this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)

politics

19104 readers
3315 users here now

Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!

Rules:

  1. Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.

Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.

Example:

  1. Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
  2. Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
  3. No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
  4. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
  5. No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

That's all the rules!

Civic Links

Register To Vote

Citizenship Resource Center

Congressional Awards Program

Federal Government Agencies

Library of Congress Legislative Resources

The White House

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Partnered Communities:

News

World News

Business News

Political Discussion

Ask Politics

Military News

Global Politics

Moderate Politics

Progressive Politics

UK Politics

Canadian Politics

Australian Politics

New Zealand Politics

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Exclusive: clip from canvasser for Musk’s America Pac reveals apparent ease in which GPS location can be spoofed

Donald Trump’s ground game in Arizona and Nevada may be undercut by canvassers working for America Pac using GPS spoofing to pretend they have knocked on doors when they haven’t, according to multiple people familiar with the practice and a leaked how-to-fake-location video.

The ramifications for Trump may be far reaching, given America Pac has taken on the bulk of the Trump campaign's ground game in the battleground states, and the election increasingly appears set to be decided by turnout.

A bootleg how-to-spoof video, made by an America Pac canvasser in Nevada and obtained by the Guardian, shows the apparent ease with which locations can be changed to fake door-knocks, calling into question how many Trump voters have actually been reached by the field operation.

The video, shared with a few hundred canvassers, walks through the setup: a user downloads a GPS-spoofing app to falsely place themself at the door of a Trump voter, fakes responses to the survey and takes steps to cover up the fraud by varying the survey responses to make it believable.

top 16 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

This is because they are paid for the canvassing, right? I can't fathom a reason why to bother with this, if not for that. Other than maybe some Dem tomfoolery to skew the ground game reporting, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

Almost 20 years ago I was friends with a bunch of Red Bull girls. Their job was to take the Red Bull mini cooper every morning, fill it up with cases of Red Bull and drive it around handing out free Red Bull any place they found people congregating. They would often just drive down to the river and dump the cases there and then go home and get high and watch TV all day. Red Bull seemed to catch on to how easy it was for their employees to do this, so they issued them PDAs with GPS that would track where they went all day. I was a Windows CE mobile app developer at the time, so they asked me to see if it was possible to spoof the Red Bull tracking app, which turned out to be ridiculously easy to do since it just logged the raw GPS coordinates into a plain text file once every 15 minutes.

I did this for a pretty obvious reason (they were all very attractive) and because they gave me cases of diet Red Bull which I actually liked for some reason, but I think I was also doing humanity a service by preventing at least some people from ever even trying that vile concoction. I don't think it helped the fish though.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

When your entire philosophy is based around a more base, animalistic interpretation of human nature, is it really all that surprising when your own people take advantage of you?

We get more of the behaviors we role model to our fellows, whatever those are. If you role model being a little shit, then more of your followers will be little shits to you.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

Exactly. He's getting out what he put in. This is what he deserves and he has no one to blame but himself.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

Given that Trump-era Republican politics is ideologically about self-serving grift, one could argue that the canvassers who do this are the Trumpist true believers, and the idealistic shlubs who actually knock on doors because they care are RINOs.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

Fake knockers sounds very on-brand for Trump, though...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

They have concepts of door knockers

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

This doesn't hurt anyone but Trump does it? I'm trying to figure out the election fraud angle - it's really just defrauding Trump and his campaign for payment of services not rendered, correct? Not that it's OK if so (I mean, it's funny, but they should still be prosecuted), but how does this fraudulently influence the election (if at all)?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

I think in a lot of cases this is just a big rabbit hole for anyone who wants to fix it or prove it even happened.

  • The best option is to start over and start canvassing again from scratch.
  • Proving and then holding someone accountable can’t be automated in a trustworthy way, so you’d have to invent that process and then run everyone through them.

Both of those are just expensive, in both time and money terms. I think it’s got to be damage control, and then maybe some attempt to round people up and find the fraud after the election?

But the bottom line is that it’s the PAC that shoulders the entire cost, for now, and the Trump campaign just has to eat the damage for now. These aren’t federal crimes or really even actual crimes, so any eventual outcome is most likely to just be lawsuits or legal threats against supposed fraudsters?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

One thing this does is amplify the false narrative that the election will be stolen away from Trump.

These canvassing results make it look like there are more Trump supporters than there really are. It looks like it's going to be a very close race anyway, but if Harris gets a higher number of votes in states like Nevada or Arizona than this canvassing data suggests, then Trump and his supporters will ignore the prospect that their numbers are bad and will instead use these corrupted numbers as evidence that either a) fake voters are in the mix or that b) votes for Trump are being suppressed.

And this will then be extrapolated across all battleground states that don't go their way, not just Arizona and Nevada.

Edit: clarified a couple of sentences.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

Great point, thanks for pointing that out.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

Campaign run by fraudster attracts fraudsters, news at 11.

Good for these people for grifting an asshole who has grifted so many others.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

I don't know shit about american polling but isn't there a software solution that guards against it? I assume pollsters are given android tablets by the orgs, and that it would be pretty trivial to lock them from installing apps if someone is interested in that. Like, parent control with a pin code or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

What little canvassing I've done has been using your own device, and that was where I was volunteering for a cause I believed in. If the canvassers are paid and not ideologically motivated you could imagine tablets walking off.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

Trivial, smart, and likely amongst the first operational considerations when "real" political advocacy organizations do it.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they had a BYOD policy and the "PAC" exists mainly in three forms: A hastily made app, Leon's drug fueled rants, and the media's overestimation.