The actual campaigns took out billions of $ in ads and campaign ads are never honest, accurate or logical. Who cares about $100k in Russian ads?
It was pretty clear, even for the sensationalized media and sensationalizable public, that Russia did not "hack" the election and that no votes were altered, etc. But now it turns out, hey, there were actually successful penetrations of state voting systems, and at present we are not sure of the extent.
So while the initial "Russia hacked the US election" line was quickly redrawn to be precise about what we knew, it turns out now that there's a reasonable possibility that Russia actually did hack our election. To what extent or effect? Yet unknown.
I guess you missed the news about their attempted and successful intrusions into state election databases?
I did miss the news where Russians successfully manipulated results in those databases. Can you provide me some links, please?
Well, you claimed that Russians hacked our elections, when there is no hard evidence they did. I'm not sure why you had to resort to lying.
>I guess you missed the news about their attempted and successful intrusions into state election databases?
which is borne out by the evidence.
I don't see that as the issue here.
If there's a plane crash in the US, there is an exhaustive effort to identify the failures and improve policies and technology so it doesn't get repeated. Trump sees any audit or investigation into the election as a personal attack on him. I see any feet-dragging as a personal attack on US sovereignty, which is what he was elected to protect.
I get that lots of the 5/6 of America who didn't vote for Trump want some way to nullify the vote. I don't think it's healthy for the country (just like Gore in 2000 decided not to file additional lawsuits to extend the inevitable) to pretend like there is a viable path to overturning the election results.
I want and audit (of the election systems, election financing, and election-season media buys) and accountability for the failures of our overfunded and underperforming intelligence community + military cyber command. And I want some recommendations for policy changes and ideas about how to make sure the plebs are more media literate in the future.
We'll see when Mueller's investigation is over.
The more this is investigated, the less like a democratic election this looks. So tell me: at what point will you accept that fact that the election Trump won was not a democratic election?
Even if everything was above board, at best Trump won exactly because of anti-democratic features of the US Presidential election system. So, in no case did Trump “win a democratic election”.
If an electoral college upset is undemocratic, then there probably aren't any democracies around at all. For instance, there's the Bill of Rights which allows dead people to collude with about a dozen people appointed to lifelong roles to decide what laws you can't bring about. If we continue in this way, we reach the conclusion that "democracy" is a word with no useful significance. So do you propose some other way to describe countries like the US and Canada, and to distinguish them from countries like China and Saudi Arabia?
It's a simple fact that Trump won directly and solely due to anti-democratic features of the US Presidential election system.
> If Trump didn't win a democratic election, then neither did Obama, Bush, Clinton or Washington.
Three of those did not win solely and directly due to anti-democratic features of the then-current system, so while, yes, you could construct standards by which none of them won a “democratic” election, those aren't the standards at issue.
> He apparently won according to the rules that are established.
And, if so, he won a legal election. “Legal” and “democratic” are not the same thing. There are plenty of leaders who have won election under the rules established at the time who no one would argue won a democratic election (for a current and fairly non-controversial example, Pope Francis.)
> The only question is, did he really win according to the established rules, or did he take advantage of foreign power?
That's not only not the only question, but it's not even a question. Whether Trump (potentially illegally) collided with foreign actors in regard to the election is one of the questions that exists, but even if he did, he was unmistakably legally elected: there is no question that he was a Constitutionally-qualified candidate, that the majority of the state-level electors cast ballots for him, and that the Congress accepted, counted, and ratified that result, which is the entirety of what it takes to win by the established rules.
While there are legal questions around Trump and his campaign and administration, the Constitutional validity of his election is not among them.
The questions that concern legitimacy and potential impeachment, while they may be informed by investigation of the legal issues, are ultimately more nuanced and less prior-rule-bound issues of what people are willing to accept.