The stolen election thing is very dumb, but people forget the same argument was made in 2016 with Russia “hacking the election” with no evidence found.
There is plenty of evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, to the point where it's impossible to say they did not with a straight face. Just because it wasn't directly "hacked" doesn't mean there was not overwhelming evidence of interference. But in the end, very few people considered that election "stolen".
Providing voters with accurate information about how and where they can cast their ballot is not the same as buying ad space on Facebook to run ads with doctored images and outright false information.
Domestic groups and individuals are expected to be involved in elections. Foreign ones, by law, are not. An obvious difference and I doubt you're unaware of it.
The Intercept published an interesting (and, I suspect, related) article[1] today about the chamber of commerce no longer being the darling of the GOP. Retribution for not loyally supporting the big election lie, perhaps?
> They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.
An information campaign and a disinformation campaign are hardly the same.
Not sure I'd say 'no evidence' at all. It wasn't "hacking" in a technical sense as much as "social media hacking" - bots, trolls, huge numbers of lies spread via memes, etc. Some (much?) of that was traced back to Russia, IIRC.
Attribution is notoriously hard. Also, general propaganda pretty much to be expected. It's the same thing in the last election, it's absolutely expected that some people did commit voting fraud and that some votes were counted wrong.
The big question is the scale of the operation and whether it impacted the results. It appears to me that the opinion people have is very related to how much they like the result.
We investigated 'russia' election interference allegations. Some 'interference' was found, largely pushing down HRC and aiding (even if indirectly) Trump.
We investigated claims of 'stolen election' (Arizona, other states) and found marginally more votes for Biden in subsequent recounts. Even if that had been reversed, the numbers would have not have been impactful.
Other investigations in the last few years have turned up smatterings of 'voter fraud', and it usually seems to be Trump supporters voting fraudulently.
My opinion is that we've always had small bits of 'bad' votes (intentional or not), but with continued drumbeats on that topic, it's motivating some Trump supporters to commit fraud in an effort to try to balance out what they believe (wrongly) to be 'the other side' committing fraud.
I had a friend die on Election Day 2020. He'd cast an early ballot. I often think of him when we get these refrains of "dead people voting!!! it's fraud!!!". I do not know if his vote was counted or not (I assume it would have been) - this was in southeastern PA, so there may have been some recounts that removed ballots like that???
How can you say there was no evidence found of Russian interference in the 2016 election? There was, in fact, a startling amount of evidence uncovered and made public.
Can you provide citations? The claims which dominated mainstream coverage were not about hacking the election system itself but interference with things like social media campaigns or hacking the DNC’s email service to mine for PR dirt, which is by now well-documented:
Please identify specific people and times for any claims - I’m sure you can find some nut on truthout.org claiming that the GRU hacked voting machines but that’s not the same as a lie becoming the most important GOP litmus test leading to a violent assault on the U.S. Congress trying to prevent the election process from being accurately completed.
Not by major thought leaders or elected representatives. That was a popular conspiracy theory among the too-connected internet left. The problem in the modern world is that you have elected republicans and talking heads on FOX News saying the same thing to millions of believing partisans.
Nobody with real power suggested Russia actually hacked the 2016 election. Hilary Clinton conceded the election, and she certainly didn't send an army of crazed supporters to take over the capitol in a poor attempt to overturn the results. We didn't have Democratic governers and Attorneys General suing to overturn the results of their own elections.
In 2016, Russian hackers hacked both the DNC and GOP, and selectively released information collected from the DNC in order to hurt their ongoiong campaign. Russian actors also ran interference campaigns on social media. These are all established facts. They are also not allegations of fraud, simply pointing out that these actions quite possibly had an impact on the outcome of the election.
What Republicans have been claiming for almost two years now is that Democrats have committed outright election fraud. They have accused Democrats of everything from tampering with voting machines to ballot stuffing to throwing out Republican votes, and they make all of these accusations without a shred of evidence. Many Republicans in office today have taken the hard stance that Joe Biden was not elected President.
By who? A handful of internet nutjobs, surely. No one in a position of power or influence ever claimed that the election results were fraudulent in the sense that today's elected republicans are straight up claiming.
(What was claimed, and largely substantiated, was that one campaign appeared to be coordinating closely with Russian interests during the campaign. And indeed people were upset by that. But again, that's not a claim about the election.)
> "No, it doesn't kill me because he knows he's an illegitimate president. I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used – from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did," she said.
I’m not sure it’s entirely undisputed. Some people think it was leaked by a Bernie supporter who worked for the DNC and wanted to expose them rigging the primaries against him.
The chutzpah. To project that OP is giving revisionist history, and then to dead-ass present an out-of-context[1], highly-edited quote mash-up as evidence. What a dick move.
- Trump committed crimes in hiding campaign finance violations, for which he was an unindicted coconspirator, unindicted only because he was President. Funny how that works: commit crimes to become President and then become immune to prosecution for said crimes because you're President. We now know from Geoffrey Berman that Trump's political appointees in the DOJ leaned heavily on prosecutors to make that issue go away for Trump.
- His campaign met with a Russian spy to discuss an exchange of dirt on Clinton for relaxed Russian relations, and lied about it. Dirt came, and relations were indeed relaxed.
- The Trump campaign had over 100 contacts with Russia when Trump lied and said there were 0. Jeff Sessions lied about that under oath in front of Congress, and ended up having to recuse himself and appoint a Special Counsel because of it.
- That the biggest deal of Trump's life, Trump Tower Moscow, was in development when he said he had no business deals in Russia.
- Trump's campaign manager was meeting with a Russian intel operative, and it was later shown he was coordinating campaign strategy with him by exchanging internal campaign data.
- Russians had hacked the DNC and disseminated the data through wikileaks, and Trump promoted it as much as possible. The leak of that data was coordinated exactly with the publication of the Trump's serial sexual assault admission on the Access Hollywood tape.
- Trump made public statements directed at the Russian GRU to hack Clinton, which the GRU heeded.
- Trump fired the FBI director for investigating all of the above conduct (which was obstruction of justice), and then obstructed the subsequent special counsel investigation multiple times.
- Trump's AG Bill Bar lied about the contents of the Muller report to the public in his executive summary and then kept the actual report hidden, which turned out to be exceedingly damning, contrary to Barr's public statements.
I mean... if all of this was "legitimate", why did they lie constantly about it? 2016 was the dirtiest, most underhanded campaign in US history. That doesn't scream legitimacy to me.
I've been watching the show American Crime Story: Impeachment, and it just rings so hollow as to what offended people in the 90s compared to what happened in the Trump years.
Hillary Clinton conceded and said she'd support Trump. Recommend watching her concession speech. Trump still hasn't conceded two years on.
I wasn't aware of the interview that the article you posted above covers. What she says is dumb, and dangerous, and damages norms, and she shouldn't have said that.
That said, you have to admit that what Trump has done is many orders of magnitude more serious than this. It's effectively the official position of the Republican party that Trump actually won the 2020 election and that Biden is not the rightful POTUS. That's wildly dangerous in a democracy.
Mueller's report explicitly said that it found extensive interference by Russia, and that Trump and his team "expected to benefit" from it. The conversation wasn't about "hacking the election", it was about "collusion" in the run-up.
I admit I'm biased, but I don't remember this. I do remember concerns that Russia had interfered with the election, which is was found to be true (see Mueller report, Cambridge Analytica, etc.) There were also less well founded concerns that Trump himself was not only helped by but actually colluding with the Russians, which all evidence points to being false.
Most importantly, Hillary Clinton conceded the election the next day, as did Al Gore in 2000 once it was clear he didn't have a path to victory. Both pledged to support the victor. Trump hasn't done that, two years on.
Then how do you explain the Mueller report (authored by a Republican prosecutor, who was appointed by a Republican DAG, who was nominated by a Republican President and confirmed by a Republican majority Senate); and the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference (chaired by a Republican Senator with a majority of Republican members), both concluding that Russia, in fact, interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump; and that the Trump campaign, at best, passively welcomed this help, but at worst actually invited and facilitated it?