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

I'm not American and not hugely partisan on the right/left thing but I think the whole world was watching that one and thinking it a bit odd. Obviously the Russians were trying to help Trump and may have swung things a little given that the vote was so close.

Election security might be a moving target for you, but this is something I have been paying attention to for at least a decade. I think it's important to note that there is an underlying bipartisan issue here that has been known for a long time.

> a lot of effort and thought is wasted trying to fix a system that is not that broken

This is certainly the blue-tribe talking point right now, but it's an oversimplification, and I encourage you to actually read and engage with the materials I linked. There are security vulnerabilities and auditability failures in the system which should be fixed, and this was a common blue-tribe issue prior to 2020, when it switched to being a red-tribe issue. I don't think these issues are catastrophic failures that invalidate the election results, but they are serious and worth attention.

I think one should separate out concrete claims of fraud in 2020 that have since been refuted by recounts (e.g. Antrim County) as examples of the motivated reasoning I referred to, vs. issues like un-auditable DRE machines which are actual problems that need to be fixed.

I do understand where you're coming from; the instinctive reaction in a low-trust partisan environment is that giving oxygen to the bad-faith/motivated-reasoning claims of election fraud does more harm than good. However for one example, I think if the red tribe has a good showing tomorrow (i.e. lose some of their incentive to cry fraud), then that would be an ideal time to get some bipartisan legislation in place to try to bleed the issue of salience ahead of the 2024 elections where it could be extremely dangerous.

> You waste resources playing a whack-a-mole

The point I was making is that there is some set of policy changes that the blue team thought were beneficial in 2016, and perhaps we could all agree to do them. It's not merely whack-a-mole if you leave the world a better place after whacking the first mole. The goal I'm advocating here is not to play zero-sum games to "whack the opponent", it's to actually make objective improvements to the system that in normal times would be uncontroversial bipartisan proposals. If we can execute the political Ju-Jitsu to redirect the current toxic discourse into actual improvements that would be a major win.

Sure, following that there will be another wedge issue; that's politics. But I think the important question is whether we make non-zero-sum gains during each issue cycle, and sometimes it is possible to do so.

The machines look the same to the voter and we can't choose which machine to vote on. Each citizen is assigned an electoral zone and a section within that zone. One voting machine captures the votes of every section. In my neighborhood, for example, the voting took place at a school and every classroom had a different voting machine, one for each section.

It'd be extremely suspicious if it turned out that the people voting one room away from me showed statistically significant differences from the other sections.

> Did you look at whether voting on newer models showed a higher preference for Bolsonaro than the national average?

Looks like Bolsonaro wins if only 2020 models are evaluated.

> 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?

Clearly we'd be having the same election denialism problems we're having now...