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Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

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Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#91
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way less obviously there are laws to help prevent foreign actors from injecting money and influence in to our elections. Which is why there are bipartisan congressional hearings on an unprecedented attack.

I understand that this is illegal. What I don't understand is why domestic manipulation of elections isn't. Eric Schmidt and Rupert Murdoch don't have the interests of the US in mind any more then Putin does. Just because it's quite precedented doesn't make it right.

Nevermind the US government, and its agencies manipulating elections throughout the world going on 70 years

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#92
post #9

In the US, there's a lot of concern about making it easy for voters to register and stay registered, because in the past officials used this to disenfranchise blacks in the south and minority groups. I think they are not paying enough attention to the risk of intentional voter fraud (by hostile outsiders) in the modern world. In the last election, Russian election manipulation became a big topic because they hacked e…

It's vulnerable overall but the actual act of in person voting has very low fraud rates. Most of these things disenfranchise tons of votes while stopping few (often literally none) instances of actual fraud.

Edit: it's not that there is no fraud, it's just that there is very little and you are much more likely to change the vote by accidentally disenfranchising people than preventing fraud

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#93

Anyone with half a brain knows that these purges are designed to advantage a side not protect the system. I read an article the other day that stated that some America's voting system had essentially been compromised on many levels. It made me think about why so many of our polls have, in the last few years, been so off the mark. Now I'm beginning to think it's not because the polling models suddenly don't work. It i…

Yeah, I remember the outrage when the original Diebold hacking announcement was made in the Bush Jr era. The concerns in that were never addressed and doubtless things have simply since got worse. If Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election, they could bring some of their engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud.

> engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud

Simple, don't use fancy electronic voting machines. There's really no benefit.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#94
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way less obviously there are laws to help prevent foreign actors from injecting money and influence in to our elections. Which is why there are bipartisan congressional hearings on an unprecedented attack.

I understand that this is illegal. What I don't understand is why domestic manipulation of elections isn't. Eric Schmidt and Rupert Murdoch don't have the interests of the US in mind any more then Putin does. Just because it's quite precedented doesn't make it right.

>domestic manipulation of elections

You mean campaigning?

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2016 polling models were pretty good, or at least, as good as they are usually[1]. The problem is, it was a very close race by electoral college standards. Trump ultimately won by 80,000 votes in three states in an election with 136m votes cast[2]. So the 'deciding' votes were just 0.06% of the vote total. I think we can have it both ways. Voter suppression is being done and we have statistical heats in competiti…

It would take a Constitutional Amendment to get rid of the Electoral College. That’s 2/3rd of both houses of Congress and 2/3rds of the State legislatures. Better to call a third Constitutional Convention.

The unfortunate irony is that 2/3 of state legislatures will never vote to abolish the electoral college in favor of the popular vote, because a vast majority of states get relatively more voting power than they would with the popular vote, since every state gets a minimum of 3 electoral votes no matter how small their population is. This comes at the expense of the few most populous states (e.g. California), which are severely disenfranchised.

I wonder if we will ever see an effort to exploit this by having the ruling party start splitting the states friendly to them into multiple smaller states in order to get more electoral votes and more senate seats on their side. It seems that creating a new state requires a 2/3 majority in both houses and the signature of the president [1], so this seems unlikely to come into play any time soon.

[1]: https://people.howstuffworks.com/new-state-in-us.htm

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#96
post #4

This is a crime. The power to unregister voters must be forcibly taken away from states; especially red states, since they are the only ones abusing this power. It should require federal action, instead.

> It should require federal action Shooting from the hip is a good way to trash a democracy. What you're proposing would allow a single, centralized actor to purge voters from the rolls. De-centralised systems will always have longer, more-idiotic tails. That's the tradeoff for their robust central tendencies.

[deleted]

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#97

New York purged me back in 2010 and I was forced to vote provisional despite voting there consistently for many years. The fail extends all around.

And odds are high that your provisional ballot was simply tossed unless you contacted your county Board of Elections, probably with documentation to prove that you were allowed to vote and probably within just a few days after the election. What happens with provisional ballots is very highly variable, but quite frequently ends up with them simply being tossed.

Are they tossed because of malicious intent, or because they can't change the outcome of the election?

For example, if the outcome of the election has Candidate X ahead of Y by D votes (D = X - Y) and there are less than D provisional ballots to count, is there a reason to count them?

(This being for a simple one-post election; if there are multiple posts where proportion of votes allows for a seat being won/lost by a party, the formula would have to be different.)

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#98
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are spreading FUD which is detracting from a more immediate (and actual) issue

That’s a feature, not a bug.

That's not really fair. I care about making sure people are able to vote, too. I expressed a concern about election security because I think it's an issue people should give more thought. It's not fair to suggest that means I don't care about the same things you do too.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Zealand was one of the first countries to offer universal adult suffrage in 1893. Which is a decent definition of a modern democracy. Sweden, where I live, was a bit late and got it voted on in 1919 and the first election in 1921. So just under a century now.

I'm not saying centralized voting is incompatible with democracy. (It isn't.) I'm objecting to arguments in the form of "because most countries do X, we should too" when it comes to voting. The sample of old democracies isn't large enough to draw much from alone. Note that the Voting Rights Act was an act of federal oversight over voting. I fully agree with it. If you get a chance to read its drafting, please do. It'…

American democracy has a myriad of problems, maybe keeping the status quo is the worst of all options.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#100
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most countries have centralised voter registration. Often tied to ID and other registration systems.

> Most countries have centralised voter registration Most democracies haven't lasted more than a century. De-centralisation is an annoying but core feature of American democracy. It's wise to be conservative when discussing its dismissal, particularly in respect of something as fundamental as voting.

Was America actually a democracy prior to the voting rights act of 1965? (Not trolling, this is a critical part of the issue, the extent to which black people could actually participate in said democracy)
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