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Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

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Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of progressives have been against electronic voting machines from the beginning. What we're calling right-wing people out on is only caring about it when their candidate loses, and calling the previous election where they won "the most secure in history".

It's not about us vs them. People are labeled "right wing" when they ask questions, regardless of their political affiliation. I think that's wrong.

That isn’t true. People are labeled right wing when they’re regurgitating Tucker Carlson and “just asking the questions” in bad faith. There’s asking questions with the intent of answering them in good faith, and there’s asking questions to generate fud in bad faith. The Republican playbook and talking points right now are to generate fud. That’s why every Republican tries to stuff “fraud”, “radical”, “far left” etc every time they speak and are asking the questions. It’s not in good faith. If it were, they’d be asking the same questions when their team wins.

Truth is, if you continue to allege fraud, some people will stop voting. And you can push laws that restrict voting to a specific time and manner. That also reduces turnout. And it just so happens that turnout is negatively correlated with republican election victories. That is the playbook and we are watching it happen, because “just asking questions” isn’t generally being done in good faith.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#62

Quoted post unavailable.

This is definitely going to be used as proof that Trump won in a landslide in 2020 and all of the poll watchers nationwide are in the (((Democrats))) pockets.

> some straightforward cryptographic scheme

Anybody who designs cryptographic systems is LOLing right now.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of progressives have been against electronic voting machines from the beginning. What we're calling right-wing people out on is only caring about it when their candidate loses, and calling the previous election where they won "the most secure in history".

I don't understand the us v them mentality. I have lots of right wing friends and family and many of them have been against electronic voting from the beginning. For example, in my home state of oregon, many right wingers are against vote by mail and have been since oregon became the first state to go fully vote by mail. These issues are not so binary as you're making them out to be, and I think everyone would do wel…

I'll agree, our elections are shit. They're designed that way so that interested and connected individuals can manipulate them. The most successful ways of doing so are the time honored traditions of gerrymandering and voter suppression. My problem with a lot of popular right-wing complaints are that they are rarely directed at those things, they're directed at things like vote by mail which helps alleviate the latter while, as far as I can tell, not being significantly worse than voting in person for security. Voter ID sounds like a decent idea, but the solution to getting everyone their ID is to make people skip work to go to the DMV and close DMVs in areas with too many "unfavorable" voters.

But I agree, we should put aside partisan bullshit and come up with some meaningful improvements, but that will never happen as long as we have politicians who insist on trying to rig everything their way. We should be pushing for an end to gerrymandering, a way to count votes that makes it reasonable for every eligible voter to vote, assures to a reasonable degree that only eligible voters can vote, and that the count is accurate. Let me know when there's a conservative idea that actually does those things and I'll be behind it.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#66
post #54
post #30

Americans have a really tough time with the notion of materiality. America is such a big country that, as a matter of statistics, anything that can happen is happening. That doesn’t mean it happens often enough to call into question our basic systems. In this case it’s the right that fails to grasp materiality. Yes, people vote illegally, ballot boxes get stuffed, their is collusion, etc. No, it doesn’t happen often…

> No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate. Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact. Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones where the vote will be close enough that the fraud doesn't have to be too large. I'm not saying it has or hasn't hap…

> Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones

Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas. For a presidential race, there are a lot of eyes on this comparing demographic data with vote totals.

For instance, in 2020 there were some allegations that cities were faking votes for a specific political party, but analysts found the same voting trends against the incumbent president occurred in suburbs and in states controlled by the other party that were not decisive to the outcome. For the fraud to not be obvious, it would have needed to be committed in every major city and state.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#68
post #53
post #31

They make it sound so simple: Bribe the Judge of Elections who oversees everything. Dilute the vote tallies by using the voting machines to increment the votes for specific candidates. Certify that the fake results are correct. Lie if anybody asks. This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?

> Dilute the vote tallies by using the voting machines to increment the votes for specific candidates > Why is it so easy? I don't know, it doesn't seem easy to me. I mean, it seems like the result of a ton of long-term planning to implement processes that allow each instance of this to be easy. But the fight against electronic voting machines was fierce, and took a long time. We lost, by the way.

There is no mention of electronic voting machines. Nothing described in this press release would even require electronic voting machines. They cast actual (fraudulent) votes and then falsified the records in the polling books to match.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#70

Quoted post unavailable.

Best option is paper ballots that are machine-readable and human-readable. Cryptography doesn't help; what you need are processes which make fraud difficult (for instance, observers with line of site to all ballot boxes from when voting starts until they're counted; cross-checking counts of blank, spoiled, and voted ballot papers before & after voting, translucent ballot boxes that are clearly empty at the start of e…

Accurate Voting seems like the most viable use case for triple entry accounting, you know that thing that got created in 2009 by that mysterious Satoshi guy and everyone hates it now and thinks it’s a Ponzi scheme- totally legitimate use case here with voting and the only real world scenario I know of where the solution hasn’t located the problem yet.
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