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Comment by latencyloser | Hacker News Reader

You're getting down-voted without anyone else actually providing a rebuttal. But what you're saying matches, roughly, my understanding of what happened. Perhaps their issue is with the way it is phrased, sounding sort of like rhetoric.

So I'll add because I'm more or less with you: I'm sincerely confused how we can spend years alleging Russian interference and now that on a really close election, with contention over the way the ballots were counted, it's being called by the media without presenting doubt despite polling being pretty off? The inconsistency is concerning, in my opinion. What am I not understanding?

If I'd introduced a new system in at work (my understanding is the mass mail-in ballots are new at this scale, but please correct me if I'm wrong) and was testing it and it gave a weird result, I'd at least double check it.

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There is no contention over how the ballots were counted. There are allegations which have been repeatedly thrown out or debunked by judges and press across the country, including those friendly to the parties making said allegations.

So I’d say that’s what you’re not understanding, though I’m puzzled as to how you could have missed it if you spent any time looking into it at all, since every reputable source has reported the rebuttals right alongside the allegations.

There is no question in this election. The margins are not close. They are not surprising. They were not even terribly unexpected. The only party alleging any of those things is the party that has repeatedly eschewed facts for 4 years and longer. The one that has repeatedly pushed useless investigations that they themselves conclude are baseless. And in fact it’s not even the whole party, it’s mostly the parts of the party working directly for the loser.

Does that help clarify your confusion?

Yes, that helps, thank you. I'd read of some officials denying it, but the information around judges is new to me and I will explore it further.

Who do you consider to be reputable sources? I will include them in my reading.

I'm also interested in why it was necessary to refer to the president as a "loser." I thought your point stood without it and all that did was clue me in on the possibility of bias in the rest of the response. Staunch supporters would likely discard your reasoning entirely because of it.

I did indeed mean loser as the opposite of victor, as mentioned in the sibling response, rather than as an ad hominem.

Reputability-wise I focused on the American press in general (Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NYT, etc). My main through-line during the week was following the 538 live blog, which did a good job of linking out to a variety of sources as several of the cases unfolded during the week. A decent summary is the one at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/election-2020-trump-campaign... . You'll find the legal challenges so far are largely about technicalities rather than actual allegations of voter fraud, despite claims otherwise, and that the ones that have been heard have mostly either been dismissed or they have resulted in minor adjustments to procedures, at times to the frustration of the presiding judge (finding in-person recounting of the proceedings requires digging deeper than the above article).

Not featuring in the legal proceedings are other allegations, such as those that certain people who were supposedly deceased had submitted votes. These have mostly turned out to be clerical errors, many of which were already fixed but hadn't necessarily propagated to the systems that the allegers were looking at. As a bonus, here's a 538 feature from 2016, when the groundwork for this kind of argument was once again being laid just in case now-president Trump lost: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voter-fraud-is-very-rar... .

FWIW, I read that part in the non-insulting context, like as in "loser" versus "victor".

Oh, thank you. I can see that now. Perhaps that is how they meant it.

Taking your question in good faith, it's because the argument isn't that "Russian interference" happened. It's that the argument is "Russian interference in favor of Trump" happened. So clearly, if Biden won, the belief isn't that Russia helped Biden, it's that Biden's victory was able to overcome whatever interference was still trying affect things in favor of Trump.

For those who don't recall, Russia had big reasons to endorse Trump over Hillary in 2016: Hillary was bellicose about Russia and Syria, to the point where people echoed worries she'd plunge us into "WW3". That, compared with Trump's contrarian sympathies toward Russia and irreverence about the U.S.'s moral highground (and conservatism AND clear, probable incompetence) of course motivated Russia to support him.

They also hoped that he would come to the table and legitimize Russia as a fellow superpower and usher in a new era of diplomatic relations. The fact that Trump utterly failed to do that probably chilled Russia's interest in the 2020 election though.

China has good reason to endorse Biden; should we assume that Biden has colluded with China in efforts to “hack” our election (whatever tf that means)?

Not solely because of motive, no. You'd need evidence, which is different than motive. Russia having a motive wasn't the only reason to suspect collusion, either.

Because the polling majorly favored Biden and the results showed far more Trump votes than anticipated could rationally be interpreted to mean that mail-in ballots were flawed in a way that favored Trump.

I'm not claiming this is the case but providing an example of how subjective and spinnable any set of facts can be made.

The downvoting could also be because I asked a very basic question and they responded to it with a non sequitur that did not even attempt to answer the question.

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