The only thing Trump was right about is how stupid his base can be.
Yeah it . . . wasn’t going to happen anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Counting by hand is fine. I see no value in the process being instantaneous. Especially not compared to the monetary cost and organizational overhead.
Election integrity? Like, just to pick a wild and random theoretical example, election fraud in Georgia?
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.
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?
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.
Everything in MAGA is a con job. Election Integrity is a euphemism for stealing elections.
4 years in and their base clearly hasn’t done the legwork to educate themselves. Nov is gonna be another shitshow.
