My question is: doesn’t everybody get to say what they want? If the Russians want to post “HRC is a poopy head” a million times on the internet, don’t they get to? I could go to the Daily Caller web site and start posting, “Theresa May is a poopy head” every day, and maybe the paper would cancel my account, but I would never be charged with a crime, no?
So the question of whether foreign propaganda influenced voters is moot, isn’t it? Everybody talks, everybody makes up their own minds. If the propaganda is deemed a hostile act, it is up to the authorities to stop it, but the election results are the election results are the election results.
Collusion is a whole other question, as would be vote count tampering. But I don’t think there is anything to be done after the fact about plain ol’ opinion influencing.
I’d just like to jump in here and say, this thread must really be going the way the OP planned. By page four, we will be in an argument about Shark Week.
Might as well close the thread anyway; it’s gone off the rails, caught fire, careened down a hill into an orphanage, plowed through a highway, thudded into a river, and exploded.
And so what? People still made up their own minds and cast their own votes. If they were deceived by false information, that’s on them. I don’t recall complaints about the adulation given to Obama by the European press before the 2008 election.
Back to the colors, I thought they were reversed until the 1980 election and I thought the networks did it because of Nancy Reagan’s fondness for wearing red. Reagan Red just kind of stuck.
And if the GOP gave the Russian trolls targeted voter info by way of Cambridge Analytica so they could make sure their misinformation hit exactly the right voters in the right locations, that is all fair game as well?
Are we entering a phase of our democracy where literally anything goes? That winning is the only thing that matters, even if it means working with another country to subvert our elections?
Thank you. I believe in democracy because I believe that ultimately the best thing for all of us is for the majority to decide the fate of the country. Even if that differs from the way that I would do things by fiat. My fiat (or anyone’s fiat) will ultimately destabilize society, and so even if I disagree somewhat with the majority, it is ultimately in my best interest for society to be stable.
I don’t mind that Republicans win elections. I’ve voted for a equal (technically, one more Democrat than Republican, but it’s an odd number of elections!) number of Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in my life. I mind that they are cheating to win elections that they shouldn’t win, and instituting unpopular policies that are destabilizing society. The ends do not justify the means. The means are going to ruin this country for us.
There’s already pretty solid evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The question is whether we will have enough proof to say whether or not it definitely and incontrovertibly gave Trump the victory, and I’d say that there’s about less than a 1% chance of that happening. Even relatively neutral experts are probably going to disagree wildly on the degree to which Putin’s efforts were effective. What we probably can say is that they’ve deepened the animosity and distrust between the two political parties and the different socioeconomic and sociocultural factions in this society, which is exactly what Putin intended to do. Having Trump actually win, and actually having an asset in the most powerful office of the land, was just a big time bonus.
Even if experts and the majority of the country agreed that Trump won by virtue of Russian meddling, the Constitution is very clear on the means of both electing (“confirming,” if you will) a president, and removing him from power. Nowhere in the Constitution does it talk about do-overs. Individual states, before certain deadlines can refuse to certify election results and the electors can decide for themselves how to treat questions of an election’s validity, but once the electors select the president…that’s it. Over and out.
Even if the people agree that Russia gave Trump the victory, that doesn’t mean they want him removed from office. It’s possible that enough people think he’s doing well enough to remain president, or that they fear President Pence or President Ryan, or a Democrat even more. You’d really have to move the needle enough to make an impeachment happen. Even if Dems win in a landslide in November, there’s no guarantee that there’d be enough support to remove him from office, and a partisan attempt at impeachment could actually end up backfiring and make people sympathetic to the president.
I don’t know either. It seems unethical as hell though, and dangerous to our democracy. Maybe it should be illegal. It would be nice if something was being done to prevent similar things from happening in future elections, but I’m afraid that those in power don’t really have any incentive to stop this sort of thing since it seems to have helped them this time.