* Obviously this entire reply assumes an ideal world where people are responsible and prominent political movements want to prevent foreign interference (even when the interference arguably benefits them.) I realize we don't live in that world anymore, but how about let's pretend we do for the purposes of this thread.
I would argue there’s a lot of creative interpretation of how much “interference” actually happens. Democrats are pretty much starting from the position that, due to demographics, the only way Republicans can gain the upper hand in national elections (or particular state/local elections) is through trickery and the assistance of foreign government meddling. Hence why before and after every election we’re warned repeatedly about foreign interference in our elections. And you would be lying if you said that if the expected red wave materializes that there won’t be large amounts of ink spilled over how Russia pulled it off yet again.
Yet if Democrats were to unexpectedly come out on top in a few days, do you think the same people going on about foreign interference would insist that we have to see what role it played in helping certain Democrats win their respective races? Somehow I doubt it. Which is why I think “interference” is a very useful political tool. It’s vague in nature, if we’re being honest it’s impossible to measure its impact, and it serves a very useful purpose — to cast doubt on the victories of political opponents.
WTF. Our voting system is so fundamentally broken and all any party needs to do to get a government majority without a popular majority is to push on the cracks. No foreign interference necessary, though, it helps.
The USA is so heavily gerrymandered that the vast majority of congressional races don't even need to hold actual elections, the outcome is 99% certain. There are 10 seats in the up-coming midterms which could be considered competitive out of 435. [0]
For the presidential election, the electoral college makes it possible for a candidate to win the presidency with a mere 23% of the popular vote.
_Possible_ does a lot of work for you here. You have to assume all the losing states vote at 0% toward the winning party and all winning states vote at 50%+1 for that to happen. Something that is absurdly unrealistic given that California only voted 65% Biden and 35% Trump in the last election.
The EC doesn't favor one party over the other except for the fact that Democrats refuse to move their national politics to the center to win the EC and use words like "populist" to describe the candidates that do.
Realistically, the popular vote "problem" you bring up isn't the issue with the EC. The issue is that it allows candidates to ignore the vast majority of the country, causing all candidates to cater to the same minority of the population. There's nothing wrong with the EC except that the states are mostly "winner-take-all", essentially gerrymandering the presidential elections.
There are a lot of things I'd like to see done to increase the veracity of our elections (ranked choice voting, open primaries, etc.) but, I think, if we could solve or make progress in the reduction of gerrymandering it would make a sizeable difference in the quality of politics in the country. And, notably, gerrymandering is very much a "both sides" issue, ask Californian politicians if they would favor splitting California EC votes proportionally by vote. That would make California more represented in Presidential elections and would also force candidates to try and win votes in California, moderating national politics. The only downside would be to the Democratic party itself.
However, the first-past-the-post issues you're talking about have very little to do with gerrymandering? EC / Senate politics are unrepresentative of population-majority preferences due to where people have decided to put themselves; House politics are unrepresentative due to how the districts for each seat are drawn. Gerrymandering is the political manipulation of the latter.
Senate politics aside, winner-take-all EC states are mostly gerrymandered to the majority party. It has exactly the same effect as gerrymandered house districts. some states are just not worth putting any effort into winning for the losing party and all focus/money/attention/politics is aimed at persuaded a small subset of constituents, the only difference is scale.
The inaction of the party in power to undo the winner-take-all EC model in a uncontested state shares the same motivation (more power to the party) and has the same outcome (worse representation for the people).
Using the example of California because it's a one-party state (so the advantages and disadvantages are more clear), if they were to proportionally allot EC votes, it would be good for every single Californian. The national Democratic party would move toward California Democrat values and the same situation for Republicans. And, since the state is so blue, it might even provide some incentive for the national Republican party to try and persuade purple Californians, moving them even further left. That's also good for California Democrats. People are led to believe that it would be worse for them, as individuals but that isn't the case. It would be better for _everyone_ in California if California wasn't winner take all.
The only group that it's bad for is the Democratic party.
I’m trying to be generous in my interpretation here but are you using “trickery” to include the gerrymandering and voting restrictions Democrats spend most of their time on? In particular, I’d like some citations about who is saying specifically what about “interference”.
There isn't really any way to compensate for it. All that does it encourage voter apathy at best, or at worst, people start to think "both sides do it, so it evens out."
US fuckups like Iraq were accidents, aka unplanned. Overwhelming majority of civilian victims is work of their opponents, like Iraqi religious insurgents, suicide bombers or ISIS.
You can be outraged at what happened to Salvador Allende and Patrice Lumumba and all that. I think you should be! And at the same time you can realize that was some time ago and if you don't believe in eternal collective punishment (everyone in Mongolia must suffer for what Genghis Khan did!), then it is relevant that the US is behaving better now and Russia isn't.
And regardless of all this, whataboutism is a counsel of despair: no good can ever be done by anyone because everyone's nation has done bad at some point. Everyone should silently take the abuse. If you truly believe there is such a thing as bad behavior, you don't silence criticism of one act by pointing to another act. You criticize both acts. And your criticism is proportional to the relevance of the act. It sucks that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes drove out the Britons, but that isn't the top problem to solve anymore.
Now there's nation-wide protests, calls for military intervention, election denialism with some rather convincing evidence, blatant censorship of anyone who's so much as asking if this is going to be investigated.
CIA person "urging" a president of a soverign country to stop doubting voting machines? Calling his doubts "baseless"? I mean, the USA has paper ballots to this day because of the exact same "baseless" doubts. It's essentially world wide consensus that voting machines are a bad idea but this CIA guy is here pressuring our president not to question the system of his own country. A CIA guy, from a country known for compromising the world's security and spying on everyone.
I'm sorry but there's so much wrong with that it's not even funny. If that's not interference I don't know what is. The more I research these elections the uglier it gets.
Baseless means without evidence. So when a politician is yelling at his fans that the machines overturned the results of the election, and no one has found evidence of it, you should doubt those claims.
In other words, through certification and audits there is a lot more evidence the machines worked properly than the feelings you are using for making your decisions.
This isn't what he was doing though. He wanted the voting machines to have a printer function so that an auditable paper trail was established. I've seen highly voted comments arguing for this exact same thing here on HN not even a week ago.
> and no one has found evidence of it, you should doubt those claims
I did doubt those claims. At first.
Some serious evidence has surfaced though: discrepancies in the election data set showing older less thoroughly audited voting machines clearly favoring the winning candidate by as much as 15%.
I was still skeptical, tried to reproduce the results on my own dataset... Then I watched the government's election website go down for hours, then come back up with the data set modified. Then I watched a supreme court judge censor anyone asking questions about this on Twitter.
It's not exactly inspiring confidence.
> In other words, through certification and audits there is a lot more evidence the machines worked properly than the feelings you are using for making your decisions.
The 2020 voting machine models seem to have been thoroughly audited. However, we're still using older models and I don't think they were audited recently. There were discrepancies in the voting patterns of the 2020 model and older models and nobody has been able to refute that at this time.
edit: oh, I spaced out, you're asking about the last three decades? I thought you were asking about the last few years.
If there is evidence the election wasn't fair, you should object. But your evidence that it was unfair shouldn't be your own hurt feelings and propaganda.
Obviously.
> But your evidence that it was unfair shouldn't be your own hurt feelings and propaganda.
Of course not. I have some real reasons for doubting the results.
Three days ago, an argentinian man streamed a video where he analyzed our election's official data set. He found that the older models of our voting machines, less thoroughly audited, displayed a clear advantage to the winning left-wing candidate, as much as 15%.
After I watched this, I went to the government website and downloaded the entire election dataset and attempted to reproduce his analysis.
Then I saw the website go down for hours.
An API for data set changes notifications remained up though. I monitored that API and saw them pushing changes to the 2022 and 2018 elections datasets. I saved that data too.
Then I witnessed that API go down.
Next day, it was back up, the data was modified and there was a bullshit note on the website explaining it went down due maintenance.
Then this supreme court judge started censoring everyone who even so much as asked if he was going to investigate any of this. Last weekend I counted at least 10 influential people censored, including a doctor in economics, elected politicians and policemen. It got to the point people on Twitter got Elon Musk to look at it.
I'm very worried about this. If it's so false, why can't they just refute it? It seems to me like they're all in damage control mode. Media is pretending nothing's going on.
If I understood correctly, they were compared to other machines in the same electoral zone. Each zone can have 2020 models and pre-2020 models. The older models had more votes compared to 2020 models even in the same geographical locations.
> I think you’re looking at correlations in data and fantasizing a causation that isn’t there.
Look I honestly don't know anymore. Can you help me make sense of it? It was published here:
https://brazilwasstolen.com/en/
Attempting to discuss this anywhere else, I was met with censorship and heavily biased political discourse. I know the electoral court has not made any statements regarding it, they're just censoring everything. I've never seen anything like this in my country before.
The argentinian man made a video presentation but I don't have access to it anymore due to censorship.
If voting preference is at all correlated to income, and what models of voting machines used at a polling place are correlated to the wealth of that district, then you will likely find a correlation between voting machine model and voter preference, with the older/cheaper model showing a preference for the candidate more favored by poorer people.
It’s not a sign there was fraud. Did you look at whether voting on newer models showed a higher preference for Bolsonaro than the national average?
What if Bolsonaro had won and someone claimed that the newer machines were built while he was in office so they were clearly programmed to favor him? Would you accept that narrative based purely on a correlation in data?
The machines look the same to the voter and we can't choose which machine to vote on. Each citizen is assigned an electoral zone and a section within that zone. One voting machine captures the votes of every section. In my neighborhood, for example, the voting took place at a school and every classroom had a different voting machine, one for each section.
It'd be extremely suspicious if it turned out that the people voting one room away from me showed statistically significant differences from the other sections.
> Did you look at whether voting on newer models showed a higher preference for Bolsonaro than the national average?
Looks like Bolsonaro wins if only 2020 models are evaluated.
> What if Bolsonaro had won and someone claimed that the newer machines were built while he was in office so they were clearly programmed to favor him? Would you accept that narrative based purely on a correlation in data?
Clearly we'd be having the same election denialism problems we're having now...
So saying that you will "accept the results of an election" is just a chant or a ritual that doesn't mean anything, because you can still declare the election was not fair after the results come in?
I don't think this was done on purpose, but I'm noting it because it seems to be becoming the common way we speak these days and that isn't healthy to our abilities to solve these issues. We need to discuss the nuance and complexities of these events or else others will control the narratives and make us fight within ourselves instead of uniting to solve these issues.
Please do not normalize the use of a term that is being pushed by the government to justify censoring information they don’t like [1]. I understand that there is such a thing as “true information presented out of context in a manner meant to mislead”, and I even grant that the comment might be guilty of it. But “malinformation” and “misinformation” are just becoming labels for “information that is inconvenient”, and I don’t think normal internet commenters adopting their use is doing us any good.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
The same goes for dog whistling. It is easy to see dog whistling everywhere because that's its entire purpose: to hide within normalized speech. Covert speech is not covert if the only ones using that speech are manipulators. But that's why fighting it is so hard, because you don't know who's a useful idiot and who's a manipulator. But it is clear that the manipulators hide in a sea of useful idiots and parrots.
So I think good faith is trying to extract the signal from the noise and to differentiate the two rather than assuming maliciousness.
All of these fancier words like whataboutism or misinformation are just attempts to assert authority via the word. They don't convey additional meaning.
Malinformation doesn't mean something is wrong but that it is misleading. This distinction is important because if you claim malinformation you actually aren't claiming that the information used is wrong, but the way it is is. A classic example of this is white nationalists using the phrase "despite being 13% of the population black people <insert something about crime here>". While the statistics may be accurate it does not incorporate the complexities involved which end up decoupling race from the statistics. To put it more accurately, this is an aggregation error (more specifically ascertainment bias, a form of collider bias on conditional probabilities). Without the deaggregation here it is natural to assume that the conditional variable here is ethnicity (the intent of the malinformation) but in reality this is misleading because the way the information was presented is not entirely accurate.
Malinformation is specifically difficult to defend against because one can google to confirm accuracy of claims. But in reality it takes expertise to dismantle the claims. It is preying upon people's naivety and inability to process information that they are not intimately familiar with (which is all of us, just in different subjects). So it is important to recognize that this form of manipulation exists. The defense is to maintain skepticism and consult experts. Looking for consensus among experts specifically.
These words do in fact convey a significant amount of additional meaning and the distinctions are important. Especially if we're trying to encourage more meaningful and nuanced discussions.
It is easy to see dog whistling everywhere because that's the phrase's entire purpose: it's a weapon. It's an accusation that's cheap to make, and near-impossible to disprove.
Sure, legitimate cases of dog whistling probably exist. It's impossible to tell for sure, because the "test" has near 100% false-positive rate. Or, put another way, talking about dog whistling being a thing is itself malinformation - technically the phenomenon exists, but bringing attention to it is between confused and malicious.
I'm not saying that the government isn't trying to manipulate the topics and use the same words too. After all, that's the entire thing we're discussing. But that doesn't mean that they get to control words either. That's an unwinnable battle because the adversary has such an easy path to victory. All you need to do is take language people are using and incorporate it into your own, but with slightly different (but reasonable) meaning. You're actively engaging in their strategy. Words are defined by how they are used and understood by the public. So if you understand my intention and that I am not using it in this same manipulative manner, then we're pushing back and ensuring they do not take control of our language.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...
Thanks for a new word for my 1984 dictionary.
Good, now we finally have an accurate, single-word description of all non-tabloid journalism.
> It muddles the conversation with more noise.
I agree with GP and I believe that this whole conversation is noise. The biggest red herring there ever was (no pun intended). Yes, Russia is interfering with US elections. So does US with Russia's. I can point at any news article and claim foreign interference and, unless you're literally NSA and can map-reduce the entire Internet in an afternoon, there's no way for you to conclusively prove me wrong. And whether a given article is a result of foreign interference or not, it's creating a misleading context anyway.
The right answer is to understand that the news articles, particularly on hot topics, are always manipulated by some combination of: {your party, other party, foreign influence, The Elites, advertising money} - and to treat it accordingly. That is, don't update your views on the world based on second-hand recycled soundbites. Either try to dig in and understand an issue, or accept the fact that you don't know enough to have an opinion. Yes, it's OK for an adult to not have a strong opinion on a topic. And be very careful about any argument that lets you preferentially dismiss things you don't like as malicious interference by third parties.
I'd be interested to hear more about this ... do you have links to a summary ?
> Putin came to power as a result of the US interference, after blackmailing Boris Yeltsin
I'm not clear if you mean Putin blackmailed Yeltsin or the US blackmailed Yeltsin ? What was the blackmail over ?
From a brief bit of reading and what memory I have Yeltsin was having various ...
- health ("months in hospital" [1]),
- political (four prime ministers in eighteen months [2])
- and, allegedly, criminal (government contractor providing Yeltsin and family with "we pay the bills" credit cards [3])
... problems so him going of his own accord doesn't seem impossible ?
Also wasn't it the case that you could only do two terms as President until Putin fixed it so he could reign for ever ? If that was the case then Yeltsin wasn't going to be able to run again anyway ?
I'm open to the idea that the CIA was, as is traditional, shooting itself in the foot, and there may have been US elements who felt that Boris was dangerously unpredictable but it does seem that there was other things going on which might have led to his demise ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin#1996%E2%80%93199...
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/415087.stm
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jan/28/russia.iantray...