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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   34280 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Authorities are investigating after at least two ballot boxes were set on fire Monday morning in the Portland, Oregon, area.

Police responded to a call about a fire in Portland about 3:30 a.m. Monday, the Portland Police Bureau said in a statement. An “incendiary device” was placed inside the box and security personnel extinguished the fire, officials said.

CNN has reached out to the Multnomah County Elections Division for comment.

So it seems that there are some vulnerabilities in the early voting system. The people are getting crazier and the whole election is getting heated. Literally.

Can you think of any other innovative tactics that could disrupt the election - especially since there is literally a non zero chance couple of hundred votes somewhere in Pennsylvania or the Midwest to swing the election one way or another.

The New York Times reports:

Investigators responding to arson fires at two ballot boxes in the Pacific Northwest this week found devices at both scenes marked with the words “Free Gaza,” according to two law enforcement officials. Investigators are trying to determine if the perpetrator was actually a pro-Palestinian activist or someone using that prominent cause to sow discord, one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing. But the message has added a heightened layer of political sensitivity to a closely watched investigation in the final days of a tense presidential election.

The “Free Gaza” message appeared not only on the two devices, which were discovered on Monday, but also on a device found at a third ballot box this month in Vancouver, according to the law enforcement officials. That device also had the words “Free Palestine” on it. Officials said at a news conference that they believed all three events were linked. They later released surveillance images of a suspect vehicle, asking for the public’s help in identifying the person driving a dark, early 2000s Volvo.

I guess we will never know who that was and what were their motives.

Unfortunately this kind of media attention (itself an extension of Trump’s own bad faith arguments) is often a self-fulfilling prophesy similar to the nature of mass shooting coverage leading to copycat shooters, I predict.

So it seems that there are some vulnerabilities in the early voting system.

So there's some moisture in the Pacific Ocean!

But this particular thing is not going to disrupt anything important. We all know where Portland leans, and if due to unlikely turn of events, this will lead to one hyper-leftist local candidate losing to another hyper-leftist local candidate, nobody but other local hyper-leftists would care, and they like it this way. "Forget it, Jake, it's Portland".

especially since there is literally a non zero chance couple of hundred votes somewhere in Pennsylvania or the Midwest to swing the election one way or another.

This is one of the many reasons why the electoral college is so profoundly stupid.

In a world where elections are run by mutually-distrusting state governments, the logic of the electoral college (fixed number of EVs per state, allocated winner-takes-all) improves election security because it means there is nothing for a one-party state government to steal - to steal a presidential election you need to tamper with votes in a state with functioning two-party politics, which means committing multiple felonies with a sympathetic and politically powerful victim. The actual machinery of the electoral college is bad because it creates additional attack vectors (what happens if you blackmail or threaten an elector to vote faithlessly?) and creates additional process steps which take up time pointlessly, cutting into the time available for recounts and investigations.

A version of the electoral college where each state government cast its electoral votes directly (by certificate fedexed to the Capitol on January 5th, by Eurovision-style capitol-to-capitol video link of January 6th, or by some hypothetical future system of secure electronic communication between federal and state governments) would just work better. To avoid the Hawaii 1960 problem, you could require the state chief justice to countersign the certificate to confirm that there is no ongoing state court litigation that could change the vote.

I'll preface this by saying that I don't think statistically significant election fraud has ever happened for the presidential elections. For state elections I don't know. But in the counterfactual, isn't there a stronger incentive for precariously positioned swing state government officials to fix the vote in the hopes that the national party returns the favor through patronage than for a securely positioned official to risk their reputation?

Also, moving past the election security question and more directly addressing the "should we have an ec question"... If we're sticking to per-state voting and giving state governments even more power to shift things their way... Why not just return to the original way of doing things, where state governments selected electors directly? I'm strongly in favor of the popular vote because I don't think states are or should be discrete cultural-economic interests... But if we're going to treat them like they are, I would unironically prefer the old way of doing things because at least it forces people to care about local politics.

ll preface this by saying that I don't think statistically significant election fraud

Does "except Illinois" go without saying nowadays?

I haven't heard about illinois election fraud. I've heard about their machine politics but thought that was the standard "not technically illegal" monopoly tactics.

How so? With the national popular vote you encourage such vote inflation practices nationwide. Engaging in election security would be gimping your own state's votes, better to just have the election security of a subway turnstile during rush hour. A city of 100k produces 200k votes? All the better for amplifying the will of your state citizens.

All the incentives for rigging the vote already exist everywhere-- people want to win local elections too. But in truly national vote small state-level distortions have less effect on the overall total, and natiomal election-fixing rings have to deal with a fact that large secrets aare harder to keep.

I actually have the opposite opinion: it prevents local shenanigans from swinging the overall vote except in niche cases (which admittedly have happened at least once in my lifetime in Florida). National popular vote means that any ballot box can be stuffed to swing the result, subject to mostly local rules on elections.

Although I will concede that it's disproportionate weighting of votes between states is probably not ideal.

The amount of ballots you can stuff (or otherwise compromise) is in either case proportional to what turnout "should" be for a given area. But the net effect is smaller if the race is decided by millions of voters versus thousands. Also, in a popular race you have to spread out the vote fixing over more overall states or people can catch your interference by looking for states where turnout is unusually high. Meanwhile in an EC race you can focus your operation on specifically the swing states, which have a built-in explanation for high turnout.

If you don't believe me, just look at the non-illegal "vote-fixing" measures the candidates have been using-- making all sorts of promises narrowly tailored toward swing state voter interests specifically.

A few off the top of my head:

Power substation attacks on Election Day, killing power to polling stations in a major metro for an extended period, say a few days.

A flood of mail-in ballots using the names of registered voters and info gleaned from credit agency data leaks, not necessarily with the intention of having them counted but to overwhelm the various crosscheck and verification systems. Bonus if lots of voters get to the polls on election day only to learn a ballot has already been submitted in their name.

Theft of a significant proportion of a large jurisdiction's paper ballot supply. Again, bonus if not discovered until late. Alternatively, a supply chain attack causing a significant fraction of ballots mixed into the overall supply to be slightly misprinted, requiring checking each blank manually to ensure it is correct.

Radio/cellular signal jammers covering polling places: as I understand it, the vast majority of machines use some type of communications signal to report results at the very least.

Exposure of a poorly concealed scheme to outright buy votes for cash (false flag, of course).

I'm gonna suggest that it's probably not a great idea to come up with long and seriously-considered lists of ways to upset civil society, especially those that could be planned and executed in less than a week.

Probably not for an individual to publicize them. But isn't this the perennial question in security vulnerability reporting? An organization says they have perfectly secure systems; an investigator thinks of a dozen ways they're not secure and reports it; organization responds in a way that the reporter doesn't think is serious and so makes them public.

An hour after I wrote this, /u/SomethingMusic linked to reports of what appears to be Bad Idea #2 in action.

I think most of these would be tough to pull off in a week though, with the possible exception of jammers.

(Hi feds! I'm a good guy, promise.)

Oooh, that’s smart. The evidence is literally destroyed, along with the ballots. Authorities would be able to switch to fire-resistant envelopes if this became a problem, but not until the next election cycle.

fire-resistant envelopes

My biggest complaint about The Batman other than it's absurd length.

Not the Riddler being 100% sane and rational until the director/writers realized he was too sympathetic and had him start indiscriminately target civilians with a flood?

Something like that. The film had a very lengthy narrative about Batman following the Riddler's string of murderers and clues. And also Selina's struggle against her father. Those story lines all wrapped up and the film was over. Wicked father dead, Riddler in jail. We're done.

And then they introduce the bomb truck/overly online white guy terrorists plot line and it goes on for another half hour or so. Pointlessly excessively long. And as you mention they threw away a better interpretation of the Riddler in which he murders corrupt politicians and mofiosos who wronged him and every other orphan in Gotham.

The evidence is literally destroyed, along with the ballots.

Do you think this was someone getting scared of the ballot stuffing they engaged in and torching the evidence, as opposed to someone trying to invalidate votes in a GOP advantage prectinct ?

Any such speculation is pointless unless and until we know who did this. It could be a GOP member worried about ballot stuffers. It could also be a democrat burning republicans ballots. It could be the government trying to cast doubts on a potential Trump win. It could be a teenager doing the equivalent of stuffing a firecracker in the mailbox because fire is cool. Trying to guess why it happened with no evidence of who did it is just going to end up with all sides accusing all others of trying to manipulate the outcome of the election. We have no idea.

Left off "homeless guy setting the fire because he wants to get arrested." e.g. https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/ballots-damaged-after-usps-mailbox-lit-fire-phoenix

But how likely are we to find out who did it? 50/50 seems high odds. Throwing a molotov into a mountain of paper isn't exactly something that is all that easy to sleuth out. Unless the offender drove up with a license plate visible to nearby cameras or stared into one their ID is going to be pretty hard.

No. I think if someone threw a match inside they would be able to catch him. My assumption is that this was some kind of delayed chemical reaction that was engineered to take place within one of the envelopes, the kind of thing that takes planning.

I think you have a massively optimistic idea of the competence of law enforcement.

There’s literally nothing innovative about arson. In related news, my parents went to see Conclave last week.

I disagree that a couple hundred votes, lost in a fire or flood, would sway the election. Too well-documented, I think. In the inevitable court case, you’d actually be able to point to the abuse, and…hmm. I suppose I don’t know what the remedy would be. Runoff? Cage fight?

This was intended to hurt Joe Kent, where dozens or hundreds of ballots will absolutely matter.

They're intending to hurt the Republican candidate by setting fire to ballots in urban Portland? Do you think those ballots leaned R or leaned D?

Edit: there are two burnt mailboxes. One in the 1000 block of Southeast Morrison Street, Portland. This is not even in Washington so obviously it has nothing to do with Joe Kent. The other one was in the Fisher's Landing transit center in Vancouver. That is actually in WA-03 but Clark county, which contains Vancouver, has Kent lagging behind majorly, so I really don't see the connection at all.

That was the primary, not the general, and you'll notice that there are two Republicans splitting the vote. I expect a win by less than two points, but mayhaps I'll eat crow on that expectation.

I thought we were talking about the one in Clark County, and was unaware of the Portland one.

I would guess this is Antifa/black bloc types, because they are prevalent in both sides of the border.

That was the primary, not the general, and you'll notice that there are two Republicans splitting the vote.

Thanks for the correction. Clark county was still blue in the 2022 general.

https://archive.is/mZo7J

I expect a win by less than two points, but mayhaps I'll eat crow on that expectation.

Perhaps, but that doesn't prove that this was supposed to hurt Kent. I don't have sub-county numbers but I don't see why someone would target this mailbox to hurt the Republican candidate.

I thought we were talking about the one in Clark County, and was unaware of the Portland one.

The OP was about the Portland one.

I’m saying that, if the race is close enough, “someone burned two ballot boxes of votes” is fuel for a recount. Or whatever court remedy is allowed. It’s provable in a way that 2020 allegations weren’t.

You can’t count ballots that no longer exist. They’d have to hold the election all over again. Apparently this is a thing that happens.

Is the box located in an area that'd be expected to go for Joe Kent?

A couple points here:

  1. There is a significant chance that this was just methheads doing methhead shit and there's no political motivation at all. This is the most likely, imo.

  2. The next most likely outcome was that this was the local anarchist/black-bloc idiots. So theoretically left aligned, but mostly just retarded agents of chaos. Slightly better organized than the drug-retarded agents of chaos in #1 above, but still not great culture war fodder because basically everyone already hates them.

  3. There's a slim, slim chance that this was anything more meaningful, but what would the purpose possibly be? The local elections are absolute chaos because the city switched to rank choice voting and expanded from a five person city council to a 12 person city council all in one shot, so there's no clear benefit to burning ballots because nobody has any clue how this is going to shake out. For national elections Oregon is as blue as it gets, so pretty much nothing can move the needle there.

Have we considered it might be a right wing extremist? It doesn’t seem like their usual MO but it’s definitely possible.

Devices With ‘Free Gaza’ Messages Found at Ballot Box Fires. Ah yes, the infamous "Free Gaza" right-wing extremists!

Yes, I will admit this was almost certainly some kind of lefty activist, probably antifa. Still think ‘right wing extremists’ should have been on the list of possibilities, albeit not as the #1, before we knew this.

A right wing extremist would have obviously just shot the boxes 5000 times with the ammo he had laying around in his truck, not used a Molotov. It's all about which tool you reach for.

Right. Because setting two mailboxes on fire is going to turn Portland red. Nope, there's nothing to "consider" here, it's not even good as a Disney movie plot. And that's a very low bar.

Something tells me that whoever did this(and I’m not sold of the right wing extremist hypothesis but its categorical exclusion is strange) will not turn out to be a careful planner who gamed out the impacts for maximum political effect.

That's why I'm going with homeless drug addicts or anarchist dipshits, this is definitely not part of some greater plot.

/r/Portland being absolutely 100% convinced it was the proud boys just makes me more sure.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but there's an article that police are looking for the owners of a Volvo S-60 spotted near the box via CCTV.

Yeah, and it looks like both were incendiary devices placed on the exterior of the boxes. That disqualifies criddlers, so now my money is on anarchists.

What's strange? When people consider violent acts done, in the city known by the multitude of violent acts performed by left wing extremists that has been tolerated and encouraged for years, and when there are no base nor numbers nor hope in the area for right wing extremists and they do not gain absolutely anything from it, then people go with most plausible explanation and exclude the least plausible? I think it's the least strange way of doing it.

But by the same token, Portland is already blue, so why bother?

Some people just want to watch the world burn. Portland is where their safe space is.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/28/us/ballot-box-fires-oregon-washington/index.html

The boxes are about 15 miles apart. The one in Vancouver is in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, where one of the most competitive House races in the country is taking place.

This seems to point to #2 - this was coordinated across state lines and not some spur-of-the-moment thing. But I can only speculate as to what the local anarchists think they're accomplishing by doing this. Maybe it's a far-left accelerationist thing: "We want Trump to win while Kamala supporters think it's rigged, so that the system will be discredited in the eyes of liberals and they'll realize that since voting D won't change anything, radical action is needed."

Can you think of any other innovative tactics that could disrupt the election

Not today, federal agent.

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