The Grand Illusion
Back in 2016, Donald Trump said, “I love the poorly educated.” That was after polling showed that less educated voters contributed to his winning the Nevada caucus during his 2016 presidential primary campaign. Voters who are poorly educated about the facts of key issues — including inflation, immigration, and violent crime – are much more likely to vote for Trump than Democratic rival Kamala Harris, according to new research released last Thursday by Ipsos’ political tracking team.
Analysis shows that voters’ primary media sources strongly determine their voting preferences. The primary news sources for less educated Americans are the Fox News Channel and other conservative media outlets – and/or conservative social media. Followers of such media sources were and are markedly more likely to incorrectly answer fact-based questions about inflation, the stock market, FEMA’s hurricane aid, violent crime, and illegal immigration.
The irony of this is that the primary purveyor of false (factually incorrect) news in the United States is Fox News and the greatest beneficiary of that false news is Donald Trump, who is trying, and often succeeding, in convincing Americans that the more accurate news sources are peddling false news.
It’s fair to say that Donald Trump and Fox News are a marriage of convenience and misinformation, because neither Trump nor his supporters are in the slightest interested in factual news that conflicts with their views.
There are 3 levels of competence: incompetent, marginally competent and competent.
Dealing with marginally competent people can be confusing. Their arguments sound good, but are wrong. Unfortunately the marginally competent have been taking over many fields which is why progress in so many fields has stalled.
Many “educated” believe their competence in one field leads them to be competent in others. It doesn’t. Hence sayings about academics in ivory towers. The only antidote to this is humility.
Trump’s voters do not come from the “professional classes” where success is judged by one’s peers (these days mostly other marginally competent people). In that world, appearance matters a great deal, and thus so does agreeing with the herd.
Trump’s voters seem instead to come from other areas of life where performance as judged by reality (did the field produce food? did the sewage go down the pipe? did the transformer blow up?).
When Trump said he loved the uneducated he was probably mocking NPR which goes on about the “uneducated”. Only this weekend I heard them bemoaning the fact the “uneducated” will be voting for him.
What NPR is not doing, and should be doing, is figuring out exactly why they are voting for him. What they say may not be the actual reason. It may be that they are rebelling against the current system of incentives which benefit the professional class and harms them. Michael Young’s book “The rise of the Meritocracy” might be coming to pass.
The Fox viewers that I know are easily worried people. They’re worried, and Fox gives them plenty to be worried about. They watch and say to themselves, “See, I was right to be worried!”
That’s why it’s difficult to change their minds. You can inform them that illegal immigrants are not running wild and seeking them out. All that they hear is that you’re telling them not to worry.
As soon as they tune back into Fox, their worries are validated. And all the folks who told them not to worry are clearly wrong.
Trump … Murdochs … Sacklers … Zuck … Musk … now Bezos …
Have robber barons always been this awful? (Probably.)
I heard on NPR that no election interference has been demonstrated, and that requiring machine counted votes to be checked by hand would reduce the accuracy of the vote.
The Rocky Mountain Voice
now reports that the BIOS passwords to all of Colorado’s elections machines were posted unencrypted online.
That’s enough for anyone with a tiny amount of computer knowledge to silently hack the election: boot from a different device, modify the file(s) that count the votes on the voting machine’s hard drive after the vote. With more knowledge, you could hack the executable which counts the vote before the vote. It’s not much different from hacking a computer game to remove its protection. The only indication you’d have this was happening would be by counting the votes by hand… It is unreasonable to expect the election officials to have the competence to discover how the election computers were hacked if they leave their BIOS passwords online unencrypted. The latter only requires marginal competence, the former requires real competence.
So, assuming the Colorado Republicans are right about the passwords being online, there are grounds to be concerned.
The Colorado Secretary of State announced a number of reasons why the error would not compromise voting security, and the Republicans and the Secretary of State are working together to assure election security.
Yes, she did.
One claim was that the log files would prove something. That is a statement is proof of incompetence. Let me explain why:
If I have control over the BIOS, I can boot to Linux from an external drive. No log file will have been written to on the internal harddrive because the operating system on the internal harddrive will never have run, and it is the thing that writes log files.
From Linux on my external harddrive I can then mount the internal harddrive’s filesystem and change whatever I want, including parts of the operating system on the internal harddrive. For instance, I can change what the keyboard does, what the touch screen does, of the filesystem drivers, etc. I have control in a way that the election user interface cannot detect.
That’s just one trivial way of hacking a machine. A harder one to detect is to rewrite the BIOS itself. An even harder way is to rewrite the firmware of the internal harddrive so that files read differently depending on the situation. There are a million ways to do things.
Another claim was there was a second password. That’s probably the password to boot the internal operating system. If so, it doesn’t matter because I’ve side-stepped the internal operating system. So that statement is also likely proof of incompetence.
Ironically, it’s a lot harder to hack an iPhone, because Apple has spent a lot of effort ensuring its boot process is a lot more secure. Despite this, people manage to hack and unlock iPhones. And Apple only does this to preserve its profits. The fate of nations depend on the results of the elections, so the incentive to hack these machines is a lot greater, yet the security in which they are kept is far lower.
People who trust the people who keep these machines locked away will find nothing to fear.
People who don’t have that trust won’t be reassured by this level of incompetence.
It is extremely unlikely that the Secretary of State nor the Colorado Republican party have the tech know-how to detect an OS-level hack, so none of their reassurances mean diddly squat.
It seems to me that it’s pretty easy to understand why NPR’s “uneducated” have doubts, and do not blithely accept the reassurance their “betters” berate them with.
Personally, knowing how easy it is to hack computers, I think it would be a good idea to count the votes by hand, and that’s not because I am a “Republican”. I’m not.
I should point out that I’m assuming these machines are PC’s since as far as I know only PC’s have BIOS.
Since I don’t actually have access to these machines, I don’t know what they actually are for sure. Maybe they are something else, and the reports calling it a BIOS-password refer to something else or are wrong.
But if it were a PC, then these are the sorts of attack people with evil intent could do… which is why others would be justified in worrying.
They’re definitely pcs from the screenshots I’ve seen, though I’d expect the hard disks would also be encrypted by whatever OS was put on them. That’s normal nowadays for most operating systems.
Given some in the screenshots are Dell machines, It’s also not clear if this is the user bios password, the admin one, or the hard disk one. Two of those simply allow the machine to boot, only the admin one allows modifications to the bios settings.
I’d also expect voting machines to be similar to atm machines, where there’s a user accessible front end and a secured back end with additional functionality, and ballots being stored in the equivalent of the cash bin, so non-tech staff have access to the ballots but not the pc.
This is pretty careless, but not a significant vector for attack at this point in the process.
Dominion Machines seem to have a problem with straight party voting.
Allegedly, if you vote for Trump at the top of the ticket but select straight-party Democrat for the rest, your vote won’t be processed correctly. […] Dominion has decided not to address this glitch until after the election, fearing that any update might trigger other issues that could prevent the machines from counting votes accurately.
For context, the follow program in python counts votes:
a,b = 0,0
while 1:
x = raw_input(“Enter your vote: (a or b)”)
if x == “a”: a+=1
if x == “b”: b+=1
print(“%d votes for A and %d votes for B” % (a,b))
It’s not exactly rocket science.