This is a not very useful breakdown of the political situation. There is only one thing that is required to have a democracy, and that is the peaceful transition of power. And that requires that people have to accept the results of elections. Elections don't have to be fair. They don't have to be free from corruption. They don't have to be accurate, lord knows the elections in the United States are horribly skewed due to the fact that we have such low voter turnout. If you wanted to accurately assess who would be the best elected official in a given position you could do a lot better by just getting a board of statisticians and sampling the hell out of your electorate. But the thing that is important is that we go through a process, that process terminates, and we go with whatever it says the winner was. If it was a bad choice c'est la vie I'll see you again next election and if there was shady shit that happened, we can address that in the interim.
I don't give a shit what the far right views on like immigration or abortion or taxes are. I can disagree with them, but that's not like an existential threat to the country. What is in the US is the fact that we have a candidate for president who was still not conceded his loss in the 2020 election and is running again on the same premise that the elections are rigged. Like the bar is so low here.
> There is only one thing that is required to have a democracy, and that is the peaceful transition of power. And that requires that people have to accept the results of elections. Elections don't have to be fair. They don't have to be free from corruption. They don't have to be accurate
"Democracy" means "rule by the people".
If the people are told who their new rulers are rather than choosing who their new rulers are (or even ruling directly, I think there are a couple places that still have direct democracies), then it's not a democracy regardless of how orderly the transitions are.
An important part of democracy is that it proves its legitimacy to the citizens. Threatening citizens who are skeptical or critical of the process (whether reasonably or not) is the only thing here which is a threat to democracy
Yes, but the time to do this is not directly after an election in which your preferred candidate lost.
Okay :: "I think our electoral process needs improvement and changes to make it fair, secure, and auditable."
Not Okay :: "I think our electoral process needs improvement and changes to make it fair, secure, and auditable… and therefore I reject the results of the last election and believe $other_guy to be the rightful president."
> Threatening citizens who are skeptical or critical of the process (whether reasonably or not) is the only thing here which is a threat to democracy
Yet another thing the supreme court judge involved in this Twitter debacle is guilty of.
He opposed all attempts to add an auditable, anonymous paper trail to our electronic voting machines. At some point, he straight up declared that they were unquestionable. It's all "fake news", he claims. Then he started censoring and fining and persecuting anyone who questioned them. Out of all the stupid things our former president said and did, they banned him from politics over his perfectly reasonable criticism of the brazilian voting machines.
Does he have the balls, the sheer audacity to bring his unquestionable machines to defcon and offer them a billion dollars if they can subvert our elections? No. Oh you can audit the machines and the software... By appointment. You're allowed to bring a pen and a piece of paper. The thing runs Linux, good luck with that. Before the elections when I was really engaged with this, I read a report that said the software's makefile downloaded some libraries off the network and linked them right in. Yeah... Normal people protested the elections by actually asking for source code. It wouldn't have helped.
>What is in the US is the fact that we have a candidate for president who was still not conceded his loss in the 2020 election and is running again on the same premise that the elections are rigged.
I was thinking I had heard he conceded recently, but when I looked it up I found that he conceded before the inauguration:
It’s completely legal within a democracy not to accept the results of an election. Right now the sitting president of the US is refusing to accept the results of an election which Lula accepts.
I don't give a shit what the far right views on like immigration or abortion or taxes are. I can disagree with them, but that's not like an existential threat to the country. What is in the US is the fact that we have a candidate for president who was still not conceded his loss in the 2020 election and is running again on the same premise that the elections are rigged. Like the bar is so low here.