> For the most recent presidential election maybe.

Yes, that’s generally what “believe the election was stolen” without further qualification means; its not a reference to the total sum of people who believe at least one election in the history of the US was stolen.

> For the previous one a majority of Democrats including high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.

No, they weren’t.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-republicans-distru...

A large percentage of Democrats believe Russian interference and other improper interference influenced the election results, but that’s different than thinking the actual vote was rigged or invalid.

Yes they were a huge number of election deniers for the 2016 election and a vast amount of irresponsible rheotoric around it that was very dangerous to democracy. Don't try to gaslight on this one. A lot of uneducated morons and delusional conspiracy theorists thought "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", fueled by dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric from certain anti-democratic election denier politicians and media corporations.

> a huge number of election deniers for the 2016 election

[citation needed]

No it isn't.

Well, since you are just lying, I can see why a demand for evidence is inconvenient.

How many election deniers?

A large majority of Democrat voters fell for these baseless and dangerous election-denial conspiracy theories. Why do you ask?

https://twitter.com/peterjhasson/status/1064259048902668289

The one question you present evidence of is not questioning the legitimacy and validity of the election; there is a difference between believing (rightly or wrongly, with or without sufficient cause) that improper activity effected the popular vote tally and believing that the election is illegitimate.

You present no evidence relating to actual election denial.

> The one question you present evidence of is not questioning the legitimacy and validity of the election;

False.

> there is a difference between believing (rightly or wrongly, with or without sufficient cause) that improper activity effected the popular vote tally and believing that the election is illegitimate.

There are differences between different things. Believing election tallies were hacked certainly is a baseless conspiracy theory that questions the legitimacy of the election, despite your wailing and gnashing of teeth. Not to mention something like a full 1/4 of Democrat voters believed Trump to be an illegitimate president too.

Your gaslighting and sealioning doesn't work I'm afraid, better luck with somebody else.

You've broken the site guidelines egregiously here, and have unfortunately been doing that a bunch elsewhere. We've warned you multiple times before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34429933 (Jan 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30858404 (March 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29085513 (Nov 2021)

If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you. Therefore could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? Including, but not limited to: not being snarky, not calling names, not making personal attacks, not posting flamewar comments, and not using HN primarily for political battle.

Sure I'll try to do better, I'm sorry. Would you apply the same rules to people escalating, calling me names, being snarky, etc in the same thread?

Appreciated!

Yes, if that's what they were doing, but I'd have to see specific links. (For example I don't think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366985 broke the site guidelines although it wasn't entirely un-edgy either.)

I don't have a problem with the comment you linked. But this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 kicked off the snark with the first sentence, and quickly escalated to namecalling, calling me a liar a few comments later.

So yes I should have just ignored them or kept the higher ground, but sometimes that kind of trolling sucks me in.

I don't think the first sentence of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 was snarky. Interpretations differ, of course, and often by quite a bit when someone is speaking to you personally, but FWIW that sounds rather neutral to my ear.

When push came to shove, how many Democratic leaders (Reps and Senators) voted against or objected to the electoral college results in 2017? It was less than 10 Representatives and no Senators, meaning none of the objections were even put to a vote[1]. That is a far cry from what occurred in 2021.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_States_Electoral_C...

Talk about clutching at straws and trying to find any possible metric to deflect from the dangerous 2016 election deniers and conspiracy theorist lunatics.

You can't just pick out some other thing and claim that is what is matters most. Just saying "when push comes to shove" doesn't mean anything. How many times did the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee lie about having evidence for the delusional conspiracy theory that "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", dangerously fueling election denial and undermining confidence in the democratic process? Aside from rhetoric and assertions by partisans and conspiracy theorists involved in the whole mess, where is the evidence to say what one side does is better or worse or more or less "damaging to democracy"? There isn't any.

If you in denial of the reality that both sides question elections and make up conspiracy theories when it suits them, you are incapable of anything approaching an objective understanding of the topic. Sorry.