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Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook (nymag.com)
Max Read makes his case via New York Magazine for how Facebook was the reason for Donald Trump's surprise victory on November 8th. Though, to be fair, "Facebook" is called out specifically due to its large online presence, but in reality all the "large and influential boards and social-media platforms where Americans now congregate to discuss politics" are to blame. The main reason why has to do with Facebook's "inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news" that is spread rampantly and effortlessly across the platform: Fake news is not a problem unique to Facebook, but Facebook's enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies -- i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm -- makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three. Many got hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of shares, likes, and comments; enough people clicked through to the posts to generate significant profits for their creators. The valiant efforts of Snopes and other debunking organizations were insufficient; Facebook's labyrinthine sharing and privacy settings mean that fact-checks get lost in the shuffle. Often, no one would even need to click on and read the story for the headline itself to become a widely distributed talking point, repeated elsewhere online, or, sometimes, in real life. When roughly 170 million people in North America use Facebook every day and nearly forty-four percent of all adults in the U.S. say they get news from Facebook, the spread of "fake news" is all the more detrimental. The problem is that Facebook seems "insecure about its power, unsure of its purpose, and unclear about what its responsibilities really are." Earlier this year, Facebook acted on what was right and wrong by censoring the iconic "napalm girl" photograph, later issuing a statement saying "These are difficult decisions and we don't always get it right." Of course, lies and exaggerations have always been central to real political campaigns; Facebook has simply made them easier to spread, and discovered that it suffers no particular market punishment for doing so -- humans seem to have a strong bias toward news that confirms their beliefs, and environments where those beliefs are unlikely to be challenged.
that's why. it couldn't be the candidate or the policies that lost.
that's why. it couldn't be the candidate or the policies that lost.
Trump won because of facebook?
I've lost track of the rationalizations, the reasons why Trump won.
Anyone have a list?
...that Trump won because the media could not control the narrative despite their best efforts.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Hillary is almost the perfect foil to her husband in politics. If Bill divorced her and ran as a Republican he'd probably have crushed her 70/30 that is how unpopular she is.
Look at her stats. She is damn near in McCain/Palin territory. She is the Nickelback of Democratic candidates.
Please stop living in a bubble and you will realize why it could have never been anyone else. How many established Republicans ran against him? Dozens, he slaughtered them for the same reason he destroyed Hillary. If you are looking around for a reason why he beat your establishment crook, don't look at Facebook, try the mirror.
Hoaxes were always there.
Trump won because Hillary lost. She lost it because she mistakenly took SJW outrage for actually what people think. Turns out, there was/is silent majority and they don't care one bit about SJW issues but do care about corruption, warmongering, foundation profiteering, and DNC machine rigging.
this morning, trying to figure out why Hillary lost. It was because the same party candidate after a two President usually loses. It was because she was a woman. It was because the current President is black. Now it was because of Facebook.
Absolutely any possible reason except that the voting public do not like and do not trust Hillary Clinton. She lost because Trump was less distasteful.
(And because he beat her at her own game, on her home turn. Her whole political career has been based on being so vicious and nasty that no one would dare cross her. And it turns out Trump was even more vicious and nasty. And Americans love that shit.)
So let me get this straight, the problem is that there wasn't enough control over the news by the Democratic party?
Never mind how Wikileaks shows us that CNN leaked all the debate questions to Donna Brazille to help them cheat. Never mind how the Washington Post held a clandestine fundraiser with the DNC with services in kind that they kept off the books, much to the lawyers' dismay. And we have Correct the Record's "nerd virgins" (their words, not mine) shilling for dough on every social medium possible, etc., etc., etc.
I wonder when they'll realize that their own propaganda machine is half the problem?
They don't know why they lost and that's why they lost.
Trump won because Americans don't trust the government to consider their best interests any more. I mean, I see it in your comments here all the time. Clinton didn't do enough to separate herself from the institution, I mean, did she even try at all? Trump took it because it's America's attempt to fight fire with fire. You feel betrayed, so send in the betrayer, a bull dog.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
http://www.snopes.com/2016/06/...
she and the Democrats abandoned the Rust Belt. Michael Moore described election night back in July: Donald Trump was going to take Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, plus the Romney states, and win. That's pretty much what happened, except Trump also got Florida. Hillary conceded Ohio, paid only a little attention to Pennsylvania, took Michigan and Wisconsin completely for granted, and lost.
Or actually the LACK of the Donald's access to his Twitter feed for that last month...
Think about it. Every time he got into a Twitter war at 3AM over some foolishness that irked him, it got out of hand and he fell in the polls. So that last month where he stopped being stupid on Twitter is what cost Clinton the election.... Well, that and the fact that she had some serious flaws to overcome....
So, the next election cycle we make all the candidates debate on Twitter. Either side can initiate a debate on a question by posting it with a given tag. Points are given for the wittiest come back with difficulty points for quick responses before they can be fully vetted and focus grouped, as well as a bonus given for the time of day. All responses MUST be posted by the candidate themselves and they must personally craft every answer without outside help.... It will be a blast, trust me, and Trump will LOOSE BIGLY for sure.
The problem wasn't Facebook... It was Twitter...
sarc off
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
No, the problem is that ya'll were too busy reading about how the moon landing was faked to bother to find out how much of a con man Trump is.
Someone had to do it.
I at least as many anti-Trump memes as anti-Hilary memes.
That's kind of the point. Unfiltered access to the modern equivalent of the yellow press means that people were free to follow their prejudice (in the Latin sense of the word) down the rabbit hole of their choosing.
More people voted for Hillary than voted for Trump, but no matter the outcome, the margin was vanishingly small. Basically, people just chose their narrative and cleaved to it, nourishing and sustaining it with the self-reinforcing feed that Facebook provides.
Trump is not going to 'drain the swamp', and Hillary was never anything but the enemy of ISIS. But in the final analysis, nobody fucking cares. And why should they? We just watched two straw dolls dance for 15 months, each accompanied by a back story knocked together by the political equivalent of an oxycontin-addicted non-Union Hollywood hack who's just been told the franchise needs a new Avenger.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
The devs at reddit had a special algorithm running that artifically suppressed the trump discussion page from appearing on the front "most active" page list.
This came to light about a week ago, when the algorithm had a bug and stopped working, and the trump pages started showing up.
It was quickly corrected, though...
As more and more voting fraud is exposed, Hillary's chances will just keep increasing.
You mean like this kind of voting fraud:
http://alexanderhiggins.com/st...
You can ignore this if your reality bubble won't allow it. Surely Berkley must be part of the vast right wing conspiracy that Hillary's wrong doing gets attributed to.
> There is no evidence CTR exists or ever did.
https://correctrecord.org/
The DNC had a strong foothold online behind Bernie. Large amounts of youth waited in lines for hours to vote for Bernie, do you think they did the same for Hillary? Trump had the bored, young, white, male demographic if for no reason other than it pissed off someone they knew.
And that demographic hangs out on Facebook, Reddit and 4Chan. Tada, you now 'control' online.
Meanwhile when Bernie voters logged into facebook they were told they weren't wanted in the DNC or in November from a few people there to correct the record.
My thoughts exactly, regarding the former point. Considering how much misinformation was spewing out of the mainstream media regarding Trump, I wouldn't be surprised if he had MORE fake news about him on social media. Plus there was enough REAL news painting Hillary as a corrupt bought-and-paid-for politician, so I don't know how much of a dent fake news would have made. Not to mention that it seems like a lot of people were already firmly either anti-Hillary or anti-Trump, so they probably would have ignored the fake news for their candidate of choice, preventing them from having it affect their decision. All these people scrambling to produce theories on why Hillary lost when figuring out the real reason is easy: Ask the Trump supporters why they didn't vote for Hillary.
Without him, and if Johnson voters had gone for Clinton, that would have flipped MI, WI, PA and FL.
So basically what you're saying is that if all of the Clinton voters had voted for Johnson, he would have won. Clinton cost Johnson the election, now we're stuck with Trump!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Dealing with this problem that the news most people get these days hasn’t been carefully vetted as it was (or at least they tried) back in the days of Uncle Walter Cronkite is important. The Internet, with it’s ability to spread unfounded rumor at a wildfire pace, has broken America. I’m not talking about this current election, this has been going on for some time now. The question comes down to how does an organization like Facebook help keep down the levels of total bullshit without censorship problems. And I’m talking both sides of the political spectrum here. One way might be to take on a vetting responsibility in which bullshit posts aren’t removed but are edited by adding a statement something along the lines of “this statement is the most puro of bullshit” along with a link to something like Snopes where the issue is explained.
This won’t fix this problem, but it might help people see that there’s more to a story than what their good buddies or BFFs are posting on Facebook. And no, it’s not perfect, but it’s also not censorship. You can post whatever nonsense you feel like, but the owner of the site has the right AND THE OBLIGATION to watch for and flag nonsense. It would be nice if everyone had a working bullshitometer, but the newer models of People seem to have dropped that module.
CNN booted her for that: http://www.politico.com/blogs/...
Of course, this was just weaseling out, because Donna isn't the only one who was involved in this. But no, it's not fair to give one side a copy of the test in advance, that's just cheating. If they want to do that kind of thing fairly, they should just publish the questions in advance, so it's about ideas and policies, not about the media trying to tell us what to think. And yes, they were lying in that clip.
There were a large number of younger Bernie supporters that went anywhere but Clinton.
I know a few that went Johnson. Some Stein. Some just stayed home.
Bernie won Michigan (against all polls) and Wisconsin. Stein voters alone would have put Clinton over the top in Wisconsin or Michigan. They assumed wrong which way the fallout from the primaries would fall. The DNC got exactly what it wanted after throwing a lot of people under the bus along the way.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people just checked out of the political process after the DNC this year. Not changing to Republican but not turning out to vote for the Democrats.
Then less than 20% of the country supported Hillary too. Current estimate is that the popular vote is within ~200,000 votes nationwide.
The only conspiracies I've read about were those hatched by the DNC, which we learned about in their own DKIM validated emails. I note that everyone who posts things like this never bothers to give examples, citations or links.
Free thinking is about examining the sources yourself and coming to your own conclusion, including sources you're predisposed to disagree with. If you cannot even interact with ideas you disagree with, you simply blind yourself and you're in for a rude awakening when your filter bubble suddenly bursts.
the "large and influential boards and social-media platforms where Americans now congregate to discuss politics" are to blame.
Sounds to me like they should be crediting Facebook and other forums with helping people become more involved in the process. For decades voter apathy was bemoaned. Now we have people taking an interest. That's a good thing. Unless you're a loser...
Dr. Carson is smart and has first-hand knowledge of the healthcare system.
Unfortunately he is also insane.
#DeleteChrome
Carson is a retired pediatric neurosurgeon. He knows as much about the business side of healthcare as a cow knows about the inside of a church. That was distressingly obvious during his brief 'campaign'.
And it seems that age is catching up to him. He didn't sound or act like anybody I would want operating on me.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Its not a matter of "control" but getting the truth out there.. so much of what he said was pretty slanderous (blantent lies) and would under any normal circumstances (including him) be actionable in the court of law.. but no one did that.. and rather than keep FAKE news out, it was a matter of, let the disinformation flow.
If I started a campaign against you and lied (literally) at every turn, you would be firing up your axe and had your lawyers on speed dial. If I called out your flaws (not a lie, but kept calling out the actual flaws in you as a candidate) then that would be a different thing.
Virtually every fact-checking site has shown that 98% of what he uttered was a lie (most medium, quite a lot large, and some small), which is being regurgitated as "news". And Facebook (the "news" site it is (even though they keep claiming they are not) is doing nothing to stem the tide. And I say this not just for campaigns but also in general.. (my wife gets more scams and just false stories about so many things that even a single check the link shows its all false.. BUT.. most people don't).
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board -- Mark Twain Look for http://Thebar.steelbeachca
I think the election results disprove that only 20% supported him. I think the truth is a lot of people voted for him that did not want to admit they would. Not because he wasn't their choice, but because the left was so quick to label anyone that supported him as a deplorable, racist, sexist, bigoted misogynist. People that are not any of those things don't like being labeled that. What we're seeing is the attempted suppression of opposition by the left failed and likely actually fueled votes that may not have happened otherwise.
> That only confirms the headers. The bodies of the emails are Russian fabrications.
Okay, so click here and then the "view source" link and you can read the DKIM signature yourself. I'll save you some trouble and copy paste it:
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
d=hillaryclinton.com; s=google;
h=from:mime-version:references:in-reply-to:date:message-id:subject:to
bh=EHIyNFKU1g6KhzxpAJQtxaW82g5+cTT3qlzIbUpGoRY=;
b=JgW85tkuhlDcythkyCrUMjPIAjHbUVPtgyqu+KpUR/kqQjE8+W23zacIh0DtVTqUGD
mzaviTrNmI8Ds2aUlzEFjxhJHtgKT4zbRiqDZS7fgba8ifMKCyDgApGNfenmQz+81+hN
2OHb/pLmmop+lIeM8ELXHhhr0m/Sd4c/3BOy8=
X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
d=1e100.net; s=20130820;
h=x-gm-message-state:from:mime-version:references:in-reply-to:date
bh=EHIyNFKU1g6KhzxpAJQtxaW82g5+cTT3qlzIbUpGoRY=;
b=dEYKdN2vH085sl/02zUgJ1Lr66LV8lRV9Lrqx9SIpfiF1bOLLbIr1Au6AAY5vwg1vS
klK/TvacKT0j8aYADGNWP6BtG5XZ+IME6ydojlufQ3jqksqLkycSJ2ahYhxw4LmCii8n
kja2EKzRFcKGPnfhYnfwBCmIk/D5FWN6+yvpAYSmmZlxsR4b7mTJ8r/NmB7dKRIHeq8b
Ersjyl8edCTfC6nGbUrEEV7C6uQE3N16B5m2XPnRATWSuWj/Nz7ZsM/9snj+rlTjJx5e
wI5Epet9ADtlAWqJw/L/5HCNaAFqyR3QK1/AFjsTk+Q2METC3+0Eo+yMaArw2viFZLu4
hvoQ==
What does that mean? Let's check Wikipedia:
Now, would you like to go back and look at the b and bh parameters in the signature and tell me what those mean? Right, they cover contents (headers and body) as well as the body hash. If you want to make a serious claim that this is fake, give me a link to the blockchain transaction when you win 1 BTC from Erratasec for breaking DKIM.
I'm waiting.
I had a thought earlier today: The internet is the primary vector for the worst epidemic of mental disease ever to strike humanity, on par with the Old World plagues that wiped out New World peoples upon first contact. Here's what I wrote about it elsewhere:
Fuck 4chan. They're responsible for this Trump victory. Actually, fuck the internet in general as it is today, but 4chan is where that shit first gained a foothold.
Trump winning this election happened because of the continuous shitfest of frothing-at-the-mouth rabid drivel that now circulates around 24/7 nonstop. The internet is what lead my dad to turn into a crazy conspiracy theorist who thinks that 9/11 was a coverup for the then-recently-revealed existence of extraterrestrial life awaiting our spiritual awakening ever since the fall of Atlantis at the end of the Pleistocene. It's also what's convinced my original-generation-hippy, lifelong-Democrat, now-disabled mom, who survives entirely off of social programs likely to be cut under Trump, that Obama is a Muslim building a Mosque at Ground Zero, and that Hillary is part of the Illuminati who apparently worship Satan on some hill in Oregon (according to the obviously doctored photos someone posted online), and made her vote Trump for her first Republican president ever.
Once upon a time I was under this blissful delusion that instant worldwide communication would lead to a new enlightenment for the populace in general, but it's become abundantly clear that the only thing keeping an echochamber of the worst, craziest, lowest-common-denominator "truthy" bullshit from drowning what few braincells most people have to rub together was the physical difficulty in that kind of craziness spreading.
I think there's an analogue to be made with biological disease here. Back in the days before modern medicine, cities were about the least healthy places you could live, because being in close physical proximity to so many other people (and animals) made it so much easier for disease to spread; you weren't air-gapped from most people like you would be in the country. I think the same is true of what I guess we'd call "memetic" diseases of the mind: nasty, destructive, viral ideas spread and mutate far more quickly now that everyone is plugged into the internet 24/7, than they could back in the day when they would be contained to whoever Joe McNutbar was ranting to at the local pub.
A further hypothesis: When the Old World first met the New World, the New World people died of Old World plagues but not vice-versa because the Old World had lots of previous exposure to plagues, having had lots of big dense cities for a long time and developing strong immune systems piecemeal over time enough that those plagues could just be everywhere in the Old World and most people were unaffected by them, while New World peoples with their sparser populations had no history of plagues (none that had any survivors to adapt to them at least) and so had both no resistance to the European ones and none to offer in return. I wonder if the earliest netizens, those of us who remember when UseNet was the happening place, are like the Europeans in that analogy. Those of us who grew up with trolls and flamewars and the kinds of crazy that the internet could breed... we got inoculated to it. That crazy was always still around but you know, don't feed the trolls and you'll be fine. We grew up knowing not to believe everything you read because the internet is full of lies.
But now the whole goddamn world is very suddenly connected to that cesspool of lies and madness, and they have no defense against it, so it's spreading like wildfire, mutating into ever-more virulent strains, and wiping out (the minds of) the population at large.
I just hope there are survivors enough to adapt a herd immunity to it some day.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Next your going to blame the onion.
The people who believe whatever shit they read on facebook would otherwise have believed whatever crap their neighbors told them about something they heard from a friend of a friend.
Donald Trump won because of Clinton. There is no way around that.
If a person with decades of experience runs against someone who has no experience in politics and has no organized campaign (according to the media at least), and still loses, there is no one else to blame.
As more and more voting fraud is exposed, Hillary's chances will just keep increasing.
You mean like this kind of voting fraud:
http://alexanderhiggins.com/st...
You can ignore this if your reality bubble won't allow it. Surely Berkley must be part of the vast right wing conspiracy that Hillary's wrong doing gets attributed to.
Or an unreviewed paper by a couple students from Berkley does not count as proof. If election polls and exit polls were that reliable it would also prove that Trump won the general election because of fraud.
Instead it's more likely that old voting machines were not distributed randomly, and the variables that correlated with old voting machines also correlated with support for Clinton. And what ever these variables were, the researchers didn't manage to control for it.
I stole this Sig
So let me get this straight, the problem is that there wasn't enough control over the news by the Democratic party?
Never mind how Wikileaks shows us that CNN leaked all the debate questions to Donna Brazille to help them cheat. Never mind how the Washington Post held a clandestine fundraiser with the DNC with services in kind that they kept off the books, much to the lawyers' dismay. And we have Correct the Record's "nerd virgins" (their words, not mine) shilling for dough on every social medium possible, etc., etc., etc.
I wonder when they'll realize that their own propaganda machine is half the problem?
They don't know why they lost and that's why they lost.
The Democratic party didn't control the news.
Rather reporters are typically educated and self-critical, and in the US political climate these characteristics skew sharply left.
I'm sorry but the right wing media is an absolute joke. Fox News is notorious for pushing flat out lies among its viewership, many of their leading anchors have been caught lying multiple times. But Fox is a minority, most mass media is actually fairly good.
In the past if you wanted to convince people to give you a platform you needed to be smart and have integrity to pass the gatekeepers who had the time and expertise to take a good hard look. So the only mass media the public saw came from people who went through a fairly rigorous vetting process.
Now with social media the gatekeeper is wrong, you can make up an infographic that is complete BS, but as long as it's internally consistent it's just as convincing as an infographic that's completely true.
That being said in this election the mass media failed spectacularly, they got caught feeding the slow drip of a couple minor Clinton scandals while letting multiple major Trump scandals slide by.
I stole this Sig
Donald Trump won for the following reasons.
1. The Mainstream media (MSM) kept telling everyone HRC was going to win, so everyone in rural America and flyover country made 100% sure their vote counted, and wow, did it!
2. The MSM would repeat anything and everything Donald tweeted or posted to Facebook for ratings and the hopes of discrediting him as a clown. This only gave him free press and brought things that were previously politically correct to the forefront for discussion.
3. Trump won, not because everyone wanted Trump, but because the people are collectively sick of the Federal Government constantly intruding in everything from small business to healthcare to trans-gendered high school locker-rooms. The people are sick of being called racist, biggoted, hatemongers or worse anytime they exercise their right to free speech and speak out against the never ending Federal Government Mandates. Trump won because he talked about all the unpopular things like illegal immigration, unfair trade deals, and the collapse of the middle class. Trump and Pence visited rural America and flyover country. They spent time there campaigning, yelling, screaming, brawling, and listening. Trump spent the last hours of election eve in Grand Rapids, Michigan a city with little political power and one that barely matters due to it's geographic proximity to rural northern michigan.
That is why Trump won. It is not because of Facebook.
Just like the UK, it was a full out revolt. This is how a democracy is supposed to work when they feel they aren't being heard. "The People" of the United States were heard this election.
It's all going to be ok. Trump will not destroy America. There is no need to move to Canada. The president is not king and only has a limited amount of power. The pendulum will swing back the other way for awhile and it will either work and benefit the USA or it won't.
In any case, it is time to stop fighting, yelling, screaming and come together to run the country again for the benefit of all. It will all be ok.
Apparently you don't know what gerrymandering is or why it can't work on a state-wide basis.
This election will be the defining moment for these online millennials as they learn to deal and grow the fuck up.
I'm still wondering when slashdot will do that. Literally every summary posted somehow can't deal with the reality that its (obviously) favored side just fucking lost. In this case it blames facebook, of all fucking things.
but because the left was so quick to label anyone that supported him as a deplorable, racist, sexist, bigoted misogynist. People that are not any of those things don't like being labeled that. What we're seeing is the attempted suppression of opposition by the left failed and likely actually fueled votes that may not have happened otherwise.
The word for this is bigotry.
https://www.google.com/search?...
The democrats, and especially the social justice crowd, has been highly bigoted against people who don't share their viewpoint. In my opinion, the most egregious example of it was this:
http://the-toast.net/2013/08/2...
Which only took two years to turn into this:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-g...
TL;DR: Kid gets denied heart transplant because of bad grades and long rap sheet. Doctors were accused of being racist, so he gets heart transplant anyways in spite of this happening to everybody, regardless of race (I personally was initially denied kidney transplant listing myself, though for health reasons which I later resolved.) Two years later, in a criminal rampage, the kid attempts to shoot an old lady in the head during a robery, flees the cops in a high speed chase, strikes a pedestrian, and then dies in a high speed collision with a lightpost. Meanwhile somebody else likely died while waiting for a heart transplant that should have been theirs. Thank you social justice.
Never. And this election just proved it.
By my completely biased viewpoint, issues were discussed like 1% of the time and the cult of personality vs the brick and what they allegedly did over the last decades made up the other 99%.
Personally, I voted policy, not personality.
I also voted for the losing side. But I'm not bitter, after all when your candidates only redeeming value is people seem to hate her slightly less. That's not a campaign strategy. That's desperation.
It was The Creamsicle Charlatan vs. The Pantsuited Enabler!
It should of been on WWE, not our ballots.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Why the fuck do that way. It's an issue at every election. Every. Single. One.
They need to do away with voting machines, period.
Here in Washington (not DC, the other one, no we are not part of Canada...) we do paper ballots. Most are mailed out and we drop them in any of 100's of boxes. There are permanent ones at libraries and the courthouse and hundreds of temporary ones during a general election.
We have a very strict accounting system overlooked by a bi-partisan pollsters at every step.
The mailed ballot has an outer envelope that identifies the voter, and an inner yellow security envelope than can have nothing written on it and the ballot enclosed and sealed.
After it is received they are electronically separated into districts and initially checked against registration rolls. They are then hand checked against voter rolls as the yellow envelopes are separated.
The separated vote then is removed and counted and all votes stored for a period (I'm unsure of how long.).
No problems large enough to make national news. A full paper trail. No internet, no machines to fuck up or be fucked with.
You can fill a vote out online and print it out. But the vote is only accepted at polling places or in-person drops as they don't have a second security envelope like the mailed ones.
Since it never touches the internet, you need physical access to do any fraud. That vastly complicates things compared to a few lines of code.
Sometimes the old fashioned way truly is best.
I don't know how costs compare, but with all the possibility of lawsuits, bad press, recounts and maintenance, I'm guessing it's not an astronomical difference. And I can be fairly confident that the counts are legitimate, as it would take some high-level fraud to cover up a paper trail with so many checks in place.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
To be fair doctors are not supposed to pass moral judgements on their patients. That means that a criminal gets the same life saving treatment as a boy scout. Was this a waste of a good heart that could have helped someone that wasn't total scum instead of this guy? Yes, but was it right to withhold the treatment? I'm not sure that it was.
Looking at RCP it's currently within 2m. That's basically a dead heat. I guess we had a hard time choosing who we hated more as neither are a clear winner with the populous. I think many votes were cast against candidates and not for candidates.
Personally, I voted policy over personality. (not that I agree down the line with either, just ones a tad closer to what I believe in, too bad they don't seem to believe in it once in office)
Seriously this election would of been better represented by the WWE.
(really loud, obnoxious announcer)
"November 8th, 2016, the match of the century is upon us! See the ultimate demonic duel of damnation!"
"The Creamsicle Charlatan vs. The Pantsuited Enabler no holds barred cage match. This is to the finish folks, no tag outs, no substitutions! Get your ballots now!"
It fits WWE better than it fits our ballots....
Kinda drifted off-topic there, damn good micro-brew. That's my story and I'm sticking with it...
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Yep. The strategy now is:
1. Tell them whatever the fuck they want to hear (ban muslims, mexicans are rapists, etc)
2. Get elected
3. Do whatever the fuck you want
We don't seem to have anybody who creates a policy based on what they think is best, and trying to sell it. Instead, they want to know what people want, so they can vacuously promise it.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
>so quick to label anyone that supported him as a deplorable, racist, sexist, bigoted misogynist.
A 100% accurate label. Just because they didn't want to publicly wear the label, doesn't mean it's any less accurate.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
> racist, sexist, bigoted misogynist
I mean, to be fair here. He's done nothing short of put all of those features on full display. You can say "hey I voted on policy" but you also own that shit too.
Just like I own the fact Clinton would make a garbage sysadmin and all the insider BS.
There is a dive into party preference for people who supported Johnson and Stein. One thing that was visible from polling data was that including Johnson or Stein on a poll would see Clinton with a narrower margin over Trump. That is suggestive that third party candidates were leeching from Clinton not Trump. I also recall reading on fivethirtyeight, although I can't find it anymore, information that suggested that if Johnson voters had to pick Clinton or Trump they would be split about 48% Clinton and 52%, something very close to even while Green party supporters were closer to 25% Trump and 75% Clinton.
If we used those ratios then the only state where Trump did not secure 50% of the vote (there were seven, of which one was Utah) that would have flipped from Trump to Hillary was Michigan and that state isn't even declared. If Clinton supporters are blaming third party for Clinton's loss then they're idiots.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
By my completely biased viewpoint, issues were discussed like 1% of the time and the cult of personality vs the brick and what they allegedly did over the last decades made up the other 99%.
That's the media's doing. I watched a lot of Trump rallies, and he would talk about policies he wanted to enact, on trade, on immigration, on the military. So you'd have an hour of substance, with Trump's humor thrown in because that's how you actually get people to want to listen to a speech on trade and immigration. And the media would wait for one sound bite they could take out of context and then scream "TRUMP INSULTS ALL [INSERT GROUP]!!!!" and that would dominate the news cycle for 3 days. And then people online would say "OMG Trump doesn't have any policies!" Yes he does. They're on his website. He talks about them at his rallies. But if all you were watching is CNN then Trump does nothing but scream at Mexican rapists and disabled reporters all day.
The media's been near criminal in their behavior this cycle. They've convinced half the people Trump is literally Hitler, so my FaceBook feed is full of terrified crying women who think America just elected...literally Hitler. And that half their neighbors who voted for literally Hitler are also literally Hitler. It's psychological abuse. I said this when Trump won NH and HuffPo did that ludicrous headline "NEW HAMPSHIRE GOES RACIST SEXIST XENOPHOBIC!" (literally their headline). I wondered, what are people who believe this going to think if Trump wins? Are they going to wake up and realize the media's been lying to them? Or will they now spend their days terrified because they never know which of their friendly neighbors is really a Hitler-loving monster who could murder them at any moment? Judging by my FaceBook feed, it's the later.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.