Not the parent, but I think there's a difference between looking at a few datapoints that make you curious and jumping to "Trump stole it." As for 2012, who's to say they back the same party each time, or even that it is the same attacker? Certainly most on Hacker News know software can have vulnerabilities.

In other words, there should be many scientific steps between "that's odd" to "hypothesis proven" otherwise it's just a conspiracy theory.

I blame a combination of:

advertisements :: all political ads should probably just be banned period

misinformation on social media :: probably _some_ of which are foreign powers trying to divide the population of other nations

Lack of IRV :: I'd prefer any IRV system over what we have now, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method seems like a winner focused variation of eliminate the 'biggest looser' first and yield the winner IRV.

The Electoral College :: for distorting the entire process and being non-necessary in the modern world. In the late 1700s when it was created the speed of communication was horseback letters and trans Atlantic sailing ships. It made sense to select a representative who would then travel in person to the core of politics, learn more, and possibly change their mind if the interests they represented were better served by another choice. The hyper-politicized, party focused, blindly following electors of today may as well not exist.

To solve voter representation and choice I believe the US needs:

0) Go all mail in ballots everywhere, like Washington State https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/faq_vote_by_mail.aspx

1) IRV, preferably "beatpath method, beatpath winner, path voting, and path winner" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method

2) Remove the electoral college. Step A.1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... Step A.2) Require all votes are counted everywhere. B) Constitutional amendment removing the Electoral College; and while we're at it, mandating IRV of some sort (and hopefully enumerating academic criteria of the method rather than enumerating specific methods).

3) A ban on all political ads and limits on campaign finance and PACs.

4) More voter (general populace) education, an informed public is an implicit requirement for a functional democracy. Probably also better info-graphics presenting 'the books' (money in, money out) about who's paying for what results.

I'm not implying and wouldn't guess Trump stole it. If it was rigged, my guess would be that Putin rigged it without even caring whether Trump wanted to be president or not.