[Merged] MyPillow guy to start own Social media site due to “all the election-machine fraud.”

[JayUtah]

I don't know how Jay you have kept up fighting for so long, I was member on cosmoquest.
thou shall not pass. I hope foolishly.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1854985522323796078

Most of my active skepticism has been in the fields of science and engineering, which conforms to my professional training and experience. When I delve into history, it has been in the history of those pursuits. Those questions tend to have clearly right and wrong answers. Finding them is mostly a matter of education, which I also pursued as a university teacher before striking out in the business world. But it's easy to be a skeptic when you can be sure the truth is on your side.

I've really only ventured into political skepticism in the past ten years or so. The questions are messier; they involve things like what we should be doing rather than what is observably true. That doesn't mean skepticism has no role in politics. But it means that you have to adopt a different rhetorical footing. And you have to admit that not all the ultimate questions have clearly right answers.

The United States is a conservative country. There is no use denying that. Even our so-called liberals would be considered conservative if they were transplanted to, say, Europe. Luckily I've had the privilege of living overseas in both liberal European democracies and in repressive regimes. I look at America through that lens. And luckily I'm old enough to remember when the U.S. political climate was not so divisive and when disagreement could be pursued rationally as adults. I still believe most Americans are centrists (on the American spectrum) and are being disingenuously manipulated by powerful minority interests: people like Mike Lindell who can command a lot of attention without intellectually deserving it.

I keep going because I'm a true believer in getting the right answer even if that answer is disappointing and takes a lot of effort to find.

 

[JayUtah]

Weird how there are no claims of voter fraud since Tuesday night. Wonder why?

Also weird how the Democrats could so effectively steal the 2020 election but utterly failed to do it again in 2024. I suppose that's due to all the voter suppression "election integrity" efforts on the part of Republicans over the past four years.

there is thread on twitter claiming that Trump cheated but i think it is time now to allow the process to go on and if you go around saying Trump cheated you no better than the extremists in Trump camp,

No, you really aren't. The overriding goal of skepticism is to get the right answer, not the answer that soothes you. The overriding principle of skepticism is to follow the evidence. Elections were safe in 2020 and they were safe in 2024, according to the evidence.

 

[Davidlpf]

No, you really aren't. The overriding goal of skepticism is to get the right answer, not the answer that soothes you. The overriding principle of skepticism is to follow the evidence. Elections were safe in 2020 and they were safe in 2024, according to the evidence.

Maybe it is how we go about saying they were cheating is the difference, the las election in the states they were people outside some voting places with guns because they thought people who shouldn't be voting. One thing that is probably unique to the states is Gerrymandering where the state politicians get to choose the political boundaries. Also there are videos showing Bannon trying to tell Trump supporters to work at the polling stations and to challenge every vote, I don't know how successful this was. I don't know how poll workers a hired in the American system and how they are trained. Here, in Canada, there is a central elections organization in each province and on the federal level and the poll workers and returning officers are hired locally, usually retired people and some semi employed people and are paid for the training and working during the election.

 

[JayUtah]

All elections in the United States are run by states according to their individual policy and procedure. Aside from the few guidelines set down for federal elections, states may select, train, and oversee their poll workers as they see fit. There are lots of opportunities for partisan intrusion and influence in that system, but there are surprisingly few occurrences of corruption or error. When they do occur, they are inconsequential. My state votes extensively by mail-in ballot, and has since long before the pandemic. The notion that the 2020 election was rife with error or fraud due to irregularities in balloting is purely a Republican invention. It didn't happen.

Mike Lindell kept flogging old, debunked theories, but there is simply no credible evidence of significant balloting irregularities in the 2020 election. And so far, none in the 2024 election. Our system may look haphazard compared to a more centralized national election policy, but it succeeds at securing elections no matter who that election ends up favoring.

There seems to have been a greater effort this time around to curb voter intimidation and the intimidation and harassing of poll workers. Poll watching wasn't really much of a thing before 2016, so the laws around it didn't need to be fleshed out or rigorously enforced until the problems and accusations from the last cycle.

Gerrymandering is a giant topic on its own, probably not within the scope of this thread. But yes, it's very much an American peculiarity. My efforts locally in politics have been focused on eliminating partisan gerrymandering in my state. We made some very good strides over the past four years.

 

[Davidlpf]

During the last provincial elections I worked the machine tabulation machine that counted the votes. In our process the ballots get dropped into a box as it leaves the machine and afterwards they are put into envelope and sealed so they can be counted later if their are issues or as sample later. At the end of election night a cellular modem is attached to the machine and then the results are suppose to be beamed to the elections office. My luck I was in a fire hall with no cell service. Ok the cell modem for me was on longer than it should because I kept trying a number of times but the results were phoned in eventually. We had two complaints one lady refused to vote unless her vote was counted by hand and not the machine and one man made a remark.
Now federally in Canada we have to hand count each ballot because two provinces refuses to use the machines, it takes much longer to count the ballots because we have to have witnesses and each ballot has to be presented and verified. Most of this has to go on while the polling station is being torn down and has to be several times because there usually is a small error like one count of ballots vs voters does not equate.
The machines are lot faster and they have no way to connect to a connection until the end of the night and the ballots are there to be counted in case there is a need. The hand counting takes longer which means the crew needs to paid for those hours so if you are into cutting waste this would be a good place. Plus since there are so many machines in network all coming in at once it would be hard to hack. And the machines are often placed in the open with people around all the time and there are seals on different parts of the machine it would be hard to hack.
I just typed that whole thing realizing i don't how this thread started but I assumed he still on how the machines got hacked or something like that.

 

[JayUtah]

Plus since there are so many machines in network all coming in at once it would be hard to hack. And the machines are often placed in the open with people around all the time and there are seals on different parts of the machine it would be hard to hack.

Historically the weakest part has always been the machine at the other end of the connection: the tabulator. You have these point-of-contact voting machines made by companies like Diebold that have a proven record of engineering robust secure transaction systems. And then the whole thing ends up on a Windows PC with the tabulations being done in an unencrypted Microsoft database. Because the individual voting machine is what most people see, that's the part they naturally (but naively) think ought to be the point of attack. Of course these days the tabulators are significant hardened, but that wasn't always the case. And by "always" I mean these potential hacks go back to well before the Trump era.

As far as the topicality of the thread, it was mostly to poke fun at Mike Lindell's frantic efforts to be relevant. With the legitimate Trump victory in 2024, Lindell is made even less relevant.

As for the rest of the discussion, I think this is as good a place as any to talk about the mechanisms to ensure security in electronic voting. Our mail-in ballots are easy to hand-count, but the machine counters are very much faster and more accurate. Utah started voting by mail long before the pandemic, so we went through the growing pains during the Obama era. We've had two glitches: one reasonable and the other embarrassingly chronic.

The singular incident was a programming glitch in the ballot generator. Voters who would have been 18 years old at the time of the general election were mistakenly sent ballots to vote in the primary election, even though those voters were only 17 at the time of the primary election. This was easily remedied by invalidating those ballots in the authenticator, following appropriate safeguards. We have since changed our state law to allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries for elections that will occur after they turn 18.

The chronic problem was parents of Mormon missionaries serving outside the state filling out the ballot that was sent to the missionaries' homes in Utah, as directed over the phone by their missionary. This is unlawful, a felony. For residency purposes, Mormon missions serving outside Utah retain their residency and voting rights in Utah. But there is no carve-out for someone else filling out and signing a ballot, even if it's your mom and even if you tell her how you want to vote. That has been addressed by warnings from both church and government leaders. It's now literally printed on our ballots. But a number of parents were charged in prior elections for voting for their missionary children.

 

[Davidlpf]

I don't know what the policy on the receiving end is on the ballots but hopefully it is good, there are a number of security firms in the Fredericton area.
We like most democratic countries don't have the primary system. Parties choose their leader thru conventions, I think some actually use a digital voting system but there hasn't been anyone in the family that close to politics for years. Plus, the primary system seems to extend the election process for a lot long then it has to be.
About the missionaries being out of state , I don't think that would much of an issue here.

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

Most of my active skepticism has been in the fields of science and engineering, which conforms to my professional training and experience. When I delve into history, it has been in the history of those pursuits. Those questions tend to have clearly right and wrong answers. Finding them is mostly a matter of education, which I also pursued as a university teacher before striking out in the business world. But it's easy to be a skeptic when you can be sure the truth is on your side.

I've really only ventured into political skepticism in the past ten years or so. The questions are messier; they involve things like what we should be doing rather than what is observably true. That doesn't mean skepticism has no role in politics. But it means that you have to adopt a different rhetorical footing. And you have to admit that not all the ultimate questions have clearly right answers.

The United States is a conservative country. There is no use denying that. Even our so-called liberals would be considered conservative if they were transplanted to, say, Europe. Luckily I've had the privilege of living overseas in both liberal European democracies and in repressive regimes. I look at America through that lens. And luckily I'm old enough to remember when the U.S. political climate was not so divisive and when disagreement could be pursued rationally as adults. I still believe most Americans are centrists (on the American spectrum) and are being disingenuously manipulated by powerful minority interests: people like Mike Lindell who can command a lot of attention without intellectually deserving it.

I keep going because I'm a true believer in getting the right answer even if that answer is disappointing and takes a lot of effort to find.

A state's politicians are also the people who decide which of the state's US citizen residents get to vote. And in "red" states that choice is very colour coded.

Edit: ◊◊◊◊, replied to the wrong post, meant to reply to #763.