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Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

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Re: Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

#51

Post by jeltz »

bediger4000 wrote: post #37
whatsupdog wrote: post #4

Unpopular opinion: Paper ballots with in person voting (with an ID) is the only 100% fool proof and verifiable voting system. Everything else could be manipulated or hacked. And when there's trillions of dollars and world power on the line, it's just a matter of time when the "could be" turns to "would be".

Human marked, human and machine readable both is good practice. Risk limiting audits after elections is good practice. CA, WA and CO at least do all this. What does in person (with an ID) add to election security? That practice most certainly restricts voting unless there's a holiday for election day. What keeps in person voting from being manipulated less than other good practice elections? Why did in person voting…

In person voting on election day makes replacing people's votes much harder. You only need to compromise a handful of people who guard the ballots othewise. The ratio of votes per staff guarding is much lower on election day in at least my country. Compromising enough people on election day would be ridiculous in my country.

Re: Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

#52

Post by normalaccess »

bediger4000 wrote: post #44
jeltz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point then? Why introduce a machine where none is needed. In most countries all votes are counted twice by his d and the initial voubt finishes in a few hours.

They're faster.

Are they? we used to have same day numbers... Now elections can take weeks to figure out who won. Progress in the negative direction.

Re: Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

#54

Post by whoiskevin »

kristjansson wrote: post #14
alistairSH wrote: post #2

~1/3 of their annual revenue. Not nothing, but likely small enough that it’s just a cost of doing business and not a real deterrent. IMO.

Agree that it should be more, but what sort of margins do you realize that 1/3 of _revenue_ seems small?

I'd like to see something that takes 50% of their revenue for 5 to 10 years.

Re: Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

#55

Post by kristopolous »

baggy_trough wrote: post #25
the_gastropod wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were literally Russian-sourced bomb threats at several major democratic strongholds' polling locations in the last presidential election. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/06/nx-s1-5181834/election-day-vo... Voter ID and blocking mail-in / early voting are just a few examples of contemporary Republican voter suppression efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

Count me as one who strongly opposes mail-in and early voting because I believe it violates the sanctity of the voting booth.

"sanctity of the voting booth"?!

> More than one in five polling places have closed over the last decade, according to an ABC News and ABC Owned Stations analysis of data from the Election Administration and Voting Survey, the Center for New Data and the Center for Public Integrity. https://abcnews.go.com/US/protecting-vote-1-5-election-day-p...

This is after Shelby County v. Holder, and now states are shutting down polling stations to suppress the vote --- well you can no longer accuse them that in the courts, but it is clearly what they are doing.

Just like how Alabama passed a voter id law and then closed half their DMVs, the ones in black neighborhoods. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/10/alabama-closes-d...

There's no "sanctity of the voting booth" - shutting down polling stations and DMVs and then requiring people to visit the DMV and the polling station and making it intentionally more difficult for some people, this is all very very obvious and you can't hide it from me by waving a flag in front of my face.

Here's the actual plan:

Require in person voting, "protect" the polling places with armed masked goons working for ICE to "keep illegals from voting" and then call it freedom.

Give me a break. Do you really think we're that dumb?

Re: Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

#56

Post by lesuorac »

otterley wrote: post #34
sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its believed that more democratic voters are less likely to have an id This notion that Democrats keep pushing - that a sizable portion of their voting base is too dumb to get an ID - when massive developing countries like India that are still struggling with basic things like sanitation have long ago solved this problem - is nothing short of embarrassing. There are people in rural India that live in straw huts tha…

We've been trusting our voters' word for centuries and it hasn't been a problem yet. Why all the distrust all of a sudden? What changed?

It has been a problem! Even paper ballots have been a problem!

Jimmy Carter has documented his own first hand account with it.

> We asked John Pope, a friend of ours, to go to the courthouse to represent me. When he arrived he was dismayed to see the local political boss, Joe Hurst, ostentatiously helping my opponent. He was requiring all voters to mark their ballots on a table in front of him and telling them to vote for Homer Moore. The ballots were then dropped through a large hole in a pasteboard box, and John watched Hurst reach into the box several times, remove some ballots, and discard them.

https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/the-fi...

Re: Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

#57

Post by somat »

whatsupdog wrote: post #4

Unpopular opinion: Paper ballots with in person voting (with an ID) is the only 100% fool proof and verifiable voting system. Everything else could be manipulated or hacked. And when there's trillions of dollars and world power on the line, it's just a matter of time when the "could be" turns to "would be".

disagree, I think paper ballots are just as easily hacked(printers are cheap). I think that while technical mechanisms are nice and should be used, they should not be depended on to secure the election. The only real solution is to have a politically neutral well motivated uncorrupted election officer corps. and if this sounds hard, it is. Thus why people keep trying to turn to technical means to secure an election and are baffled when it lets them down.

Among it's many faults, I think this is one advantage of the weird US method of running elections at the county level. While it is probably easier to corrupt individual election corps, due to it's distributed nature it is harder to systematically corrupt all of them. This does mean that US elections are strangly inconsistent from county to county, but that is the price you pay for a distributed system.

As a counterpoint to the "electronic election transactions are impossible to secure" platform, look at the credit card processing systems, yes there is fraud, but compared to the volume of daily transactions it is insignificant. the point being, large scale trusted electronic transactions are possible.

Re: Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

#58

Post by nemomarx »

kristjansson wrote: post #14
alistairSH wrote: post #2

~1/3 of their annual revenue. Not nothing, but likely small enough that it’s just a cost of doing business and not a real deterrent. IMO.

Agree that it should be more, but what sort of margins do you realize that 1/3 of _revenue_ seems small?

Well it is only one year of revenue for an action they did across multiple years.

Re: Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

#59

Post by CharlesW »

sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #26
marstall wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arguments pro and con are purely motivated by partisan concerns. its believed that more democratic voters are less likely to have an id, therefore voter id laws supposedly favors republicans. that supposed fact is at the heart of the entire debate and as far as i know there is nothing more to it.

> its believed that more democratic voters are less likely to have an id This notion that Democrats keep pushing - that a sizable portion of their voting base is too dumb to get an ID - when massive developing countries like India that are still struggling with basic things like sanitation have long ago solved this problem - is nothing short of embarrassing. There are people in rural India that live in straw huts tha…

The actual argument by anyone who cares about voting rights concerns structural barriers to obtaining ID (hint: doesn't include stupidity). India's Aadhaar ID system, which still struggles with duplicate and missing voter records, doesn't magically solve any of the problems you mention.

> Not "let's have just anyone vote and we'll trust their word".

That's not how it works here. Voter registration requires proof of eligibility, poll books, signatures, and address checks are used for verification. Thanks in part to multiple levels of safeguards, impersonation fraud has been effectively non-existent. Of course, Rockland County and similar cases may prove the existence of other attacks on our democracy that don't depend on impersonation fraud.

Re: Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

#60

Post by jeltz »

bediger4000 wrote: post #44
jeltz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point then? Why introduce a machine where none is needed. In most countries all votes are counted twice by his d and the initial voubt finishes in a few hours.

They're faster.

Same day results should be more than good enough and that is possible with hand counting in most of the world.
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