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‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

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Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#201

Post by bjhartin »

this_user wrote: post #115
marviel wrote: post #17

The timing of this information suggests that while it may be true, its very disclosure may also be meddling in foreign elections -- i.e. casting doubt on their legitimacy helps many within the US who are actively trying to propagate that narrative. EDIT: A word

That is what a lot of people are missing with this: The goal of Russian propaganda has always been to create chaos and get people to disengage by creating a feeling that nothing is true, or at least that the truth is unknowable. Hence the constant stream of extremely transparent lies and BS. In other words, the point of their election interference is not primarily to manipulate the election successfully, but to creat…

This. What a powerful tool - try to get people to believe what you want, but if you fail, steer the landing so it just further adds to the confusion, rather than being evidence of dishonesty.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#202

Post by mistermann »

theptip wrote: post #189
godelski wrote: post #77

> Russian companies were charged in the U.S. with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord and dividing American public opinion This is key here and I think we should all take note because I see comments here that feed into their tactics. Their goal isn't to have a specific election winner, but to divide us as a nation (not just US but all Westerners and even countries like Japan) and creat…

One thing we could do would be to implement some common-sense election integrity improvements such as those recommended in https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25120/securing-the... , or similarly by the advocacy group: https://verifiedvoting.org/annual-report-2021/advocating-for... . These should have bipartisan support. Things like paper votes for every election, random manual recounts to sample error rates an…

> According to Verified Voting (https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/ppEqu...), ~5% of votes are made with un-auditable "direct recording electronic" voting machines, where the votes are held in memory rather than printed to paper. When you actually do pentests, it turns out that these machines are sometimes connected to the internet (even though best-practices are to not do so), and they have been demonstrated to be hackable by someone with a USB drive even when air-gapped. Any such tampering is undetectable if done well. It's simply unacceptable to use such technology for voting IMO, and we should pass laws mandating paper-trails and banning DRE voting.

This is quite contrary to the ~~propaganda~~ trustworthy journalism take on the matter:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/13/us-election-...

> One problem is that much of the worry about election fraud is motivated reasoning ("my preferred candidate didn't win therefore there must have been fraud; let me find evidence of fraud to support my theory")

Another problem is that much of the lack of concern about election fraud is based on bad epistemology ("my preferred candidate won fair and square [in an epistemically sound, absolute sense] because some people said it was the most secure in history).

> ...rather than actual concern based on an objective analysis starting with the facts.

In my experience, this (utilizing actual objective analysis) is a good way to collect downvotes and insults.

> I do wonder if we can still make some changes to the system that strictly improve security and require zero trust of the opposition party, without destroying trust in the underlying institutions.

I wonder if we will ever try, as opposed to simply repeating the same claim enough times so that people believe it to be true. The latter is certainly cheaper, and certainly gets the job done (where the job is persuading the public that their election system is secure in fact, regardless of whether it is actually true).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#203

Post by mistermann »

jonny_eh wrote: post #116
godelski wrote: post #77

> Russian companies were charged in the U.S. with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord and dividing American public opinion This is key here and I think we should all take note because I see comments here that feed into their tactics. Their goal isn't to have a specific election winner, but to divide us as a nation (not just US but all Westerners and even countries like Japan) and creat…

That may have been true pre-2016 but it's clear at this point that one of the major parties (starts with an R) is the pro-Putin party. They may have got to that point by dividing, but now they're reaping the benefits.

It may be "clear", but whether it is true is a very different matter.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#204

Post by piva00 »

ozzythecat wrote: post #164
godelski wrote: post #77

> Russian companies were charged in the U.S. with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord and dividing American public opinion This is key here and I think we should all take note because I see comments here that feed into their tactics. Their goal isn't to have a specific election winner, but to divide us as a nation (not just US but all Westerners and even countries like Japan) and creat…

> The point is to further political extremism, on both sides, and to create in fighting so that no united formation can stand against them. > So the question is how to fight against this. I think our political parties and media are responsible for 99% of the political extremism, unwillingness to compromise, and placing their self interests over the well being of the country. And frankly, I think posts like yours cont…

> I think our political parties and media are responsible for 99% of the political extremism, unwillingness to compromise, and placing their self interests over the well being of the country.

FPTP usually creates this polarisation. I don't agree with your take that both parties are equally responsible though, one of them has consistently used political gridlock as a weapon, since Obama years. To the point where one of these parties fillibustered their own bills just to spite the other side.

There are differences in level and scale.

> You say Russia did exactly what they said they would do if NATO didn’t stop expanding eastwards? Oh you’re a traitor or must work at a Russian troll farm.

I have a huge grievance with this line, it's literal Russian propaganda you are repeating.

I'm not from the US if that matters.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#205

Post by rayiner »

piva00 wrote: post #195
theptip wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing we could do would be to implement some common-sense election integrity improvements such as those recommended in https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25120/securing-the... , or similarly by the advocacy group: https://verifiedvoting.org/annual-report-2021/advocating-for... . These should have bipartisan support. Things like paper votes for every election, random manual recounts to sample error rates an…

I believe you are focusing on a moving target. Electoral fraud is just the current wedge issue, it will become something else next when a lot of effort and thought is wasted trying to fix a system that is not that broken to be causing such uproar. You waste resources playing a whack-a-mole game against the firehose of bullshit. It's electoral fraud now, something to do with green energy plans next, then whatever welf…

It's essential to the voting system that different groups who do not trust each other can trust the vote counts. There is a reason even a high-trust, homogenous society like Taiwan does vote counting like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw

Lack of trust in the election system isn't a partisan issue. When I was a young Democrat, the kerfuffle was over how Diebold voting machines delivered Ohio for George W. Bush. In 2018, two thirds of Democrats polled said they believed Russia "tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President."

Programmers should understand this. When a system is opaque and hard to reason about, people won't trust it. We can't afford for our election system to be like that.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#206

Post by ineptech »

legohead wrote: post #81
bell-cot wrote: post #4

My impression (mostly from coverage that I've seen at UnderstandingWar.org ) is that Yevgeny Prigozhin might be happy to admit to quite a few things - whether or not he'd actually done them - so long as doing so advanced his public image (hint - neither "weak" nor "pro-American") and political ambitions. Pass the salt?

This guy is known for saying ridiculous and highly sarcastic things. They also left out key parts of this specific statement: > My answer will be delicate, sophisticated, and forgive me - ambiguous. We have interfered, are interfering and will continue to interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once. This is pretty mu…

Didn't the US intelligence services say they had clear evidence he was involved in exactly what he's confessing to, several years ago?

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#207

Post by divided »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #197
divided wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Lula also have more support in the polling in those places that used those older models? I assume those districts would be the poorer districts, and Lula did have more support among the low income, correct? I think you’re looking at correlations in data and fantasizing a causation that isn’t there.

> Did Lula also have more support in the polling in those places that used those older models? If I understood correctly, they were compared to other machines in the same electoral zone. Each zone can have 2020 models and pre-2020 models. The older models had more votes compared to 2020 models even in the same geographical locations. > I think you’re looking at correlations in data and fantasizing a causation that is…

Depends on what you mean by same geographical locations, but that can vary a lot. If you’re looking over 100’s of kilometers, there will be both poor and wealthy districts. If you’re looking within a single city, there will be poor and wealthy districts. This really only gets informative if you’re looking at different models used in the exact same polling place and even then it could be no more than correlation for other reasons (maybe for example poorer people prefer the older machines because they’re more familiar while wealthier people prefer newer machines because it matches their iPhone).

If voting preference is at all correlated to income, and what models of voting machines used at a polling place are correlated to the wealth of that district, then you will likely find a correlation between voting machine model and voter preference, with the older/cheaper model showing a preference for the candidate more favored by poorer people.

It’s not a sign there was fraud. Did you look at whether voting on newer models showed a higher preference for Bolsonaro than the national average?

What if Bolsonaro had won and someone claimed that the newer machines were built while he was in office so they were clearly programmed to favor him? Would you accept that narrative based purely on a correlation in data?

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#208

Post by spamizbad »

godelski wrote: post #77

> Russian companies were charged in the U.S. with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord and dividing American public opinion This is key here and I think we should all take note because I see comments here that feed into their tactics. Their goal isn't to have a specific election winner, but to divide us as a nation (not just US but all Westerners and even countries like Japan) and creat…

I wonder how much of this is "divide and conquer" and how much of this is just the Putin administration trying to export its own flavor of governance, which doesn't really directly translate to Western democracies. What comes out are ultimately sentiments of anti-liberalism / anti-rule-of-law / anti-individuality and the political factions who tend to embrace that live on the fringes.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#209

Post by rhino369 »

lucretian wrote: post #46
NDizzle wrote: post #38

$100k in Facebook ads, in 2016. Soros has donated $126M for midterms tomorrow. [1] But, you know, mean tweets, Putin's puppet, etc, etc. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/us/politics/midterm-money...

Soros is an American citizen. Thanks to a conservative SCOTUS decision, he apparently has every right to exercise political free speech via cold hard cash. Are you going to say anything similarly conspiratorial about Robert Mercer? Robert Uihlein? The Koch brothers?

But the idea that 100k in facebook ads had any impact--whatsoever--on a race where many billions were spent is ridiculous.

Re: ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

#210

Post by godelski »

rayiner wrote: post #205
piva00 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you are focusing on a moving target. Electoral fraud is just the current wedge issue, it will become something else next when a lot of effort and thought is wasted trying to fix a system that is not that broken to be causing such uproar. You waste resources playing a whack-a-mole game against the firehose of bullshit. It's electoral fraud now, something to do with green energy plans next, then whatever welf…

It's essential to the voting system that different groups who do not trust each other can trust the vote counts. There is a reason even a high-trust, homogenous society like Taiwan does vote counting like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw Lack of trust in the election system isn't a partisan issue. When I was a young Democrat, the kerfuffle was over how Diebold voting machines delivered Ohio for Georg…

> It's essential to the voting system that different groups who do not trust each other can trust the vote counts.

This is one of the big reasons I endorse cardinal style voting over ordinal systems. The act of counting the vote is trivial in comparison (singular round, no runoffs, trivially parallelizable). There are other reasons I advocate for it, but this is a major one: transparency.

I definitely a agree that creating a highly transparent system is integral to our elections. I think we need substantially more transparency than we have now. But not just with how votes are counted, but also in who has power and how they are making decisions. The left has been discussing quite a bit about how the right is trying to hijack the system. So I think even both sides would be highly in favor of increased transparency.

But like I said in my OP, complex problems require complex solutions. The original post was about one such need. I think this is another need under the same umbrella and I think there are many more too.

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