Will you accept the election results?

[Hermit]

...to give the lie to the assertion of the present left-wing propaganda machine that the election was somehow subverted or "hacked".

It's no more of a lie than all other assertions made in the absence of evidence. It only becomes a lie when the assertion is paraded as truth by people who know they have nothing remotely resembling compelling evidence.

[Tero]

I can't find the 2012 story but every election urban polling staions get this
http://www.kmov.com/story/28485686/prob ... out-voting

2012 was the worst

[Jason]

...to give the lie to the assertion of the present left-wing propaganda machine that the election was somehow subverted or "hacked".

It's no more of a lie than all other assertions made in the absence of evidence. It only becomes a lie when the assertion is paraded as truth by people who know they have nothing remotely resembling compelling evidence.

Well, quite. I had thought, though, that the leftist media has gotten on board with the whole idea of having sufficient evidence to back your claims. Apparently, all it takes is an election result they find disagreeable to throw out any such pretensions.

I should be clear that even if Russia is behind the hacking of Hillary's emails, that doesn't qualify the election as having been "hacked" or subverted. At least not in my books. If you want evidence of real subversion of democracy you have to look no further than the Fake News epidemic - which is a continuous, and effective, stream of disinformation. I suppose it's less compelling than unsubstantiated claims of direct foreign interference in the democratic process of your country, but it's also an actual subversion of the democratic principle of having an informed electorate.

[Hermit]

How did it give Trump the states? 48 states are winner take all; all the electoral votes go to the winner of the popular vote statewide. Congressional districts have no impact on the overall vote. The two remaining states, Maine and Nebraska (with a combined total of 9 electoral votes) award one vote per congressional district, and two based on the statewide winner. So gerrymandering can only affect the results in those two states.

No. The gerrymandering is precisely due to the winner takes all method. This is what enabled Trump getting 77 more electors even though he trailed the loser by 2.8 million votes.

By the way, Tero's diagram is deeply flawed. Look at the scenario in the middle: Red gets 40% of the votes and 0% of the districts. Does anyone else see a problem with that?

[laklak]

No. The gerrymandering is precisely due to the winner takes all method. This is what enabled Trump getting 77 more electors even though he trailed the loser by 2.8 million votes.

By the way, Tero's diagram is deeply flawed. Look at the scenario in the middle: Red gets 40% of the votes and 0% of the districts. Does anyone else see a problem with that?

OK, maybe I'm dense, but I still don't get it. Gerrymandering is the drawing of Congressional district boundaries to favor one party or the other. It's only effect is on the composition of a given state's House delegation. Yes, that has an effect on national politics in so far as voting in the House of Representatives is concerned. It can have no effect on Senatorial elections, since Senators are not elected based on Congressional districts. Similarly it can have no effect on electoral college votes (caveat Maine and Nebraska) since the total electoral vote is awarded to the winner of the state's popular vote. That popular vote is not based in any way on Congressional districts. In Florida, for example, Trump narrowly won the popular vote by about 1.3%, therefore he got all 29 electoral college votes. That total would have been the same no matter how Congressional district lines were drawn, as it is a statewide total and is not dependent on the political affiliation of individual districts.

Yeah, the diagram is flawed, and it points out the difficulties of any proportional system that utilizes districts. It's very difficult to set up a "fair" district no matter what you do. Plus, even if you did manage to get one set up that precisely mirrored the party affiliation of a given area, people change their politics. People move into and out of districts. There are independent voters who are not affiliated with any party. There are minority parties with no representation at all.

[Hermit]

...to give the lie to the assertion of the present left-wing propaganda machine that the election was somehow subverted or "hacked".

It's no more of a lie than all other assertions made in the absence of evidence. It only becomes a lie when the assertion is paraded as truth by people who know they have nothing remotely resembling compelling evidence.

Well, quite. I had thought, though, that the leftist media has gotten on board with the whole idea of having sufficient evidence to back your claims.

Just an aside: It's a source of continual bemusement for me when North Americans use "leftist", "the left" and even "left wing". Clinton is a liberal in the conservative mould. Trudeau is a straight down the middle liberal. Sanders is a liberal of the social-democratic flavour, and he did not get anywhere. The MSM are no more left than the candidates they are sympathetic to.

Apparently, all it takes is an election result they find disagreeable to throw out any such pretensions.

Who are "they"? Are you by any chance excluding that arseclown's refusal to say he'd accept the election result if he lost?

I should be clear that even if Russia is behind the hacking of Hillary's emails, that doesn't qualify the election as having been "hacked" or subverted.

Assuming the Russians were behind the hack and assuming they'd rather deal with Trump than Hillary, it is safe to say that they'd be bloody well aware what electoral damage the latter was bound to suffer by a well-timed release of dubious information. It was critical to plan the release as close to the actual election date as possible. This would create the initial negative knee jerk reaction by the shocked electorate while not allowing them to rebound before the voting is done, and rebound a great proportion would. Comey did not even know what he had in his hands when he wrote that letter to those eight Republicans, except that they were hacked emails, and yet he said he felt obliged to inform the public. It turned out they were basically copies of emails already in the FBI's possession from a previous hack, about which he said: "We cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts."

So, I put it to you: Had the Russians been behind the hack, and had they chosen the timing of its release, they would have clearly done so with influencing the election result in mind. This may not be exactly the same as subverting the election, but a discussion of the distinction between "influence" and "subvert" would amount to no more than a quibble about semantics.

[Jason]

Oh no, I have no doubt the Russians would rather deal with a Trump presidency than a Clinton one. If they were behind it, it was almost certainly calculated to promote a Trump victory. It may have changed the course of the election, it may have not, Hillary Clinton was a spectacularly unsuitable candidate and I speculate she was destined to be the loser regardless, but it did not subvert the democratic process. Influencing is not subverting. Releasing information that is true may influence the vote, but it takes disinformation to subvert it. The leftist media, "they", have run with this story of "subversion" and "hacking" to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, claiming boldly that the democratic process was compromised. My point is that even if Russia is behind the hacks, and we have no compelling evidence to prove that they are (at least not that the CIA has deigned to release), no subversion occurred. The democratic process was not compromised. All that happened was the American people were better informed - perhaps to the benefit of Russian designs but that has no bearing on the issue.

[Tero]

How did it give Trump the states? 48 states are winner take all; all the electoral votes go to the winner of the popular vote statewide. Congressional districts have no impact on the overall vote. The two remaining states, Maine and Nebraska (with a combined total of 9 electoral votes) award one vote per congressional district, and two based on the statewide winner. So gerrymandering can only affect the results in those two states.

On the Wisconsin / Illinois thing, how can you give Wisconsin "more" of the land? Congressional districts cannot cross state lines. I don't understand your point.

If the one state donated land to the other. There is a guy that draws these maps. Giving some counties or halves to neighboring states he came up with a Hillary elector win. A sort of gerrymandering. It gave away democrats from states that had too many. It was less than a dozen counties he had to tinker with.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Assuming the Russians were behind the hack and assuming they'd rather deal with Trump than Hillary, it is safe to say that they'd be bloody well aware what electoral damage the latter was bound to suffer by a well-timed release of dubious information. It was critical to plan the release as close to the actual election date as possible. This would create the initial negative knee jerk reaction by the shocked electorate while not allowing them to rebound before the voting is done, and rebound a great proportion would. Comey did not even know what he had in his hands when he wrote that letter to those eight Republicans, except that they were hacked emails, and yet he said he felt obliged to inform the public.

What the FBI had that prompted the October surprise letter was a laptop belonging to Anthony Wiener. Wiener is married to (but separated from) Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin. It seems that both Wiener and Abedin used that laptop, and it contained a number of Abedin's emails, apparently including at least some that were job-related. I am unaware of any indication that the Russians hacked Abedin's email account.

It turned out they were basically copies of emails already in the FBI's possession from a previous hack, about which he said: "We cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts."

I don't know if you read Comey's July statement, but it's clear that there was no "hack" involved with the FBI's investigation, unless you count their efforts to retrieve emails from servers that had been decommissioned but not data-wiped.

The actual hacked emails were the ones that the CIA says were obtained by hackers working for the Russian government (from the DNC and from the Podesta [Clinton's campaign manager] email account) that were then given to Wikileaks. This is a separate issue from the FBI investigation of Clinton's email server and the emails discovered on Wiener's laptop in the course of an unrelated investigation.

[Hermit]

No. The gerrymandering is precisely due to the winner takes all method. This is what enabled Trump getting 77 more electors even though he trailed the loser by 2.8 million votes.

By the way, Tero's diagram is deeply flawed. Look at the scenario in the middle: Red gets 40% of the votes and 0% of the districts. Does anyone else see a problem with that?

OK, maybe I'm dense, but I still don't get it. Gerrymandering is the drawing of Congressional district boundaries to favor one party or the other. It's only effect is on the composition of a given state's House delegation. Yes, that has an effect on national politics in so far as voting in the House of Representatives is concerned. It can have no effect on Senatorial elections, since Senators are not elected based on Congressional districts. Similarly it can have no effect on electoral college votes (caveat Maine and Nebraska) since the total electoral vote is awarded to the winner of the state's popular vote. That popular vote is not based in any way on Congressional districts. In Florida, for example, Trump narrowly won the popular vote by about 1.3%, therefore he got all 29 electoral college votes. That total would have been the same no matter how Congressional district lines were drawn, as it is a statewide total and is not dependent on the political affiliation of individual districts.

You're losing your way in unnecessary detail. Back in the good old days before gender identity and expression had become an issue, the principal slogan of people fighting gerrymanders was "One man, one vote". At the end of the day, when a candidate gets 2.86 million (2.1%) more votes than the opponent and still loses, that very clearly means that one man's vote counts for more than another. That's really all there is to it.

Yeah, the diagram is flawed, and it points out the difficulties of any proportional system that utilizes districts. It's very difficult to set up a "fair" district no matter what you do. Plus, even if you did manage to get one set up that precisely mirrored the party affiliation of a given area, people change their politics. People move into and out of districts. There are independent voters who are not affiliated with any party. There are minority parties with no representation at all.

Perfectly proportional representation will never be possible, but that said and ignoring the distortion brought about by the mediation of the Electoral College, you really have the worst possible voting system. First past the post means that only the eventual winner's votes matter. If you voted for Clinton, bad luck. Worse still, if you voted for Johnson or Stein. Why the fuck did their supporters even bother getting out of bed on polling day? A symbolic act? You may as well piss in your black pants.It gives you a warm feeling, and nobody else notices. Just imagine if your seat, district, state, nation or whatever the geographical unit is for an election had five approximately equal candidates. A tad over 20% of all voters would determine who represents 100% of them. Not very representative, is it? Preferential voting, as in Australia, would be an improvement. Better still would be New Zealand's multi-member constituencies. Something we could discuss in another thread, maybe.

[L'Emmerdeur]

As for the assertion that evidence of Russian hacking is unavailable to the public--that's true of the evidence that is held by the CIA and other US government intelligence agencies. However, if a person had been following this story they would have learned that the US government were not the only ones investigating the hacking. Private cyber-security firms have also been involved, and they have not been so hesitant to publicly describe what they discovered. This is old news.

"Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the Democratic National Committee"

CrowdStrike stands fully by its analysis and findings identifying two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network in May 2016. On June 15, 2016 a blog post to a WordPress site authored by an individual using the moniker Guccifer 2.0 claimed credit for breaching the Democratic National Committee. This blog post presents documents alleged to have originated from the DNC.

Whether or not this posting is part of a Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign, we are exploring the documents’ authenticity and origin. Regardless, these claims do nothing to lessen our findings relating to the Russian government’s involvement, portions of which we have documented for the public and the greater security community.

"Threat Group-4127 Targets Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign"

[Jason]

For all that we know, these "private" cyber-security firms have associations with the CIA. They provide as much evidence for their claims. Regardless, it is immaterial to the question of whether subversion of the democratic process actually occurred. What they need to do, if it is at all within their purvue (which as private cyber-security firms I highly doubt it is), is to confirm, or deny, that the information released as a result of these hacks is accurate. If inaccurate then it is, indeed, disinformation and evidence of subversion of the democratic process.

[L'Emmerdeur]

For all that we know, these "private" cyber-security firms have associations with the CIA. They provide as much evidence for their claims.

It appears that you didn't bother to actually read the links I provided.

Regardless, it is immaterial to the question of whether subversion of the democratic process actually occurred. What they need to do, if it is at all within their purvue (which as private cyber-security firms I highly doubt it is), is to confirm, or deny, that the information released as a result of these hacks is accurate. If inaccurate then it is, indeed, disinformation and evidence of subversion of the democratic process.

I don't think that releasing hacked emails constitutes "subversion of the democratic process." Rather it constitutes an effort to influence the result of the election. As has been pointed out, the US has been guilty of that and much worse. While there is some poetic justice in having a foreign government meddle in a US election, the fact that the US has done something doesn't mean that it is excusable.

[Jason]

I glanced at them. Perhaps you'd care to outline the evidence they provide here (after all, it is your claim that they provide evidence)?

[Jason]

I don't think that releasing hacked emails constitutes "subversion of the democratic process."

It doesn't. Unless the information contained in those released emails was fabricated. Then it becomes disinformation and subversion of the democratic process.