- Joined
- Oct 14, 2015
- Messages
- 64,221
- Reaction score
- 62,568
- Location
- Massachusetts
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Other
As we know, Kobach (Kansas's SoS) is vice president of Trump's "voter fraud commission". He requested each voter’s full name, address, birthdate, and political party, as well as the last four digits of every voter’s Social Security number. Through his experience as Kansas SoS and work with Interstate Crosscheck, he would know full well that many states simply cannot provide this information under the law, while others are likely to balk at federal intrusion into their election process and their citizens' privacy.
Result: 14 states refused to comply entirely, 44 refused to comply in part.
Purposes?
1. Allow Trump to dishonestly use legally required state resistance to suggest states are conscious of their own guilt in the short term.
Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017
Check.
2. Generate large numbers of false positives positives in the search for fraudulent votes.
How? "List matching" techniques to determine whether voter rolls are accurate require perfect information to be maximumally efficient. The poorer the information, the poorer the list-matching procedures, which in turn means more false positives (aka, persons wrongly identified as fraudulent voters). Again, Kobach/Trump know full well that states cannot legally provide all the information and that others have principled objections, therefore, they will have very poor list-matching procedures. Meaning, in turn, they know right now that they'll be able to generate a lot of false positives.
With only partial information, for example, you might wrongly conclude that two individuals who have the same name and birth date actually represent one fraudulent voter voting twice. Similarly, some states (like Georgia) have tried using the national SS database to match voter rolls to it. But as the inspector general of the SSA reported, the system is simply not sufficient to determine whether someone is eligible to vote. One can enter the same information multiple times and get different results – sometimes saying the person exists, sometimes saying they do not exist.
3. Generate headlines for months based on the deliberately generated false positives.
When election officials and law enforcement finish investigating, they end up finding out that people identified as fraudulent voters are not – the poor matching procedures created the false positive – but that part does not make the papers. (And if you're on the right, you probably cannot object to this point because you have probably also complained about left-leaning media making sensational claims about Trump that turn out to be false).
Because these will be nation-wide, it will easily take months or years for local election officials to disprove the commission's findings. That creates a long gap where the deliberately generated falsehood can soak in headlines, most likely right-wing headlines. Further, the same right-win media is going to be unlikely to run similar headlines on how their prior claims were debunked. Through this feedback loop, a lie becomes truth in the target audience's eyes.
4. Use the false atmosphere of fear created regarding these false positives to pass voting laws crafted to target certain populations which, ahem, one could expect to be populations supporting the other party.
No side is immune to the "we need a law" mentality. This simply follows the usual course: generate fear --> we need a law --> pass the law you already wanted before you generated the fear.
5. Oh, and one possible last goal: rely on the fact that the con requires enough explaining that existing supporters will say "tl;dr" to avoid finding something that might clash with their agenda/narrative.
Some sources on point.
The secret goal of Trump’s voting commission is to gut the Motor Voter Act.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=997888
44 states won't give some voter info to panel - CNNPolitics.com
A Trump commission requested voter data. Here's what every state is saying. | PBS NewsHour
Result: 14 states refused to comply entirely, 44 refused to comply in part.
Purposes?
1. Allow Trump to dishonestly use legally required state resistance to suggest states are conscious of their own guilt in the short term.
Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017
Check.
2. Generate large numbers of false positives positives in the search for fraudulent votes.
How? "List matching" techniques to determine whether voter rolls are accurate require perfect information to be maximumally efficient. The poorer the information, the poorer the list-matching procedures, which in turn means more false positives (aka, persons wrongly identified as fraudulent voters). Again, Kobach/Trump know full well that states cannot legally provide all the information and that others have principled objections, therefore, they will have very poor list-matching procedures. Meaning, in turn, they know right now that they'll be able to generate a lot of false positives.
With only partial information, for example, you might wrongly conclude that two individuals who have the same name and birth date actually represent one fraudulent voter voting twice. Similarly, some states (like Georgia) have tried using the national SS database to match voter rolls to it. But as the inspector general of the SSA reported, the system is simply not sufficient to determine whether someone is eligible to vote. One can enter the same information multiple times and get different results – sometimes saying the person exists, sometimes saying they do not exist.
3. Generate headlines for months based on the deliberately generated false positives.
When election officials and law enforcement finish investigating, they end up finding out that people identified as fraudulent voters are not – the poor matching procedures created the false positive – but that part does not make the papers. (And if you're on the right, you probably cannot object to this point because you have probably also complained about left-leaning media making sensational claims about Trump that turn out to be false).
Because these will be nation-wide, it will easily take months or years for local election officials to disprove the commission's findings. That creates a long gap where the deliberately generated falsehood can soak in headlines, most likely right-wing headlines. Further, the same right-win media is going to be unlikely to run similar headlines on how their prior claims were debunked. Through this feedback loop, a lie becomes truth in the target audience's eyes.
4. Use the false atmosphere of fear created regarding these false positives to pass voting laws crafted to target certain populations which, ahem, one could expect to be populations supporting the other party.
No side is immune to the "we need a law" mentality. This simply follows the usual course: generate fear --> we need a law --> pass the law you already wanted before you generated the fear.
5. Oh, and one possible last goal: rely on the fact that the con requires enough explaining that existing supporters will say "tl;dr" to avoid finding something that might clash with their agenda/narrative.
Some sources on point.
The secret goal of Trump’s voting commission is to gut the Motor Voter Act.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=997888
44 states won't give some voter info to panel - CNNPolitics.com
A Trump commission requested voter data. Here's what every state is saying. | PBS NewsHour
Last edited:
