[MyFedora]

I'm having a hard time understanding your comment. I'm not American, but can someone explain why it wouldn't make sense to lose confidence in elections when gerrymandering and the electoral college skew the results so much? Sure, votes are technically counted, but if the system is set up so that those votes don't really impact the outcome the way you'd expect, isn't that a pretty valid reason to feel disillusioned?

[hellotomyrars]

The GP isn't making a statement about how voters feel disillusioned in the electoral process in general. They are making a statement about how one of the two political parties has spent 4 years telling their supporters that the 2020 election was stolen because of rampant voter fraud.

It doesn't even matter if you agree with the claims that were made about voter fraud, I can't think of any good faith argument by literally anyone on the political compass that it didn't cause people to lose faith in electoral process.

[lmm]

> It doesn't even matter if you agree with the claims that were made about voter fraud, I can't think of any good faith argument by literally anyone on the political compass that it didn't cause people to lose faith in electoral process.

Maybe people shouldn't have faith in the electoral process, and the way to rebuild confidence in the integrity of the electoral process is to rebuild the integrity of the electoral process first and tell people about it second.

[parasubvert]

That would make sense if there was an actual argument for the process being compromised. But there isn’t. You can rebuild it and be accused of inserting back doors. There’s no win - the whole argument is that the process is sound if a certain party wins, if that party loses, then the process is corrupt.

Notice how there’s no cries of election integrity problems for this election? Because the “right” party won.

[lmm]

> That would make sense if there was an actual argument for the process being compromised. But there isn’t.

There are pretty strong arguments that many states illegally (according to their own rules) expanded the scope of postal ballots in 2020, added people to the voter rolls without adequate checks that resulted in people getting added who shouldn't have, etc., which could very plausibly have added up to enough to tip the knife-edge election.

> Notice how there’s no cries of election integrity problems for this election? Because the “right” party won.

I don't think anyone seriously disputes that the civil service has a partisan imbalance. If (and it's a big if) the "deep state" were to cheat, it's pretty clear which side they would cheat for. Well before the results came out this time, it was widely reported that the Republicans had filed hundreds of lawsuits questioning various election irregularities and the Democrats... hadn't. So yeah, only one party doubts the integrity of the election (or, if you want to be more cynical, only one party cares whether it's being rigged, since both parties know which way any rigging is going). That's exactly what we'd expect, whether it's being rigged or not?

[nerdponx]

The assertion that the deep state skews Democrat is so preposterous it sounds like an SNL sketch. Imagine a bunch of G-men sitting around in a conference room with oat milk lattes while the Cigarette Smoking Man lays out plans for the next year Pride parade.

Also consider that maybe only Republicans filed suits because their presidential candidate lost.

But more direct to your point: No consequential voting irregularities were found, and this time around the Democrats arguably had an even stronger incentive to commit widespread voter fraud than before, while the current President is a Democrat, and yet somehow all the fraud from 2020 is now just gone. That stretches credibility, to say the least.

[lmm]

> The assertion that the deep state skews Democrat is so preposterous it sounds like an SNL sketch. Imagine a bunch of G-men sitting around in a conference room with oat milk lattes while the Cigarette Smoking Man lays out plans for the next year Pride parade.

The top LGBT-friendly employer these days is Raytheon. Even pre-Trump the Dems were the party of big government, unions, urbanity, education...; now they're also the party of military interventionism, the media, and really most of the establishment.

> Also consider that maybe only Republicans filed suits because their presidential candidate lost.

I'm talking in the run-up to this election before the outcome was known.

> No consequential voting irregularities were found

Now you're subtly narrowing the goalposts a whole lot. Voting irregularities, no (other than that ballot box getting set on fire, but I guess you're saying that's not "consequential"), but plenty of potential crime in the overall process (lists of names being added to the rolls at the last minute, that sort of thing). The legal challenges will likely be dropped, if they haven't already, because the Republicans won the election anyway, so what relief could they possibly ask a court to grant?

> the Democrats arguably had an even stronger incentive to commit widespread voter fraud than before, while the current President is a Democrat, and yet somehow all the fraud from 2020 is now just gone

Some of the alleged misdeeds of 2020 were only possible because the pandemic created an excuse - rapid expansion of postal voting in violation of the law and/or under "creative" executive orders was something that could happen in plain sight then, but would be rather harder to brush under the carpet now. But, again, a lot of the same allegations were being made in the run-up to this election - we're only not hearing so much about them because the Republicans won.

[toyg]

> I don't think anyone seriously disputes

... that the federal "deep state" doesn't matter, since elections are handled at the lowest level by state authorities - which are tightly controlled in red states, as much as in blue states (if not more, arguably), by the locally-dominant party. This is just how business has always been done in good ol' Murica.

Writing sweeping statements like the one you make, indicates that one lives in a partisan bubble.

[lmm]

> ... that the federal "deep state" doesn't matter, since elections are handled at the lowest level by state authorities - which are tightly controlled in red states, as much as in blue states (if not more, arguably), by the locally-dominant party.

The whole point of the "deep state" concept is that it's not controlled by the formal political structures at all - yes the state bureaucracy is nominally accountable to the elected executive, but in practice it's made up of humans who are unlikely to be 100% loyal to their boss or their organisation's stated mandate (and with the chain of command being pretty long, there's plenty of room for small disalignments to compound). Even in red states (and red counties), the offices of the state bureaucracy are, systematically, often in blue islands. It's got nothing to do with state vs federal, because it's the same kind of people who work in government jobs[1] either way.

[1] OK, "government office jobs" or something, yes the typical military employee is quite different from the kind of people I'm talking about. But you know what I mean.

[throwaway-blaze]

You must not read lefty X / Twitter where they're wondering where 15mm voters went from last time.

[nerdponx]

They stayed home.

Ironic though because lefty social media just spent a solid year telling people that both candidates were trash and Gaza would suffer regardless of who got elected.

[antonyt]

What lefty twitter tweets is irrelevant. Are the losing party's establishment and candidate crying foul and mobilizing crony media to cast doubt on the election's legitimacy? Because in 2020 that's what happened.

We have multiple sitting Congressmen and other government officials still refusing to admit Trump lost in 2020.

[nerdponx]

But the electoral process already has integrity. There is nothing to rebuild. There was no voter fraud. It was a big baseless fuss and a lot of lies specifically to keep the core Trump supporter base hooked and radical.

[lmm]

Well, that's exactly what's in dispute. The person I replied to said "it doesn't even matter if you agree with the claims that were made about voter fraud"; if your whole argument is that those claims are wrong then it matters quite a lot.

[a_cool_username]

Those are definitely reasonable reasons to lose confidence in elections and feel disillusioned, but voter ID laws won't help you there (which was GP's point).

[troyvit]

You have an excellent point that I didn't take into account when I left my comment. Personally I don't mind the electoral college too much but the gerrymandering that goes on in the U.S. is epic.

Against that we have people saying we need Voter ID? Is there any more better time to use the "arranging deck chairs on the Titanic" analogy, except for perhaps on an actual sinking ship?