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.
republicans would NEVER
IDK about projection, but if you convince people that a system is corrupt, they’re much more likely to cheat.
A little of column A; a little of column B.
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.
Perhaps they wanted it to be caught, where it wouldn’t make a difference if it wasn’t, in order to shore up their future claims that more of the same occurred in more competitive districts. As well as undermining faith in the election as a whole.
That’s actually a very insightful theory.
But if I had to bet on it, I’d still put my money on outright stupidity.
the county totals don’t matter for president, it is counted statewide.
And the statewide margin was still a 14 point margin. Too much to overcome with 12 stolen ballots.
testing the waters. probably would have kept doing it if they weren’t caught, or tried on a larger scale in future elections.
There are more things to vote on than just the President. State representation is important.
You’re right, it is. In 2020 not a single race in Mesa County was competitive. Likewise, none of the state-wide races were competitive enough to have their results changed even if everyone in Mesa County voted the same way.
Every accusation is a confession
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.
“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.
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.
I would bet the house on the motive and who they voted for.
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.
The motive was trying to change the outcome of the election. There are zero other possible motives.
I guess we’ll never know.
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.
0% would have gotten through if the judge had done their job.
appeals responsibility of the job
Am I doing it right, Georgia‽
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 .
Technically there’s a non-zero chance of the margin being within three votes for any population of voters.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Wait, how exactly could a crypto hash connect a vote to a voter and still be anonymous…
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.
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…?
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.
It could go a number of ways.
-
An attempt to stuff a ballot box for their preferred candidate
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An attempt to invalidate voting by mail by conducting obvious fraud, then publicly blame vote by mail
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An attempt to vote for an opponent to claim the opposition is conducting fraud
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“We don’t know the motive,” she said.
are you fucking serious?
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.
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?
If they were a Democrat, we would “know the motive.”
It will be important to publicize which side is implicated ASAP - and do so clearly with an authoritative voice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’
Easy to figure out? But that plays right into their scheme of making the other party look like they were comitting fraud. /s
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.
source?
Personal conversations with election judges over the years.
Hearsay much? The election judges I speak to go on and on about how clear and transparent our elections are.
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.
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.
The phrase is “a few bad apples spoil the bunch”.
Which is why we don’t do vote by mail ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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
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.
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Why?
Safeguards preventing fraud worked here. Your comment doesn’t make sense in relation to the story you filed it under
They prevented fraud at the cost of voter anonymity, this is exactly what is wrong with voting by mail. You cannot protect both.
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.
No instances of being thwarted doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Just means it’s successful
