There Really Was Some Voter Fraud!

[The Great Zaganza]

Nope. Nobody but you knows it was actually you handing in a blank ballot. The ballot doesn't have your name on it. Not even the electoral officer knows. It counts only as an invalid vote. The only statistical value would be the overall count of invalid votes.

not by name, but by geography

It tell candidates that there are undecided voters, most precious resource.
If there are enough in an area, you can send in pollsters to find out what the locals Would vote for.

 

[Norman Alexander]

They can, if there's enough blank ballots that they think it's worth the time\money, get some local polling going and try to find out why people are feeling that disenfranchised or disillusioned.

not by name, but by geography

It tell candidates that there are undecided voters, most precious resource.
If there are enough in an area, you can send in pollsters to find out what the locals Would vote for.

Again, no. Blank votes get lumped in with other informal votes, like the dick-and-balls efforts. You won't know for sure if the voters are deliberately avoiding candidates or cannot follow voting instructions. There's always a percentage of the latter in every election. We had a couple of methodology changes in our elections a little while back, and the informal votes went up all round until we learned them.

Generally, though, our participation rate is well over 95% most elections, with only a small informal count. So we do regularly get high eligible voter results, which is well representative of the whole population. Importantly, compulsory voting removes avenues for voter fraud - discouraging voters and preventing voters from voting.

 

[Stacyhs]

That’s not how it works out, in real life.

Citation needed.

But I'm not going to argue with you about your misconceptions.

That's mighty big of you.

 

[Norman Alexander]

Citation needed.

The sitting Prime Minister in 2007 loses in his own electorate which was traditionally "unloseable" for his own party. It's the rough equivalent of, say, MTG being voted out in Georgia. Proving that the majority of voters ARE interested and concerned at our compulsory elections.

Howard was only the second Australian prime minister to lose his seat in an election since Stanley Bruce in 1929.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Howard

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

Yes. And so does a person's freedom to make their own decision to vote or not. I consistently vote, but the idea of being forced to vote is anathema to me.

Spoil your ballot. It's what I'll be doingat least one of in tomorrows European, Local and (Limerick) mayoral elections.

I'm spoiling the mayoral election as it's a new office that is being granted the same kind of powers that lead to the planning tribunals into local government corruption of the early noughties.

 

[Stacyhs]

The sitting Prime Minister in 2007 loses in his own electorate which was traditionally "unloseable" for his own party. It's the rough equivalent of, say, MTG being voted out in Georgia. Proving that the majority of voters ARE interested and concerned at our compulsory elections.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Howard

That has nothing to do with what I said:

People who have to be forced to vote aren't exactly the kind of people who put much, if any, thought into it. Just what we need: more ignorant, uninformed, can't be bothered people just putting their X next to whatever name they might recognize or has the right letter next to it.

Notice I never claimed that the majority of voters are NOT interested and concerned at compulsory elections. Try again.

 

[shemp]

Maybe someday this thread will get back on topic.

 

[Norman Alexander]

Maybe someday this thread will get back on topic.

Yeah, I thought it had drifted off track. My apologies.

 

[kookbreaker]

Smartmatic is in a lawsuit with Newsmax over their false claims about their voting machines being rigged.

The NewsMax CEO thought he’d be clever and deleted incriminating messages after discovery is ordered.

It’s not going well for him.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/may/22/newsmax-delete-evidence-2020-election-lies

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Smartmatic is in a lawsuit with Newsmax over their false claims about their voting machines being rigged.

The NewsMax CEO thought he’d be clever and deleted incriminating messages after discovery is ordered.

It’s not going well for him.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/may/22/newsmax-delete-evidence-2020-election-lies

Actually, if I'm reading the article correctly, it is going well. Critical messages are gone forever. So no evidence. No proof.

 

[Norman Alexander]

Actually, if I'm reading the article correctly, it is going well. Critical messages are gone forever. So no evidence. No proof.

Nope. Text messages are never gone forever. They will be recoverable.

 

[kookbreaker]

Yeah, the recipients of said messages weren’t so big on breaking the law for their CEO.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Nope. Text messages are never gone forever. They will be recoverable.

You've been watching too many TV shows.

No provider or email service stores your emails for ever. There is no reason to and the cost will add up eventually. At some point the backups are overwritten and that's it.

 

[Norman Alexander]

You've been watching too many TV shows.

No provider or email service stores your emails for ever. There is no reason to and the cost will add up eventually. At some point the backups are overwritten and that's it.

IT storage was my field.

SMS messages are kept for at least decades. It is a US security requirement. They are not always on quickly accessible media so retrieval can take some time. Until not so long ago, they were on magtape.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

IT storage was my field.

SMS messages are kept for at least decades. It is a US security requirement. They are not always on quickly accessible media so retrieval can take some time. Until not so long ago, they were on magtape.

The site here says otherwise: Text Message Retrieval Policies for Legal Investigations

Requirements in government agencies may be stronger.

 

[Norman Alexander]

The site here says otherwise: Text Message Retrieval Policies for Legal Investigations

Requirements in government agencies may be stronger.

That's referring to immediate retrieval, i.e. interactively, which is suitable for legal reasons. Yes, there are storage limitations involved there, and the table shows this. FYI, in Australia, this is 7 years for all telcos, by law.

But for security purposes, most telcos will store the aged data in an offline method such as cartridge tapes stored securely, and more recently, low-speed cloud repositories. They generally talk about 25 years plus archives. That data is still retrievable, but it might take days, weeks or even months to recover.

It has also been a problem in some cases going back decades that the storage method is so outdated that there are no longer platforms to read them (old versions of proprietary backup software, outdated media, etc.) This has been of particular relevance to me, being a greybeard system manager since the 80's. Getting old tape systems operable again to get 20 year old data off a tape for a children's court case was not as fun as you think.

 

[Orphia Nay]

The article mentioned the costs of the data retrieval. So the data seems to have been retrieved.

“Smartmatic asked the superior court judge Eric Davis, who is overseeing the case, to order the company to pay legal fees it spent obtaining the concealed messages.”