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Then they just handed them that victory without extracting any sort of price.

The incoming challenger is riding on a "populist" base. These polices are legitimate "populist" policies. The strategy here is obvious.



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The fact that the result was so close is chilling. How bad do populists have to be to not be re-elected?

There were a set of rules. According to the rules, he won. That's not stealing the election, that's winning by the rules. That's like saying that one team "stole" a baseball game because they had fewer hits than the other team. Yeah, but they had more runs, and that's the rules of the game.

It’s not particularly shocking that the nominal winner of an election would not contest the nominal results of that election. To expect a party to do that out of principle would be ludicrously naive.

According to the article, the desired outcome of the election was a free and fair election. Not a particularly terrifying conspiracy.

Their candidate lost.

Nothing unexpected enough happened that people suggested this. The results weren't far from polls.

What’s your point? A corrupt party was removed by peoples’ votes. It’s how democracy works. Eventually people notice the stealing.

Did I say that ended corruption? No, I said he won because people were tired of the previous party corrupt ways. That’s hardly controversial.


I think the surprise (as stated by their campaign) was from overcoming voting fraud, not from popularity.

I'm not sure Lessig expected anything different to come out of this. Sometimes people run to draw attention to some ideas, rather than because they think they have a realistic chance.

In other words, Lessig didn't need to win in order to win. (Whether he actually won, in the second sense, is a different question...)


Or they thought she was guaranteed to win and wanted to have this mattered handled much quietly once the election was over.

Why?

The concession plan is clear, and everyone knows the vice president of whoever wins. I don't see the problem.


Imagine if "winner takes all" weren't the strategy used to elect officials.

Na, those votes were coming regardless of the loon running

This is similar to the election in Australia just after Julia Gillard took power from Kevin Rudd. Basically to quash the people complaining that she didn't get voted in and just usurped power instead.

That looks like an example of RCV working as intended. The candidate with a lot of support didn't win because a lot of people also strongly opposed him. I don't see how he would have won if his supporters made him their #2 or #3 choice instead of #1.

That is not what the OP is saying. They are indicating _not_ that the oppo party would win, but that the party in power is clearly lying about the results. If they are lying, then that calls for a new election.

They still elect a single candidate at the end.

Amusing aside; if "none of the above" could have won that election it would have been a landslide victory.

Consent of the governed, yeah, right.


Hopefully they were simply campaign promises to get votes.
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