http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38254946 As mail-in and absentee voter ballots continue to trickle in and the country braces for President-elect Donald Trump to step into power, Hillary Clinton quietly marked a milestone. The latest election totals showed that Mrs Clinton, who lost to outsider Mr Trump last month, has received more votes than Mr Obama did in his 2012 victory, according to data from the National Archives and a running total by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. She has overtaken Mr Trump by more than 2.5 million votes (48% to Mr Trump's 46%). [...] Just how pathetic is it that, five weeks after this election (or "election"), nobody really knows what the result is? "Trickle in." My God, what a ramshackle --- and theft-prone --- set-up. I think both of Dubbya's "victories" were stolen fair and square (in Florida and Ohio respectively). Yet Americans didn't hit the streets in protest. Unshakeable complacency. As for Donald, I'm willing to believe that he really did win this election by the rules. And equally willing to believe that somebody stole it on his behalf. Be that as it may, any American who can still claim that he/she lives in a Democracy wins da big Bunny Wabbit for pure breathtaking gall.
America is neither the purest democracy in the world nor the freest, despite all the mindless jingoistic exclamations of "freedom". So what else is new?
I never said pure democracy, I said purer than others. Let's put aside for a second the fact that you don't understand what a city state is, let's put aside for an minute the fact that at 8 million people out of a country of 70 million London does not have a "vast segment" of the British population concentrated within its demise and let's put aside the fact that the UK is four countries that form a union, can you tell me what any of this has to do with the extent of American democracy? I expect you'll run away without answering again...
When a huge portion of people are concentrated into a single urban center it is much easier to babble about "democracy" and how this means the popular vote. It is different when you have a continent sized country where in the case of Hillary Clinton's popular vote totals are concentrated in New York City and two or three cities in California. With a nation the size of Australia between them.
Why are you negative repping my reply that you both wanted and didn't expect me to answer El Chup? Hypocrite......
Obviously you don't. Elections are more than "one person, one vote". Don't worry though. That is a classic mistake by those of you not well read or educated in history and government.
Because your comment failed to address my own - which pointed out that the British population is far more evenly spaced out than you are claiming, and you show ignorance of our electoral system, not least through not having a clue about Parliamentry constituency boundaries and the sizes of the populations therein. Furthermore, Brexit and the last general election demonstrates that London does not dictate British voting trends. Quite the opposite.
LOL. 'Course! I disagree with you, therefore I'm lying. So uhh.. simple. Of course there effing well is. Just swept under the carpet and ignored is all. You can lead a horse to water, Dayton, but you can't make it drink.
Let's see some evidence, then. I didn't like the result of those elections, but that isn't sufficient for claiming a fraudulent result. Are you saying ballots were destroyed, boxes were stuffed, that sort of thing? What exactly is the allegation?
I personally wasn't predisposed to thinking this. After watching all the nauseating Swift-Boating tactics in the 2004, I would have thought it was yet again a bunch of dumbass Americans drunk on 911 who genuinely wanted four more years of Dubbya. Then I read this: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0601-34.htm Seems to me it's all still there. Otherwise I could send you a Word copy, since it won't be on the internet forever, so I saved it on my hard drive. In my view, this is an extremely well-researched (exhaustively footnoted) article, and if only 10% of it were true, then you have a stolen election. If -- on the other hand -- it's a pack of lies, I would think that RFK Jr would have his ass in court for the rest of his life for libel. Which he apparently hasn't. (Here we all are 12 years later. I think we'd know by now.) Mind you, in the days before elections could be hacked wholesale, you had to have a close election if you wanted to steal it (1960, 2000). Well, 2004 was pretty close and therefore stealable in a Republican-controlled swing state. All you need to do is what RFK describes in the article. (And notice how he starts by wondering how the polls could have gotten it so wrong .......)
Thank you for your source. While it's concerning, it doesn't rise to the level of the 2000 election. 2000's votes were eventually recounted in full for Florida, and that recount -- 18 months or so after the election -- clearly showed that Gore would have won the electoral college if the votes had been counted correctly. The case for 2004 you quote is about voter disenfranchisement; while that is a real threat, there's no proof that all of those votes would have gone to Kerry.
Wow, you digested a 10,000-word text in four minutes flat??? That's some kinda speed-reading feat .... They didn't need to all go to Kerry. Just a moderate percentage. And we're talking places like Black Urban Cleveland. No, sorry, think about it.
You know how extremely difficult it is to prove "libel" in the United States? For one, IIRC you have to prove "intent" which is all but impossible.
Well, that's not evidence of fraud, though. It's a compelling case that vote suppression happened. But as @k has pointed out, we don't know how people who didn't vote would have voted. Mind you, I think such efforts are despicable, but it doesn't rise to meet the claim you have made, which is that the election was outright stolen. [edit to add] I'm not quite the speed reader that some are, but I read the article when it was originally published.
As long as there are unsecured electronic voting machines: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html
Large-scale vote tampering would require a massive campaign in which people, armed with the knowledge to effectively hack machines and whatever tools would be required for such a hack, along with forged seals, were dispatched to hundreds of precincts in the hopes of finding enough unsecured ones to make a difference. (And then managing to have not a single one of them get caught.) Theoretically possible, but highly unlikely. Large-scale voter disenfranchisement is another matter. It involves efforts to make voting more difficult (cutting back on early voting hours, closing polling places in urban precincts to make sure the lines are as long as possible, fighting against same-day registration), selectively targeted voter roll purges, and so on ... and Republicans have gotten very good at it.
You can call it whatever you want, but just because it's de facto rather than de jure doesn't change the fact that Republicans have to resort to large-scale dirty tricks and cheating in order to win.
There's more than one way to skin a cat. You can stuff ballot boxes, have dead people voting 17 times over, rig the machines (in countries where they're foolish enough to use machines), and so on. Or you can make sure that people likely to vote for your opponent never make it into the booth. All these methods do work. If you recall, vote-suppression played a role in Florida 2000, with felons being disenfranchised. A disproportionate number of felons are black and a disproportionate number of blacks vote Dem, so bingo --- you're part way there. The many-week operatic drama following Florida 2000 (hanging chads, supreme court and whatnot) was just the icing on the cake. Therefore, you can successfully steal an election as done in Ohio. Don't forget how close the result was. Do you really think that if a free and fair election had occurred in Ohio 2004 Bush could have been re-elected?
