#fake electoral ballots

[supremechancellorrex]

Honestly, my respect for the BBC continues to take a nose-dive. If I had a penny for every false equivalence made by hack reporters there, I'd be a millionaire.

Comparing the "far-right" and "far-left" is comparing a dumpy wolf with blood on its mouth to a kitten. The far-right, fuelled by misinformation and immoral, self-interest billionaires and cult leaders, are an astronomical threat to democracy, to the point of violently trying to overthrow it or at least weaken democratic institutions in real-time so they can in the future. The fact the BBC even writes a sentence like this shows how unobjective they are.

[nando161mando]

Georgia Democrats trying to block several candidates, including De la Cruz/PSL from ballot

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/georgia-democrats-kennedy-jill-stein-presidential-ballot-election

[craycray-wolf]

IMPORTANT POST FROM THE BEACONTOWN SERVER

The following is a screenshot of the announcement, PLEASE READ

Someone also shared on the server the following prompts:

"SOME STUFF IF YOURE STUGGLING TO FIND WORDS FOR THIS

"I urge you to recount the election and investigate election interference. Bomb threats have been called into multiple polling locations. Domestic terrorists have burned ballot boxes. Ballots are being discarded. An investigation and recount for this election is urgently needed."

OR

" I am a concerned citizen, and I need you to hear me. I urge you to recount the ballots from this election and investigate election interference. Bomb threats have been called into multiple polling locations, causing some to close early. Domestic terrorists have burned ballot boxes. An unprecedented number of ballots have been rejected and require curing. There have been reports of polling officers allowing voter intimidation in and outside of polling places across the country. And an estimated 20 million mail in ballots are unaccounted for. A thorough investigation and recount for this election is urgently needed. Please take action, all votes cast should be heard. Thank you. "

OORRRR

"As of the 6th of November 2024, there have been at least 32 fake bomb threats called into democrat leaning polling locations, which ended up in many polls to have been closed for at least an hour. Many people have reported that ballots were not counted for suspicious reasons such as signature invalidation which is information that vote counters do not have access to. These events have occurred in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia, for instance. This is very coincidental and is unfairly in favor of candidate Donald Trump's favor after months of suggesting electoral foul play. A recount of the votes is not enough. Launch an investigation on tampering, interference, and fraud." "

[sweet-bitsy]

“As of the 6th of November 2024, there have been at least 32 fake bomb threats called into democrat leaning polling locations, which ended up in many polls to have been closed for at least an hour. Many people have reported that ballots were not counted for suspicious reasons. such as signature invalidation which is information that vote counters do not have access to. These events have occurred in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia, for instance. This is very coincidental and is unfairly in favor of candidate Donald Trump's favor after months of suggesting electoral foul play. A recount of the votes is not enough. Launch an investigation on tampering, interference, and fraud.”

[via @politvidchannel, @DaliaaaLaUnica, and @twennyseeks on Twitter]

[mariacallous]

The target is you, voter. Russia, China, Iran, and other bad actors sought to interfere in the run-up to today’s US elections, according to research by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), which has been monitoring online trends along with statements by governments, private companies, and civil society in its Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker. As DFRLab experts detail below, this year’s malign efforts in many ways surpass previous influence campaigns in sophistication and scope, if not in impact—and they are expected to continue well after the polls close.

Tipping the scale

“By sheer volume, foreign interference in the 2024 US election has already surpassed the scale of adversarial operations in both 2016 and 2020,” Emerson says.

Dina notes that each US adversary played to its strengths. For example, Iran and China “attempted to breach presidential campaigns in hack-and-leak operations that raise concerns about their cyber capabilities during and after the elections,” she tells us.

At the same time, the United States is more prepared than it was in previous election cycles. Russian efforts in 2016 “made foreign interference a vivid fear for millions of Americans,” Emerson notes. “Eight years later, the US government is denouncing and neutralizing these efforts, sometimes in real time.”

In fact, Graham tells us, “the combined actions by the US departments of Justice, Treasury, and State against two known Russian interference efforts was the largest proactive government action taken against election influence efforts before an election.”

Doppelgangers and down-ballot races

US officials this week called Russia “the most active threat,” and it’s easy to understand why. Emerson notes Russia’s “ten-million-dollar effort to infiltrate and influence far-right American media,” alongside the “Doppelganger” network, which has spread “tens of thousands of false stories and staged videos intended to undermine election integrity in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.” Increasingly desperate, Russian actors have even sought to shut down individual polling places with fake bomb threats, he adds.

Meanwhile, China has focused on “down-ballot races instead of the presidential election to target specific anti-China politicians,” Kenton explains. Using fake American personas and generative artificial intelligence, China-linked operations have appeared across more than fifty platforms. Perhaps surprisingly, Kenton adds, “attributed campaigns appeared sparingly” on the Chinese-owned platform TikTok and far more often on Facebook and X.

Faith, fakes, and falsehoods 

“The primary aim is to erode Americans’ faith in democratic institutions and heighten chaos and social division,” Kenton explains, and thus to undermine the ability of the US government to function so it will have less bandwidth to contain adversarial powers.

“Some of the fake and already debunked narratives and footage circulating before the elections will likely continue to be amplified by foreign threat actors well after November 5,” Dina predicts. Expect to see activity around the submission of certificates of ascertainment on December 11, the December 17 meeting of the electors to formally cast their votes, and through inauguration day on January 20.

And in a post-election period where the results will likely be contested, Graham thinks there’s a “high likelihood” that foreign actors will “cross a serious threshold” from pre-election attempts to broadly influence American public opinion in service of their geopolitical interests to “direct interference” by trying to mobilize Americans to engage in protests or even violence.

Nevertheless, Graham points out that the high volume of foreign-influence efforts observed during this year’s election cycle so far does not appear to have had a significant impact in terms of changing Americans’ opinions or behavior.  

The consequences of foreign disinformation, Emerson adds, should be assessed against “the far more viral, sophisticated, and dangerous election-day falsehoods that Americans spread among themselves.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Johnson at The UnPopulist:

Joe Rogan, a UFC commentator and comedian who hosts the most popular podcast in the United States and possibly the world, has developed a reputation as an anti-tribal and fiercely independent voice who is beholden to no political party or faction. In the eyes of his regular guest Jordan Peterson, Rogan is “the most powerful journalist who’s ever lived,” and he has managed to gain such broad appeal because he “just asks questions.” But the notion that Rogan is an honest broker of information who has an overriding commitment to the truth is absurd. In fact, he has only one consistent mission: attempting to debunk mainstream media narratives by entertaining conspiracy theories. He’s more of a populist than a non-partisan—and he’s definitely no truth-seeker. Nothing illustrates this better than his warmly favorable treatment of both Donald Trump and RJK Jr., along with the parade of other cranks he features who peddle outlandish conspiracy theories and constantly congratulate themselves for being “anti-establishment” or “heterodox.” The effect, whether he intends it or not, is to overwhelm our epistemic infrastructure and pave the way for dangerous populist demagogues.

The Most Popular MAGA Pundit in the World

In his much-discussed interview with Trump last week, Rogan’s approach was to first encourage Trump to air his typical barrage of conspiratorial falsehoods—and then to endorse them himself. Take, for example, the segments on elections and voting, which were always shaped by Rogan’s MAGA-friendly framing. When Rogan told Trump that “a lot of weirdness ... was going on during the 2020 elections,” he was basically affirming Trump’s Big Lie and ignoring the fact that the 2020 election was the most scrutinized contest in American history. The rest predictably followed:

Trump claimed that “old-fashioned ballot screwing” had taken place, such as “people ... dropping in phony votes.” Rogan agreed.

Trump claimed “the Russia hoax” swayed the 2020 election. Rogan agreed.

Trump claimed the temporary suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story also swayed the election. Rogan agreed.

Trump claimed Democrats weaponized the justice system against him. Rogan agreed.

Trump alleged that Democrats are opposed to certain forms of voter ID “because they want to cheat.” Rogan responded: “It doesn’t make sense any other way.” Voter ID laws are a solution in search of a problem, given that there is little evidence of widespread voter fraud, but Rogan preferred to attribute to Democrats the most sinister motivation imaginable. Rogan also said “mail-in ballots are a problem” and worried about vote-counting machines getting hacked—a version of a famously discredited conspiracy theory for which Fox News had to pay $787 million in a settlement with a voting systems firm for pushing it on its airwaves.

When the discussion turned to the topic of denying election results, it was the perfect opportunity for Rogan, the interviewer renowned by fans as a tenacious truth-seeker, to press the most high-profile election denialist American politics has ever seen. That’s not what happened. Instead of challenging Trump’s years-long insistence that he actually won the 2020 election, or his enlisting of attorneys like Sidney Powell to claim communist-designed voting machines rigged the contest against him, or his attempts to overthrow the election by sending fake slates of electors to Washington, or his incitement of an insurrectionary mob at the U.S. Capitol to halt the certification of the vote, Rogan brought up ... the Russia investigation. Democrats are especially prone to denying election results, he told the man who believes he beat Hillary Clinton in the popular vote in 2016 and Joe Biden in the Electoral College vote in 2020.

But the segment on elections and voting wasn’t only about 2020. Consider their exchange about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. After Trump declared that Democrats had turned Springfield into a “horror show” by “dropping” immigrants into the community, Rogan’s follow-up wasn’t to press Trump for corroboration, given that state Republican officials said this was nonsense and have asked Trump to stop endangering an innocent minority group. Instead, Rogan asked Trump to hypothesize about what must be motivating Democrats to allow a flood of immigrants into the country. As if that was not a loaded enough question, Rogan then proceeded to say this: “One of the things that’s been very clear is that they’ve moved a large percentage of these migrants—they’re coming across the border illegally—[into] swing states.” Never mind that the Haitians in Springfield are legal. In one fell swoop, Rogan managed to seamlessly transition from asking a question about immigration to asserting the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Democrats are importing illegal voters to steal elections—exactly Trump’s view.

[...] Rogan’s embrace of RFK Jr. isn’t ultimately down to his personal charms—Rogan is dependably supportive of health and wellness conspiracism just generally. During the Covid pandemic, the Joe Rogan Experience was among the most formidable engines of misinformation about the disease, alternative treatments, and vaccine safety, with appearances by conspiracists like Bret Weinstein, Robert Malone, and Pierre Kory. He regularly invites conspiracists onto his show to pump out hours of uninterrupted anti-vaccine propaganda. Alex Jones—one of the most prolific and notorious conspiracy theorists of our time, who accused the grieving families of Sandy Hook victims of being crisis actors who were part of a plot to take Americans’ guns—has been a guest many times. Conspiracy theorists like Weinstein who rant about the horrors of vaccine injuries, the life-saving properties of ivermectin, and the totalitarian machinations of the WHO for long stretches, are honored guests.

[...]

Heterodox Media Has a Right-Wing Conspiracism Problem

Rogan has presented his podcast as a counterweight to the “establishment” media. That means he regularly platforms figures that traditional outlets won’t because they don’t meet basic journalistic standards. He evades accountability by always pointing out that he’s a mere comedian and entertainer, a clever rhetorical shield. This grants him the latitude to speculate as recklessly as he wants, indulge some of the wildest conspiracy theories around, and consistently get basic facts wrong while allowing his guests to do the same. So long as his audience laps it up, he has no reason to approach things any differently. But that’s also why the backlash from Trump’s MAGA base was so threatening to him: that’s an occasion in which he risked losing his audience. Rogan has become wholly captured by his audience even as he maintains the pretense that he’s a fair-minded and inquisitive political observer who is capable of seeing through what he regards as the sinister machinations and distortions of both major political parties. That’s why, when the wave of MAGA resentment came crashing down on him when he endorsed RFK Jr., he caved.

Kamala Harris’ supporters never expected Rogan’s endorsement, and there’s no Democratic equivalent of Catturd to chastise Rogan for supporting a third-party candidate. Nor does Rogan have much of a non-right audience. So all his incentives lean in the direction of becoming a right-wing conspiracy theorist—especially since, right now, there are more conspiracies on the right. Indeed, there are few, if any, MAGA conspiracy theories that Rogan hasn’t amplified. Last year, he suggested that Jan. 6 was a “false flag” operation in which “intelligence agencies were involved in provoking people into the Capitol.” He defended Arizona’s Republican senatorial candidate, Kari Lake’s, debunked claims about voter fraud in her state’s gubernatorial race: “All that Kari Lake stuff in Arizona they tried to dismiss, it doesn’t look like that’s invalid. It looks like there’s real fraud there.”

Rogan, of course, isn’t the only one. There is an entire industry of self-styled “heterodox” thinkers who have gravitated toward the right. Peterson, Rogan’s frequent guest, was once merely critical of campus identity politics and other forms of “wokeness.” He’s now a committed political partisan indistinguishable from a standard-fare Fox News commentator (e.g., characterizing Harris as “a master of chaos and deception” who is full of “envy” and “spite”; or describing Trump’s indictments as a “horrible” form of political “persecution”). Rogan and Peterson are part of an alternative media community providing an intellectual permission structure for people to support MAGA under the guise of “independent thought,” “heterodoxy,” or “classical liberalism.”

But Rogan plays a crucial role in this right-wing alternative media ecosystem. Because he has always presented himself as non-partisan, millions of listeners trust that he doesn’t have an agenda. Heterodox intellectuals and influencers like Peterson constantly decry traditional media as captured by elite interests, and they present shows like the Joe Rogan Experience as the alternative. But when Rogan and his guests shower praise on Trump and relentlessly attack his political opponents, they prove that they aren’t the anti-establishment crusaders they claim to be—they’re just supporting one establishment over another. In many ways, Rogan is the perfect embodiment of the Trump-era podcaster.

Joe Rogan claims to be an independent voice, but is in reality a right-wing conspiracy theorist whose podcast has a largely MAGA audience.

[tenaflyviper]

He won with LESS votes than in 2020?

Bullshit. They were already caught in a fake elector scheme in 2020, and caught numerous times leading up to this election (a landlord in CA stealing his tenants' ballots to vote for Trump, another person in PA, etc). And bomb threats sent to polling locations from Russia???

This election needs to be investigated.

He should also be held accountable for numerous offenses, including violating the Logan Act.

[robertreich]

Does the Constitution Ban Trump from Running Again? 

Donald Trump should not be allowed on the ballot.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment prohibits anyone who has held public office and taken an oath to protect the Constitution from holding office again if they “have engaged in insurrection” against the United States.

This key provision was enacted after the Civil War to prevent those who rose up against our democracy from ever being allowed to hold office again.

This applies to Donald Trump. He cannot again be entrusted with public office. He led an insurrection!

He refused to concede the results of the 2020 election, claiming it was stolen, even when many in his inner circle, including his own attorney general, told him it was not.

Trump then pushed state officials to change vote counts, hatched a plot to name fake electors, tried to pressure his vice president into refusing to certify the Electoral College votes, had his allies seek access to voting-machine data, and summoned his supporters to attack the capitol on January 6th to disrupt the formal recognition of the presidential election results.

And then he waited HOURS, reportedly watching the violence on TV, before telling his supporters to go home — despite pleas from his staff, Republican lawmakers, and even Fox News.

If this isn’t the behavior of an insurrectionist, I don’t know what is.

Can there be any doubt that Trump will again try to do whatever it takes to regain power, even if it’s illegal and unconstitutional?

If anything, given all the MAGA election deniers in Congress and in the states, Trump is less constrained than he was in 2020. And more power hungry.

Trump could face criminal charges for inciting an insurrection, but that’s not necessary to bar him from the ballot.

Secretaries of State and other chief election officers across the country have the power to determine whether candidates meet the qualifications for office. They have a constitutional duty to keep Trump off the ballot — based on the clear text of the U.S. Constitution.

Some might argue that voters should be able to decide whether candidates are fit for office, even if they’re dangerous. But the Constitution sets the bar for what disqualifies someone from being president. Candidates must be at least 35 years old and a natural-born U.S. citizen. And they must also not have engaged in insurrection after they previously took an oath of office to defend the Constitution.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has already been used to disqualify an insurrectionist from continuing to hold public office in New Mexico, with the state’s Supreme Court upholding the ruling.

This is not about partisanship. If a Democrat attempts to overthrow the government, they should not be allowed on ballots either.

Election officials must keep Donald Trump off the ballot in 2024. 

Democracy cannot survive if insurrectionists hold power in our government.

[foreverlogical]

In a New York Times profile of the Michigan Republican Party, state Rep. Lisa McClain offers a quintessentially stoic midwestern insight about the ailing state party that perfectly sums up the GOP's national dynamic too.

“It’s not going real well," McClain told the Times' Nick Corasaniti.

“The ability to raise money," she continued, "we’ve got a lot of donors sitting on the sideline. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact. It’s just a plain fact. We have to fix that.”

Though McClain was assessing the divide between the state's monied benefactors, such as former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and its Trumpy grassroots activists, she may as well have been talking about national GOP donors' frantic search for a savior as the MAGA grassroots coalesce around Donald Trump for the 2024 nomination.

In fact, Corasaniti's piece—an anatomy of GOP dysfunction encapsulated by the Republican Party in a Rust Belt swing state—mirrors rifts emerging across the country at both the state and national levels. Corasaniti portrays a party coming apart at the seams after its drubbing in the '22 cycle in a state where Republicans roundly lost the gubernatorial contest, every statewide executive office (e.g., attorney general and secretary of state), and control of both legislative chambers. A hat trick, if you will.

The key cast of characters includes:

Tudor Dixon, 2022 gubernatorial nominee, Bible-thumper, anti-abortion activist, and former right-wing news host.

Fervent 2020 election deniers Kristina Karamo and Matthew DePerno, 2022 GOP nominees for secretary of state and attorney general, respectively.

Meshawn Maddock, former co-chair of the Republican Party and leader of Women for Trump, who has been charged in the fake elector scheme.

The DeVos family, longtime Republican Party donors and Michigan establishment heavyweights.

Every one of those is effectively a stand-in for similarly situated Republican players in GOP apparatuses around the country.

Following Michigan Republicans' midterm election implosion, a round of rapid-fire finger-pointing broke out, with MAGA party officials blaming Dixon for a toxic near-total abortion ban position and soft fundraising, Dixon blaming both the party and old-guard donors for her campaign's collapse, and party officials chastising donors for insufficiently funding their cuckoo election-denying candidates.

Corasaniti writes:

A state party autopsy days after the election, made public by Ms. Dixon, acknowledged that “we found ourselves consistently navigating the power struggle between Trump and anti-Trump factions of the party” and that Mr. Trump “provided challenges on a statewide ballot.”

True enough. On the national stage, every 2024 Republican hopeful but Trump is presently trying to thread the needle of enthusing high-dollar donors while managing to peel away pro-Trump voters open to alternatives.Campaign Action

Back in Michigan, establishment type Dave Trott, a retired GOP congressman and former state party donor, dished about the Republican elite's distrust of former GOP co-chair Maddock, a MAGA activist.

"Meshawn was never connected to the donor base, and so having her as the vice chair [of the party] for a lot of us was a showstopper,” Trott explained. "We just knew she would never be someone that would be rational in her approach to state party politics."

In response, Maddock expressed a reciprocal lack of trust in the party's establishment muckety-mucks.

“The state party needs the wealthy RINOs who often fund it to come to terms with what the actual voters on the right want,” Maddock told the Times. Wealthy donors, she added, need to treat the base "with an ounce of respect for once.”

The same could be said of national Republican donors who have never crossed paths with actual base voters and apparently still believe Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin can save them from Trump.

That same mutual distrust and disgust between establishment Republican donors and state party officials is also playing out in Georgia, where popular Republican Gov. Brian Kemp warned well-heeled donors earlier this year they could "no longer rely on" the state Republican Party to win elections. Kemp has effectively built a parallel political apparatus after urging donors to abandon the pro-Trump state party.

And then there are the anti-abortion zealots pointing fingers at everyone else for their own deeply unpopular position. Dixon's support for a strict abortion ban doomed her candidacy, just like the efforts of Ohio Republicans to ban abortion there sank an anti-abortion ballot measure earlier this month.

Following that loss, the nation's premier forced birther group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life 

America, castigated establishment Republicans and the business community for not pulling their weight in the battle to pass the measure, which would have significantly raised the bar for enshrining abortion protections in Ohio's constitution.

All across the nation, the Republican Party is reckoning with the deal it cut with the devil. In swing states like Michigan and Georgia, red states like Ohio, and nationally, the GOP is cracking up as different factions variously cling to or reject Trump. The damage done may not be fully realized until voters cast their ballots next year, but the Republican Party is entering 2024 in a position so precarious that it almost defies historical comparison.

[tomorrowusa]

« What I care about is seeing a big, gigantic blue wave come November — and not just the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, but the entire downballot.

Trumpism is fascism and we must eradicate it from our body politic. Otherwise, we're going to lose our democratic republic. »

— Michael Cohen, onetime attorney and fixer to Donald Trump, telling CNN's Jim Acosta that the US needs a "gigantic" blue wave this election cycle.

We should work not just to beat Trump but to sweep away all the sycophants and opportunists in the Republican Party who have enabled his strain of authoritarianism to infect the American political system over the past nine years.

Dictators can do nothing without a vast army of flunkies. Just as Germany underwent systematic de-Nazification after World War II, we need to undertake de-Trumpification with our ballots.

So don't neglect downballot races. Officials and elected judges at the county level who have engaged in 2020 election denial need to go. So do state legislators who supported fake electors and passed legislation to restrict voting or make it difficult. Such officials have no business holding office in a law-based democracy.

From the courthouse to the White House: Vote Blue No Matter Who.

[nando161mando]

Yep, voting surely matters

[collapsedsquid]

I think the plan is to steal the Electoral College outright by getting states Trump loses to refuse to certify the results of their election. That’s because the 12th Amendment provides that the president is the person who wins the majority of the “whole number of Electors appointed.” That “whole number” is supposed to be 538. But one potential reading of the amendment is that Trump doesn’t have to win 270 Electoral College votes but just a majority of however many electors show up. Trump’s goal, I believe, is to decrease the number of electors appointed until he wins. This reading is untested. Nobody has yet tried to win an election with fewer than a majority of the Electoral College votes by decreasing the overall number of electors appointed after the election. But it’s an argument the Trump team could put forward, and it’s an argument Democratic lawyers and experts are preparing for. The first step in such a process is to get Republicans in states Trump loses to contest the certification of their own elections. In 2020, Trump and his team illegally tried to get slates of alternate electors submitted in states where Republicans control the state legislatures. They could try that again, but for this scheme to work, they don’t even have to get “fake” electors submitted but just to convince Republican state legislatures or Republican governors not to submit their valid slates of electors before statutorily imposed deadlines. All slates of electors are supposed to be certified by December 11. Those electors are then supposed to vote and submit their results by December 25. [...] If enough states refuse to certify the results of the election and submit a slate of electors—with the Supreme Court’s blessing—the math is not actually hard for Trump. Let’s say Vice President Kamala Harris wins the bare majority of Electoral College votes necessary, 270, but the Republican legislature in Wisconsin refuses to submit the state’s 10 electors by the deadline. In this scenario, the new total number of electors becomes 528, not 538—and Trump needs only 264 electoral votes to “win.” If you take Wisconsin and Nevada’s six electors out of the mix, Trump needs only 262 electoral votes to “win.” He’ll likely achieve those numbers without having to win one of the “blue wall” states.

[...]

And this is where Speaker Johnson becomes critical to the whole “secret” plan. In 2020, Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House. If states had tried to get cute and not submit their electors by the December 11 deadline, Pelosi would just have extended the deadline. But Speaker Johnson surely won’t. If electors are not submitted by December 11, he’ll likely declare the process “over” and say that the electors appointed by that date are the only ones allowed to vote for president.

Like to consider these strategies in terms of "Is this going to cause a civil war(or honestly more realistically a 'general strike')" with the idea that if it will then he's not going to get people to go along with it. I feel just rejecting the votes outright without a pretext or just empty claims that some people may have voted illegally, you're talking something that won't be acceptable. You would have to destroy a good number of ballots or something.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

What's the bad thing about the recall election?

The point of the recall was to make an example of persky before other criminal judges in cali: be more lenient in sentencing than we regard as fitting, and your place on the bench will also be put on the block. In this the recall campaign succeeded: CA courts saw an immediate uptick in severity of sentencing, and california lawyers will openly tell you that judges discussed the success of the campaign in apprehensive terms. If, like me, you think that severe sentences are one of, if not the, greatest ills in the American criminal justice system, this should naturally concern you greatly

This also should help dispense with the fake-deep tripe someone was giving me in the reblogs about how the legitimate public anger over brock turners light sentence was coopted by the "carceral surveillance state" to "manufacture consent" for increased sentencing severity. This gets the causation completely backwards: first came the grassroots opposition campaign, then the courts (the "carceral surveillance state") responded by acceding to the publics threat. In this sense the public accountability mechanisms worked as advertised

Judicial elections are generally a social cancer anyway, even if recall campaigns are especially bad. Lots of peer nations have no truck with them. Judges and prospective judges running for the bench electorally always always always wind up pandering to lawandorder jagoffs first and foremost; as just one example, there is a richly attested link between judicial elections and liberal application of the death penalty. "Lynching by proxy" i always call it. This is a useful example to point out to pseudowoke antielectoralists who will eagerly justify squandering their hard wom democratic rights at the ballot box by explaining our elected officials dont care what we have to think of them. Turns out elected judges care a lot what we think of them, its just tgat most of the ppl voting for them think they should be evil

[mariacallous]

Americans need to log off. Unplug. Shoot the TV. It seems impossible. Less than five days from Election Day in the US, most people can’t help but check the news—or TikTok or X—at least once a day. Swipe, refresh, repeat. By Tuesday, the connectedness will be constant. Mentally, political stress takes a huge toll. Given that anxiety can be exacerbated by uncertainty, the 2024 election feels worse than it has ever before. There’s a reason for that.

I don’t just mean the general sky-is-falling stuff—the militias on Facebook organizing ballot-box stakeouts, the conspiracy theory spreaders, the cybercriminals potentially waiting in the wings. Some version of those nerve-janglers has been around for years. Now, though, there’s a new factor upping users’ blood pressure as they doomscroll: AI misinformation.

Clearly US voters worry about how misinformation might impact who wins the election, but Sander van der Linden, author of Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, notes that the anxiety around AI might be more existential. “If you look at the problem from a more indirect perspective, such as sowing doubt and chaos, confusion, undermining democratic discourse, lowering trust in the electoral process, and confusing swing voters,” he says. “I think we’re looking at a bigger risk”—one that fuels polarization and erodes the quality of debate.

According to an American Psychological Association survey released last week, 77 percent of US adults feel some level of stress over the future of the country. It gets worse. Sixty-nine percent of adults surveyed said the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was a cause of “significant stress”—a figure that’s up from 52 percent in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton. Nearly three-quarters of respondents thought the election could spur violence; more than half worried it could be “the end of democracy in the US.”

Christ.

On top of all of this sits the threat of AI-generated falsehoods. For more than a year researchers have warned of election misinformation from artificial intelligence. Beyond the polls, such misinformation has played a role in the Israel-Hamas war and the war in Ukraine. 404 Media called the aftermath of Hurricane Helene “the ‘fuck it’ era of AI-generated slop.” (Actually) fake news lurks around every corner. Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum released a report claiming AI misinformation is one of the biggest short-term threats the world faces. Bad election information and fake images can also bring in serious money for X users, according to a BBC report this week.

This was the first year the APA asked about AI and election anxiety and one of the things the organization found was that seven in 10 people experienced stress over the fact that fake information can seem so believable. One-third of social media users said they don’t know what to believe on those platforms. “It extends beyond just information and social media,” says Vaile Wright, APA’s senior director of health care innovation. “A majority of Americans said they don't trust the US government. So there's sort of this whole lack of trust in what used to be very trusted institutions—the media, government—and that, I'm sure, is not helping with people's stress as it relates to this election this year.”

When the US election season ramped up there were AI-generated robocalls (the Federal Communications Commission outlawed them) and now election officials are preparing staff to deal with any number of deepfakes they may encounter. X’s AI model Grok is reportedly boosting conspiracy theories. (It’s also, according to Musk, working on its MRI-reading skills.)

After months of fretting about AI taking jobs, now everyone has to worry about it taking faith in the democratic process?

For nearly two decades, one social media platform or another has ended up dominating a US election. Back in 2008, it was a still-young Twitter. During most of the twenty-teens, it was Facebook (and a bit of Instagram) and Twitter. More recently, TikTok has become a news-spreading tool. In each election cycle, people have swiped to keep up—and also confronted new levels of toxicity. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who got out of prison this week, once told reporter Michael Lewis Democrats didn’t matter, “the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” That shit went online.

Now, that shit doesn’t even have to come from political operatives. Machines can make it. When people scroll around on their smartphones for a flicker of hope about whether or not their candidate will win, whatever discouragement or reassurance they find may not even be real.

The APA’s survey found that 82 percent of US adults were worried people may base their values on inaccurate information, and more than one-fifth said they’d believed something they read online or on social media when it wasn’t true. Another poll conducted in early September found that only about a quarter of voters feel confident that they can tell the difference between real AI-generated visuals, like the fake images Trump shared claiming Taylor Swift fans are supporting him. “That’s not a good sign,” van der Linden says.

If your fears about the election seem even worse than they did in 2020, this may be why. Misinformation takes a mental toll. “Political anxiety” exists, and research indicates it can impact those who aren’t anxious otherwise. Couple that with a media landscape where newspapers are coming under fire for not endorsing a political candidate and the picture of a nervous electorate becomes very clear. Trust no one; just wait to see what happens—then decide if you believe it.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Payton Armstrong and Jack Winstanley at MMFA:

Following baseless claims made by former President Donald Trump that “Really bad ‘stuff’” is happening in Pennsylvania and the state “is cheating,” right-wing and far-right media figures are sowing early doubts about Pennsylvania’s electoral processes. Right-wing and far-right media figures have claimed without evidence that “Democrat activists” have been “caught posing as election workers in Pennsylvania,” that elections officials are attempting to “push people out of line,” that a postal worker dropping off “an Obscene amount of Ballots” is evidence of suspicious activity, and that Democrats are committing voter fraud. As these baseless claims spiral, county election officials in Pennsylvania are reassuring voters that the election is secure and people have not been denied their right to vote.

As early voting ends, Trump and his allies attempt to sow doubts about Pennsylvania’s election process and suggest that “Pennsylvania is cheating”

On Truth Social, Trump claimed that “Really bad ‘stuff’” is happening in Pennsylvania, citing batches of voter registration applications received by York County and Lancaster County and declaring “Law Enforcement must do their job.” He posted: “Wow! York County, Pennsylvania, received THOUSANDS of potentially FRAUDULENT Voter Registration Forms and Mail-In Ballot Applications from a third party group. This is on top of Lancaster County being caught with 2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person. Really bad 'stuff.' WHAT IS GOING ON IN PENNSYLVANIA??? Law Enforcement must do their job, immediately!!! WOW!!!” [Truth Social, 10/28/24]

Right-wing media election-denying pundits are pushing baseless claims of “voter fraud” in Pennsylvania.

See Also:

MMFA: Right-wing media and conspiracy theorists spread debunked viral video falsely claiming a Pennsylvania postmaster was illegally harvesting ballots

[bitchy-peachy]

Shitpublicans swear that democrats are the ones stealing elections without hilariously realizing how fucking unpopular they are.

They haven't won a popular vote in decades. Only the electoral shitass college is what helps them cos if we went by vote numbers, these pieces of dog shit wouldn't win any presidency.

They also like burning ballot boxes in democratic areas, they did voter intimidation by riding around with guns in poc neighborhoods last elections, they have tried to pass a bunch of laws to restrict voting including wanting to ban fucking water bottles from being given to voters in line

Currently they want to discount absentee voting which will not only affect civilians living overseas but the military.

People that are winning and super wanted wouldn't do shit like this. They'd be too confident to bother destroying votes.

Oh and them paying polls to only poll people in super conservative areas is sad. They can't poll in a politically diverse area only in the areas that Republicans lead in registered voters. That's why I say ignore the polls. (Also young people and millennials don't answer random ass numbers. I'm old af and I ignore unknown numbers too)

MAGAs are pussies. They even made accounts to pretend they're democrats to tell people "your vote doesn't matter" or "vote 3rd party and not Genocide Harris to 'save Palestine'."

A lot of people may be duped but these people are everything but Pro Palestine. Nobody that wants to help people would make the movement into a literal death cult. Telling people to die or sacrifice themselves is just an epic psy ops trolling and a bunch of gullible dumbasses.

People that want to help would get more people on their side without being assholes. Even I shut my asshole tendencies off to get people to donate to charity and even doing the free clicks if they don't have money (and I know a lot people want to help but don't have the funds. Those clicks mount up to tons of money but idk what will happen now after Netanyahu's fuckass stunt of blocking aid from passing through. Fucking shitty mf. Sorry I'm pissed. )

Some of these anti voting accounts are blatantly maga or just cheaply hired psy ops. Their wording, their racism, their ignorance about local politics, the fact that they've only become active close to elections...

I know some tankies are racist shits that talk over poc regularly when defending their fave dictators but the sheer magnitude I've seen just made me suspicious especially since they've been shitting on every minority that will be affected with Trump winning again.

There's been election interference for quite awhile. There's countless articles showing how these people get paid to pass fake articles and ai in multiple sites including telling people not to vote.

They're even doing digital poc face. I've had fake Latine people and fake Black people start arguments with me while they have obvious ai pictures of "themselves" as if we won't recognize the overused background scenery that comes with ai generated head shots, lol.

Last elections the pendejos were using stockphotos to pass off as poc on twatter and reddit.

They stole a friend's pictures from FB and pretended to be some "Cristina" chick on Twatter cos some white maga wanted to be a Latine black woman so bad to make maga look "accepting" of my community. That was years ago and they deleted their account as soon as my friend threatened to sue but point still stands...

These people will do anything to win.

They're the thieves, liars and destroyers and they love to project their sins on their opposition.

Remember that cos I have a feeling something worse than Jan 6th will happen when Harris wins. The only thing keeping stuff from going real bad will be that it's Biden that's in charge during these elections cos if it had been Trumpshit we would be so fucked when the maga cult snaps again.

And they're already unhinged as shit burning ballots and threatening people (a friend on here got threatened on the street cos she was encouraging people to vote in her area. She didnt even say political party but a maga threatened her cos apparently encouraging voting is a democrat-only thing 🙄.)

If they were winning they wouldn't be attacking our votes. They hate seeing us voting. Our voting counts and is important. Don't let them lie to you. Every single vote matters.