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by jtxxwl2 1950 days ago
If it is possible to carry out election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried out by people that viciously hate the former president? Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries, and there is no magical means of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get away with it here as well. They have courts and investigations and evidence in other countries as well, and that has seemingly not prevented election rigging there.
2 comments

The threshold isn’t just “it’s possible”. There needs to be some evidence. All sorts of things are possible, doesn’t mean we go around thinking they are true, or even assume they are potentially true.

It’s not Impossible I’ve murdered someone, doesn’t mean I should be presumed a murderer.

Yes, absolutely. We must use the evidence available and draw inferences, assuming that there is no magic soil type phenomenon involved. In this case, the evidence available includes 5 years of statements and actions performed by members of one political party which demonstrate beyond any doubt that they overwhelmingly possess a seething hatred of one of the candidates. It also includes undisputed evidence that election officials instituted rules for some election facilities that greatly hindered the ability of outside election observers to ensure no fraud was taking place. And it also includes undisputed evidence that these same election facilities are totally politically dominated by that one political party, and have been for decades. We can therefore infer that it is overwhelmingly likely that they engaged in fraud.
There is no “overwhelming evidence” of any election or voter fraud. Such claims have been debunked[1]. Your use of that adjective does not make them true, and your assertion is literally theorization of a conspiracy.

1. https://voterprotectionprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...

Your link seems to agree with me. From the facts for GA and PA:

"Furthermore, in an election conducted in the midst of a pandemic, each of the 159 counties was required to balance the close presence of poll watchers to election workers against the requirements for social distancing essential for the protection of public health."

"As Trump-appointed federal district court Judge Grimberg found, there is no legal “authority providing for a right to unrestrained observation or monitoring of vote counting, recounting, or auditing.”

"Second, there is no right under federal or state law for observers to stand at a particular distance or have a particular view of ballots. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the Third Circuit have rejected such claims. As the Third Circuit noted: “The Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that the Election Code requires only that poll watchers be in the room, not that they be within any specific distance of the ballots.” Id. (citing In re Canvassing Observation, No. 30 EAP 2020, 2020 WL 6737895, at *8-9 (Pa. Nov. 17, 2020)). Similarly, there is no federal right protecting the location or view of observers. Id. (noting that the Campaign “cites no federal authority regulating poll watchers or notice and cure.”). As long as observers were allowed in the room, which they were, complaints about minor deviations in the location and view of observers are legally insufficient.66"

In other words, the restrictions that were placed on observers were consistent with the law, and that is what the courts have ruled. I am willing to accept for the sake of argument that the restrictions were legal, but that's not the point. The point is that no one disputes that there were such restrictions. Nor do I see anyone disputing that the restrictions would have made it harder or impossible for election observers to detect fraud. The defense they put up is just that no fraud was detected, and that the restrictions were legal.

See: "The Trump Campaign and its surrogates have tried, unsuccessfully, to equate an alleged lack of observer access with fraudulent results. There has been no credible evidence of significant voter fraud presented in any form. The suggestion that the Trump Campaign and its surrogates were prevented from detecting fraud, and that is tantamount to evidence that there must have been fraud, is absurd."

I don't think that suggestion is absurd at all, and neither do tens of millions of other Americans. Members of the Democrat party viciously, bitterly hate Trump, and everyone knows it. Why would we not suspect them of cheating, if they made it difficult or impossible for anyone to tell?

>...neither do tens of millions of other Americans...

Because they've been propagandized to think that way by a president with a conflicted interest. The number of people who hold an opinion has no bearing on whether it is factual.

Again, all you've done is to reiterate the same conspiracy theory without any evidence.

I literally quoted evidence from the link that you provided.
> Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries

I'm not convinced that it is. Sure, election rigging happens, but that's not the “getting away with it” that would be at issue. Either people who get away with it undetected in the very short term are so good that they manage to suppress all evidence completely and it never comes out (which seems an implausible binodality in outcomes), or it usually is quite evident in even the very short-term, and either fails to do enough to change results, does enough to change results but is corrected by institutional processes, or it does enough to change results and is allowed to stand by corrupt institutions despite being widely decried.

There's not a whole lot of modern cases where election fraud is discovered only long-after the event rather than virtually in real-time.

Is vote rigging and conspiracy to rig votes possible in the modern world? Yes. Is it ever both significant and not immediately evident? It's not impossible, but it doesn't seem to be the case. If it were, you'd expect there to be examples of cases undetectable in the short-run but later discovered.

>Either people who get away with it undetected in the very short term are so good that they manage to suppress all evidence completely and it never comes out (which seems an implausible binodality in outcomes)

Why do you think that's implausible? What evidence of election fraud would you expect to be left behind that would be difficult to dispose of?

>is allowed to stand by corrupt institutions despite being widely decried.

By whom?

>If it were, you'd expect there to be examples of cases undetectable in the short-run but later discovered.

Why would that be expected? Many crimes are much harder to prove if the perpetrator is not caught in the act. Why would you not expect election fraud to be among them?

This isn't someone slashing your tires overnight when you are parked on a street.

It involves thousands of people directly and an extreme amount of information collecting and statistics analysis.

Not thousands of random people picked off the street, though. It involves thousands of people that overwhelmingly share a seething hatred of one of the two candidates.
> This isn't someone slashing your tires overnight when you are parked on a street.

Happens only in the ghettos tbh

I think you missed the point to a pretty extreme degree here.

This is about the likelihood of something occurring with no evidence left behind.

Not necessarily no evidence left behind, just no "smoking guns" that can be trivially discovered by private citizens without power of subpoena or warrant.