Election Was Most Secure In American History, US Officials Say (bloomberg.com) 423
"The Nov. 3rd election was the most secure in American history," state and federal election officials said in a statement Thursday. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised." Bloomberg reports: The statement acknowledged the "many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections" and urged Americans to turn to election administrators and officials for accurate information. The statement was signed by officials from the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, which shares information among state, local and federal officials, and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council, which includes election infrastructure owners and operators.
Among the 10 signatories were Benjamin Hovland, who chairs the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and Bob Kolasky, the assistant director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security. Key officials at the cybersecurity agency, including its head, Christopher Krebs, are stepping down or expecting to get fired as Trump refuses to concede. Krebs, who has enjoyed bipartisan support for his role in helping run secure U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020, has told associates he expects to be dismissed, according to three people familiar with internal discussions. His departure would follow the resignation of Bryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, who resigned on Thursday morning after about two years at the agency. In addition, Valerie Boyd, the assistant secretary for international affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CISA, has also left, according to two other people. Krebs and Ware are both Trump appointees.
Among the 10 signatories were Benjamin Hovland, who chairs the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and Bob Kolasky, the assistant director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security. Key officials at the cybersecurity agency, including its head, Christopher Krebs, are stepping down or expecting to get fired as Trump refuses to concede. Krebs, who has enjoyed bipartisan support for his role in helping run secure U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020, has told associates he expects to be dismissed, according to three people familiar with internal discussions. His departure would follow the resignation of Bryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, who resigned on Thursday morning after about two years at the agency. In addition, Valerie Boyd, the assistant secretary for international affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CISA, has also left, according to two other people. Krebs and Ware are both Trump appointees.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, we know (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Yeah, we know (Score:5, Informative)
I read that entirely differently. Once Georgia added a paper trail so the election could be hand audited suddenly the voting machines started matching the hand recounts. That makes me think there was cheating before.
Why mail-in-ballots are "evil" (Score:5, Insightful)
The cheating hasn't been in the counts. The cheating has been in the run-up rhetoric. It has been in the veiled threats of violence, the demonization of different voting methods, and in the various hacks and releases of private information.
The republican party has been in demographic decline for a generation. The further away you get from civilization, the closer you get to the Republican base. The tightness of this election has masked just how badly on the ropes they are. Losing Arizona and Georgia are huge indicators, and it has them running scared.
Democrats and like-minded voters are in the majority in the US, and have been for a long time, and the trend in this direction is only going to continue. The one advantage the Republicans have is that their base is more motivated and, in many cases, radical. You see why mail-in voting is under attack? It's because bote-by-mail reduces the activation energy required to vote. It makes Democrat supporters, who are generally more affluent, more likely to get off their chunk and vote if they can do it by not actually getting off their chunk. In the past, doing anything by mail was a harder sell, because while it's easier, it requires pre-planning. But this is less of an issue in a society that is becoming more used to Amazon and online shopping in generalo, to thinking ahead the lead-time required to shop-by-mail is less of an issue. People are more conditioned to pre-think "oh, if I need this then I need to order it now, ok, that will make my life easier" and they are doing it.
Mitch Mcconnell just said "something has to be done about mail in voting or else this country will never elect another Republican". This was very telling, he was on the way from somewhere to somewhere when the press caught him and I don't think he was censoring his thoughts well, and he is clearly very troubled by this election. It is telling because it shows why they are concerned. They aren't actually concerned about fraud. That's smoke-and-mirrors. They are, as we all heard from Trump's pre-election rhetoric, afraid of vote-by-mail in general. It will nullify the Republican's only advantage any more, and it has them really, really scared.
Of course, they could just start trying to appeal to a wider segment of the population, but this is Republicans we're talking about. Allergic to change and ready to fight if someone tries to make them.
So we're going to see the "pre-cheating" continue in all its forms. We are going to see them all full of sound and fury in general, and we are definitely going to see them try and curtail and limit mail-in-voting and throw as many impediments up to it as possible. The more on-the-ropes they realize they are, the more dangerous they will get.
Sigh.
Re:Yeah, we know (Score:5, Informative)
To believe something so silly as "never been any evidence of widespread election fraud in any US election, ever", you'd have to consider the Jim Crow era of cumulative poll taxes, literacy test and exceptions for white people to be something other that election fraud.
Those are voter suppression tactics, not election fraud. They're morally identical to election fraud, but a different mechanism, with a different name.
There's a widespread trend to try to increase moral outrage by calling bad things by an incorrect name in order to make them seem worse. It's an ugly rhetorical trick and attempted deception that inevitably backfires in the long run. Don't do it.
So this is the problem with the right wing (Score:3)
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Am I missing something? Why is it even necessary to use electronic machines? Are people unable to count these days?
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Call me paranoid, but I doubt elections that use computerized devices can possibly be more secure than back when it was manually counted paper ballots.
Yeah, nothing could be more secure than having William Tweed count the votes.
When it comes to counting, computers are just better. I wouldn't want votes to be fully digitized, where you use a computer than sends your vote through a network, but scantron ballots that are counted by a machine are much more reliable than a person counting paper ballots. I don't know about you, but the old farts working at my Board of Elections would still be counting if they had to do it manually, and it certainly wouldn't be
You just have 2 people do the counting (Score:2)
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I just don't see the point. I like the paper scantron ballots because they can be manually checked if need be, but the machine provides a very accurate and fast result. If the election is extremely close, by all means have a hand recount. Otherwise, it's a waste of time.
I also think it's bullshit that, in most states, Boards of Elections are comprised of people from the two parties. We have baked a party duopoly into almost all of our political institutions and there is no justification for it.
The places that had problems (Score:2, Informative)
You can't steal an election with fake votes because it requires tens of thousands of votes which in turn requires a lot of people to fake those votes. Conspiracies only work when there's a very limited number of people in on the conspiracy.
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Except there's nothing secret or illegal about junk mail. And he's not just talking about production; he's talking about keeping it a secret. It would be incredibly difficult to just recruit a bunch of people without either a) tipping off people who are hostile to your plan, or b) someone getting cold feet, or c) leaving clear evidence of your actions.
You can't recruit undisciplined amateurs because they're going to make mistakes and/or talk. You can't recruit experienced professionals because presidenti
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Yes. People have forgotten about how Diebold stole the 2004 election for Bush, and about the 2004 book Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century [amazon.com]. Back in 2003, Congress was debating whether paper trails should be required -- here is my blog post about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20061218140456/http://www.underreported.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1119&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0 [archive.org].
Digital voting is isomorphic to cryptocurrency. Without anonymiz
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest problem with a widespread postal voting system is the end of the Secret Ballot. In a traditional voting system you go alone into a booth and nobody at all can know who you voted for. With postal ballots all sorts of coercion and threats can occur.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, with not postal votes too.
And so far, unlike the postal voyes, threats DID occur at polling booths, including one loon who threatened voters with a sword if they voted democrats
Which kinda suggests maybe its the othre way around
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Here's the thing:
The victims could just LIE and tell the sword loon they voted R. The sword loon isn't allowed into the polling booth.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of people are talking about voting systems allegedly being corrupted.
And being told to shut the hell up because they're not. Remember that supposed corruption in Erie, PA where the postal worker claimed they were told to back date mail-in ballots? He fully recanted his story [thehill.com] when questioned by a Postal Service inspector general.
Remember how in Georgia an election worker was seen throwing away a ballot [thehill.com]? He was throwing away a note put inside a mail-in ballot. And now, thanks to the fascists, he's in hiding for his life because his name was revealed.
The list goes on. Every single whine about "corruption" has been met with cold, hard facts about what happened. Despite this, the uneducated losers continue to claim all manner of fraud even though Republican election officials, the people who would be most involved in any kind of fraud or corruption since they're closest to the ballots, have unequivocally stated there was not fraud or corruption or anything else.
That people would want the failure in chief to have a second term is the real issue, not some conspiracy stories about voting.
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He fully denied fully recanting his story too:
https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
But as I said, people are talking about it. We've shared multiple links now demonstrating this.
Looks like a bit north of 75 million by last count (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, McConnell laughed at the deaths of those 200k+ Americans in his debate with McGrath and still won in a landslide. The GOP know how to win. Pity they can't govern worth a shit. But I don't think the skills overlap.
Re:Looks like a bit north of 75 million by last co (Score:5, Interesting)
were desperate to be rid of him. Funny thing is he did best in counties where COVID is running out of control. I can't fault the man for his political instincts. His complete lack of basic human decency I can fault, but not his political instincts.
Hell, McConnell laughed at the deaths of those 200k+ Americans in his debate with McGrath and still won in a landslide. The GOP know how to win. Pity they can't govern worth a shit. But I don't think the skills overlap.
Yes and no. It's not just political instincts. They get a big lift from the gerrymandering that has been going on for at least the last 30+ years. By doing so, they guaranteed wins where there are a lot of conservative voters and work to minimize and isolate the more liberal areas.
While this is good for staying in power, it removes the centrists and the politicians who are willing to negotiate with the other side. This has caused the polarization that we are seeing and it's only getting worse. The only way to fix it would be to reset the districts.
Re:Looks like a bit north of 75 million by last co (Score:5, Informative)
The only way to fix it would be to reset the districts.
Districts will always be susceptible to manipulation. Resetting is not the only or most desirable way to fix the system. Check out the single transferable vote, [youtu.be] also known as multiple candidate ranked-choice vote and a couple other names. This system ensures minority representation without allowing minority rule.
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STV is a very long way from a panacea. It allows minority parties to actually gain votes but if you have a series of districts rather than PR, you end up with all the same problems as first past the post. The only difference is that strategic voting isn't such a tough choice. But it doesn't change the problem that third parties almost never have a high enough density of voters to get representation even if they have a significant proportion of the vote.
Re:Looks like a bit north of 75 million by last co (Score:4)
You have two houses, one with representatives from districts (with large districts, you only have a few hundred for the whole country after all) and one with reps selected from a list and assigned by proportion of the national vote.
No system is perfect but the best ones are designed to avoid anyone having a majority, so that cooperation and compromise are necessary to govern.
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That's better than nothing getting done at all in my book. Republicans haven't managed to undo Obamacare yet, hopefully the Supreme Court won't dismantle it, but they look to be pretty hardcore right-wing now so.
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Funny thing is he did best in counties where COVID is running out of control.
Did you read where coronavirus patients sometimes develop psychological problems due to the virus? Must be affecting their judgement, too.
Re:Looks like a bit north of 75 million by last co (Score:5, Informative)
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paper ballots are actually incredibly vulnerable to fraud.
They are not, so stop lying.
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It's hard to deny a fraud risk when there isn't even a requirement for the paper ballot signature to match the voter registration card.
You're mistaken. My state (WA) checks signatures against a voter reg card and your driver's license or state ID card. So do all the other states as far as I'm aware. I don't know if it's a requirement (I suspect it is) but they do it regardless.
I had my signature challenged several elections ago and both my wife and son had their signatures challenged this time.
For you to claim it isn't done is nonsense. This was literally the most closely watched election in US history and there is NO evidence of ANY 'wide
Trump supporters (Score:5, Insightful)
Trump literally tweeted this was the most secure election ever thanks to him, while at the same time saying he lost because of cheating.
Moronic supporters of his believe that though â" since when has contradiction mattered to Trump supporters? He will win in 2024 given how dumb people are.
I mean he is even touting vaccine and yet the anti-vaxxer nutcases still support him. They donâ(TM)t mind him lying as long as he gets rid of the Mexicans and Muslims.
Re:Trump supporters (Score:5, Interesting)
It has been a weird experience to be reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism during the election:
I came away from the book not feeling that we're on our way to totalitarianism, but that some of the tactics are being used.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/Leopa... [reddit.com]
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Moronic supporters of his believe that though â" since when has contradiction mattered to Trump supporters?
I remember seeing the announcement of Biden winning and one of the CNN correspondents said now was a time of healing. He lamented how he voted for Trump and was called stupid by other people and that he felt insulted because of it.
Maybe he shouldn't feel insulted but rather like alcohol addiction realise that admitting you have a problem is the first step to solving it. It's amazing what Trump supporters say in his support and I'm unfortunately convinced that many people believe both his and their own bulls
Re:Trump supporters (Score:5, Informative)
Found the anti-science guy...
That just isn't true and there are tons of research if you bothered to look it up.
Most anti-vaxxers focus on the oh my god "Mercury"... Well Thimerosal which is used as a preservative is approximately 50% mercury by weight. It is metabolized down to ethylmercury and thiosalicylate and quickly excreted by the body. A vaccine containing 0.01% thimerosal as a preservative contains 50 micrograms of thimerosal per 0.5 mL dose or approximately 25 micrograms of mercury. For comparison, this is roughly the same amount of elemental mercury contained in a 3 ounce can of tuna fish.
Any do you have any real hard sources?
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-b... [fda.gov].
https://www.publichealth.org/p... [publichealth.org]
Re:No contradiction (Re:Trump supporters) (Score:5, Informative)
I was listening to the Coffee with Scott Adams podcast earlier and Mr. Adams pointed out the lack of contradiction.
I'm starting to think that Adams is unaware that people view the Dilbert comic strip as a comedy akin to Catch-22 and that he writes it from the perspective of the heroic pointy-haired boss who is antagonized by evil engineers.
Call me some kind of sore loser, a Trump "shill", or what not, that doesn't change that being the most secure election ever is not contradictory to the possibility of cheating happening to flip the outcome.
Like many Trump supporters, you appear to be engaging in an extreme form of pedantry akin to a defense lawyer advocating for an obviously guilty client. If the defense lawyer does a good job, his efforts can be appreciated because he's just doing his job and it's necessary for even the worst of us to have proper representation to ensure that justice is administered. In your case, it just makes you look bad.
In a tight race like this even a small amount of cheating in the right places can flip the electoral college vote.
It's not like this was Bush v. Gore. It wasn't as tight as you're making it sound. Cheating would require tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of votes to swing the election. There's no evidence that even small scale cheating occurred.
Re:No contradiction (Re:Trump supporters) (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the 9/11 report. It tells you why smooth transitions of power are necessary, and why the Democrats are "wailing and gnashing".
Re:No contradiction (Re:Trump supporters) (Score:5, Informative)
At this point in 2016, the Obama administration had already began the transition to Trump presidency, Clinton had conceded, Trump had been invited to the White House, etc.
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Why? When did Pelosi run for the presidency?
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The gnashing of teeth is about claiming fraud and undermining the legitimacy of the incoming president without presenting evidence; this is obvious to anybody who's not an idiot or not arguing in bad faith.
Re:No contradiction (Re:Trump supporters) (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, cherry pick a few things that Trump has said and they make some vague sense together. Meanwhile there is a constant stream of garbage coming from him on twitter that is absolutely contradictory. He is making claims that the election itself is a fraud, at a scale large enough to overturn the significant margins in the current count, a scale which has never been considered before in the recent history of the country. 2000 was a tight race, where less that 1000 votes decided it. Not this time. It is a contradiction to proclaim that he is the winner, that most of Joe's required lead of 100s of 1000s of votes are illegal and yet say that this is the most secure election ever. I wouldn't call you a shill but you are certainly a good example of the kinds of mental loops Trump supporters are willing to go through in order to disregard how insane he is being right now.
It isn't that remarkable really (Score:5, Insightful)
With so much at stake and so much misinformation around it seems that all election officials were put on high alert, making sure procedures set up to detect and avoid election fraud from happening.
And guess what it seems to have worked.
But of course Trump being Trump and Trumpers being Trumpers have a lot of difficulty dealing with either reality or rules that don't work out in their favor are kicking up conspiracy after conspiracy in a vain attempt to roll back reality.
The result: currently Trump is 0 for 14 in court challenges. No evidence. Thrown out.
But this is all part of the playbook. Like Obama before, Republicans simply don't recognize the legitimacy of any government other than their own and we can look forward to at least four years of this from the "Eff-your-feelings" crowd. I was told to "get over it" in 2016 and now it is their turn.
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I think the Trumpeteers don't care if it's valid or not, they think the wrong person won and it's worth breaking the country over it. I suspect some of them honestly believe the delusion that they're saving the country from communism, and to them that is more important than democracy or the rule of law.
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Re:It isn't that remarkable really (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair... us elections are always rigged. In a legal way. It's called the electoral college and favors the low-population rural areas and states over the high-population areas. This is how in the US conservatives get an edge over progressives, and therefore we got Bush instead of Gore in 2000 and Trump instead of Hillary in 2016 - candidate with least votes wins.
Can you imagine what that would have meant for the world, had the people's voice actually counted?
Gore instead of Bush - no useless war in Iraq and collapse of the state of Iraq - no Isis, no global wave of Islamic terrorism, no civil war, atrocities and cultural heritage lost in Syria. Instead, more environmentalism and common sense.
Hillary instead of Trump - no constant barrage of fake news from the White House, no strengthening of global populism, no backup from US for crooks like Bolsanaro in Brazil and Orban in Hungary, no fawning towards Vladimir Putin and questionable links to Russia, no wave of nutjob conspiracy movements like QAnon. Instead, more common sense in the world.
The messed up US democracy has cost the world 12 years of idiocy vs. common sense in the White House with global impact.
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Gore instead of Bush - no useless war in Iraq
[...]
Hillary instead of Trump
Wait? You don't want useless wars but you did want Hillary?
Meanwhile,
no Isis, no global wave of Islamic terrorism, no civil war, atrocities and cultural heritage lost in Syria
Wrong President. Those all happened under Obama not Bush. While the instability in Iraq was undoubtably Bush (and Blair) he wasn't the cause of Bin Laden, the expansion of violent Islamic terrorism, the instability in Egypt, Libya or Syria.
no strengthening of global populism, no backup from US for crooks like Bolsanaro in Brazil and Orban in Hungary, no fawning towards Vladimir Putin and questionable links to Russia
Globalism is no better than global populism, and indeed a strong cause of it. Which crimes has Orban committed? Why is building friendly relationships with Russia wrong, and can you for the love of human
Re: It isn't that remarkable really (Score:2)
But put on your skeptic hat: if "fraud" is in the news, a whole bunch of eyewitnesses will spring out of the woodwork to swear they saw it, just like a whole bunch of eyewitnesses sprang up to swear that Judge Kavanaugh raped them
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100% of election officials interviewed testified that election officials don't commit election fraud. So that settles that...
Seriously - this is a junk article. Read the affidavits Rudy is collecting. Some of them probably misunderstood what was happening around them. Others observed real fraud happening, and there's no way around it without calling them liars.
Do you not understand what 0 for 14 court challenges mean? There has been no evidence of any tampering *at all*. Even Trumpie's own lawyers backed down from claiming there any fraud whatsoever during this election process..
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Rudy? He is obviously demonstrating senility. He's incompetent as a lawyer. He is only there to do the showboating.
Yes, there is real fraud. But it is a minuscule pittance and will not change the election outcome. Every case so far submitted by Trump campaign lawyers has been thrown out because the brilliant legal team has not submitted any evidence to back the claims. The lawyers do this because they're getting paid, not because they believe it, but getting paid means they're willing to clog the cour
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Your reading comprehension isn't very high. From the article you cited:
None of the votes affected by Thursday’s ruling had yet been included in the state’s official tally
In other words they "won" nothing whatsoever. Not only was there no evidence of fraud, but there was not even any allegation of fraud. The decision merely was validation of a rule that as yet hadn't be broken.
And it probably escaped your notice that the ballots thrown out are not even known to be Biden votes or Trump votes.
That is not a win.
Re:It isn't that remarkable really (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah well the numbers are pretty fluid. A quick look at the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] article currently shows 18 dismissals, drops, rejected or denied. The rest are still ongoing but the record is worse than what I stated and will get worse still.
Add to that that the major lawfirms working for Trump or the RNC are declining to participate any more because they don't want to ruin their reputations by filing frivolous lawsuits. They are pulling out because they don't want to be associated with fraud.
Yeah but keep clinging to that "successful court challenge" that didn't affect anything if that is what you need to feel better.
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That Wikipedia page doesn't even list the Pennsylvania court orders to allow poll watchers to actually watch the counting.
They were already watching the counting. They complained that they couldn't get close enough to see signatures, which is not what they are there for, but a judge let them do it anyway just to shut them up. Teapot, tempest.
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I do care whether there's proof. I thought I made it clear that I want other people to stop telling me that nothing happened while refusing to properly investigate all the shit that clearly did happen and that, from the vantage of an independent country, looks exceedingly dodgy.
Trying too hard (Score:2, Informative)
If they simply said there was no evidence of mass fraud, I'm guessing the majority of Trump voters would have believed it. However making a very bold statement that is not supported by evidence can only raise suspicion.
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> making a very bold statement that is not supported by evidence can only raise suspicion
That is literally Trump campaign's strategy.
Missing the bigger picture (Score:5, Insightful)
There is only one path out of this. One.
They need to do manual ( read that, non-computerized ) recounts in any State that is suspect using individuals who did not participate in the first counting. The ballots need to be verified in accordance with the State Laws they were cast in. Any ballot that doesn't meet the criteria for being valid, should be discounted.
Let me explain why.
It doesn't matter if anyone actually cheated or stole an election.
Let me say that again: It - doesn't - matter.
This election can be one hundred percent legitimate, but the problem is this:
A very large number of folks in this country -believe- it was fraudulent.
The reason for the recounts is to ensure that your populace continues to have faith in your election system as a whole.
You absolutely have to prove, beyond any doubts, that Candidate X won or lost in a fair election.
If you fail to do this, you will further erode the trust of a nation and if you think this will simply fade away peacefully, you
are naive. It will only get worse and, considering how fantastic a year it has been so far, we really don't need " worse "
right now.
This is neither about Trump or Biden. Republicans or Democrats.
This is about the future of this country.
The only way a Government works is if its people maintain some level of trust in it.
Take away that trust and things will go full stupid in very short order.
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I think it's actually a small number of very loud people claiming there was fraud. A recount by hand of every ballot will take longer than a couple of months. The laws as they are have very had and fast deadlines. And even if we change the laws, do you want the precedent that after every election in the future, not just for president, there is a 4 month back end hand count because some doofuses refused to accept that their Lord and Savior Trump might actually have lost? Worse, you finish the hand count
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I don't think any states are suspect at this point. A recount like that would be long and expensive - we already have robust ballot counting procedures which is why the existing counts can be trusted
Re:Missing the bigger picture (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry but this is just naive. If the hand recount says that Biden won, Trump and the hard core pro-Trump crowd will just insist that the hand recount was fraudulent, rigged, influenced by [pick your favorite excuse], etc. The hard core pro-Trump crowd's starting position is "if Trump lost the election then it is a fraudulent election". No amount of evidence will convince such people otherwise.
The good news is that polls show that 79% of Americans think that Biden won, 13% said the election has not yet been decided, 3% said Trump won and 5% said they do not know. And 6 in 10 republicans think that Biden won. In other words the hard core pro-Trump crowd are very much a small minority who make a lot of noise.
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On the other hand, maybe we should just always have a recount in any contest where the results are close, period. That would improve election confidence, however slightly.
Putin's releection was also "most fair in history" (Score:5, Informative)
According to Russian election officials. When have we become so brainwashed that we take such self serving statements at face value? Banks hire independent auditors and tiger teams to harden their computer systems and then use two factor authentication for account access, how is democracy less important?
don't bother (Score:2)
This isn't going to change anyone's mind. The deep state conspiracy theory thought process is now such that every statement like this is just more evidence of the corruption at every level. It's a convenient and simple minded version of reality that makes it easier for people to stick with their chosen beliefs.They believed it would be corrupt before it even started, they then went hunting for fraud no matter how the actual process proceeded and now they are just re-affirming their original view. Sadly, the
Except for... (Score:3)
Those 3 lines of code....
https://youtu.be/Ztu5Y5obWPk?t... [youtu.be]
MIT Data analyst ...
Re: hell yeah it was (Score:5, Informative)
Re: hell yeah it was (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: hell yeah it was (Score:5, Informative)
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I know you guys have issues with reading comprehension, but "interference" and "fraud" are seperate concepts. 2016 Dems claimed interference, which did result in indictments. 2020 GOP claims, without any consequential evidence, fraud - not only in an election deemed very secure, but also in a race not even as close as 2016..
Republicans are all about voter fraud.
And thieves think everyone else is a thief.
Here's one that if not outright fraud, looks like an attempt to intentionally muddy the waters for fraud claims - send your ballot in late, with email sent out after the deadline.https://bipartisanreport.com/2020/11/06/trump-supporter-voter-fraud-scheme-uncovered-in-pennsylvania/
Let's just change party Registration from Democrat to Republican: https://www.politicususa.com/2... [politicususa.com]
There are a lot more examples, when one u
More Than That (Score:5, Insightful)
After taking office, President Trump set up an Election Commission, which operated between May 11, 2017 and January 3, 2018, to investigate his assertions of voter fraud. When he abruptly terminated the Commission in January '18, the President claimed that it had uncovered "substantial evidence", but the documents subsequently revealed cast significant doubt on that.
But let's give the President the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that his concerns were valid and there was some small shred of truth to his claims. The President terminated that Commission May 2018, more than 2 years ago. What, exactly, has the President or the Federal government done to address his concerns in those more than 2 years? What changes has the President initiated to make the voting process more secure? What review of voting machines did the President ask for? What changes did the President approve to make security testing more effective?
The answer, in case it isn't readily apparent, is that the Commission found nothing [propublica.org]
It doesn't matter what claims the President and his allies make now. If he had legitimate concerns about the integrity of the elections, why didn't he speak up before November 3? Why didn't he instruct the vast apparatus of the Federal Government to do something about it?
The answer is simple: this year's claims, like his assertions in 2016 and 2017, were not only baseless, but entirely specious. The President simply wants to create the illusion of improper conduct, without the bothersome hassle of having to actually prove it.
If there are concrete facts, hand them over to the Election Commission and the FBI and let them be investigated. Just don't send legal teams in to court with baseless and indefensible claims made by people who are subsequently shown to be grudge-bearing liars.
You simply can't have it both ways: if there was fraud:-
1. Where is the evidence?
2. What were you doing about it for the last 4 years?
Re: hell yeah it was (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: hell yeah it was (Score:5, Insightful)
Russia did not compromise the election in 2016. Russia compromised the electorate.
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Re: hell yeah it was (Score:4, Informative)
A voter turnout of 89% in Wisconsin is very improbable, since the actual turnout for the 2020 election in Wisconsin was 72%. This was lower than the turnout in 2004.
The 89% figure is arrived at by using the wrong numbers to calculate the turnout, then comparing them to previous, correctly calculated numbers. Turnout is number of votes divided by voting age population, not number of votes divided by registered voters.
https://www.statesman.com/news... [statesman.com]
Re: hell yeah it was (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet four years ago, the election was compromised by Russians on Twitter and Facebook. This time, though, Twitter is suppressing the official presidential Twitter account, and Russia is no problem. So we have that going for us, which is nice!
You're comparing apples and oranges. These officials are talking about the integrity of the voting process -- accurately collecting, counting and reporting votes -- but what Russia did (in 2016 and 2020 both) is to attempt to influence who voters voted for. Actually there is some evidence that they also attempted to hack the voting system in 2016, but it doesn't appear they succeeded.
As for suppression of the official presidential Twitter account, the rules apply even to the Donald. If he doesn't want his tweets fact-checked by Twitter, he should fact-check himself before posting them.
Re: BIZX is a propaganda front. BeauHD is an imbec (Score:2)
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You have nothing to fear if they have nothing to hide.
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You forgot spouses, bosses, etc. "supervising" the filling out of the ballot. In a traditional election nobody is allowed to see who you voted for. The secret ballot is important, and completely missing with mail-in.
Re:Mail in voting is safe! (Score:5, Informative)
The mail in ballot is indeed secret unless you can figure out how to open two envelopes and reseal them before they get counted. Ballots with tampered envelopes will get tossed and likely investigated. And trying to do that wholesale is impractical.
I do think a lot of people are completely unused to mail in or absentee ballots, despite their being in common use for many decades. You have TWO envelopes. The inside one is the security envelope and it has no distinguishing marks on it to indicate who the voter is. The outside envelope that the post office uses is signed by the voter and the signature must match; if anyone turns in the envelope other than the voter or post office then that person has to be designated on the envelope. Once the outside envelope is inspected and the signature matches, the inside envelope is removed and placed in a separate box to be counted later. This is the primary reason why these take so long to count.
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Poll workers who are not experts in handwriting recognition being asked to do handwriting recognition
Poll workers ignoring signature validation and just passing everything
Poll workers performing signature validation too strictly, and rejecting valid ballots
Voters who either due to ignorance or incompetence fail to write their signature consistently, and thus lose their vote (ends up functioning like the poll tests under Jim Crow)
In most (all?) cases, *multiple* people (or a machine) need to agree that the signature is valid before the ballot is counted. If it's not deemed valid, Federal Law requires that the person have a chance to "cure" the ballot through various means, usually by providing additional proof of identity.
So all of the problems I quoted there? Not actually problems.
=Smidge=
Re:Mail in voting is safe! (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much everything in your post is wrong. My state has allowed anyone to request an absentee ballot for any reason for years. It's never been a problem and it's never been controversial. It wasn't even controversial this year, but only because Trump won the state. If we had swung for Biden then the administration would be (unsuccessfully) suing us right now.
Even if we assume that in some crazy state, each one of the potential problems you listed occurred every time a person had an opportunity to do such a thing, it's unlikely that it would be enough to change the outcome. Some of your complaints also apply to in-person voting, such as "poll workers ignoring signature validation and just passing everything" or the contrasting "poll workers performing signature validation too strictly."
Oh, any as for dumbass voters failing to fill out the ballot correctly with the signature or date—welp, I was one of those dumbasses (as were many in my state, because they made a required field easy to overlook), and my Board of Elections called me and took care of the issue over the phone.
Mail in voting is safe.
Re: Mail in voting is safe! (Score:2)
Ok audit it then. Just select 200 ballots randomly and call the people and find out if they received and sent in their ballot. If many they say they didnâ(TM)t then you have a case. If nobody says they didnâ(TM)t send in their ballot, then you know no ballot harvesting took place. If itâ(TM)s rarer than one in 200 it wasnâ(TM)t enough to flip the election.
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Yes, it does, and I'll describe two very plausible ways.
1. Jim Jones Jr. and Jim Jones III are father and son, who live at the same address. JJ2 dies or moves away but remains registered to vote. JJ3 goes to vote, and they have him sign next to JJ2's name in the book because they aren't paying attention. The spot next to JJ3's name goes unfilled. No extra ballot is cast. THIS ISN'T FRAUD, it's a mistake, and no
Re: That's because it turned out the right way (Score:2)
Re:Cue all the Orange Fan Sads (Score:4, Insightful)
Just a reminder that HRC conceded on Nov 4
Hillary conceded 4 days before the election? Why do I not remember that?
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After a 36 day legal battle Gore conceded on Dec 13.
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You mean he conceded after losing his final appeal?
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Signature validation is a stupid way to identify people. I won't dispute that. But I will dispute the implication that this means we should distrust the election. Even if you could easily vote as someone else through forgery, how could anyone possibly take advantage of this weakness in the system on the scale necessary to change the outcome?
Sorry, but your blog hasn't caused me to lose faith in the system. I lost faith in the system because conspiracy theorists such as yourself vote in significant enough nu
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The preponderance of evidence is clear. Trump lost. It doesn't matter if there's once chance in a million, she's just not willing to go out with you!
Maybe we should have some election reform, that's not a bad thing. However election reform would be a terrible disaster if it was implemented by impetuous partisan hacks like Trump and his Trumpeteers.
I think Trump is expecting some sort of miracle, like the Supreme Court deciding that the election is null and void because of a handful of ballots with proble
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Oh...and don't get me started about electronic 'voting' and 'mail in' voting..
There are many reasons that elections were originally set up to be in a private voting booth where no one could influence, buy, steal or hack your vote. It should still be that way, and with pencil and paper sheets, which are verifiable when the electronic counting machine makes an 'error'.
"All E-voting" machines with touch screens... oh my, stay away from that...so many fraud vectors they were hacked six ways to Sunday at Defcon
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Lots of reasons we can't have it. No federal system for one, and no federal standards. We had a long history of division in the country, both with slavery and with segregation after that, which meant that those slave/segregation states had a vested interest in making sure no feds interfered in their affairs. Even today after 225 years of elections, the local party leaderships do not want to give up their control on the state elections lest they lose some power.
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So there are 3 cases of "fraud" being reported by some whacko site with no actual evidence? I think we can pretty happy with that result then
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If you're trusting Zero Hedge then there's a problem. A video is not very good evidence, and you can tell because there are thousands and thousands of flat earth videos out there. Many of the videos brought forward by the Trump campaign were used out of context: videos from past elections, videos that don't show anything if you remove the narration, and so forth.
Ie, before the election there was the video of someone throwing away ballots; but of course you throw away ballots when they're done, you don't a
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And that's damned good proof that it wasn't fraud! You think there is a Democrat cabal that decided to cheat in a wholesale manner such that win the presidency, but lose the senate and lose members of the house? What the hell would the point of that be? If they were going to rig the election they'd worry first about getting the senate and keeping the house numbers up, as the president wouldn't be all that important after that.