Before I clicked on the link, I assumed this was yet another egregious lie. But this one really doesn't qualify. It falls squarely in the category of reasonable opinions. Let's look at the claim: "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent". Clearly the veracity of the statement rests on the word "substantially." It's inconceivable that no one ever takes, for example, an elderly relative's mail in ballot and votes it fraudulently. So for this to be a reasonable opinion, it merely has to be reasonably possible for the claim to be true.
So, let's consider if such fraud could possibly be substantial. Let's use California as an example. Registering to vote is easy, all you need is a web browser[1] and a mailing address where you reside or with a resident willing to give you ballots or ignorant that they are receiving them[2]. Also, the State of California faces an impractically large legal hurdle to reject suspected fraudulent ballots[3] so it can be assumed that most if not all will be accepted. It seems clear based on the observable facts that substantial fraud is certainly possible under the California regime. Please note I am not claiming such fraud actually happens, merely that it is easily practicable for an organization as well organized as, say, a political party. To be honest, I bet literally hundreds if not thousands of readers on this site could build "California vote fraud as as service" as a side gig. Let's disrupt the electoral process for a billion dollar valuation!
From this I conclude that while I personally disagree with the President, this particular statement is a (probably, I sure hope) incorrect opinion, not a factually incorrect statement.
There is evidence that mail in ballots causes more problems though. However to find unbiased information about it you have to search for articles from a time before it became political.
> Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.
California has been running absentee ballots for a long time. Are you saying all of them had "substantial fraud" ? If so, why didn't the President, who had control of 3 branches of govt and had a commission to prove election fraud, couldn't find any evidence ?
Why not just claim that your network could not possibly be compromised despite no IDS / HIDS / AV? I'm sure there would be no evidence there, either.
What evidence of fraud would you expect? How would anyone know? And given the sophistication of fraud these days (bypassing 2fa, number porting, etc) - - how could you possibly expect zero fraud in a system whose only controls are human?
What I heard was that California refused to cooperate, and the commission couldn't do much without their cooperation. Though this is only a rumor I heard.
From my fact checking, I compare to nations which also allow mail-in ballots but have much more stricter and expensive measure in place to prevent fraud. If the twitter fact checkers are correct then there is no substantially risk with mail-in ballots used by California, then using more strict measures are a waste.
Sweden where I live has several conditions on mail-in ballots. 1: it is only allowed as an exception for Swedish citizen currently residing in a other country. 2: A person must identify themselve through an embassy or the digital identity system which require a Swedish bank to perform identification. The first condition limits the scope of attacks and makes large scale attacks quite visible, while the second condition is very hard to perform. If you could break into hundred of thousands of peoples bank accounts, or take control over an embassy, voting fraud is unlikely your first priority.
> So for this to be a reasonable opinion, it merely has to be reasonably possible for the claim to be true.
This position makes no sense to me, because the original statement indicates certainty. Therefore, you need to test the opposite of what you suggest, i.e. the statement can only be true if the election must contain substantial fraud.
When you negate the double negative, the claim in the tweet is:
> mail-in ballots will certainly be substantially fraudulent
Therefore if there is any chance that they will not contain substantial fraud, it is clearly a false statement.
Can confirm a similar situtation for the "Briefwahl" in Germany. The topic came up while discussing the security of electronic voting years ago. It was sobering.
>Please note I am not claiming such fraud actually happens,
Though it would be naieve to assume it does not. Internet based crime goes through incredible hurdles today to bypass 2fa and anti fraud measures which are substantially more sophisticated than what the voting system has in place.
To suggest that criminals and nation-state actors would spend enormous effort to spread misinformation and steal credit cards, but completely ignore the far easier voting system, is absurd.
I think the place where this falls apart is that he's talking about future events. It's a prediction about the future. Unless you believe he's insinuating supernatural abilities to tell the future exactly, he's just expressing his personal level of confidence about his prediction... which is an opinion.
The real problem here is calling what Twitter did a fact check. Because what Twitter did was just promote opposing opinions/predictions about the same future event. Neither side can make statements of fact about the future, they can only state their opinion and express their level of confidence in that opinion.
People are held accountable for comments on future events all the time:
- medical claims
- fiduciary
- threats
If a doctor tells a patient that there is no way (ZERO!) that taking “the hydroxy” will be anything less than substantially successful - do we let it slide because there is a chance it might be true?
Of course you should hold him accountable. Vote against him. What does that have to do with Twitter "fact checking" something that isn't even a statement of fact? Do you think they'll start fact checking things like statements of fact about the gender pay gap, perhaps the most debunked concept in all of economics?
If you're going to autistically parse the President's tweet, then I will gladly point you towards the word "substantial" in the President's tweet. How do you intend to gauge the President's internal thoughts regarding what he believes would be a "substantial" amount of fraud? He might feel a single bad vote is substantial.
It's a sort of article (I didn't know Twitter had this type of format, I really like it, weirdly enough) that contains an introduction text and a 'What you need to know' paragraph, followed by fact-checking tweets from press organizations.
I know where the tweets come from, but who has written the introduction and summary paragraphs, and who has compiled those tweets and photos in that order?
Here’s the Twitter trends FAQ, which is where I would expect the answers to your questions to be found, yet there’s not much info on this page. Basically they say trends are determined by an algorithm, but that there are also humans in the loop.
If we're honest a lot of his tweets violate twitters content policy and they do so blatantly. I wonder if they'll ever have the guts to straight up hand him at least a temp ban.
I understand this route. The President of the United States already has a gigantic platform, so it's not like he'll just go away like @nero did. This gives Twitter a chance to annotate his hate with facts, and hopefully reach his audience. Banning him just makes him a martyr, without lessening his reach.
I do wish the UI was a bit... angrier. The friendly light blue doesn't exactly scream "misinformation!"
But as they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Removing him from Twitter won't make him or his base any less hateful. It's a constant reminder that he needs to be removed. I think if Twitter and news organizations just started ignoring him, many people would forget how horrible he is.
I disagree, giving certain folks a platform only raises them up and legitimatizes them. Didn't the Reddit folks discover that shutting down hateful subreddits prevents them from popping back up effectively? I believe this is the citation[1].
Yeah but... this is the President of the United States we're talking about, not a random Reddit user. He's already been raised up and legitimized. I don't think that study applies... in fact, I don't think any study applies, since this is the first time we've ever seen this.
> I disagree, giving certain folks a platform only raises them up and legitimatizes them.
Who do you believe should have final say over which person or group of people can have a platform, and who can't?
Should it be whoever owns that particular platform? Should it be the government? Should it be the court of public opinion? I've yet to see a compelling argument for deplatforming that answers this question, because what is acceptable to society has large grey areas that are constantly shifting. I think the intentions are nothing but wonderful - I'm very glad that communities like those in the report you cited, and many similar ones, no longer exist on Reddit. The problem as I see it is that censorship lowers visibility of hate speech very effectively, but if anything seems to strengthen people's convictions that they are right about what they believe. Hateful subreddits may disappear, but is that clear evidence that the people that participated in them changed their minds about what they had expressed online? I find that conclusion dubious at best.
I see this issue most strongly with conspiracy theorists, which seem to be a dime a dozen in 2020. Censorship is nothing if not evidence that what someone is saying is true - see the recent "Plandemic" viral video as a great example.
Deplatforming is, like I said, well-intentioned, but like so many "solutions" it is obsessed with the symptom of the disease, not the cause. It is based on the very old but very wrong notion that 'if only everyone believed what I believe, all the world would be at peace'. That notion is the cornerstone of religious dogma and has been the justification for religious conversion, forcible or otherwise, for millennia. There are proven ways to moderate people's beliefs through civil discourse. The issue is that it is so time consuming, unsatisfying, and thankless (not to mention that you don't get to play moral superiority games) that I'm not surprised people would rather just throw down the banhammer instead.
“The more you tighten your grasp, the more star systems slip through your fingers.”
Censoring the point of view of others merely lends credence to their point of view. Unless you find a way to censor them completely, you will cause more and more people to lose faith in your ideals.
All the new alternative social networks and video sites that have cropped up and the old ones that have ben gaining in popularity is evidence that people are beginning to turn away. Ex. lbry.tv, bitchute.com, gab.com, voat.co, phuks.co, zerohedge.com
This is an expected consequence of deplatforming — once you kick them off, those people are going to go somewhere. For this argument to work, you need to show that those networks are able to grow more than they would as a community on a mainstream platform.
Networks tend to follow an exponential growth rate, so even if the same number moved to the alternative platforms, the time it would take them to grow large enough to be significant would shorten substantially.
Why would it shorten the growth period compared to mainstream platforms, where there are far more users who could join the community? Is there any evidence that this is the case?
> Why would it shorten the growth period compared to mainstream platforms, where there are far more users who could join the community?
Because networks tend to follow an exponential growth rate.
The time it takes to go from 1 to 128 equals the same time it takes to go from 128 to 16384, so if you add 127, you've shortened the time for the network to grow from 1 to 16384 by half. Meanwhile, for a platform that already had 16384, subtracting 127 is a drop in the bucket.
> Is there any evidence that this is the case?
Facebook/Youtube/Twitter/et al couldn't have grown as much as they did as fast as they did unless that was the case.
Not all exponential growth is the same: x^2 and x^1.01 are both exponential. I’m asking you for evidence that the exponent is higher for niche isolated networks than it is for communities on platforms with algorithmic promotion to a massive existing userbase.
Your reply has violated our community guidelines and you have been deducted 5 points for use of the word "extremist". You have 3 points remaining before account suspension.
So you would rather funnel two differing views to two platforms where they can both agree with each other in an echo chamber, rather than reasonable healthy adult discussions and sharing of ideas?
Why is the president driving around in a motorcade, has VORFAHRT everywhere, sharpshooters, AF-One and so on, while you have to wait at red lights, and being searched at airports?
I would argue that misinformation via the web has only metastasized over the past decade and the deplatforming efforts have been comparatively minimal.
> the deplatforming efforts have been comparatively minimal
Compared to what?
From my perspective the tech censors are already on thin ice - I actually don’t see how they could ramp up efforts much more without facing serious opposition.
I think arguing based on outcome misses the more fundamental point. The president is a citizen. When Angela Merkel speeds she gets a ticket, and when she goes to the supermarket she stands in the queue (which she actually literally does herself regularly, in contrast to Trump I suppose).
So regardless of whether banning him is good or bad in terms of exposure or whatever, he's a user on the platform and he ought to be treated as such. If Trump wants to speak as the president with authority I assume he has the white house press department at his disposal.
Jack Dorsey has spoken about this on Joe Rogan's podcast, and he basically says that it was a judgement call where they weighed the public interest in the tweets against the violations of the tweets.
Alas, this is what The People democratically voted for; and with our current voting system, the will of us 49% who don’t want to hear it counts for nothing u_u
The whole reason there is a United States of America is because each state would get a voice in choosing the president. By only going by popularity, a few select cities decide all. If it was proposed that way, the USA would never have formed and we'd have a bunch of individual separate countries.
“The only reason we have an application is because the original developers wrote it in COBOL. Refactoring it to the realities of the world today is blasphemy!”
How would that be worse than a few key districts in one or two swing states running everything? Presidential candidates can afford to ignore entire sections of the country because they don't matter.
One could at least make the argument that the population centers should have more weight because that's where most of the people are, and those cities have the greatest financial and cultural influence. But why should, say, Iowa be as important as it seems to be in every Presidential election?
Because otherwise only New York, Texas and California matter, which the framers of the Constitution decided was a bad idea.
I actually like the principle of the electoral college, it reminds me that the US is in fact, a Union of States.
The real issue I see are the rampant gerrymandering of the congressional districts, which have a far greater skewing effect on the results than the electoral college (well, technically the same because the congressional districts are identical to the electoral college).
The States are also gerrymandered, and we are stuck with it for ever. When states like Wyoming and the Dakatos were formed it was calculated based on the left/right debate of the day, slavery.
If the majority of people live in LA and NY, then that'd be reasonable, but that's not the case. If we got rid of the electoral college, rural voters would still be a substantial portion of the population. In the current system rural voters in California are being drowned out by coastal cities where as urban voters in inland states are being drowned out by rural districts.
Americans whose votes are counted in the current system have never changed that.
States representing a large majority of the US population have all passed legislation for a national popular vote, and no one doubts that a national popular vote on whether to have a national popular vote would succeed.
Removing it from the normal tweet status is separate from preserving them. They could archive them and disable replies, retweets, quotes, and so on. They could remove it from feeds. They could frame it differently.
I know for a fact my aunt mails in ballots for her husband, her father and her mother. Claiming that there is no mail-in voter fraud among 300 million Americans is quite absurd in my opinion.
It's a bit absurd when claims of rampant mail-in voter fraud come without evidence from a New Yorker in the District of Columbia who votes in Florida by mail.
One, why haven't you reported your aunt for voter fraud? Voter fraud is a very serious issue and it seems to me that you're letting a criminal go free. This can be easily verified by telling the government and having the three others confirm who they voted for.
For two, if she is mailing in the ballots, then is she forging their signature as well as collecting their SSNs? Or are they simply signing on the ballots themselves agreeing to the votes? In which case is that truly fraud or not? If she's forging signatures then she's also committing identity theft which is a very serious issue, one that I hope you agree deserves reporting.
When you have become one of the de-facto news sources for a sizable portion of the population, it does sort of become your job.
Whether it’s good that they have become a news source or not is a valid question. But right now, they are, and I think preserving the president’s tweets seems like a pretty easily defensible decision. Even if it is also (or primarily) motivated by their own business interests.
Giving him a platform in the first place is what necessitates the consequent fact checking. If they didn't distribute his lies they wouldn't need to contradict them. Many media outlets have stopped airing Trump's statements live, because doing so is essentially unethical.
That is inevitable. Trump will one day not be president. And one day while not president he will bitch tweet in a way that dramatically and clearly violates the terms of service. Twitter will have reached its Rubicon with respect to Trump and the public interest / head of state exception they've carved out, and they'll have to make a permanent decision.
There's nothing I'd rather say on my deathbed than "I was really good for the shareholders." Seriously, life is too short. Ban the president. Go down in history. Be someone. Jack or whoever will die being nothing more than a low-tier mascot for the long dead American dream. But banning the president... it would be very literally epic.
What I really want to say on my deathbed is "I lived a great story," so IMO it's a no brainer.
What do you mean "interact"? He virtually never posts any responses, the account is close to broadcast-only. There's also no real interaction in the replies: even if you manage to scroll past the kneejerk responses and product spam thriving on controversy, what are the chances you'll find anyone to actually interact with?
He retweets racist nonsense constantly. If you want to add "re-tweeted by the President of the United States" to your resume, you just have to keep @-tagging him with conspiracy theories about Biden, and there's a decent chance he'll take the bait.
I have no idea what you're trying to prove. In any case: anti-white racism isn't the same as standard-issue anti-black racism.
Racism is more than some people not liking your particular skin color on Twitter. Being black means every police encounter is potentially lethal––see today's news, or that jogger two weeks ago for recent examples. People call the cops when you're birding in Central Park, and unless you're lucky and have a recording, they aren't going to believe you.
If, perchance, some virus starts going around, you'll find the hospitals in predominantly black neighbourhoods have less staff and equipment, and the 30% black people in your city make up 60% of the dead (Chicago, Detroit).
In other words: it's systematic, and about power. That stuff on Twitter is stupid, but it isn't equivalent.
No rational person would argue that X racism is worse than Y racism, this kind of thinking is what makes anti-white racism perfectly acceptable hence why you don't see these accounts/tweets taken down.
Tons of people feel that X racism is worse than Y racism, and it's ridiculous to say that they are all irrational people. The reality is that no two things are perfectly equivalent, even if they are both terrible things that should both be eradicated. We should castigate all forms of racism, but that is not at odds with the reality that it is at least a legitimate opinion to claim that the practical consequences of anti-black racism, at least in the English-speaking world, are apparently worse than the practical consequences of anti-white racism.
I find his Tweets entertaining and I get a good laugh out of them. As for the anti-white thing, I'm just making an observation about something I found interesting.
I legitimately want to know what's up with Twitter allowing these comments. I find it weird cause it'd go without saying that hating any other minority would land you a ban or suspension.
Twitter deserves our respect for stepping out of their lane (marketing/advertising) to ensure that all information on their website is 100% scientifically accurate. Thank you, selfless heroes!
This what a 2012 New York Times article[1] said about mail-in ballots:
>Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.
I'm sorry, but that so-called "fact checking" looks like a classic case of "Trump said something is bad, so we must defend that thing at all costs".
It’s interesting that in the article they write: “A leaked demo features bright red and orange badges for tweets that are deemed "harmfully misleading."”
But currently, they didn’t use that approach. Right now the warning tag is an exclamation point circled badge with blue text.
And if that happens, take note of which political parties/groups fight tooth and nail because they know that voter turn out is bad for them. (It's not difficult to predict.)
Political posts aren’t pleasant for anyone. They are also often meaningless.
Watch as I essentially take the contrapositive of your statement and say << Democrats fight hard to make voting as easy as possible because they are supported by people who are not engaged politically and by people who aren’t invested enough to vote if it takes any effort at all. >>
See? Not pleasant. I’d wager a lot of people have problems with that statement and I’d also wager that I could use each of their counter arguments to my statements as counter arguments to yours.
>Democrats fight hard to make voting as easy as possible because they are supported by people who are not engaged politically and by people who aren’t invested enough to vote if it takes any effort at all.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Fighting to increase voter turnout is infinitely preferable and authentic to the stated principles of the country than fighting to suppress voter turnout.
If increased voter turnout helps your political party, you are likely to support it. If it hurts your political party, you are likely to be against it.
When talking about politics its hard to tell whether or not people "believe X because Y" or "believe X because it helps the party". Maybe they don't actually care about X but have meta-awareness and claim to believe X because it helps the party.
This is what makes political discussions annoying and frankly inappropriate. There is no possible way to argue in good faith and people have vested interest in arguing outside of good faith. I'd wager that some people believe they are arguing in good faith but do not realize that they are dramatically influenced by the orthodoxy of their political party.
>If increased voter turnout helps your political party, you are likely to support it. If it hurts your political party, you are likely to be against it.
If you care about democracy in the slightest then you support an increased voter turnout regardless of how it affects your party.
Isn't too much voter turnout bad though? Do we really want every poor ignorant impoverished (or rich) American voting? Or just the people that take democracy seriously and vote after having puzzled it out? If you reduce the friction too much (or even force people to vote) you'll get a lot of voting based on who promised the most goodies/handouts or emotional appeal rather than rational reasoning.
There's some serious bias here. There are poor and impoverished people who are not ignorant. There are also ignorant millionaires. The moment you start saying who shouldn't be voting, make sure you realise how many people think you shouldn't be voting either.
At an extreme of that, see what the threshold of "rich" is for people saying "eat the rich".
I thought someone might interpret it that way, which is why I quickly edited to say "or rich" as well. However, you must admit that the ignorant poor vastly outnumber the ignorant rich.
In the same way highly intelligent poor outnumber the highly intelligent rich. + some slight skew due to living in poverty actually impacting your development, but it's not enough to overcome the overall distribution.
So doesn't it stand to reason that the poor should have a greater say in the operation of our government than the rich do, given that vast outnumbering?
There are quite a few countries with compulsory voting (1) and it seems to work; it'd make more sense to bolster education than to gatekeep voting to "good" education which slowly over time in the US has moved to private, expensive schools.
This line of reasoning isn't new and has been used numerous times historically to disenfranchise, prohibit or otherwise block "undesirable" groups of people.
To answer the question, yes. You absolutely want every single eligible person in the electorate to vote.
Voting is not a structured intellectual exercise like taking a test or writing a paper. There's not a single "right" answer that you have to be smart to figure out.
Voting is an exercise in representation. People vote based on what they want, not what they know. Desires, dreams, and concerns are not knowledge. Smart people, educated people, still have emotions, can still have hugely different values, and want wildly different things.
The purpose of democracy is to adjudicate between competing desires without violence. If you try to exclude a category of people from this process, you harm its legitimacy and it stops working well for everyone. The end point of that trajectory is revolution.
In an ideal democracy, that's how it works. But we see in a corrupt democracy, the elite politicians manipulate people that think with emotions, and buy their votes with false promises and handouts. And they can never be blamed because "4 years is not enough to accomplish much"
Somehow it's always other people who are too emotional or ignorant to vote properly.
I can't remember seeing someone raise their hand and say, "I'm too emotional and poorly informed, please take away my right to vote." Wonder why that is.
They aren't always false promises and handouts. Lobbyists get paid big bucks to bribe, oops, I mean to inform politicians on policy. Those promises often get delivered. Unfortunately.
Poor and impoverished? No need to repeat yourself. Maybe there should be a writing test before one could vote. We could come up with all sorts of elitist barriers.
Twitter could possibly fund itself for a long time if they hosted a pay-per-view event of the moment they lock and disable that account for policy violations.
It could be the most profitable 5-minutes of pay-per-view streaming in history and also simultaneously the most amazing test of Internet resiliency, ever.
The real world doesn't work like children playing word games at recess. "It was technically just a prediction because I was talking about the future and therefore it's impossible to make any judgements about what I said" just doesn't play in the real world.
I'm finding the response people are having to this mail in voting thing to be...puzzling.
It's not a ridiculous thing to wonder about how susceptible mail in voting is to fraud, and it seems like some of us are putting blinders on simply due to our distaste for the current president.
If we were to hold a hackathon with a $100,000 prize for the most plausible path to exploit mail in voting in order to swing an election, are people implying that there would be no entries? Or maybe no viable entries? That's ridiculous.
Here's some spitballing: (eh, I removed this. I don't think brainstorming how to committ election fraud is a good idea. I'm assuming that readers of hacker news can probably figure out some relatively obvious ways of casting doubt into the outcome of a mail in election)
How are people looking at what recently happened with 100s of millions of dollars of fraud being committed against various US unemployment systems, and not thinking that other systems might be at risk as well?
Remember the Iowa caucus? That was a hastily put together vote reporting system, not even meant for tallying, and look at what a disaster it was. Now we're expecting that states will radically alter their voting system, in 5 months, and that it won't be vulnerable to interference?
To be clear: I LIKE mail in voting. I have permanent mail in voting status in my state (Arizona), and my wife and I usually get breakfast at our favorite restaurant and spend HOURS meticulously researching every candidate and BI on the form. Being able to take that amount of time is fantastic, and a luxury I wish everybody could have.
But it doesn't have to be so polar. I like mail in voting, obviously, but I'm not so stupid as to think that it cannot possibly be criticized. I am a hacker after all.
Boo to twitter for this. This is twitter obviously putting their finger on the scale of an election, and after all of the drama surrounding the idea that foreign actors might have purchased a few 10s of thousands of dollars of facebook ads, I'd hope that Americans would have a distrust a company where foreign entities have a major stake doing such a thing. Not acceptable in my opinion.
>Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.
and another:
> Election experts say the challenges created by mailed ballots could well affect outcomes this fall and beyond.
And another:
> The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting
So who is to be believed here? Twitter? The New York Times? Why aren’t the experts from this article being listened to?
There is no need to do this much intellectual work on behalf of the president.
If he has an argument to make, let him advance it. If he fails to make a compelling case, it's not our job to look up citations and write paragraphs to fill in the gaps.
Also, please remember the context. The only reason so many states are considering mail-in voting now is because they are concerned that huge numbers of voters will stay away from physical polling places.
This is not a matter of "pick the theoretically best voting system." This is a matter of "how can we hold an election without accidentally killing thousands of old people by communicable disease."
I don't have to think that mail-in voting is perfect to prefer it over radically depressing turnout.
I could accept that argument if it were being made in good faith, maybe there is some real evidence that mail in voting is more susceptible to fraud. But the argument is not being made in good faith, the argument is part of a long on-going coordinated effort across Republican governments at all levels to limit the people's right to vote.
The issue is that mail in voter fraud doesn't scale and you need scale to turn a national election. So you can argue this is a concern in general, but someone arguing this is a real problem for the integrity of the 2020 presidential election is being disingenuous at best.
Elections are run by the states, not by the Federal government. If Washington, the 13th most populous state can conduct elections purely via mail-in ballots, why not any other state?
>Elections are run by the states, not by the Federal government.
Sorry, I was talking about national scope and not the federal government actually running the election. The larger the electorate, the more votes cast, the more votes needed to change the results, and the more important scaling becomes in your plan to rig the election.
> If Washington, the 13th most populous state can conduct elections purely via mail-in ballots, why not any other state?
Is this true? I don't think it is, and I think that has been borne out in several of our most recent presidential elections. In the last election alone, Clinton won NH by a mere 2700 votes, for instance.
OP edited their post, but they were talking about methods to change maybe one or two dozen votes at a time. The minimum number of votes that you would need to reverse the 2016 presidential election was 107k. That was if you had perfect polling going in and knew exactly what votes to change. In practice you would likely need to change several hundred thousand votes if not over a million. This process would need to be done in multiple states all over the country. You would need a large distributed team of people all committed to defrauding an election. That isn't a smart plan for a conspiracy.
Online voting could be vulnerable to such an attack but paper-based voting such as is used by mail in voting is very low tech and distributed. hacking and fraud are hard to scale in that case.
So, every mailbox in a post office gets one or two voter applications or ballots. A bunch of them get sorted out and thrown in the lobby trash can as people pick up their mail.
Some unscrupulous person grabs a bunch, forges signatures on them and mails them back in.
I mean, its hard to say that no voter fraud isnt going to happen...
but for it to happen in any meaningful way is super super unlikely as most other democracy's around the world can attest to.
he's technically right, but its not going to be in the order of even 1%. even if EVERY person in the US voted by mail, fraud on a level that would less than 1% of the entire vote.
Its a stupid blatant obvious ploy to try and gerrymander the vote.
Yes and I live in Arizona and mailed in my ballot for the 2016 election. The point is not that it is possible to do some mail in voting. The point is that it isn't ridiculous to think that mail in voting could be succeptible to fraud. Certainly not so much so that twitter should be trying to influence an election in this way.
Except that we have several years of experience with mail-in voting in states like Oregon, Washington and others. No one has ever uncovered any impactful voter fraud.
Paper-based voting like this is very hard to hack or commit fraud on a scale that is large enough to have an effect. If you were to fill out your aunt’s ballot, as someone suggested, it would have a nearly unmeasurable effect.
There are lot of interesting rules about such ballots. For example, some states do not count them at all unless the margin of victory is less than the number of eligible or returned absentee ballots.
I think most opponents are not questioning the possibility of hacking mail in election systems. I don't know if the idea you posted would have worked because lots of people can spitball ideas without fully thinking them through. Even so, proponents contest the likelihood of that happening balanced against other considerations, like the disenfranchisement of those who cannot or will not reach a polling place for health reasons.
There is also the question of differential susceptibility. Sure election fraud is possible with mail in ballots. I'd even stipulate that it's easier than casting fraudulent in person votes. But I think it remains to be answered how easily it can be scales, and whether the rewards are worth the risk this would pose to perpetrators' freedom.
I think it's reasonable to wonder if mail-in ballots are susceptible to fraud, but there is not a lot of evidence that such fraud is widespread. In particular, Trump's tweet is completely off base with what election experts already know about voter fraud.
> Now we're expecting that states will radically alter their voting system, in 5 months, and that it won't be vulnerable to interference?
Are mail in ballots for everyone really a "radical alteration" of their voting system? Local governments already have the capacity to send and receive thousands of pieces of mail, and the method of counting ballots is the exact same.
I am not sure whether there has ever been mail-in voter fraud, but it seems like the relevant agencies actively or passively avoid collection of data which might demonstrate or disprove such fraud. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
>Are mail in ballots for everyone really a "radical alteration" of their voting system? Local governments already have the capacity to send and receive thousands of pieces of mail, and the method of counting ballots is the exact same.
How would you set up this system if you were tasked with it?
Every state already has absentee voting. I would expect that the system will follow the same procedures as already exist for absentee voting, hiring more clerk and postal staff as necessary.
The same as normal ballot counting, except instead of receiving in person ballots, volunteers count mail in ballots.
Sending mail and receiving mail is already a solved problem. The post office handles nearly half a billion pieces of mail each day, and 200 million pieces of first class mail.
It's not a ridiculous thing to wonder about how susceptible mail in voting is to fraud, and it seems like some of us are putting blinders on simply due to our distaste for the current president.
You scoff at the reaction yet you've surgically extracted the political context of Trump's motivations for disparaging mail-in voting from your analysis. There isn't a new developing threat to mail-in votes, Trump has a clear political agenda. In Trump's own words a couple months back:
The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again
Can you at least pretend to understand why some people might have a hard time accepting Trump's credibility on the issue?
You could literally make the same argument about in person voting. How hard is it to get a fake id ? How about hacking ballot machines ? How about compromised ballot counters ? Yet, there is this weird focus on mailed ballots, which really should be default in a 21st century democracy. Trump is arguing in bad faith
> Yet, there is this weird focus on mailed ballots
It's not that weird. Mailed ballots can be coerced quite trivially at home, out of the view of authorities; no technology hacks or fake ID needed. That's why some of the "fact check" figures themselves are nonsense , such as the one claiming that only 0.00006% of mail votes are fraudulent. That's based on convictions. Nobody knows the real number.
In Northern Ireland postal voting is strictly controlled and monitored and permitted only in individually-reviewed case, because we had decades of coerced fraud by balaclaved men with baseball bats.
I'm more curious as to why you're giving Trump such a high benefit of the doubt giving his rampant lies in the past.
The reality is that most mail-in voting operates via what is effectively a two factor auth system or a handshake authentication system. Person A gets official mail being told they can register to vote. Person A goes to site and registers to vote. Then they receive a ballot sometime before election day, fill it out, certify that they are who they are, then it goes out.
The government can send a further correspondence indicating that you voted and where to check your vote to confirm. If someone attempts to vote multiple times using the same person this is easily verified. If the dead vote, you can cross-reference with obituary data to identify identity fraud. If someone votes for someone else (like their parents or their siblings) then that can be somewhat identified through the final check and letting people file a claim.
The reality is that actual fraud for mail-in votes is incredibly low and committing mass fraud requires the fraud to occur at the point of ballot counting. At which point you have a politician issue [1] not a voter issue. Which again, is pretty easily caught. The increase in mail-in fraud is likely offset by the disenfranchised voters that could gain the ability to vote as well as the voters in areas without easy access to voting booths.
It's frustrating that you think I'm giving Trump some credibility here. I'm not. He's an idiot, but that doesn't mean it is appropriate for twitter to behave this way.
People have been voting by mail for decades, in the US and many other democracies. There haven't been any incidents. And, yes, I am convinced wide-scale fraud would be almost impossible to hide: you can't pull off any fraud without, for example, many voters turning up at polling places even though they have been mailed a ballot. Or people noticing the voter rolls show them having voted when they didn't. Or whatever scheme you are using to intercept thousands of individual letters addressed to individual residences being noticed. Or sudden, unexplained changes in participation being noticed. Or many dead people somehow voting because you can't possibly stay up-to-date with all recent deaths in the community.
And, of course, the discussion isn't actually about voting-by-mail, yes-or-now? Because that has been possible for a long time and isn't going to change. The discussion is about making it easier and/or the default to protect people from communicable diseases.
The issue, then, isn't even if voting by mail allows fraud. It's if the likelihood of fraud is significantly higher when, say, 50% instead of 30% choose that option.
This is yet another blatantly obvious attempt to stack the deck in Republican's favour. It's sickening to see people pretend to care about the integrity of democracy by engaging with all these phantom debates about voter fraud, in the complete absence of any actual fraud happening (except that Republican in South Caroline, of course).
Meanwhile, real damage is done to democracy by the unrelenting attempts to selectively make it harder for people to vote. Take a look at these changes in polling locations in Milwaukee for a blatant example (the red, suburban spots are predominantly Republican locations, while the urban core leans democratic) : https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYoIrdZXQAILKlB.jpg
So 0.000001% of votes were fraudulent if you take the Heritage Foundation's analysis as fact (1,285 votes fraudulent out of 119,000,000 who voted in 2016).
Does 0.000001% fraud qualify as a problem in any reasonable sense?
Republicans' electoral strategy is basically "the less people vote, the better". Is that good for democracy? Is that just?
>>>f you take the Heritage Foundation's analysis as fact (1,285 votes fraudulent out of 119,000,000 who voted in 2016)
That's not how I interpreted the data. Not 1 incident = 1 vote, but 1 incident = 1 criminal case affecting 1 election. So election fraud at Timbuktu County could have impacted 2 voters, or 500 voters, but either way is recorded as 1 incident. I'm not seeing a link to their actual database so we can't dig into the records to confirm either way, which is disappointing. But the narrative text seems to support this.
>Not 1 incident = 1 vote, but 1 incident = 1 criminal case affecting 1 election.
This doesn't reason out.
The question is "What impact does voter/election fraud have on elections?"
You determine this by calculating the impact that these fraudulent votes had on the election. It doesn't make sense to say "because there was 1 fraudulent vote in one county in one state, we have to count all 500-100,000 (?) votes in that county as fraudulent too."
This Heritage Foundation report is literally an analysis detailing how voter fraud is a non-issue in American elections.
I found their webpage for their database! It's not 1 database record = 1 voter, they are listing cases of election abusers, often multiple criminal defendants in a single record, with multiple felonies and multiple votes per record.
Here's one entry for the state of Pennsylvania:
"According to Wild Acres Property Manager Robert Depaolis, Cowher approached him and asked him to provide Cowher with ballots that were due to be mailed to property owners in the community who seldom voted, for the express purpose of filling out those ballots and guaranteeing victory for Cowher's preferred Board of Directors candidates. Depaolis went to the state police, who surveilled a meeting where Depaolis handed over the ballots, catching Cowher in the act of filling out the mail-in ballots. He was arrested and subsequently convicted on 217 counts, including forgery, identity theft, and criminal conspiracy. His accomplice, Kupershmidt, was found guilty on 190 counts."
Wait a minute. That 1,285 total includes every case they could find since 1979? LOL
This proves the point even more in the extreme that voter fraud is a non-issue. An extremely motivated source like the Heritage Foundation was able to find 1,285 instances over 41 years? About how many billions of votes cast in that time period are we talking about?
Maybe my 0.000001% voter fraud estimate was too generous. It's looking more like 0.000000000001%.
Edit: Did you even click through more than one of these? The first 20 that appear for my state show that no votes were actually cast fraudulently, meaning some portion of that 1,285 instances accounts for zero fraudulent votes. This gets more hilarious the deeper we go.
>Donald Dewsnup, a housing development activist in San Francisco, registered to vote using a false address.
>State Sen. Roderick Wright (D_Inglewood) was convicted of eight felony counts of perjury and voter fraud. He deliberately misled voters as to his residency in order to run for office in a neighboring district.
>Immigrant-Rights activist Nativo Lopez pleaded guilty to one count of voter registration fraud when it was discovered that he registered to vote in Los Angeles while living in Santa Ana.
>Jose Fragozo, a trustee on the Escondido Union School District Board, pleaded guilty to a felony charge that he voted in the 2014 general election while registered at an address where he did not live.
>Alexander Bronson, former Trustee for Manteca Unified School District, California, pleaded guilty to charges of voter fraud. He listed a false address in order to qualify for candidacy in the November 2014 Manteca Unified School District Board of Education election.
blows whistle
Flag on the play. Moving the goalposts. Five yard penalty. Repeat the first down. But more seriously, let's go allll the way back to your original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23318100
>>in the complete absence of any actual fraud happening
That is an objectively false statement. Will you concede that?
>>>An extremely motivated source like the Heritage Foundation was able to find 1,285 instances over 41 years?
>>>Did you even click through more than one of these?
Did you? California's list doesn't have a single entry pre-2000, and over half of them are post-2010. Texas? Same, nothing pre-2000. New York? One in 1983, one in 1999. Florida? Four entries pre-2000 (and a BUNCH 2002-2010, probably due to fallout of Bush-v-Gore).
So either election fraud enforcement has become significantly more vigilant post-2000, or election fraud incidents have seen an astronomical uptick. Or both. But what we DO know for certain is:
-The incidence rate is non-zero, especially in the past 10 years.
-Some elections have in fact been swayed by fraud.
-We should probably spare at least some modicum of serious thought and allocate some resources to improving the process integrity and security of one of our most sacred civil institutions. We make it rain fiat currency for every other government boondoggle imaginable, why is there so much opposition to THIS?
On this website, there's an indication above each comment that notes which user left that comment. You'll notice that the comment you link was not posted by me.
>So either election fraud enforcement has become significantly more vigilant post-2000, or election fraud incidents have seen an astronomical uptick. Or both.
An astronomical uptick from 0.0000001% to 0.00001%? Horrifying! This is like when there's 1 murder in a town of 100,000 people one year, 2 murders the next, and the local paper prints "MURDER RATE DOUBLES".
>The incidence rate is non-zero, especially in the past 10 years.
Okay? Whether there was zero or greater than zero incidents doesn't tell us much.
>Some elections have in fact been swayed by fraud.
Fair enough. But again you're basing your argument on conveniently skipping over the real question which is not "was there at least one fraudulent vote in America in the last 41 years?" (the question you're trying hard to answer over and over with "yes!").
The question is whether it's a problem that has a material impact on our elections. Basically, is it really a problem? 1,285 instances over 41 years (and how many _billions_ of votes in that time period) makes the answer extremely obvious.
It's funny because I am in favor of voter ID on principle alone. But you have to acknowledge the fact that voter fraud is a non-issue in practice. There are better arguments to make in favor of election integrity.
>>>You'll notice that the comment you link was not posted by me.
You are....100% correct. My mistake to attribute that to you.
>>>The question is whether it's a problem that has a material impact on our elections.
Less than 600 votes decided the 2000 Presidential election. In the aggregate that seems tiny, but in swing states in particular, with close elections, the potential implications are massively outsized. And that's to say nothing of the State & local elections where even smaller absolute numbers are impactful ("all politics is local").
>>>But you have to acknowledge the fact that voter fraud is a non-issue in practice.
Even one of the winning candidates said the election was trash, partially due to mail-in ballots. And it's not a bunch of minority-oppressing white Republicans in that article who are complaining about the election either (not saying that's your position, but that particular strawman has been brought up elsewhere in the conversation).
>Fair enough. But again you're basing your argument on conveniently skipping over the real question which is not "was there at least one fraudulent vote in America in the last 41 years?" (the question you're trying hard to answer over and over with "yes!").
>The question is whether it's a problem that has a material impact on our elections. Basically, is it really a problem? 1,285 instances over 41 years (and how many _billions_ of votes in that time period) makes the answer extremely obvious.
>It's funny because I am in favor of voter ID on principle alone. But you have to acknowledge the fact that voter fraud is a non-issue in practice. There are better arguments to make in favor of election integrity.
We're just going in circles here. Have a nice evening :)
Am I misunderstanding something? Are you saying they completely closed down all those polling stations? It seems like the less populated areas have more* polling stations than denser ones, what is the justification for this?
I think it's important to weigh whether the person you're arguing with is making their argument in good faith. Is Trump making a nuanced argument that weighs the pros and cons of mail-in voting? No, he's clearly not. If you want to have a debate about the pros and cons of mail-in ballots, you can't have it in that context, because the other person isn't trying to debate, they're trying to dominate the discussion and cow the opposition.
Someone should coin a word for the act of getting nerd sniped, but rather than getting distracted by a fun puzzle you're sitting down trying to account for all of the nuances of an argument clearly made in bad faith.
Trump isn’t really “criticizing” mail-in voting in a responsible and measured way here though, is he? He’s claiming that it is a scam by his enemies that will definitely result in massive voting fraud. Is there any evidence for him to make those claims at all? Is there any other way he could have responded, even if he did genuinely care about empowering citizens to vote?
>>He’s claiming that it is a scam by his enemies that will definitely result in massive voting fraud. Is there any evidence for him to make those claims at all?
I think the rationale is that the existing incidence of local ballot fraud points at a widespread, under-reported problem that doesn't inspire confidence in the process.
Voting by mail is pretty normal to me, being in the military and outside of my home state for most of my adult life, but it's about as secure as WEP encryption for your Wi-Fi.
The Inquirer article is talking about old-fashioned ballot stuffing at a polling place, not mail-in voting.
The Dailybreeze is documenting a case where it looks like someone was trying to do a scam with 80 ballots. That could have an impact on a municipal election but would be lost in the noise in a national election and is hard to replicate in a coordinated and unnoticeable fashion.
It looks like the Heritage group is has been collecting cases of voting fraud for 4 years and have 1200 records. Not a huge number over so much time. It’s not clear that that is related to mail-in voting or other kinds of fraud. Again, this kind of stuff is hard to do in a way that has an impact on a national election.
Elections are never perfect but, based on the experiences in Oregon and Washington, I don’t see mail in voting adding a significant added risk. The virus on the other hand does.
> Trump falsely claimed that California will send mail-in ballots to "anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there." In fact, only registered voters will receive ballots.
This not "wondering about how susceptible mail in voting is to fraud," it's an outright lie.
"Only registered voters will receive ballots", you cannot state a future event as a fact, since it hasn't actually happened yet. Stories like the one linked show that in the past, California has had problems with this.
Should twitter now fact check their fact checking? Perhaps the idea of future-telling is flawed to begin with and twitteer should not attempt to be a source of truth!
What a bad-faith take. Technically, no, twitter's statement is not a fact about the future, but merely a fact about California's policies. In the utmost of pedantry, it should read "According to California's election policies, ballots are only to be sent to registered voters at the addresses listed on their registration."
But if we're really drilling into semantics, you posted a link about dead people on the registry. That does not, in fact, preclude twitter's statement. Hundreds of dead people have active voter registrations! Twitter's statement is not invalidated by this.
But neither does it support Trump's claim about "significant" voter fraud. Hundreds of votes in the state of California is neither significant, nor guaranteed that the dead people's ballots will be used.
But Trump's claim is that ballots will be sent to everybody in the state. That's a far greater lie than your overwrought interpretation of their statement.
A multinational company just decided to put their finger on the scale of a US election. I think that decision and the way it was made invites scrutiny.
Well, that's certainly Trump's characterization of the situation. Fox News has also been fact-checking him lately and he's similarly outraged. Bottom line, the Founders' remedy to false speech by government officials is the freedom to discuss those lies in an open forum.
He's the president of the United States operating on a private platform owned by a private company! No one should be above reproach on such a platform and that includes the president.
If he doesn't like it, he can direct Lockheed Martin and tell them to spend a couple billion dollars on making Litter. At least then it'll go to something slightly more productive than whatever contracts they're currently siphoning money off of.
Trump is not "wondering". His statement was unambiguous: "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent."
This is an unproven statement. Numerous elections experts disagree with it. Why is Twitter not within their rights to warn people of this?
"NO WAY (ZERO CHANCE) THE YANKEES ARE GOING TO WIN THE WORLD SERIES!"
Am I making a statement of fact, or stating an opinion here? Should twitter fact check this statement with some ambiguous "experts" who think that the yankees are the best team of them all and WILL win the world series?
I agree completely. Trump does not have a crystal ball. Therefore, he should not present things as established fact if they are merely unproven opinion.
He is in a position of power and influence. His words have far-reaching consequences.
Trump is currently tweeting about how this warning message is taking away his 1st amendment rights to free speech, and constitutes interference in the 2020 election. Can't wait for these tweets to get the same warning.
Jesus goddamned Christ, even the President of the United States doesn't realize that a corporation is incapable of violating your First Amendment rights.
he doesn't mention the first amendment - free speech is about more than american laws.
Saying that what twitter is doing is "stifling free speech" is a matter of opinion, and while you can certainly argue against the statement there's no need for the amendments to the us constitution to come into it.
Or shoot, get a dev team together to write a microblogging platform hosted at whitehouse.gov. Then they could even write a client that was secure enough to run on the president’s cell phone, and they don’t have to worry about third-party interests (if they exist). Just have whatever is posted on that site mirrored to @POTUS on Twitter, and if that get suspended, then the primary source still exists.
I'm really torn with this idea. It would be really good solution to the problem for him and twitter/facebook.
But, thinking of this from the new network point of view - I do not wish any good alternative social network to suddenly receive an influx of extreme trumpers following him. That could basically make it the new Voat and poison the idea unless there's some serious coordination around which nodes are excluded. Imagine the effect of him twitting that he's moving his presence to Mastodon. https://mastodon.social/@usercount claims ~530k users now. Trump has 80.2M followers. Even if only 1% of them is ready to move, that's a new mastodon.social by itself.
Yeah, this administration failing to move the conversation/information dissemination to government-run platforms is mindblowing to me. Setup a Syncloud node and have the President tell everyone to follow him on Diaspora. Get high-profile supporters (Kanye) to parrot the message and also cross-post their content. Trump has incredible reach and influence as a social media personality (witness HK protesters carrying Trump/Rocky meme images), but he is failing himself by staying beholden to obviously-hostile private platforms.
Remember when the press wanted to stop the President's daily briefings?[1] He should have used that opportunity to setup a podcast or video stream system, minus the press, who are 90% bad faith actors anyway. "America, hear what I have to say, unfiltered by the talking heads at CNN! Just download the WhiteHouseNews app!" etc....
This is a man who wants to retrofit the carrier fleet to use steam powered catapults because he found all the computers confusing[0]. You think anyone would even bother trying to explain any of that to him? He uses Twitter because it's the only thing he's comfortable with.
Which puts the onus on the Whitehouse IT department to produce a UX that is seamless enough for even Trump to transition to.
Our EM aircraft catapults are crap right now, although this is due more to "concurrent development" than an inherent failure of the concept. Trump seems to intuitively grasp certain problems (China = Public Enemy #1, lax border security, etc...) but then draws really odd conclusions on how to solve them, and doubles down with the most retarded cringe-worthy rhetoric imaginable.
Most of his 'brand' is based on Twitter these days. I would doubt that he will do much of anything. You know all of the posts here on HN about basing your entire company on the platform of someone else? Well, here is a good example.
The President of the United States of America doesn't understand the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America has absolutely nothing to do with private companies limiting anyone's speech.
> Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election. They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post....
> ....Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!
This is not going to end well. Every single aspect of life that cannot be rigorously tested under the scientific method is destined to become a partisan topic.
There is no way to be sure if mail-in ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.
Considering mail-in voting has been put through the ringer in multiple states (both red and blue!) with very little voter fraud statistically, it seems like these days the partisan topics consist of reality vs Trump.
This is something that's been statistically proven to work and yet the amount of people I see leaping to his very ignorant claims of this topic here is disappointing. Can you back up the claims that mail-in ballots will be substantially fraudulent at any level beyond baseless speculation?
A judge in Philly was just convicted of fraudulent ballot stuffing in multiple elections. He actually added enough votes to swing multiple results. If we can question the security vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines, why can’t we also question the implementation of mail-in voting and how it can enable similar ballot-filling and stuffing?
Has there been a more polarising American politician than Trump in living memory? Voter fraud is not a constant. It is completely dynamic. Just his Tweet completely changes reality. Now, if it does proceed, we'll see increased scrutiny of mail-in voting, which in turn would reduce fraud. This would then be cited by opponents as another counter-example, when in reality the increased scrutiny was the catalyst.
This isn't what I was asking. You're changing the argument now to try and claim that Trump's tweets would have increased scrutiny on mail-in voting, when in reality most states have had mail-in voting before the Trump presidency and has seen low levels of voter fraud.
You're trying to do a post-hoc justification in attempt to rationalize Trump's tweets rather than answer my argument. I'll ask you again: Where's the voter fraud data showing that vote by mail causes a massive amount of fraud?
I'm not against people becoming more educated - I have 100% faith in twitter's superiority. I know that the talented and, frankly, superior human beings over at twitter are the best people in the world to educate the ignorant public.
Every little bit helps. Lots of people out there are ignorant about lots of things. Doesn't mean they're bad, doesn't mean they can't learn, but the thing is there, someone has to show them.
> In May 2014, DeMuro inflated vote totals by adding 27 fraudulent ballots in the primary election, 40 votes in May 2015, and 46 in 2016, according to court documents outlining the scheme and the charges against him.
> While those numbers may seem small, prosecutors said, they made up a significant percentage of the total votes cast at the polling place. In 2014, 118 total ballots were reported there, which means that DeMuro’s fraudulent votes accounted for over 22% of the total voting in that division in 2014. In 2015, his fraud accounted for over 15% of the votes in the division; in 2016, his fraud accounted for over 17% of the votes.
Yes but the topic is mail-in voting fraud. He was physically at the polling place and stuffing the box. It's fraud and should be punished, but it has nothing to do with mail-in voting fraud.
The example is a demonstration that a member of the opposition party to the incumbent President was both willing and able to commit election fraud for even a paltry sum of money in a local election. The implication is that election officials from that party cannot be trusted to NOT fraudulently influence the election. If they are willing & able to exploit System A, then they are probably WILLING to exploit System B, and it's likely they are ABLE to exploit System B because its security sucks.
Basic risk management principles would lead to implementing controls to either reduce the probability of the risk, or reduce the effective impact of the risk. The US has been stuck doing neither since the Bush/Gore election.
Clearly both major parties in the US are guilty of fraud. All the more reason to implement objective, unbiased security measures to ensure the integrity of the process.
Lol that story doesn’t show mail in voter fraud either. It shows a systems issue that’s being investigated by the proper authorities with no votes counted.
It’s come to a point that even the general public is aware that certain democrats are willing to lie, ignore the truth, or flat out say “it doesn’t matter” just to gain power.
Wow man. Your first link showed an in person voter location had 27 stuffed ballots and your last link show a mail carrier changed 8 ballots and your argument is that mail in ballots are _easier_ to have fraud on?
At this rate if you keep going by the end of this thread you’ll get to some place where the evidence is clear that Republicans get dramatically more advantage from mail in fraud.
Does this work in the other online communities you are part of?
The point you are missing in the second source is that the mail in fraud is more likely, irregardless of party. Which is a fact supporting the president's tweet and ignored by Twitter's fact checking group.
I don't follow Trump on Twitter but go and look up his feed regularly by Googling 'donald trump twitter'. I always get there by the first result.
This morning? He doesn't seem to be on the front page at all... the first result is for a search done on twitter.con for 'donald trump twitter', the next result is for the POTUS account. I would say this fact checking thing has had a knock on effect to search results.
>The move comes on the heels of Twitter's decision not to remove comment President Trump made about the death of Lori Klausutis in 2001. The president has tweeted several messages promoting a conspiracy theory that Ms Klausutis was murdered by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.
I would be very curious to hear an explanation of this decision. Why do Tweets about mail in ballots receive a warning but tweets accusing a journalist of murder don't?
I don't think he actually accused a journalist of murder. He used CYA language like "the investigation ought to be reopened". The implication is obvious, but I think that keeps him out of libelous territory. Of course Twitter can have more strict standards if they want, but so far they've chosen not to.
Lol. He often twitters nonsense, but in this case Twitter itself is spreading false information. Of course mail ballots are totally insecure, esp. for nation state actors. Looks like Twitter joined collaboration with the CIA now, who is the relevant nation state actor in this case. There are multiple documented cases.
Same for his Hydroxychloriquine argument, which he promoted as good prevention (which is good information with scientific studies proving it), and this was labeled as false and dangerous information. Probably because Chloroquine phosphat is somewhat dangerous (different drug), and it has no proven treatment effects.
Please fact check the fact check warnings, and beware of dependent media.
I think one of the issues with this will be how it is linking the correct information. I like the little inclusion before tweets, but there's no sources on them. Then when you scroll down on the tweets I see them in this order: The Hill, WaPo, CNN, a CBS News reporter, a Fortune Magazine reporter, a Vox reporter, Sr Political Reporter for Huffington, ACLU Nebraska, a CNN political correspondent.
The issue here is that everything here is considered in the hard left of the media. I'm concerned that this will only help grow the divide between Americans, though I also don't have a better alternative to this. Clearly there is a lack of coverage of this from the right and in fact the opposite. A quick DDG search of "fox news mail in ballot" pulls up [0][1][2]. So when you see things like this I think it is easier to say that "the left" is trying to trick you. If Fox is your primary source of news, then it does look like Twitter is trying to silence a real issue. If Fox isn't your primary source of news then it looks like Twitter is trying to fight misinformation. Things are so crazy that it really is hard to find the truth and there is very good reason to believe that someone is lying. And no one wants to admit that someone they've trusted for a long time is lying to them, especially when there's nuggets of truth that you can hold onto.
So I'm a little worried about the repercussions of this, especially since the right already thinks Twitter is supporting the left.
Edit: By hard left I mean from the perspective of Fox viewers. My main point is about the perspective of the people this is specifically aimed at. While on the left we don't see it that way go talk to your friends on the right, they see it differently. My concern is because we need to unify and not divide.
The problem for me, someone who really wants to be in the middle, is that the only conservative leaning news outlet that I believe (no facts in my reporting) does fact based reporting is the Wall Street Journal. If I want news with data and facts I have to go with the "left" leaning papers.
The Washington Examiner and Fox News have been burning their credibility on a daily basis.
I'm still not seeing the edit, but honestly Fox News viewers seeing CBS as substantively representing the left in any capacity is a large part of the problem here. Fortunately not everyone who matters believes only Fox News and nothing else.
The edit was "by Fox News viewers" which was previously implicit. To them these are hard left, but to moderates and the left they aren't. It is a matter of perspective.
> but honestly Fox News viewers seeing CBS as substantively representing the left in any capacity is a large part of the problem here.
This is something I agree with and is actually the crux of my post.
Apparently, given how many downvotes I have, you aren't alone. Given that I'm agreeing with a lot of people that are arguing with me, I'm pretty sure it was my messaging. I think part of that is that since we are so politicized and language requires us to fill in parts that because I tried to dampen it to those on the right that it came off as supporting them.
Pretty much my point was: this links to only stuff on the left and so it gives the right an easy target to point to to continue with their claim (which I believe is false) that the left media is trying to control the people.
Yeah, except those aren't left wing sites. The problem is not the lack of balance, and I think your words keep making it seem like it is. There aren't reliable conservative sources on these issues, and the sources that are linked are all moderate. At this point conservatives will pretty much call anything or anyone that disagrees with them leftist, so it doesn't really matter what sources you put there so long as they're reflecting anything close to the truth.
I think it’s more fair to characterize them as corporatist and neoconservative/neoliberal. If the mainstream media were actually left-wing they would be propagandizing for Bernie Sanders. Instead they’re propagandizing in favor of old-guard politicians like Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi. But no matter how you slice it, it’s still propaganda.
I agree with the parent commenter that this will only backfire, likely causing the opposite of intended effect on undecided voters. Tech companies like Twitter are not in a position to play arbiters on what is factual and what isn’t. And I think it’s really dangerous both for people to expect tech companies to assume this mantle and also to expect them to do a good (or honest) job of it.
I'm not sure why you think there's an intended effect here other than "maybe get a few people who are more on the fence to read something real and make it look like Twitter is Doing Something TM." I would hardly be surprised if it succeeded at those things.
“The facts” on mail-in ballots are mostly opinions though. It’s presumptuous of a tech company to insert themselves into public discourse to correct what they perceive as wrongthink, and it invites a dangerous situation where a few tech companies can enforce discourse that suits their political biases. Just because people may agree with them in this case doesn’t make it a good idea long term. To me this looks like a slippery slope into fascism.
The facts about voter fraud aren’t opinions, though, and the fact is that it’s extremely rare. What reason do we have to expect that mail-in ballots will make it common to the extent it influences an election?
This problem is turtles all the way down, there is no trusted apolitical arbiter of the facts, you either believe twitter is making a best-effort attempt to curtail misinformation or you believe they're exercising a political agenda under the guise of curtailing misinformation.
The issue here is that the people that already believe in these sources already think the president is lying. On the other hand, people that think the president is telling the truth aren't going to believe those sources. So what does this do? Are there that many people on the fence? Because everyone I know in the middle already thinks this is laughable (Utah votes by mail and every Republican in CA I know votes from home!), those on the left think it is about voter suppression, and those on the right think it is about voter integrity.
While I don't disagree with the program, I'm also not sure what it solves.
Twitter's rebuke has consequences in the larger culture war battle being fought online, it's an acknowledgement from twitter hq that they view Trump's behavior as a violation of twitter rules even though they are not willing to go so far as to ban or suspend him since he's the president. This is as much about PR as anything else since twitter has come under increased pressure to take some kind of action with regard to Trump's conduct on the site.
None of those news outlets you mentioned are "hard left". They are corporatist status quo. They are all in support of Joe Biden who is hardly "left" at all
He is the opposing candidate of the current president, however. And why should we trust news outlets that are blatantly in favor of one candidate over another, and bury stories that look bad for their favored candidate?
It's a strange decision by Twitter here, but they are in a strange position.
Donny, love him or hate him, does say a fair few things that are ... questionable. Jack has talked about this a bit, and their conclusion thus far has been that anything he says, by virtue of the office, is newsworthy enough. Policies for thee, but not for he. It's been a battle with users, but everyone seems to just grumble along.
That policy has worked up until today.
A lot of work went into this decision. They A/B tested the color of the note, likely the font, the positioning, the exact words, the fact check itself, etc. This thing went through meeting after meeting and was run past some good legal counsel. Twitter isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but it's also not a rusty shovel. They red-teamed this a fair bit, I'd imagine. They must have known that Donny would not view it favorably and would do exactly what he is doing currently.
All the same they went ahead and decided to make the move at the end of May, ~6 months before the 'fit hits the shan'.
Why?
Their stock is, well, fairly ok. Jack seems to be doing alright. Monthly users are flat-ish since 2015, but compared to FB, it's a bit of a wash.
So, let's consider if such fraud could possibly be substantial. Let's use California as an example. Registering to vote is easy, all you need is a web browser[1] and a mailing address where you reside or with a resident willing to give you ballots or ignorant that they are receiving them[2]. Also, the State of California faces an impractically large legal hurdle to reject suspected fraudulent ballots[3] so it can be assumed that most if not all will be accepted. It seems clear based on the observable facts that substantial fraud is certainly possible under the California regime. Please note I am not claiming such fraud actually happens, merely that it is easily practicable for an organization as well organized as, say, a political party. To be honest, I bet literally hundreds if not thousands of readers on this site could build "California vote fraud as as service" as a side gig. Let's disrupt the electoral process for a billion dollar valuation!
From this I conclude that while I personally disagree with the President, this particular statement is a (probably, I sure hope) incorrect opinion, not a factually incorrect statement.
[1] https://covr.sos.ca.gov/
[2] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/politics/more-than-80-bal...
[3] https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler...