They were there in the first place because of his message

> These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!

It is possible to simultaneously believe that the election results are illegitimate and to live peacefully in society. It requires a bit more mental flexibility than I like to give myself, but there is precedent.

The call to action (go home with love & in peace) trumps the frame.

Take use of the word "socialism" or "nationalism." I've seen a disturbing tendency on the right to call anything they don't like "socialist." Nothing makes that clearer than Trump's call to the Cuban expatriates in Florida to vote against the "communist" Joe Biden.

If you know anything about Biden's policies you would recognize them as pretty standard Progressive policies. I have never once heard him discuss taking private property and distributing it as a public good. He's not once talked about erasing private enterprise. He is manifestly not communist. So the only conclusion I can draw is that Trump is using "communist" to mean "person you don't like" so he can fan the flames.

Given that, I don't think we can take anything he says at face value. This is actually a common tendency on the right, and it's why they're so good at fanning the flames. They see what our words mean and they disregard that meaning.

In the same way, you say that there are two "radical opinions" about voter fraud. This is false. There is only one radical opinion. It is similar to a flat earther claiming that schools need to "teach the controversy". No. They do not.

Regarding the current conflict, there is deep asymmetry here. Trump has been claiming election fraud prior to the election since he was elected. When the election finally happened, Trump had over 60 chances to show evidence. Hefiled and lost over 60 lawsuits, including ones in front of judges he appointed, and in front of 3 supreme court justices he nominated. They all took his claims seriously, looked at them, and rejected them. These were his own appointees. That's where it should end.

To continue to believe that "the election was stolen" under these circumstances is the only extreme view. Trump, and his GOP/Fox enablers, have been pushing this view as fact, and his followers have acted consistently, and violence has ensued. The violence, and the treason, falls squarely with them.

And if you have any doubt that Trump's motive is about anything other than Trump wanting to keep power, then listen to that phone call to Georgia's (Republican) Secretary of State.

But yes, I'm tired of hearing people say, when talking about Trump, that "both sides are bad" and "all politicians suck". No. I get the desire to avoid conflict, but those statements are simply false. Trump has broken his oath to the constitution, repeatedly and egregiously, and his misdeeds have not been matched. There is no symmetry here, there is only a traitor-in-chief and his cronies.

Actually it is even more damning than that, Trump has been claiming election fraud since before he was elected in 2016. He was ramping up to make a claim the election was stolen until just after he beat Hilary legitimately.

This meant that the intermediate results early on pointed to Trump and then shifted to Biden.

This effect was predicted in the very beginning of the pandemic! As soon as we knew mail-in voting would many up such a large fraction of votes, this was obvious, and many (including me) anticipated that Trump and others would make up propaganda about this, or even try to stop the vote counting early to stop the mail-in votes from getting counted.

And even with encouraging in-person voting, the dump was 99-100% Biden, that's the suspicious part. No way all Trump supporters voted in-person, even with the urging.

Do you have any extraordinary evidence to back this extraordinary claim?

I kept a spreadsheet of the votes in Michigan as they came in and I don't see any dumps that were 99-100% Biden.

Also, the "Red Mirage" also was a big thing in states that weren't allowed by law to start counting the mail-in ballots until the day of the election (MI, PA were two of these states.) So they ended up prioritizing counting the in-person ballots on election day, and got to the backlog of mail ballots after the polls closed.

This was all a very easily predictable, simple result of the election laws in the states, and it was predicted. None of this was surprising to anyone who paid attention prior to election day.

The graphs near the bottom of this article: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/05/joe-h...

Michigan is the one I was remembering.

Predicted.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Natanael_L/status/132318782573555...

https://mobile.twitter.com/Natanael_L/status/132264461649207...

https://mobile.twitter.com/Natanael_L/status/131234902989287...

Almost none of the districts were 100% Biden, with a few exceptions - districts which are historically democratic leaning, AND in which journalists literally could not find one single person claiming to have voted for Trump when they investigated these numbers.

And I have not heard of any example of mail-in batches going 100% to Biden.

There's statistics over the split in mail-in votes. There's like 2x more democratic mail-in votes than republican mail-in votes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/usps-states...

I certainly can. There is an audio recording of a sitting president asking, then begging, then threatening a Secretary of State to create illegitimate votes to overturn a state election so it goes in his favor. That act was the very definition of election fraud. Perhaps not the kind the person you replied to was inferring, but it's real and we have all witnessed it.

This crowdsource site has a collection of the evidence.

https://hereistheevidence.com/

~~edit~~

To flip the standard around, the chain of custody has been broken for millions of the votes. This means these votes cannot be verified as being authentic or legal. Also the IT infrastructure is not secure, despite Christopher Krebs' claim. How do I know? Georgia's Election Machines was remotely exploited by Jovan Pulitzer's team. Pulitzer also has diagnostic technology which can forensically verify if a paper ballot is inauthentic.

America simply needs to do better. Third world countries have higher standards with their elections. This election (& others) is an embarrassment to the United States.

~~edit~~

To fix these reoccurring issues/embarrassments, we need the following:

* All laws need to be followed

* A full certified chain of custody for all eligible & legal ballots

* Audit ALL Elections

* Open Source ALL relevant Election Software & Hardware

* Public Domain & distributed Voter Rolls

* Public Domain & distributed Precinct data

* All Tabulation traffic is logged

* All Electronic Ballot images is saved

* All ballots are forensically audited using automated processes. The forensic technology should be Open Source.

* Equal representation of both parties with the poll workers, poll watchers

* Protect poll watchers from harassment & removal

* Ensure public health safety measures do not affect Election Integrity

Not a single witness affidavit made it into a courtroom.

This is why people are angry.

But continue to dismiss, continue to ignore. Trump was just Hindenburg. I fear what comes next.

Moreover you aren't entitled to have your "evidence" heard when you're invoking non-existent legal rights (such as one state overturning the results of another state, or asking a state legislature to decide instead of letting the votes stand), and no one should take the word of random person in a comment thread over the collective consensus of 60+ cases rejecting every legal theory Trump's team put forward.

There's a basic pattern with all of this. Someone insists Trump had a legitimate grievance, it leads down an obscure rabbit hole of tangled facts and interpretations that, when investigated, turns out to be a series of confusions, basic misundertandings, insane theories of law fundamentally incompatible with Democracy, and in some cases willful misrepresentation of the facts.

Trump's legal team was largely incompetent, and invoked non-existent legal rights and authorities to challenge valid election results, and were appropriately dismissed.

I don't know what "Laches" is? Besides,

>> Evidence was never actually heard in any courtroom

Well, that is a lie, many of his cases were thrown out due to lack of evidence and lack of witnesses willing to actually testify to anything. Guess where does that happen? In a courtroom. Where a judge looks at the case and decides whether to proceed with it or not. So all of these cases had their time in court, to say otherwise is just a lie. You, like many other people, seem to operate under the assumption that you first start a case, everyone gathers and then you present evidence. That's not true, at least not in the US it isn't. Evidence has to be presented when you file to open the case, and since there wasn't any, judges have dismissed the cases. Why would they continue? So they could gather in an empty room listening to...nothing? Evidence can be admitted to the case later, with the permission of a judge, but you can't just start a case with nothing in the first place, which is what Trump and his team were doing.

https://www.ft.com/content/20b114b5-5419-493b-9923-a918a2527...

>>But continue to dismiss, continue to ignore

Well, thanks but I won't, I think people trying to steal an election should be in jail, so my wish for 2021 is that we see trump and his cronies where they need to be - in prison. Either because of the election, or because of his many other crimes, I'm really not going to be fussy about it, he's done enought to spend rest of his life behind bars, attorneys everywhere will have enough to bring him to justice.

>>Trump was just Hindenburg

Hindenburg represented the complete collapse and end of the entire airship industry, it has crashed and burnt and with it the entire trust and reputation these ships had. And it crashed and burnt because people in charge of building them wilfully ignored the dangers of building flying ships filled with explosive gas.

So yeah, I think this is a very apt comparison to trump - just probably not in the way you intend.

> Hindenburg represented the complete collapse and end of the entire airship industry

Wrong Hindenburg I think, although this one crashed and burned just as badly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_von_Hindenburg

I'm not sure who's supposed to be whom in this analogy, maybe that some other Republican is supposed to be Hitler?

Oh and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity) ; no comment on whether that's actually relevant or what happened.

Edit: so this is fun, https://twitter.com/Elaijuh/status/1347205394393927697 Trump campaign lawyer throws him under the bus "“client has used the lawyer’s services to perpetrate a crime and the client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant”"

You should really consider the facts instead of baseless claims repeated ad-nauseum.

Meanwhile, keep in mind that Trump himself, whenever asked to present any proof that substantiate any of his wild outlandish claims, falls back to the convenient excuse that his proof needs to be kept secret and away from the public to not be untarnished.

Trump does this continuously, even in his infamous Georgia tphone call with fellow Republicans when they stated quite bluntly that they had absolutely zero evidence to review election claims and directly requested Trump to help them out and hand out any evidence as a last resort effort.

Now as yourself this: if Trump is days before Biden is sworn in, without any election fraud claim being shown to be valid or realistic, and when fellow Republicans beg him for some evidence to support his claims for them to be able to mount any semblance of a case... Why on earth would he still refuse to share any info at all?

* electronic voting machines

* credible claims of foreign interference in elections

* credible claims of organized state agent hacking of US digital infrastructure.

* voting machines with designs and source code which are secret, and no way to know if they're working as advertised.

We have cryptographic protocols for honest, verifiable, anonymous elections, which we don't bother implementing. It's all an honor system, in a government without much honor. We, quite frankly, have no way to know if votes are being counted correctly or honestly.

As much as I disbelief Trump's claims of this election being rigged by democrats, the claims that we have excellent election security are false too. We have a huge chunk of the country openly lying about election results, and another half lying about election security. Two lies don't make a truth.

If our current elections aren't being manipulated, you can bet future ones will be. It's easy for an organized state agent to do, and if it wasn't being done before, it will be now. And fixing this will be almost impossible post-Trump, because Democrats.

This is similar to the common argument about voter fraud. Of course there was almost certainly basically no fraud to speak of in this election, like usual. (And that's important to emphasize, especially right now.) But the way this overall topic tends to be approached in general is very odd, to me:

There's a routinely used argument that concern about voter fraud is ridiculous because there's essentially been no significant incidence of it in modern history. This isn't unreasonable to bring up, but I think by itself is a very poor approach to risk assessment that's reminiscent of early COVID predictions/warnings/guidance and 2016 election odds from many of the same people. Especially when some foreign intelligence agencies appear to be getting increasingly brazen, and when considering that for most of the recorded history, voting was a lot less digitized.

There was almost no incidence of jets being deliberately flown into buildings as a form of WMD, until some people pulled out all their cards and exploited a "0-day", doing as much damage as they could in a single effort before a "patch" could be deployed. And sometimes it's simply a matter of no one making a serious, motivated attempt to do something until one day someone finally does.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-we-know-about-vote...

I was just trying to talk about this specific argument and how it's often used in isolation to create a certain way of seeing things that I think is based on shaky grounds.

I'm not trying to take any ideological stance, but just discuss epistemology in general. (Though for the record, I've only ever voted and will very likely only ever vote Democrat. I promise I don't have any ulterior motives regarding this topic and am a strong supporter of voter enfranchisement. Risk assessment in general just is a component of my job and hobbies.)

Epistemologically, that's why I believe these discussions should be evidence based instead of theoretical or ideological. We don't do a good job of figuring out what is going to work and what is not going to work until we've tried some stuff out. And it needs to balanced. There will be a few people who will try to cheat the system. As long as they get caught and it doesn't affect the election, that's ok. There will be a price to pay in legitimate votes who are unable to cast a ballot because of whatever countermeasures we put in place. The question is, did we strike the right balance?

https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign...

Whether or not something happened in Georgia this election -- and I don't particularly care whether something did -- the perfectly valid point is we have an insecure election system, and we should fix it.

In this context, though, security is NOT hard. We've just made the decision not to do it. I see no excuse for why I shouldn't be able to see the source code and design of the voting machines in my state, or audit any part of the manufacturing or voting process. This should all be open and transparent. A not-for-profit should be able to spot audit a hundred random machines around the US:

- Swipe a credit card to cover supervisor time

- In a secure facility, confirm the source code and hardware are as advertised on local voting machines

This just isn't rocket science.

Judging from downvotes and comments on HN, building political consensus around that will be neigh-impossible post-Trump. Click on my post history. Most of my comments are in the +3 to +15 range. Virtually all my comments in this thread are either 1 (not voted on) or between 0 and -4 (having gone to -6). None are swinging Trump conspiracy theories; merely pointing out the obvious: we need robust, auditable, secure voting.

And in this context, you are choosing to jump into those conversations to express vague generalities and open ended speculation that can't be pinned down to any specific claims about anything in a context where a mob is looking to those exact themes to motivate their violence.

There's a form of dishonesty that comes from making untrue claims about voter fraud, and there's another kind that comes from the themes you choose to emphasize to fan on the flames of false arguments while being coy about whether you personally believe them. This falls in the latter category, and this is the problem people have with your comments.

1) Lying to them that elections are secure, and telling them to sit down and shut up

2) Taking concerns seriously and addressing them

Your premise is that #1 will prevent a violence. My claim is that #2 will.

You can flipped this around. We had a lot of violence and lawless behavior around BLM protests. What would have calmed people down? Telling them we didn't have racism, to go home, and shut up? Or providing a clear process to address their concerns peacefully?

I think most folks on the right will move on from the Trump election if the left knocks it off with "sit down and shut up," which is coincidentally the exact language right wing commentators use.

As a footnote, which concerns are valid is almost irrelevant. For this, what matters is which concerns people believe.

You are trying to equivocate between those specifically and indisputably false allegations and something completely different: a much more generalized and vaguely expressed set of concerns with election security writ large.

These have nothing to do with each other and yet you are equivocating between them.

Especially not 10 days of "investigation" by congress who they already do not trust.

With that attitude -- that there are tens of millions of people who can't be trusted or reasoned with and need to be locked up and silenced -- civil war is inevitable.

"Those people" are human beings too. You might not agree with them and they might be wrong, but they're not very different from you. They're just exposed to different culture and information.

It is. How many papers were been published in Oakland between 2000 and 2010 on election security? Lots. Clearly this is a problem interesting enough to capture the interest of computer security faculty. It isn't a toy problem.

In addition to technical challenges (open sourcing isn't magic), there is a very complex organizational challenge due to the decentralized structure of elections in the US.

But more importantly, making vague claims about hypothetical limitations of the existing systems while tens of millions of americans believe that actual literal fraud stole the election from Trump and are using that as motivation to invade the capitol building and disrupt the process of transitioning power between parties is tone-deaf to say the least.

Seriously.

It's tone deaf to one side, but I'm pretty scared since the other side has, just as wrongheadedly, convinced itself these systems work. I'm not worried about 50,000 votes stolen due to doublevoting somewhere or a mailtruck of votes getting lost. If victory falls on the 50.1% mark versus the 49.9% mark, that's okay. I'm worried because we have a system which IS exploitable and which WILL be exploited, if it hasn't already been.

Rigging US elections has incredible ROI for any foreign state actor, and simply isn't hard.

For the record, I made equally tone deaf comments when 9/11 happened and when COVID19 was in its early days. Now, they're common sense to most people. I don't want to wait for Russia, China, or North Korea to pick our next president before we do something.

Open source, transparency, and auditability won't solve the problem 100%, but they'll prevent most types of gross, blatant rigging. Cryptographic voting algorithms or paper trails will get us much of the rest of the way there. We don't need perfect security, but we need to be in a place where a single point of compromise can't break our democracy.

I'm serious. Go read the papers. You very obviously don't have a background in academic security. Because Oakland doesn't tend to accept stuff on trivial matters.

We have reached an era of wrongthink- where even if you align slightly with the wrong side in your thinking, you are silenced. You are no longer allowed to agree with any portion of the wrong side, it must wholly be rejected.

We can loop back to election security when POTUS isn't trying to use it as an excuse for a coup.

If the machines were switching votes so rampantly you'd think, of the millions of people who voted, more people would've raised concern at the polls when they noticed their vote for the president of the United States at the top of the printed ballot was switched.

Am I missing something?

Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky and New Jersey.

These are the states you should be worried about. With no paper trail, there is no reliable way to audit the results.

States with electronic voting, which does not print out a paper receipt. But interestingly, no one is looking into these states for alleged fraud

We do?

Techniques like Zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and multiparty computation exists, but none of them are sufficient for elections. The security requirements are simply too complex, and we can't require that every voter manages a private keypair to issue their votes from an electronic device they can't audit.

Paper voting is safer.

* You have a list of votes. That's public (and not correlated with the above) by anonymous tokens.

* You have an anonymous token, which lets you verify your own vote.

If the list of people who voted doesn't match up to real people, that's detectable. If I go into Massachusetts and find 10% of the people claimed to have voted don't exist, I can confirm fraud. If someone who didn't voted has there vote counted, that also confirms fraud.

Anyone can count up and add up the votes. That's public too.

And anyone can confirm their own vote was counted.

- Everyone can verify who voted (so number of votes equals number of voters)

- Everyone can verify their individual vote was correctly and uniquely counted

- All votes are released under unique, anonymous identifiers, so anyone can recount all votes

- However, no one can verify anyone else's vote individually

It's pretty awesome! I've watched with gradual shock and horror as voting machines came out and seemed almost designed for riggable elections.

This violates the secrecy of the vote. I can threaten you to vote for someone then force you to prove you voted according to my orders.

> If we could do away with anonymity — if everyone could check that their vote was counted correctly — then it would be easy to secure the vote. But that would lead to other problems. Before the US had the secret ballot, voter coercion and vote-buying were widespread.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...

of course every fix creates another problem

The question I've had with this is whether you can prove who you voted for. If you can, you can sell your vote and prove tongue buyer that you voted correctly.

That's also my concern with mail in voting.

If you're trying to buy my vote, and I'm trying to sell it, I could give you my unique anonymous number, and you could verify my votes. But I could also vote a different way, lie, and give you someone else's unique number, and you'd have no way to know.

You could ask for a special ballot too, where, for example, I vote a particular pattern (yes/no/no/yes/yes/no), to encode things, ideally picking ones that aren't likely to come up in practice, or other complex schemes, but these generally have work-arounds.

At the end of the day, though, it'd be cheaper and easier for you to require me to wear a pinhole camera to vote, do a mail-in, or otherwise. Plus, we had open voting for much of history, and it worked okay. If we went back to the risk of illegal vote selling versus the risk of wholesale election fraud, I'd take the former which seems like the lesser of two evils (and much easier to police too).

The problem is closed, proprietary, secretive, touchscreen voting machines. For all we know, Biden won Texas. Or perhaps everyone wrote in Putin as a joke write-in. We just don't know.

For how this works in practice, Applied Cryptography has a nice, readable explanation.

Some of these "stolen" elections took place under Republican state administrations, supervised by Republican appointed election officials. WTF are these people doing if tens of thousands of votes are sneaking through the system and they can't find any evidence of it, and say themselves the election was fair?

Trump did exactly the same thing in 2016, claiming massive vote fraud and that the election was being stolen from him. Not only did he provide no evidence, but his own Justice department and subsequent administration was unable to find any evidence. If he really though the electoral system was so badly flawed, he had control of the House and Senate to do something about it, so why no voting reforms? If he actually believed his claims why didn't do something about it?

The truth is he didn't do anything because there's nothing to be done. He and his people know perfectly well the electoral system is fair, that's why they haven't bothered to reform it. There would be no point. In fact it would simply make them responsible for the voting system and thus unable to claim fraud anymore. Instead he's simply using claims of fraud as a tool to incite his supporters and avoid the ignominy of being a "loser". Something he has said many times he cannot tolerate.

Both his words and his actions show very clearly this is a pre-meditated attempt to undermine democracy in America.

It's like telling your grandma to install security updates, and her coming back saying no one has broken into her computer so it must be secure (while gramps insists someone has).

The simple fact of the matter is our elections are NOT secure, and making them secure would be cheap, and easy.

We have absolutely no idea whether the vote counts in the US are authentic. That doesn't mean anyone stole this election. That certainly doesn't mean Democrats stole this election. But it does mean we should secure them.

Of course, physical security is a cheap and easy step. The harder part is gaming our media. If attackers can help direct where voters vote with $$$, that's a cheap attack too.

As a footnote, if I were an attacker, of any type, I wouldn't even bother with the November election. The easiest place to attack is primaries. Both 2020 and 2016, we had among the weakest candidates among the crop win.

We're going from a con artist to a senile mildly corrupt lifetime politician of limited accomplishment. UPGRADE! I'll expect we'll move from major corruption to minor corruption, without an attempted coup.

What I think we deserve, though, is a politician with intelligence, vision, and integrity.

That requires fixing systems, rather than GOP pointing to DNC, and vice-versa.

Of course we do. Georgia did a full hand recount this election, finding no evidence of anything like what you're alleging. And many states do random-sample hand recounts every election. We didn't check every single vote, but "absolutely no idea" is way off the mark.

Indeed. A recount provides absolutely no evidence in either direction on what I'm alleging. Fortunately, if you'd like evidence, you can look for the auditable source code for my local voting machines on github. Didn't find any? There's your evidence of a transparency issue.

What many of these posts did provide evidence for are reading comprehension issues on web forums. But we knew that already.

Georgia electronic votes were all backed by voter verifiable auditable paper ballots. That's independent of whether the software is competent at arithmetic. A hand recount does, in fact, protect against fake totals.

Unfortunately, there are a handful of states that don't mandate paper backups. The solution for machines of that sort isn't open source—it's adding auditable paper.

It's simply a flat out repudiation of democracy.

"These people" also couldn't allege fraud in Georgia if we had fraud-proof systems. It's not rocket science. I wish we could point them to proof. We can't. We can point "these people" to pretty good evidence, but we wouldn't have this particular problem if we could point to hard proof.

We'd probably have a different problem, but it is what it is.

What evidence do you have that they couldn't? Plenty of people would make claims of fraud, even in a "fraud-proof" election systems. What would that even look like, in theory, let alone in practice?

What specifically out our current system leaves it open to the widespread, multi-state fraud that is being claimed by the president and others?

I mean, seriously. Look under the hood for five minutes.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

This stuff wasn't even controversial among most liberals pre-Trump.

You imply that liberals have changed their position on this post-Trump, but I don't think you'll find these suggested improvements controversial to most liberals. But what do you mean by we can't point the people of Georgia to hard proof? I fail to see how addressing even all of the points you raise would suddenly convince the president and his supporters. The existing measures don't appear to have swayed them at all. So I don't think it's productive to pretend like this wouldn't be a problem if only we had some mythical "fraud-proof" system.

https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...

> Today, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the results of the Risk Limiting Audit of Georgia’s presidential contest, which upheld and reaffirmed the original outcome produced by the machine tally of votes cast. Due to the tight margin of the race and the principles of risk-limiting audits, this audit was a full manual tally of all votes cast. The audit confirmed that the original machine count accurately portrayed the winner of the election.

> By law, Georgia was required to conduct a Risk Limiting Audit of a statewide race following the November elections.

> The differential of the audit results from the original machine counted results is well within the expected margin of human error that occurs when hand-counting ballots. A 2012 study by Rice University and Clemson University found that “hand counting of votes in postelection audit or recount procedures can result in error rates of up to 2 percent.” In Georgia’s recount, the highest error rate in any county recount was .73%. Most counties found no change in their finally tally. The majority of the remaining counties had changes of fewer than ten ballots.

We never have. The only way to know would be to personally verify the voter's driver's license, watch them vote and submit their ballot, count their ballot, and repeat for every single voter in the United States. Since this will never, ever happen, one could always make vague claims about authenticity. But without concrete evidence of fraud, it doesn't matter.

Let’s be real that’s basically a part of politics. That’s not an issue with elections per se.

Plus it’s clearly easier to just use social media and targeted propaganda to manipulate voters.

I’m all for secure elections and improving that security.

But my understanding is that to date when people have taken a serious look they’ve found no meaningful evidence of fraud.

The real deal is if we got rid of the electoral college then the presidency wouldn’t come down to a few thousand votes in a few counties in a few states.

I reckon the US system needs to self-reform if it wants to survive. All democracies change their electoral laws from time to time. The current system appears unsustainable: roughly two thirds of the electorate now feel fundamentally disenfranchised (one third thinks it's racist; the other that it's corrupt).

I will mention that the split-down-the-middle thing isn't a property of electoral college. That's how you win in a democracy. If voters are distributed between 1 and 10 on some issue:

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10

I win by picking 5.5. Whatever you pick, you get a minority of voters. That's complicated by primaries. In the same system, if I want to be a ballot candidate, though, I can't do that. I want to pick 2.75 or 7.25 so the majority of my party votes for me.

Of course, things like charisma fit in a bit too, but for the most part, if one party runs a 2.74 candidate and the other a 7.24, the 7.24 has an advantage, and vice-versa for 2.76 and 7.76.

All that things like electoral college do is shift weights. Tight elections just means politicians have learned to play the game well.

A system where someone with 40% or 60% of the vote wins isn't fundamentally broken -- the underlying check-and-balance works. What is fundamentally broken are when incentive structures misalign.

What strikes me, and what I want to say, is why pick someone like HIM out of all people available, and why does everyone seem to ignore his condition? Seeing him talking, it seems like himself and everyone around him try really hard not to put something cognitively challenging in his head, that will have to translate to comprehensible speech.

Do those in charge think one's name and past deeds campaign on their own, as opposed to the actual candidate showcasing himself with his present words and image? Does the need to bring Donald down give a blank canvas to the other side to put in front someone unfit?

I am semi-sure the President can be a puppet - not by definition, but can happen sometimes I guess - since Bush Jr, that creature with the obviously sub-par IQ and cognition, was elected - and again, nobody in the US seemed to actually freak out 24/7 with having such a man as the president. Just remember on the reason he cited for deciding to attack Iraq - and I am not talking about the false WMD claims, but for "God told me", which he stated in complete seriousness. So, when I saw that guy governing, I said to myself - it can't be this thing having the actual power here, he does not have the mental capacity to achieve that on his own.

Same with Biden. He obviously does not have the mental capacity to rule, and Donald going away is not enough reason to be ok with that. I don't even see a consensus of the type "Yeah he is an old senile guy, we'll just use him to take down Trump and then we see how it goes" - everyone pretends he is normal, and that's what baffles me.

The main stream media has engaged in slightly less fabrication, but there was definitely some of the same "boy who cried wolf" dynamic in the other direction too.

Why exactly should Democrats block any attempts at improving election security? The Democrats even introduced several election security bills the last couple years that all got blocked by the GOP..

At this point, the Republicans are mid-flop towards election security, while the Democrats have made statements which will be very hard to back out of, so I think we're seeing the fish flipping.... You can even see this in action, as every single one of these posts is trending toward negative infinite upvotes, where just a few months ago, they would have been trending towards upvotes. Even a mild pointer to a textbook on cryptography summarizing a cryptographic protocol is now at zero.

I'll be delighted to be proven wrong, though. Democrats will control both chambers and the presidency. If I see crypto-secure voting, I'll be delighted. I just don't see it. At this point, Democrats are firmly in the voting-is-secure-nothing-to-see-here camp. I understand why given the unpleasantness in DC, but it is, as a point of fact, not secure. That doesn't mean it's been rigged, but it does mean we should fix it.

I’m sorry but that is way too reductive. For one thing, there’s a bipartisan consensus (for better or worse) on a lot of foreign policy, which is a pretty huge area.

And, your comment obscures the meaningful differences in ideology between the groups of people each party represents. And the different interests of those groups.

The Democrats are far from perfect. But it’s not a “both sides equally bad” situation.

Well, maybe it is when it comes to corporate money in politics. But even there you see bipartisan consensus on the fringes, I think, plus iirc the Republicans were basically all about Citizens United.

But yeah money in politics is a big problem on both sides. To be fair, it’s been a big problem in all of politics throughout all recorded history.

Which doesn’t mean we can’t (and haven’t) made some progress.

My own observation is that we saw major progress with the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment, the Constitution, and so on. Progress slowed around a hundred years ago. From around 1920-1970, we had progress on issues of representation, race, and gender, but otherwise, political behavior gradually drifted towards the Nash equilibrium.

1970-2020, progress mostly stopped, and we've pushed hard to optimizing to game theory. Politicians who now get elected play a near-optimal game, and playing this game is overt.

To make progress, we'd need significant reform of the system.

I would argue, though, that a statement like "money in politics is a big problem on both sides. To be fair, it’s been a big problem in all of politics throughout all recorded history" is very reductionist.

For most of history, it wasn't so much money as military might. If I had money and you had military, soon you'd have both. Money was a component of buying military, but it was just one component (see Rome v Carthage for an example, or Athens v Sparta).

I'd much rather be controlled by someone corrupted by money than by a corrupt warlord where I'm a serf. Democracy is a big step up. We just need another step up right now... and pretending we don't is actively harmful.

Um if nothing else a LOT in the US happened with regards to women’s rights and feminism between 1970 and today. And LGBTQ rights.

Oh yeah - Obama! First black President. Kind of a big deal when it comes to race and social justice.

Also it’s just a hugely broad statement you are making. I’m not gonna speculate about the sweep of hisiory.

Also your point doesn’t really address the specific points I mentioned - real, actual differences between the parties.

[EDIT: For example if the Republican Party suddenly endorsed the Green New Deal (or other climate legislation) I don’t see the Democrats who already support such legislation flip-flopping.

Same with gun control laws.

And with more federal pandemic relief funds to individuals and states and cities.

And the Affordable Care Act.

And abortion.

And so on. ]

And it's exactly what game theory predicts.

To go with even your first example, Nixon created the EPA.

Flops happen when both parties go too far left or too far right. At that point, it makes sense for the "crowded" party to leapfrog and grab the coveted center.

Like, I don't think the Democrats became less invested in environmental regulation when Nixon created the EPA.

Or with healthcare. Or abortion.

You can't just point to a flop and use it to say "oh both parties are the same and don't really stand for anything."

I think what I said was that both parties try to be just at the 50 percentile mark of voters, since that wins elections, while candidates try to be at the 75th/25th percentile since that wins primaries (and then sprint to the center).

If both parties are at e.g. the 36th and 37th percentile, the 36th percentile party can jump to the 38th and be wildly successful. That's what happened with surveillance. After 9/11, the electorate shifted, and Republicans leapfrogged the Democrats, leading to a lot of success.

Both parties fundamentally want to win first.

Whether that's good or bad depends on what you compare it to. You can view it as lack of spine, or as a democratic check-and-balance.

And I appreciate your clarification that (if I’m understanding correctly) you do believe there are currently some meaningful differences between the two parties.

The percentages bit I didn’t really follow (where’s the data/evidence? Or is this a theory?), and, if I’m being honest, on a day like today with the attempted coup and all, I simply don’t have the motivation to parse and understand more of what you are trying to say.

But I appreciate your clarification and additional effort to explain your intended point.

Yes, there are meaningful differences. The differences behave just as game theory would predict, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. If you want 2nd amendment, vote Republican. If you want to control guns, vote Democrat.

You may be right that an individual politician might not flip on a stance because of those dynamics. Some optimize to dynamics and do flip and flop. Others happen to fit the current Nash equilibrium, and will generally eventually lose a primary or a general election once the equilibrium changes, and one with the aligned view will move in. It's a super-competitive system. The result is the same in the end.

But in terms of effort, given you're exhausted, perhaps I'll let you search for that when you have more mental capacity.

Good starting point is "Rules for Rulers," a short video on Youtube. But there's a lot of robust academic work behind it.

I totally could believe that.

But, be aware that just because you saw it in a left wing site (NYT, CNN, Vox etc), doesn't make it so.

Unfortunately, the few times something got me upset enough to actually try to track down original sources, I found the sites to be representing falsehood, on both sides of the spectrum.

Like, the complete and total opposite of the facts. Some twisted logic, omissions or half facts, but other times it seems they just said "facts be damned".

So, would be curious if you actually have sources, and if you actually looked up the bills and the riders, and the deals.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/hr2722

(2) Many of the machines with paper trails don't show the voter what's printed is the same as their vote (although I haven't looked at the models you refer to).

If there's a printer paper trail that the voter can see, that's a big step forward.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3375755

Or they know the truth, but respect and follow the forceful power, which Trump wants to represent.

Edit: I guess people misinterpret what I mean. The truth is that Biden has won honestly, but insurgents just don't respect that.

I feel like the “Twitter internal politics” explanation is more convincing than eg some small committee of expert moderators looking at trumps tweets and carefully deciding if they break the rules, balancing that with public interest considerations, and deciding if some restrictions should be placed on them

There were two more tweets that led to the definitive suspension of the account, per the NYT. This is one tweet that was taken down almost immediately around 6:00PM.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he tweeted. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

I mean, 'Remember this day forever'? Like it's the Alamo? Really?

Considering the way Trump, during his infamous Georgia phone call, fell back to weasel words to allow him to claim plausible deniability, such stating that "in my opinion they are shredding votes" after fellow Republicans made it very clear that there was absolutely no doubt that no vote was shredded... Those statements sound like nothing more than further weasel words to allow him to weasel himself out of any responsibility for his own actions.

This even seems a lot tamer and more to the point than Trump usually is.

"These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"

I agree with the premise. If your vote is stripped from you then force may be justified as you have no other option. The problem is that votes were not stripped and he knows it.

Even if he didn't think it, as what he thinks shouldn't matter unless he wants the stirrup to continue. He's supposed to be a politician, or even just a grown up person after all, not a child who cannot control himself.

Living in Hungary, living through this very same shit for 10, or maybe 14 years now, I've watched the whole Trump story in horror, but also thinking most of the time: yeah, this is kind of expected. This double talk thing is something our PM (Viktor Orban) does a lot of time. So yeah, Trump didn't want to calm these guys down, or to be more objective, that's not what he DID (even if we believe he's totally childish and dumb).

> "Even if he didn't think it, as what he thinks shouldn't matter..."

no, that's called lying, and we don't want presidents (or any person with even a modicum of power) doing that, even if we disagree (sometimes vehemently) with what he says. we have checks and balances on what the president can do, which is what matters. it would be great if trump were gracious, but he's not, and the people have (admittedly narrowly) spoken against him. our system has actually shown that it can tolerate a presidency like his intact.

A bit orchestrated? To show the less radical Trump supporters, this is what your president is responsible for, chaos and anarchy in the capitol. Disturbing the democratic process.

But I guess, don't assume evil, what can be explained with incompetence.

This could've been prevented if the president (1) didn't incite this and (2) didn't deny national guard to step-in.

So what's left is the capitol police facing a mob invited by the president, without backup. And they stated they had two choices, barricade the capitol and prevent entry, or evacuate the people inside.

It could've gotten ugly if the people in the capitol got overrun, e.g. Pelosi facing people that think they're sent by Q to fight off a satanic coup by Pelosi, but they got evacuated to safety. Apparently capitol police chose to evacuate rather than to barricade, in hindsight that's clearly the least risky option to human health. If they break through with nobody inside, that's not as bad if they break through anyway with people inside. A bunch of idiots roaming the capitol building isn't a threat per se, shameful and sad yes, but not one that should've been met with violent force from a small number of capitol police at the expense of (and risk of not) evacuating the people inside.

Of course, if the mob were leftists or had any significant amount of minorities mixed in, there would have been rivers of blood outside the Capitol.

In Austin, 16-year-old Edwin Ayala attended a protest. He stood alone on a grassy hill, about a dozen yards away from police and other protestors. As Ayala stood still, an officer on the street raised his gun and shot a bean-bag bullet at the boy's head. Ayala collapsed instantly.

I'm not disputing whether American police are violent; we have another example from yesterday: an unarmed woman killed by police.

I'm disputing the claim that the response would have been more aggressive at a leftist protest. Thousands of National Guard troops, in addition to police in riot gear, were dispersed to clear the Capitol. They did so. Less violence was required to do so, because the protestors complied.

Were it a left wing protest, the National Guard would not have been delayed by the federal executive until after the insurrectionists had spent their energy and either failed to achieve their violent goals because the targets had escaped immediate threat, and would hace acted violently to disperse the crowd earlier, and the right-wing counter-protestors that would have been present (left-wing counter-protestors were specifically told to avoid this event by major left-leaning groups because of the risk of violence) would have been permitted by law enforcement to freely act violently against the same group targeted by LE. We know all that, because we've seen it time and again over the last year, across the US, including specifically in D.C.

If it were a left wing or minority advocate protest, the response would have been the same as with BLM protests:

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/07/us/police-response-black-...

The double standard is striking.

19 dead in 2 weeks, without any aggression even close to what happened yesterday. It's obvious that the death toll would be higher if BLM protestors were as aggressive as the Trump protestors yesterday.

I was. Most of the victims during the protests were black. You cherry picked quotes from the article to support your views.

The reality is that a peaceful BLM protest was dispersed with greater violence so that the president can pose across the street with a bible, than a mob attacking and storming the Capitol.

Makes me chuckle that the result of this + the deplatforming of most of the opposition will only result in even more extremism and separation in the US.

I guess you reap what you sow

The level of violence at blm protests were a lot higher for a lot longer in a lot more places. The age groups were opposite. The weapons usage by protestors were much higher and the trepassing on private property didn't exist here. Besides by nightfall the protest was done blm protests turned violent at night.

The comment I responded to, which claimed there would "rivers of blood" if leftists tried something like this. Where's the evidence of that?

And let's not forget that a protestor was killed by police yesterday.

No, now the Republican party is up there with the Communist party or Anarchists, as a danger to America and democracy. Republican mobs paraded racist Confederate flags through federal buildings in a violent attempt to overthrow an election.

Thank god for brave Americans who stood up to harrassment and threw out baseless, evidence-free lawsuits trying to overthrow state electors. Hell, even the head of the Republican party has been recorded trying to strong-arm state election officials and fake the reporting of votes.

Give it up. The Republican party is clearly more corrupt and anti-American than any other organization you can name.

How does your comment relate to whether "if the mob were leftists or had any significant amount of minorities mixed in, there would have been rivers of blood outside the Capitol."?

This seems really strange to me. So the capitol police isn't staffed and doesn’t plan for a situation where they need to do both of these things?

What struck me the most is that the rioters seem like just a few hundred/thousand. Definitely scary but should have been able to be controlled by law enforcement. It wasn’t a million people or a zombie horde.

Their web site [0] says they have 2,300 officers and staff. So even if only half are officers it seems like 1,150 armed, trained capitol police should be able to control a mob of this size.

Certainly rioters trying to stage a coup is a rare event but seems like something that the capitol police should have contingency plans for.

Them saying that they had to choose between evacuating lawmakers and protecting the building seems like they need a lot of help planning.

[0] https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/uscp-fast-facts

Then there would be the question, of why there was no riot gear, when riots or riot-like situation could be expected. And since this was a planned event - and protestors openly planned to storm it - then maybe there should have been some better preparation?

And crowd control is indeed tricky, but it is still standard procedure for police.

You have fences.

You have lines of strong policemen with shields and tonfa.

You have tear gas.

Watercannon.

Beanbag.

Taser.

And ultimately, if rioters are indeed shooting or preparing to do so: there are guns with the police, too.

Many others brought the point: there probably would have been rivers of blood, if the black life matters movement, would have tried to storm the capitol.

That’s what I mean about odd that they don’t have a plan for this. I live near a top 50 city and the local police has crowd control equipment. Seems like the National capitol police would have some capability for this.

Certainly not shooting everyone.

Can someone explain why the people trained in handling civilians, ie the police in the capital of the united states, is not enough in order to secure a building?

A large protest can have 100,000-500,000 protesters [1]

So even if 95% of protesters are peaceful, a mere 5% inclined towards disorder can easily outnumber the local police. So it's not so crazy they'd need to call backup from somewhere. Why it's so common to deploy the national guard rather than cops from other nearby jurisdictions I don't know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_in_the_United... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Police_Department... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C.

Even the most self-sufficient of cities would find their cops outnumbered in such a situation.

"Nope, can't do that, not enough timeslices on mutex semaphore of a monadic type for me to transpile that functionality of changing the color of the background"

But was this not known?

The FBI could not bring more people in?

But yes, could also very well explained by, "they would not really dare it" preparation.

He can certainly influece it, but did he? If not, who is responsible for the lack of defensive preparations, the local police? The FBI?

DC is not a state, it’s a district under federal control. There is a mayor and a police department, but responsibilities that would normally fall to a state-level government are handled federally.

This is a contentious issue in the US right now, because it means that the residents do not have representation in the house and senate.

Further, the insurrectionists were definitely armed, at least five guns were seized from among those arrested.

https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/13-arrested-5-weapons-reco...

From Merriam-Webster

Armed protestors invaded the Capitol intent on disrupting the government from certifying an election. This was quite literally an insurrection.

In the case of Washington, DC they are not. The mayor has a normal municipal police force and the president has control over the equivalent of the state-level force, which would usually be called for such an incident. The Capitol specifically also has another force, independent from the municipal police, which is federally controlled.

There are numerous reports Trump explicitly refused to allow the National Guard to respond; governors of two adjacent states mobilized their state forces instead, and eventually Pence also mobilized the DC guard, which it's not really clear he had the authority to do (or if he does, also the authority to issue orders contravening Trump's refusal).

If you were to read that and go to Trump's twitter feed and read the above quoted tweet, you would now be left with two competing ideas: Was Trump inciting the mayhem or trying to quell it?

On the other hand, if you go to his Twitter feed and just see what's currently there, two blank spots replaced with, "This Tweet is no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules," you will think, "oh, Trump was inciting mayhem."

So deleting those tweets helps construct a narrative.

Anyone could see this was the most likely outcome of Trump's behaviour. I can't see how anyone could honestly argue otherwise.

Certainly hasn't been shrieking that the election was stolen and that if Democrats control the government it's the end of democracy. Literal apocalyptic rhetoric that millions lap up.

Then of course at the rally yesterday telling people to march on the capitol building where they are currently stealing the election!