Well, the 2024 election is officially underway, and already the ‘election integrity deniers’ have been proven correct — our current voting system is an unworkable mess. In Vancouver, WA (also known as hometown north!) hundreds of ballots were destroyed when an unidentified man dropped an incendiary device with the message “Free Gaza” into the official ballot drop box:
While this story kicked up a little bit of national attention, many were quick to dismiss the arson because there’s approximately 0% that Washington state goes to Trump. This is a very short-sighted view, because WA03 is one of the few ‘swing’ districts in the 2024 election — and this particular box was in one of the better-off neighborhoods of Vancouver (and thus would presumably have a high percentage of Republican votes).
Regardless of the criminal’s political persuasions, perhaps we shouldn’t simply place our ‘sacred’ vote into an unmonitored box next to the side of the road? (Nonsense, says Jay Inslee.)
Of course, we election integrity deniers such as Kamala Harris have been warning about faulty (or hackable) voting machines for decades at this point. Dominion Voting wants you to know they have heard your concerns, and will be suing you for voicing them:
And that’s not just an idle threat when it comes to Dominion. Remember this (incredibly suspicious) settlement with FOX News that led to the dismissal (and subsequent rebirth) of Tucker Carlson?
You can’t say that the Dominion Voting machines are faulty, because everybody knows that’s just a Trump-fueled lie! Tell ‘em, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson!
Oops! Turns out those ‘proprietary systems’ we’re not allowed to investigate just have a little ‘programming glitch’ that causes the machine to miscount ballots nationwide. But don’t worry, this is only one specific type of machine and this error (or others) could IN NO POSSIBLE WAY make Dominion Voting machines unsuitable for determining who leads the free world.
Are you some sort of conspiracy theorist or something?
The machines are OBVIOUSLY secure and it would take something like a giant password leak to make them vulnerable to election fuckery!
Hold on……….I’m getting word……
Luckily, the election remains secure because Colorado's Secretary of State Jena Griswold immediately changed the passwords as soon as the issue was brought to her attention.
Colorado's Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold found out on Oct. 24. Her office only started changing the leaked passwords after the issue was made public.
Voting machines used by county clerks are listed on a spreadsheet on the Colorado Secretary of State's website. The machines are listed by serial number, county, model and vendor.
Until last week, there was a hidden tab at the bottom of the spreadsheet that, when unhidden, showed one of two passwords needed to make changes to each computer.
A spokesperson for Griswold said the office did not start having any of the passwords changed until the security issue became public on Tuesday. Her office also did not notify county clerks until it became public.
Local reporter Kyle Clark takes Griswold to task in this video, comparing her conduct to “the Mesa County incident” — but Griswold explains that’s different because shut your stupid face:
The “Mesa County Incident”, of course, was the shameful prosecution of Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, who preserved evidence the Dominion machines were being altered after the election. (You can read her evidence here.)
Peters was recently sentenced to 9 years in prison during a trial in which she was basically barred from mounting a defense.
I can see why maybe Griswold doesn’t want to compare the incidents.
But normal Americans see right through this. Either election integrity is so sacred that we have to aggressively prosecute anybody who threatens it, or it’s really not a big deal. Try to guess which this is:
Did “Wild Thing” Ricky Vaughn pop into your head while you were watching that? Here’s why:
Mackey’s horrific crime was creating a meme saying that Hillary supporters could vote by text.
This was such an egregious example of election fraud, the government tracked the dude down 5 years later and charged him.
Unfortunately for the DoJ, this post from election day 2016 is still up, and it contains this video:
Why does one person get sent to jail while the other is ignored? As usual, it’s about narrative and power. If you try to expose election fraud as a county clerk, they throw the book at you. If you actually PERFORM the election fraud as an election worker, you get all of Rudy Guliani’s stuff.
If you hypothetically deny people in Georgia the right to vote, it’s akin to Jim Crow 2.0 and Major League Baseball will very publicly chastise you by taking away your All-Star Game. If you actually deny people in Pennsylvania the right to vote……..the Democratic governor doesn’t say a word.
Thousands of voters in Pennsylvania received a confusing text message this weekend claiming they already voted in the 2024 presidential election.
“Records show you voted,” the message said, directing people to an official website with information about polling places and early on-demand voting in the state.
The organization behind the texts, AllVote, said the messages contained errors and should have told voters they had cast their ballots in 2022 and directed them to a link with information about voting in 2024. However, “in 2022” was left out, causing confusion. A spokesperson said the misleading text was followed by an apology message, though those who had replied “STOP” or marked the first message as spam may not have received it.
It’s the latest case of misleading or incorrect election-related information being disseminated by the group, which has been flagged by officials from across the country – including in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Arizona – as a scam.
Later in the article:
The controversy in the Keystone State comes just a few days after the Wisconsin Election Commission criticized AllVote over another misleading text message campaign. The group previously sent thousands of Wisconsin voters text messages that had a link to the wrong election website, leading to complaints to the commission.
This is a clear example of election interference! No, not AllVote spewing out election misinformation — I mean the people TALKING about how AllVote is spewing out election misinformation……they are undermining confidence in our election process — which is obviously safe and effective secure!
At this point it’s obvious “The Blob” is simply trying to make examples of anybody who dares point out of the obvious — this system is designed to be cheated. (And nobody will be better at it than the people who created it!) And it doesn’t help the hyper-partisan government employees are the ones tasked with running the election.
Election officials shouldn’t EVER be ‘on a team’ to the point where they say things like “delivering just the margin needed at 3 am.” You’d think that Ryan Chew would understand that based on the last line of his e-mail signature.
Here at SitV we talk a lot about incentives and how they drive behavior — and there’s perhaps no worse case of screwed-up incentives than partisan election officials running an election. There’s too much money at stake — not to mention saving the country from another Literally Hitler — to expect them NOT to cheat.
As a libertarian, my first instinct is some sort of market-based fix for this problem — which would undoubtedly be attacked as “privatizing our democracy.” But I fear that we’ve actually already privatized our elections — and unsurprisingly, the politicians chose the company that makes it the easiest for them to cheat.
If voters were in charge of the system, transparency would be the #1 goal. This means open-sourced voting machines, or perhaps no voting machines at all. It would certainly mean removing the huge integrity holes, such as mail-in ballots, that are outlawed in the rest of the world.
As a country we’ve sort of accepted this idea that unless we litter the cityscape with ‘legal’ ballots, we’re attacking voting rights. But the most important voting right is ensuring your ballot is counted correctly and isn’t counteracted by an illegal voter. (Which, of course, is impossible. Illegal voters can’t vote and if they tried they would be stopped!)
*sigh*
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The Vance/Rogan podcast dropped today. I'll be doing a highlight clip article, but if you want to get ahead of the curve, the interview is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRyyTAs1XY8
I'm in a blue state. I voted last Tuesday to get it on the record at least, anticipating some shenanigans come what should be, a single election day.
Really don't care what 'experts' want to say. Can't buy into the argument of " we're a computerized society" so everything has to be computerized. No. It doesn't.
One day, one ballot. No voting "machines" other than onsite, completely offline, tabilizers per voting place. Secure, locally, before transmitting the results for national tabulation. More security problems as the data stream progresses, but need that independent proof of source data.
Same day. One verified, validated and counted vote.
Sure, exceptions for folks say, in surgery on voting day. Exceptions for validated/verified overseas citizens such as for Service members. But any exceptions should include rigorous scrutiny.
That's not where we are now.