• dhork@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    They go out of their way in the article to not cast any partisan aspirations on the scheme. But it is the same county where Tina Peters used to be the county clerk, and is now in jail after being convicted of election shenanigans for Trump. And it looks like it had the complicity of at least one judge.

    Watch this one, folks. The details sadly won’t come out until after the election, but when they do I think we will find that Republican talk about election fraud is also projection, like all their other complaints.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
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      6 days ago

      It’s so fucking disgusting. The Republicans have 252527171 ways to try to win this, and we have 1.

      Kamala needs to be perfect and Trump could walk on stage with nothing but a shit filled diaper, do the Hitler salute and somehow gain in the poles… It’s infuriating.

      • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 days ago

        Harris and Trump have very different bases.

        If Trump went to New York and shot a black person, his base wouldn’t care whereas if Harris did, the Democrats would be in an uproar.

        However, if Trump went to New York and gave people COVID shots, now his base would be fucking furious.

        Both candidates are appealing to their base. It’s just the Democratic base is a bunch of sane and rational people.

    • yesman@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      IDK about projection, but if you convince people that a system is corrupt, they’re much more likely to cheat.

    • vortic@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      You’re probably right but I don’t really get it. Mesa County is so red that Trump won by 28 points in 2020. What was this person trying to achieve? For that matter, what was Tina Peters was trying to achieve? I just don’t understand how either of them could have made a difference when, in 2020, Trump won by over 25K votes out of a total of 91K votes cast and 107K registered voters.

    • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 days ago

      It is always projection. There have been previous Republican voters fraud cases in the last election(s).

      At least it’s an easy alert for what problems to look for. If they’re declaring “the other guys” are doing something, they’re already doing it themselves.

  • ALQ@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    “We don’t know the motive,” she said.

    Really? You don’t know the motive? I’d give anyone on the internet three guesses, and the first two don’t count.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      They were trying to, uh… outspit god for scrump. No wait, that’s not it, uh… emit cod for gump? That doesn’t sound right either… OH, I think I get it: they were trying to commit fraud for Trump.

    • Godort@lemm.ee
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      6 days ago

      I mean, it’s true that they don’t actually know the motive.

      You can make a strong educated guess, and you’d probably be right, but until there is a full investigation leading to a conviction, they can’t say that for sure.

      • snooggums@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        The motive was trying to change the outcome of the election. There are zero other possible motives.

  • gargamel@leminal.space
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    6 days ago

    However, three ballots were counted before election officials could pull them from the process because they passed through the signature verification process. Those votes cannot be remedied or removed.

    What? So the person whose ballot was stolen now has their vote cast for trump (let’s be real there is a 99.99% chance it was a trumper who did this even they are being coy about it) and there is nothing they can do about it? WTF?

    • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 days ago

      They will likely revamp the process. The problem is, once the ballot is counted, the vote is separated from the voter, so there’s no link to who the person was and who they voted for.

      It’s a process meant for privacy. That someone was able to accurately forge signatures enough to pass verification (which is handled by trained humans) is a bit on the “this was creepy/planned” side, which is likely how the outlier event happened.

      America isn’t there yet, but cryptographic hashes anonymizing but connecting a vote to a voter, so the vote could be anonymously recalled for an attack like this would likely be the best privacy-preserving process.

      • Wes4Humanity@lemm.ee
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        5 days ago

        99% of Congress is too old to understand a word you just said… Someday it’ll all be zoomers, and then maybe tech will start to help us

        • VinnyDaCat@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          Maybe.

          Millennials, zoomers and even gen alpha likely won’t be much different. There’s a difference between understanding how to use technology and understanding the intricacies of technology, understanding how to regulate or use different functions of it. The majority of boomers know how to use a modern phone. They don’t know how to properly take care of the phone nor do they understand how it functions, but they know how to use it. A lot of younger people aren’t much different.

          • DokPsy@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            Idk about that majority of boomers know how to use a modern phone. Make calls, text, play candy crush, and go on Facebook, sure but that’s hardly knowing how to use it beyond surface level.

          • Wes4Humanity@lemm.ee
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            5 days ago

            That’s true, but where boomers are pig headed about it because they don’t want to have admit younger people know more than them, I think millennials and zoomers would be much more willing to accept expert advice

        • plerwf@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          Can identify one way, from voter to vote. If a voter for some valid reason has to re-vote, the hash-id could be used to only count the person’s vote with the last timestamp.

          • diffusive@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            What would you hash, though? The name? The SSN? These are all know plaintexts…

            If you want to de-anonymise a vote with any of these you just make a rainbow table of all voters.

            Do you add salt? But now salt becomes a secret… how does the secret is picked? Someone centrally? Back to rainbow table. Everyone picks one? Then the voters has to write the hash… at that point there is no benefit with an unique id that is not really anonymous

    • Further down it states:

      All of the voters affected by the Mesa County fraud will be offered a new ballot.

      So does that mean those voters are counted twice? One fraud and one real, or…?

      • SuperEars@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        That’s how I interpreted it, yes. The criminal(s) succeeded in getting 3 illegal votes into the count beyond retrieval. The victims of stolen ballots need not lose their votes.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      It could go a number of ways.

      • An attempt to stuff a ballot box for their preferred candidate

      • An attempt to invalidate voting by mail by conducting obvious fraud, then publicly blame vote by mail

      • An attempt to vote for an opponent to claim the opposition is conducting fraud

  • Cephalotrocity@biglemmowski.win
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    6 days ago

    Those three ballots represent 0.003% of the total ballots cast in the county in the last presidential election year.

    Or put another way: 25% of the known fraudulent ballots got through.

    I hope they catch the perpetrator(s) and inflict maximum justice.

    • dhork@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      With less than 100k voters in the county, there is a non-zero chance that the margin will be within 3 votes, and now this scheme has given both sides a legitimate excuse to hold up certification if the margin is close. Even if it’s not within 3 votes, we know there is shady shit going on.

      Now, it does look like this county is heavily Republican. But the State will probably go to Harris, so any delays might endanger the casting of CO’s 10 Electoral Votes .

      • Makeitstop@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Technically there’s a non-zero chance of the margin being within three votes for any population of voters.

    • Throw_away_migrator@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I think it’s a poor phrasing. A more accurate statement would have been, “We have not been able to confirm a motive at this time” or similar. Basically leaving room for the idea that we all more or less know what the motive was, while acknowledging that’s it has not (yet) been proven conclusively.

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    Griswold said she also couldn’t discuss the “political implications” of the case, meaning whether the person or people behind the scheme had a political motivation and what candidates they voted for on the stolen ballots.

    “We don’t know the motive,” she said.

    Hmm, can we place bets on which party the fraudulent votes supported? And maybe taking a look at that would give a clue to the motive?

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    It will be important to publicize which side is implicated ASAP - and do so clearly with an authoritative voice.

    • bluGill@fedia.io
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      Not really - both sides have somebody that is willing to cheat. That one was caught does not mean the other isn’t also trying to cheat. Unless they can conclusively implicate the high leadership and not just a small local group of course - I doubt they can. Implicating the whole because of a few bad apples is election interference and must only be done on strong evidence which I doubt they have time to gather.

      • dogslayeggs@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Well, you see, when every single time election fraud and election interference has been found it is only on the same side, then it tends to make people think there might be something going on in that one side.

        • bluGill@fedia.io
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          It isn’t only on one side though. You are just paying attention to one side and avoiding finding abuses on your own side - most humans do this.

          • Tinidril@midwest.social
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            5 days ago

            Nope. Some things actually are extremely one-sided, independent of what biases observers might have about them. BTW, neutrality bias is also a thing.

            Election rigging in the US has been almost entirely exclusive to the Republican party for the last several decades, just like voter suppression and disenfranchisement.

          • nomous@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            Can you point us to any election fraud by democrats cause it seems like every time we hear about any that actually happened it seems to be Republicans.

      • Docus@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Go touch a cow. How hard is it to check a dozen fraudulent votes and work out who these votes were for. I’m willing to bet they are not for ‘both sides’

        • Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works
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          Easy to figure out? But that plays right into their scheme of making the other party look like they were comitting fraud. /s

        • bluGill@fedia.io
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          This is undoubtedly for one size. There are abuses elsewhere for the other side. Have been every election and no reason to think there won’t be in the next.

              • nomous@lemmy.world
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                5 days ago

                Hearsay much? The election judges I speak to go on and on about how clear and transparent our elections are.

                edit: and if the election judges you’re talking to are aware of fraud and aren’t reporting that crime they’re being incredibly negligent and criminal in their own right.

      • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        You can actually point to Trump’s fake electors scandal, or the J6 attempt to taint the chain of custody for the state ballot counts before they could be certified at the Capitol, on the day and at the time the riot was orchestrated.

        They’re real world Republican led attempts by Trump and co. to endangered the democratic process.

        So what are you going to point to in the other direction? Do you have anything?

        …and you better not say the Russian interference claims, because they were confimed by a bipartisan intelligence committee, not the Democratic party. The commitee was even led by Republicans.

      • crusa187@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        This isn’t a both sides issue. Every time we find actual voter fraud occurring in the US, republicans are committing the crime. Be it election worker intimidation, submitting falsified votes, or attempting a coup with fake electors, republicans are behind it every time. GOP policies are so unpopular they need to cheat to win - this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.

    • SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I love how when a scheme like this fails people like you act like it succeeded in your rhetoric. Very silly billy ain’t ya

      • ammonium@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        At the cost of voter anonymity, which shows exactly what is wrong with voting by mail. It’s impossible to prevent fraud while preserving anonymity. Not silly billy at all.

    • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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      5 days ago

      Why?

      Safeguards preventing fraud worked here. Your comment doesn’t make sense in relation to the story you filed it under

      • ammonium@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        They prevented fraud at the cost of voter anonymity, this is exactly what is wrong with voting by mail. You cannot protect both.

      • Subverb@lemmy.world
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        One success at thwarting fraud doesn’t mean that all attempts are thwarted though, it only proves that fraud is happening. That’s the problem.

        • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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          No instances of being thwarted doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Just means it’s successful