Fox News Is Sued by Election Technology Company for over $2.7B
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Ballot papers are understood by everyone. Just about every voter knows when they're seeing something happen with ballot papers that is suspect. Just about every voter knows when there really isn't anything remotely credible about ballot papers marked and properly counted and scruitinised. It's not perfect but it is so much better than litterally anything else it's not comparable. Justice must not only be done it must be seen to be done.
Any and all voting machines /must/ only ever be used to mark ballot papers that are filed in the usual way and can be counted in the usual way if there is any doubt whatsoever.
To hell with these election tech companies for doing anything else. Undermining the proper functioning of democracy for profit is something for which I will never, ever forgive them.
The whole point is I should be convinced, everyone should be convinced that the election was run and counted fairly when I loathe and hate the result. When I can't understand how it could be true I should be utterly convinced that it is.
So here we are with baseless claims of election fraud and yet there's some fertile ground to sew them where there should be NONE. Cheering these assholes for suing fox is just because I hate Murdoch is beneath me and should be beneath us all.
So here's the question. Will America reform its electoral process to increase citizens confidence that the voting and counting is free of political and/or corporate interests? Including gerrymanders and such or will the disease march on ever worsening to more and louder cries from all losers of "We were robbed!" See Neera Tanden's "Russia tampered with the election to make Hilary lose" if you need examples for the whole "both sides" thing.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the machines used in this election do. Some counties use touchscreen ballot marking devices that print a ballot for scanning, others have the voter fill out their ballot with a pen and then feed that into the scanner. Of those two variants, I believe election security experts prefer the latter type. But as far as I know all voting machines used in the US do use a paper ballot as the permanent record.
Didn't help, here, since when they recounted those paper ballots the argument shifted to "well you have to re-check the signatures on the envelopes, those could've been fake ballots", or "well there was a lot of traditional fraud with mail-in ballot harvesting and dead people voting". But the same people were still saying the machines cheated, too -- especially whenever they were talking to a receptive audience.
I'm all for more openness in elections and publicly auditable data (and open-source voting machine code), but let's not pretend that it would've changed much here. People believed the election was stolen because they wanted to believe it was stolen.
If not it's not close to being good enough and muddies the waters. All of them /must/ be. Without exception. Every single encroachment of the integrity of and understandability election affects all of them. The confusion matters. "Oh but it's actually ok in this case." is a totally different point that is irrelvant here. Fertile ground for conspiracy where there need be none is fertile ground. Donald and Neera for two of many examples have exploited that fertile ground for personal political gain. Condemn both for their craven and vile dishonesty. Fix the issues.
https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/ppEqu...
The dark red category is "DREs without VVPAT for all voters". That's direct-recording electronic voting machines, without voter-verified paper audit trail. The voter enters their vote on a touchscreen and doesn't get to see the paper ballot that records it (and the recording may never be on paper at all). That sucks and I agree that type of machine should not be used.
I have to admit I was surprised that those machines are still allowed in any state. My research into the voting machines, thus far, had been focused entirely on the swing states in this election -- because those are where the Trump campaign and allies have alleged fraud. Those are Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. None of those use DREs without VVPAT, and Nevada is the only one that uses DREs at all instead of BMDs or hand-marked ballots with a scanner.
But I get your point. After all, a voter in Louisiana who voted for Trump on a DRE could make the (reasonable enough) assumption that the machines are the same everywhere else, and be more susceptible to the claim that Dominion machines stole the election undetectably in Georgia.
So ballot papers really aren't understood by everyone. That 2000 election is still dubious. It didn't turn into the dumpster fire that this one did, because the personalities involved didn't stoke it that way.
In 2020 there was no way for it to end well. There would have been equal arguments over paper ballots. They shot out hundreds of equally ludicrous conspiracy theories, not one of which was accepted by a court. There were thousands of other contests being decided, and all of them somehow managed to be run without controversy.
There was no way for justice to be seen to be done, and any arguments for or against electronic voting are moot.
I can't wait to see the evidence. That'll prove that the devices are auditable. They are, right?
If anyone in government really wants to have a notable legacy, here's how: petition the USDS to create an integrated open-source election system, and get people like Matt Blaze and Harri Hursti to run a red team against it.
Enough with the foreign companies creating and operating black boxes. Enough with the smears against people who call for entirely reasonable verification while we have absolute top-tier experts regularly showing us that these systems are deeply flawed. Make elections trustworthy.
An important part of elections is for people to understand and trust the process. Paper is easy to understand; you and a bunch of your neighbors counting paper votes is easy to trust. Maybe mix in a machine to speed up the process that is also verified by hand.
Yet I can't help but think nothing will convince those who so easily believe in a vast conspiracy to alter election results spanning multiple states with different political leanings and cultures.
Microsoft has a project that seems to work in this direction:
>Smartmatic technology was used only in Los Angeles County, California in the 2020 election. The system we provided to LA County does not count, tabulate or store votes.[1]
A single county in the whole of the United States used them. Verifiable or not, there's nothing this company could of done to change a national election outcome.
Someone somewhere started repeating that Smartmatic currently owned Dominion when their only connection was that they had sold off Sequoia Voting Systems——which Dominion currently owns, more than a decade ago.[2][3] Once that false factoid got in the system it was a convenient enough fact for some political factions that it got repeated everywhere.
[1] https://www.smartmatic.com/us/smartmatic-fact-checked/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartmatic#Sale_of_Sequoia_Vot... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems
When Fox talking heads are claiming Hugo Chavez had a hand in the design, and "The Smartmatic software is in the DNA of every vote-tabulating company’s software and systems", I don't think the ability to audit the machines will come into play. What will come into play is whether or not any of Fox's unsubstantiated shit-talking can be taken to be true. IANAL, and I have might have a particular dislike for all parties involved, but I don't think we'll get the evidence we'd like to see.
It seems to me that the people getting served with lawsuits weren't just concerned about vulnerabilities and calling for verification, they were outright claiming that the election was stolen. And stating made-up ideas about how it was done as facts, at that. Like Sidney Powell saying Dominion machines were designed to count Biden votes as 1.26 and Trump votes as 0.74.
If all they wanted was verification, well, Georgia recounted all the paper ballots by hand and compared the results to what the machines scanned. So did Antrim county in Michigan. So did Dane and Milwaukee counties in Wisconsin -- which Trump's campaign paid $3M to recount. Those recounts didn't show a problem with the machines.
If you believe it was stolen, you have to believe they faked the recounts too, or that they recounted fake paper ballots fabricated to back up the original numbers. But at that point, is it really about the voting machines? You could take the machines out of the picture completely, have an all-paper election, counted by hand starting on Nov 3, and have the exact same allegations that you don't trust the count.
The authors: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-repor...
Have they been hit with lawsuits or smears? Are they alleging that the attacks they demonstrated were actually used in this election?
Check out the nonprofit VotingWorks, which is far along in already doing this: https://github.com/votingworks For example, their system has been used in Mississippi in real elections.
We've had decades of technologists and cryptographers being wary of digital voting, however many years of the voting village at Defcon where the only challenge left now is how quick you can exploit it not whether you can.
As an aid beside regular paper voting I think it's probably fine but disliking electronic voting is bread and butter for the types of people who visit this site.
I don't see anyone supporting "insurrection" in the comments.
ALL voting systems should be open source or have the source somehow publicly reviewable!!!
Also, Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine so it doesn't really matter. Basically Fox is free to lie as much as they like and it's perfectly legal because some politicians found it to be beneficial.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-shepard-smith-opinion...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sean-hannity-the-whole-newspa...
Any time a Fox News host is pressed about their lies they fall back to the "nobody would believe these obvious lies" defense, and it works. Accountability is dead.
But the doctrine never applied to print publishers because the government didn't have a similar stake in that medium. Given that cable companies and the wires they use are all private, it seems unlikely they could be restricted under a revised Fairness Doctrine without running into 1A issues.
Genocide, civil war, etc.
http://www.projetaladin.org/holocaust/en/history-of-the-holo...
What's new now is that everyone's ability to create a network (and leverage network effects) via social media is tremendously amplified. That means both a reward system for embracing lies as long as the lies agree with in-group beliefs, and a greatly increased ability to spread them.
Congress can't legislate that media (or Karen on Twitter for that matter) has to tell the truth -- that's a pretty well established point of law and you'd likely need to amend the Constitution if you wanted wholesale, mandated change. Against the backdrop of that not-gonna-happen-in-our-lifetime heavy lift, the boomlet in deplatforming is actually a pretty good (although I personally dislike it) and organic solution. Private-sector actors are doing what Congress and the Court cannot.
Now, does it solve for the dopamine drip and self-reinforcing vitriol that caused our current problem? No. But it does, at least partially, quarantine it.
Nah that's cancel culture. /s
For instance, in the Snyder v. Phelps case, all sorts of nasty (and probably untrue) things were said, yet SCOTUS ruled in favor of Phelps.
Yes. It absolutely is a free speech issue. In fact, criticism of the government, e.g. election processes, is specifically mentioned in the First Amendment.
Do you wish that they didn’t use the only tools available to them when someone is trying running a smear campaign against them? Would you sue someone for trying to devalue your company and it’s reputation? Why do you believe it’s inherently wrong to sue someone?
At least Rupert Murdoch's son James has split from the family media interests and spoken out:
* https://www.ft.com/content/9eab68e1-7afb-4282-95fa-3149bd091... [paywall]
* https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/15/media/james-murdoch-elect...
"It’s been forgotten this was actually a business-wide consensus, which included the enthusiastic participation of a blue-state intelligentsia. The New Yorker of Remnick, who himself wrote a piece called “Making the Case,” was a source of many of the most ferocious pro-invasion pieces, including a pair written by current Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, one of a number of WMD hawks who failed up after the war case fell apart. Other prominent Democrat voices like Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and even quasi-skeptic Nick Kristof (who denounced war critics for calling Bush a liar) were on board, as a Full Metal Jacket character put it, “for the big win.”
The Washington Post and New York Times were key editorial-page drivers of the conflict; MSNBC unhired Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura over their war skepticism; CNN flooded the airwaves with generals and ex-Pentagon stoolies, and broadcast outlets ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS stacked the deck even worse: In a two-week period before the invasion, the networks had just one American guest out of 267 who questioned the war, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting."
- Matt Taibi, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq...
Some CNN lies:
1. "When President Trump met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last November, the pair took part in a koi fish feeding ceremony. A video posted by CNN appeared to show Trump dumping his entire box of food into the koi pond unprompted.
An unedited video revealed that Trump was simply following the lead of Abe, who emptied his box of food first."
2."CNN claimed that only Democratic members of Congress gathered to pray before the 2017 Congressional Baseball Game — the first game after House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was shot and nearly killed."
3. "After a May shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas, CNN reporters immediately began claiming that there were 22 school shootings on the year.
However, CNN wildly exaggerates the number of school shootings by using methodology that includes accidental firearm discharges on school property, domestic disputes, and other non-active shooter events."
4. "Multiple CNN reporters speculated about the whereabouts of Melania Trump after a scheduled kidney surgery and then denied responsibility for any conspiracy theories about the first lady.
Media reporter Brian Stelter led his “Reliable Sources” newsletter on June 3rd with the headline “Melania M.I.A,” and insisted the first lady’s whereabouts were a “mystery” because she had not been seen in public since May 10."
5. "CNN fakes internet meme to smear alt-right. CNN told their viewers that this racist meme was going viral in alt-right circles. However it was revealed that the network actually created the image themselves in an attempt to smear Trump supporters as white supremacists. The internet did not exist on the internet at all."
There is so much more fake news from CNN than these few examples.
You KNOW that these two are totally incomparable. None of your examples are any better.
“The Earth is round. Two plus two equals four. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election for President and Vice President of the United States. The election was not stolen, rigged, or fixed. These are facts. They are demonstrable and irrefutable.
Defendants have always known these facts. They knew Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 U.S. election. They knew the election was not stolen. They knew the election was not rigged or fixed. They knew these truths just as they knew the Earth is round and two plus two equals four.”
https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/02/04/what-smartmatics-giul...
Fascinating! I look forward to someone demonstrating these facts.
No, not all elections.
> Trump, Obama, Bush, all the result of rigged elections too?
Perhaps, how would one know? Are you at all aware of the allegations about Bush 00 and 04?
> What could ever satisfy you that you know, without a doubt, how millions of Americans voted?
The results of a system that was designed to be verifiably resistant towards fraud would go a long way towards removing reasonable doubt.
I’m only aware of allegations of fraud pertaining to 1960, 2000, 2004, and 2020. I’m not really able to sit here and tell you what elections were fraudulent and which ones were not. That’s basically the point. No one knows, and the government never bothers to investigate or update the systems to anything less reliant on the honor system. They buy new equipment all the time, but it never becomes secure. They get allegations of fraud from time to time, but somehow no one ever gets away with it, even though election security experts have long sounded the alarm about election integrity. Imagine that: an adversarial contest with high stakes and poor process controls, but no one ever cheats! The casinos should hire the people in charge of elections.
> So the big bad guys are only being fraudulent once in a while, even though they get away with it every time. I don’t understand these mental gymnastics.
Frankly thats because you’re not trying to understand very hard. I have not spoken on the frequency of fraud nor argued that they do or do not “get away with it.” The gymnastics are all yours.
> Either believe in democracy (with all its flaws) or you don’t.
I’m glad you recognize that its a belief system and not any sort of rational social function.
> Democracy works and is trusted because we can verify with hand recounts what happened.
That doesn’t protect against ballot stuffing, among other things. You still have to trust the people doing the counting. This doesn’t do anything to protect against spoiling ballots for candidates that you don’t want to win.
> Saying that the results are unverifiable is dishonest.
It is dishonest to say that results are verifiable when they are not. It is dishonest to say you can prove the election wasn’t stolen when you cannot prove so. Why are you so threatened by plain statements about the security of elections? What is there to hide?
> If you want to reinforce democracy, then put effort into fixing it. Your current tone only serves to cast doubt about democracy.
I can’t even get you to acknowledge there is anything to fix.
You got me, I am a secret member of the deep state.
> Smartmatic’s complaint takes into account not only the reputational and financial damage the company said it had suffered, but also the harm done to the United States by the claims promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies and the Murdoch-controlled networks he had long favored.
It appears that they are also trying to add the United States of America as defendants after Fox News slandered them with lies during the post-election period.
In other words, this lawsuit is going to be laughed out of court. I agree that Fox News lied a lot, maybe even more than usual and is at least partially responsible for the riots on the capitol, but these guys are nuts I don't want them representing me against a giant media empire.