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Google Surfaces Fake News About Election Results (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Last week, Facebook faced criticism that the platform's habit for surfacing fake news contributed to the election of Donald Trump -- a claim Mark Zuckerberg denied. This week, Google faces a similar problem, as its search algorithm surfaces fake election results. As Mediaite's Dan Abrams first reported, when you search "final election numbers" or "final vote count 2016," the first result in Google's "in the news" box is from a scrappy-looking Wordpress blog called 70 News that appears to be run by one person. The article, posted on November 12th, features the headline "FINAL ELECTION 2016 NUMBERS: TRUMP WON BOTH POPULAR ( 62.9 M -62.2 M ) AND ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTES ( 306-232)HEY CHANGE.ORG, SCRAP YOUR LOONY PETITION NOW!" First, the numbers in this post are inaccurate. Though millions of votes have yet to be counted, but Clinton has already been shown to be leading the popular vote by a sizable margin. Current counts have her ahead by around 668,000 total votes, with some polling experts projecting Clinton will ultimately rack up a 2 million-vote lead. Second, the writer of the 70 News post claims that the source material for the article is "Twitter posts," specifically, this tweet from a user named Michael. Michael, on the other hand, is sourcing an article from the ultra-conservative tabloid USA Supreme, which argues that Clinton might win the number of votes "counted" but will not win the number of votes "cast" because of ignored Republican absentee ballots. (Michael also believes that Trump has been singled out by God to be president of the United States, a conspiracy theory popular with 4chan users who believe that Pepe the Frog is a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian deity.) And yet Michael -- by way of 70 News, by way of Google -- has become the sole source for a story squatting at the top of Google's search results. 70 News has since updated its post with a single line admitting that CNN is showing different numbers -- the headline and the body of the post remains the same.
The absentee ballots may not be counted right away if they can't possibly affect the election results. However, the final certified totals do include all absentee ballots. See http://help.vote.org/article/8...
Why does it matter - that's just a pissing contest. The actual election is held in the Electoral College, which has built-in checks and balances.
States get 1 Elector for each Representative. That number is directly related to the state's population and the number of associated Electors will very closely match the popular vote. Each state also gets 1 Elector per Senator. That number is equal for all states.
Consequently, the result of the Electoral College vote is a balance between the popular vote, and the number of states which a candidate's Electors won.
Those claiming it's somehow unfair for the winner of the popular vote to not be the winner in the Electoral College are either ignorant, or ignoring that the system is working exactly as intended. It's not a fluke, or a rounding error, or a problem with how votes are counted. It's by design. By the same design which created a House of Representatives with directly reflects the population, and a Senate which represents States. It's checks and balances, to prevent populous states from overwhelming the less populous ones. It's a Federal government because the US is a federation of states, not a direct democracy.
You want to change to a direct vote for President? To be consistent, you'd better be pushing to get rid of the Senate, too, where the imbalance between population and power is even more pronounced.
Your candidate got 1% more of the popular vote? Well, the other candidate won in 50% more of the states.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
But it doesn't really work that way, and if you applied even an iota of critical thinking, you'd realize why it can't.
Did you vote on Tuesday? Did your ballot really only have a single multiple choice item for President of the United States? Because mine didn't. My had president, senator, representative, state senator, state representative, city council member, state supreme court justice (multiple), municipal court justice (multiple), family court justice (one or two), and multiple local millages.
My wife's absentee ballot, being that she lives with me and all, was identical. Which means that whether Trump defeated HRC by several hundred thousand votes or a few hundred, there were many other races where her vote was relevant to the outcome, and the presidential election was not the end-all-be-all of whether all those little bubbles would be scanned by the county's equipment.
Your inability to find governmental information concerning this myth is as ridiculous as this Michael nonsense.
"The media often will report the projected outcome of the election before all of the ballots are counted. In a close election, the media may report that the outcome cannot be announced until after the absentee ballots are counted. However, all ballots, including absentee ballots, are counted in the final totals for every election - and every vote (absentee or in-person) counts the same."
The ability to project a winner in a top-of-ballot race does not eliminate the need to count absentee ballots in all other races.
Tell you what, why don't you actually telephone your county board of elections as ask them yourself rather than settling for discrediting the messenger only when it suits you.
Just because something is "working exactly as intended" doesn't make it fair.
Furthermore, there's no evidence that the system is "working exactly as intended." I've pointed this out numerous times in the last week, but the Electoral College basically NEVER worked as intended by the Founders. They created this system to deal with a collection of 13 individual states and no major political parties. The Electoral College was created because the assumption was that most voters would vote for a candidate from their home state, leading to a slate of a bunch of random candidates, no one with more than 10-20% of the vote. Aside from any qualms some of the Founders may have had about direct democratic votes in general, getting only 10-20% of the vote would not have resulted in an adequate "mandate" to govern.
Hence the Electoral College, where electors were required to vote for two people, one of whom had to be NOT from their home state. The idea being that the "native son" from the home state would get one vote, and the other would be for someone with regional consensus. The top 5 such candidates would float to the top, and Congress would make the final selection.
Within 12 years, that system failed due to the emergence of political parties, since that system didn't differentiate vote for President or VP (the most votes just became President, and the runner-up became VP). Hence the 12th amendment, which separated the votes for VP.
And yet still the Electoral College did not function as originally imaged by the Founders, since they imagined a group of educated folks with essentially free choice to elect the best person in their own view. Instead, more and more states started moving toward a "general ticket" structure where you'd just have a slate of partisan Electors who were designated to vote for their party candidate. By the 1830s, that was pretty much the norm everywhere.
So no, the system is NOT working as intended, and never really has. It was an idealistic and abstract system constructed before anyone had a clue what the electoral landscape of the new nation would look like -- and it basically became irrelevant (and redundant) the moment political parties emerged.
Your link is run by Alex Jones, an alt-right radio host and conspiracy theorist. Per the wikipedia article:
Jones has been the center of many controversies, including his statements about gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. He has accused the U.S. government of being involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks and the filming of fake Moon landings to hide NASA's secret technology. He says that government and big business have colluded to create a New World Order through "manufactured economic crises, sophisticated surveillance tech and--above all--inside-job terror attacks that fuel exploitable hysteria".
Forgive me if I don't take him too seriously.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Claiming something is unfair with no argument as to why, while ignoring how and why the system was designed to be fair is ignorant.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law