BUDOS said:
Oldbear, I am fairly aware of those, although you gave me two that I don't have (thanks). My reference is to what I have personally witnessed as an election judge. The crap about feeding us more misinformation and "stuff" to influence our vote is a fact. What I have a problem with are the allegations that the actual voting machines are being hacked, when they are not connected to the internet. We test them before the day of voting and that morning of and at least six people, equally divided among parties sign as witnesses.
Part of the problem is transparency, BUDOS. Every election there is a sea of allegations, followed by a wave of assurances our elections are perfectly secure. To the best of my knowledge, there really is no published study which proves the claims either way. Part of that is the reasonable desire of election machine companies to protect proprietary design, but it also leaves one with the unpleasant sense that we are not really getting the facts.
Consider that polls talk about a
Margin of Error. That's the statistical chance that their numbers are off by a bit through just human behavior. This matters because most polls claim a MoE of around 3% to 3.5%. And that applies to both major candidates in an election. That is, if the poll says Candidate A polled 52% and Candidate B polled 47%, the difference is 5 points but A could be as low as 49% and B as high as 50%, so that 5 point difference in the polls could actually mean a closer race than those numbers say.
The winning candidate loves to point to anything that makes them look decisive, which is why Trump doesn't point to his Popular Vote totals in 2016 and 2024, but his Electoral Vote totals. The problem there is how many states were decided by less than that 3 point Margin of Error the polls have, and frankly a lot of polls have not done so well in predicting the outcomes in battleground states. If you look at those states and consider the
possibility that some of those states could have gone the other way, you begin to see what Clinton was claiming in 2016 and Trump in 2020.
Now about the machines. Votes are made at precinct polls, then aggregated to the state level. It's possible,
in theory, for an outside party to access those vote totals at either the precinct or state level, and to change them. If someone could access the state machines, they could alter the tally and the outcome.
Obviously, that would be a very difficult ask but from the public perspective it looks more doable, precisely because the details seem arcane to the public. This is one possible reason for making the claim that an election was rigged, not to so much change the outcome as energize anger from the base.
So in the end, the best solution is to show how votes are not just tallied, but verified and challenges confirmed or rejected on evidence. Just making vague statements is not going to convince anyone.
