They can’t even say they’ve found evidence when pressed https://newrepublic.com/post/213185/trump-election-fraud-guy...
This is an area that desperately needs new laws to catch up to the reality of what is going on, but I don't really see much motion toward that goal in the near future.
Why have constitutional protection against search if in practice nothing can be shielded from such searches?
The state's even setup a nice portal to automate these requests across 600+ data brokers.
A company could defy state law but they wouldn’t be protected from state level civil and criminal charges. There’s not much of a mechanism for the federal government to do anything about that.
We are really through the looking glass here, folks. Watch the confirmation hearings where potential appointees are asked to simply state factually who won the 2020 residential election. The amount of dissembling, avoidance, and inability to say that the emperor has no clothes..... it's just shocking.
This sort of rank corruption, of turning a government against its own people to subvert democracy... that more people aren't out in the streets about this makes me quite angry. We live in a state of continual shock of how bad things have gotten, I guess
ETA: Why the downvotes? It's true, and I have photos of the signs. These people exist.
Of course they are.
In addition, there can be issues related to fees, Kelly betting (if the correct bet is 98%, don't want to bet all the way to 98% or you have no returns and you definitely don't want to put all of your wallet in on it in case it goes against you), and so on.
So this isn't a "3% chance of the elections happening" it's "3%, plus or minus the rate of return over three months, plus or minus all the other related issues". I don't know if that gets you down to zero percent, but it definitely gets you closer.
(Yes Polymarket has tried to do some things to resolve these issue, no they don't work very well.)
The ICE comparison is spot on, IMO.
More information:
Target Data Collected
According to procurement records initially reviewed by 404 Media, the system allows continuous monitoring of the following personal data points: [1]
Names and addresses
Social Security numbers
Ethnicities
Geolocation information
Social media activity [1]
https://www.change.org/p/demand-thomson-reuters-cancel-its-1...
No. They're not the 'correct agency' for anything.
But really if you compare the US with the first country your mind thinks of when you think if trustworthy elections we have a long way to go and spending money and time looking for the weak spots is the correct start.
This is an example of the minimum viable amount of effort that should go into this:
"Belgium who was little known that time received more votes than mathematically predicted. So the members of the counting authority took out the magnetic cards and started counting again. After several hours they found that the vote total for every candidate was exactly the same before except for Maria Vindevogel. For Maria Vindevogel, the number of recounted vote was less than the original by 4096 number of votes. How this inflation in votes becomes possible even? What went wrong? Computer experts were brought in to run extensive tests to check the programme. They combed through the code but no bug was detected. Then they tested the hardware again and again."
https://scotopia.in/journal/journalbkend/paper_list/v-4-i-1(...
It would be like declaring “we are taking the big step of installing smoke alarms in every school in America!” when there are already smoke alarms in every school. You just want the political noise for a base that is too dumb to realize you’re not doing anything new.
The history of the US is one of voter suppression. Women couldn't vote. After Emancipation, barriers were put in to stop black people from voting (so-called "grandfather" laws). We got the Voting Rights Act for a reason. Many reasons actually.
All the way back in the Reagan era we had the Republican Party engaging in voter disenfranchisement with, for example, the Ballot Security Task Force [1]. This was part of the reason why we needed federal preclearance until John Roberts and his Heritage Foundation henchmen decided that it was impossible to prove racism or disenfrachisement.
We continue this by not only removing the voting rights of felons (which should be unconstitutional) but we pass around lists of names of felons and strike off people from electoral rolls for having names that sound similar to that of a felon from a completely different state.
There is no widespread voter fraud. There is widespread voter disenfranchisement. All of this is just a pretext for stealing elections. We'll se on January 3rd if the current House Speaker refuses to certify results and swear in new members when the Republicans lose in a landslide. Or we see more shenanigans like in the 2020 election to overturn the presidential election.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force
This is about instilling fear, uncertainty and doubt.
More importantly, how in the hell it this under the purview of ICE? Agencies and units have strictly outlined mission statements they are not supposed to go outside of. What kind of secret police nonsense it this?
EDIT: Word choice & spelling
All of this is a painful lessons that institutions are not things, they are agreements and if someone with enough power does not agree than the institution is reshaped by that disagreement.
There are only a small handful of voter fraud cases per year: someone tried to vote for a dead relative or whatever. Never enough to change an outcome. https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/how-many-cases-of-...
On the other hand, potentially far more impactful is election fraud and election interference. Tampering with voting machines (Coffee GA, Tina Peters etc), paying voters (Musk in PA), asking a state to "find more votes" (GA), ...
Heritage Foundation, you know those super-left liberals, already did this and found like a hundred votes max over a decade and most of those were pure accidents and not intentional fraud, certainly not able to sway elections even by accident
I previously felt there was a suitable purpose for a small tiny ICE like Obama-sized era
But now I'm with the abolish folks, it's 100% irredeemable and between them executing people without repercussions and a budget larger than many critical organizations, just delete them completely and start over.
I see they're no longer bothering to even put up the slightest bit of pretense ICE is anything but Trump's brownshirts, a group of goons to brutalize and intimidate any opposition to his antidemocratic project.
And one of the deep ironies is that CLEAR is already highly deployed at the state level, among other things, to verify voter identity and prevent voter fraud!
DHS and ICE also ostensibly already use CLEAR for a variety of other purposes - what's novel here isn't that they are getting access to new data, it's that they want to backseat drive on investigations the states are already conducting, using only a subset of the data the states already use.
There is a non-trivial chance that Trump prefers the latter and he'd end up vetoing SAVE because it has some small amendment he claims to hate.
Worth remembering that there was strong bipartisan immigration reform on the table in 2024 that Biden would have signed, but Trump told its own GOP co-sponsors not to pass it because it was easier for him to run against "open borders".
Drummed-up fear from the absence of the SAVE act might be the one thing that gets Trump's disillusioned base out to vote for him. By contrast, getting the SAVE act passed might be a dog-catches-car thing.
Now you begin to understand.
And it is extremely unlikely we ever get a constitutional amendment to fix it. We're more likely to simply fall apart as a nation first.
This is a huge issue. Privacy is dead as long as the government can buy its way around it.
Sheriffs depts and FLOCK, Ring Cameras, FBI , etc.
There are lots of things that are public information. Anyone can request public records like land titles, marriage certificates, bankruptcy filings, etc. Even ostensibly social media posts I'm kind of okay with being treated as public information.
The question is - why is Thomson Reuters allowed to get my utility records? If you call up my utility, this is not information they will give you. But Thomson Reuters is allowed to have it.
The utility can point to the language of the contract and say it's in their terms and conditions, but for the most part, I as a consumer don't have a choice between utility companies. And the law appreciates that access to water and electricity is a right - but yet these utilities enjoy a monopoly, so the idea that accepting their terms and conditions was a consumer choice wouldn't stand up to any strong legal scrutiny.
>I don't really see much motion toward that goal in the near future.
There is progress! Carpenter v. United States was a clear win that is still slowly matriculating through the legal system.
More importantly, the Not For Sale act passed the House not too long ago with broad bipartisan support. It's stalled in the Senate (of course) - but it's clearly something that has legislative attention.
Private companies take whatever information they want and sell it to any bidder they want and you get no say
It's freedom. It's not like its the government that is doing the collection, so that's ok.
Anybody looking with an inquisitive eye and no preference for the outcome reaches an extremely strong concision, that there was no voter fraud that could have influenced the outcome.
You have to be disinformed to think elections there are secure, you can't possibly know they are.
California's elections are widely audited, observed, and secure.
Stop spreading lies.
If they choose to believe a histrionic liar, that’s their problem. The rest of us don’t have to entertain their credulousness and ignorance. Repeating lies doesn’t make them true, it only makes credulous people believe it. Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the theatrics around election fraud will cease.
Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the theatrics around election fraud will cease.
We could all hope so, but this is a very passive response. Do you really think the people in the President's orbit are unaware of his advanced age and declining health, or are willing to just return to private life and give up power once he dies of natural causes? It seems far more likely to me that they know he could go any time and have some sort of plan to stick around. While none of them have exert the same sort of charismatic influence as the President does, do you really imagine that they and the substantial bloc of voters behind them are just going to magically come back to their centrist senses and abandon their violent and paranoid ethos?
Is it really? Have you been asleep for the last decade?
I will retain my right to be shocked and angry about government overreach, thanks.
ICE knows illegals are less inclined to register to vote knowing that ICE monitors voter rolls.
The next step is to go dark on data about ICE, immigration, and voter fraud so that nobody can prove the opposite anymore.
This is a very old playbook, and it works extremely well.
I'm not sure what a bureaucratic shuffle would buy you in today's environment.
add-sub-mul-div•2h ago
ivell•1h ago
Neither Biden's administration, nor the judge presiding over Trump's crimes did what should have been done.
The checks and balances failed both when Trump was in power and when he was not in power.
cosmicgadget•37m ago
With the recent immunity ruling and the impossibility of the Senate upholding impeachment, yes, the president can basically try anything he wants.