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Comment by wernercd | Hacker News Reader

Which person who was "supposed" to win the election didn't win the election?

The person who was supposed to win did win. There was only one person with the most Electoral College votes...

There are a set of inputs that go into the voters mind that produce a certain output: the voting decision. The technology inputs to produce the correct candidate choice has been somehow thwarted by a bug in the system. The bug has been identified as fake news. To restore the proper functioning of the system the bug has to be fixed by implementing AI systems, overseen by properly vetted quality control personnel, in order to detect and remove fake news. The quality control personnel should be properly vetted to make sure that they are not under the influence of fake news which may cause errors in voting behavior to leak through. You see, people having an incorrect voting decision is evidence that there is a bug in the system that feeds them information. That, or there is a fundamental flaw in their cognitive systems which is why they have been called "deplorables". /end of the movie evil guy speech

Incorrect opinion? Who gets to decide the incorrect opinion?

The side that thinks Trump is a racist/xenophobe/terrorist? Or the side that thinks Hillary Benghazi/Emails/Charity? Or the side that thinks Bernie Venezuela/Socialist/etc? Or the side that think Stein ... Or the side that think Johnson... or... or...

What makes a Trump Supporters opinion wrong and a Clinton supporters opinion right? Or Bern? Stein? Johnson?

We should absolutely work on getting rid of "Fake" news... but what is fake news? What is true news that is obviously biased (CNN/Fox/etc)? What is satire (Onion)?

Who is producing "Non" fake news? CNN? Fox? CBS? NBC? Politico? I can look at news stories on all of the above and see "True" information spun to make one side look good and the other bad...

I love how people think their opinion is OBVIOUSLY right... their opponents opinion is OBVIOUSLY wrong and anyone who doesn't agree with them is a Terrorist/Xenophobe/Islamaphobe/Racist/etc'ad'naseum.

As seen by a foreigner, me, it is quite clear that the status quo and the powers that be had chosen Hillary Clinton as the next US president. But Trump won, so the system has to be corrected so similar things do not happen again in the future. It has nothing to do with who is right or wrong.

Only if the status quo you are referring to is the political, which was the same as TPTB, and not the social. This country did not want more of the old administration and took option B.

I am distinguishing the TPTB from the masses. The TPTB failed and Trump was chosen. Now they need to ensure that a similar thing does not happen again in the future.

And the TPTB exceed the political leaders. I mean the ones that really run the country.

Did you just seriously say "people didn't vote right?" headdesk

The person who won made repeated claims the system was rigged. I can't say if the correct person won. I can say it's clear to the winner there is a public system for show, and a secret system for actually selecting the president.

And the other side said the system was fair. We can trust the results. Anyone who challenges the results is a threat to Democracy.

BEFORE the election everyone was confident and trusting of the election. It wasn't until AFTER the Election that we all of a sudden started to care about Russia "hacking" the election.

I mean... which is it? it's fair and trustworthy if you win but it's not trustworthy and fair if you lose?

Honestly though... if there is a secret system for "actually" selecting the President... do you think those secret puppet masters would choose Trump?

I don't believe there is a secret system. Our president does.

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/74970946297443532...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/78799502552741068...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/78769993071869542...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/78761820744413184...

There are a bunch more.

It were in the news all fall:

https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/russian-election-hacking

October 11: Obama Considers ‘Proportional’ Response to Russian Hacking in U.S. Election

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/us/politics/obama-russia-...

There's also little to no mainstream doubt about the outcome of the vote (of course the President has raised concerns that the vote was not accurate, but most responses to that, for example from Secretaries of State, have tried to emphasize that there is no evidence of major issues with the election). The controversy is all about how Russia may have acted to influence voters.

Supposedly Obama knew for Months/Years... that Russia was trying to influence the election. And by his admission BEFORE the election, you could trust the results. Hillary has a well known quote that "If you don't trust the election results, you are a threat to democracy" (Paraphrased).

If the Obama Administration was worried about Russia influence in the election, why didn't we hear about it BEFORE the results that they didn't like? Why is all the outrage about Russia AFTER the election?

It's hard to hit such a large topic in a short blurb... but where is the anger about Obama influencing elections (Brexit, Israel, etc)? It's okay for Obama to do it but not Putin?

My main point is this: Why is the problem NOW everywhere when the issue was known BEFORE the election and the previous administration did nothing then?

Second point is this: Everyone is trying to influence each others shit. Why is Russia so much worse? Where is the outrage that Obama worked on influencing the elections of other democracies?

October 11 and January 20 is after the election - which is my main point.

October 11 was a month before the election. I don't understand what you are trying to say here.

lol you're right... I was distracted and had a brain fart on that point.

But everything else still stands. The entire Democrat party line was "You can trust the results".

Any activity from the previous administration supported that and pushed the reliability of the system.

And there still isn't anyone questioning the mechanics of the election process (other than the President).

There is still plenty of question about the "mechanics". Plenty of places where people are registered who shouldn't (registered in multiple places, etc). People who shouldn't be voting that is (dead people, immigrants, etc).

The left says "There is no issue. at all. If you disagree, you are trying to subvert and you are a racist."

The right says "MILLIONS AND MILLIONS! ZOMG!"

The truth is somewhere in the middle as far as the "mechanics". There is plenty that can be done to insure the accuracy and veracity of the voting booth.

Sure, there are lots of people in a given year that move or die and are not immediately purged from their previous voter roll. There's no one serious suggesting that multiple registrations and fraud have impacted any election results.

The President and some of his followers have made baseless claims about millions of illegal votes. No evidence and lots of election officials contradicting them, but no retraction of the baseless statements.

> Supposedly Obama knew for Months/Years... that Russia was trying to influence the election. And by his admission BEFORE the election, you could trust the results. Hillary has a well known quote that "If you don't trust the election results, you are a threat to democracy" (Paraphrased).

> If the Obama Administration was worried about Russia influence in the election, why didn't we hear about it BEFORE the results that they didn't like? Why is all the outrage about Russia AFTER the election?

There are two different things going on here, which the right likes to conflate.

Russia influenced the election by manipulating voters' opinions, with means that many consider illegitimate (hacking).

Nobody falsified the election results, by hacking or otherwise. When Clinton said not accepting the results was a threat to democracy, she was referring to that - specifically, Trump's claim that the election was "rigged" through voter fraud. And she did accept the results. Democrats today like to argue that Trump doesn't deserve to be president, but nobody credible is saying that the election was literally invalid and the courts should throw him out of office, or anything like that.

Obama did claim Russia was trying to influence the election before the election occurred - on October 7. [1] It's true that he didn't do more in part because he thought Clinton would win, but he also didn't want to seem to be unfairly influencing the election himself.

There are significant differences between Obama influencing the elections of other democracies and what Russia did: the Russian hacking was (1) covert, not overt, and (2) a violation of US law. Of course, you don't have to agree that those differences matter.

There were absolutely concerns over Russia's cyber attacks before the election. It was even an issue brought up at the debates.

That's true... and the Left said, as a whole and by party line, that the results can be trusted.

The results of the actual polling machines can be trusted. Nobody is claiming that Russia hacked into the polling stations and changed the results, which is what Trump supporters were going on about prior to the election.

That does not mean that Russia did not interfere in our election, which is what the left is angry about today. The evidence of ties between Russia and people involved in the Trump campaign was public knowledge during the campaign and connections between Trump and Russia were topics on the campaign trail and were even discussed in the debates.

You are (at length) confounding Trump's express statements prior to the election that he might not accept the results, with those of others to ensure that the results were trustable.

Verifying a process isn't casting doubt on it.

(Blocking attempts to verify it, as the GOP has repeatedly done, including the 2000 election's split and partisan SCOTUS decision, on the other hand, very much does.)

And the fact is that Clinton did not seek and did not assist the few election recount efforts which were made, at the insistence and initiation of Jill Stein. Clinton's campaign did provide observers to that process, but AFAIU didn't otherwise participate significantly.

(A category error on her part, in my opinion.)

You have (and repeat here) miscategorisation of the state of concern over Russian interference in the election process, though not in the election mechanics. Distinguishing process as propaganda, media manipulation, and voter manipulation through the media, and mechanics as the process of vote collection and tabulation itself.

There are numerous other ways in which votes and elections can be, and are, influenced, including gerrymandering (not a factor in US presidential or Senate elections, but very much so in US House, statehouse, and local elections), and voter suppression through elegibility (e.g., felons' loss of voting rights over their entire lifetime), suppression (ID and registration systems), and the location and outfitting of polling places (requiring hours of wait or miles of travel to vote), and support or rejection of automatic or late registration, or of voting by mail.

Your participation in this thread hasn't particularly enhanced your own credibility.

The Electoral College isn't much of a secret.

I think one can have this attitude with a lot of things. The job which you were supposed to get is the one you got, etc. It must then be that 'supposed to' doesn't really have any meaning, or the opposite, that things are going according to whatever grand plan there exists for us. Who knows.

If you suppose that X is true, that doesn't mean that X is true or even that you're claiming X is true, just that you've supposed it's true.

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