Alright I see one crux here.

Bush and Obama governed almost identically, despite the "heated" election between Obama and Romney/McCain. It seems like what we have is essentially a uniparty with two WWE faces for the public, and they execute mostly Kayfabe performances that all lead to the same outcome in the end.

It appeared, from the media reaction to Trump, that the uniparty was actually threatened by him. This is why I think it's more likely in this election, rather than previous elections, that there was more of an effort to rig on one side than there was on the other.

I do find myself confused: Trump himself seems relatively incompetent, and his first term didn't seem all that threatening to the establishment (despite the rhetoric). Even with this confusion, though, I still think the difference between Trump and "Republican candidate X" is significant.

Also, I intentionally didn't refute your point about "as fair as any other election." I completely understand that idea; no one here is claiming nothing nefarious ever happens, it's just a matter of degree and impact.

I think there are significant differences between this post and the run of the mill leftist drivel you see somewhere like reddit. This post is well written and coherent, and, as such, invites discussion. I've also seen the author respond to opposing comments with real counter-arguments, rather than random ad hominems and fallacies.

Also, while politics is certainly the mind-killer, I personally enjoy the occasional political article where we get to discuss it with LessWrong's forum features and LessWrong's audience. There's a chance of actually having my mind changed, and the new agree/disagree feature, as distinct from upvote/downvote, makes this kind of thing possible.

I will agree, though, that it's not the same class as the typical post. I can feel my own mind being killed by my own political bias trying to engage with this, as I'm sure others can as well, but I still want to try. Maybe some sort of compromise with a political and non-political section would be useful.

It was the mechanism and order of the counting which differentiated this election from others. The counts continued long into the night, and into the following days. It was the first election with substantial mail in voting, adding many new attack vectors for fraud.

At about 2am on election night, Trump was a -190 favorite, so not huge, but definitely expected to win. It was certainly unlikely that there were enough votes in the deep blue areas that had yet to be counted to swing the election, although it was no where near prohibitively unlikely.

Then there were the tens of anecdotal reports of various fraudulent or suspicious behaviors at polling and counting sites. To determine what update, if any, these provide, we'd need to know the base rate for them: would there be this many reports for any election where there was sufficient scrutiny? It's very possible, but it's also possible this one really was worse.

So those are the updates. Again, it's unclear how large they are, but they are there.

I can't think of a position I hold for which the election being rigged/sound is actually a crux, other than "I think 99% probability the election was sound is too high," which is why I objected. As far as "roughly as fair as any other election," it's possible, but as the first election with widespread mail in voting, it's certainly reasonable that it wasn't.

I do want to stress though, I really don't care whether or not the election was rigged. What I'm interested is where people get these really high priors that elections are sound and fair. Everyone is assuming a base rate of rigging that is so low so as to ignore everything that transpired. 

It seemed like the second we started actually looking at the election mechanics, there were fraud reports and suspicious activity everywhere, and now I have no idea what to make of election integrity as a whole. There seem to be tens or hundreds of relatively trivial attack surfaces, and especially in non-federal elections, where voting and counting take place in far fewer locations, and far less people vote, it seems very likely some results are fake.

The Trump section makes a few assumptions that aren't defended. They might be right, they might be wrong, but even the most basic counterarguments aren't addressed.

First, you call questioning the election "overthrowing democracy," which implies that questioning it wasn't in any way justified. What's your prior that an election is sound? This is a genuine question; I'm not sure what's appropriate. Many, many elections throughout human history have been various degrees of rigged. I have no idea what prior to use, and I have no idea what level of fraud/questionable behavior occurs every election, so it's hard to analyze both the prior and the update. That said, you're ascribing bad faith to anyone questioning the results, when most of those truly believe the democratically chosen vote was different. Rigged elections that the media covers up are an equally valid way to abolish democracy, and you provided just as much defense of that claim as you did of yours (none).

If anything, what happened with Gore and Bush in '08 was more egregious than this, and that didn't destroy the republic, at least not to the point of property rights vanishing. Contested elections are par for the course for as long as we're using this ridiculous half the people hate every president system.

Second, you act like leaving NATO is authoritarian in some way. If anything, leaving NATO would create more decentralized control over the globe, not more centralized control of it. If it weren't for NATO, Ukraine and Russian wouldn't be at war right now. I could be wrong about those things, but that's not the point. The point is that, if you want to change the mind of someone like me, this claim about the US being in NATO being universally good has to be defended. 

Third, your reference to "despite having a minority of the popular vote;" are we still doing this? Why should California and New York City govern the entire country? The electoral college is a necessary compromise for making the bad system of voting a little less bad.

Lastly, there's a very visceral reaction on the "new right" to race based ideology. So much of Trump's support comes from what we'll call the "Joe Rogan Internet" (and offshoots like Jordan Peterson, Daily Wire, etc), and that entire apparatus is extremely sensitive to and against racial superiority ideology. So perhaps far-righters in the US could swing some sort of class based change up, instead of using race, the way the communists did, but far-right racially motivated ideology has so little power in the US it's laughable.

Again, I'm open to having my mind changed on any of these. The issue is that they're cruxes, and they weren't addressed in the piece at all.

This is a super interesting take. I'll keep it in mind if I dig into the history of monetary systems again.