Warning. With remote access to e-poll books (yes, vendors have it & I’m told they pass around a url to watch), bad actors cld track in real time how many votes they need & where to alter election outcomes. This wld NOT work w/ vote by mail. 1/

I remain very concerned about e-pollbooks, which have exploded in use since 2016. A former election official told me about the Election Day remote access & URL. 2/
I wrote about America’s largest e-pollbook vendor, Knowink, here. Knowink is managed by a former Republican election official. It’s product manager is Religious Right. It’s products are in 23 states now. 3/ https://t.co/mbxFpCpFoQ
I was told about the passing around of a URL re: Tenex. They can watch voters sign in as they sign in. They can tell what party they are from. 4/
In theory, w/ e-pollbooks (electronic sign ins), bad actors cld fraudulently sign in real voters who rarely vote in order to pad vote totals. This wld work best at the end of Election Day. Mail voting wld obviously throw this off. 5/
These are risks. I do not know if any of this occurred. But they are risks. And a former election official was worried enough to mention it to me about Tenex. 6/
“The [Kentucky] State Finance and Administration Cabinet awarded a contract for electronic poll books to Tenex Software Solutions, a Tampa, Florida-based company, for up to 5,500 e-poll books for the state's 3,732 voting precincts.” - 7/26/19
7/https://t.co/CpRzENXPON
8/ I keep trying to figure out why bad actors might prefer in person voting to vote by mail. Both systems use hackable electronics. At the moment, we don’t conduct evidence-based elections with either system. But this is one reason why they might prefer in person voting.
9/ The phrase evidence-based election was coined by @philipbstark. This is what it means.
10/ I’m not sure what this is about but I hope to find out! @robchandhok https://t.co/iefnbhVL54
11/ BTW, vote by mail does use #HandMarkedPaperBallots, ie, a reliable paper trail, which is another reason why I prefer it to touchscreen voting machines. Even when touchscreens generate paper records, the records often put votes into unverifiable QR code’s & barcodes & many...
12/ ... experts consider them too unreliable to provide the basis for a reliable audit or recount (even if they didn’t use barcodes or QR codes). https://t.co/tyQcsu45Fz
13/ But I do not want to suggest that we are conducting evidence-based elections with either in person voting or vote by mail. Because we aren’t. And we must demand that and change that ASAP.

More from Jennifer Cohn ✍🏻 📢

This analogy is unfair. In 04, exit polls suggested Kerry had won, and the Bush administration itself had helped fund exit polls in Ukraine that year & supported a Ukrainian election re-do based in part based on the exit polls. In 2020, exit polls favored Biden, not Trump. 1/


2/ US State Dept commentary re the 2004 election in Ukraine and the discrepancy between the exit polls (which suggested a pro-West Yuschenko victory) and official results (which suggested a pro-Russia Yanukovych victory).

3/ The 2004 election in Ukraine was re-done and produced the opposite result, consistent with the exit polls.

4/ Exit polls in the US around the same time as Ukraine’s 2004 election suggested a solid Kerry victory. Voters had every reason to question why the Bush administration considered exit polls reliable in Ukraine but not in the US at the same time. https://t.co/SwUPeRnGtf


Discussion of Ohio 2004. 5/

More from Politics

My piece in the NY Times today: "the Trump administration is denying applications submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services at a rate 37 percent higher than the Obama administration did in 2016."

Based on this analysis: "Denials for immigration benefits—travel documents, work permits, green cards, worker petitions, etc.—increased 37 percent since FY 2016. On an absolute basis, FY 2018 will see more than about 155,000 more denials than FY 2016."
https://t.co/Bl0naOO0sh


"This increase in denials cannot be credited to an overall rise in applications. In fact, the total number of applications so far this year is 2 percent lower than in 2016. It could be that the higher denial rate is also discouraging some people from applying at all.."

Thanks to @gsiskind for his insightful comments. The increase in denials, he said, is “significant enough to make one think that Congress must have passed legislation changing the requirements. But we know they have not.”

My conclusion:
This idea - that elections should translate into policy - is not wrong at all. But political science can help explain why it's not working this way. There are three main explanations: 1. mandates are constructed, not automatic, 2. party asymmetry, 3. partisan conpetition 1/


First, party/policy mandates from elections are far from self-executing in our system. Work on mandates from Dahl to Ellis and Kirk on the history of the mandate to mine on its role in post-Nixon politics, to Peterson Grossback and Stimson all emphasize that this link is... 2/

Created deliberately and isn't always persuasive. Others have to convinced that the election meant a particular thing for it to work in a legislative context. I theorized in the immediate period of after the 2020 election that this was part of why Repubs signed on to ...3/

Trump's demonstrably false fraud nonsense - it derailed an emerging mandate news cycle. Winners of elections get what they get - institutional control - but can't expect much beyond that unless the perception of an election mandate takes hold. And it didn't. 4/

Let's turn to the legislation element of this. There's just an asymmetry in terms of passing a relief bill. Republicans are presumably less motivated to get some kind of deal passed. Democrats are more likely to want to do *something.* 5/

You May Also Like