Comment by abernard1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abernard1 | Hacker News Reader

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What are these "huge incentives" you speak of?

What states were swung by a small margin "administered by Republicans" (political parties don't administer elections).

Most of the arguments revolve around mainly 4 metro areas: Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia (with a little Pittsburgh thrown in). These 4 metro areas alone could decide the election via electoral math. It is cliche that these areas have had voter fraud. It's been going on for a century. People have been convicted for these crimes in these areas regularly. For people to act like _this election_, that kind of talk is unreasonable, well, I have some not nice words to say to those people.

Given the extraordinary circumstances, and the narrow margins of victories, people bringing up these facts is reasonable. Youtube allows holocaust denial, and I'm supposed to believe that people claiming inner city fraud (only when it's claimed in the U.S. btw) is "a threat to democracy".

Please.

It is a cliche that conservatives, who fare poorly both in urban areas and among the minorities who disproportionately live in those areas, accuse Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia of voter fraud. Nevertheless, no real evidence of fraud is produced; in fact, the rare cases we do see of actual voter fraud tend to be committed by older Republican voters.

The reason for this is simple: voter fraud is a stupid crime. It's hard enough to convince people that it's worth their time to add their real voice to the cacophony of voices being recorded on election day. To risk imprisonment to add a couple more voices makes no sense.

This has been a conservative trope for decades. If there was any substance to it, you should have no trouble coming up with concrete examples within the last 20 years of material voter fraud being detected in Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. You can't, because there isn't any.

What the affidavits attached to these ludicrous but high-profile lawsuits instead provide is suppositions, like "suspicious" swings from certain levels of Clinton support to different levels of Biden support (it's almost like they're... different people!), or worse, batshit conspiracy theories, like the guy named "Spyder" who ran a SpiderFoot scan on Dominion Voting Systems and got dunked on by the author of SpiderFoot for not understanding the results. Or the woman who testified in Michigan, with the President's personal lawyer sitting next to her, who believes the Obamas funded the secret Wuhan lab where Coronavirus was created.

Liberals have their own problems and blind spots. But conservatives own this, and the travesty of the administration's handling of its predictable loss in the 2020 general election, completely and absolutely.

> It's hard enough to convince people that it's worth their time to add their real voice to the cacophony of voices being recorded on election day. To risk imprisonment to add a couple more voices makes no sense.

But the voter fraud being alleged now isn't one or two ballots. It's ballot harvesting here, and lost SD cards there, voting machines not properly recognizing votes, and poll watchers not being allowed near tables. In any of these cases thousands of votes could have been altered, added, or removed.

We need to take this seriously, investigate, show that the fraud (which is inevitable at some level) didn't change the election (hopefully), and tighten up the rules for next time.

Stuff that should be bipartisan. 1) Voting machines suck, even when they only count. 2) Recounts can't be on the same machines as the first count. 3) Counts must stop unless poll watchers are able to watch. 4) Poll watchers should have to make a positive assertion that they could see, and did watch, or the votes should get recounted. 5) All disputed votes, either the ID or the vote marking, should be kept separate and recounts should involve reexamining the entire vote.

Here you go:

> During his guilty plea hearing, Demuro admitted that while serving as an elected municipal Judge of Elections, he accepted bribes in the form of money and other things of value in exchange for adding ballots to increase the vote totals for certain candidates on the voting machines in his jurisdiction and for certifying tallies of all the ballots, including the fraudulent ballots. [1]

This was 6 months ago. That's election fraud. Investigations don't start with proof, they start with claims. These areas have in large part said that even trying to discover evidence is moot, and that no investigation has standing.

Worse, YouTube is saying that even claims for investigation are invalid. Or that claims of voter fraud past a deadline are somehow off limits, when essentially the _entire_ left wing of the Democratic party has been making claims like these for 4 years.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...

> when essentially the _entire_ left wing of the Democratic party has been making claims like these for 4 years.

Clinton conceded the day after the 2016 election. The democrats have been saying that it is bad to solicit aid from a foreign power to help you win an election through social media campaigns and hacking email accounts. That's wildly different than "actually I got the most votes in relevant states and really should be president".

> Clinton conceded the day after the 2016 election.

That's immaterial. YouTube's censorship restrictions have nothing to do with a formal concession, merely claims of fraud impacting the election. And identical claims of election tampering resulting in a "fraudulent electioin" have been ongoing by Democrats on MSNBC, Twitter, Facebook, CNN etc. for 4 years.

So we're now in a boat where Google/YouTube is essentially arguing they're qualified to make judgements on defending election integrity in the U.S.

It has nothing to do with policy consistency, and everything to do with who the people are who work there.

Every private entity is qualified to make judgements on defending election integrity in the US. They are not required to come up with plans you like.

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