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Comment by mmmmmbop | Hacker News Reader

> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.

I honestly have no political axe to grind here, but I distinctly remember how 4 years ago it was a legitimate talking point on the losing side that 'faithless electors' (or 'Hamilton electors') should step up to deny Trump the presidency ([1], [2]). Michael Moore offered to pay the resulting fines for any Republican faithless electors [3].

To me as an outside observer those seemed like attempts to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. However, neither the politics subreddit nor Michael Moore have been deplatformed. So I'm not sure the criterion you mentioned is entirely correct.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/5gpmru/first_repu...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/meet-th...

[3] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-moore-appeals-gop-el...

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Also an outside observer, isn't the ability to do that the entire point of having electors in the first place? As terrible as the electoral system is, it wouldn't be illegitimate to use it for its intended purpose.

I strongly believe that if Trump or one of his surrogates had tried to bribe electors into certifying him as a winner in 2020, it would have been rightly called an attempted coup and not a legitimate use of the electoral system.

Probably, which might have something to do with the fact that there's no genuine belief that Biden is going to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands due to administrational incompetence, or going to spend his entire term attempting to subvert democracy. On the other hand, it turns out the people who said those things about Trump in 2016 have been proven 100% correct.

The purpose of faithless electors isn't to stop the appointment of arbitrary candidates based on personal preference, it's to stop the appointment of people who are completely unfit for the position. It absolutely makes sense that it would only be justifiable to exercise that option on certain individuals. An individual who blatantly and repeatedly lies about election results and encourages their supporters to commit voter fraud in an attempt to retain power seems like the exact type of person you might want to stop from having that power in the first place.

To be fair, Michael Moore didn't try to assassinate the Vice President and hold Senators for ransom.

Were either of those things attempted?

That's a good point, but I think it actually services to show just how bad this situation was. It's not a stretch to say that faithless electors are a "feature" of the electoral college. One of the stated reasons behind choosing electors rather than voting directly is that the electors could exercise their own discretion in the choice. I agree that it's unscrupulous to attempt to coax electors like that, but it's at least within the bounds of the framework of presidential elections.

This was a crowd of thousands of people, many armed, attempting to interfere with the actual process of counting the votes of those electors. More than a couple members of the crowd had zip ties, which can only be reasonably explained as hostage taking paraphernalia. A literal gallows was erected, and members of the crowd were chanting for violence against Pence and Pelosi (the next two after Trump in the order of succession). A couple IEDs were found on the premise. A police officer was beaten to death. If security hadn't managed to evacuate congress and the VP before the crowd got to them, it seems likely that there would have been deaths among them.

Treating those two things as equivalent is absurd.

To be fair they wanted to do that because they saw Trump as a would-be dictator unwilling to leave power peacefully and deadest on using the government to punish his enemies and line his own pockets. They did THAT to avoid THIS. Being right about the reasons why you are doing things is actually important.

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