Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning
bbc.com
bbc.com
So, let's consider if such fraud could possibly be substantial. Let's use California as an example. Registering to vote is easy, all you need is a web browser[1] and a mailing address where you reside or with a resident willing to give you ballots or ignorant that they are receiving them[2]. Also, the State of California faces an impractically large legal hurdle to reject suspected fraudulent ballots[3] so it can be assumed that most if not all will be accepted. It seems clear based on the observable facts that substantial fraud is certainly possible under the California regime. Please note I am not claiming such fraud actually happens, merely that it is easily practicable for an organization as well organized as, say, a political party. To be honest, I bet literally hundreds if not thousands of readers on this site could build "California vote fraud as as service" as a side gig. Let's disrupt the electoral process for a billion dollar valuation!
From this I conclude that while I personally disagree with the President, this particular statement is a (probably, I sure hope) incorrect opinion, not a factually incorrect statement.
[2] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/politics/more-than-80-bal...
[3] https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler...
There is no reasonable interpretation of "There is NO WAY (ZERO!)" to mean "there may possibly be".
e: The President just helpfully tweeted out in support of my argument:
"They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect"
> Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.
New York times article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
Your are spreading false narratives. Stop.
https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advi...
What evidence of fraud would you expect? How would anyone know? And given the sophistication of fraud these days (bypassing 2fa, number porting, etc) - - how could you possibly expect zero fraud in a system whose only controls are human?
Though it would be naieve to assume it does not. Internet based crime goes through incredible hurdles today to bypass 2fa and anti fraud measures which are substantially more sophisticated than what the voting system has in place.
To suggest that criminals and nation-state actors would spend enormous effort to spread misinformation and steal credit cards, but completely ignore the far easier voting system, is absurd.
This position makes no sense to me, because the original statement indicates certainty. Therefore, you need to test the opposite of what you suggest, i.e. the statement can only be true if the election must contain substantial fraud.
When you negate the double negative, the claim in the tweet is:
> mail-in ballots will certainly be substantially fraudulent
Therefore if there is any chance that they will not contain substantial fraud, it is clearly a false statement.
Sweden where I live has several conditions on mail-in ballots. 1: it is only allowed as an exception for Swedish citizen currently residing in a other country. 2: A person must identify themselve through an embassy or the digital identity system which require a Swedish bank to perform identification. The first condition limits the scope of attacks and makes large scale attacks quite visible, while the second condition is very hard to perform. If you could break into hundred of thousands of peoples bank accounts, or take control over an embassy, voting fraud is unlikely your first priority.
No what Mr. POTUS said was > There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent
Translation: 100% certainty that Mail-In Ballots are substantially fraudulent
He specified a 100% certainty of substantial election fraud
The real problem here is calling what Twitter did a fact check. Because what Twitter did was just promote opposing opinions/predictions about the same future event. Neither side can make statements of fact about the future, they can only state their opinion and express their level of confidence in that opinion.
- medical claims - fiduciary - threats
If a doctor tells a patient that there is no way (ZERO!) that taking “the hydroxy” will be anything less than substantially successful - do we let it slide because there is a chance it might be true?
If you're going to autistically parse the President's tweet, then I will gladly point you towards the word "substantial" in the President's tweet. How do you intend to gauge the President's internal thoughts regarding what he believes would be a "substantial" amount of fraud? He might feel a single bad vote is substantial.
It's a sort of article (I didn't know Twitter had this type of format, I really like it, weirdly enough) that contains an introduction text and a 'What you need to know' paragraph, followed by fact-checking tweets from press organizations.
I know where the tweets come from, but who has written the introduction and summary paragraphs, and who has compiled those tweets and photos in that order?
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-trending-f...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/twitters-first-f...
How much digital ink is spent on exhaust from his tweets?
They get mentioned in the news hundreds of times a day, and they're "the" platform for all celebs posting their thoughts.
If POTUS moves to, say, Facebook, they lose all that free advertising.
There's nothing I'd rather say on my deathbed than "I was really good for the shareholders." Seriously, life is too short. Ban the president. Go down in history. Be someone. Jack or whoever will die being nothing more than a low-tier mascot for the long dead American dream. But banning the president... it would be very literally epic.
What I really want to say on my deathbed is "I lived a great story," so IMO it's a no brainer.
EDIT>> I dug up the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K571_jqnCpM
Jack Dorsey's public interest is increasing engagement and making money. That's it.
Whether it’s good that they have become a news source or not is a valid question. But right now, they are, and I think preserving the president’s tweets seems like a pretty easily defensible decision. Even if it is also (or primarily) motivated by their own business interests.
If the answer is yes then Twitter isn’t performing the civil service it claims as it is not an archival medium.
One, why haven't you reported your aunt for voter fraud? Voter fraud is a very serious issue and it seems to me that you're letting a criminal go free. This can be easily verified by telling the government and having the three others confirm who they voted for.
For two, if she is mailing in the ballots, then is she forging their signature as well as collecting their SSNs? Or are they simply signing on the ballots themselves agreeing to the votes? In which case is that truly fraud or not? If she's forging signatures then she's also committing identity theft which is a very serious issue, one that I hope you agree deserves reporting.
That said, perhaps “unsubstantiated” is a better description.
One could at least make the argument that the population centers should have more weight because that's where most of the people are, and those cities have the greatest financial and cultural influence. But why should, say, Iowa be as important as it seems to be in every Presidential election?
I actually like the principle of the electoral college, it reminds me that the US is in fact, a Union of States.
The real issue I see are the rampant gerrymandering of the congressional districts, which have a far greater skewing effect on the results than the electoral college (well, technically the same because the congressional districts are identical to the electoral college).
States representing a large majority of the US population have all passed legislation for a national popular vote, and no one doubts that a national popular vote on whether to have a national popular vote would succeed.
I do wish the UI was a bit... angrier. The friendly light blue doesn't exactly scream "misinformation!"
But as they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Removing him from Twitter won't make him or his base any less hateful. It's a constant reminder that he needs to be removed. I think if Twitter and news organizations just started ignoring him, many people would forget how horrible he is.
[1] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
Despite huge deplatforming efforts over the last decade fringe views have grown to become mainstream and there is less trust between people than ever.
Compared to what?
From my perspective the tech censors are already on thin ice - I actually don’t see how they could ramp up efforts much more without facing serious opposition.
Who do you believe should have final say over which person or group of people can have a platform, and who can't?
Should it be whoever owns that particular platform? Should it be the government? Should it be the court of public opinion? I've yet to see a compelling argument for deplatforming that answers this question, because what is acceptable to society has large grey areas that are constantly shifting. I think the intentions are nothing but wonderful - I'm very glad that communities like those in the report you cited, and many similar ones, no longer exist on Reddit. The problem as I see it is that censorship lowers visibility of hate speech very effectively, but if anything seems to strengthen people's convictions that they are right about what they believe. Hateful subreddits may disappear, but is that clear evidence that the people that participated in them changed their minds about what they had expressed online? I find that conclusion dubious at best.
I see this issue most strongly with conspiracy theorists, which seem to be a dime a dozen in 2020. Censorship is nothing if not evidence that what someone is saying is true - see the recent "Plandemic" viral video as a great example.
Deplatforming is, like I said, well-intentioned, but like so many "solutions" it is obsessed with the symptom of the disease, not the cause. It is based on the very old but very wrong notion that 'if only everyone believed what I believe, all the world would be at peace'. That notion is the cornerstone of religious dogma and has been the justification for religious conversion, forcible or otherwise, for millennia. There are proven ways to moderate people's beliefs through civil discourse. The issue is that it is so time consuming, unsatisfying, and thankless (not to mention that you don't get to play moral superiority games) that I'm not surprised people would rather just throw down the banhammer instead.
Censoring the point of view of others merely lends credence to their point of view. Unless you find a way to censor them completely, you will cause more and more people to lose faith in your ideals.
Because networks tend to follow an exponential growth rate. The time it takes to go from 1 to 128 equals the same time it takes to go from 128 to 16384, so if you add 127, you've shortened the time for the network to grow from 1 to 16384 by half. Meanwhile, for a platform that already had 16384, subtracting 127 is a drop in the bucket.
> Is there any evidence that this is the case?
Facebook/Youtube/Twitter/et al couldn't have grown as much as they did as fast as they did unless that was the case.
See how that works? Very slippery slope.
Sounds very segregationist.
I think if the president of the US is unable to operate within the terms of service, he shouldn't get a platform.
Why is that something you're going to argue against?
Am I the only one who gives a fuck about the rules around here?
/me plays AC/DC - Thunderstruck
So regardless of whether banning him is good or bad in terms of exposure or whatever, he's a user on the platform and he ought to be treated as such. If Trump wants to speak as the president with authority I assume he has the white house press department at his disposal.
But the relationship is symbiotic. While Trump loves him some free platform, he's a big traffic draw.
So, if Twitter wants to be too uppity, Trump could, for example shift operations to Gab.
I submit that a key point here is THERE IS NO CORRECT ANSWER to the policy question.
If one engages in social media, one's feelings will be hurt.
This is no blank check to be a dick. Criticisms of Trump cheapening the office are trivially shown correct. Vote accordingly this November.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/27/after-twitter-fact-check-t...
- Crowd sourced
- If 80%+ agreement it's true or false, report it as such with top sources provided
- If less than 80%, report it as "controversial leaning (strongly)..." with sources provided, inviting actual research
In the US, the question of mail voting encouraging fraudulence would get far less than a 80% consensus.
>Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.
I'm sorry, but that so-called "fact checking" looks like a classic case of "Trump said something is bad, so we must defend that thing at all costs".
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
No need to censor, only offer a second opinion
Someone: I don't trust the establishment
Establishment fact checker: FALSE. The establishment is perfectly trustworthy.
Maybe we need to start talking about The Right to be Suspicious or something.
The demo was a bright orange notice.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-testing-new-w...
It’s interesting that in the article they write: “A leaked demo features bright red and orange badges for tweets that are deemed "harmfully misleading."”
But currently, they didn’t use that approach. Right now the warning tag is an exclamation point circled badge with blue text.
There's some serious bias here. There are poor and impoverished people who are not ignorant. There are also ignorant millionaires. The moment you start saying who shouldn't be voting, make sure you realise how many people think you shouldn't be voting either.
At an extreme of that, see what the threshold of "rich" is for people saying "eat the rich".
To answer the question, yes. You absolutely want every single eligible person in the electorate to vote.
Voting is an exercise in representation. People vote based on what they want, not what they know. Desires, dreams, and concerns are not knowledge. Smart people, educated people, still have emotions, can still have hugely different values, and want wildly different things.
The purpose of democracy is to adjudicate between competing desires without violence. If you try to exclude a category of people from this process, you harm its legitimacy and it stops working well for everyone. The end point of that trajectory is revolution.
I can't remember seeing someone raise their hand and say, "I'm too emotional and poorly informed, please take away my right to vote." Wonder why that is.
Watch as I essentially take the contrapositive of your statement and say << Democrats fight hard to make voting as easy as possible because they are supported by people who are not engaged politically and by people who aren’t invested enough to vote if it takes any effort at all. >>
See? Not pleasant. I’d wager a lot of people have problems with that statement and I’d also wager that I could use each of their counter arguments to my statements as counter arguments to yours.
I see this pattern a lot. Its strange to me.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Fighting to increase voter turnout is infinitely preferable and authentic to the stated principles of the country than fighting to suppress voter turnout.
When talking about politics its hard to tell whether or not people "believe X because Y" or "believe X because it helps the party". Maybe they don't actually care about X but have meta-awareness and claim to believe X because it helps the party.
This is what makes political discussions annoying and frankly inappropriate. There is no possible way to argue in good faith and people have vested interest in arguing outside of good faith. I'd wager that some people believe they are arguing in good faith but do not realize that they are dramatically influenced by the orthodoxy of their political party.
If you care about democracy in the slightest then you support an increased voter turnout regardless of how it affects your party.
It could be the most profitable 5-minutes of pay-per-view streaming in history and also simultaneously the most amazing test of Internet resiliency, ever.
It's not a ridiculous thing to wonder about how susceptible mail in voting is to fraud, and it seems like some of us are putting blinders on simply due to our distaste for the current president.
If we were to hold a hackathon with a $100,000 prize for the most plausible path to exploit mail in voting in order to swing an election, are people implying that there would be no entries? Or maybe no viable entries? That's ridiculous.
Here's some spitballing: (eh, I removed this. I don't think brainstorming how to committ election fraud is a good idea. I'm assuming that readers of hacker news can probably figure out some relatively obvious ways of casting doubt into the outcome of a mail in election)
How are people looking at what recently happened with 100s of millions of dollars of fraud being committed against various US unemployment systems, and not thinking that other systems might be at risk as well?
Remember the Iowa caucus? That was a hastily put together vote reporting system, not even meant for tallying, and look at what a disaster it was. Now we're expecting that states will radically alter their voting system, in 5 months, and that it won't be vulnerable to interference?
To be clear: I LIKE mail in voting. I have permanent mail in voting status in my state (Arizona), and my wife and I usually get breakfast at our favorite restaurant and spend HOURS meticulously researching every candidate and BI on the form. Being able to take that amount of time is fantastic, and a luxury I wish everybody could have.
But it doesn't have to be so polar. I like mail in voting, obviously, but I'm not so stupid as to think that it cannot possibly be criticized. I am a hacker after all.
Boo to twitter for this. This is twitter obviously putting their finger on the scale of an election, and after all of the drama surrounding the idea that foreign actors might have purchased a few 10s of thousands of dollars of facebook ads, I'd hope that Americans would have a distrust a company where foreign entities have a major stake doing such a thing. Not acceptable in my opinion.
Just to highlight my point a little further: here is an article from the nytimes highlighting that mail in voting is far more vulnerable to fraud than in person voting: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
Here’s a quote from the article:
>Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.
and another:
> Election experts say the challenges created by mailed ballots could well affect outcomes this fall and beyond.
And another:
> The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting
So who is to be believed here? Twitter? The New York Times? Why aren’t the experts from this article being listened to?
"The Democrats are trying to Rig the 2020 Election, plain and simple!"
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12647175457870069...
I think the rationale is that the existing incidence of local ballot fraud points at a widespread, under-reported problem that doesn't inspire confidence in the process.
Voting by mail is pretty normal to me, being in the military and outside of my home state for most of my adult life, but it's about as secure as WEP encryption for your Wi-Fi.
https://www.inquirer.com/news/voter-fraud-philadelphia-ward-...
https://www.dailybreeze.com/2016/11/03/how-more-than-80-elec...
https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/datab...
The Dailybreeze is documenting a case where it looks like someone was trying to do a scam with 80 ballots. That could have an impact on a municipal election but would be lost in the noise in a national election and is hard to replicate in a coordinated and unnoticeable fashion.
It looks like the Heritage group is has been collecting cases of voting fraud for 4 years and have 1200 records. Not a huge number over so much time. It’s not clear that that is related to mail-in voting or other kinds of fraud. Again, this kind of stuff is hard to do in a way that has an impact on a national election.
Elections are never perfect but, based on the experiences in Oregon and Washington, I don’t see mail in voting adding a significant added risk. The virus on the other hand does.
Paper-based voting like this is very hard to hack or commit fraud on a scale that is large enough to have an effect. If you were to fill out your aunt’s ballot, as someone suggested, it would have a nearly unmeasurable effect.
There is also the question of differential susceptibility. Sure election fraud is possible with mail in ballots. I'd even stipulate that it's easier than casting fraudulent in person votes. But I think it remains to be answered how easily it can be scales, and whether the rewards are worth the risk this would pose to perpetrators' freedom.
Some unscrupulous person grabs a bunch, forges signatures on them and mails them back in.
Sorry, I was talking about national scope and not the federal government actually running the election. The larger the electorate, the more votes cast, the more votes needed to change the results, and the more important scaling becomes in your plan to rig the election.
> If Washington, the 13th most populous state can conduct elections purely via mail-in ballots, why not any other state?
I agree.
> Now we're expecting that states will radically alter their voting system, in 5 months, and that it won't be vulnerable to interference?
Are mail in ballots for everyone really a "radical alteration" of their voting system? Local governments already have the capacity to send and receive thousands of pieces of mail, and the method of counting ballots is the exact same.
How would you set up this system if you were tasked with it?
Sending mail and receiving mail is already a solved problem. The post office handles nearly half a billion pieces of mail each day, and 200 million pieces of first class mail.
Pointing out that trump is lying isn't a bad thing.
but for it to happen in any meaningful way is super super unlikely as most other democracy's around the world can attest to.
he's technically right, but its not going to be in the order of even 1%. even if EVERY person in the US voted by mail, fraud on a level that would less than 1% of the entire vote.
Its a stupid blatant obvious ploy to try and gerrymander the vote.
The reality is that most mail-in voting operates via what is effectively a two factor auth system or a handshake authentication system. Person A gets official mail being told they can register to vote. Person A goes to site and registers to vote. Then they receive a ballot sometime before election day, fill it out, certify that they are who they are, then it goes out.
The government can send a further correspondence indicating that you voted and where to check your vote to confirm. If someone attempts to vote multiple times using the same person this is easily verified. If the dead vote, you can cross-reference with obituary data to identify identity fraud. If someone votes for someone else (like their parents or their siblings) then that can be somewhat identified through the final check and letting people file a claim.
The reality is that actual fraud for mail-in votes is incredibly low and committing mass fraud requires the fraud to occur at the point of ballot counting. At which point you have a politician issue [1] not a voter issue. Which again, is pretty easily caught. The increase in mail-in fraud is likely offset by the disenfranchised voters that could gain the ability to vote as well as the voters in areas without easy access to voting booths.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-...
Someone should coin a word for the act of getting nerd sniped, but rather than getting distracted by a fun puzzle you're sitting down trying to account for all of the nuances of an argument clearly made in bad faith.
This is an unproven statement. Numerous elections experts disagree with it. Why is Twitter not within their rights to warn people of this?
"NO WAY (ZERO CHANCE) THE YANKEES ARE GOING TO WIN THE WORLD SERIES!"
Am I making a statement of fact, or stating an opinion here? Should twitter fact check this statement with some ambiguous "experts" who think that the yankees are the best team of them all and WILL win the world series?
He is in a position of power and influence. His words have far-reaching consequences.
> Trump falsely claimed that California will send mail-in ballots to "anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there." In fact, only registered voters will receive ballots.
This not "wondering about how susceptible mail in voting is to fraud," it's an outright lie.
How could you possibly know this, and how could twitter possibly know this? Surely that is the intent, but what do you make of stories like this one: https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/11/05/goldstein-investi...
"Only registered voters will receive ballots", you cannot state a future event as a fact, since it hasn't actually happened yet. Stories like the one linked show that in the past, California has had problems with this.
Should twitter now fact check their fact checking? Perhaps the idea of future-telling is flawed to begin with and twitteer should not attempt to be a source of truth!
But if we're really drilling into semantics, you posted a link about dead people on the registry. That does not, in fact, preclude twitter's statement. Hundreds of dead people have active voter registrations! Twitter's statement is not invalidated by this.
But neither does it support Trump's claim about "significant" voter fraud. Hundreds of votes in the state of California is neither significant, nor guaranteed that the dead people's ballots will be used.
But Trump's claim is that ballots will be sent to everybody in the state. That's a far greater lie than your overwrought interpretation of their statement.
If he doesn't like it, he can direct Lockheed Martin and tell them to spend a couple billion dollars on making Litter. At least then it'll go to something slightly more productive than whatever contracts they're currently siphoning money off of.
And, of course, the discussion isn't actually about voting-by-mail, yes-or-now? Because that has been possible for a long time and isn't going to change. The discussion is about making it easier and/or the default to protect people from communicable diseases.
The issue, then, isn't even if voting by mail allows fraud. It's if the likelihood of fraud is significantly higher when, say, 50% instead of 30% choose that option.
This is yet another blatantly obvious attempt to stack the deck in Republican's favour. It's sickening to see people pretend to care about the integrity of democracy by engaging with all these phantom debates about voter fraud, in the complete absence of any actual fraud happening (except that Republican in South Caroline, of course).
Meanwhile, real damage is done to democracy by the unrelenting attempts to selectively make it harder for people to vote. Take a look at these changes in polling locations in Milwaukee for a blatant example (the red, suburban spots are predominantly Republican locations, while the urban core leans democratic) : https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYoIrdZXQAILKlB.jpg
Am I misunderstanding something? Are you saying they completely closed down all those polling stations? It seems like the less populated areas have more* polling stations than denser ones, what is the justification for this?
Which of these examples of election fraud are...not examples of voter fraud?
https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/datab...
Does 0.000001% fraud qualify as a problem in any reasonable sense?
Republicans' electoral strategy is basically "the less people vote, the better". Is that good for democracy? Is that just?
That's not how I interpreted the data. Not 1 incident = 1 vote, but 1 incident = 1 criminal case affecting 1 election. So election fraud at Timbuktu County could have impacted 2 voters, or 500 voters, but either way is recorded as 1 incident. I'm not seeing a link to their actual database so we can't dig into the records to confirm either way, which is disappointing. But the narrative text seems to support this.
This doesn't reason out.
The question is "What impact does voter/election fraud have on elections?"
You determine this by calculating the impact that these fraudulent votes had on the election. It doesn't make sense to say "because there was 1 fraudulent vote in one county in one state, we have to count all 500-100,000 (?) votes in that county as fraudulent too."
This Heritage Foundation report is literally an analysis detailing how voter fraud is a non-issue in American elections.
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
Here's one entry for the state of Pennsylvania: "According to Wild Acres Property Manager Robert Depaolis, Cowher approached him and asked him to provide Cowher with ballots that were due to be mailed to property owners in the community who seldom voted, for the express purpose of filling out those ballots and guaranteeing victory for Cowher's preferred Board of Directors candidates. Depaolis went to the state police, who surveilled a meeting where Depaolis handed over the ballots, catching Cowher in the act of filling out the mail-in ballots. He was arrested and subsequently convicted on 217 counts, including forgery, identity theft, and criminal conspiracy. His accomplice, Kupershmidt, was found guilty on 190 counts."
This proves the point even more in the extreme that voter fraud is a non-issue. An extremely motivated source like the Heritage Foundation was able to find 1,285 instances over 41 years? About how many billions of votes cast in that time period are we talking about?
Maybe my 0.000001% voter fraud estimate was too generous. It's looking more like 0.000000000001%.
Edit: Did you even click through more than one of these? The first 20 that appear for my state show that no votes were actually cast fraudulently, meaning some portion of that 1,285 instances accounts for zero fraudulent votes. This gets more hilarious the deeper we go.
>Donald Dewsnup, a housing development activist in San Francisco, registered to vote using a false address.
>State Sen. Roderick Wright (D_Inglewood) was convicted of eight felony counts of perjury and voter fraud. He deliberately misled voters as to his residency in order to run for office in a neighboring district.
>Immigrant-Rights activist Nativo Lopez pleaded guilty to one count of voter registration fraud when it was discovered that he registered to vote in Los Angeles while living in Santa Ana.
>Jose Fragozo, a trustee on the Escondido Union School District Board, pleaded guilty to a felony charge that he voted in the 2014 general election while registered at an address where he did not live.
>Alexander Bronson, former Trustee for Manteca Unified School District, California, pleaded guilty to charges of voter fraud. He listed a false address in order to qualify for candidacy in the November 2014 Manteca Unified School District Board of Education election.
etc.
>>in the complete absence of any actual fraud happening
That is an objectively false statement. Will you concede that?
>>>An extremely motivated source like the Heritage Foundation was able to find 1,285 instances over 41 years? >>>Did you even click through more than one of these?
Did you? California's list doesn't have a single entry pre-2000, and over half of them are post-2010. Texas? Same, nothing pre-2000. New York? One in 1983, one in 1999. Florida? Four entries pre-2000 (and a BUNCH 2002-2010, probably due to fallout of Bush-v-Gore).
So either election fraud enforcement has become significantly more vigilant post-2000, or election fraud incidents have seen an astronomical uptick. Or both. But what we DO know for certain is:
-The incidence rate is non-zero, especially in the past 10 years. -Some elections have in fact been swayed by fraud.
-We should probably spare at least some modicum of serious thought and allocate some resources to improving the process integrity and security of one of our most sacred civil institutions. We make it rain fiat currency for every other government boondoggle imaginable, why is there so much opposition to THIS?
On this website, there's an indication above each comment that notes which user left that comment. You'll notice that the comment you link was not posted by me.
>So either election fraud enforcement has become significantly more vigilant post-2000, or election fraud incidents have seen an astronomical uptick. Or both.
An astronomical uptick from 0.0000001% to 0.00001%? Horrifying! This is like when there's 1 murder in a town of 100,000 people one year, 2 murders the next, and the local paper prints "MURDER RATE DOUBLES".
>The incidence rate is non-zero, especially in the past 10 years.
Okay? Whether there was zero or greater than zero incidents doesn't tell us much.
>Some elections have in fact been swayed by fraud.
Fair enough. But again you're basing your argument on conveniently skipping over the real question which is not "was there at least one fraudulent vote in America in the last 41 years?" (the question you're trying hard to answer over and over with "yes!").
The question is whether it's a problem that has a material impact on our elections. Basically, is it really a problem? 1,285 instances over 41 years (and how many _billions_ of votes in that time period) makes the answer extremely obvious.
It's funny because I am in favor of voter ID on principle alone. But you have to acknowledge the fact that voter fraud is a non-issue in practice. There are better arguments to make in favor of election integrity.
You are....100% correct. My mistake to attribute that to you.
>>>The question is whether it's a problem that has a material impact on our elections.
Less than 600 votes decided the 2000 Presidential election. In the aggregate that seems tiny, but in swing states in particular, with close elections, the potential implications are massively outsized. And that's to say nothing of the State & local elections where even smaller absolute numbers are impactful ("all politics is local").
>>>But you have to acknowledge the fact that voter fraud is a non-issue in practice.
Today's news: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/nj-naacp-leader-cal...
Even one of the winning candidates said the election was trash, partially due to mail-in ballots. And it's not a bunch of minority-oppressing white Republicans in that article who are complaining about the election either (not saying that's your position, but that particular strawman has been brought up elsewhere in the conversation).
>The question is whether it's a problem that has a material impact on our elections. Basically, is it really a problem? 1,285 instances over 41 years (and how many _billions_ of votes in that time period) makes the answer extremely obvious.
>It's funny because I am in favor of voter ID on principle alone. But you have to acknowledge the fact that voter fraud is a non-issue in practice. There are better arguments to make in favor of election integrity.
We're just going in circles here. Have a nice evening :)
You scoff at the reaction yet you've surgically extracted the political context of Trump's motivations for disparaging mail-in voting from your analysis. There isn't a new developing threat to mail-in votes, Trump has a clear political agenda. In Trump's own words a couple months back:
The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again
Can you at least pretend to understand why some people might have a hard time accepting Trump's credibility on the issue?
If he has an argument to make, let him advance it. If he fails to make a compelling case, it's not our job to look up citations and write paragraphs to fill in the gaps.
Also, please remember the context. The only reason so many states are considering mail-in voting now is because they are concerned that huge numbers of voters will stay away from physical polling places.
This is not a matter of "pick the theoretically best voting system." This is a matter of "how can we hold an election without accidentally killing thousands of old people by communicable disease."
I don't have to think that mail-in voting is perfect to prefer it over radically depressing turnout.
It's not that weird. Mailed ballots can be coerced quite trivially at home, out of the view of authorities; no technology hacks or fake ID needed. That's why some of the "fact check" figures themselves are nonsense , such as the one claiming that only 0.00006% of mail votes are fraudulent. That's based on convictions. Nobody knows the real number.
In Northern Ireland postal voting is strictly controlled and monitored and permitted only in individually-reviewed case, because we had decades of coerced fraud by balaclaved men with baseball bats.
[1]:https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12654275381401886...
Does he have to be on Twitter? I mean, if Hillary can set up a mail server, surely Donald can host a Mastodon instance.
Remember when the press wanted to stop the President's daily briefings?[1] He should have used that opportunity to setup a podcast or video stream system, minus the press, who are 90% bad faith actors anyway. "America, hear what I have to say, unfiltered by the talking heads at CNN! Just download the WhiteHouseNews app!" etc....
[1]https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/washington-post-pub...
[0]https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/28/trump-aircraft-car...
Our EM aircraft catapults are crap right now, although this is due more to "concurrent development" than an inherent failure of the concept. Trump seems to intuitively grasp certain problems (China = Public Enemy #1, lax border security, etc...) but then draws really odd conclusions on how to solve them, and doubles down with the most retarded cringe-worthy rhetoric imaginable.
But, thinking of this from the new network point of view - I do not wish any good alternative social network to suddenly receive an influx of extreme trumpers following him. That could basically make it the new Voat and poison the idea unless there's some serious coordination around which nodes are excluded. Imagine the effect of him twitting that he's moving his presence to Mastodon. https://mastodon.social/@usercount claims ~530k users now. Trump has 80.2M followers. Even if only 1% of them is ready to move, that's a new mastodon.social by itself.
Saying that what twitter is doing is "stifling free speech" is a matter of opinion, and while you can certainly argue against the statement there's no need for the amendments to the us constitution to come into it.
<shakes head>
> ....Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!
Whelp, it was fun while it lasted.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12654275381401886...
There is no way to be sure if mail-in ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.
Remind me again how rigorously testing under a scientific method has quelled any misinformation these days??
This is something that's been statistically proven to work and yet the amount of people I see leaping to his very ignorant claims of this topic here is disappointing. Can you back up the claims that mail-in ballots will be substantially fraudulent at any level beyond baseless speculation?
You're trying to do a post-hoc justification in attempt to rationalize Trump's tweets rather than answer my argument. I'll ask you again: Where's the voter fraud data showing that vote by mail causes a massive amount of fraud?
Where's the data showing that wearing a red hat causes a lot of abuse to be yelled at you by strangers?
The answer is historically, not much. Well, unless it happens that we're talking about a Trump (MAGA) hat.
https://www.inquirer.com/news/voter-fraud-philadelphia-ward-...
This morning? He doesn't seem to be on the front page at all... the first result is for a search done on twitter.con for 'donald trump twitter', the next result is for the POTUS account. I would say this fact checking thing has had a knock on effect to search results.
I would be very curious to hear an explanation of this decision. Why do Tweets about mail in ballots receive a warning but tweets accusing a journalist of murder don't?
Same for his Hydroxychloriquine argument, which he promoted as good prevention (which is good information with scientific studies proving it), and this was labeled as false and dangerous information. Probably because Chloroquine phosphat is somewhat dangerous (different drug), and it has no proven treatment effects.
Please fact check the fact check warnings, and beware of dependent media.
The issue here is that everything here is considered in the hard left of the media. I'm concerned that this will only help grow the divide between Americans, though I also don't have a better alternative to this. Clearly there is a lack of coverage of this from the right and in fact the opposite. A quick DDG search of "fox news mail in ballot" pulls up [0][1][2]. So when you see things like this I think it is easier to say that "the left" is trying to trick you. If Fox is your primary source of news, then it does look like Twitter is trying to silence a real issue. If Fox isn't your primary source of news then it looks like Twitter is trying to fight misinformation. Things are so crazy that it really is hard to find the truth and there is very good reason to believe that someone is lying. And no one wants to admit that someone they've trusted for a long time is lying to them, especially when there's nuggets of truth that you can hold onto.
So I'm a little worried about the repercussions of this, especially since the right already thinks Twitter is supporting the left.
Edit: By hard left I mean from the perspective of Fox viewers. My main point is about the perspective of the people this is specifically aimed at. While on the left we don't see it that way go talk to your friends on the right, they see it differently. My concern is because we need to unify and not divide.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/voter-fraud-california-man-...
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/south-carolina-election-bal...
Maybe the edit here makes the statement clearer because before it was implicit.
It's a relative measure - left compared to Fox. Not left compared to SZ or Haaretz.
I agree with the parent commenter that this will only backfire, likely causing the opposite of intended effect on undecided voters. Tech companies like Twitter are not in a position to play arbiters on what is factual and what isn’t. And I think it’s really dangerous both for people to expect tech companies to assume this mantle and also to expect them to do a good (or honest) job of it.
>> The issue here is that everything here is considered the hard left of the media by Fox viewers.
Maybe the edit here makes the statement clearer because before it was implicit.
> but honestly Fox News viewers seeing CBS as substantively representing the left in any capacity is a large part of the problem here.
This is something I agree with and is actually the crux of my post.
Pretty much my point was: this links to only stuff on the left and so it gives the right an easy target to point to to continue with their claim (which I believe is false) that the left media is trying to control the people.
I believe most people would consider them left wing. But that doesn't matter because it is a matter of perspective.
> he problem is not the lack of balance, and I think your words keep making it seem like it is.
The problem isn't that, the problem is I was saying that this is going to happen (which didn't take very long):
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12654275381401886...
The Washington Examiner and Fox News have been burning their credibility on a daily basis.
Oh really? Name some things they lied about in the last 5 days.
While I don't disagree with the program, I'm also not sure what it solves.
Donny, love him or hate him, does say a fair few things that are ... questionable. Jack has talked about this a bit, and their conclusion thus far has been that anything he says, by virtue of the office, is newsworthy enough. Policies for thee, but not for he. It's been a battle with users, but everyone seems to just grumble along.
That policy has worked up until today.
A lot of work went into this decision. They A/B tested the color of the note, likely the font, the positioning, the exact words, the fact check itself, etc. This thing went through meeting after meeting and was run past some good legal counsel. Twitter isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but it's also not a rusty shovel. They red-teamed this a fair bit, I'd imagine. They must have known that Donny would not view it favorably and would do exactly what he is doing currently.
All the same they went ahead and decided to make the move at the end of May, ~6 months before the 'fit hits the shan'.
Why?
Their stock is, well, fairly ok. Jack seems to be doing alright. Monthly users are flat-ish since 2015, but compared to FB, it's a bit of a wash.