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You want to campaign on improving election security and transparency (hopefully without being misleading about all of the systems already in place and the secur

by pclowes 4mo ago

You want to campaign on improving election security and transparency (hopefully without being misleading about all of the systems already in place and the security, statistical analysis, and auditing already done)? Go for it. That is very different than claiming fraud without evidence.

rayiner 4mo ago
The problem is that Americans, including our political class, are innumerate: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mara-gay-gets-dragged-doing-170030795.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mara-gay-gets-dragged-do.... They react to things based on gut feelings, not mathematical analysis. To them, isolated incidents, anomalies, and irregularities—which always exist—are “evidence” of stolen elections, without proof that those anomalies were significant enough to alter the outcomes. Let me pick an example that hopefully isn’t controversial. I was in Iowa in 2019. Mayor Pete got on stage and credited Stacey Abrams’ claims that she had won the 2018 georgia gubernatorial election. Those claims were based on isolated incidents of people who say their voter registrations were wrongfully deleted. That kind of story hits people in the gut. But people are really, really bad at evaluating mathematically whether such incidents could have materially changed the outcome in an election that was won by 50,000 votes. Election security must similarly operate on the gut feeling level. Look at the video of how they do things in Taiwan: taking out each vote and holding it up for everyone to see. Was it in response to evidence of people cheating? It’s to impress upon people the appearance of a system that is transparent and difficult to corrupt. It’s gut feeling weighed against gut feeling. People must be so impressed by the obvious security of the election system that they dismiss the inevitable anomalies as immaterial.

by pclowes 4mo ago

rayiner 4mo ago

The problem is that Americans, including our political class, are innumerate: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mara-gay-gets-dragged-doing-170030795.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mara-gay-gets-dragged-do.... They react to things based on gut feelings, not mathematical analysis. To them, isolated incidents, anomalies, and irregularities—which always exist—are “evidence” of stolen elections, without proof that those anomalies were significant enough to alter the outcomes. Let me pick an example that hopefully isn’t controversial. I was in Iowa in 2019. Mayor Pete got on stage and credited Stacey Abrams’ claims that she had won the 2018 georgia gubernatorial election. Those claims were based on isolated incidents of people who say their voter registrations were wrongfully deleted. That kind of story hits people in the gut. But people are really, really bad at evaluating mathematically whether such incidents could have materially changed the outcome in an election that was won by 50,000 votes. Election security must similarly operate on the gut feeling level. Look at the video of how they do things in Taiwan: taking out each vote and holding it up for everyone to see. Was it in response to evidence of people cheating? It’s to impress upon people the appearance of a system that is transparent and difficult to corrupt. It’s gut feeling weighed against gut feeling. People must be so impressed by the obvious security of the election system that they dismiss the inevitable anomalies as immaterial.