Waffledynamics said:
aggiehawg said:
From the link:
Quote:
The first task was overhauling America's balky election infrastructurein the middle of a pandemic. For the thousands of local, mostly nonpartisan officials who administer elections, the most urgent need was money. They needed protective equipment like masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. They needed to pay for postcards letting people know they could vote absenteeor, in some states, to mail ballots to every voter. They needed additional staff and scanners to process ballots.
In March, activists appealed to Congress to steer COVID relief money to election administration. Led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, more than 150 organizations signed a letter to every member of Congress seeking $2 billion in election funding. It was somewhat successful: the CARES Act, passed later that month, contained $400 million in grants to state election administrators.
But the next tranche of relief funding didn't add to that number. It wasn't going to be enough.
Private philanthropy stepped into the breach. An assortment of foundations contributed tens of millions in election-administration funding. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million. "It was a failure at the federal level that 2,500 local election officials were forced to apply for philanthropic grants to fill their needs," says Amber McReynolds, a former Denver election official who heads the nonpartisan National Vote at Home Institute.
McReynolds' two-year-old organization became a clearinghouse for a nation struggling to adapt. The institute gave secretaries of state from both parties technical advice on everything from which vendors to use to how to locate drop boxes. Local officials are the most trusted sources of election information, but few can afford a press secretary, so the institute distributed communications tool kits. In a presentation to Podhorzer's group, McReynolds detailed the importance of absentee ballots for shortening lines at polling places and preventing an election crisis.
Quote:
The Voter Participation Center, which in a normal year would have deployed canvassers door-to-door to get out the vote, instead conducted focus groups in April and May to find out what would get people to vote by mail. In August and September, it sent ballot applications to 15 million people in key states, 4.6 million of whom returned them. In mailings and digital ads, the group urged people not to wait for Election Day. "All the work we have done for 17 years was built for this moment of bringing democracy to people's doorsteps," says Tom Lopach, the center's CEO.
Quote:
The most important takeaway from Quinn's research, however, was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse. "When you get attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, say, 'This isn't true,'" Quinn says. "But the more engagement something gets, the more the platforms boost it. The algorithm reads that as, 'Oh, this is popular; people want more of it.'"
The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place. "The platforms have policies against certain types of malign behavior, but they haven't been enforcing them," she says.
Quinn's research gave ammunition to advocates pushing social media platforms to take a harder line.
In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. "It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement," says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) "It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down."
Amazing.
This is the most damning admission I've ever seen. This article includes just about everything people were called "conspiracy theorists" over.
Except it really doesn't.
What those quotes describe (with the possible exception of pressuring the social media platforms) is essentially a massively stepped up ground game that went in new and unexpected directions that the Republicans were not prepared for or able to counter. There's nothing illegal about local election officials getting grants from private organizations. Should there be? Maybe, but it isn't now.
The left stewed over Trumps win for 3+ years and didn't just sit idly by or stage some protest marches. They went out and came up with ways to drive their voters to the polls and to get their people to vote.
There is nothing new about any of these initiatives. We know the democrats want to find ways to get as many people to vote as is possible and to them that means illegal aliens, convicted felons, street addicts, the mentally ill, hobos, expanded mail-in voting, people that can't be bothered to register, people as young as 16, and anyone else that can fog a mirror and reach the voting booth.
This has been their official policy for years. So much so that even now, in the middle of a global pandemic, with travel restrictions and limits on public gatherings and business and all the rest, the newly elected president is throwing open the doors to the country to illegal immigration. Think of how irresponsible it is in the midst of a global pandemic to encourage huge groups of people mass together and travel from their impoverished Central American countries to cross through multiple other countries and then mass on our southern border so that we can let them into the interior of this country, never to be seen (officially) again. The countries they are coming from have no ability to know how many have covid, the countries they are traveling through have no way of testing them, and the US has no way of screening them. They have no access to healthcare on the journey or when they get to the border. It is patently insane. But it is happening, and it is purely about getting them here to vote Democrat.
Now couple this already manic level of activity with the opportunity for expanded mail-in voting that the pandemic created. The dems were ready to take advantage while the republicans were caught off guard and basically playing a poorly coordinated and not very effective defense. And very quickly states were agreeing to massively expanded mail-in voting, mailing ballots to every voter on the rolls across entire states with no plan in place to cross check those ballots against in-person votes on Election Day to prevent double dipping and basically no way to really insure the integrity of the election.
It may be slightly underhanded and unprecedented, but it isn't illegal. Just like picking up bus loads of hobos and crackheads and driving them to the polls (which the dems have done for decades) isn't illegal technically, but is rife with the possibility for illegalities.
Might there have been an effort below the level of planning discussed in this article to take advantage of the shadows that all this created? Absolutely. But we know the dems have always done this. Their operatives on the ground didn't have to get told how to take advantage of the grey areas because they are already skilled at it and know what they need to do without being told.
And the planners mentioned in this article knew that. But that doesn't make their activities illegal, and it's not "rigging" an election. It's shady and underhanded, but not illegal. The illegalities occurred in the same manner they always have, they were just given greater opportunities because the left was more and better organized and took better advantage of the situation.
And even with all of that they barely pulled it off.
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. It's inherent virtue is the equal sharing of miseries." - Winston Churchill
