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Comment by Herring | Hacker News Reader

Trump won the popular vote. I don't think this is going away without a major demographic shift, time probably measured in decades.

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He won by a single point, when 30% of the population didn’t vote. It’s not good for the future of the country that he got anywhere as many votes as he did but we should remember that an emboldened minority is still a minority.

A large minority is still large. And not voting is a signal of apathy. Not opposition.

Might be true, but a president is a president for all, not just those who voted for him.

How would this platitude apply to this discussion even if Trump believed it?

Because of the way that the Electoral College works, it doesn’t matter if 2 million more people voted in California or everyone voted in Texas. It wouldn’t change anything. Only the swing states mattered

Sure, and in the swing states he won by small margins. I’m not saying it’s good by any means – much of the damage internationally seems irrecoverable – but anyone opposing him should remember that they have a lot of allies.

He won the popular vote in a year when incumbents across the world ate shit at the polls because of COVID inflation.

The US had the smallest drop in support for an incumbent party.

And yet he still won

It's a winner take all two-party election where a 3% swing in sentiment results in a complete blowout.

Generally one of the two participants wins those.

There's a really serious systemic problem with the party that chose him in its primaries, and there is nothing to prevent it from happening again, but my point is that a 49.8% mandate given the circumstances is... Well, it's not one of overwhelming sentiment.

Tinfoil hat time, I don't think the man claiming everyone else cheated and who got caught cheating in a previous election got all his votes in a legal manner

All the data suggests the opposite. He wasn't in a position of power at the time; the federal government was controlled by the democrats. Elections are run at the state level and are so disparate procedurally that Russia gave up trying to flip them directly. There has been no discrepancy between exit polls and the results. We have to face the fact that this is who the United States chose, and this is who a significant portion of the electorate is ok with.

Elections are, in many if not most states, run electronically.

I don't know about you, but I certainly don't trust all the companies that make the voting machines. For instance, does Musk own stock in some of them? Do their owners vote Trump?

Conflicts of interest are not evidence of fraud.[1]

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/mattblaze.org/post/3lmgt4ufllc26

Voting machine integrity was litigated in the election trump lost. Fox, trump's propaganda organ, had to pay $781 million because they could not substantiate claims of electronic fraud. There are adversarial reviews of voting data at all levels, and audits done at the physical and electronic level. 60 lawsuits found no evidence of fraud. You can't just say, "I think this might have happened because it sounds sinister." There is a ton of legal, procedural, monitored, and reviewed data that overwhemingly makes the case that electronic voting fraud did not happen. If you have evidence to the contrary, present it. Otherwise, its just vibes.

Wait, do you also think Biden won because of voter fraud?

He got 49.8% of the popular vote.

> Trump won the popular vote.

He did not, he got <50% of the total votes at final tally. People who parrot this are under-informed, or lying to claim a mandate his administration lacks.

The person who received the most votes is the popular vote winner.

74,749,891 v 77,168,458 for Trump. Last time I checked, thats winning the popular vote

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