Howtown
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New Video: Adam attempts voter fraud
🕑 Added 2024-10-25 12:48:32 +0000 UTCWhen we started talking about making an episode related to the impending US election, we realized that we didn't understand, at a fundamental level, how they work. So Adam spent a few weeks immersed in court transcripts and cybersecurity studies, talking to election workers and security experts - to find out if he could steal an election.
As part of his research he spoke to a poll watcher from the 2024 Venezuelan election - and we made a little video about that for our Howtown Heroes on Patreon:
In Shorts:
We're heading to Austin, TX on November 16th to perform a live show at IMI Fest - and it is all about how we measure the spiciness of peppers! (There's a surprising amount of drama around this question in the "chilihead" community). If you're in the area, we'd love to see you there.
Patreon has kept us afloat during this first 5 (!) months of Howtown, and we are so grateful to you all. As we approach 6 months, we're thinking hard about how to make Patreon the center of the community we're trying to build. More soon!
Adam & Joss
Comments
Joss
A lot of states (including PA) use this system called ERIC (that David mentions in his comment) that share new voter registration data - this allows them to remove voters from the rolls who have recently registered somewhere else. It's a pretty good system - and certainly better than nothing - the only problem is that many republican led states refuse to participate in ERIC thanks to conspiracy theories that under the control of George Soros.
Chaston Kome
What prevents me from voting in two states (maybe I moved recently)?
David Weintraub
The idea that mail in ballots allow for vote buying is pretty silly. Once my ballot is mailed in, there’s no way to see who I voted for. It’s just like at a voting booth. There are two ways of cheating at an election: “wholesale” and “retail”. Individual vote buying and voter fraud are retail methods. They are complex, hard to do, and easily caught as shown by the Howtown video. True election cheating is done wholesale. In 2000 in Florida, over a hundred thousand votes, most in Democratic heavy population centers were simply not counted. Thousands of voters, mainly minorities who the Democrats counted on suddenly found themselves off the voter lists on Election Day. Florida’s governor was Jeb Bush, the brother of the Republican candidate for president, and he let it be known he’d do everything in his power to win the state for his brother. The person in charge of the election, the Secretary of State, Catherine Harris, was the chairman of the Bush election campaign. In 2000, the entire election came down to Florida, and the Florida administration did everything in its power to give the state to Bush. This included preventing ballots from being counted by creating impossibly tight deadlines to finish recounting votes. And culminated in the Supreme Court opinion that basically gave the state to Bush. The full story was covered in this ClimateTown video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jucDFrO89Ko Americans are whipped up into a frenzy about retail voter fraud. In the meantime, wholesale voter fraud is rife. In Florida, Ron DeSantis has dispatched sheriffs into questioning recently registered voters about their registration and demanding documentation: https://news.yahoo.com/news/ron-desantis-insists-voter-intimidation-204740704.html In Texas, the Attorney General raided the homes of Latino voters in an effort to intimidate voters: https://www.tpr.org/government-politics/2024-09-29/federal-judge-in-san-antonio-cripples-ag-ken-paxtons-vote-fraud-investigation Much of the “anti-voter fraud” tactics are purposefully making it harder to vote for certain populations. Required photo ID where college IDs and government IDs aren’t valid, but gun IDs like in Texas are meant to make voting difficult for certain populations. North Dakota’s requirement that all voters must have a physical mailing address and not a PO Box makes it impossible for many Native Americans to register. And anyone who works in an election system knows how badly they are run. They are terribly underfunded and the data keeping is poor. In Republican states, efforts to “clean voter rolls” based upon names, birthdates, and social security numbers has proven to mainly affect minorities. Yet, these same states have dropped out of ERIC, a voter verification system designed to find voters who moved from one state to another. You want to fight “voter fraud”, it’s the wholesale you’ve got to fight.
