I’m hoping that individual election officials and state officials will act. Terry McAuliffe just took Virginia off voting machines and put it back on paper ballots and I hope that in other parts of the country that were targeted, officials are working to prevent it happening again.
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This is like a book I read in Junior High (at the urging of a classmate who was a member of Young Americans for Freedom) called None Dare Call It Treason.
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CIA has interfered in democratic elections in other countries for decades. Not many Americans complained about that, although some did.
Blowback sucks.
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Extremists are idiots, so this doesn’t surprise me one bit.
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You are so right, Tena. We need federal election standards with validatable and recountable ballots.
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The Russians have a term for what they have been doing, ‘agitprop’, short for agitation and propaganda. Just the old Soviet model. You can take the comrade out of the party, but an oligarch returns.
Now, to bribe a fool to run for the Presidency, I can see it now…
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I’m not a fan of both siderism in the media at all. It’s been highly pernicious and destructive.
But the Russoan hacking is a case where it really is a both sides issue. Even if their impact on the left was less than that on the right it was more impactful (since Trump got elected).
The reason I bring this up is that this is something even Republicans should be afraid of. The Russians have shown a capability to influence public opinion which is quite remarkable in it’s effectiveness and the Republicans who truly believe they are acting in America’s interests should recognize that automatically means that Putin’s Russia will use that influence against them (and if he uses it in their favor they need to question their beliefs that they are acting in the US’s interest).
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Blowback with treason by one of the major parties, the one which has for decades claimed to be more patriotic than the other, sucks too.
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Blame the Presidents that did it, not the populace.
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I didn’t say that.
I said that I hoped individual election officials and state officials acted. We don’t have a federal system and I am not positive it would be an improvement if we did. But we do need to reform the system to make sure it operates the way it is supposed to.
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You have totally nailed it. They never seem to see that, either.
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Sam Thielman’s been consistently doing great work.
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@tena But we do need to reform the system to make sure it operates the way it is supposed to.
The ‘system’ list is long, as you know.
–Voter rights
–Health care access
–Dreamers/immigration
–Voter integrity
–Harassment/discrimination
–Climate change/environment
–Etc.
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There is bound to be state side troll farms too.
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I live in a state with a GOP governor. He won’t do shit. Thankfully we have optical scan machines that have a paper ballot that are supposed to be able to leave a paper trail in case of a recount.
But this invasion by Russian bots and troll farms goes well beyond setting up the voting machines and manipulating them by someone with a direct attack in mind. This is still the Russians putting their thumb on the scale of our democracy, trying to influence the electorate through propaganda, stoking outrage using fake actors masquerading as legitimate citizens with an axe to grind, or with a bias to sow chaos in building opposition to whoever they target…and all done by a hostile foreign power outside our country. That’s interference. It may not cost much relative to the damage being done, but it probably has some far-reaching influence in some areas of the country being targeted. That’s what’s so outrageous to me.
Homeland Security, the FBI, the DoJ, elected officials need to be all over this, and yet…that ain’t happening, still. I can’t understand how or why that’s happening other than we have an idiot for pr*sident and a bunch of obsequious goobers in Congress. That just about explains it all I guess.
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That spring, the organization used publicly accessible webcams in Times Square to see if people would follow instructions on Facebook to show up at a designated place and time for a free hot dog. They did, and didn’t even get a promised hot dog for their trouble.
Can someone tell me again, why the EC needs to abolished? (Partial sarcasm)
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To be fair, Fox News and conservative radio softened up Trump’s base long before the 2016 election. The Russians didn’t invent fake news. It is disturbing that so many people fell victim to the propaganda, but appealing to humans’ sense of injustice ( whether real or fabricated) is pretty easy. Even toddlers react when some kid has something they didn’t get.
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State Farm hires trolls? 
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Even 71 year old toddlers react
fify
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We talked about this
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