And once again, that doesn’t rule out misogyny playing a role in this election.
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Winning according to long-established rules is not a technicality. If we play chess, and I achieve checkmate, you don’t get to claim victory because you have more pieces on the table.
Vote tampering? Releasing embarrassing emails is not the same as tampering with anyone’s vote.
Trump said the following- “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Once, when I lost some important data, I made the joke that perhaps we can contact the NSA to see if they can locate a copy if the file. By doing so, I was not saying that I want the NSA to copy all my data, or that I approve of them doing so. If you follow both his and my statements to their logical conclusions, we were talking about data that has been deleted. Hacking us now would not help them find it. They would have my files, and HRC’s emails, only if they had been copying the data before they were deleted.
The number of states in the US is not divisible by 3.
The Democrats held the White House for the last 8 years, and held a Senate majority from 2007 to 2015. From a progressive POV the Party’s legislators have been very bad at converting Party platform into law, but I’m not sure that Party reform will help that as much as getting candidates with some modicum of conviction.
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Therein lies a big problem; the system itself is broken, in many areas.
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A victory based on strict interpretation of established rules rather than the actual explicit intent of the majority of American voters? That’s almost the definition of winning on a technicality.
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Mod note:
We seem to be going around in circles, with each circuit picking up a few more edges and insults. Let’s stop that here, please!
More like that will get edited down to whatever nub of argument remains.
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It’s a bit of a tangent but i think there are a couple of things worth noting about those statues:
- Firstly and less important, there’s the differential effect. This sort of thing is going to have more of an impact, both personally and in society’s reaction, on a member of an oppressed group.
- Secondly, both those statues and the misogyny expressed against Hillary Clinton come from the same source. The patriarchy is what tells us idiotic things like hand-size is indicative of penis-size or penis-size is the most important fact about a man or that if a woman’s only value is her attractiveness. These sorts of beliefs don’t even have to be believed to affect you. I laughed at those statues. I rationalize that it was attacking Trump’s insecurities, but it’s still using and perpetuating sexism.
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I feel like I’ve laid out my points pretty well (while also feeling a bit like they’ve been misunderstood by others), so will back off for a bit. Maybe somebody else can bring something new to the debate?
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the thing that gets me is that - by design(!) - many of the voting machines in this election’s swing states are not auditable, and even where they are, were not audited.
how can anyone say there wasnt vote tampering. if you don’t, or can’t check, there’s no way to know.
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BTW: there are comments at that link arguing that American elections are too complicted for unmechanised voting.
This is a (hand-filled, human-counted) Australian Senate ballot:
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I think “people are too stupid” is more accurately “we want people to be too stupid”
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We just had an election between the two most disliked candidates since polling on that axis began.
Trump’s negatives were in the 60 percent area while Clinton’s were about 55.
Now, you can say, “If we could largely get rid of misogyny, Clinton could have won” and that’s a plausible argument.
You can also say, “A woman with lower negatives could have beaten Trump” and that’s a plausible argument too.
All I’m saying is, the second approach is more quickly achievable than the first.
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Yes, vote tampering. Approximately 75,000 blank votes were recorded in Michigan alone, a key state that let Trump claim electoral victory. His lawyers specifically prevented any investigation into those blank votes.
I don’t personally find it a coincidence that Donald Trump Jr. was in Syria meeting with Russians to work out various undisclosed deals right before Donald Trump Sr. started talking about how much he loved Putin.
Those aren’t long-established rules. And the long-established rules we have were designed to make sure slaves and underpopulated rural states had as much a say as the cities; those rules are clearly a wee bit out of date.
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I don’t think anybody’s suggesting that Trump didn’t win the electoral college; it’s clear that he abandoned all pretense of doing what every other candidate does, and focused only on the key swing states which he knew would be extremely tight contests. He knew quite well that even if he lost the popular vote, he could just lie about it afterwards (which he did, and keeps doing); what mattered was cheating his way into the big win by any means necessary. Those are established facts, yes.
My point is that Clinton being a failed, widely-loathed, despised candidate is a myth. She not only won the popular vote by a wide margin, she got more votes than any other white male in history.
But, back to the original topic, Trump knew exactly how close things could be, and focused on tamping down her support in those key states. He absolutely used misogyny as a major tool in his arsenal, and Clinton – for all her years pushing against the glass ceiling – wasn’t able to project enough strength and inspiration to rally against it in the places it mattered.
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Even if true that doesn’t mean we should depend on machines that don’t leave an auditable paper trail. In California voters fill out paper ballots that are counted by machine, but the original paper ballots are retained in case there’s a need to audit the results. Voters also get a coded receipt for every ballot we fill out so we can confirm that they were counted. There’s no excuse for any voting technology that can’t be audited.
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Alright, as many other people have pointed out, given the closeness of the outcome, perhaps it was one of a bunch of causes of defeat.
But if the misogyny of the electorate becomes a generally acknowledged reason for Clinton’s defeat, are we prepared for the natural consequence on internal electoral politics (to say nothing of high level boardroom politics, etc.):
For high-stakes elections (and aren’t they all?), favour nominating male candidates over female ones.
It’s that calculus (which is already present, but could become much worse) that scares the willies out of me, and makes me highly dubious about the value of acknowledging (true or not) the misogyny of the electorate as a deciding factor in elections.
The fight against misogyny, racism, etc will be carried out over decades in a million personal interactions. High profile nominations and appointments also help. But putting the blame for high-profile failures on misogyny, racism, etc. seems (to my mind) to guarantee fewer such high-profile appointments.
Hillary’s campaign was an important step in the fight against misogyny, and could argued is even worth the loss to Trump. But spending time and effort blaming misogyny (if it catches on to become generally accepted wisdom) could undo all the benefit her candidacy has wrought.
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So we shouldn’t acknowledge the clear reality that misogyny was a reason for Clinton’s defeat because if we did then we might live in a world where male candidates have an advantage over female ones? That’s the world we live in NOW.
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Indeed, you’ll certainly hear that on the right. I’m worried that the same “wisdom” will spread to the left.
“This election is simply too important to ignore the voters prejudices.”
Obama didn’t get the nomination because Democrats were naive enough to pretend that racism wasn’t alive and well in America. We can acknowledge the reality of prejudice without surrendering to it.
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