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Ask HN: Could you rig the US Elections?

2 points by ansmithz42 ↗ HN
Here's my question: Through completely legal means, gerrymandering and redistricting, to redraw the district boundaries on a state by state basis to achieve the following goals: 1. Take a majority of state legislatures 2. Take a majority of seats in the House 3. Take a majority of seats in the Senate 4. Take a majority of Electoral College votes 5. For bonus points, take a 3/4 majority of state legislatures and thereby guarantee the control of constitutional amendments Is this possible? I know that it is ethically questionable, but when power comes into the game that doesn't matter. With cheap computing power, could you set up clusters to achieve these goals?

(Edited: Corrected the constitutional level to 3/4)

11 comments

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dekhn
Sure... but that wouldn't be "rigging", that would be "working entirely within the existing legal framework of the US to gain majority control of the apparatus which implements updates to the legal framework". Note that redistricting and gerrymandering aren't always legal (they lead to court cases which sometimes override them). Also, you left out the supreme court- you could pack the supreme court (it's been done) which would allow you to avoid your legal changes being rolled back.

No, there aren't computational ways to achieve this. It's politics and people. In the past, one party has held extreme power but did not egregiously abuse it to remain in power.

AnimalMuppet
Nit: If I understand correctly, "packing" refers to appointing more than 9 Supreme Court justices, which has not been done.
dekhn
For some reason I conflated the fact there were more than 9 justices in the past with that being court-packing. Clearly, I misremember my social studies.
AnimalMuppet
Wait, what? There were more than 9 justices in the past? When, and how many?
dekhn
10 for a short period During the civil war if I read it correctly. For some reason I thought that either FDR or Wilson had packed the court with 12 justices. It was FDR who tried this but failed.
MattGaiser
3. Is impossible without changing the states themselves. 4. Same with the electoral college 5. Same with the states convention.

If you can edit states, then yes.

AnimalMuppet
You need step 1 in order to do gerrymandering; you can't do it by gerrymandering. (Though you can maintain it by gerrymandering.)

And, you can't gerrymander the Senate without moving state borders. That's beyond the power of any state legislature. So if you meant that to be a bootstrap path, it fails, because you can't use step 2 to cause step 3.

The one exception to the above would be if you allowed the state legislature to appoint the senators for that state. To do that, you'd have to repeal the 17th Amendment.

And, you need 3/4 of the states in order to ratify a constitutional amendment.

WheelsAtLarge
It sounds possible but it's a pipe dream. Trying to execute your plan is next to impossible. Also, what you outline is , like you said, perfectly legal. It's not rigging.

Rigging a national election: No way. People bitch about how inefficient the voting system is but that's what gives the system its security. While it might be possible to rig a few areas (very unlikely though) it's impossible to rig the whole country since each state has its own voting rules and system. Coordinating an attack on all the systems is not possible. But it's important to note that we need to protect the system so it doesn't become easy to manipulate in the future.

We see voting manipulation in movies as part of the plot regularly. I suspect that's why people think it's possible. It seem so easy but keep in mind that it's fiction. Just like Superman being able to fly.

If you want to manipulate an election, the way to do it is by using mass media to misinform the masses . If you control the media you control the message and you can sway people to do your bidding. That's one of the reasons we have freedom of the press. It keeps the people in power from controlling the message and staying in power forever. We see this type of manipulation regularly in other countries.

shams93
Because the process is handled locally there are too many pieces to pull off a national level rigging. Bush managed to manhandle the election from Gore but he didn't rig it he stole it. Its much easier to steal an election than to rig it especially if you come from old money power like W Bush did.
shams93
However even in the case of Bush it had to be very very close, when the election is a landslide manhandling won't work.
tomjen3
There is a much easier way: the president has pardon powers, so as long as you have somebody willing to commit murder, he can pardon them and then appoint new justices who know that they have to toe the line or they will die.

I am not advocating this, just pointing out an even more straight forward way to do this.