1y ago

Stunning Republican Probe Finds 4,000 Missing Votes From Trump-Biden Election — Votes TAKEN FROM Biden

www.mediaite.com

The reporting errors were presumably a consequence of the results tapes not being programmed to a format that was compatible with state reporting requirements. Attempts to correct this issue appear to have created errors. The reporting errors did not consistently favor one party or candidate but were likely due to a lack of proper planning, a difficult election environment, and human error.
...
The discrepancies did not affect the outcome of any of the elections, but they did add to a growing list of defeats for Trump’s election lies.

55 comments

Surprise, surprise. Yet another accusation turns out to be an admission. Colour me shocked.
- What's surprising is, they actually admitted they found it, rather than dragging out a report until nobody cares anymore
  
  It's three years later. How much longer could you drag this news out?
  
  I could be misremembering, but I feel like I remember them admitting it in Arizona, too.
- Every conservative accusation is actually a confession.
  Just a reminder, they are actively trying to steal this phrase right now.
  
  Just a reminder, they are actively trying to steal this phrase right now.
  Oh? I'm out of the loop on this one. Any links to this sort of idiodicy? I'm genuinely curious how they could possibly coopt this.
“We know you cheated because we cheated and lost so that means you cheated better than us”
- Best explanation of projection for this that I’ve seen
- "Do you know how I see that you ate them three by three? When I ate two by two and you were silent." Lazarillo de Tormes (1556).
- I read that in White Goodman‘a voice.
  “Ball me Blazer!”
- The GOP; Gaslight, Obstruct, Project.
  Abandon any quantifiable substance, merely control the narrative.
  Power for powers sake. Absolute power corrupting absolutely.
Most republicans don’t actually care about cheating as long as it benefits them. Republicans didn’t say shit when Bush Jr got elected by hook and crook.
- Especially since 2 recent supreme court appointees were involved is the legal crap to overturn Florida
  
  Plus Roberts makes three in total.
  Let me reiterate that: an entire third of the current Supreme Court worked in furtherance of a successful Republican coup 24 years ago.
  
  And Kavanaugh was one of the lawyers who was investigating Clinton in one of the most obviously politically-motivated independent counsel investigations in modern history
  Dude was pushing Q Anon theories before it was cool
  Kavanaugh also argued in favor of investigating the suicide of Vince Foster, the White House deputy counsel, even though two prior investigations had already concluded that his death was a suicide.
- Most republicans don’t actually care about ~~cheating~~ anything as long as it benefits them. FTFY
Republicans will never stop trying to steal elections.
That's the most honest Republican probe yet.
I mean, that's pretty bad in itself. You'd think for a national election someone could find programmers able to make formats match and catch errors properly.
What were you guys voting on anyway? MySpace bands?
- The UK has humans count pieces of paper with X next to candidates names.
  It's pretty cheap and it works really well.
  And it's really hard to mess with the thousands of votes needed to swing an election because that's a lot of paper.
  
  Republicans were against that in 2000, I imagine they still are
  
  Physical votes need to be paired with digital votes so the two can corroborate each other. The paper tickets should be gps tagged, signed for at all times, and remotely monitored, their location backed up in the cloud.
  Ensure the numbers are correct with a clear path to find discrepancies.
  It's too easy for a dozen hundred crates to end up in the bottom of a river. Every step needs to guarded against humans doing humanity.
  Distribution and logistics are an obvious area AI could/should take over. We already relinquish scrutiny to the "algorithm".
  But that might actually be beneficial to humanity, so don't hold your breath.
- lol no
  It should be paper and humans. I know the comic is meant to be funny, but it is accurate.
  
  Am software engineer, can confirm
- It's not that easy... There's a bunch of proprietary systems, each adapted to dozens of specific regulations.
  Id say every 200 lines or so of code you make a mistake. Sometimes you hit the wrong key, sometimes you have a brain fart, sometimes there's some complex interplay that leads to occasional issues.
  A good programmer catches like 90% of them. Giving time for self-testing catches another few percent. A rock solid design with high automated test coverage might cut mistakes by a factor of 10. Add in great qa (a low paid role with low status and easily cut for profit) and you might get 90% of whatever is left
  There's no perfect code, and if you have to interface with another company jealously guarding their own implementation? They might give you a sample file and a short format definition. Is it correct? Can everyone read the spec and come away with the same understanding? Is there room for a bad actor to put their finger on the scales?
  It's just beyond human capability to write perfect code, even in the perfect environment. And the ideal solution is redundancy - ideally you'd have like 5 teams running very different software in parallel for each vote and count, and you'd debug any situation where they don't all agree and recount.
  But that would be ungodly expensive and politically impossible... There's room to do better, but there's no money in it
  
  There's a bunch of proprietary systems
  interface with another company jealously guarding their own implementation
  See, this is dumb. Not you, I mean. Program to format text documents and automate office paperwork, sure. I prefer TeX but YMMV. But how do you commercialise voting? Oh, "it's America". I guess.
  There was a good Tom Scott that pointed out the problem of electronic voting is not just the reliability and trustworthiness of the systems, but the transparency for ordinary people to know it's trustworthy.
  You can't achieve that perfectly with computers - not even with paper - but it's important. Obviously to me, that would mean having the system open source, with closed (for extra security) extra measures for auditing. I understand them not doing that, but the government not wanting the voting software and systems to be fully open to government? That just blows the mind ...though I kind of expected it.
  As to redundancy and lack of bugs, there are some impressive programs out there by people who've got what it takes to make things very precise from formal definitions and so on (cf some of the Functional Programming community, amongst others, and certain un-bloated well-defined security things). Does the American government not have access to such people? Did they spend all their money on TV shows so they've none left for good programmers? And tallying election votes is not really the most elaborate of tasks, more one that needs formally defining very carefully. No ML professors left over from the dark ages who can write a formal spec as a PhD? How about all those NSA lot who are supposed to be able to make spyware so clever it slips between the cracks in Apple phones? I suppose that's a field more of try lots of things and hope some work, but still.
  Sorry, rant over ;-)
"find the votes"
"WAIT, NOT LIKE THAT"
It's always projection.
- Not really; that would imply Republicans deliberately arranged the miscounting of those votes.
I believe the old American adage applies well here, "who ever smelt it delt it*
Stunning to who, at this point? Nobody should be stunned by any of this.
- I read the "stunning" as sarcasm, but who knows at this point.
  
  sTuNnInG
- Stunned that they owned up to it and didn't bury the result
  
  You know what? In that context, I guess I am stunned.
4,000 total.
Donald Trump overcount: 2,327 votes
Joe Biden undercount: 1,648 votes
Just under a 4,000 vote swing.
Biden won the contest statewide by more than 450,000 votes.
That can’t be the headline. It is.
Ah the irony
results tapes not being programmed to a format that was compatible
Tapes? Not drives or discs? I mean, even punch cards makes more sense than this (if it's one card for one ballot).
- It's understandable to be surprised, but tapes are not an obsolete technology. They are still, by-far, the best price value for long-term data storage. particularly for storing backups. Guaranteed you use websites or apps that use tapes in their infrastructure, possibly even this one. Give them a google if you're curious.
- Tapes are used all the time for data storage, far more than discs.
  
  Just to be clear, they look more like ADAT/VHS cassettes than they do those big spools of reel-to-reel you see in movies with old mainframes. Pretty sure the only people who use those tapes anymore are the computer museums with working examples on display.
The reporting errors were presumably a consequence of the results tapes not being programmed to a format that was compatible with state reporting requirements. Attempts to correct this issue appear to have created errors. The reporting errors did not consistently favor one party or candidate but were likely due to a lack of proper planning, a difficult election environment, and human error.
wut?

55 comments