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by matwood 2055 days ago
The big difference is that it's been clearly shown that Russia did interfere [1]. The arguable point is did Trump's campaign know and direct the interference?

And if we're really talking about shaping elections, disinformation and voter suppression is the way to get it done. Once votes are cast, it's too hard to move enough in order to have any meaningful change. There are too many checks, rechecks, and processes in place to commit fraud at the scale needed for a large election.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

1 comments

Russia has been meddling in our elections since the Cold War began[1]. China, Israel, and every other power "interferes" in our elections, too, just like we do to them.

What was disingenuous of the US media was to make a huge deal out of 2016 shenanigans by Russia without any context, making it appear to the average voter that it was both significant and unique, neither of which is true.

The intel community and major media spent 3 years and tens of millions of dollars looking for something illegal or even unethical that the Trump campaign did related to Russia, and nothing was found.

The idea that there are "too many checks, rechecks, processes ... to commit fraud at the scale needed for a large election" is absurd in the US where the whole national election can be determined at the end by a single large county in one swing state, as happened in 2000. Now realize that 45 states were required to haphazardly design and implement, in 3 months, a mail-in voting system on a scale with which they had no experience, we'd expect a lot of errors that aren't even malicious.

Add in a flurry of state governments quickly passing various laws to swing things to their favor as happened in all the swing states, and you have a recipe for disaster as we're seeing.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt...