Donald J. Trump is a racist demagogue and dangerous for democracy. Tell me something I don’t already know. The author is preaching to the choir.
Try telling this to a center-right audience or even a far right group of people and see how well that goes…They won’t listen, nor will the more “respectable” Republican establishment types that now say they’re all for voting for Hillary rather than giving their vote to Trump. They too have propagated and kept this voter fraud nonsense going…so its not just the far right wingnuts claiming this…Its the entire GOP because it serves an important objective for them in being able to suppress the Democratic vote whenever their little cold hearts find it advantageous.
I know math and logical thinking are hard but even a cursory attempt at it would show anyone how completely stupid and impossible voter fraud could happen enough to move a national election…
how many votes in any state would it take to change the results in a state… 1000s? 10’s of thousand?
and it would have to be across several, swing?, states to move a national election…
fraud on that scale would require such a massive conspiracy that it would be impossible to cover up…
and it’s scalable… a state Senate race? Congressional race?
massive amounts of people conspiring to move any race…
A more likely source of fraud is in the computers counting the votes. So far as I know, no jurisdictions are auditing the machines. The machines operate on proprietary code: no one can verify that the code does what it claims to do.
If we must have voting machines, the code should be open-source. In any event, the machines should be audited against the paper trail. It isn’t necessary to audit every machine – a 5% sample should be sufficient. If the hand tally doesn’t match the machine tally and the discrepancy cannot be explained, then the election needs to be recounted with properly programmed and functioning machines.
A state’s chief election officer trying to suppress the vote doesn’t instill confidence in me as to the integrity of his/her practices regarding the programming of voting machines.
More evidence for my assertion that the right does not care about constitutional principles, or any other kind of traditional American principles for that matter. They only care about getting their way. Period. These people are not patriots, despite all of their self-rightous claims to be such. Evidence also continues to mount that the Christian right isn’t even Christian, they are just another authoritarian group on the right seeking to enforce their will on everyone else.
Is Trump’s flogging a conspiracy theory questioning the integrity of the election before the vote, and his database-building sign up of “poll watchers” on his website anything more than building an audience and “launch issue” for his & Steve Bannon’s post-election Hillary-bashing media business?
Bottom line. This election does not need to be stolen. He is giving it away.
There is one kind of vote rigging that we do have to pay attention to: cyber attacks against votes cast over the Internet. 30+ states allow emailed ballots, which are not even end-to-end encrypted. A handful of other states allow votes to be cast online through a web interface by overseas and military voters. And one state – Alaska – allows all voters to vote online in any election.
Internet voting is an extremely dangerous voting mode because anyone in the world can perpetrate any of a large number of kinds of attack that are unlikely to be detected. The wrong person may be declared the winner and take office without anyone knowing. But even if an attack is detected, it cannot be corrected, and the perpetrators may never be identified.
The entire computer and network security community is virtually unanimous that online voting is extremely vulnerable to cyber attack by anyone from a kid in Bolivia, to nation state adversary, to our own domestic partisans. Since Russia has recently shown interest in using technical means to interfere with our elections, we simply must take this threat seriously.
I realize that by merely saying this I appear to be giving some support to those who scream about rigged elections. But by and large they don’t know what they are talking about, and they worry about the wrong things. Some elections are vulnerable to rigging, but not by the means suggested by Mr. Trump.
(For the record, I am a computer scientist who has been studying and following Internet voting for 17 years now. I am one of a couple dozen independent computer scientists in the U.S. with extensive expertise both on election and voting processes and on computer and network security, who are actively involved in security research aimed at protecting the integrity of public elections from technical threats. For further information I recommend http://verifiedvoting.org.)
I too have worried more about this than any other issue, especially given the known Russian hack of the Democratic Party emails. Nice to know the WikiLeaks mobster is offline. I see Verified Voting got $300,000 MacArthur grants this year, in 2012 and in 2010. Excellent. Good luck!!
Trumps use of it is a bit different than the GOP’s. The GOP’s been pushing the allegation in order to fix it. Those fixes coming at the expense of minority voters and other folks that vote for Democrats. They are using it to stifle voting that’s not likely to be for them. Trumps using the hoax to justify a loss. He’s going to lose and he knows that. But he cannot accept it. He cannot face it. So with Voter Fraud and Rigged Election he won’t have to. He won but it was stolen by Crooked Hillary. It won’t matter how much post election polling shows he truly lost. He’ll never accept that. Nor will his followers.
And that could be one bunch of chaos starting on Nov. 9
Your very valid and pertinent concerns have been discussed for years. The amazing thing is that no one appears to be listening. The best system is the one we use in SD - voting using optical scanning methods, where you bubble in to vote. This keeps a paper record, but also ensures that the actual tabulating machines are at a minimum. It is the cheapest and simplest approach to the voting process. The paper record can be kept afterwards, and recounts are very simple.
Absolutely. While instances of voter fraud are very rare, they do exist. The notion of the “crooked election” is a much different one.
I have been yelling that this ‘voter fraud’ thing is pure nonsense and cited facts and figures. But if THOSE don’t cut any ice with you, I can show you that this voter fraud thing makes absolutely no sense another way.
I come from North Dakota, the ONLY state in the country that does not even have VOTER REGISTRATION, which even DEMOCRATS, who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of this illegal alien vote the GOP is worried about, say is necessary to have fair elections.
We USED to have it. In fact, ND was the first state that DID have it back in the 20s, but after 30 years with no electoral problems, we all looked at one another and said, “What do we need THIS thing for?” Come 1951, we got rid of voter registration. Wanna take a guess how we held fair elections? Easy. Small precincts. I mean really small ones where the election workers in one knew everybody there.
Years ago I was in line behind my dad while he was showing me how voting worked. A guy two people in front of me had never voted in the precinct before. He gave his name to the election worker who jotted in down on a card in the master file that told whether you voted or not. Then she asked if anybody in the line knew him. Two people did. One of them was my father, who said, yeah, he just moved here that spring.
Off he trotted with his ballot to go and vote.
That was our voter I.D. in the precinct where I grew up. I kid you not.
But according to guys like Trump, or Kobach or Spakowsky or all those OTHER Chicken Littles, North Dakota should be SWIMMING in voter fraud.
Except it isn’t. And never has been. Don’t believe me. Check out the ND Secretary of State’s office. https://search.avira.net/#/web/result?q=Nort6h+Dakota+has+no+voter+registration&source=homepage
So that leaves only two questions:
- Are the people in North Dakota more honest than everywhere else?
- Or is this voter fraud thing pure bullshit?
Which?
Nothing’s perfect, especially in drumpflandia, but they are going for one thing and that is intimidation. Frankly, a few inciters should become examples for all to see.
While I strongly agree, this assumes that there is, in fact, a paper trail. Unfortunately that’s increasingly not the case. I think there should be laws requiring paper trails for every voting machine in operation, as well as periodic machine audits as you suggest.
But then I think federal elections should be controlled by federal laws (instant run-off, # machines per precinct population, early voting hours, same-day registration, vote-by-mail option, etc.), and none of those will ever happen as long as the GOP can possibly prevent it.
There are already several posts on Facebook locally by voters who say they voted for Trump and it got changed to Clinton by the machine. Trump and his supporters are not going to go down without a uuuge fight!
OT… love the Weather Channel’s Election Escape calming video they have up and running.
What Republican’s mean when they complain of vote rigging: Vote rigging and voter fraud = Any assistance helping the “wrong” type of voters (i.e. non-republicans) to register and vote.
I thought I should retract a Wisconsin public website screenshot with too much personal detail. It is sufficient to say this idiot has six counts of felony voter registration fraud, voting in more than one place, more than once per election.
The election was rigged, just not in the way Donald Trump and the Republicans claim.
You just have to consider two facts: (1) Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, and (2) she lost the election. This is the second time in less than 20 years and in five elections that the person who won the most votes did not assume the office. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find a justification for this result.
In discussing this outcome, economist Brad DeLong makes a very good point:
"Choosing technocratically competent leaders and guarding against rent-seeking are not the reasons why democracy has an advantage.
"Democracy has an advantage because it short circuits the process of coup or revolution to throw the bastards out by violent means. It short-circuits this process because it was the people–most of the people who voted, that is–who put the bastards in. Thus the majority must blame itself before it starts looking for others to blame.
“It is for this reason that it is very dangerous to have an institution that is a failure point in that it generates a non-majoritarian choice of leader in what is supposed to be a democracy.”
Any school child will recognize that if an election is held, and the person having the least amount of votes wins, you do not have a democratic system,
What would we say about some underdeveloped nation which held and election, and the winner was the guy with the least votes? We would say their system was rigged.
Our system was rigged a long time ago – when our constitution was created. Under our constitution, the only people with the vote were white male property owners. Slaves could not vote. Women could not vote. People who did not own property could not vote.
The electoral college itself is a product of the institution of slavery. Originally, James Madison wanted the selection of the president to be based on the popular vote. However, this was not consistent with the wishes of slave owners, who wanted to have their slaves included in the electoral tallies while denying those slaves the right to vote.
The answer came in the form of what later became known as the Electoral College. Each slave would count as 3/5 of a person for determining representation in Congress and the Electoral College. But since there was no direct election, the slaveholders, in effect, would be casting those votes on behalf of the slaves.
Unfortunately, when slavery was abolished by the 13th amendment, the Electoral College was not. But we must recognize the Electoral College for what it was and remains, a vestige of slavery which was intentionally designed to rig elections.
The only answer is a national across-the-board recount! Buy into his psychosis and push for a recount … it’s the right thing to do!