There are (outdated, but still) campaign financing laws designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the candidate apparently broke. If the courts throw their hands in the air and say "whelp, what can you do?" they would be setting the precedence that foreign election interference is only wrong when you lose.
Of course, the analysis rests on fair authorities trying to do good which is a high bar to clear. But letting a cheater get away with it in plain sight doesn't seem fair either.
I feel like a large swath of the developed world has forgotten why we have elections. We do it because we don’t trust each other, we don’t agree what’s “fair,” etc. So we establish elections as a way of resolving disputes between people who don’t trust each other. It’s exactly like software security. You create a minimal trusted kernel—the machinery of voting and counting the votes—and then build decision making off the forced consensus generated by the elections.
If there was anybody whom everyone trusted enough to second guess the elections, to look at voters’ motivations and fuzzy ideas of fairness you wouldn’t need elections.
Lawrence Lessig (well known to HN for his open source law work) proposed that the US Electoral College was created with the purpose of second-guessing elections. (He didn't like the outcome of the 2016 one and was trying to rationalize mechanisms of overturning it).
Lessig:
- "The framers believed, as Alexander Hamilton put it, that "the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the [president]." But no nation had ever tried that idea before. So the framers created a safety valve on the people's choice. Like a judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not — the people's choice. Electors were to apply, in Hamilton's words, "a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice" — and then decide. The Constitution says nothing about "winner take all." It says nothing to suggest that electors' freedom should be constrained in any way. Instead, their wisdom — about whether to overrule "the people" or not — was to be free of political control yet guided by democratic values. They were to be citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-constitution-let... ("The Constitution lets the electoral college choose the winner. They should choose Clinton")
It’s 1789, and you’re designing a voting-based system. You’ve decided each state gets votes proportional to its population in the presidential election. How do you validate that the result you got from Georgia, two weeks’ travel from NYC, is trustworthy? Seals? They can be tampered with. What about special messengers? Someone could impersonate them.
Solution: send dignitaries that can vouch for each other. The elite of neighboring states is likely to know each other, and you establish a chain of trust up and down the coast. Great!
Except these are people with better things to do than to be errand boys. There has to be something in it for them. Solution: they get to cast the final ballot for President. They are electors.
(This is a theory that I have not validated at all, to be clear.)
So how to interpret the results from one state could be quite different (and potentially subject to rapid change) even if you know the results were genuine. So the results of states always would need to be converted, by the states, into e.g. 15 final votes. So the electoral college emerges quite naturally in this context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
That trust isn’t there when the oversight is from random people at an election commission or law enforcement agency.
If those laws are grossly violated and the candidate wins… then what? “Sorry nothing we can do” just means you’re a sucker if you follow the rules.
All the last decade has shown me is that democracy is far more fragile than any of us really realized. Populations are frighteningly easy to mislead and misinform en masse. Enough voters to swing most elections vote primarily on vibes more than anything resembling a coherent or informed political philosophy.
Drought caused food prices to rise? Better kick out the current guy. Random weakening of our biggest trade partner’s currency causing lower prices of goods? The current guy is a genius!
This is absolutely the wrong lesson to take away from the events of the last decade. The whole point of democracy is that we don’t have a priestly class that gets to impose their views by fiat, like the Brahmins of ancient India.
Spread the right kind of vibes and misinformation and you can get enough of the population to believe anything. Hell, upset enough people and they’ll start to do it themselves.
We’ve already seen several countries essentially vote themselves into dictatorships based on misinformation. This may have been a near miss.
No influence doesn't exist in any country. In France during the first elections Macron was elected, he was pushed heavily by the media. In 2016, almost every news outlet in the country were vocally against Trump. Those are example of "state-actor" level influence on elections, but somehow it's supposed to be fine because it was supporting the "good" candidate. Democracy in unironically in danger, but not for the reasons often voiced. So people and factions try more and more to impose what is the supposed correct outcome of elections or the definition of democracy.
You think that having bad press, as Trump had, was bad - that's not true at all, there is no such thing as bad press. The fact that the media in the US all went against him was just a freebie for Trump in terms of exposure.
Here, on the other hand, no media outlet reported on him, which is very different - yet mysteriously he got 20% from TikTok alone.
So yes, it's good to remove him.
Wtf? Not sure in which Fantasy land you live, but all political candidates everywhere receive campaign money from billionaires specifically "for money and power reasons and not to make life better for the voters", otherwise they wouldn't pay and elections would be worthless to them.
You're just pissed trump won, and ignoring that Kamala received 3x-5x the campaign money from wealthy donors than Trump did. So who's the one being influenced by mad billionaires more?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/11/04/trump-v...
Same with Joe Rogan. He even invited Kamala for a talk and she refused. But Trump didn't and then people blame Joe Rogan for "helping Trump win the elections". At what point is the Democratic Party gonna admit they fucked up every step of the way to connect with the voter, instead of blaming everyone else?
RO is even worse since we're ruled by the same cabal from the communist regime and their chronies and descendents who are basically in every political party. So it doesn't matter who you vote for, the same people will end up profiting off corruption.
At least the US cabal has some entreprenourial billionaires who create top companies and great jobs boosting their economy. RO politics is just thieves stealing from the economy, so we depend on the EU and their companies hiring here for jobs and economic growth.
Please speak for yourself. I voted for Trump and I knew exactly for whom/what I was voting for.
Instead of taking a cue and learning why they lost, they double down that they were right and everyone else (the majority of voters), was wrong.
So they'll have to keep loosing voters until it sinks in.
Based on the media coverage? Building a narrative around a character is done over time, that's what PR consultants do, in hand with journalists and newspapers owners and advertisers.
> This guy in Romania was at 5%, no one knew who he was, then suddenly he's at 20+%. That's next level.
This is very common in elections. Trump was supposed to lose by a large margin in 2016. Polls aren't votes.
In both elections Trump running by was the aberration. His wins have been a function of the electoral college in action.
Going back a bit further, and somewhat tying into the topic of the thread, 2016 Trump owes his GOP nomination (and thus indirectly the Presidency) to a Clinton/DNC op designed to weaken the Republican field.[2] That’s not to say that Trump didn’t eventually resonate with the GOP base, but the powerbrokers of the RNC absolutely didn’t want him and yet their counterparts at the DNC were heavily in favor of putting Trump front and center everywhere.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/clinton-losing-wisconsin-res...
2. https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaig...
It also shows that the counterfactuals are misguided. Campaigning makes a bigger difference than the typical margin of the popular vote. Candidates only campaign in the swing states (if they’re smart) so we don’t know what would happen if they were trying to win the popular vote.
That the establishment and traditional media didn't know him doesn't mean that he was unknown.
But it doesn’t address the actual question, or point.
And I’m not your opponent.
If it’s important to earn the personal point to you, I’m happy to leave it here.
If it doesn’t show up in the polls, either it’s an impressive polling failure - which is a high bar that has to be passed.
Or it’s something else.
Manipulation also poses a very high bar that must be passed.
Most Romanians that work in IT(and post here) live in their own bubble (because they make 5-10x average Romanian salary) and are totally disconnected from the common folks and can't now believe that the person making less than minimum wage that is serving their 3 euros expresso is not loving it.
Those common folks are similar to the rest of Eastern Europe with strict religious beliefs and very conservative so it's not a surprise they vote for someone that they resonate with.
Similar stuff happened in Brussels where a radical islamist party won seats in the parliament by using TikTok tactics. He did not show up in the polls either.
I don't know any of the TikTok people and yet many peers call them celebrities.
This guy broke some rules around elections spending and he will be punished, but calling it Russia interference just because of his politics doesn't have any weight behind it.
Legal decisions can't be based on hearsay from the secret service. Courts take decisions based on proof presented in front of them. For extraordinary decisions, they are supposed to look for extraordinary evidence. The declassified documents are pointing at irregularities, and perhaps a campaign finance violation by one individual. That is a far cry from overwhelming evidence.
- CG's campaign was well organized, on Telegram, by many dedicated people (at least some of which are Romanians, such as those identified but blacked out in the MAI report); at least some of these people have a history of extremist and pro-Russian views, but the documents make no mention of any direct Russian connection
- the campaign used large numbers of fake or dormant Tik Tok accounts, and accessed these from many IPs
- Romanian influencers were paid to promote pro-CG messages, and they mislabeled much of the paid promotion videos; some Romanian corporations that funded this are identified but blacked out in the MAI report
- Russia led its own disinformation campaigns in various ways, unrelated to CG's campaign (the SIE report documents various Russian activities, not a single one mentioning CG or any other candidate or party or group of parties)
- the SRI documents mention some data breaches and published passwords; the STS documents vehemently deny that any cyber actor made any successful attack on the core electoral infrastructure
- the shape of the campaign, from content to infrastructure (mass numbers of dormant Tik Tok accounts being resurrected, coordination over Telegram, etc) is veryalmost identical to known Russian campaigns in Ukraine and Moldova
- there is exactly one, non-specific, claim that "a state actor" coordinated with the CG campaign; here it is quoted in full, from the second SRI document:
> the activity of the accounts was coordinated by a state actor who would have used an alternative communication channel to "roll" messages unto the platform
That is the only specific claim that some state actor, and Russia is not mentioned here despite being mentioned in many other places in these documents. So again, only a suspicion of direct Russian interference in the campaign.
And, while these documents suggest those services have more detailed proof of many of the suspicious activities they represent, the Court has not seen any of that proof: they have only seen these documents, as mentioned in their motivation, which constituted hearsay.
That’s an extremely Soviet/Russian mindset. Blind trust is what leads to authoritarianism. Really the opposite of what you’d want in a functioning democracy.
You can say exactly that about Macron in 2017, he never was elected before candidating for the presidential election. His only public role was as deputy secretary-general of François Holland who was at the time French president.
He was also the Minister of Economics, Industry and Digital Affairs under President François Hollande from 2014 to 2016. A very public role indeed.
There are laws to limit this, whether they limit campaign funding or the involvement of certain persons. In the Romanian case, the argument is not whether the right candidate won, it is whether campaigning laws were broken.
> In France during the first elections Macron was elected, he was pushed heavily by the media.
This canard again. Prove that something unlawful happened, and then you can talk. If you are butt hurt because Marine cannot win an elections then be relieved: she’s likely to become ineligible for 5 years and a candidate that might be able to win the damn thing will have some room instead. If your pet politician is Mélenchon then lol is all I can say. He’s a reason why France is in this shite in the first place.
> Those are example of "state-actor" level influence on elections, but somehow it's supposed to be fine because it was supporting the "good" candidate.
This is completely off-base and intentionally misleading. The media endorsing candidates is nothing like state actors at play.
> Democracy in unironically in danger, but not for the reasons often voiced.
Yeah. Not for the reasons you mention either. The fact that so many people keep repeating these bullshit arguments is part of the problem. Macron would not have had a chance had the others not thoroughly undermined the system for at least a decade before he showed up.
> Prove that something unlawful happened, and then you can talk.
Why this double standard? In the Romanian case, nothing has been proven. There are precisely two one-page long reports from secret services saying there were irregularities favoring this candidate. This is barely enough evidence to even start a prosecution, nevermind issue a final judicial decision to overturn an almost finished election.
I'm as happy as anyone with half a brain that Călin Georgescu is not our next President. But the way the courts went about this is undeniably illegal.
Aren't you worried about actually getting him (or some pal of his) as president due to the Streisand effect?
I don't know much specifically about Romanian politics, but in general this kind of thing can help rather than harm a politician. He can now claim to be a martyr of the establishment and an opponent of authoritarianism.
On the other hand, the court has just shown that it's willing to redo the entire electoral process if the elections don't go the right way. Călin Georgescu will certainly not be allowed to run again. One of the other hard right wing candidates (Diana Șoșoacă) had already been disqualified, for even flimsier reasons, and I don't expect she will be allowed to register either. There is only one far right candidate left (George Simion) - I suspect that they can find reasons to exclude him too.
Whether people might rise up against this or not is unclear. I was dreading some violence last night, but not even a handful of those who had voted with Georgescu, or the far right parties, have taken to the streets (thankfully) so who knows.
> This canard again. Prove that something unlawful happened
Nobody can prove that, but it wouldn't be the first time that alien powers would interfere in French elections, beginning with USA. There is a long list of US interferences in France on Wikipedia [2] and CIA was very active recently in France [3]
* in XXth century: Monnet, Bastien-Thiry, Guy Mollet, Antoine Pinay, Maurice Faure, Jean Lecanuet, François Mitterrand [0], Algiers putsch [1]
[0] https://www.revueconflits.com/soft-power-de-gaulle-washingto...
[1] https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/rendez-vous-...
More damning is stuff like AIPAC, or British Labour's material support for the Democratic party in the last election. Foreign lobbies openly "interfering" in an election in ways less favoured countries never would be allowed to.
There are...campaign financing laws designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the candidate apparently broke
to
the results were "likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign"
He's declared 0 campaign spending. For all we know, the only way he was promoted was by a swarm of foreign-controlled accounts bypassing TikTok's own anti-swarming policies, knowingly or not. The growth in his account was not organic. He had practically zero other exposure to justify his growth
Accepting him as president is tantamount to Romania accepting a president chosen by someone very high up in another state. That, for me, is Romania becoming a puppet state of that power, be it Russia, China or both working together
No, thanks, I'm happy with a borderline legal decision by Romania's Constitutional Court. There were enough red flags in the way this candidate conducted himself for his case to not stand as precedent if a legit candidate is challenged in the future for minor (and even maybe significant, but not exclusive) foreign support
There would be 24/7 headlines about tyranny, disregarding democracy, and more. The US would be leading the charge with sanctions against Hungary if not outright "regime change", and the EU would likely even begin working on motions to remove them from the EU. Yet when the wrong candidate wins a democratic vote, suddenly everything is entirely different. The 'rules based order' becoming a joke is precisely why anti-establishment candidates are winning everywhere.
To now say that the election was invalid when people actually chose him is extremely risky. My guess is it will reinforce a lot of narratives about how evil the west and the USA is. This will only make things worse, and will put the winner in an even stronger position.
Indeed, that's what a lot of the middle upper class urban Romanians with corporate jobs don't understand, that a lot of the people, especially the older less educated ultra conservative ones, resonated with him and his message so they voted for him.
TikTok didn't hypnotize and mind control them to vote for him, they stil had free will, they just like his message the most. Sure his message was full of lies and pandering but that's every single politician.
Do we discard the democratic process because someone undesirable by the educated middle upper class won by majority? Then what's the point of democracy? You keep repeating elections till your preferred candidate wins?
Why do people on this thread keep hammering on this ridiculous point? He is discarded for breaking the law in multiple points, not because he is "undesirable by the urbanites" or whatever ffs. If it was the "soy globohomo candidate" or whatever you'd call it that was breaking these laws, he should also be suspended.
This is the only conclusion I take from this: you are so anti-democratic that you cannot fathom following the rules impartially, that indeed if a court determines that a candidate broke the law it must be because it is trying to manipulate election results. Because this is what you would yourself do if you had that power, protect "your" guy and persecute the "other" guy?
The point is that he broke the election law. That is not negotiable.
Modern mass social media isn't just "help spreading the message", as everyone on this website must surely be aware. It's not a guy handling out pamphlets. It's a hyper-optimised, hyper-targeted psychological howitzer that would make Goebbels or Bernays blush.
Ffs I search for cake recipes on YouTube and my suggested videos are infinite hours of the local far-right guy ranting about gypsies and nepalis. Of course it has an effect, of course such one-sided avalanche of propaganda skews and manipulates things. This is obvious and also empirically verified.
I stress: one-sided. It's not even so much as all the boomers (and impressionable kids) being fed this propaganda for hours on end, it's that it's the only thing that they are fed. Listening to 30 tiktoks in a row of the guy ranting about gypsies and the EU would not be so bad if at least it was followed by some tiktoks giving an opposing views, or exposing that guy's shady business deals and how he pockets millions in taxpayer money! But we all know echo chambers are more lucrative than balanced views......
I still don’t understand why anyone willingly subjects themselves to mass social media, there’s absolutely nothing of value and disinformation runs rampant.
I know I have blind spots in my knowledge and believe stuff that isn’t true, but I do my best to avoid being misinformed.
While I think it would be suboptimal you could imagine "rerun the elections if the winner breaks campaign finance law or gets support from abroad" as an established norm in western democracies, but that's not the world we live in and the EU would not accept these shenanigans from a populist right wing government.
Keep in mind that their ill-gotten gains include votes, and that a criminal's ill-gotten gains of a crime must be disgorged to hold the criminal to account.
It’s a “who watches the watchers” problem. Many countries have tried to impose the legal system on elections and it invariably results in destruction of trust in both elections and the justice system.
Prior to the election, the information was illegally kept secret, so voters couldn't take it into account.
Now, in a new election, if this candidate stops illegally hiding the information, voters will be able to take the information into account.
The rules often appear to exist to punish the just and law abiding, while the unscrupulous simply ignore the laws, win their current sportball match, and then rewrite the laws afterward to legitimize whatever the results were. Really common theme with corporate America.
A lot of campaign finance laws are almost flagrantly ignored, or superficially followed, with a light slap and a candy treat afterward. Corporate laws are almost amazing when there's a fine that "actually" matters, and not just a round-off error "cost-of-doing-business." Company makes $10^11 - $10^9 revenue per year, gets a $10^7 - $10^6 fine a decade later? Right, that was like 100th to a 1000th of a single year revenue fine.
But election laws are completely different. Enforcement of election laws inherently allows unelected lawyers and judges to second guess voters. It puts the justice system above the electoral system, which is corrosive to democracy. What are the checks and balances on the people enforcing those elections laws?
Um, legal enforcement of almost any standard allows unelected lawyers and judges to second-guess "the popular will" — for example, in buying goods and services, many people vote with their dollars for the cheapest option as opposed to quality (as airlines have learned). Without enforcement, this "revealed preference" can drive a cost-cutting race to the bottom on the part of producers — adverse impacts on society be damned (e.g., pollution and other negative externalities).
And voters, in particular, can be subject to buyer's remorse: see, e.g., the recent polling about the increase in the number of Brits who voted for Brexit and now regret it. [0]
[0] E.g., https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/politics/brexit-poll...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Austrian_presidential_ele...
All they have done is giving his supporters a martyr to support. Do they actually think that the mainstream candidates will get the votes of the people who voted for this man?
If anything, this will reinforce their anger and distrust in the system.
So be it, if Google, Instagram, et al. are influencing a campaign, and it is deemed to be illegal with proof, the results of the elections shall be repeated.
The same. If "my" candidate wins in a way that in the long term undermines democratic values, it's still a net negative and I don't want it. That would just empower the "they are all the same" narrative that autocratic politicians use to get to and stay in power.
Like “he who gets the most votes wins, even if the powers that be don’t approve”?
Through fair elections, yes. No election is ever 100% flawless as perfection isn't practical. However, what happened here is blatant cheating involving shady funds.
Aren't you forgetting the essential "while playing by the rules"? Getting the most votes by cheating - and it looks like that was certainly the case here, no doubt about it - is the opposite of democracy. Winning by cheating just happens to be the staple of the very country suspected of interfering. Are you promoting the same "values"?
> the powers that be don’t approve
You are right here. I personally consider it completely normal if the democratically elected powers that be don't approve when someone claims to have won an election - which nobody actually won since the process didn't finish - despite cheating. Winning by cheating is the opposite of democracy. If breaking the law to win is considered democracy, then why is legally restarting elections to win any less so? Hypocritical or trollish preferences aside.
I feel your attitude is a bit defeatist. I think there are mechanisms that can work to protect from deception. For example, transparency of funds, or origin of the message. It's similar to asking for candy bar makers to disclose the true ingredient list and calorie count. It's not a Pandora's box to require this transparency from all politically inclined parties.
And I'm sure other mechanisms could be thought off.
To me, putting in place mechanisms like that and valuing them above even your current opinion of who to vote for matters as much as free speech. It's in the same category. Free speech is another mechanism that even if you don't like what's being said, you should value the right to free speech above it. I think mechanisms to prevent deception are just as important to value even above your personal choice, if you care to keep democracy free.
The scale at which information can be manipulated now, it's easy to be consuming more ideas that are coming from outside your country than inside it without even knowing that all the posts, blogs, tiktoks, tweets, news, memes, and ads you are seeing are not representative of what people in your country are thinking or saying in any proportion, but instead coming from outside your country, orchestrated by rich or organized groups, trying to make you think this is the current discourse, until it becomes the current discourse.
Too many people on this thread think in black and white. Because everyone cheats/lie it’s ok to cheat/lie as much as you want.
Very defeatist, as the other commenter said.
How selective, rayiner. But really "cheating" means not following the rules of the activity you engage in. Those rules are thankfully codified in election law and not an internet comment.
Just to give you some food for though, I could poison my opponents. Which doesn't "manipulate votes", it just “persuades voters through means others don’t like”. By your carefully thought out definition, I did not cheat, fair win.
On the other hand I could take a whole load of dirty hidden money (from foreign actors) against what the law demands, and use that money to... "manipulate votes", because effectively I manipulated and lied to the people giving me the votes. So, as you'd say, I cheated.
I have no expectations that you're here to let your mind be changed though, because I don't think many of the hundreds of "troll" like comments here come from genuine misunderstanding.
Feelings are one thing, but breaking laws like here cannot just be brushed of as some people having hurt their feelings.
What I do not really understand is why this hasn't been handled before the election, i.e., why was the candidate with seemingly zero monetary transparency even allowed to be on a ballot?
In Spain there are violations of campaign laws all the time (and I'm talking by major traditional parties) and they are investigated, but typically the outcome is a fine, or maybe some jail time in severe cases, not invalidating a whole nation-wide election. And I suppose it's the same elsewhere because otherwise we would see news of invalidating elections left and right. Shady campaign financing is not exactly uncommon across the world.
If elections are rigged, the results cannot be accepted under any circumstances. Using shady, undeclared capital in elections amounts to cheating and invites outside influence. This is a serious issue because we entrust the governance of nations to those elected by the people.
Democracy only functions if the outcomes cannot be bought. While no system is ever 100% immune to corruption, blatant disregard for election laws cannot be taken lightly.
If irregularities occur, people can vote again. Yes, redoing elections costs time and money, but if voters still choose the same leaders after understanding how they gained power, then that's democracy in action.
For me, the line is very clear because I've seen it blurred so many times in Turkey, where I come from, and I’ve witnessed the devastating consequences.
Then by definition absolutely every democratic country/society does not function, because guess what: It takes truly stupid amounts of money to win an election. Ergo, you need to buy the election.
Every single candidate and party and reform movement who have argued for removing money from democratic politics have all lost/failed without a single exception. You absolutely cannot win an election without money, without buying it.
The only saving grace is that the guy who spends the most money doesn't always win.
We can go on for years about how it's stupid you need money to win an election, how the amount of money is despicable, how the world is unfair. Whatever: We aren't living in ideal dreams, we're living in the brutally unfair and practical reality.
Some may downplay the importance of this, but I see it as absolutely crucial.
Supporting point 1, remember that he declared zero campaign expenses and never explained how he ran his campaign
Regarding the second point, the urgency under which his campaign took off and the proximity to the elections allowed him to elude mass-media scrutiny. A lot of shady details were unveiled since he became popular, which arguably would've made him unpalatable for a lot of his voters
ISW has a fairly good synopsis of the findings from the Romanian secret services here: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/likely-kremlin...
If you want a comparison to the US political situation, this is not your "Twitter did something shady which bumped Trump's result by 2 percentage points"
A better translation is: Chase Oliver wins the White House! (If you wonder who that guy is, Google him - that's what Romanians had to do with CG after the election night; he was on the ballot and you didn't even know it). All while declaring zero expenses. NSA and CIA suspect foreign interference. His only campaign was on TikTok. Looked eerily similar to Ukraine, Georgia (the country) and Moldova's Russian influence campaigns. He eluded TikTok's swarming detection algorithms. He was unknown until late October - the campaign started in earnest 2 weeks before Halloween. Oh, and he actually looks like RFK jr., talks like RFK jr., just didn't have the same notoriety going into the election
The votes were grossly manipulated through undisclosed funding. This would cancel the results in any democratic country.
but if a South African gave away $1M a day to support his candidate in the US, would that be foreign interference?
Should news media companies that report positively about one candidate or negatively about another be required to file in-kind donation reports? Can we disqualify their favored candidate if they don’t?
If we statistically see that there are a lot of social media posts for or against a candidate, should we require all social media posters to file in-kind donation reports?
If poor university students with nothing more than time and access to a photocopier be required to report in-kind donations for posting flyers?
I’m sure in any election we could and would find plenty of “unreported” donations, and if the penalty was removing the offending candidate, it would be weaponized to remove candidates from competition.
There is no “fair” distribution of information. Allowing courts to interfere in elections with the assumptions that they can remedy that fairness is a recipe for tyranny and manipulation.
The only reason courts should step in is when legally established processes related to registration and casting of ballots (objective, observable processes) are not followed correctly.
Because 100% fair and transparent is not possible, anything should be allowed.
Democracy is not just the fact that people can vote. While manipulation always happens at some level, even between 2 human beings, I believe there should be a limit for an election to be democratic.
I also believe, based on the facts being reported here, that this candidate was far ahead in terms of manipulation.
Although, in his favour, I’d say I haven’t seen a list of facts on all the manipulation the other candidates have done so far, as I’m sure it’s not nothing.
And the theory that TikTok was in on it seems unlikely, they basically burned themselves with a lot of governments with this. I mean, every single established politician in the whole world will take note that TikTok is a threat to him or her and will throw its weight behind banning TikTok.
It's fucking hilarious that this is your argument when in fact blocking opposition candidates and stacking courts and centralising powers and receiving shady money and prosecuting freedom of speech is precisely what Orban has been doing for the past 15+ years, with the EU doing exactly... fuck all about it.
“Rules Based Order” is anything but based on equally applied rules.
[0] - https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/05/09/georgia-foreign-influenc...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Tenet_Media_investigation
Of course if you can prove someone cheated an election it should be scrutinized no matter the side.
What even is your point here? That we shouldn't care because you imagine that your political enemies would do the same thing? What kind of argument is that
> is precisely why anti-establishment candidates are winning everywhere.
Anti establishment? Like Trump, Orban, Miley, Fico, Meloni? Lmao the only people saying they're anti establishment are themselves and their propaganda, as soon as they're in place they're very happy to milk the establishment and serve their own interests
I'm the first to criticize the EU but if the only way out is through Russian puppets I'd rather stay in until we find a better solution.
Information technology is giving all kinds of actors leverage to exploit our human brain's fundamental shortcomings.
In this case, it's a fscking nazi sympathiser jumping to the fore of a presidential election from nothing.
Remarkable and ironic to me, these actors weaponise the powers of technology while often spitting at the scientific method underpinning them.
Why do you call him "a fscking nazi sympathiser" ?
And (ironically) simply convinces people that those who are concerned about Putin's arguably fascist (as opposed to actual Nazi) inclinations are just hyperventilating and overreacting.
Thus, promoting his (and Orbán)'s longevity.
Why is this wrong?
Huh... you know, I never tought about it like that. But I don't disagree with with this statement. thanks
Sorry, you'll have to deal with translating yourself, but current browsers make it easy
For context, Romania's fascist movement, prominent in the late 30s, was called "legionaries"
The right thing to have done here was to let the process continue, have the fascist investigated by the relevant authorities for his likely crimes regardless of whether he won or not, have him stand before a judge, and convict him - and, if he had won, have Parliament suspend him and strip his immunity so that this can all happen.
We have laws and established legal frameworks for all of this. The CCR can't just overrule all other procedures and base its decisions on hearsay.
Is Ukraine being influenced by a state actor? Is Israel? Is Taiwan?
After 2 weeks of frantically trying to convince people not to vote for him, I am exhausted and just want a good night's sleep.
Someone should document the amount of absolute insanity that the candidate was and maybe then you'd get it. I just feel relief at this point.
We're in the same place in the US.
> After 2 weeks of frantically trying to convince people not to vote for him, I am exhausted and just want a good night's sleep.
How many of us felt after the US election.
Then: "By forcing you to publicly sacrifice your integrity, I've poisoned any future resistance with mutual doubt."
> He thought: the worst thing about Vorbis isn’t that he’s evil, but that he makes good people do evil. He turns people into things like himself. You can’t help it. You catch it off him.
-- Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
Which is different to flooding the channels with contradictory information, so that no-one knows what to believe.
The film 'Hyper Normalisation', by Adam Curtis, is well worth watching, BTW.
(or, at least, pretends to)
Europe is going down the drain due to the lack of innovation and over-regulation making people poorer and poorer. Refugees cause crime on the street making people feel unsafe.
The average Joe is pissed and votes whatever extremists, as long as they oppose the EU.
We have inequality in Romania, but we don't have flrefugees causing crime or making people feel unsafe.
The quality of life as steadily been improving.
There is lack of faith in the political class.
It is quite ironical that the main newspaper in the Soviet Union was called la Pravda = "the truth".
Alot of these old Soviet jokes are becoming quite appropriate again. What times we live in.
It's not really a true people's vote in that case any more, so it seems rather like defending democracy.
You know about the old dilemma used for justifying the electoral college "the tyranny of the" majority". Well, me and my countrymen mostly judge that we were about to vote for tyranny in our country. An EC like approach wouldn't have stopped it because of the vote repartition, but only because of electors refusal to vote for a particular candidate. Well, actually, it kind of DID stop it because we had the CCR step in and declare the election null.
This fetishizing of democracy need to take into account the safely valves baked into the law for situations like this and a safety valve just triggered.
the only thing you can attack him for is the lack of reporting of election spending
You elect this guy, you kill democracy. Essentially, this guy's platform was "let's try dictatorship for a change".
And we try to keep the best option that could lead to having a working democracy again in the shortest possible time.
So let the will of the people stand and then it will just be a democracy with a leader you don't like. Overturning the election is the fascist thing to do.
Does fascism stops being fascism when it has popular approval?
I agree that you can't really legislate this kind of sentiment away, but I don't think attempts to do so are entirely useless, either - they slow down the process, which, at the very least, buys more time for potential targets to realize what is happening and get out of harm's way through emigration etc.
If the end result of democracy is fascism, one can simply not allow this transition to happen in good conscience. I fetishise democracy less than I value the truth and in turn that less than I value not having people suffer.
We might have dug our own grave here, and the situation is pretty serious. I for one am not a big fan of the CCR decision and am thankful I was not the one to make it. But I understand how they might come to this decision.
So the insinuation is that people stop having free agency when they’re allowed to view certain kinds of “wrong” speech? Therefore they aren’t entitled to a vote in an election? That’s not democracy, that’s textbook tyranny.
It frankly speaks to your democratic culture, that you can only conceive of a candidate being prevented to run by a shady cabal of elites blocking the candidate they don't like.
Yes how bad he is is irrelevant. I read GP's comment more about how utterly impossible it is for a single person to keep up, let alone fight, the torrent of hyper-optimised propaganda that a few tens of millions can buy on tiktok. Maybe this illustrates why mass social media manipulation skews democracy towards the highest bidder.
Do you have a link to his trial, conviction, and appeals? Was he given an opportunity to respond to the charges, provide his own witnesses and offer his own evidence?
Does the constitution really say, “if foreigners on tik-tok give you too many likes, you may be disqualified”?
By your argument if a country (e.g. China?) outlaws competing political parties then the rubber-stamp single-party elections are “free and fair” because they are in accordance with law. In general the whole point of a “free and fair” election is that the government can’t just change the law and rules to get the result it wants. There is an independent notion of “free and fair” election that is rightly independent of country specific law.
There is no “independent notion of a free and fair election”. Personally I think your idea of a fair election is highly unfair and unethical.
Foreign interference is one of the biggest threats to democracy today. I’d absolutely support a redo of an election, even if my party one, if it was found to be significant enough.
More broadly I think all democracies need to thinking about ways to handle this problem as it’s only getting worse.
* we want candidates to spend ~the same amount of money on campaign and
* Russia interferes
then the state, Canada or Romania, should block TikTok propaganda. What else?
Also I think that if the "same amount of campaign money" rule is proven to be wrong, and they want to go in an "anything goes" way instead, then they should redo the election, and they shouldn't accept the results with unfair conditions.
Ya, that's illegal. If any political party conspired with a foreign state actor to get secret funding and targeted propaganda campaigns on Canadian citizens? You're ok with that?
I think you meant to say, if the foreign state actor independently without the local party conspiring with them, chose to back them up by targeting Canadians with messaging against the other parties and in support of the one they want to win, and you say that's illegal, that would seem wrong.
That I agree. But it still leaves a problem that Canadian have all been manipulated and deceived. At least if it is found out, people should know just to what extent the information they were fed was curated to them by foreign actors to influence you in aligning with their interests. And after that information comes out, if it was that a majority amount of it was, I think it would be fair to have a redo election. Now people could vote conservative again, if they assume that even with that knowledge, they still feel strongly about it.
I'd also add, for future elections, it really shouldn't be possible for foreign actors to target and curate information like that to local citizens, there needs to be safeguards of some sort.
Think of it like a game, it’s only fair if the rules are unbiased and everyone to follow them. There’s a wide range of possible rules for a fair game, but allowing one player to cheat is equivalent to unfair rules.
So sure, you can have fair elections where no candidate needs to disclose their net worth, or fair elections where everyone is registered to share their net worth, but you can’t have a fair election where some people are registered to share their net worth.
Didn't he do that? As for the election spending even if he's lying about the spending they can't prosecute and convict him without delaying the elections for many months if not more.
At this point any outcome seems like a huge failure of the Romanian electoral/political/legal systems.
In fact, I think your response proves my point. What you're saying is that the specifics of the laws matter - i.e, whether or not a election is "free or fair" depend on _what_ the rules of the game are, not only on the fact that they are the rules.
I would like to quote Spock here: "Fascinating..."
Anyway, if the ideas illegally disseminated through this campaign material convinced the voter to choose this candidate over another, what other choice does he have ? Vote for someone that he wouldn't vote in the first place because of his opinion ?
May be I'm wrong assuming people vote for ideas and opinion...
The thing is - in a fair election media scrutiny applies to all candidates. This guy flew under the radar, so media couldn't expose him. Therefore it wasn't a fair choice people were given because the mainstream candidates all received significant more scrutiny.
As crazy as the premise is of Hitler getting inexplicable transplanted into the 21st century, the film manages to demonstrate the appeal of these dangerous populists.
He very clearly broke the law. We could debate the severity of the violation, but it's certainly enough to make you ineligible to run many places.
EDIT: I do find it impossible for him to spend 0 on it though. You have to travel from A to B (at the very least)
The correct course of action is to take the case to the highest court and get them to make a ruling. They decided a do over because the election is too flawed to continue.
If this guy can run again and isn't wrapped up in a criminal case, maybe they will vote for him, but at least now they have far more information than they did before.
Yes, of course.
> and the tainted election must be re-run
No, not at all. First because there is no law that even mentions this possibility - courts should not get to invent rules and regulations.
Secondly because there is no time to take correct decisions of this nature during the short election cycle, and ensure that evidence is properly gathered, rights are respected, and so on. The standard of evidence used to take this decision is barely good enough to charge someone.
There are reasons why there are rules on how to influence voters (campaign), actually, despite voters having absolute 'agency'. There are problematic influences you know, considered problematic by the society.
You act based on information. If someone controls your information, then they control your choices. This is most obvious in cults.
Leaving the topic of these specific elections, and discussing how these operations work-
Censorship isn’t the offensive tool.
You flood an information ecosystem with specific data, and you crowd other information out.
The primary sin in similar discussions is usually the assumption that the best ideas win in the market place of ideas.
This is definitely not the case, because that competition of ideas assumes a fair fight.
Current disinformation techniques target disinformation researchers, flood networks, increase mistrust and spread doubt on fact checkers.
—————-
Holmes, who is wrote the Abram’s dissent, which led to the analogy of the market place- didn’t assume that the best ideas would win.
He assumed majoritarian beliefs would often supplant other ideas.
His point was that it’s only through the process that humanity arrives at better ideas.
Today, there have been domestic and International workarounds found to capture and disrupt the fair trade in ideas.
I know that people like Trump or Georgescu are in a different league in this respect, they lie more and in a more unhinged way, but it's hard to draw a line and say that their votes are don't legitimate becuase their voters were lied to, while probably voters for other parties are putting hope in promises that will be unfulfilled as well.
Okay, I'll get specific now. In the US this typically isn't because the Democrat candidate lied, it's because of obstruction from the right-wing. Sure, Biden promised to cancel student debt, but he was met with obstruction at every step from the right-wing. That isn't a lie from Biden, but the lack of results is what we get when voters believe the right-wing obstructionist liars telling them that student loan forgiveness is evil. So then people call out Biden for somehow "lying" about forgiving student loans, and then don't show up to vote for the Democrat in the next election, because "they are liars".
I still believe that the main "problem" was that the front runner party that has been in the 2nd round for 10s of years and which has the prime minister as the candidate, didn't make it to the 2nd round. Someone wanted this fixed. Obviously the prime minister who was 3rd in the 1st round made declarations in support of the ruling.
Why do you think you can decide for romanians? They made their voting laws - he violated them. They sort it out.
But yeah not a great look for Romania and its political system either way if they have to invalidate the elections and throw away the votes of a significant proportion of the population to stop them from electing a pro-russian/fascist candidate...
No.
But Romania has laws regulating election campaigns. Is your point of view that that Romanian courts should not enforce those existing laws?
There is also a law for how the vote results are to be tallied, when they can be recounted, and in what conditions the recount can lead to a do-over of the election (specifically, the law says that only if widespread fraud of a nature that could have changed the order of candidates). The law also mentions when this do-over would take place (the second next Sunday after the decision is taken, which must be within two weeks of the suspect vote itself).
However, no law in Romania stipulates that an election is to be entirely canceled, from the beginning steps of candidate registration before their campaigns, if one candidate disobeyed campaign finance laws and/or electoral ad labeling laws and no one caught them in time.
> Yes, they were likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign.
That's not how democracy works, and as a matter of fact, how the human brain works.
You can't make informed decisions when state actors are working day and night to make you go against your own interest.
That's exactly why we have regulations like public campaign spending, radio/TV quotas, &c. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than the alternatives? Most likely
The question is: who gets to decide which are nullified and which are not?
> You can't make informed decisions when state actors are working day and night to make you go against your own interest.
It is possible for a brain to do, but it is not common because almost everyone thinks based on heuristics, like you are doing.
It is highly analogous to the rise of science's influence on beliefs and thinking styles in the physical realm, but a different realm. We remain in a sort of dark ages in this regard.
You could still say "The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves."
But this doesn't really pass a smell test for what we want democracy to look like.
Similarly, if you live in a country and you see billions of dollars poured into your election advertisements from USA, Russia, China, etc, you'd be like "wtf are we even sovereign?"
That is done for good reason, you can't waive it away with 'voting secrecy'.
'voting secrecy' can be defeated pretty quickly by asking the voter to take a picture with phone and report it.
you have a phone and the voting booth is private, how is anyone going to catch you?
the other old school (90s) way was you were given an already stamped paper and you had to return an unstamped one to get the money.
or if you want to go communist old school, you had people looking at you through holes in ceiling.
After all, if they are endorsed by the Party, why do you think you can do a better job, citizen?
Elections aren't about defrauding people - you're framing the electoral process as "people have agency to make an X on a voting card, and it doesn't matter what happens until then".
There are laws for elections for some reason. If you're defrauding people, it doesn't represent agency, it represents that people are misinformed.
Do you disagree with the above?
The international consensus is that trump sows international discord with USA's allies. I agree. My analysis has nothing to do with right vs left or sides here
This assumes they were presented with accurate information and a proper understanding no?
Otherwise it's just manipulation? So wouldn't you want to have safeguards in place to make sure as a voter, you are not deceived?
It's not a new idea that this is a serious problem: demagogues were recognized in the Antique.
They got brainwashed into the vote. The other parties had very weak candidates, some with a bunch of corruption issues that the press raved about just before the election. The others are just weak and unprepared, even the second runner up, a former journalist who's currently a mayor in a small town. This surprise candidate is no different, but he has an empty discourse that strikes a chord with many frustrated voters, without screaming or being hysterical, much like that Stoianaglo guy in Moldova. Of course, it's all mumbo jumbo, the guy is either deluded or a mythomaniac. People are fed up, most of them have given the current establishment a hate no-confidence vote, which Russia has speculated mainly with bots on Tiktok. It was quite easy for them to do so given that the inept Romanian politicians also set the dates of both presidential and parliamentary elections over the course of two weeks.
Ffs I search for cake recipes on YouTube and my suggested videos are infinite hours of the local far-right guy ranting about gypsies and nepalis. Of course it has an effect, of course such one-sided avalanche of propaganda skews and manipulates things. This is obvious and also empirically verified.
I stress this: one-sided. It's not even so much as all the boomers (and impressionable kids) being fed this propaganda for hours on end, it's that it's the only thing that they are fed. Listening to 30 tiktoks in a row of the guy ranting about gypsies and the EU would not be so bad if at least it was followed by some tiktoks giving an opposing views, or exposing that guy's shady business deals and how he pockets millions in taxpayer money! But we all know echo chambers are more lucrative than balanced views....
I think this comes down to a very simple question: Is one open to entertain the notion that well crafted messages targeted through algorithmic platforms can drive people to change behavior.
As an ex Facebook person let me offer this thought:
Either advertisement works or it doesn’t. Looking at my past paychecks and stock price of all tech advertisment giants, I have my opinion.
I think it’s preposterous to think that political choices / votes somehow are in a different category for people than all the other things advertisements are run for.
If medical ads work (why would we regulate them) to “manipulate” or convince people to act or spend against their own self best interest, then why would political ones not work.
And in many countries political ads are allowed and are regulated and have massive ad spend. We shouldn’t spend and regulate now if we didn’t think they’d work, would we.
And the debate is not new. I was at FB for Cambridge analytics and saw the damage mitigation first hand - along with the weird conclusions that no harm was done.
Which is the same we see every time a big tech company announces they banned foreign adversaries running influence campaigns and found no evidence they had any impact.
So we have Schroedingers ad product here - highly effective when the ads are official, as measurable via the ads manager, but totally hapless and ineffective when it’s not run by an allowed source.
Romania is a great one minute past midnight wake up call for western democracies to resolve this cognitive dissonance and get off their high horse of humans being selectively able to resist an industry that has mastered manipulation through scientific a/b testing for decades.
Resolving that doesn’t mean getting rid of the notion of free will … one merely need to remember that people’s ability to make decisions is constrained by the data available to them and their ability to make sense of that data.
And time spent on platform and activity - active or passive collection of data - is the constraining factor there. The channels of information are changing and passive absorption is vastly outpacing active informing at a pace most politicians do not comprehend.
The latest ofcom report in the UK shows a 25% increase (1h) of time spent on phones - the vast majority of which is either video social media platforms - in one year!
Maybe 2016 the effect wasn’t strong enough yet. But it’s 9 years of a/b testing down the road, a rise of aggressive engagement video platforms and political podcast influencers and a pandemic later and in the last year alone we’ve seen a massive change in engagement patterns and where people get their data to sensemake reality from.
The human mind is not well understood, and we've seen correlation between things like exposure to suicide and self injury content and increased suicidal ideation.
We KNOW that advertising works, we KNOW that opinions can be swayed with misinformation (it's easier to fool someone, than convince someone they've been fooled) - just look at QAnon for a great example.