Why the 2020 presidential election is deeply puzzling | Hacker News Reader

Why the 2020 presidential election is deeply puzzling

spectator.us

7 pointstxmachinery6 comments

> With 60 percent or less of the national Hispanic vote, it is arithmetically impossible for a Democratic presidential candidate to win Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico.

Please, show us the arithmetic, author. Don't claim arithmetic, and show none. An appeal to an empirical approach needs evidence, not a mere sentence saying it is so.

> Please, show us the arithmetic, author.

This is the _Spectator_ (which has, apparently, metastasised to the US). They've never been too big on evidence; it's not that sort of publication. I mean, Boris Johnson was its editor for a while.

This was certainly the weakest point in the article for me. Not explained nor backed up, and not easy to verify (unlike other points).

I did find a PEW Research article [1] that stated Hispanics made up 13% of democratic voters circa 2019, a growing metric (10% in 2012, 11% in 2004, 5% in 1996). Versus Replublican which was 7% in 2019. But I'm not sure how to interpret these (and what other context may be necessary).

It did illustrate Dems rather greater reliance on non-white voters, so if they lost many to Trump, that would at least support the general direction of the statement.

The Spectator article also states that in 2020 Trump grew his support among Hispanics by "two-thirds", but from what? Presumably 2016, but what was that number? From the PEW article it could perhaps be inferred to be 6%, meaning it would be 10% for 2020, a significant jump toward near parity with the Democrats, a trend which might well engender some of the requisite puzzlement.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-20...

No matter who sits in the white house after this, it's clear that we need a complete overhaul of how we do voting. There's zero standardization or accountability across states or even municipalities. We have local volunteers in charge of everything. Maybe that works for local elections, but we demand a higher standard for Federal elections.

Agreed. If some kind of Proof of Personhood, optionally anonymized, combined with a permanent publicly verifiable and immutable record (blockchain?), elections may be conducted securely, verifiably and efficiently.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_personhood

Absolutely, if facial detection allows me into the country no reason not to use that or fingerprints or something for voting. It might not be perfect but its a lot better than what exists now.

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