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Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

It’s not quite Russia levels of vote fakery, but rather similar to many other backsliding democracies - the incumbent is credibly accused of using their influence to insure victory. See “controversies” on this page, which describes the election where they modified the constitution to give erdogan completely unchecked power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Turkish_presidential_elec...

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The subject of that referendum—abolishing indirect election of the president and moving to direct election—is something that people want in America. And the close result on the referendum seems to match opinion polling.

Maybe the referendum was rigged, I don’t know. But centralizing more power in the executive, if that’s what the people want, isn’t necessarily anti democratic.

I know “checks and balances” aren’t exactly written in stone by the Athenians, but they seem like an objectively good idea - I’d argue that any attempt to remove them is anti-democratic in a pragmatic sense. See: the situation in Israel as Netanyahu attempts to consolidate power away from the judiciary to protect himself from corruption charges. Also see: “ turkey accounts for 1/3 of the world’s imprisoned journalists”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Turkey

The real story in Israel is more complicated; the courts have taken power from the other branches; it's about time for there to be some kind of correction, and is often the case, the rebound might very well go too far in the other direction, ruining the possibility of a real system of checks and balances. Netanyahu himself may be going along with it to penalize the courts, but it's unlikely to help his court cases directly. The idea that it's supposed to somehow magically help him is a talking point for some of the political parties, but he would probably need some kind of new legislation to grant him immunity.

>is something that people want in America.

Speak for yourself; as someone who understands what (note: what, not who) POTUS represents and why the Electoral College even exists, I hope our system does not change for vapid reasons.

Direct election of POTUS across state lines is going to reduce democracy, not increase it.

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