Even if you support the President and his policies, I don't see how you could be surprised at his rather large loss in 2020.

He lost the popular vote in 2016 by around 3 million votes. And he was running against someone very unpopular.

He ran in 2020 against someone who is much more popular than his 2016 opponent.

His approval rating never touched 50%, IIRC.

The economy is terrible right now. Never a great sign for an incumbent.

And that's all to say nothing about the fervor of the people who oppose him.

There's absolutely no reason to believe that he wouldn't have lost by >3 million this time around.

What doesn't make sense to me are all the statistical anomalies everywhere. How did down ballot republicans outperform Trump everywhere, when Trump's approval ratings among republicans were incredibly high?

The bellweather counties perplexes me.

The crazy turnout in specific counties that far exceeded demographically similar counties that wouldn't have the impact to flip the election. The fact that Trump out performed himself with all demographics except white men, he had historic republican support from black and hispanic voters, except in specific key counties.

The fact that all of these counties all flipped the next morning was perplexing, especially since many of the flips came from ballot dumps that had statistically impossible ratios of votes for Biden. Or the massive number of ballots that were showing up for Biden, but had no downballot choices filled out at all.

Couple all of this with the thousands of witnesses that swore on strange activity during counting, and the absolute lack of security around the Dominion machines. I'm surprised HN hasn't been all over the Dominion machines, the HN of several years ago would have had several posts decrying the security of those machines.

There are reasons to doubt things. The doubt needs to be addressed with transparency and in court, and so far, all of the municipalities that are raising suspicion are fighting tooth and nail against transparency.

If the concerns are met with censorship and dismissal without real rebuttal, I don't see an optimistic future for this country.

> What doesn't make sense to me are all the statistical anomalies everywhere. How did down ballot republicans outperform Trump everywhere, when Trump's approval ratings among republicans were incredibly high?

The general polls were super, duper, off. Biden was supposedly leading by 3 points in Florida and then lost by 3 points, for a net of 6 point error.

I'm not shocked by polls being wrong.

I think, if you accept that polls can be wrong, it's pretty easy to imagine the voters who were lifelong Republicans might have continued to vote R but left the top slot blank.

> The fact that Trump out performed himself with all demographics except white men, he had historic republican support from black and hispanic voters, except in specific key counties.

He BARELY won in 2016 because of a few thousand votes in three states. The geographic distribution of votes matters. Just because he picked up a few percentage points on minority demographics (still far behind Biden, just more than he had against Clinton) doesn't matter unless you tell me WHERE he picked up those margins. One of the places was south Florida and he won Florida. So there's nothing here that surprises me or seems suspicious at all.

> The fact that all of these counties all flipped the next morning was perplexing, especially since many of the flips came from ballot dumps that had statistically impossible ratios of votes for Biden. Or the massive number of ballots that were showing up for Biden, but had no downballot choices filled out at all.

No. We all knew for MONTHS that Trump would look better on election night than he would as the rest of the votes were tallied. We knew for MONTHS that Pennsylvania was not allowed to START counting mail in votes until AFTER polls closed on November 3rd. We knew it so well that they even coined a cutesy term for it: the "red mirage". We were repeatedly warned that we would see the red mirage on election night. You should not have been perplexed. I'm sorry.

The only statistically impossible ratio of votes for Biden are those that are over 100%.

> Couple all of this with the thousands of witnesses that swore on strange activity during counting, and the absolute lack of security around the Dominion machines. I'm surprised HN hasn't been all over the Dominion machines, the HN of several years ago would have had several posts decrying the security of those machines.

What lack of security, specifically? What thousands of witnesses? What activities were "strange"? All I've seen or heard is a bunch of people who are very ignorant of the election process pointing to video clips from the live streams and saying "OMG, this worker just filled out a ballot!" when the person in question was clearing performing "ballot curing".

Maybe HN wasn't exploding because there isn't anything to see here.

That's not to say that the election was perfect. No election is. I'm in Florida. We can't do an election to save our lives down here. But a nationwide conspiracy that would require thousands of individuals to coordinate in key counties in key states (many of which are run by Republicans) is basically "moon landing didn't happen" levels of conspiracy.

> If the concerns are met with censorship and dismissal without real rebuttal, I don't see an optimistic future for this country.

I've seen and read many real rebuttals against all kinds of claims. From "poll workers were ejected" to "suitcases full of ballots". Similarly I saw something about a Dominion machine that supposedly flipped Trump votes to Biden votes that was summarily debunked.

There was nothing surprising about the results except that Georgia flipped blue. But I think that says more about Trump and Georgia's demographics than it does about the election. Remember that 2016, when he eeked out his EC win, it was because he barely flipped the "blue wall" states. The fact that they went back blue this year is not at all surprising.

Credible by repetition only, at this point. They've shown themselves at the same level, and the most self-righteous networks have proven the most hypocritical, and they don't even seem to see it.

Don't forget, not only do they only care about the battleground states Trump lost, but also the congressional victories which were on the same ballot are not similarly being questioned.

Republicans picked up seats in the House. They did better in the Senate than expected. No one is questioning the results of those races.

Why?

This is a good overview why you should be skeptical.

https://spectator.us/reasons-why-the-2020-presidential-elect...

Democrats did do everything in their power. I’m not sure what you expect, do you want them to try to be totally corrupt and step outside of their constitutional role? Because they made sure it was a really honest process:

1. They made sure investigations happened to determine the validity of any claims. Investigations from trusted intelligence officials and even from the Republican-controlled senate confirmed the same thing. 2. They impeached trump based on the evidence provided by the investigations. 3. When the republicans didn’t vote to remove him, they focused a lot on the election and driving voter turnout.

>why wouldn't Democrats do everything in their power to get him removed from office?

Correctly, people note that a sure marker of a conspiracy theory is that the absence of evidence supports the claim. (ie, there must have been a cover-up!)

This is definitely true, but another aspect which doesn't get enough attention is an argument which relies totally on psychoanalysis. "Group X would surely want to do x, and therefore they probably did!"

The truth is that you generally don't understand people's incentives as well as you might guess. Further, simply because there is an incentive does not mean there is a capability.

But, most importantly, claims require evidence. Reading incentives is pretty flawed regardless. At best, it must be backstopped by real, hard evidence. This total lack of evidence is why these cases are being unceremoniously tossed out of court.

I will come out and say I have not looked at a single court case nor do I look at Trump twitter nor do I read any social media beyond Hacker News. My interest in politics is not partisan. I am not here to debate the likelihood of any sort of fraud because internet debates about this kind of thing are pointless.

The rationalistic question is something along the lines of "how do you adjust your priors of voter fraud based on the rhetoric of the party alleged of committing the fraud." The lazy answer is "your voter fraud prior should always be zero." Is that the right answer? There's are interesting discussions to be had here. They likely cannot be had on Hacker News.

Many people have beliefs about Trump where, IF I had the same beliefs I'd totally be on board with voter fraud to get him out of office.

>Many people have beliefs about Trump where, IF I had the same beliefs I'd totally be on board with voter fraud to get him out of office.

I wouldn't, but this is because of the game theory sort of nature of democracy. If I can do it, so can my opponents. Suppose Trump is evil, and defeated, and next election my side has a truly wonderful and excellent candidate. (again, I'm just being theoretical.) I don't want the other side to be able to beat my candidate using voter fraud. Ideally, no one can beat anyone using voter fraud.

>The rationalistic question is something along the lines of "how do you adjust your priors of voter

I'm not sure what you mean, but I'm guessing you mean "this party has previously had issues with voter fraud, and therefore it's not stretch to be concerned about it again." If I have you correct, I'd again say that this is a fine suspicion, but then evidence must be produced. If evidence cannot be produced, then the priors alone are not enough. To use a very flimsy metaphor, suppose in a small town there is a kid who has robbed a convenience store. Later, when another convenience store is robbed it might make sense to suspect the kid. But, you had better not charge or convict him unless you can produce some real evidence. (and to be clear, I am not comparing either party to a common criminal, I just wanted a simple metaphor which I thought best explained the argument.)

Just to pull the thread a little further, what if you already believed that the other side was using unfair tactics to achieve their political goals. Gerrymandering, unfair court appointments, electoral college unfairness, racially based voter suppression.

I'm hard pressed to believe that someone who believes these are going on AND that the current president is a Russian asset (for example) would not support voter fraud.

And that's exactly the problem. Republicans are indeed benefiting from the backwards or technically legal but scummy tactics you outlined.

Democrats are not trying to fight fire with fire, they're just trying to make it easy to vote for anyone who is entitled to vote. It just happens that there are more of those people than there are people supporting Republicans. Quite a bit more.

You just can't imagine someone wouldn't stoop that low when you would.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here, so I'm going to address both possibilities as I understand them:

#1 - Could there be anyone, anywhere, who believes that voter fraud is warranted because they believe the situation is so dire?

Sure, I'll bet there are some people who feel this way.

#2 - Does the possibility that some people, somewhere feel this way suggest that there is real possibility of fraud?

Without evidence, no. Remember that "some democrats" feeling this way is actually not very useful. Instead, various and multiple people with different levels of the election oversight process would need to 1) feel this way, and 2) be willing to risk a federal crime despite all other incentives, and 3) have the actual capability of carrying this out. Each step in the process here carries further inter-dependencies.

For example, the people who really feel this way must be multiple election officials in multiple locations. Recall that there are no "state" elections, but rather multiple districts, which are then collected for the state elections. And so there has to be fraud in multiple locations, and it must be coordinated. Before we go any further, it's important to understand that when we're supposing that we know "how people would feel," we suddenly mean "I know the motivations and incentives of multiple strangers, whose jobs and lives I know nothing about." This is where our ability to judge a person's incentives really falls apart. If we're considering scenario #1, where an imagined other might feel some way, that's probably fine. By the time we're in scenario #2, we already do not know enough information to determine all the incentives involved. One pole worker may be a republican, another a democrat. One pole worker may have a strict credo they live by (in other words, they wouldn't break the law no matter what) while others may be much more open to malicious actions. Some might be risk averse, so might be risk addicted. The point is we don't have factual information about all these different competing incentives.

Even if we could establish the various incentives, there's further information we don't have: What is the structure of the various election boards? Which individuals would be required to coordinate malicious to reach the desired outcome? And, which of those individuals do we think have the "wrong" incentives? In other words, were enough bad actors in the right place?

Lastly, (and shortly since I'm getting too wordy) supposing we could work out the first two problems, do we think such a group could escape the nigh-historical oversight which has been playing out after this election?

Did they not?

Have you been following the news at all in the past year or so?

I have edited my comment to make it clearer.

You would realize they haven't been trying very hard at all if you've been paying attention.

I agree that their tactics were terrible. Their concerns are mainly about optics and they get caught up in their own coattails.

But you can't claim that they weren't trying to use legitimate means to remove him from office. That is just absurd.

The could have impeached Trump on N things, where N is way more than one. They impeached him on one thing. Yes, I would say they were not trying hard at all.

Again, that's a question of tactics, not strategy.

Tactics, strategy, you're just shuffling. The point is that the Democrats could easily have done much more with the impeachment and they didn't.

So what? Completely irrelevant.

You're acting like a jilted lover, not a participant in democracy.

Lol, good place to retreat to buddy

He was impeached, was he not?

> why wouldn't Democrats do everything in their power to get him removed from office?

Because they believe in the process, the integrity of our country and our Constitution, the voice of the people and the validity of the election. (That doesn't mean Democrats are knights in shining armor, but with many politicians following the President's lead on fighting the integrity of our own country, many find it preferable that Democratic politicians refrain from taking that same low road. Sometimes the high road works. Often it doesn't.)

How do you explain "Russiagate"? I just got through 4 years of unbridled partisanness that puts your entire post in to question.

Democrats believe in the process so much they would rather waste four years convincing themselves a red herring is more than a fish. If they were as conniving as you have been implying, they would have either gotten results or switched tactics sooner.

They're rule-followers. That doesn't mean they're smart.

I'm not a fan of the partisan nature of our politics, or the political theater of Russiagate.

Out of curiosity, did you mean: partisanism?

I accepted that President Donald Trump won the electoral college in 2016, and that he lost it in 2020. I don't think Democrats trying to get a few million people in on an election fraud conspiracy would have been good for the country, and I don't think Democratic politicians believed that was a good idea either.

GOP doesn't want Trumps cult to turn on them, Democrats don't want the cult on the left to turn on them either ;)

It's a bit funny both sides proclaim that only the other side is in a bubble.

It's funny to pretend that 2016 election interference from the Russians didn't happen, even though every single intelligence agency (under Trump, by the way) agreed that it did.

I don't see how Russiagate is at odds with what neogodless said. The democrats collected evidence, went to court, and lost. Russiagate, however misfounded, was legal. To imply that there were no other avenues for them to go down so they turned to voter fraud is laughable.

Also, I will try to say this in the nicest way possible, but you are repeating, nearly verbatim, talking points that the President has been using for months in various rallies. The idea that the democrats needed to turn to voter fraud to ensure Biden won a Trump talking point - not something born out of any sort of rumor or leak. What is particularly nefarious about this talking point is it's not something he crafted out of the blue, but it is one that he has been forming since at least July. He has carefully planned to use pandemic and the growth in mail in ballots to throw chaos into the electoral process. In other words, I'm asking you take a step back and consider if voter fraud is a credible rumor or if its something that has been manufactured by the right wing media machine.

>The democrats collected evidence, went to court, and lost. Russiagate, however misfounded, was legal. To imply that there were no other avenues for them to go down so they turned to voter fraud is laughable.

You forgot a few steps. First, they claimed there was fraud (w/o evidence). Then they 'leaked' the Steele dossier and other nonsense documents. Then, there was 24/7 wall to wall coverage for months and months of it (including insane stuff like the pee tape) to manufacture consent. High profile Democrats happily went on TV expressing fake concern and repeated unproven allegations. They happily were the 'inside source' to NYTimes, rollingstone, nymag, etc, etc for more ridiculous stories. Then, they wasted tax payer money knowing full well that it was bogus.

Respectfully, I would invite you to do the same as you ask others. Take a step back, and consider (even if you aren't convinced) whether you've been had by the Dems on the most ridiculous story (if not on all of them) about Trump.

I agree. This is all established fact. Look at the FISA and the Carter Page lawsuit. A government informant leaked fake information to the press and the FISA warrant was based on that information. They literally made up information to get a warrant. That's literally a baseless allegation and all the documents that have come out in discovery back that up.

I think there are two fundamentally different worlds here. Many of the people in this thread, and in big tech, still trust CNN/FOX/MSNBC/NYTimes. But if you look at the past four years, they've constantly given us bad information, or used misleading headlines (most people don't read past the headlines), and often the content of the post itself contradicts the headline.

That's why this YouTube thing is so important. People like Shapiro, Megan Kelly, Tim Pool, Viva Frei, No Agenda .. they actually dig through this stuff and expose how corrurpt the media really is .. and they are insanely corrurpt.

We've had months of "mostly peaceful protestors" and I've watched people all around me on the left defend the burning and looting. "It's just property." The media is corrurpt and this shows YouTube/Google is just as corrurpt, trying to use their massive influence to control a narrative; making something absolute that should be brought deeply into question.

We are not in 1984. We've been in 1984 for decades. It's just now the Internet has allowed people to see that for themselves, and Big Tech wants to take that away and tell people what to think again.

I think there is a larger portion of regular folks who dislike the nutty behavior on both sides (I'm one of them) and just want to move on to more important things than the current fake-outrage news cycles over irrelevant drama/gossip.

We might be screwed in the short-term, and if people out of choice/ignorance no longer care about certain democratic ideals, then it is impossible to force it upon them. Having said that, I trust people more than I trust systems. So it might take time, but I believe we're going to get past this eventually.

I don't listen to right wing media. Or left wing media. They're both terrible. (I pay for my news to try an avoid the nonsense.)

I will say this nicely as well, you should re-read my argument to see where the depth lies. I take caution to ask a simple "IF/THEN" question that's really just a latent criticism of media including social media. The idea that "voter fraud" is some "Trump concocted nefarious scheme" is also rather ridiculous. Voter fraud gets claimed after every election.

I hope our new censorship overlords are fair and honest in their censorship.

> I pay for my news to try an avoid the nonsense.

I sincerely applaud your paying for news, but a person who gets all their news via the free AP News and Reuters newsfeeds, cspan, PBS, VOA, Propublica, NPR, and so on can be very well informed and avoid a fair amount of nonsense.

> I don't listen to right wing media. Or left wing media. They're both terrible.

One is substantially more terrible than the other, and seems to be perpetually stuck in lala land.

> Voter fraud gets claimed after every election.

Not at this scale.

The democrats impeached him. You were saying?

This type of "reddit" comment is not appropriate for HackerNews.

I just want to be sure here. Is he a huge national security threat? If so, is he big enough of a threat to justify voter fraud?

Foolish question with a faulty premise.

No one is required to respond to this in earnest, just like there is no requirement for Google to publish materials just because they were uploaded to their servers.

A stable belief system is not shaken by a hypothetical question. You can dodge the question if you'd like but it probably doesn't make your world view appealing to outsiders.

"Stable belief system" is orthogonal to "belief system aligned with verifiable facts".

Are you nice because it is required to be nice? "Requirement" is a loaded term, but I would hope Google employees show some decency and hold up their liberal values and bolster free expression that they claim to value so much.

The rules were changed prior to the election, in a way that clearly favours the democratic party. That should raise suspicion.

We also had :

1. Unusually low mail in ballot vote rejection rate (0.02 vs 6% previous elections)

2. Unusually many voters

3. Unusually high turnout in specific areas (90%+)

4. Delay in announcing results

5. Results that don't match (6000 votes flipped back to Trump after "glitch"

Vote rigging: How to spot the tell-tale signs https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37243190

> The rules were changed prior to the election, in a way that clearly favours the democratic party. That should raise suspicion.

Meaning voting was made easier for millions, hence they voted. Meaning Republican suppression of Democratic voters was less effective, hence more voters.

There is one of the two parties fighting for election security and it's not the republicans. Mitch McConnell has a few election security bills on his desk that were never brought to a vote.

1. If huge swaths of Americans are forced to vote by mail, wouldn't you expect the rate to decrease?

2. Trump is incredibly polarizing, so, sure

3. What was the previous turnout / percentage increase?

4. The GOP specifically passed laws that disallowed counting ballots until election day in many districts, which, combined with lots of mail-ins, makes things much slower

5. This was an accident, and was corrected

1. No, I would expect people filling out a mail-in ballot for the first time to get it wrong (and thus have the ballot rejected) more often than people who have done it before. This would track with previous elections, where first-time mail-in voters are more likely to have their ballots invalidated.

Protections on mail-in ballots have unambiguously been reduced this election - many states skipped signature validation, for instance. This may be acceptable, but IMO should not have been implemented due to being easy fodder for conspiracy theorists. Yes, the mere appearance of illegitimacy is reason enough to not do something when it comes to potentially contested elections.

2. This election turn out was 2 standard deviations above average. That has never happened in the past.

3. Detroit region of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. Oakland had a 15% increase in turnout compared to 2016 and Macomb was up 18%. More black people came out to vote for Biden than Obama in these historically Black counties.

https://www.mlive.com/politics/2020/11/see-2020-election-tur...

1) Didn't happen. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-georgia-rejecte...

2) Both Democrats and Republicans had greater turnout. This was expected since Trump is a highly polarizing figure. Not relevant to claims of fraud.

3) Like, say, Utah, which voted for Trump? https://www.fox13now.com/news/election-2020/utah-reports-90-... Please show relevance.

4) Expected, due to increased mail-in ballots and delay in counting mail-in ballots required by law in several states.

5) A glitch that was fixed. Relevance?

1) "The total rejected ballots data is not yet available for 2020." from the fact check. So how can the fact check be used to disprove Trump's statements, or that it "Didn't happen".

More worrying, its been weeks since the election, and we still don't have definitive results. You don't find that suspicious? Most countries have final results on election night.

Okay, so if the total rejected ballot data isn't available what is your basis for claiming that it did happen? The burden of proof rests on the accuser. In any case we know that the signature rejection rates for Georgia in past elections were low.

What do you mean we don't have definitive results? Biden's win was certified by the states in the last week, in accordance with the law. It will only get more definitive when the electoral college votes next week. This is nothing new in the U.S., it's the way the process works.

These seem to be the most up to date numbers. "Rejected absentee/mail-in ballots as a percentage of total absentee/mail-in ballots returned, 2016-2020"

Georgia 2016 6.42%

Georgia 2020 .60%

Source https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_...

Which cites the official Georgia election website as source of the raw data.

If you check the footnote there it seems Ballotpedia computed this rate themselves. It seems exceedingly unlikely this has anything to do with fraud, since other states handily won by Trump like Alaska and Iowa show similar large drops in 2020. I think fundamentally the data here is incomplete for 2020 and nothing meaningful can be said about it yet.

Is Google also going to ban all the people who pushed the baseless Russia-made-trump-win nonsense? What a giant waste of time and money that was.

Do it equally for everyone, or don't do it at all.

We don't know if Russia made Trump win, we only know that they helped him.

Likewise, we don't know if Trump himself worked with Russians, we only know his campaign chairman Paul Manafort did.

These are both facts that have been verified by the Republican controlled Senate Intel Committee.

You are free to read their report yourself.

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

>We don't know if Russia made Trump win, we only know that they helped him.

That's a bit like saying we know there is election fraud in 2020 because we found 2 voting irregularities. Minor voting irregularities happen in every election and are also facts.

Sorry, it goes both ways. Both sides need to provide evidence and prove it in court before making such statements. If you don't know, then the right thing to do is to say nothing unless it has been proven.

Have any democrats been implicated in voter fraud?

You are completely ignoring the high level of coordination that has been proven, between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

It's impossible to know what the effect was, but we know for sure they tried, which is illegal.

Can you find any example of a "voter irregularity" that has the same level of intent and coordination with an official of the Democratic party?

It only "goes both ways" when you are blatantly lying and discounting reality.

Many of the states in question are run by Republicans. Are you saying that Republicans conspired to steal the election from Trump?

>You are completely ignoring the high level of coordination that has been proven, between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

No high level of co-ordination to steal the election was "proven". I don't know what kind of "news" you read.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-mill...

>It's impossible to know what the effect was, but we know for sure they tried, which is illegal.

If you don't know what the effect was, what is your point again?

>It only "goes both ways" when you are blatantly lying and discounting reality.

Childish name-calling? Nice..

>Many of the states in question are run by Republicans. Are you saying that Republicans conspired to steal the election from Trump?

Actually, I'm claiming both sides are in their own bubble clutching their little (R) and (D) flags and waving them frantically.

To claim something false is lying. To point out lying is not "name calling".

> No high level of co-ordination to steal the election was "proven". I don't know what kind of "news" you read.

Here, try this:

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

Ctrl+F "manafort" if you are having trouble finding it.

> Actually, I'm claiming both sides are in their own bubble clutching their little (R) and (D) flags and waving them frantically.

Bro, is this not name calling? At least I am actually offering evidence. All you is your sense of superiority.

Also, the whole cover of partisanship is just so intellectually lazy. You can literally dismiss any evidence or reality just by claiming partisanship.

I am sure partisanship is involved, but that is not a rebuttal to the evidence presented.

What a poor use of time to have a conversation with you.

So you keep posting the same old tired link claiming its "evidence". I don't think you understand what that document actually says.

I don't rebut evidence, I accept it, if courts accept it when used as evidence in a case. I don't know what rebutting evidence means, or what that would accomplish. After four years of nonsense investigations there were no indictments on this so called "collusion". This fact alone makes anyone involved in making those allegations look completely nutty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment

No indictment = no charges = no case = no conviction = innocent until proven guilty. Regardless of this report, if Dems had solid evidence to bring criminal charges, I'd bet my life savings that they'd have brought cases by now, and we'd know about it.