A blackjack dealer at a casino has like 40 cameras watching his every move and they're trained to constantly show their palms to prove they didn't do anything nefarious.
Hell, a cashier in a grocery store has a camera setup in place watching them.
If there was a will to have real elections, I'm not sure why it wouldn't be possible to have some form of monitoring in place that would prevent us from knowing who voted for who, but still have some form of visual record of the proceedings.
I do think cheating is 100% certain in this election for many reasons, but the "devil's advocate" argument that a Democrat can make to explain this seeming disparity in the stats is that Orange Man is just very polarizing. More rural people came out for Trump (why he won more counties than ever before) but also more city people came out for Biden (their explanation for why Biden got so many votes).
In and of itself, this factoid is very interesting, but not a kill shot or proof of anything other than a deep urban/rural divide right now.
I suspect that masks used in a clinical setting by trained doctors generally do work 95-99% of the time. They put the mask on carefully, don't touch their face, and use the mask for one task in one room, and then take it off carefully.
In real world usage by non-trained people, things are different.
The problem is that normal people aren't always using N95 masks once for less than 2 hours. They'll often wear the same mask all day, or for days.
They'll go days/weeks/months between washing their masks. I'm sure people will be breathing in a colony of bacteria and giving themselves pneumonia.
They'll constantly be touching their face and adjusting their face diaper and spreading germs that way.
Because they have the mask on, they'll be super confident and avoid any kind of social distancing. (Ever seen a sandwich shop worker handling cash while wearing gloves, and he thinks he's doing the right thing just because he's wearing gloves? Masks give people the same false confidence that they're immune)
Perhaps. But if this was the concern, was it documented anywhere before the election? Is there a pre-November 3 email trail that says "Hey we're worried about Covid with crowds standing together on election day. Let's speed up the process by using markers on election day as that's just a bit faster and the machines work 100% perfectly with them."
And this merits an explanation for why the switch. If you want to use markers on election day because it's faster, ok fine, but why not use markers all of the time? Don't you want pre-election day voting to go fast too? Why the sudden switch?
Without a great explanation, there doesn't appear to be a reason to have early votes with pens and election day votes by markers. Now, maybe there's a good explanation, but it's hard to see.
Do the vote counting machines have a sensitivity setting? If so, how is it altered? And are there application logs for changes?
Here's just one way (out of many) a fraud could occur in this election. They could set the sensitivity setting to normal before election day, so the early voting is all normal and legit.
On election day, when heavy Trump voting is expected, you dial the sensitivity setting down just a bit so that some percentage of votes by marker or votes that don't completely fill in the circle are missed (is it 1%?, 5%, or more?). Even a calibration test in the morning of the election wouldn't necessarily catch this if you have a stack of test ballots that are well filled in.
Perhaps after the in person vote, you swap the setting back to sensitive so you capture the mail in (fraud) ballots perfectly, and anybody checking the machine sensitivity wouldn't see that it was set to low sensitivity during the in-person vote.
Top Investigator 4chan is suggesting that this was a paper ballot that was scanned and then OCR'd, and the OCR detected one of the l's as i's. Backing this up is the slight crease in the middle of one of the pages. Not sure how that would get there if this was the original file and they deliberately put an l as an i. I'd keep an open mind on this one.
If it was just dumb counting software, it should be relatively simple. What should just be a simple counting program with full paper logs of every action taken probably has morphed into something that tries to do way too much.
Enterprise software companies usually pile every random feature into their program, schmooze and wine and dine the executives in charge of making the final decision, and then give the purchaser easy justification for choosing the complicated software because they get treated like a king and can easily justify buying the complex software because it has more features.
Even besides manipulation and weighting functions, I'd imagine this software has lots of tools for communicating with other machines, sending and reporting data to central sources, being remotely controllable, and many other features that are unnecessary for the core functionality. Buried within this complexity it's easy to encounter actual bugs and hide manipulation functionality even from employees trained in this software's use.
What should be used is some kind of simple, open source counting software available on sites like Github and fully audited every year by multiple nerds.
Please fact check me on this, but as I understand what happened with Virginia, the expansion of the Federal workforce brought more left leaning people to the area. They then voted to bring in lots of immigrants further pushing the area left. There may or may not be cheating going on (probably there is) but they could make the argument that it's now a blue-leaning state.
I have no real knowledge of how media outlets get their data from states, what technology is involved and how this industry works, what the server setup is, etc.
All I can really contribute is this. Here is the page that graph appears on. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-virginia-president.html
The source cited on the website is edison research which appears to be this company. https://www.edisonresearch.com/ I have no idea where they get their data, where and how it's transferred to the NYT, etc.
This appears to be the API endpoint for NYT where that page populates the data from. https://static01.nyt.com/elections-assets/2020/data/api/2020-11-03/race-page/virginia/president.json
You can look at the timeseries object in the API output to examine the data. Look at Timestamp 2020-11-04T05:07:23Z Biden had a 52.4% to 46% lead with 3,572,807 votes in, and an estimated total of 76% of the votes processed (I assume that's what eevp stands for)
**The next timestamp at 2020-11-04T05:12:38Z shows Biden at 48.2% and Trump at 50.2% with 3,199,165 votes in (fewer than the last time stamp) at an estimated 76% of the votes processed. (fewer votes)
The next timestamp at 2020-11-04T05:26:21Z shows 3,390,813 votes (also less than the 2020-11-04T05:07:23Z timestamp) in and the estimated votes at 76%**
The next timestamp at 2020-11-04T05:26:48Z has the estimated vote count go to 80% with 3,782,386 votes.
The bolded data in the middle is odd, why did the NYT API give out old data and showing the estimated vote total stay at 76%? Was it New York Times or Edison that might have screwed up? There's more than 1 explanation, here's a few possibilities.
- It was some attempt at rigging votes, and somehow they screwed up the process. It's impossible to know if it was Edison, NYT, or the state that did this. A mathematician diving into the timestamps here would probably be able to better tell if the numbers make sense.
- Some data entry somewhere in the process was wrong and some intern entered in old data by accident in their election reporting system.
- Software bugs. Running a big live event like this is really hard. You can run tests and hope everything is working, but you're under a lot of pressure with I assume a lot of moving parts while your website is under extreme traffic load.
- Somewhere in the process from state to edison to NYT, some caching server served up old data somehow. I don't know election technology setups at all so it's tough to comment further.
As a web developer, I'd say there's a potential plausible explanation for oscillating counts like this. If you have a few different caching servers that the election sites are frequently hitting to fetch data from, and somehow hit an old count, depending on how the servers are setup there's a potential to temporarily show old data until the databases get consistent. In order to prove this you'd have to examine the frontend and backend code. I'd put odds at this being the explanation at extremely small, but there's a possibility that something like this or other technical issues could be the reason.
If high voter turnout is the only argument in favor of fraud (I'd hope there's better ones), I'd think it would be tough to convince a reasonable judge about fraud. With the Kenosha shootings and riots taking place there this year, a Democratic lawyer can make the argument that people there were just really amped up about voting.
If you work in tech, you'll notice pretty quickly that certain groups tend to be pretty nepotistic towards hiring members of their own group. If you get one of them in a leadership position or HR, the hiring will tend to sway heavily in that direction rather quickly and the organization will change in makeup over time.
I don't begrudge a group for prioritizing their own. I just wish every group was allowed that right. There's only 1 group that is not allowed to have any sort of interest in working with individuals who are somewhat like them.
If racism is wrong, as we've been taught, then it should be a universal rule that applies to all groups. But in practice, it's only 1 group that is singled out as the root of all evil.
H1-Bs, it's not about finding people able to do the job, it's about finding people willing to do the job when the job is antithetical to American values. The set of leftist Americans willing to do the job and Americans who can code well enough to do the job isn't big enough for what they need.
I knew that Silicon Valley had a lot of foreigners, but I didn't realize it was so many. Each of these big tech firms has thousands, according to this. https://insights.dice.com/2019/10/22/h-1b-apple-google-facebook/ Amazon isn't listed in that graph, but they also have thousands according to other articles.
I think many of them really are "fine people" (KEK) who actually have American values, but they're in a position of extreme vulnerability having an H1-B visa. The Commie boss they have who wants to do bad things probably doesn't have to lean on them too hard to have them do unethical things because of the implication that they might be fired, lose their visa, and have their life flipped around if they don't follow orders. The threat of being sent back to the designated streets of Mumbai when you've tasted life in America is probably overwhelming.
Regardless of the national security implications of H1-B, it's a shit deal for the workers and should be very heavily scaled back (only allow H1-Bs for $400,000 or more salary or something so there's no wage pressure against the majority of tech workers, only allow it for actual world class experts), if not entirely eliminated.
In a normal working class Brooklyn New York neighborhood here, not the hipster or activist parts of town. I've seen far more public support for Trump than 2016, especially among black folks.
Many people hate Trump's personality or have heard some bit of fake news about him that they haven't managed to shake free of yet, but literally everybody I've talked to hates what's going on in the city and despise Cuomo and DeBlasio. People can't live in NYC with cops not supported and crime being allowed to increase. Businesses are shutting down left and right due to crazy ChinaVirus rules. Nobody can go out to eat at a restaurant like normal times and enjoy it. Most normal people see the economic death spiral the city is in where taxpayers flee, leaving behind the people who don't pay taxes. It's not sustainable. I think just the ~5% of crazy commies really like this state of affairs right now.
I'd still think that getting a victory in NY is unlikely, but Trump will have a far stronger showing here than polls will predict. If the fix wasn't in and there was all in-person voting, I'd think Trump would have a chance of winning NY if he focused on it.
If it wasn't so sad on a personal level for Hunter, and if it wasn't so devastatingly bad for the US to have high-ranking political figures under foreign adversaries thumb, I think this story would be hilarious in the context of a comedy.
Be the black sheep son of the US Vice President
Have enough money through corruption to buy unlimited Cocaine and laptops.
Have Random Cocaine Benders every other week where you lose a new laptop with high-level criminal acts every time.
Run your staff ragged buying you and setting up a new laptop every week
Your dad has dementia and is trying his best to keep you out of trouble
Part of the reason why going so hard to get along with North Korea was an interesting play. North Korea is one of the places that has these in abundance. If you can swing them over to work with us, both sides can greatly benefit. Who knows what's going on internally on NK and where we really stand, but a few years of peace could start to open up those doors a bit.
The prayers for him worked. 6 months, drug free! Keep it up George.