this post was submitted on 19 May 2024

219 points (96.2% liked)

politics

19236 readers

3431 users here now

Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!

Rules:

Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.

Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.

Example:

Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

That's all the rules!

Civic Links

• Register To Vote

• Citizenship Resource Center

• Congressional Awards Program

• Federal Government Agencies

• Library of Congress Legislative Resources

• The White House

• U.S. House of Representatives

• U.S. Senate

Partnered Communities:

• News

• World News

• Business News

• Political Discussion

• Ask Politics

• Military News

• Global Politics

• Moderate Politics

• Progressive Politics

• UK Politics

• Canadian Politics

• Australian Politics

• New Zealand Politics

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

219

Don't fall for MAGA's "election integrity" con job (www.salon.com)

submitted 7 months ago by jeffw to c/politics

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

all 25 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 65 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The only ones dumb enough to fall for this bullshit are the ones who absolutely will, and are not gonna be swayed by any articles, no matter how well written or well reasoned.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Was going to comment something similar. Good message... but people voting for Biden aren't the ones who need to hear it. How can we even share this message with the right? How to convince people completely divorced from reality to listen to reality?

[–] whotookkarl 3 points 7 months ago

If you're actually asking how to reach people about a delusional belief they hold it seems often if you try to show them evidence that directly contradicts their belief, argue reasonably, etc they will often become more entrenched in a defiant 'you can't teach me anything' stance to protect their perceived self identity from unwarranted attacks. You have to demonstrate the warrant first.

A possibly more effective method seems to be temporarily accepting their proposed perspective, and asking skeptical questions to reduce their confidence in the delusion. Providing the questions to work it out themselves instead of forcing the conclusion. I haven't read it yet but I've seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combating_Cult_Mind_Control recommended as a study on cults and breaking their indoctrination & control tactics but I'm open to more contemporary recommendations if anyone has them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

You don't. Their minds are closed.

There are a huge mass of people who don't normally vote who are much easier to sway.

[–] JeeBaiChow 16 points 7 months ago

4 years in and their base clearly hasn't done the legwork to educate themselves. Nov is gonna be another shitshow.

[–] Stern 16 points 7 months ago

Election integrity? Like, just to pick a wild and random theoretical example, election fraud in Georgia?

[–] FuglyDuck 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The only thing Trump was right about is how stupid his base can be.

[–] billiam0202 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

And about how he's as mature as a first-grader.

[–] FuglyDuck 3 points 7 months ago

dunno.

They generally require you to be potty trained for kindergarten.

[–] homesweethomeMrL 5 points 7 months ago

Yeah it . . . wasn’t going to happen anyway.

[–] TheJims 5 points 7 months ago

Everything in MAGA is a con job. Election Integrity is a euphemism for stealing elections.

[–] AnUnusualRelic 2 points 7 months ago

He was right. They really let you do anything.

[+] [email protected] -9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The one thing they are right about IMO is that voting machines are dangerous, useless garbage that endangers the integrity of the election protests.

The way they used them to do so wasn't on my list, but still.

EDIT: Wow, so many downvotes. Remember when these concerns were held by mostly left wing techy people? You don't have to love them now because Trump hates them/uses their presence to spread FUD. The fact that that works should be a strike against having them, FFS! You might think they are fine now but to regular people they are still opaque and scary.

[–] dhork 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

There was a lot of effort put in to changing how those machines work, based largely on the work of a few independant researchers in the early 2000's. Newer machines are more secure, auditable, and have a documented paper trail of all votes that can be recounted. These companies had to be shamed into doing the right thing, but at least they did it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Many still have notable gaps in voter verification - for example, the ballots are tallied by reading a printed QR code, which the voter has no means to verify. So close to voter-verifiable, yet not voter-verifiable.

In addition, polling places are often bottlenecked by the limited number of expensive machines, which local precincts have no power to remedy - especially in dense urban areas.

I have to wonder why bubble (scantron) forms, which are simple, cheap, low-infrastructure, and present vastly less software surface area (they can be counted by an array of photosensors and discrete flip-flop registers) were not the preferred choice. And, it’s always possible to have a touchscreen machine which prints a filled bubble form - which the voter can actually verify.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The right thing would be to abandon the concept altogether. Paper is accessible and obvious to everybody, auditing an election machine isn't. Just keep it simple, even if it takes longer.

[–] dhork 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Many machines now are paper based, the machines just scan the paper and deposit it in a lockbox, and the physical paper can be recounted if necessary. These are the machines I use in my district.

The ballot is scanned right in front of you, and if you made a stray mark that would cause the ballot to be invalidated, or it detects an over/under vote, it informs you so that you have a chance to destroy the ballot and re-vote if necessary.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

But what's the point? Count everything by hand instead of relying on the machine to report anomalies, do exit polls to satisfy the news cycle. This seems too important to introduce an ultimately opaque machine into and also costs a lot for zero gain.

And then there are also the machines that so take over the process more thoroughly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ghe point is that the automatic process tends to be very reliable and instantaneous while hand counts can be used as an auditing process. So machines that are easily auditable and have an inherent paper trail because thenvotes are on actual paper ballots are the best combination of steps for voting.

Auditable machines make ballot stuffing impossible.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Counting by hand is fine. I see no value in the process being instantaneous. Especially not compared to the monetary cost and organizational overhead.

[–] mrcleanup 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They couldn't even hand count an election of 127 people correctly. Imagine how big the errors would have been with thousands of votes.

The fact is that this isn't being counted by full time well-trained accountants, but by temporary and on-call employees at best, and lots of them are retirees, who can afford not to have a full-time gig.

Hand counting requires more blind faith trust than a machine you can easily audit at any time.

It's not just about the speed, it's about an inhuman level of consistency and memory that the machine provides.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

How does the auditing work in these cases?

Also I found news reports about some US states still using machines without paper trail...

[–] mrcleanup 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Every state has it's own laws and every set of equipment is a little different, so each county can be a little different too , but the basics are that you pull a few scan batches, count them by hand, and then compare to what the computer says. If the two ever don't match, you know you have a problem and you count again to make sure the problem wasn't the humans recounting. Then you check to make sure they weren't scanned wrong. If you still have a problem after that, the auditor should be calling the secretary of state as fast as they can and I would guess the goal would be to get a new tabulator in there ASAP to start fresh on a completely different system.

With regard to machines with no paper trail, counties can choose to be as OCD or laid back as the law and their elected official (the auditor) wants them to be; the auditor is theoretically there to represent the interests of the people and make sure the system is trustworthy.

I'm my county the April election was small enough that they ended up recounting every single ballot as part off the audit since it was only about 200 ballots for one taxing district.

You should also be able to observe if you want to, contact your county and ask how to get on the list and you can observe first-hand exactly how they do it.

I'll also point out before I go, that the audits of the machine show that the system looks to be working right, but when you batch audit a hand count all you can do is verify that one batch because humans are not a consistent process.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Alright, thank you for the information! I still think that those machines are unnecessary but I can see how they are at least not making things worse.

No paper trail still seems like insanity though, especially if auditing comes down to a non-technical person with "training" connecting some box to the machines that then tells them it's OK.