was referring to: In 2020, Pennsylvania was one of the states that made many changes to how their elections work under the guise of the pandemic. But they changed their rules at the last minute once more in a way that may have altered Pennsylvania’s outcomes.
Existing state law meant ballots had to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day in order to be counted. The Democratic Party filed a lawsuit to extend that deadline and the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court (not SCOTUS) made a highly controversial ruling that extended the deadline to the following Friday. This extension would have helped Biden (given his party filed the lawsuit to force the change), and given they barely won the state (Biden had 50.01%), there is a good chance it affected the outcome.
Are you referring to Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar over the 3 day extension of the received date? Those ballots were collected separately but there were less than 10k of them so even if they’d been 100% Biden voters they wouldn’t have affected the outcome of a race which Biden won by 80k votes.
I am referring to a case filed by the Democratic party of Pennsylvania (not republicans), and I don’t recall the numbers off the top of my head but when it was in the news it was expected that the case would affect a few million votes from mail in ballots that had not yet been returned. Mail in ballots were mostly requested by Democratic voters. The ruling also had some other changes that I can’t recall. Also I forgot to mention that state supreme court deciding the case had a Democratic supermajority.
To me this situation felt like a manipulation of the election process that is outside of the norms, especially for it to happen so late. That was a few years ago but it is an example situation that causes many to still feel the election was “stolen”. I think lots of people use that term to also include actions that are technically legal but feel unfair.
Try to find a reference. The date component makes it sound like Pennsylvania Democratic Party v. Boockvar, whose decision lead to both the case I mentioned and SCOTUS requiring such ballots to be held separately so they could be removed based on the decision of that case. The major discrepancy is that you’re talking millions and that only affected thousands.
Yeah, and if you look at my comments, I agree that Biden won the race as run. I just question the entire legitimacy of counting any of the votes in a rogue election. I don't think rogue elections should happen. The moral hazard is too great, and it's a direct attack on democratic processes.
Yes, my point is that “rogue election” as a term is using the language of deniers. Every election has mistakes, and the pandemic especially created novel challenges, but that’s a strong term to use if the best you can say is that a statistically insignificant number of ballots were challenged with no evidence of misconduct.
Mistakes sure. This was intentionally done though.
It's a strong term but there is no denial. I'm not even sure why people are so against calling out the obvious. Biden probably would have won a legitimate contest
What was intentionally done? Every election has ballots received late but that’s almost always human error, not someone trying to cheat, and in this case there’s been no evidence of that despite a massive effort looking for anything amiss.
> Biden probably would have won a legitimate contest
That’s why you’re getting pushback: he did a legitimate contest. The language you’ve been using has implied otherwise, which is implicitly throwing in with the convicted fraudsters.
I meant the state, although a sister comment to yours (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42032946) claims the affected number of ballots was too small (which doesn’t match my recollection but sharing it here for balance). Regardless - although I am open to the possibility of various issues or flaws in various states adding up to something more, I personally am confident Biden won the election, for what it’s worth. I do have my doubts about the overall process though - voting is just the very end step, but there are things that happen before that can skew election results (media bias, social media censorship, whatever).
It might just be the neuro-spicy in me but Pennsylvania seems morally in the right here even when the courts ruled against them. The rules as set are really dumb and Pennsylvania was counting valid unambiguous ballots. The election as run was to me better than the one following the letter. How shitty would it be to have your vote thrown out because you didn't put it in the special double envelope that's for preserving your anonymity— the state doesn't give a shit if the ballot is anonymous when counting.
I get that this is a privileged take because broadly speaking the more people vote overall the better Democrats do but it's really hard to fault throwing out fewer ballots. Like turnout is already so low and a person took the time to make their voice heard. People already feel like their vote doesn't matter, dqs for arbitrary reasons aren't helping.
I mean I guess it's a viewpoint on who ought to set the rules. I actually don't even disagree with you, and I'm a sworn Republican. However, the moral hazard and threat to democracy of bureaucrat and officials overriding legislative policy is something I dislike basically universally, especially for elections
>After all, if made up my own election law and ran an election, and declared my candidate the winner, no one would listen to me, but that's what happened here, which we know based on scotus's interpretation of whether secretaries of state can change rules the way they did in Pennsylvania.
1. what happened in Pennsylvania?
2. why did a SCOTUS with 6-3 majority of republicans decide to side with Biden, of all people?
3. you haven't answered my previous question. what specific "irregularities" lead to you to not believe the official election results?
Honestly, your line of questioning is a non-sequitur, because I don't question the election results. I question the election itself. There is no doubt in my mind that Joe Biden had enough votes in the contest as run. I just think the contest is not a legal election since they didn't follow the law.
As I've said elsewhere, it's as if I put a ballot box outside my house, got enough votes based on my own rules, and then declared whomever got enough votes in my contest the winner. That's great, but for it to be a legitimate election, the law has to be followed.
Again I'm hardly alone in this. Polling shows widespread bipartisan belief that the election was irregular. I'm honestly shocked at how different the mainstream media views are from the everyday person you talk to.
>As I've said elsewhere, it's as if I put a ballot box outside my house, got enough votes based on my own rules, and then declared whomever got enough votes in my contest the winner. That's great, but for it to be a legitimate election, the law has to be followed.
>Again I'm hardly alone in this. Polling shows widespread bipartisan belief that the election was irregular.
The implication here seems to be that because the election was "irregular", that it wasn't legitimate. But what does "irregular" mean, and should the irregularities be the basis for overturning/ignoring the results of the election? For instance, the election happened in a pandemic. That's arguably pretty "irregular", and probably had a material impact on the results. Should the results be tossed on the basis of that alone? In other comments you mentioned other objections, like counting votes that turned up late, but it's not clear that tossing out those votes would make the election more legitimate. What's more irregular, sticking to the letter of the law exactly, and letting all the pandemic disruptions affect campaigning/turnout, or adding accommodations?
The irregularity is not following the written law when conducting the election and instead making up rules.
These were not mistakes. The secretaries of state announced that they were going to ignore election law. That should not be tolerated. It's an attack on democracy of the highest order.
> Yeah it’s just a polite retelling of the crazy Trump nonsense that was laughed out of court by every judge who looked at it and the rest is just misunderstandings from casual election observers who refuse to do one iota of research about how things work.
The majority of the cases relating to that election were dismissed for various technicalities, not on merit. As in the judges didn’t laugh them out of the court based on the ideas in those cases. Of course they may have also been rejected on merits but we won’t know.
I think it’s worth remembering that Trump’s AG, campaign, and RNC lawyers were all clear that he lost fairly. The cases he brought trying to overturn the results were most commonly rejected not on technicalities but because he couldn’t show evidence of a wrong, and were often dismissed with prejudice and in a surprising number of cases the possibility of penalties for frivolous lawsuits which you just don’t tend to see at that level because the national players have not historically been trawling for anything they could possibly use.
There’s a good list here, and it makes it clear that these cases were simply not going anywhere. The rulings aren’t technicalities like “you filed at 12:01 and the deadline was 11:59” but the failure to provide evidence of a problem even occurring in real life.
Cases dismissed for “technicalities” means they were just dismissed… administering law is a technical process, and while I know what you’re attempting to convey with that phrasing, it’s still abundantly clear that there was no evidence at all of anything untoward or election-changing happening in 2020. So much so that several of trumps lawyers were sanctioned for filing such frivolous nonsense and others were sued for millions of dollars for their defamatory proclamations and conspiracy theories.
Junk mail democracy is the most insecure model for an election I could possibly conceive. Other than entrusting closed source software companies with tabulating votes.
So why do red states who have every incentive to remove vote-by-mail entirely not do so? You can vote by mail in every state, lots of red states are no-excuse.
Almost every state lets you vote in person instead if you prefer. And if you do, any mail-in ballots that were sent out under your name are null and void. So if you don't trust it, just vote in person and problem solved.
Yes drop boxes and mail in ballots with no signature verification and the counting done largely by one side of the partisan divide (county/state employees) is totally 100% secure what could go wrong? Those conspiracy nuts just don't get it.
They had a very long hand-counted ballot audit of the 2020 election in Arizona in 2021, and after (iirc) a few months of double and triple checking they were unable to find any irregularities.
Every polling place and every vote-counting center is open to observers from both parties, by law. Your idea that one party is shut out of this system has no basis in reality.
There is a lawsuit right now in Georgia over the decision by some locations to accept ballots over the weekend without GOP observers present. Counting without bipartisan observers happened frequently in 2020.
Also "observers" weren't mentioned in my original post. Just because someone watches a count is irrelevant to my original points.
You mean the one that was rejected? The lawsuit was wrong legally and morally— these are people who are eligible to vote casting their vote in a more secure manner than mailing it in, and doing so prior to election day.
There's just no moral defense of rule-lawyering to throw out valid ballots or turn away voters, and judges in red and blue states alike aren't having it.
The side that says there's virtually 0 fraud is correct, and the other side is living in a fantasy land because they feel their party is becoming less and less relevant. That side has never produced an iota of proof that there is widespread fraud of that it has affected elections in major races, especially the presidential one. Sometimes "both sides" works in an argument, but when one side has all the proof and the other side has only accusations, I comfortably give my allegiance to the one that has the proof.
US election process is a joke. Pretending otherwise is some sort of gaslighting that could backfire.
If 'one side' break the silent understanding of 'do not criticize our complex, convoluted and arcane election process', well, bad luck if 'the other side' defends it instead of agreeing there is a need to do something about it.
I don't like how about every question becomes some sort of thrench warfare around strawman extremes.
I can not bypass the fact that basically no other developed country allows citizens to vote without proper official photo identification, neither that the sates that allow people to vote without any identification, are the ones where the Democratic Party always wins elections.
I know correlation doesn't mean causation, but I also know that where's there smoke, there's usually a fire.
Neither of these claims is right. Personally, I doubt the election was stolen. I know of a handful of cases of voter fraud both anecdotally ("My mom [in a retirement home] told me to vote for McCain, but I know she really wanted to vote for Obama, so that's what I put.") and numerically[1].
I would not be surprised if one or two of the very razor thin House district elections in 2020 experienced enough fraud to flip the decision. This doesn't mean that I believe all of the Dominion voting system hack nonsense or anything like that. I just think only a Sith deals in absolutes.
1: https://apnews.com/article/ohio-voters-citizenship-referrals...