Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Election

  • USB Drives to Move Election Malware

    From “Can Georgia’s electronic voting machines be trusted?“: Though voting machines aren’t directly connected to the internet, witnesses testified last week that USB drives are used to transfer election data from internet-connected computers to election servers. So, computers that are connected to the Internet are used to move data to the election servers. Malware can…

  • Qualification for President

    The office of President of the United States is an enormous one. This is a person who in order to run the government has to appoint over a thousand positions. The senior advisers number over a hundred. Being able to locate and retain the services of high quality people is a huge challenge. Throw in…

  • GA Voter Registrations Increase

    I was reading an article about how the two candidates for governor represent two sides of voter registrations. One ran an organization who went around getting people registered to vote. The other ran an organization who got legislation to make it easier to remove registered voters and make it harder for people to prove their…

  • Why Trump should counter Russian meddling in 2018 elections

    A common complaint the PotUS has is that Democrats should agree with him. He rails on Twitter about this lack of support. The Russian meddling in the 2016 elections was designed to target certain groups of people to discourage them from voting. We were already divided. The meddling exacerbated it. So, Democrats would hate Trump even…

  • Review: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

    The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt My rating: 5 of 5 stars Back in 2012, I took the Moral Foundations Questionnaire test. So almost five years later, I finally got around to reading the book that explains it. Since it is now Facebook integrated, I kind…

  • Quasi-Mandatory Voting

    Yesterday, in Mandatory Voting I wrote: In the end, I think finding ways to lower the costs of voting is the best approach. A low participation rate suggests there are problems. Solving those problems would be better than simply punishing people for not overcoming those costs. Additionally I mentioned: Certainly, I am in favor of things…

  • Mandatory Voting

    Given the closeness of the recent election, the inevitable complaint about how few people voted are swirling in the national conversation from the losing side. Part of the conversation is the winning party does not have a mandate. The more interesting claim is that if everyone had to vote, then Hillary could have won. The rationale is that…

  • In the time of Hamilton

    So, the social media sphere is abuzz over our President-elect tweeting about a member of the cast of the Hamilton play reading a statement to the VP-elect. The P-elect seemed upset about it all. The VP-elect seemed amused people are buzzing about a non-issue and people should expect the P-elect to be the kind of person they…

  • Illusory Truth Effect

    Repeated statements receive higher truth ratings than new statements, a phenomenon called the illusory truth effect… Repetition makes statements easier to process (i.e., fluent) relative to new statements, leading people to the (sometimes) false conclusion that they are more truthful… Indeed, illusory truth effects arise even without prior exposure—people rate statements presented in high-contrast (i.e., easy-to-read) fonts…