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Comment by theultdev | Hacker News Reader

Yes, as I said, as of right now they have not been held liable, only the voters have been punished by having their votes revoked.

The voters were apparently too stupid and got tricked by scary russian ads, so we must re-do the elections until they come to their senses and pick the correct candidate.

It's TikTok's fault for letting Russian ads in, so we'll take some of their money and we'll also stay in power. Win-win for the establishment.

It couldn't possibly be that the voters knew exactly what they were voting for... They're too gullible, that's it.

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The point is that in the future, TikTok / Google / whatever will have to be more careful with political ads, because they can be bad for business.

Whatever your opinion on the candidates is, it's a fact that many people didn't consider the election results legitimate. In a situation like that, it's impossible to make them legitimate by any administrative action. Courts can make the results legal, but legitimacy is something people decide on their own. If legitimacy is considered important, the only way to regain it is to run new elections. It may take a long time and many attempts, and it may not work at all. But you can't have legitimate elections if the losers don't accept that the elections were fair and they lost.

> it's a fact that many people didn't consider the election results legitimate

it's a fact that more people considered it legitimate, otherwise the candidate in question wouldn't have won the election.

let me ask you this about your "fact" how "many people" didn't consider it legitimate? should be easy to answer since it's a fact.

Legitimacy is not determined by majority vote. It's determined by the people who don't like the results for whatever reason. If the vast majority of them accept that the elections were legitimate, they were legitimate. If a substantial minority of them don't accept the results, the legitimacy is questionable at best, and the country is in a lot of trouble.

> Legitimacy is not determined by majority vote.

> If the vast majority of them accept that the elections were legitimate, they were legitimate.

???

> determined by the people who don't like the results

So I guess I have to ask, which people and how are you determining majority legitimacy if not by vote?

Legitimacy is fundamentally about trust. Trust that the elections were fair, even if you don't like the outcome.

If your candidate won, your opinion on the legitimacy doesn't matter much. If your candidate lost, your opinion matters more. If you think that the elections were legitimate, your opinion doesn't matter much. If you think they were not legitimate, your opinion matters more.

It doesn't really matter if the elections were fair. If the losers don't trust the system, the elections were not legitimate.

A society can handle a small number of people who question its legitimacy. Maybe 5%, maybe 10%, maybe even 20%, depending on the overall level of trust. If too many people don't trust the system, the society doesn't really work anymore. Laws, constitutions, and other institutions are only as strong as people's faith in them.

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