We're going to hit a breaking point soon on faith in elections. We have poll workers refusing to work due to threats to their safety. We have an increasing number of candidates and elected officials who believe the last election was stolen in positions to override actual election results. We have an increasing number of people who want to "police" the polls (this one troubles me the most). And of course there's been a huge increase in restrictive and oftentimes convoluted voting laws that are going to confuse the hell out of people and result in many votes not being cast or counted.
We already have the majority of one party believing the last election as stolen despite a comprehensive lack of evidence. It won't take too many more people until a clear majority simply stop believing any election results are valid.
> We already have the majority of one party believing the last election as stolen despite a comprehensive lack of evidence.
This is the part that gets me. I don't know how anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see this behavior and then still support the people perpetrating it.
To be clear, not every theory is sound. I happen to think what Sidney Powell was pushing is pretty flimsy. But there is video evidence of ballot harvesting, stuffing, and more.
Please show me these videos of ballot harvesting. If you point to 1000 mules let’s be clear it’s legal to drop of family members ballots, name the mules, and gps data is easily debunked by knowing voting locations are found in high trafficked areas public transports, Ubers, mail services, Ect can account for people being at multiple locations over time. It’s not rocket science.
Many besides 2000 mules are linked to on https://hereistheevidence.com/. Again, I'm not arguing everything linked to there is true. But for someone to say there was _no_ fraud in 2020, everything there must be false. But to cite one: Rachel Rodriguez on video confessing to ballot harvesting, knowing it is illegal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHI_-4ySY4o. She has since been arrested and charged.
Clearly it does happen. This, coupled with the other irregularities listed should be enough for most people to understand we need better security controls on our elections.
The first step in committing ballot fraud is always accusing the other side of it. We know who was trumpeting that even before the election. And, somehow, it is all said to have happened in counties the accusers controlled.
1) Then all this started when Democrats accused the other side in 2016, so by your logic, _that_ was projection and their first step in 2020's fraud. 2) that logic is circular. Given that logic, any complaint about insecure elections is projection and there is never any valid complaint about election security. 3) It's been said to happen in both democrat and republican counties and states. Neither party (nor closed-source private companies) should "control" elections. They should be 100% above board, fair, and one person one vote and run on open source hardware and software.
One should take complaints seriously but with a grain of salt, investigate, and draw conclusions. One way to do that is do download the official records from PA, analyze them, and see for yourself there are many discrepancies that show at a minimum massive issues with mail-in ballot verification in PA. The code linked above helps you do that, or you can do it yourself easily enough with your favorite tool. Maybe each of those has a valid explanation, but I've yet to see any. Submit a pull request for any incorrect analysis.
No one said there wasn't fraud in the 2020 election, there wasn't widespread fraud. This is a manipulation tactic, the claim is there was widespread fraud to flip the election when pestered for proof you produce evidence of isolated small cases of fraud. This doesn't prove anything about widespread election fraud.
What irregularities and how does that prove widespread fraud?
Show me a specific video and time that shows fraud.
I'm not aware of anyone claiming there was _no_ fraud. That would be silly. In a country with over 300 million people we can't possibly know that _no one_ successfully committed some form of fraud. Especially given the fact that we know for a fact of a number of people who tried both for and against Trump.
The claim is simply this: there is not, to date, any evidence of fraud sufficient to cast doubt on the election results. Your Gueillermina Fuentes is a perfect example of this. We're talking about 4 ballots. Even if we accept that all of those were Biden votes that would've otherwise gone to Trump (which is an unreasonable assumption), it changes the count by a total of 8 votes. You'd need 1300 all cheating for Biden against Trump (there have been Trump voters caught cheating too) to change the election.
That's evidence of an individual commiting a crime, not of a stolen election.
>If you point to 1000 mules let’s be clear it’s legal to drop of family members ballots
I think the issue was there isn't a good explanation for making multiple trips to different ballot drop-offs all over the state with different batches of ballots, and then taking pics as proof that they were delivered. Doesn't seem like what you would do when dropping off grannies ballot.
Doesn't mean an election was stolen though, Trump was unpopular enough to lose to Biden without help. But we probably shouldn't call people election deniers who point out the shenanigans that are on video and think we need to tighten up our procedures.
"good explanation" is subjective and regardless this isn't proof. What you are showing is something YOU think is suspicious and offering it as evidence.
Evidence is for court. It's not a court of law, it's a documentary showing that non-normal voting behavior was rampant in some of the most heavily contested areas. People who got the result they wanted are free to handwave it away, and people who didn't get the result they wanted are free to demand those sorts of shenanigans are mitigated against in the future.
The people making false claims damage democracy by causing people to believe their vote doesn't count. The also have proposed or enacted
changes that reduce access to voting which disenfranchises people so, no, they don't have the right to do all these things, not morally at least.
We are closer to a civil war than ever before which would damage the economy and cause a loss of life. Explain why you think it's acceptable for these people to do this?
Also, evidence is for proving your argument, not just for use in court.
Because nobody has been able to provide a reasonable explanation for why someone would drop off batches of ballots at one location, take a pic for proof, drive across town and do the same, drive to another county and do the same, etc. Rinse and repeat with multiple "mules".
Even if you're a "legitimate" ballot harvester, what is the reason for multiple drop off points and taking pics of the box after you've dropped the ballots in? It doesn't prove you dropped my ballot in but it does show you physically were at the dropoff location. Does this seem normal to you?
Why would I be qualified to judge what's normal for something I know nothing about? I'm not an election official.
How does the lack of explanation prove anything? There could be a valid reason you don't know about.
How does this prove widespread election fraud? You have no proof. At best you have a suspicious situation but no other evidence. But you believe there was widespread fraud, enough to change the vote for Biden?
My friend, you are getting very emotional and putting words into my mouth. Please re-read what I wrote. I've made no such claims. I said they made the documentary showcasing non-normal voting behavior. That's what it is. Non-normal doesn't necessarily mean widespread fraud and it doesn't mean the results would have been different. It just means that is not normal voting behavior and that if we care about our election integrity we should investigate it to ensure everything is handled better and better each election.
And don't view it through an anti-Biden lens either. Ask yourself if the J6 crew had been caught ballot harvesting and delivering to multiple drop-offs and sending pics to right wing orgs etc. in battleground states, would it be looked upon as suspicious? Or can we trust Trump and has supporters to abide by all the rules?
I don't view this as a democrat or republican issue, I think it just makes sense to ensure everyone agrees with the election integrity of the system. Otherwise, there could be huge problems.
"I believe the 2020 election was stolen, I read it on X internet source plus foxnews has been reporting on it, and everyone I know says it" - Person
"Well how do you know they aren't lying?" - Me
"How do you know they aren't, I also trust my friends and family, read this random news article from suspicious site" - Person
"Do you think we should punish people who spread false information" -Me
"No, freedom of speech, also I still believe the 2020 election was stolen. If Democrats are just going to steal elections that means my vote doesn't count and I'm not really in a democracy, this justifies civil war" - Person
I saw a woman say that Biden created SpaceX to capture the votes as they traveled through the satellites. They were then changed to Biden.
Now that I've heard this what greater understanding do I have?
But what you really mean is listen to their grievances and anger at being left behind economically. I'm aware of this but it doesn't justify destroying democracy with false accusations of election fraud.
I should note, lest anyone think I’m taking sides, that it is not overly difficult to follow US news closely enough to know that there are cheaters and creeps of all sorts trying to subvert elections and the law. It’s a rainbow of representation. All sorts of jerks are breaking and bending all sorts of laws and norms.
All y’all need an apolitical electoral commission, like Australia or Canada (and probably others) have. Heck, invite them over to run the next federal election.
No. I said you can dig up scum of all stripes. Politicians, brain-washed groupies, social activists pro- and con-, the wilfully criminal who shed ethics for pay, and on and on. The problem is bigger than your myopic political bias, and its solution requires more than taking sides: it requires full prosecution of anyone engaged in unlawful shenanigans.
This is not about choosing. It is about prosecuting. If one side commits more and worse crimes, they should get more prosecutions and stiffer sentences.
There's two Americas happening when it comes to voting it seems. In one you have this sort of thing going on. In the other America, voting couldn't be more trivial. I have a 10 day window to show up at the polls if I really want the in person experience, and my ballot is mailed to me no matter what in the first place weeks before its due. I can drop it off in any ballot box or even a mailbox will do.
The big question is, would the outcomes even change with more access? Districts are highly manipulated to guarantee political outcomes no matter who votes, even in blue states this is true, at all levels of representative government. My extremely blue city council even gerrymanders their council districts to entrench political dynasties. Plus you have Prop 22 which has proved that an informed vote is not easy to come by among the public, and money buys policy.
What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?" Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, referencing legal standing.
“Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” said Michael Carvin, the lawyer defending the state's restrictions"
In Supreme Court, GOP attorney defends voting restrictions by saying they help Republicans win
Easier access leads to higher turnout, which tends to help team blue, which is why team red works so hard to make it harder to vote. However, you're absolutely right that in many places, districts are so gerrymandered that turnout doesn't really make a difference.
In some places, state governments are preparing to ignore the results of popular votes entirely, but that only applies to the presidential election.
One theory could be that they had to do that initially to capture a state and have a power majority when redistricting comes up. Once its gerrymandered sufficiently, there is no way that they'd ever let it be uncaptured. You can let everyone vote but their vote is useless, if you've slivered the population into chunks that stymie voting power of blue votes against a swath of red voters. Ohio is already like this in many ways, blue cities held hostage by a state captured by the GOP. You have, e.g. the 9th district that takes a sliver of Cleveland and extends over 100 miles down a strip of rural coastline (1). This is the district that Dennis Kucinich (D) used to handily win until maps were remade by republicans and it extended out from Cleveland like the tentacle of a giant squid.
The term gerrymandering, let alone the practice, goes back to 1812. No one alive lived in a time that it didn't exist or has even met anyone who did. It's an unsavory practice, but it's not some new thing contributing to the decline of trust in institutions.
The last 20 or 30 years (i.e., the last 2 or 3 redistrictings) have seen the use of increasing amounts of data and computation to produce more accurately and more optimally gerrymandered districts. It's fundamentally the same practice that goes back to 1812, but the details actually matter in a quantitative sense.
That's assuming the scope and effects of gerrymandering, and that the public understanding of gerrymandering, remained constant, which is a big assumption.
Yes; It's not uncommon for the gubernatorial race to be highly competitive in a state where one party has a solid lock on the state legislature, for example.
>We already have the majority of one party believing the last election as stolen despite a comprehensive lack of evidence.
On the other hand, I'm old enough to remember the election in 2000 and still to this day there are people convinced that election was stolen despite evidence. In fact, were it not for 9/11 I'm sure the protests over that presidency never would have stopped.
I guess I shudder to think what would be required to unite this country again then..
As much as I detested Bush, this isn't exactly accurate as it relates to the election being stolen. First, the suing parties only wanted to count ballots in the 4 counties they had the biggest advantage in, so it would have only generated more confusion and delays than recounting the entire state. Second, full recounts were later performed and in every recount he ended up with more votes than Gore.
You can't keep counting forever or you end up with nobody as president since Clinton was term-limited, and ultimately the decision turned out to be correct. So the people saying that election was stolen are just as much election deniers as the J6 crowd.
There is no constitutional time limit on when election results have to be complete. They have very frequently in the past taken much longer. At the time of their ruling, the SC did not know how the final count would turn out. They did not want to know.
I.e., the majority on the SC was completely OK with the idea of having stolen the election.
Do you have any evidence to support that claim? The issue was the suing party only wanted to recount 4 counties that they had the biggest advantage in - what is a legitimate reason for that?
Also, there are limits base don when the electors are required to meet, and the President was term limited. There is no legal way for him to have remained in office beyond the expiration of his 2nd term.
That does depend on honesty of unobservable USPS activity. So it's not obviously better. Even with USPS honest, people opening the envelopes need policing.
Well, it’s called mail in voting, but they actually have locations around town where you drive up and drop them into a locked box. There are also boxes set up at the library and other places. You can mail them in, but we feel better about dropping them into the box while out and about doing other things.
> Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.
What you're alluding to as nefarious are bog-standard practices and results that have been true since elections have been a thing. It's been true in every election that the full count takes maybe a week or more to fully tally. During this period, of course people go home and sleep. The counting has always paused and resumed. And given your complaint about inaccurate tallies, why would you want tired people counting 24/7, when they would make more mistakes?
Likewise, the recount total always differs by some margin. That's because counting to large numbers is actually hard. It's not like counting to 10 where you arrive at 10 every time. Counting to a 160 million is error-prone and the results are never 100% the same for any number of innocuous reasons.
> Finally, there was extra-legal processes of voting introduced with very little oversight
The most hilarious of which was Pennsylvania, where PA Republican state legislatures introduced those changes, and then complained about them after the fact when their candidate lost! That just goes to show me the complaints are disingenuous, and wouldn't have materialized had their candidate won.
> What you're alluding to as nefarious are bog-standard practices and results that have been true since elections have been a thing. It's been true in every election that the full count takes maybe a week or more to fully tally. During this period, of course people go home and sleep.
Maybe this is acceptable to you, it isn't to me. That's a system that's ripe for abuse.
> That's because counting to large numbers is actually hard
Nobody should be counting extremely large numbers of ballots. That's why there are smaller voting precincts (curiously, some areas decided to do away with this system because putting everyone in once place was safer for covid...). It should also be possible to know, prior to tallying outcomes, how many ballots were cast in each location. That number should be immediately transmitted, and the total in each race should be no more than that number. I'm confident Disney world can tell you how many customers entered their park on a given day, it's not rocket science.
So, it doesn't really matter to me what the outcome is, it matters what the process is. If I was designing a software system that had the level of controls the election system had (even without considering the electronic portion of the system), I would be escorted out of the building for incompetence.
If someone says there's 'no evidence of cheating' that's because the system isn't designed to collect the evidence. In fact, it's barely a 'system' with a 'design' whatsoever.
This is always the argument, but then when it's time to show that actual abuse is occurring, it can never be shown in a court of law. Cyber Ninjas were saying for months how the Arizona election totals were wrong and posited all kinds of vectors for fraud, but they were unable to prove anything after being given unprecedented access to the election documents. Every claim of potential fraud in GA has been disproven after multiple recounts that seriously investigated every single claim. The official who did this investigation testified under oath to congress as to the veracity of his analysis, yet the people who claim fraud haven't even brought evidence claims before a court (because they don't have any that would withstand judicial scrutiny and meet the standard of evidence appropriate in a courtroom setting). So the continued suggestions about how the process could be abused are really hollow at this point.
> I'm confident Disney world can tell you how many customers entered their park on a given day, it's not rocket science.
Disney is a centralized system by a corporate entity, voting is done in a decentralized way by the states. Centralized systems have their own faults. And yes, maybe the system as it exists has faults, and maybe you could design a better system hypothetically on paper, but you still have to show the faults in the existing system resulted in systemic fraud (which has been the claim since the election), which to date no one has been able to do, despite herculean efforts to prove exactly this. Not the Republican state legislatures, not the Cyber Ninjas, not independent "investigators" pouring over election data, and especially not the former President. Showing that the system has flaws or is subject to a hypothetical attack is not the same as showing the system was subject to that attack or experienced massive systemic fraud.
> Every claim of potential fraud in GA has been disproven after multiple recounts that seriously investigated every single claim.
Here's where the disconnect is. I don't think you or anyone can prove there wasn't fraud because the system doesn't have the necessary controls in place to prove that.
The poster isn't asking for proof that there wasn't fraud. They're asking for proof that there was. Which is a significantly easier ask, since you you only need to point to a single instance.
If you set your DB password to 123456 and open it to the internet, turn off all logging, will you have proof someone unauthorized accessed your system? Probably not, unless they did something really overt.
That's the level of the integrity of the election system.
As laughably bad as the controls are in the system, we know that even still, many of the controls weren't followed. Basic things like counting the ballots with observers present. Chain of custody for large batches of ballots (ballots arriving to counting locations in unapproved containers). Destruction of mail-in-ballot envelopes.
Now, to the credit of people that think the election was fair and square, the people leading the 'fraud' charge is a group of charlatans and morons. Many of their arguments are ludicrous and detached from reality. That doesn't mean the system as a whole isn't broken.
Yeah. I know. I’d almost just let Trump have another 4 years if we could just restore faith in democracy and see our elected officials compromise across the isle more. And for QAnon to never have happened. Too many folks with guns believe that nonsense.
> I’d almost just let Trump have another 4 years if we could just restore faith in democracy
Would that restore faith in democracy? Or would that demonstrate that if you yell loudly enough about the election being stolen, then it will be given to you no matter what.
I dunno. I think the man is as evil as everyone else does, but what are we to do I fear, Q anon and gun toting crazies more than I fear a grifter president.
> He’s the one who started pushing the stolen election idea before votes even started.
Omitted from your statement is that he first did this in 2016. He was prepping a "the election was stolen from me" claim at that time when it looked like he might lose, but when he ended up winning, he still claimed voter fraud had occurred. He said he would have won by more if NH hadn't been stolen by illegal immigrants who were sent via bus to cast fraudulent votes. He started a commission to find evidence of that, and it dissolved after it couldn't make any progress (because no such fraud existed). This was a footnote in 2017 many people have forgotten, but it presaged 2020.
The stolen election thing is very dumb, but people forget the same argument was made in 2016 with Russia “hacking the election” with no evidence found.
There is plenty of evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, to the point where it's impossible to say they did not with a straight face. Just because it wasn't directly "hacked" doesn't mean there was not overwhelming evidence of interference. But in the end, very few people considered that election "stolen".
Providing voters with accurate information about how and where they can cast their ballot is not the same as buying ad space on Facebook to run ads with doctored images and outright false information.
Domestic groups and individuals are expected to be involved in elections. Foreign ones, by law, are not. An obvious difference and I doubt you're unaware of it.
The Intercept published an interesting (and, I suspect, related) article[1] today about the chamber of commerce no longer being the darling of the GOP. Retribution for not loyally supporting the big election lie, perhaps?
> They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.
An information campaign and a disinformation campaign are hardly the same.
The only evidence I've seen ever cited for 2016's Russia "interference" was a handful of facebook ads. Highly plausible foreign (and domestic) intelligence used and continue to use facebook and twitter ads and bots as part of their operations, but a far cry from actual vote stealing.
In 2020 we have video evidence of paid ballot harvesting, counting irregularities, and more. https://hereistheevidence.com/
To be clear, it does not follow that every claim about 2020 or 2016 is sound, but people who claim "there is no evidence for fraud in 2020, but there is evidence for 2016" are not thinking critically about the situation.
How many democrats voted against certifying election results compared to 2020. How much news time was dedicated to discussing these claims. How many court cases occurred because of them. How many people attacked government buildings?
Did the Democrats attempt to send a second set of electors?
Did any Democrat state party make false claims of election fraud part of their platform?
"We reject the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States,"
Q:How many democrats voted against certifying 2016?
7. https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-democrats-object-mor.... How much news time? 4 years. How many court cases? 1 impeachment and countless other cases. Attacked government buildings? Plenty of democrats on video using the "stolen election" to agitate far left violence. Regardless, talk about "whataboutism". My point isn't to justify every claim and response from every republican. It's to point out there is actually evidence of fraud in 2020. To say there was none is intellectually dishonest.
Q:Did the Democrats attempt to send a second set of electors?
A:Yes, and were successful in some cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016... But again, irrelevant to my point. Again, I'm not saying all republican responses to actual and perceived fraud are correct. Just that fraud did happen. How best to rectify is another question completely.
Q: Did any democrat state party make false claims of election fraud part of their platform.
A: Neither did republicans. They made true claims of election fraud part of their platform. Even if you disagree that the code above is accurate or the video is showing fraud, there are tons of democrats - including Hillary - urging the same for 2016 with the main evidence being a few facebook ads from russia.
" They made true claims of election fraud part of their platform. "
What claims of substantial fraud in multiple states have been proven? The statement below is from the source document. This is an official republican party document.
"We believe that substantial election fraud in key metropolitan areas significantly affected the results in five key states in favor of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. We reject the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States. We strongly urge all Republicans to work to ensure election integrity and to show up to vote in November of 2022, bring your friends and family, volunteer for your local Republicans, and overwhelm any possible fraud."
Okay, now let's continue to answer the question you were actually asked: “How many democrats voted against certifying election results compared to 2020”.
To summarize: 7 House Democrats objected, never more than one per state and not a single senator supported this. Quoting the same article:
> Because no senators signed onto the objections made by House Democrats in 2017, then-Vice President Biden by law denied all of the objections, repeatedly saying "there is no debate."
Now, let's talk 2020:
* 6 senators and 121 members of the House objected to Arizona's outcome
* 7 senators and 138 members of the House objected to Pennsylvania's
That's far more significant than a single person making a stunt protest, especially since it includes a number of people in what has traditionally been the more conservative chamber (finding a single crazy vote in the House has historically not been a challenge), and it's worth noting that those numbers widely accepted to be lower than expected prior to the January 6th attack on the Capitol – those were predicted at 14 senators so still nowhere near a majority but a large enough number to believe these beliefs were shared by a sizable fraction of the party if they got ⅓ of the GOP senators and ⅔ of the GOP reps to sign onto baseless accusations at a time when even Trump's own campaign was telling him he lost fair and square.
What's even more telling has been what happened afterwards, as the few Republicans willing to publicly stand up for objective reality keep getting purged from the party.
There is nothing remotely on that on the Democratic side: Hillary Clinton conceded the election immediately, and there's no sizable fraction of the party leadership claiming that the election wasn't accurately counted. There was considerable talk about foreign influence or voter suppression but there's nothing like the equivalent of election officials receiving threats because they performed their duties with integrity.
You're leaving out the key part that a) most of these were Democrats chasing not to vote for Clinton and b) they were protest votes for third-parties, not flipping to the opposition as the Trump team was hoping to do in 2020:
> As a result of the seven successfully cast faithless votes, the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, lost five of her pledged electors while the Republican Party nominee and then president-elect, Donald Trump, lost two. Three of the faithless electors voted for Colin Powell while John Kasich, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Faith Spotted Eagle each received one vote.
> Even if you disagree that the code above is accurate or the video is showing fraud, there are tons of democrats - including Hillary - urging the same for 2016 with the main evidence being a few facebook ads from russia.
Anyone who writes this has no business accusing anyone else of intellectual dishonesty. Nobody serious claimed that the election had been compromised, as opposed to influenced by outside sources, and on the influence front you're leaving out things like how in addition to Facebook ads there were things like intelligence reports from the U.S. agencies and our allies, the part where Russia hacked the DNC looking for dirt, and, of course, the various contacts and financial disclosures we heard so much about since. Despite considerable pressure to limit the investigation, it still reached the point where Trump had to pardon multiple members of his campaign.
I posted a link to open source code that you can download yourself to analyze the official PA voter records and see proof of several irregularities. As well as video evidence of ballot harvesting, some of which actually has been prosecuted. It's not vague at all. Again, I don't believe all of it, but covering your eyes and ears and saying "no proof" is intellectually dishonest.
Not sure I'd say 'no evidence' at all. It wasn't "hacking" in a technical sense as much as "social media hacking" - bots, trolls, huge numbers of lies spread via memes, etc. Some (much?) of that was traced back to Russia, IIRC.
Attribution is notoriously hard. Also, general propaganda pretty much to be expected. It's the same thing in the last election, it's absolutely expected that some people did commit voting fraud and that some votes were counted wrong.
The big question is the scale of the operation and whether it impacted the results. It appears to me that the opinion people have is very related to how much they like the result.
We investigated 'russia' election interference allegations. Some 'interference' was found, largely pushing down HRC and aiding (even if indirectly) Trump.
We investigated claims of 'stolen election' (Arizona, other states) and found marginally more votes for Biden in subsequent recounts. Even if that had been reversed, the numbers would have not have been impactful.
Other investigations in the last few years have turned up smatterings of 'voter fraud', and it usually seems to be Trump supporters voting fraudulently.
My opinion is that we've always had small bits of 'bad' votes (intentional or not), but with continued drumbeats on that topic, it's motivating some Trump supporters to commit fraud in an effort to try to balance out what they believe (wrongly) to be 'the other side' committing fraud.
I had a friend die on Election Day 2020. He'd cast an early ballot. I often think of him when we get these refrains of "dead people voting!!! it's fraud!!!". I do not know if his vote was counted or not (I assume it would have been) - this was in southeastern PA, so there may have been some recounts that removed ballots like that???
How can you say there was no evidence found of Russian interference in the 2016 election? There was, in fact, a startling amount of evidence uncovered and made public.
Can you provide citations? The claims which dominated mainstream coverage were not about hacking the election system itself but interference with things like social media campaigns or hacking the DNC’s email service to mine for PR dirt, which is by now well-documented:
Please identify specific people and times for any claims - I’m sure you can find some nut on truthout.org claiming that the GRU hacked voting machines but that’s not the same as a lie becoming the most important GOP litmus test leading to a violent assault on the U.S. Congress trying to prevent the election process from being accurately completed.
Not by major thought leaders or elected representatives. That was a popular conspiracy theory among the too-connected internet left. The problem in the modern world is that you have elected republicans and talking heads on FOX News saying the same thing to millions of believing partisans.
Nobody with real power suggested Russia actually hacked the 2016 election. Hilary Clinton conceded the election, and she certainly didn't send an army of crazed supporters to take over the capitol in a poor attempt to overturn the results. We didn't have Democratic governers and Attorneys General suing to overturn the results of their own elections.
In 2016, Russian hackers hacked both the DNC and GOP, and selectively released information collected from the DNC in order to hurt their ongoiong campaign. Russian actors also ran interference campaigns on social media. These are all established facts. They are also not allegations of fraud, simply pointing out that these actions quite possibly had an impact on the outcome of the election.
What Republicans have been claiming for almost two years now is that Democrats have committed outright election fraud. They have accused Democrats of everything from tampering with voting machines to ballot stuffing to throwing out Republican votes, and they make all of these accusations without a shred of evidence. Many Republicans in office today have taken the hard stance that Joe Biden was not elected President.
By who? A handful of internet nutjobs, surely. No one in a position of power or influence ever claimed that the election results were fraudulent in the sense that today's elected republicans are straight up claiming.
(What was claimed, and largely substantiated, was that one campaign appeared to be coordinating closely with Russian interests during the campaign. And indeed people were upset by that. But again, that's not a claim about the election.)
> "No, it doesn't kill me because he knows he's an illegitimate president. I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used – from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did," she said.
I’m not sure it’s entirely undisputed. Some people think it was leaked by a Bernie supporter who worked for the DNC and wanted to expose them rigging the primaries against him.
The chutzpah. To project that OP is giving revisionist history, and then to dead-ass present an out-of-context[1], highly-edited quote mash-up as evidence. What a dick move.
- Trump committed crimes in hiding campaign finance violations, for which he was an unindicted coconspirator, unindicted only because he was President. Funny how that works: commit crimes to become President and then become immune to prosecution for said crimes because you're President. We now know from Geoffrey Berman that Trump's political appointees in the DOJ leaned heavily on prosecutors to make that issue go away for Trump.
- His campaign met with a Russian spy to discuss an exchange of dirt on Clinton for relaxed Russian relations, and lied about it. Dirt came, and relations were indeed relaxed.
- The Trump campaign had over 100 contacts with Russia when Trump lied and said there were 0. Jeff Sessions lied about that under oath in front of Congress, and ended up having to recuse himself and appoint a Special Counsel because of it.
- That the biggest deal of Trump's life, Trump Tower Moscow, was in development when he said he had no business deals in Russia.
- Trump's campaign manager was meeting with a Russian intel operative, and it was later shown he was coordinating campaign strategy with him by exchanging internal campaign data.
- Russians had hacked the DNC and disseminated the data through wikileaks, and Trump promoted it as much as possible. The leak of that data was coordinated exactly with the publication of the Trump's serial sexual assault admission on the Access Hollywood tape.
- Trump made public statements directed at the Russian GRU to hack Clinton, which the GRU heeded.
- Trump fired the FBI director for investigating all of the above conduct (which was obstruction of justice), and then obstructed the subsequent special counsel investigation multiple times.
- Trump's AG Bill Bar lied about the contents of the Muller report to the public in his executive summary and then kept the actual report hidden, which turned out to be exceedingly damning, contrary to Barr's public statements.
I mean... if all of this was "legitimate", why did they lie constantly about it? 2016 was the dirtiest, most underhanded campaign in US history. That doesn't scream legitimacy to me.
I've been watching the show American Crime Story: Impeachment, and it just rings so hollow as to what offended people in the 90s compared to what happened in the Trump years.
Hillary Clinton conceded and said she'd support Trump. Recommend watching her concession speech. Trump still hasn't conceded two years on.
I wasn't aware of the interview that the article you posted above covers. What she says is dumb, and dangerous, and damages norms, and she shouldn't have said that.
That said, you have to admit that what Trump has done is many orders of magnitude more serious than this. It's effectively the official position of the Republican party that Trump actually won the 2020 election and that Biden is not the rightful POTUS. That's wildly dangerous in a democracy.
Mueller's report explicitly said that it found extensive interference by Russia, and that Trump and his team "expected to benefit" from it. The conversation wasn't about "hacking the election", it was about "collusion" in the run-up.
I admit I'm biased, but I don't remember this. I do remember concerns that Russia had interfered with the election, which is was found to be true (see Mueller report, Cambridge Analytica, etc.) There were also less well founded concerns that Trump himself was not only helped by but actually colluding with the Russians, which all evidence points to being false.
Most importantly, Hillary Clinton conceded the election the next day, as did Al Gore in 2000 once it was clear he didn't have a path to victory. Both pledged to support the victor. Trump hasn't done that, two years on.
Then how do you explain the Mueller report (authored by a Republican prosecutor, who was appointed by a Republican DAG, who was nominated by a Republican President and confirmed by a Republican majority Senate); and the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference (chaired by a Republican Senator with a majority of Republican members), both concluding that Russia, in fact, interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump; and that the Trump campaign, at best, passively welcomed this help, but at worst actually invited and facilitated it?
So, trying to keep this technical and not political (this is HN after all)...
Assuming these machines that were handled are decommissioned, is there a risk to future elections that use the same model of machine? I imagine there's significant security through obscurity. Do all models of this machine need to be decommissioned? We're taught that physical access to a machine should deem it compromised. But voters handle machines behind curtains every election. Does 4 hours unfettered access make things worse for the whole model?
At my voting location in the last presidential election, we were given paper ballots to fill out (at tables with privacy dividers), and then we handed those to a poll worker who immediately fed it into the machine right in front of you (and everyone else).
I think that's a good low-tech way to have security, since random people never directly interact with the machine. The only outside input is the paper ballot, and it shouldn't be hard to write scanning software that's perfectly secure from malicious ballots.
The only remaining issue then is making sure the machine isn't tampered with before/after the events. You don't even need to trust the poll worker that feeds the ballot into the machine, since they're standing in plain view of everyone at all times, and under surveillance (I assume).
At my (non-US) voting location, we put marked ballots into big plastic boxes. After the polls closed, the ballots were counted by volunteers, and the counting was supervised by other people to make sure it was done correctly.
Nobody had to worry about the boxes being tampered with, or about "unauthorized" people gaining access to them before or after the election, because they're just boxes.
If your election can be trusted only if only "authorized" people interact with voting equipment, then it can't be trusted at all. Obscurity has no place in elections.
Let's get some basic universal healthcare in place like virtually every other first world country on the planet and then revisit this "greatest" descriptor.
Is there an actual reason you assume that? You have similar voter turnout to Canada, with a corresponding increase in both votes to count, and people available to count them. Are your districts dramatically bigger? And is the delay in getting an answer worth a large swath of the population not trusting the results?
Signed bootloaders, machines that print ballots which can be independently reviewed. Maybe even unannounced audits by manufacturer or federal election officials would be useful (if there were some election mechanics standards that existed, I suppose). We should be able to make it so that even if the equipment is not monitored minute-by-minute we can still be confident
Former Travis county clerk Dana DeBeauvoir teamed up w UT profs [1] to make voting more secure. let's roll out some standards across the country.
So if I made an accusation of rape against another person with no evidence the police should watch that person more to increase the feeling of safety of the community?
What you are proposing legitimizes traitors and liars
Buried Lede: comparing sworn deposition to video evidence,
"Latham said that she went to her job as a high school teacher and stopped by the election office briefly that afternoon. But the video image shows her arriving at 11:37 a.m. while time stamps on other images show her there throughout much of the day. She also said she didn’t see specific people and saw others only briefly, but the video images show otherwise."
There are efforts in Georgia to establish paper ballots to make electronic tampering impossible. They could still stuff ballot boxes, but that takes physical work.
The first step in election fraud is always to accuse the other side of it. But real paper ballots are a thing anybody honest and competent supports.
They are an entirely unnecessary risk. There are plenty of countries that manage to count elections a lot faster than the US while using only pen and paper. It provides a lot more transparency as observers can actually follow every single step of the entire process and verify everything. A voting machine is a big black box that you have to trust (unless they also have a paper trail, and you actually verify it).
> It provides a lot more transparency as observers can actually follow every single step of the entire process and verify everything.
Simple folk physics gives everyone an understanding of the security of ballot boxes. There's thousands of ballot boxes, each in a different physically-secured location, with various personnel keeping track of them, many of them citizen volunteers and workers, as well as partisan observers. Everyone intuitively understands the security, as well as security flaws, of this system.
All of that is lost with electronic voting. Even with complete confidence/faith in the system, it simply becomes a black box. Press button and the vote total is spit out. Only a few experts understand the system in a way that they could explain how that total was arrived at and why you should have confidence in it. And even fewer would be able to actually verify that the black box does what it says it does and that you should by confident in it. Otherwise it's just a box that spits out a number. And computers make up numbers all the time.
The HAVA [1] legislation was extremely misguided and IMHO designed to create an industry where none was needed to line even more rich pockets.
Ostensibly it was done to support disabled (blind) folks to vote without anyone else seeing their ballot, but has introduced a massive potential for fraud (lack of paper ballots originally) and distrust (can you verify your vote?) in the process. MAGA just took that distrust and weaponized it.
Massachusetts uses hand-marked printed paper forms that are fed into an optical-scanner, with the paper dropping into a lockbox for auditability. The paper is the vote, the scanner just allows you to count faster.
If you're blind or otherwise need assistance marking your form, you can bring along a person of your choosing or you can ask for two officials to help you out.
If you need accessibility and online voting, you're hosed: there's a system and it sucks.
Overall, there's room for improvement but it's better than all of the electronic-first systems.
For anyone who might need to know: in the US you have an affirmative right under federal law to have someone of your choosing (although IIRC you may not choose your boss/employer) accompany you into the voting booth in order to assist you in casting your ballot. And assistance isn’t limited to people who are blind or have a disability that prevents them from being able to mark a ballot. If you struggle to read or if you struggle to understand how to fill out the ballot you have a right to get assistance.
Stuffing should be hard: you get checked off (name and address) when you receive your ballot, and again when you deposit your ballot. Vote totals need to match in both those places and the ballot box.
I think it's not just techno-optimism. Profit motivated media wants faster results to keep people excited on the edge of their seat, eyeballs glued to the advertisements.
There's no reason to need the "best of both worlds." People will doubt the validity of the electronic count anyway, you might as well skip that step and go straight to a hand count.
The more counts the better, let a machine count first to give quick results, but use multiple machines and software solutions, kept fully airgaped. Then count by hand.
A tiny horror story from the last Norwegian election was when some results were delayed due to problems with a scanner. The news story about that machine mentioned that the machine was connected to the internet (shudder), and ran Win XP (facepalm).
The internet should only be used for reporting preliminary numbers, and the counting machines should not be talking directly to the net at all.
Not sure about your state but mine uses paper scantron with a scanner/lockbox. If there is a dispute/recount they verify the paper record against the digital record. The results at each poll site are ready 30-60 minutes after polls close. Rarely, if the results aren't ready by 9pm its usually because a long line at 7pm at that polling station.
You must be too young to remember the 2000 election. Butterfly ballots. Hanging chads. The threshold level of “filled” a Scantron circle must be to qualify as “a vote” vs merely an errant mark.
When one side is determined to scrutinize a large-scale process until it falls apart the process will inevitably breakdown.
- They can provide different accessibility assistance than pen and paper, allowing people to vote on their own. Multi-language support should be easy.
- They can provide UI improvements over paper. Consider situations where the voter needs to select up to 3 candidates out of a list of 12. Or a long ballot with lots of distinct questions.
- Hopefully less lead time for updates to the ballot if someone drops out of the race, is replaced, etc.
The past few times I've voted (Canada) it's been pencil on paper, stuck into a machine that confirmed it could read the ballot, then I left. When it's been a longer ballot for municipal election it's actually felt like a bit of a test. We are voting for: city councillor, mayor, regional representatives, multiple school board trustees from one of two different school boards (but not both).
OTOH you can get a paper ballot in any language an electronic ballot is served, and the UI is the same "fill in the bubble by the name" only its a virtual bubble you tap to fill. Disability wise it seems worse. You need to have access to some way to get to the polling site, the polling site has to be accessible itself for you, you need to be able to read the screen well and have a good finger to touch the buttons. Meanwhile if you are very disabled, you get a paper ballot mailed to you wherever you live, and your nurse/friend/pastor/whoever can help you fill out the ballot and sign off as having helped you fill it out.
There's one very clear answer as to why we still use electronic voting machines: money[0]. States have to fund their own elections and machines are cheap. When you're choosing between a funding shortfall for schools, firehouses, or elections, it's really no surprise that the elections don't come out the winner.
There's a small but significant advantage to some partys when using voting machines, just with touch screen being more likely to malfunction in humid/hot weather, which really is only an issue in poor districts lacking AC.
IMO, for the same reason people are concerned about them...
France handles elections via paper and pen and has everything counted within 24 hrs. Somehow the U.S. had trouble even doing it in a week last election.
It is important to present results as quickly as possible to prevent the sorts of fuckery Trump did. So voting machines with a paper trail and risk-limiting audits (basically randomized audits—the closer the result is the bigger the sample) are ideal
I'm curious about how feasible it would be to two competing counting systems put side to side in each election such that the bulk of the agreements on a given ballot could be ignored and allow manual focus upon those ballots that are discrepant between the two systems.
I would think that would show up with a summary discrepancy of the count of the ballots. First you’d match overall ballot counts and drill into the specific ballots when disagreement is found. It should be a straightforward merge operation on the ballot ID where null values reveal a missing datapoint for a given row in the ballot.
> In May, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported that a man challenged the voter eligibility of 13,000 voters in Forsyth County, Georgia. To reiterate: a single individual questioned the right to vote for around 8% of the registered voters in the county.
The correlation of "accuses other people of cheating" and "engaged in activity that looks like trying / preparing to cheat" is a bit too high in the GOP for my taste.
I find some of the "ideas" that the GOP might push somewhat appealing, but more often than not I find them distasteful as people and more often than not in reality betraying the ideas they claim to want to uphold.
Free markets, any sense of libertarianism ... all of it seems to actually be the opposite and a guise for "get mine", or "impose my religion", pick winners, and so on.
Reaganism is dead. Trumpism is the party now. It's an attractive ideology to the people is pretends to look after, and our elections are set up to empower the crazies in primaries.
There absolutely are fake electors, because some of the "alternate slate" sent by states' GOP were neither the preselected Democrat nor Republican electors, but completely different people.
In my home state of Georgia, the slate of electors pledged to Donald Trump and Mike Pence on the 2020 presidential election was: Joseph Brennan, Ken Carroll, Vikki Consiglio, Carolyn Fisher, Patrick Gartland, Gloria Godwin, David Hanna, Mark Hennessy, Susan Holmes, John Isakson, Cathleen Latham, Daryl Moody, C. J. Pearson, David Shafer, Shawn Still, and C. B. Yadav.
The individuals who signed the fake electoral certificate did not include John Isakson, Patrick Gartland. C. J. Pearson, or Susan Holmes. Instead, the signers included Burt Jones, John Downey, Brad Carver, and Mark Amick.
"We would just be sending in 'fake' electoral votes to Pence so that 'someone' in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the 'fake' votes should be counted," Jack Wilenchik, a Phoenix-based lawyer who helped organize the pro-Trump electors in Arizona, wrote in a Dec. 8, 2020, email to Boris Epshteyn, a strategic adviser for the Trump campaign.
In a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that "'alternative' votes is probably a better term than 'fake' votes," adding a smiley face emoji." [1]
The VP is entitled to reject if there is a gross mistake by the state in the covering material/certificates about number of electors, etc, even a clerical error. He can accept if he is satisfied the clerical error will be remedied. So you are dead wrong that "if the state certifies it's fine"
There is fraud in every aspect of life. Tax fraud, welfare fraud, credit card fraud, covid fraud, government grant fraud, charity fraud, bank fraud, etc etc etc… Yet every election is beyond reproach? I call bullshit.
We already have the majority of one party believing the last election as stolen despite a comprehensive lack of evidence. It won't take too many more people until a clear majority simply stop believing any election results are valid.