@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me Mickey Mouse stealing art

That is a great question, and one I spent hundreds of hours thinking about. I still don’t really know about the answer.

I have some fragments.

I think it is a deep rooted cultural thing we are talking about here. One that is generations old and will continue for generations more. Also America is a huge country and for each thing I mention here , there is some areas not doing that .

Most Americans who vote, trust the counting of their votes, and the more obscure the vote counting is, the more they trust it. In other words if they are completely baffled by how it works, they will believe in it. And they are told by a father or mother figure that it’s accurate, then they will go along with it, without questions.

Americans are like Russians in that large segments of their cultural elite don’t understand democracy. But it’s the American flavor. They understand voting, but there it stops. There is no instinct with most voters that participation is only half of democracy , the other part is counting. They distrust simple counting like mail in ballots but fully participate in the most convoluted vote counting with childlike faith and hope.

Many fundamentally do not understand that counting can be simple and done to the satisfaction of all participants, even if they do not like the results.

So when one suggests paper ballots counted in front of people, allowing recounts for any reason. It’s challenging faith itself.

I’ve been trying to get people to think about using the British or French ways of counting ballots.

But I was confused why I made so little progress in the USA.

I finally decided it was cultural. There was something about Americans I did not understand. After a few more years I realized it was people who were politically active , and the journalists who reported on politics, who had this filter, or taboo about addressing any of this.

For example, if you talk to disenfranchised blacks in rural east Texas, they readily understand and agree. But if you talk to black progressive activists in Texas, they have the filter. Same for poor white fundamentalists in my area and their conservative representatives.

So, I think it’s more the price of admission to politics now, than anything else. And those who cannot ignore don’t participate at all

Bush the elder laid the groundwork for the current systems while president in the 1990s. People he knew got the first contacts soon after, . And then when they were used in Texas in 1995 the state started to switch from democratic to republican and his son won the governorship. Many southern states switched the first year they were used.

What distinguishes the American voting experience from other democracies is

that these systems are closed source and protected by intellectual secrets legally. There is no public knowledge of administers with access keys or any other of the hundreds of details that are addressed in the Baltic states

there is no curiosity about the above by most politically active people. There used to be loud tech community responses about all this, even conventions. But by ten years ago these were effectively ignored.

when the republicans claim cheating by this, they only stay in conspiracy mode and never try to use technical help in explaining why these are bad to have.

the democrats react to the above and fully embrace the voting machines despite having no clue how they work or are monitored, and a new type of bogus technical experts have become accepted to explain how this is all very safe. Again with no talk to most of the hardware or software community

there is an effort to use paper ballots and were having some success but this was sidelined by the 2020 election denial fallout

I used to tell that joke but I forgot, and was surprised at the answer. Now the shoe is on the other foot

There are a huge number of lemmy users who are genocide deniers and hate many other things , including lemmy.ml and the developers

Apologies, no offense meant.

Aaaaarrgg! This is horrible they stopped AI summaries, which I was hoping would help corrupt a leading institution protecting free thought and transfer of knowledge.

Sincerely, the Devil, Satan

It’s going to get wild

Nothing is stopping the AI summaries from using social media as the primary source

Cold drinks await

Now you hit me curious too. This was my source on Texas https://www.texasalmanac.com/place-types/town

Also the total number of total towns is over 4,000 with only 3k unincorporated, I did get the numbers wrong even in Texas.

I had looked at Wikipedia but could not find totals, only lists

I know the Texas count is accurate, I looked it up. I was too lazy and uninspired to look at other states. However I would be surprised if it were not at least half the corporate areas, nationally in total?

I’m a paper ballot and small town guy, I’m not a mega and my life was saved by vaccines. Also I indirectly help people get abortions ( I live in Texas). In all actuality I’m closer to being a communist than anything else.

So, if people can agree that exit polls are off, the next question is why?

If you look at the history of exit polling they are only off, in a historical sense, when there is mass ballot stuffing.

So that leaves either there is cheating or somehow Americans are so exceptional they overturn precedent.

And don’t forget the other stats tests. One of them which sorts the precincts by size and compares the percentage of votes each candidate received. It should be a kind of line. In California it is, in many other states it is not.

So not only do Americans have to be unique, in one way. They have to be exceptional in other ways to explain the other tests, used over the works fur generations.

All of this while the hidden counting of ballots is going on, without enough recounts .

Occam’s razor and all that.

So many states have problems with exit polls being correct , that all the major broadcasters and news agencies, in the USA, stopped using them a few years ago to predict many races.

Exit polls are used elsewhere reliably to detect large scale manipulation of ballots, and have been used by the United Nations. They used to work in the USA

Mail in ballot counting is reliable. This leaves electronic ballots as the only means to change that many votes. Indeed, if you look at states that use more traditional methods of counting their exit polls generally are accurate.

In addition many states fail other statistical tests that are also used to detect cheating in the primaries for both parties and general races.

Based on statistical tests that have been accepted worldwide for generations there is cheating happening. This is ignored by both parties and the vast majority of people .

In my opinion nothing was proved that these counting companies have accurate results. This is because most of what they do is hidden by trade secrets. And the USA has a lack of recounts that do not use these very systems.

Unincorporated towns in Texas is 4k, I would guess the number of very unincorporated is a ratio of 2:1 nation wide I am not sure.

But using some rough math , and being incredibly stubborn to prove my point, that brings the total number up to 60k, of which 1/3 ( maybe) have seen economic hardship

That election companies cannot be trusted, but the deniers were careful to not approach this scientifically or convincingly. Offering instead pseudo science and illogical schemes done by madmen. Because of this they set back the paper vote movements by decades in some states.

Another thing that draws them followers is that tens of thousands of small towns have died economically, in the last three decades, but no programs to help them, and no sympathy in the large cities

Releasing by global warming?

And this is why billionaires should not control vital resources

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