Simple: you just need the wille to rig and the power to manifest your will freely. No fancy technology, counting systems, or statistical anomalies can stop you. Quantum cryptography is useless in such a case.
Sad but true—if there isn’t enough power to balance that wille.
Watching this brings back memories of Nigeria's 2023 elections. It was (one of a series of) turning point(s) for me when it slowly sank in that the country wasn't worth building a life in. Working remotely & spending in a local currency meant that for the past couple of years, I was insulated and could accumulate savings with little effort. But, the blatant corruption pushed me off the edge.
Quick scan of my social network just confirms the same: anyone extremely agentic, intelligent, or educated I know has either left, is in the process of leaving, or is considering leaving.
Last person out of Nigeria can turn the lights off.
This is why my dad left Bangladesh in 1989. Over the years he developed hope that maybe things had turned around. For awhile, the government wasn’t quite so corrupt and GDP was growing at a fast clip. Then the people overthrew the government and now who knows. I could see that he was upset about having believed for the moment in the country getting better.
I've been through your comment history and I can relate. If you're highly placed enough as an elite, you can form a counter-elite and stage a change of government.
But, in most cases, if you have portable, in-demand skills, it's more reasonable to decamp to a better team than try to fix a failing one. The ones with enough proximity to make any change are usually co-opted, driven into exile, threatened into compliance, or straight-up murdered.
Based on what I read about her and the Awami League, I think removing Hasina will be a net-positive for Bangladesh. Yunus is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist and widely-respected, and if they can keep AL out of power, and pacify any extremists, I think Bangladesh will quickly continue growing.
That's very sad to hear. I've been to Lagos and I always have wished I could have visited longer. As an American I found it an absolutely fascinating place.
I'm happy (?) you found it fascinating, but only because you were visiting. If you had to live in Lagos for, say, 1 year, your opinion would change drastically and you'd be eager to leave.
In many ways it seemed to be a very chaotic place, where money makes the rules, and most people get by however they can, some in the direst of circumstances. I can understand not wanting to live there long-term. But it's also a city of over 10 million people, so I can only image there's so much more to it. I'm just genuinely glad I had the opportunity to visit, because it made real to me the place and the people that I would otherwise only hear about on the news.
Considering the population growth of Nigeria I find it hard to believe that one of the most populated countries in the world will ever run out of talented people.
The systems eroding the country & making the educated & talented leave will make any new batch raised to self-select out of the country. In fact, successive generations of talented kids won't even be raised (or, only at a significantly reduced rate) because of poor investment in education.
Or, to be blunt: a syndicate of evil clown politicians have seized control of the ship of state, looting it of anything not bolted down, and murdering anyone who challenges them.
Fixing it is an extremely high-cost endeavor, so leaving is just the only logical option if you have a portable, in-demand skill.
Perfect example would be 1940s China vs. modern China. Same people, but went from a pre-industrial hellhole to a technological superpower because the gov. deliberately invested into creating a sustainable STEM pipeline and creating a nation where their talented young people are happy to live and work. Nigeria isn't doing any of that in any significant capacity.
On the population angle, Nigeria's politicians have a thing for fudging population numbers and realistic figures are closer to 120M to 140M, vs. the 240-260m Western demographers take at face value. I explained in detail in this comment here. [0]
See also the last presidential elections in Venezuela, where they did not even bother to pretend they did not steal the election, even under overwhelming evidence. A year later, we are still waiting for the official ballots.
That's almost the final level. The final level would be not even holding elections...
At least people can actually audit paper ballot elections. In my country we use electronic voting machines. Attempts to add a paper trail were declared unconstitutional.
>In germany we just saw very public rigging of an election for the federal high court of justice.
Not familiar with that but I imagine that is going to be a controversial statement.
Using Russia as a subject is interesting. A western audience is probably a lot less defensive against the idea that Russia rigs their elections. The video looks interesting.
> Not familiar with that but I imagine that is going to be a controversial statement.
I'm not sure if it's fair to call it rigging, but there was a massive smear campaign against a judge nominated for their constitutional court. Leading to the nomination being withdrawn when it really should've been an appointment as usual. Which is likely the first massive step toward Germany politicising one of the foundations of their democracy, similar to how the USA supreme court seems like it's red vs blue when looked on from the outside.
I'm guessing this conference is rather left leaning, which is why they'd called that rigging, but there wasn't election fraud. It's an issue of course, since this means that rich people can essentially buy massive influence on the German democracy by clever use of social media and lies. Which may seem like the norm to a lot of people on HN, but that's not how it has traditionally been in Germany.
Not to mention that one of the major issues in that debate (for the supposedly "centrist" party) was abortion rights - even though most of her views on the topic were fairly in line with other sitting judges.
It's now alleged that this was caused by a disinformation campaign targeting MPs of that party.
I am shocked, shocked I say, at discovering the US Supreme Court engages in politics! I got bad news for you friend: it always has been. That, or maybe you’re one of those knaves who thinks it’s only fair when your side gets to rule.
What part of my comment leads you to take away whatever is in your head? I just pointed out that SCOTUS is not a fair representation. You've clearly read somethings in between the lines or are confusing other threads.
It is by definition representative and fair: Senators chosen by the people approved thier nomination to the court. You’re not this uninformed about how US politics work, are you?
I see this so often it gets old especially from a certain side of the aisle. If I make an intentionally contained and concise argument someone always seems to interpret it as if it was part of some larger point I'm making. I used to believe it was a tactic to draw you in. But more and more I believe it's reading comprehension and a good bit of built-in bias.
Since Garland didn't even get to a vote, it wasn't necessary to Kavanaugh (or Bork) him to the same degree. Abe Fortus got denied a vote via filibuster in '68, so you could say that Merrick Garland was Fortused.
But a filibuster is an accepted way for the minority to fight back. That's not the same thing as making up a new rule and denying a vote because it's a lame duck year. To equate the two is just strained logic at best.
TIL; I'd always used it for broken/stopped working but I looked it up - neat!
> Origin
1980s: from the name of Robert Bork (1927–2012), an American judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court (1987) was rejected following unfavorable publicity for his allegedly extreme views.
Is "Kavanaugh"ing someone to direct the FBI not to investigate or interview witnesses?
> Wray: "I apologize in advance that it has been frustrating for you. We have tried to be clear about our process. So when it comes to the tip line, we wanted to make sure that the White House had all the information we have.[180] So when the hundreds of calls started coming in, we gathered those up, reviewed them, and provided them to the White House."
> Whitehouse asked: "Without investigation?" After a long pause, Wray answered, "We reviewed them and then provided them to..." Whitehouse interjected: "You reviewed them for purposes of separating them from tip-line traffic, but did not further investigate the ones that related to Kavanaugh, correct?"[180] Wray confirmed that process. Whitehouse asked, "Is it also true that, in that supplemental B.I. (background investigation), the FBI took direction from the White House as to whom the FBI would question, and even what questions the FBI could ask?"[180] Wray confirmed that process.[180]
> Kavanaugh had Eighty-three ethics complaints brought against him regarding his behavior during those Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Chief Justice John Roberts appointed a special federal panel of judges to investigate them. In December 2018, the panel dismissed all the complaints, calling them "serious" but deciding that lower court judges are without any authority to investigate Supreme Court appointees.[181]
> In October 2024, Whitehouse published a final report supporting the view that the supplemental investigation was heavily curtailed by the Trump administration. [182]
It shouldn’t be that controversial a statement. It’s an accurate assessment of what happened this summer in Germany. A judicial candidate was destroyed by false claims online. To me it seemed like German politicians were reading too much US news and wound up aping patterns seen there.
> imagine that is going to be a controversial statement.
not really
but compared to what seems to be happened nearly daily in the US it really is not a big deal
but compared to what is supposed to happen it was a big deal
which seems to be a common trend, being very pissed of about what happened in German politics, then looking to the US and being "they did what now!?", oh it seems things are still fine here
Norway is better ranked, sure so are most other Nordic countries.
But the difference between a (using their terms) "full democracy" and a noticeable better (in the index) "full democracy" is much less noticeable then the difference between a "full democracy" and a "flawed democracy".
The other thing is that is a more then imperfect index. To be able to create such an index you need to select metrics and criteria which are strongly oversimplified. Weather or not this can lead to a bias. Also there is a time delay e.g. 2025 stats are not yet out.
Anyway I'm really getting off topic. The more relevant thing is, that it doesn't matter too much if there are better (or worse) of countries in the index. What rally matters is that you see where your country can improve an try to push for it, even if it's just with voting, otherwise you will stagnate improvements once you reach a relative high standard.
It isn't. A right wind millionaire and his media outlet started a fake campaign against the potential judge. Other media and social media jumped on it as well and the "normal" conservative party was "concerned". A lot of heel-dragging later, the judge had enough and withdrew herself from consideration.
It's a civil matter, but yes. Sadly, courts are slow and the whole story was "there might have been plagiarism in her thesis". Even as traditional media started to explain the story as baseless, social media is a different beast.
The funny thing is after Trump cried wolf so hard about the 2020 election even if that were true no one would take any Democratic attempt at an investigation seriously.
And Trump has even made statements which can easily be interpreted as admission[0].
That’s right. Cry wolf, no foul, cry wolf again but this time, commit foul. Cry wolf one more time for good measure and unleash the military on the citizens.
I'm incredibly skeptical of the idea that Trump stole the election, especially when stuff like that video is used as evidence. Trump is clearly referring to the 2020 election. He is saying that if that election wasn't "rigged", his second term would be over by now, but since it was (in his opinion) "rigged", he will still be president during the World Cup.
All that said, one thing I can't get out of my mind is perhaps the most consistent trait of Trump's political career is him projecting his weaknesses and crimes on others as a preemptive defense for when those same criticisms are made about him. So any time he accuses his opponents of something, it should probably raise red flags for his own behavior.
Are there center or organizations that focus on studying election fraud and manipulation and how to identify it? In a rigorous nonpartisan (to the extent that's possible) way? Organizations that would regularly support and disseminate the sorts of papers being discussed?
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. This subthread (and other similar ones) has nothing to do with anything specific or interesting about the actual OP. That makes it bad for this site. That remains true, btw, even if you're 100% right about everything.
Since unsubstantive/indignant rhetoric tends to attract upvotes, generic dross like often floats to the top of threads, choking out any actually interesting discussion. Therefore please don't post it.
Now do when your country is a democracy. Step 1 would just need a few tweaks like defund public media, start your own social platforms, have existing social platforms bend the knee, appointing judges, appointing executive board members.
I agree to some extent but there were a lot of advantages that Trump had that aren't particularly democratic. Electoral college gives more weight to rural voters. First past the post sucks. It's easy to mislead people because most metrics are lagging indicators (which is why neither party will ever fix the deficit). It also helps that his electorate tends to be less educated.
> they are incompatible with a fair debate
Considering his polling tanked after debating Harris and then he refused to debate again, I'm not sure if you can make this argument.
Didn’t a lot of that polling turn out to be massively wrong? The fact that it was off by so much seems to imply you’re right, it wasn’t a fair debate. Harris received significantly more sympathy from the press and polls, even to the point of peddling outright lies.
The dominant effect of the electoral college isn't giving more weight to rural voters, it's giving more weight to swing states. Votes in California and Texas don't count. Votes in Alabama don't count either.
And first past the post doesn't give an intrinsic advantage to either party. What it does is cause there to be two parties instead of more than two, which doesn't benefit anybody except for the party leaders in both major parties who don't want competition.
> Considering his polling tanked after debating Harris and then he refused to debate again, I'm not sure if you can make this argument.
The general consensus was that Harris would be defeated in a debate if there were neutral moderators, so she would only agree to a debate if the moderators were in her camp. Trump took a chance on that once and it went about as you would expect, after which Trump wouldn't agree to left-wing moderators and Harris wouldn't agree to right-wing or neutral moderators which meant there were no more debates.
The Harris campaign tried to paint this as "Trump won't do any more debates" but it's hard to make that seem credible when Harris was the one dodging media interviews.
The Democrats had better candidates than Harris. Their problem was they didn't nominate one.
It has actually been kinda nuts seeing the media completely flip. 10 months ago Trump had no power and was catching 24/7 flack from media outlets. Now he has power and the media has shifted their stance very quickly.
I live in a democracy, Spain, and the government controls the press through subsidies and ads. All mass media is losing money; our biggest media conglomerate has been in a hole of almost 1 billion euros for decades. The president of the country openly brags on TV about how he controls the public prosecutors. A former president (of the same party) changed the law so the government elects the judges directly decades ago.
Of course you will never hear about this because we are not Poland or Hungary, we did not have the audacity of voting the way they did :)
The complete and total lack of any plan (or even the appearance of the desire) to combat the damage is a good indicator they haven't done anything. Half our leaders are tearing down the government and the other half are wringing their hands about it.
This. The fact that democracy is up against an extremely organized, centralized, and well resourced effort decades in the making with seemingly nothing comparable to combat it has those opposing this on completely reactive footing.
It is hard to see how a reactive group can come out on top in such a case.
The problem is we got rid of "democracy" a long time ago.
The original premise was you have a lot of elected officials and then they act as checks and balances on one another. So, for example, to pass a law against something it has to be voted on by the House (elected officials), and the Senate (originally elected by state legislatures, giving the states, an independent elected body, a voice in the federal government; not anymore) and then signed by the President (another elected official), and then as a final check it had to be upheld by the courts (elected by the President and Senate for lifetime terms).
Then we effectively replaced most of that with administrative bureaucrats that act only within the executive branch. They're not only not directly elected, they're not even indirectly elected by the Senate; the President appoints them -- or they're hired by other unelected bureaucrats -- and then they tend to stick around between administrations because there are so many of them that you can't plausibly replace millions of people every time the constituents want to change who is in office.
Meanwhile they make the rules and enforce them and bypass the courts through coercive plea bargaining. But we call an attack on this system an attack on democracy?
What was the party that continually lost all the important elections supposed to do? The law is very clear that they are not in power in any way.
There's no such thing as a power that the losing team has. The people with authority in the US come from the majority party.
You want the DNC to do stuff, to solve problems, to execute plans that grow this country, you have to put them into power first
Republican voters understand just fine that if republicans don't win the election, their will does not become law. Why is that so hard for Democrat supporters and voters to understand?
There are lots of Democrats legitimately elected to Congress who are not using their lawful power effectively. But the other answer is that Dems could have created a party worth voting for ten or even five years ago.
> What was the party that continually lost all the important elections supposed to do?
They're supposed to write a coherent plan with specifics on what they are going to do once they are in power. The (R) side did this with Project 2025. It was detailed and specific and they are executing on it like a checklist. Where is the (D) checklist?
> You want the DNC to do stuff, to solve problems, to execute plans that grow this country, you have to put them into power first
I'm not going to help vote them into power unless I see what their plan is. Even a one-liner that says "We have a list of what Trump did and we're going to revert each commit!" is better than nothing. Their party platform from 2024 is vague and talks more about principles and what they're not going to do rather than specific things they are going to do.
The Heritage Foundation is a think tank, not the RNC. Project 2025 no doubt has plenty of supporters in the RNC thanks to how influential the think tank is, but it's not an official party position. Any left of center think tank could cook up a Project 2028 document and claim it's the DNC's equivalent – it'd have just as much (official) standing as Project 2025.
To be clear, I'm not defending Project 2025, Trump or the RNC. I don't need any convincing that Trump and republicans are following the plan, it's plain to anyway who's passingly familiar with it. What I'm trying to point out is that there's a strange trend for people to place all of the blame for our current state of affairs squarely on democrats and the DNC, ostensibly because of their failure to precisely match the steps of the RNC – steps the RNC didn't even take, in this case.
Project 2025 is not a response plan. It's also not the same as the Republican platform. They publish separate documents. What you are seeing is the overlap between Project 2025 and Agenda 47. There are multiple think tanks for both sides that are not officially party affiliated - Heritage Foundation, Third Way, Center for American Progress, etc.
Most of the actual strategic mechanisms for either side will not be published. Why would you publish your playbook for the other side to anticipate your moves?
What happens is a candidate posts their platform, such as Ageneda 47. Then you can view the published documents from the think tanks on how that might be achieved, such as Project 2025. And yes, oftentimes the people creating or pushing those programs get put in charge of them or advising on them (see Biden pulling someone from the Center for American Progress to be an advisor, etc).
It's the same link as Republican's equivalent. I.e., it doesn't exist. P25 was some extreme right wing crazies that no one really cares about. It would have been a nothingburger if the Dems didn't try (and fail) so hard to associate it with Reps.
I skimmed the Project 2025 doc during the leadup to the election when there was a big hullabaloo about it. Did not read the whole thing as it was incredibly long, but did read some summaries. Maybe 75% of it was utterly boring conservative stuff that some people surely disagree with, but is hardly worth losing sleep over. 25% or so was somewhere in the territory of extreme right wing / borderline insane.
Skimming that website, whoever is maintaining that is being...very generous with themselves about what they mark as "completed", to put it mildly. For example, "Roll back goal of haze reduction (visible air pollution)" is marked as complete, with the source being an EPA article [1] saying "[the EPA] is reconsidering its implementation of the Clean Air Act’s Regional Haze Program", but no indication of what is being reconsidered, or if anything is actually done.
Putting all of that together with the claimed 46% number, I guess you can count me as a fool. But I'm not buying the hysteria here, sorry.
You are a fool because you didn't expend any effort before dismissing.
Yes, on March 12, 2025 the EPA published that press release.
But a non-fool would search the CFR to see if any proposed rules had been published.
Almost exactly one month after that press release the EPA started releasing draft rules revoking the previous administration's rejections of regional haze reduction programs and approving them instead.
Then you have to actually READ what West Virginia's haze reduction plan does: it removes the previous requirements to install additional post-combustion controls on various coal-fired power plants in the state in order to reduce emissions.
The rule was approved last month.
And the same thing is happening in other states.
"We're reconsidering an implementation" is bureaucratese for "that shit's done, yo".
Jesus fucking Christ this country is doomed because it's full of idiots who won't expend any energy whatsoever to figure out what's going on.
And do what? Say they need to investigate voting machines in <battleground state>, only to have republicans answer "no" and send out the brown shirts while the entirely corrupt federal legislature certified the results anyways?
Voting in the US was already a fragile thing with very little to trust about, purely due to the use of voting machines. Now it's a fully broken system, where no rules are holding up anymore.
I get the feeling this is meant juxtapose the statements Democrats made about the election being very secure in 2020/2024 and how little election fraud is even attempted let alone is successful with the statements Democrats are making now about how the midterms and 2028 elections are going to be rigged.
There is surely nothing at all different about our government as it was in 2024 vs today. We don't have a president that openly told his supporters that they won't have to vote in the next election because "we'll have it fixed so good." We don't have a president helping states more effectively gerrymander their districts, we don't have an administration passing new regulations making it harder to register to vote, restrictions on mail in ballots, and new rules for voting machines designed to decease polling location throughout which affects population centers the most.
Democracy in the US isn't well protected against "find a thing that splits across parties mostly evenly and then make it harder for your opponents." The AlphaPheonix gerrymandering software can give you any election result you want. You don't have to ever stuff a ballot box to get whatever result you want.
The same thing as every election that involves voting machines: that its results cannot be trusted, and that their very presence erodes what little trust Americans can have in their failing democracy.
Now, if you want to trust that the private militia with a budget higher than every single army in the world is definitely not going to intimidate voters and that the machines being "re-certified" are going to have accurate results, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.
And what understanding of the chains of custody, any audit processes, formal validation, authentication and security, and any FOIA-requestable information do you have that qualifies you to say that?
---
Is that really your own-developed opinion, based on concrete available data and reasonable examples, having passed through your own mind and examined by yourself? Or just entertaining oneself by spouting vehement political rhetoric for gratification? (i.e. opinion entertainment. as FN is rightly called)
Your failed democracy is imprisoning citizens in concentration camps, ignoring judge orders, threatening political leaders and has shown callous disregard for any rule of law.
But yeah sure, they're very afraid about FOIA requests :)
It was well-litigated by the Trump administration, and none of their frivolous claims held up. They lost ~60 of their 63 court cases, and the 3 they won were technicalities.
What voting machines are we talking about? To the best of my knowledge, most states and municipalities have moved onto some kind of paper-based machine-read balloting system. Those often take the form of scantron sheets where voters bubble in their choices by hand and feed it into a scanner+box for tallying and safekeeping. Even if the tallying machines were broken or compromised, the paper ballots retain a direct record of voter intent.
There are a variety of voting machines in use, some are like you describe. Others are ATM-like kiosks that print out your ballot based on electronic input. Verified Voting keeps a database of which precincts use which machines.
> the paper ballots retain a direct record of voter intent.
This is true, although it's expensive to recount the paper ballots and in practice people don't often do it. They routinely do a sort of checksum or sanity check by sampling small numbers of ballots. But a full-on paper ballot recount is rare.
Bush v Gore is a famous example of a recount that was halted before it finished.
A lot of the innovations and changes in US elections are the direct result of Bush v Gore, from the (ill-conceived) rush into pure-electronic voting, to modern optical scan balloting technology. You're right that Florida 2000 was fishy and super close, but I don't think it's all that much of a relevant example today. It's famous, but we've learned a lot in the last 25 years.
A better example of close elections and recount procedures is the literal tie that happened in a Virginia state legislature race in 2017. The attorneys were able to litigate the validity and intent of individual ballots in that race because they had the physical ballots, as well as the machine scans and logs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia%27s_94th_House_of_Del...
Thanks because probably about half of all Democrats are moderate and DINOs. You can’t coordinate on a plan when half your base is defecting to the other side when the progressives don’t line up and kiss the DNC ring.
Wild that he even had the opportunity to ask these questions and do his own investigating. The exact same issues happened in a recent US election, but in ours no one was allowed to examine any of the things he was able to.
Sounds like elections in both Russia and the US are rotten these days. Curious to note which party has no desire to rectify these issues.
In the video he shows actual footage of him observing ballot counts by hand. In the 2020 election several precincts in urban areas actively prevented observers from viewing the counting, in violation of state law.
During the hand count they discovered series of ballots that all were marked identically for the United Russia party. Hundreds of them. In the US, tens of thousands of ballots get run through tabulation machines and the result is accepted as accurate simply because the machine counted a known batch of ballots accurately. You can’t see patterns like this with electronic tabulation machines.
He also discusses voter turnout numbers in precincts that broke for Putin’s United Russia party being 80% or greater whereas most other precincts had turnout of 30-40%. He just as easily could have been describing some Detroit precincts that had 90%+ turnout in 2020.
He spends a lot of time discussing security features on ballot bags that reveal evidence they have been tampered with. He discusses chain of custody at length and describes how and when he suspects ballot bags were tampered with. In 2020, mail-in ballots were accepted without any evidence they were actually returned by the voter named on them.
This video is interesting because it describes a lot of the same issues that plagued the 2020 election but for some reason we all expect Russian elections to be rigged, but can’t conceive of ours being anything but squeaky clean.
Simple: you just need the wille to rig and the power to manifest your will freely. No fancy technology, counting systems, or statistical anomalies can stop you. Quantum cryptography is useless in such a case.
Sad but true—if there isn’t enough power to balance that wille.
Quick scan of my social network just confirms the same: anyone extremely agentic, intelligent, or educated I know has either left, is in the process of leaving, or is considering leaving.
Last person out of Nigeria can turn the lights off.
But, in most cases, if you have portable, in-demand skills, it's more reasonable to decamp to a better team than try to fix a failing one. The ones with enough proximity to make any change are usually co-opted, driven into exile, threatened into compliance, or straight-up murdered.
Based on what I read about her and the Awami League, I think removing Hasina will be a net-positive for Bangladesh. Yunus is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist and widely-respected, and if they can keep AL out of power, and pacify any extremists, I think Bangladesh will quickly continue growing.
Or, to be blunt: a syndicate of evil clown politicians have seized control of the ship of state, looting it of anything not bolted down, and murdering anyone who challenges them.
Fixing it is an extremely high-cost endeavor, so leaving is just the only logical option if you have a portable, in-demand skill.
Perfect example would be 1940s China vs. modern China. Same people, but went from a pre-industrial hellhole to a technological superpower because the gov. deliberately invested into creating a sustainable STEM pipeline and creating a nation where their talented young people are happy to live and work. Nigeria isn't doing any of that in any significant capacity.
On the population angle, Nigeria's politicians have a thing for fudging population numbers and realistic figures are closer to 120M to 140M, vs. the 240-260m Western demographers take at face value. I explained in detail in this comment here. [0]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44870564
That's almost the final level. The final level would be not even holding elections...
At least people can actually audit paper ballot elections. In my country we use electronic voting machines. Attempts to add a paper trail were declared unconstitutional.
>In germany we just saw very public rigging of an election for the federal high court of justice.
Not familiar with that but I imagine that is going to be a controversial statement.
Using Russia as a subject is interesting. A western audience is probably a lot less defensive against the idea that Russia rigs their elections. The video looks interesting.
I'm not sure if it's fair to call it rigging, but there was a massive smear campaign against a judge nominated for their constitutional court. Leading to the nomination being withdrawn when it really should've been an appointment as usual. Which is likely the first massive step toward Germany politicising one of the foundations of their democracy, similar to how the USA supreme court seems like it's red vs blue when looked on from the outside.
I'm guessing this conference is rather left leaning, which is why they'd called that rigging, but there wasn't election fraud. It's an issue of course, since this means that rich people can essentially buy massive influence on the German democracy by clever use of social media and lies. Which may seem like the norm to a lot of people on HN, but that's not how it has traditionally been in Germany.
It's not just the outside who see it that way!
It's now alleged that this was caused by a disinformation campaign targeting MPs of that party.
https://www.volksverpetzer.de/analyse/brosius-gersdorf-union...
> Origin 1980s: from the name of Robert Bork (1927–2012), an American judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court (1987) was rejected following unfavorable publicity for his allegedly extreme views.
> Wray: "I apologize in advance that it has been frustrating for you. We have tried to be clear about our process. So when it comes to the tip line, we wanted to make sure that the White House had all the information we have.[180] So when the hundreds of calls started coming in, we gathered those up, reviewed them, and provided them to the White House."
> Whitehouse asked: "Without investigation?" After a long pause, Wray answered, "We reviewed them and then provided them to..." Whitehouse interjected: "You reviewed them for purposes of separating them from tip-line traffic, but did not further investigate the ones that related to Kavanaugh, correct?"[180] Wray confirmed that process. Whitehouse asked, "Is it also true that, in that supplemental B.I. (background investigation), the FBI took direction from the White House as to whom the FBI would question, and even what questions the FBI could ask?"[180] Wray confirmed that process.[180]
> Kavanaugh had Eighty-three ethics complaints brought against him regarding his behavior during those Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Chief Justice John Roberts appointed a special federal panel of judges to investigate them. In December 2018, the panel dismissed all the complaints, calling them "serious" but deciding that lower court judges are without any authority to investigate Supreme Court appointees.[181]
> In October 2024, Whitehouse published a final report supporting the view that the supplemental investigation was heavily curtailed by the Trump administration. [182]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh_Supreme_Court_...
not really
but compared to what seems to be happened nearly daily in the US it really is not a big deal
but compared to what is supposed to happen it was a big deal
which seems to be a common trend, being very pissed of about what happened in German politics, then looking to the US and being "they did what now!?", oh it seems things are still fine here
UK, Canada, Spain are similar ranked.
Norway is better ranked, sure so are most other Nordic countries.
But the difference between a (using their terms) "full democracy" and a noticeable better (in the index) "full democracy" is much less noticeable then the difference between a "full democracy" and a "flawed democracy".
The other thing is that is a more then imperfect index. To be able to create such an index you need to select metrics and criteria which are strongly oversimplified. Weather or not this can lead to a bias. Also there is a time delay e.g. 2025 stats are not yet out.
Anyway I'm really getting off topic. The more relevant thing is, that it doesn't matter too much if there are better (or worse) of countries in the index. What rally matters is that you see where your country can improve an try to push for it, even if it's just with voting, otherwise you will stagnate improvements once you reach a relative high standard.
(That's partly why Germany is getting infested with Nazis again. You can go to jail for calling them out.)
And Trump has even made statements which can easily be interpreted as admission[0].
But it doesn't matter.
[0]https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-trum...
All that said, one thing I can't get out of my mind is perhaps the most consistent trait of Trump's political career is him projecting his weaknesses and crimes on others as a preemptive defense for when those same criticisms are made about him. So any time he accuses his opponents of something, it should probably raise red flags for his own behavior.
From 2016 Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/a-ti...
Since unsubstantive/indignant rhetoric tends to attract upvotes, generic dross like often floats to the top of threads, choking out any actually interesting discussion. Therefore please don't post it.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't fulminate."
> they are incompatible with a fair debate
Considering his polling tanked after debating Harris and then he refused to debate again, I'm not sure if you can make this argument.
And first past the post doesn't give an intrinsic advantage to either party. What it does is cause there to be two parties instead of more than two, which doesn't benefit anybody except for the party leaders in both major parties who don't want competition.
> Considering his polling tanked after debating Harris and then he refused to debate again, I'm not sure if you can make this argument.
The general consensus was that Harris would be defeated in a debate if there were neutral moderators, so she would only agree to a debate if the moderators were in her camp. Trump took a chance on that once and it went about as you would expect, after which Trump wouldn't agree to left-wing moderators and Harris wouldn't agree to right-wing or neutral moderators which meant there were no more debates.
The Harris campaign tried to paint this as "Trump won't do any more debates" but it's hard to make that seem credible when Harris was the one dodging media interviews.
The Democrats had better candidates than Harris. Their problem was they didn't nominate one.
Of course you will never hear about this because we are not Poland or Hungary, we did not have the audacity of voting the way they did :)
It is hard to see how a reactive group can come out on top in such a case.
The original premise was you have a lot of elected officials and then they act as checks and balances on one another. So, for example, to pass a law against something it has to be voted on by the House (elected officials), and the Senate (originally elected by state legislatures, giving the states, an independent elected body, a voice in the federal government; not anymore) and then signed by the President (another elected official), and then as a final check it had to be upheld by the courts (elected by the President and Senate for lifetime terms).
Then we effectively replaced most of that with administrative bureaucrats that act only within the executive branch. They're not only not directly elected, they're not even indirectly elected by the Senate; the President appoints them -- or they're hired by other unelected bureaucrats -- and then they tend to stick around between administrations because there are so many of them that you can't plausibly replace millions of people every time the constituents want to change who is in office.
Meanwhile they make the rules and enforce them and bypass the courts through coercive plea bargaining. But we call an attack on this system an attack on democracy?
It was a clear sign of the inaction and impotency to come.
There's no such thing as a power that the losing team has. The people with authority in the US come from the majority party.
You want the DNC to do stuff, to solve problems, to execute plans that grow this country, you have to put them into power first
Republican voters understand just fine that if republicans don't win the election, their will does not become law. Why is that so hard for Democrat supporters and voters to understand?
They're supposed to write a coherent plan with specifics on what they are going to do once they are in power. The (R) side did this with Project 2025. It was detailed and specific and they are executing on it like a checklist. Where is the (D) checklist?
> You want the DNC to do stuff, to solve problems, to execute plans that grow this country, you have to put them into power first
I'm not going to help vote them into power unless I see what their plan is. Even a one-liner that says "We have a list of what Trump did and we're going to revert each commit!" is better than nothing. Their party platform from 2024 is vague and talks more about principles and what they're not going to do rather than specific things they are going to do.
Here the link to Project 2025 for reference https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
What steps are you referencing? I don't get your comment.
Also, the DNC and RNC just choose people and fundraise. It's strange to me how people refer to the parties like this.
Most of the actual strategic mechanisms for either side will not be published. Why would you publish your playbook for the other side to anticipate your moves?
What happens is a candidate posts their platform, such as Ageneda 47. Then you can view the published documents from the think tanks on how that might be achieved, such as Project 2025. And yes, oftentimes the people creating or pushing those programs get put in charge of them or advising on them (see Biden pulling someone from the Center for American Progress to be an advisor, etc).
Project 2025 is almost halfway implemented and several of its authors hold positions in government, charged with its implementation.
Everyone who thinks it is some side project or wish list that isn't "real" and actually, literally, happening right now is a fool.
https://www.project2025.observer/en
Skimming that website, whoever is maintaining that is being...very generous with themselves about what they mark as "completed", to put it mildly. For example, "Roll back goal of haze reduction (visible air pollution)" is marked as complete, with the source being an EPA article [1] saying "[the EPA] is reconsidering its implementation of the Clean Air Act’s Regional Haze Program", but no indication of what is being reconsidered, or if anything is actually done.
Putting all of that together with the claimed 46% number, I guess you can count me as a fool. But I'm not buying the hysteria here, sorry.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/administrator-zeldin-begins...
Yes, on March 12, 2025 the EPA published that press release.
But a non-fool would search the CFR to see if any proposed rules had been published.
Almost exactly one month after that press release the EPA started releasing draft rules revoking the previous administration's rejections of regional haze reduction programs and approving them instead.
Here's a draft rule revoking the disapproval West Virginia's plan and approving it: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-06608.pdf
Then you have to actually READ what West Virginia's haze reduction plan does: it removes the previous requirements to install additional post-combustion controls on various coal-fired power plants in the state in order to reduce emissions.
The rule was approved last month.
And the same thing is happening in other states.
"We're reconsidering an implementation" is bureaucratese for "that shit's done, yo".
Jesus fucking Christ this country is doomed because it's full of idiots who won't expend any energy whatsoever to figure out what's going on.
It's all part of the show folks.
Voting in the US was already a fragile thing with very little to trust about, purely due to the use of voting machines. Now it's a fully broken system, where no rules are holding up anymore.
The 2026 midterms _will_ be stolen.
There is surely nothing at all different about our government as it was in 2024 vs today. We don't have a president that openly told his supporters that they won't have to vote in the next election because "we'll have it fixed so good." We don't have a president helping states more effectively gerrymander their districts, we don't have an administration passing new regulations making it harder to register to vote, restrictions on mail in ballots, and new rules for voting machines designed to decease polling location throughout which affects population centers the most.
Democracy in the US isn't well protected against "find a thing that splits across parties mostly evenly and then make it harder for your opponents." The AlphaPheonix gerrymandering software can give you any election result you want. You don't have to ever stuff a ballot box to get whatever result you want.
Now, if you want to trust that the private militia with a budget higher than every single army in the world is definitely not going to intimidate voters and that the machines being "re-certified" are going to have accurate results, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.
--- Is that really your own-developed opinion, based on concrete available data and reasonable examples, having passed through your own mind and examined by yourself? Or just entertaining oneself by spouting vehement political rhetoric for gratification? (i.e. opinion entertainment. as FN is rightly called)
But yeah sure, they're very afraid about FOIA requests :)
2020 was a free and fair election.
> the paper ballots retain a direct record of voter intent.
This is true, although it's expensive to recount the paper ballots and in practice people don't often do it. They routinely do a sort of checksum or sanity check by sampling small numbers of ballots. But a full-on paper ballot recount is rare.
Bush v Gore is a famous example of a recount that was halted before it finished.
A better example of close elections and recount procedures is the literal tie that happened in a Virginia state legislature race in 2017. The attorneys were able to litigate the validity and intent of individual ballots in that race because they had the physical ballots, as well as the machine scans and logs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia%27s_94th_House_of_Del...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992351
Sounds like elections in both Russia and the US are rotten these days. Curious to note which party has no desire to rectify these issues.
It doesn't really help that this line of thought is completely banned by one party though.
During the hand count they discovered series of ballots that all were marked identically for the United Russia party. Hundreds of them. In the US, tens of thousands of ballots get run through tabulation machines and the result is accepted as accurate simply because the machine counted a known batch of ballots accurately. You can’t see patterns like this with electronic tabulation machines.
He also discusses voter turnout numbers in precincts that broke for Putin’s United Russia party being 80% or greater whereas most other precincts had turnout of 30-40%. He just as easily could have been describing some Detroit precincts that had 90%+ turnout in 2020.
He spends a lot of time discussing security features on ballot bags that reveal evidence they have been tampered with. He discusses chain of custody at length and describes how and when he suspects ballot bags were tampered with. In 2020, mail-in ballots were accepted without any evidence they were actually returned by the voter named on them.
This video is interesting because it describes a lot of the same issues that plagued the 2020 election but for some reason we all expect Russian elections to be rigged, but can’t conceive of ours being anything but squeaky clean.