> The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.

Yeah that's a nice thought, but it ignores a whole lot of recent evidence to the contrary.

Half the country feels the way you do. The other half felt that way for the past four years.

If centralized ownership is an issue, we should all work together to fix that. If the issue is the party affiliation, then it isn't an issue at all.

Half the country is wrong. I agree that centralized ownership is a problem regardless of party, but putting on both sides blinders is not the answer.

In that case, do you agree a one-party state, run by Democrats, would be "correct"?

In the context of election security, yes.

The "correct" setup is a loyal opposition during time out of power.

In the absence of that, a one-party state is probably better than a two-party state in which one party is actively trying to burn the system down.

You're talking about the mostly peaceful protesters who tried to burn down the Federal building in Portland for over 200 nights, right? Sedition and insurrection.

> tried to burn down the Federal building in Portland for over 200 nights

If you're pissing your pants in fear of people who fail to do something 200 nights in a row, I'd argue that says a lot more about you than it does them.

When did HN become so bad at false equivalencies?

Can I say Singletons are not recommended but also agree that there are contexts where it's an "okay enough" option? Singetons are never the "best option" in modern software, but it's not the "worst" in every case either.

Now, filling your code base with incorrect calculations: pretty much always a bad idea.

In the context of election security, absolutely.

After the wild amount of disproven claims made by republicans about election security, I don't trust them at all.

Did Dominion have a party affiliation? I would assume we just went from neutral party affiliation to strong party affiliation, not from one party to another.

The discussions I've seen on the right certainly indicate that they believed Dominion to be affiliated with the left.

As for the reality, I can't say. I've not done the legwork to have an informed position.

So it didn’t move from one party to another

Dominion didn't, but it became a focus of blame by Trump for the 2020 loss, and so to MAGA it became, like all enemies, part of the Radical Left.

That’s two reductive and poor arguments. Both sides fallacy doesn’t fly in 2025.

Voting machine anxiety for lack of a better term has been a presence for some time and isn’t a partisan issue. What is a partisan issue is President Trump’s baseless allegations re the election he hasn’t acknowledged losing in 2020.

Party affiliation is absolutely an issue with respect to Marvel villain parody that the modern Republican Party has become. I can’t read the article because Substack, but if the new owner is in fact a MAGA guy, (and this isn’t just drama) that’s a big problem.

archived version: https://archive.is/xvdh0

If only the other party owned intolerable influence over the machinery that counts the votes, we'd be safe!

If only a neutral party had that influence.

What leaves first? The neutrality or the influence?

> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.

No? I wasn't upset about it for the past decade, not only because I didn't know about it, but because I wasn't even concerned about it. Ten years ago US democratic institutions and norms were not being challenged and neither party seemed particularly intent on transitioning the country to one-man rule. During the second term of Obama, Biden, and even the first term of Trump (until he lost) democracy was not under attack.

Well those things that were true 10 years ago are no longer true now, so I can change what I get upset about. Jan 6 changed this country, unfortunately.

I hate to be the one to point this out, but Republicans have been aggressively gerrymandering districts for multiple decades. While the goal of doing so may have not been to have a dictator, as it appears to be now, I can assure you that their intent in doing so was not to promote representative democracy.

I’m already aware of that. I don’t love gerrymandering, but it’s categorically different IMHO. Gerrymandering is an abuse of the system, but it is still working within the system.

That’s in stark contrast to the current, mainstream Republican ideology which dictates that if Republicans lose, then the election must have been “rigged,” which is more like burning the whole system to the ground.

Once you’re comfortable openly and actively disenfranchising voters, and you get away with it, it is a small step to start whining all the time about how the system is rigged against you to try to ramp up your efforts to further disenfranchise voters. Burning the system down doesn’t just happen overnight. It happens slowly and starts with ‘working within the system.’

I disagree with your analysis for a variety of conceptual reasons, but the proof is in the pudding: we’ve been gerrymandering districts for a couple hundred years and I don’t think it ever threatened a peaceful transition of power. So what, it’s like a hundred years per “small step?”

The fact that gerrymandering isn't prohibited by law is just astonishing.

Well it’s easy to understand why legislatures elected by a Gerrymandered map are not motivated to fix it.

Also not trivial to design a law against it. Most common solution seems to be use of independent commissions, but commissions can also be “independent” in name only.

an independent and officially non-partisan commission is imperfect, but will at least have constraints on it in that it needs to appear independent, unlike the brazenly partisan way things work now.

Are State elections also badly affected by gerrymandering?

I have only ever seen examples of it at the Federal Election level, so wondering if your first point is actually completely accurate. (I believe the States themselves control the "maps" but forgive my ignorance if not)

The states control both maps, the district map which determines the population eligible to elect the US Rep for a given district, and a separate district map (with more and smaller districts) that determines the population eligible to elect the State Rep for a given district.

Both are a problem. The latter just means that the State Congress can be artificially heavily tilted vs one party or the other.

It's not at all astonishing, since those who write the laws benefit from the gerrymandering. Even if a legislature passed a law forbidding gerrymandering, future legislatures could reverse it. If the party in control of the legislature is corrupt, then that is exactly what we should expect.

Gerrymandering should be prohibited by the courts, but the current SCOTUS in its great wisdom ruled that courts must remain silent on the subject.

>The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.

Only one party tried to overturn an election, repeatedly refused to acknowledge they could lose and respect the result of the election, and is propped up by anti-democracy billionaires.

Respectfully, I don't believe that to be true.

Hillary Clinton refused to concede on election night. Al Gore didn't concede in 2000 until over a month afterward. Gore initially conceded, retracted it, demanded multiple recounts and fought his loss in the courts all the way to SCOTUS.

Both parties have many billionaire donors - the Democrats are at about 10% of all donations, the GOP at about 30%.

As I've said elsewhere in this discussion, the only thing that I see that has changed with Trump is that his administration is doing openly what has traditionally been hidden from the public.

Oh man I forgot when Clinton and Gore egged on a mob in an attempted coup as well

   Hillary Clinton refused to concede on election night.

The Associated Press didn't call the election until 2:29 AM EST, publishing their primary story at 2:43 AM EST.

See: https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/behind-the-news/cal...

See: https://apnews.com/article/fb2e92a47f054019a2589ace78d20836

Based on the former link, Hillary gave her concession call to Trump at 2:50 AM EST.

She gave her public concession speech several hours later.

See: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/clinton-concedes-to-t...

I'm rather curious what more you expected.

In Gore's case, we had a razor thin electoral result that hinged on a single state with less than a 550 vote margin against 5.96 million votes cast, or 0.009%. We can argue about how many recounts there should have been, but it makes perfect sense there'd be some contention when the entire election came down to so few votes.

To his credit, he conceded the day after the Supreme Court made their ruling, exhausting his final legal recourse.

See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/dec/14/uselections200...

You may notice a distinct absence of attacks on the US capitol during the certification of either the 2000 or 2016 elections. You'll also do well to note that Bill Clinton in 2000 and Obama in 2016 dutifully aided their Republican successors getting up to speed with their office on the way in, sharply contrasting Trump's treatment of Biden's incoming administration.

And, to this day, Trump still hasn't publicly conceded his 2020 loss. Quite the opposite - on multiple occasions, he's voiced the opinion that he should be allowed to run again in 2028 to make up for his "stolen" second term.

There are still plenty of Republican members of Congress as well as many state-level Republicans who maintain the 2020 election was stolen.

You would have a hard time finding a single elected Democrat at either the federal or state level who would claim any presidential elections were stolen from their party's candidates.

There is no good faith argument to be made that both parties are the same in this regard.

You are completely wrong, as shown by the other posts. Time to reflect on why and readjust your biases and the gaps that let you fall for clear lies (in the case of Clinton) or muddled thinking (in the case of Gore).

Dems aren't even reopening the Russian interference case once Mueller gave his mediocre report, whereas Trump still says and forces everyone around him to say that 2020 was rigged.

Al Gore (2000) and H. Clinton(2016) are counterexamples to that statement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45586134 No they're not

One more MAGA lie

So you and your priors claim.

Helplessness? Not at all. I'd be very much in favor of changing the way our elections are run, in many ways.

Pointing out that one person that you don't like is in a position of power isn't the same thing.

I think this quote by Thomas Paine illustrates my position:

> [...] so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.

There's a reason the US Constitution prohibits bills of attainder. We are supposed to be a nation of laws, applied equally to all. The way to fix this is via legislation that codifies the system we want to have.

Didn’t America not have laws equal at all for a long time based on the Constitution and only recently it is superficially equal to all (we all know the law doesn’t work the same for everyone)?

Yes. We still do.

>> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.

Thanks for the finger wagging - great motivation there. I mean if you live in a country where these things are actual serious problems, you're no longer living in a democracy. I have doubts that ownership of the voting machine company is truly a problem - though it certainly doesn't look great.

>you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.

I have been. What's next?