The POTUS has made claims that need to be thought about rationally.
Does the tech world really think that electronic voting is reliable when done the way Dominion did it?
Is there is a rational explanation when votes jump from one candidate to another on live public TV?
Are there too many acceptable mail in votes to make sense?
Etc.
The conclusion for someone who does the research may be that things are OK, that all is legit. I don't know, as I have no interest in doing that research.
But if you start removing all the videos that present any arguments in that direction, than I will definitely assume there is fraud going on.
It is far better for all the "proofs" to be out there and available, than to have people saying that all of the "proofs" were deleted by the people with obvious interests.
Given that there is a paper trail in virtually all cases, and that the manual counting of that paper trail almost perfectly matched the electronic version, the answer can only be "Yes!". There's zero evidence of fraud, and abundant affirmative evidence that the machines accurately and completely counted the ballots that were entered.
By all means, continue to have a paper record so we can verify afterwards, but the dominion systems worked very well.
Edit: The fact that this question is continuing to be asked, in spite of all of this mountain of easily available affirmative proof, is a shocking indictment of the general public. I wish people took the responsibility which comes with the right to free speech a little more seriously.
> Edit: The fact that this question is continuing to be asked, in spite of all of this mountain of easily available affirmative proof, is a shocking indictment of the general public. I wish people took the responsibility which comes with the right to free speech a little more seriously.
And yet cites no sources to this "easily available affirmative proof". Thanks for setting the example.
I'm no Trump fan, but I try to be open with this stuff and actually tuned into one of the Arizona hearings out of curiosity. It was pretty interesting hearing from a retired US colonel giving evidence to say that these machines are built to be manipulated (1).
While I'm highly skeptical of any of the fraud stuff, I would much rather the opportunity to explore the issue like this myself than have it shut down by corporate gatekeepers.
Perhaps I'm stating the obvious, but the video you linked to is still up. This, despite the fact that the specific claims made have been roundly debunked. Pima county, the county referenced, has done a hand count and it matched the machine count almost exactly. That news is widely available.
These videos being up isn't contributing to the debate so much as providing a lot of smoke that can be pointed to as evidence of fire by people who mostly haven't watched them and can't be bothered to do their own research (I'm not accusing you of this, to be clear).
I really don't have a dog in this fight. I'm not a US citizen. I cannot stand Trump. I pretty much only care about this issue from an information architecture pov.
But ... from my understanding, a hand-count is not the same as an electoral audit. An audit exhaustively looks at the systems, procedures, and the path that the data has traveled in order to verify the result.
From what I'm aware of, that is what Trump people are disputing? Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.
The Trump people are alleging that there was fraud, frequently with no specifics. Where they have made specific allegations, those allegations have been roundly disproved. They then continue to say there was fraud, see my previous statement about smoke.
The fundamental problem here is the impracticality of proving a negative. In order to conclusively demonstrate that there was no fraud of any kind we would need to have an audit trail from citizenship being granted (largely at birth) through votes being tabulated. That's impossible. So we have standards for what things we investigate and how we investigate them. Those standards have been surpassed out of an abundance of caution in virtually all cases this election cycle.
As an aside, it's interesting to me that the group which normally screams the loudest about government inefficiency and the waste that comes from the government are suddenly the people screaming that everything needs to be checked and rechecked at huge cost to the tax payer when there is very, very little chance of anything changing. This is going to be in textbooks in the future under the heading "Loss Aversion", which I guess means at least we'll get something out of the money we're lighting on fire?
I looked for the dominion api that lets you add weight factors to people’s votes, haven’t found the code though, its release has been blocked for trade secret reasons or something?
Come on, it's not being censored based solely on the fact that it's false and misleading, it's being censored because it has the potential to incite violence and cause serious social upheaval.
As does silencing a large majority of people that either correctly or incorrectly believe that there was massive electoral fraud that resulted in Biden being elected president.
If you are trying to incite a civil war, this is a good way to help push it along by silencing people.
How do you feel about calls to 'liberate' individual US states, plots to kidnap and put on trial a state governor, and exhortations to sacrifice life on behalf of a failed candidate?
I've been rather unpopularly predicting an eventual civil war for about 5 years on HN, maybe a bit longer. Predicting is one thing; if you're suggesting that others are inciting it, as you did above, then your analysis should be a bit broader and more inclusive.
I think it's a lot more likely that Trump pushing outlandish/false/inflammatory claims starts the civil war, not the fact that some YouTube videos suddenly vanish.
If you can prevent the former by removing viral reach of the latter, isn't that a net win? It's sad that a private company has to do it, but one could argue that it's the morally correct thing to do, in this case.
These people are free to host their videos on Parler / Gab / etc, and broadcast this nonsense without the free mainstream reach.
It's telling that none of these "fraud" arguments ever make it into the president's campaign's lawsuits. They're only ever repeated on sympathetic propaganda outlets.
It's almost as if they realize they're peddling bullshit.
There will always be fraud going on in every election, in every country.
It's just stupid to think otherwise, now the question is to what extend and would it have changed the outcome. The answer is obvious.
> now the question is to what extend and would it have changed the outcome
That actually isn't the question in my mind. If there is fraud it should be investigated and prosecuted regardless of whether it would change the result or not.
I'm more interested in improving things for future elections, and for that reason I don't think it makes sense to dismiss accusations of fraud, widespread or not.
It seems pretty clear that there are lots of things we can do to improve the way in which we carry out elections. Devising systems that are resilient to fraud and are transparent such that accusations of fraud are easily resolved is important for injecting confidence back into the process.
Then how is it that election security was backburnered his entire term? And his accusations aren't that "voting machines may be vulnerable" which is at least defensible, but rather that "Voting machines were deliberately configured to flip votes for Biden based on a planned conspiracy involving the manufacturers, democrats and multiple foreign governments" which is utterly ludicrous and deserves nothing but scorn.
Does the tech world really think that electronic voting is reliable when done the way Dominion did it?
Is there is a rational explanation when votes jump from one candidate to another on live public TV?
Are there too many acceptable mail in votes to make sense?
Etc.
The conclusion for someone who does the research may be that things are OK, that all is legit. I don't know, as I have no interest in doing that research.
But if you start removing all the videos that present any arguments in that direction, than I will definitely assume there is fraud going on.
It is far better for all the "proofs" to be out there and available, than to have people saying that all of the "proofs" were deleted by the people with obvious interests.