90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, November 10, 2022

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #762

The Partisan Rigging of the 2022 Election Election reform candidates are not the threat. The threat to democracy is to leave things the way they are.

In a society that retains trust in its institutions, the most authoritative source for news and information would probably be the publicly funded media property that is supposed to adhere to the highest standards of journalistic objectivity. Here in America, that would have been PBS. Except it isn’t. The American media, by and large, along with Silicon Valley’s social media communications oligopolies, are doing everything they can to deny American voters the opportunity to politically realign their nation.

It’s always useful for conservatives to watch the legacy networks, starting with PBS, to fully appreciate the level of bias that pervades their “news” organizations. While watching them all the time might quickly become intolerable, return periodically to be reminded: The political content on these networks serve the interests of the Democratic Party.

These days, and for at least the past year, PBS anchor Judy Woodruff, along with every PBS reporter, repeats the term “election denier” dozens of times during every daily news broadcast. They repeat it without irony, without hesitation or qualification. It doesn’t matter what level of skepticism someone may have about the 2020 election. Skepticism in and of itself makes one a “denier.” One can have well founded, incrementalist concerns about election integrity, or one can believe every allegation ever made about systemic election fraud, but there’s no room for such a continuum. According to PBS, all these folks are “election deniers.”

Characterizing anyone concerned about election integrity as an “election denier” is manipulative and deceptive, and with rare exceptions, every major news network is doing it. The pervasive deception practiced by the national media throughout the Trump presidency and ever since, in addition to being deliberately manipulative, is designed to cause profound election consequences. We know it was coordinated; we know it was effective. It still is. And all of it designed to elect Democrats and defeat Republicans. Does that constitute “rigging” an election, and if not, why not?

The media’s role in rigging elections to favor Democrats cannot easily be overstated, but it’s far from the only way in which elections in America are rigged. We’re all familiar with the way laws were ignored in swing states by partisan election officials. Depending on which state these violations occurred, they included ballot drop boxes, ballot harvesting, mailed ballots, changes in procedures governing ballot custody and ballot verification, same day registration, waiving voter ID requirements, and more. We all remember how one activist multi-billionaire sent over $400 million dollars to public agencies tasked with administering elections, and restricted his donations to Democrat-heavy precincts in these same swing states in order to “get out the vote.”

To reduce this to the obvious: Ignoring laws is against the law. And public entities accepting private donations that are made with explicitly partisan objectives, at the very least, violates the supposed impartiality and political neutrality of the election bureaucracy. Does any of that constitute rigging an election? Why not?

These allegations are beyond serious debate. Nearly all media is partisan, favors Democrats, and manipulates their audiences. Election officials broke state election laws to help Democratic candidates. Partisan private-sector billionaires made donations to public entities with the goal of increasing Democratic turnout.

But there’s so much more. Consider the manipulated search results on Google, and the suppressed content on the major social media platforms. The partisan participation of America’s social media and search giants in manipulating public opinion, all by itself, has decisive election consequences. These communications platforms deliberately shape...

My research team is currently monitoring online political content being sent to voters in swing states through more than 2,500 computers owned by a politically-diverse group of registered voters (our “field agents”), and we are concerned about what we’re seeing.

We are aggregating and analyzing search results on the Google and Bing search engines, messages displayed on Google’s home page, autoplay videos suggested on YouTube, tweets sent to users by the Twitter company (as opposed to tweets sent by other users), email suppression on Gmail, and more.

We have so far preserved more than 1.9 million “ephemeral experiences” – exposure to short-lived content that impacts people and then disappears, leaving no trace – that Google and other companies are able to use to shift opinions and voting preferences, and we expect to have captured more than 2.5 million by Election Day.

In emails leaked from Google to The Wall Street Journal in 2018, Googlers (that’s what they call themselves) discussed how they might be able to use “ephemeral experiences” to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban. The company later denied that this plan was ever implemented, but leaked content (including multiple blacklists) and startling revelations by Tristan Harris, Zach Vorhies, and other whistleblowers show that Google is indeed out to remake the world in its own image. As the company’s CFO, Ruth Porat, said in a November 11th, 2016 video that leaked in 2018, “we will use the great strength and resources and reach we have” to advance Google’s values.

Since early 2016, my team has been developing and improving Neilsen-type monitoring systems that allow us to do to Google-and-the-Gang what they do to us and our children 24/7: to track their activity, and, specifically, to preserve that very dangerous and persuasive ephemeral content.

Since 2013, I have been conducting rigorous controlled experiments to quantify how persuasive that kind of content can be. I’ve so far identified about a dozen new forms of online manipulation that make use of ephemeral experiences, and nearly all these techniques are controlled exclusively by Google and, to a lesser extent...

Visage à trois #582

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #760

Watch: Arizona Voters Allegedly Turned Away from Polling Place as Tabulation Machine Debacle Continues

Midterm election day is here and in Maricopa County, Arizona, there have been issues with some of the machines.

The Wall Street Journal reported that there are 223 voting stations in Maricopa County (the county that holds Phoenix), but that about a fifth of the locations are having problems with the voting tabulation machines.

Maricopa County officials told KSAZ-TV that technicians have been sent out to try to fix the machines.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates (not the billionaire), who is the chairman of the county board of supervisors, announced that everyone is still able to vote, the Journal reported.

“Everyone is still getting to vote; no one is being disenfranchised. This is a technical issue and we have a redundancy for it,” Gates said.

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Gates and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer also fully explained the situation in a video posted to Twitter.

Gates also tweeted that there are different options for voters who go to a location that has faulty machines.
Should states do away with tabulation machines?

“If you’re at a polling place experiencing an issue with a tabulator, you have three options & your vote will be counted in each. 1) stay where you are and wait for tabulator to come online 2) drop your ballot in the secure slot (door 3) on tabulator 3) go to a nearby vote center,” Gates tweeted.

However, some videos have surfaced on Twitter in which people are claiming that they were sent away from locations with malfunctioning machines.

“Ok Central Christian voting station in Mesa on Lindsey and Brown the machines are broken, we got turned away! Unacceptable!!” one user tweeted: