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Perry Dorrell blogs as PDiddie at Brains and Eggs, usually on topics concerning
the strange brew of Texas politics. He’s also on Twitter @PDiddie.
Brad, you’ve done a lot of great material on electoral fraud with tamperable voting machines. Regardless of who you thought should have won, do you think that it’s impossible nowadays to compromise these machines? The left is in a kumbaya moment and needs a rude awakening about how flawed our election systems are.
Bob @1 said:
Thanks, Bob.
Of course not. Not even close to “impossible”. It’s pretty easy, in fact.
Though I would also add that, to date, I’ve seen less things that concern me about this election than almost any election in about 20 years. That, was mostly thanks to so much early/absentee voting that made it less likely that voters were suppressed and that voting system failures left people unable to vote at all.
Moreover I would add, that if human beings don’t actually count hand-marked paper ballots to confirm they were tallied correctly by the computer tabulators, there is no way to know whether a result was “compromised” (on purpose or by accident) or not.
I guess I missed that “kumbaya moment” on “the left”. By and large, it has been “the left” and only “the left” that has been trying for YEARS to bring attention to these concerns. At the same time, the Republican Party from top to bottom has called those same folks (including me) “conspiracy theorists” and “sore losers” for pointing out these concerns and Mitch McConnell spent the entire past two years blocking ANY funding for any kind of real security measures to mitigate the vulnerability of these voting systems.
Hope that helps!
And here’s a fun related thread I posted at Twitter today, Bob, in case you missed it. (Click to see the full thread)….
You’re totally right that suppression and electoral fraud using machines has not been a concern of the right, but even so it really isn’t a concern either for media and their horserace election coverage, nor has the democratic party done much to challenge the republicans’ open attempts at suppression and fraud.
For example, state after state had fewer polls available than four years ago during the dem primaries. I think the democratic party is fine with this because they would rather represent middle class white people, who as a voting block don’t stand to lose out from such closures, allowing the party to keep out progressive contenders.
So all the while these things haven’t seemed to be a concern for any of the parties mentioned in this comment, since most haven’t been shown or don’t care about the depth of depravity present with the current amount of suppression, one can only hope that this post trump kumbaya moment isn’t used to weave the integrity of our elections into some sort of state religion, and ostracize anyone who doesn’t deem elections resulting from these machines to be very credible. I see a lot of that sentiment right now and it’s quite troublng. That’s all, have a good day.
Bob said @4:
Not sure why you’d say that, at least regarding suppression. They have been *very* aggressive in combating that, if much less so regarding concerns about fraud via electronic voting systems.
Don’t know if you heard, but there’s a pandemic on, which resulted in the necessity of poll closures due to lack of poll workers during the primaries.
In other cases, polls were closed in some places due to the conversation from community based precincts to Voting Centers (where anyone can cast their vote.) I think the latter is a terrible idea, but not due to reasons of voter suppression. Moreover, I have no reason to believe that any location who moved to Voting Centers did so in order to suppress voters (even if that is what ultimately happened when voting systems failed at some of them, resulting in long lines.)
That’s just a baseless contention. While the party establishment may be frightened by more progressive voters, I have seen no evidence whatsoever that there has been any attempt by the Democratic Party to prevent them from voting by closing polling places.
Please feel free to share your evidence of that assertion. You keep making it, and yet I am unaware of any evidence to support it. Since you keep repeating it, I assume you must have some evidence. Please feel free to share.
Again, I am unaware of this “kumbaya moment” of which you speak. Perhaps you and I hang in different circles.
Okay. I hope your day is lovely as well.