This process has been carried out, publicly, a few times. Every time the results not only fail to support the current regime's narrative, they actively goes against it. So, the question becomes: "Who is getting kickbacks for this 'deal'?"
More importantly, how in the hell it this under the purview of ICE? Agencies and units have strictly outlined mission statements they are not supposed to go outside of. What kind of secret police nonsense it this?
On the other hand, potentially far more impactful is election fraud and election interference. Tampering with voting machines (Coffee GA, Tina Peters etc), paying voters (Musk in PA), asking a state to "find more votes" (GA), ...
ICE has been basically transformed into the FBI but mostly targeting American citizens. The goal has been, for a while now, to develop a domestic military and intelligence apparatus that can be used against the American people where they are - in their cities, in their states.
The police largely failed this job. Too local, too much accountability if you can believe it. The government really wants a federal force, beholden only to the desires of the dictator. The constitution gets in the way a bit, as you can't just deploy the military domestically against the US people. So ICE it is.
Because he's turned them into his own secret police - they even wear masks to hide their identifies. Fun fact - ICE has only been around for a little over 20 years. It's not some sancrosanct entity that couldn't have its necessary functions moved to entities with some sort of actual oversight and eliminated.
In a world where most people blindly accept answers from machines and never care to verify from actual sources the simple announcement effect followed by lies and accusations of fraud relayed repeatedly is enough. The whole mode of operations of extreme rights all over the world is to repeat lies ad nauseam until people unconsciously surrender and accept them as facts.
They don't need to prove that it's true. They just need to get it repeated enough, with some officialdom thrown in, for it to enter the public consciousness as "true".
The next step is to go dark on data about ICE, immigration, and voter fraud so that nobody can prove the opposite anymore.
This is a very old playbook, and it works extremely well.
ICE is Trump's private army, and their only loyalty is to him (and Stephen Miller, who's actually the puppet master here).
All of this is a painful lessons that institutions are not things, they are agreements and if someone with enough power does not agree than the institution is reshaped by that disagreement.
If you're a California resident, under the CCPA you can submit a request for Thomson Reuters to both provide you with and then delete any information they have collected about you.
The state's even setup a nice portal to automate these requests across 600+ data brokers.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but is this really the best way to respond here? Won't this just give them the opportunity to claim that California is doing this specifically to hide fraud? $125 mil is a drop in the bucket compared to ICE's budget, if they want to spend it like this why not just let them? Thomson Reuters has an excellent track record of being impartial/non-partisan.. maybe we could finally get past the nonsense election rigging claims. Just my 2c
The type of people who have been worked up about supposed voter fraud have rejected all existing evidence, so I don't know why you'd expect this go do any differently. Let's not forget that ICE has already admitted to lying directly to courts about the justification for their actions[1]; there's absolutely no reason to enable them in digging for more info. At absolute best, they're in a wild goose chase based on our speculation, but more plausibly they'll either lie about the results or try to use it for entirely unrelated purposes.
Is there a federal law with supremacy over the state law? My layperson’s understanding is that there would need to be something in existing federal law that forces retention. Not just some executive order, government contract, or executive policy.
A company could defy state law but they wouldn’t be protected from state level civil and criminal charges. There’s not much of a mechanism for the federal government to do anything about that.
Either outcome is risky for TR here. They're a very respected news publisher, so if they start colluding in fraud that would damage all their other business. If they take it seriously and don't produce results they'll get reprisals. I suspect they'll dig up every random voter registration paperwork error they can find and hand that over, while trying not to have their name tied to bigger conspiracy theories.
They're not a news publisher. Not exactly anyway. They are a huge conglomerate and Reuters is just one division - and a recent addition at that. TR is probably more known for legaltech, Westlaw and ancillary kind of stuff that ends up spilling over into other industries like tax and accounting. They also have a large government division, which presumably will take on this project. Their bread and butter is enterprise tech, consolidated public data and research tools. That's sort of where the news fits in. It's just another data source.
The boring truth is they’ll find nothing and the admin will pretend it never even looked. They’ve done this already with all the “very real and provable voter fraud” they investigated in previous elections. All the initiatives quietly disbanded after saying they found nothing.
Are you not counting the SAVE Act as an “initiative”? Even if it doesn’t pass, it’s certainly keeping the idea of election uncertainty front and center going into the midterms. Which gives cover to the local officials who have been inserted all over the country to mess things up.
Indeed. If the law passes they can use it. If the law doesn't pass, they can run against it not having passed.
There is a non-trivial chance that Trump prefers the latter and he'd end up vetoing SAVE because it has some small amendment he claims to hate.
Worth remembering that there was strong bipartisan immigration reform on the table in 2024 that Biden would have signed, but Trump told its own GOP co-sponsors not to pass it because it was easier for him to run against "open borders".
Drummed-up fear from the absence of the SAVE act might be the one thing that gets Trump's disillusioned base out to vote for him. By contrast, getting the SAVE act passed might be a dog-catches-car thing.
I’m not sure what you’re asking. All I’m saying is they keep saying they’re “going to prove it” and when they find no evidence, they don’t stop acting like they’re going to solve the problem that they know doesn’t exist. The investigations are a waste of time and money because they already decided it’s true. They don’t care what the results are.
I’m responding to the “quietly disbanded” part. Neither is true; they continue to loudly come up with new initiatives. I don’t even know that they “decided it’s true”, as that’s irrelevant to the strategy, which is just to maintain a continuous atmosphere of loud uncertainty.
My guess is the fraud they are looking for vs the fraud they find will not at all be related. If they find the fraud at all, it will be entirely the current administration at fault.
My bet is that they'll find a few jurisdictions where the voting rolls or other paperwork were altered in a way that runs afoul of some reconstruction era laws. The root cause will likely ultimately be metric gaming. They'll find a few more people from Chicago, New Jersey and the other "usual" places who did "real fraud", likely at the local and party primary level and immaterial to federal elections. This is technically election fraud, not voter fraud, but that won't matter. They'll flamboyantly prosecute everyone they can, maybe for a dozen total, and declare it a success before moving on to the next shiny distraction
Pretty sure you're supposed to get a warrant to access private information. I don't know how we ended up in this place where somehow paying for info precludes the necessity to get a warrant a la flock, cell tower data, etc.
The legal argument is that we gave this data "voluntarily" to the data broker so the government no longer needs a warrant.
This is an area that desperately needs new laws to catch up to the reality of what is going on, but I don't really see much motion toward that goal in the near future.
To put it more specifically the third-party doctrine needs reforms.
There are lots of things that are public information. Anyone can request public records like land titles, marriage certificates, bankruptcy filings, etc. Even ostensibly social media posts I'm kind of okay with being treated as public information.
The question is - why is Thomson Reuters allowed to get my utility records? If you call up my utility, this is not information they will give you. But Thomson Reuters is allowed to have it.
The utility can point to the language of the contract and say it's in their terms and conditions, but for the most part, I as a consumer don't have a choice between utility companies. And the law appreciates that access to water and electricity is a right - but yet these utilities enjoy a monopoly, so the idea that accepting their terms and conditions was a consumer choice wouldn't stand up to any strong legal scrutiny.
>I don't really see much motion toward that goal in the near future.
There is progress! Carpenter v. United States was a clear win that is still slowly matriculating through the legal system.
More importantly, the Not For Sale act passed the House not too long ago with broad bipartisan support. It's stalled in the Senate (of course) - but it's clearly something that has legislative attention.
The government never needs a warrant merely to ask for info, and a private entity doesn't need a warrant to voluntarily hand over info that they have. If we had decent privacy protections then a private entity couldn't decide to just hand over whatever data they have on others, but, well, we don't.
Every once in a while a company will publicly push back on such requests, but I feel it is getting rarer. Public libraries are a good example of places that still care about privacy, but companies that have to worry about going out of business because of a heavy-handed government tend to cave easily.
I do. Citizens United. It is a pay-to-play system we have going on here and it is working exactly as designed. Bribery? Why no, that is simply a donation. With enough money and moral bankruptcy you can accomplish all sorts of silly things that are in direct violation of the constitution, the law, and even common decency.
There's no mechanism that could possibly cancel the mid-terms. What we should worry about is the election being interfered with, and swayed by intimidation and disinformation, NOT being cancelled.
Wow, 97% that there will be elections. That's high, but if you handed me a gun with a 3% chance of being loaded and offered me a billion dollars to point it at my head and pull the trigger, I would not. My foot on the other hand...
It's worth noting that Polymarket (and all other prediction markets using money) has some fundamental problems that cause inaccuracy. Most notably here, the elections are still several months out, so you're asking people to put up 97 cents to get a dollar back in three months. But for that time frame I could also put 97 cents in treasuries and get 98 cents back, so the market won't be accurate within 1% of reality, and treasuries are considered a good deal safer than Polymarket.
In addition, there can be issues related to fees, Kelly betting (if the correct bet is 98%, don't want to bet all the way to 98% or you have no returns and you definitely don't want to put all of your wallet in on it in case it goes against you), and so on.
So this isn't a "3% chance of the elections happening" it's "3%, plus or minus the rate of return over three months, plus or minus all the other related issues". I don't know if that gets you down to zero percent, but it definitely gets you closer.
(Yes Polymarket has tried to do some things to resolve these issue, no they don't work very well.)
I don't think it's high at all. Elections are required for almost any legitimate government these days. Russia has elections. China has elections. North Korea has elections. The question is not whether there will be elections, but whether they will be free and fair.
And one of the deep ironies is that CLEAR is already highly deployed at the state level, among other things, to verify voter identity and prevent voter fraud!
DHS and ICE also ostensibly already use CLEAR for a variety of other purposes - what's novel here isn't that they are getting access to new data, it's that they want to backseat drive on investigations the states are already conducting, using only a subset of the data the states already use.
Of course, sorry but — rephrasing slightly for clarity — has it been their bailiwick since they were created? Like, is illegal voting an immigration law violation, or is this just Trump projecting a new responsibility onto his independently funded army?
Adjudicating whether an individual is eligible to vote is not and has never been the domain of any federal agency. It is categorically none of their business. The only federal intervention in elections that the Constitution permits is for the executive branch, traditionally through the Department of Justice, to ensure that states are not improperly preventing voters from voting, via the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments.
This is shocking and scary amount government over reach, to fabricate evidence of something that everyone knows is false...
We are really through the looking glass here, folks. Watch the confirmation hearings where potential appointees are asked to simply state factually who won the 2020 residential election. The amount of dissembling, avoidance, and inability to say that the emperor has no clothes..... it's just shocking.
This sort of rank corruption, of turning a government against its own people to subvert democracy... that more people aren't out in the streets about this makes me quite angry. We live in a state of continual shock of how bad things have gotten, I guess
(We're not supposed to talk about downvotes, but boy have I seen my comments fluctuate up and down at the top, which is highly unusual. In most web open forums I take part in, anything connected to this brings in lots of "new" users, some or many of which end up being bots. I upvoted you, for the record.)
I've noticed on Facebook that when you make a comment on a political article, you will sometimes - within a minute or two - start getting failed login attempts or password reset attempts on your account.
Given that your email address and phone are not visible unless you explicitly share them (and I use a pseudonym on FB), the implications are frankly chilling.
Could be coincidence, could be a data leak from Meta that wasn't reported, could be outside groups using LLMs to match profiles of text to external sources that do have your name...
It's a wild world out there in political technology, and I probably can't even guess what's going on with half of it.
Way back in the early 2010s I went to a data science meetup, way before facial recognition and face processing was easy, and found out that Facebook was tracking the faces in every photo, building databases of locations, times, and people out of it all, even for people without accounts, etc. And that was just a side project! 15 years ago!
For motivated groups operating without the usual bounds of being part of the US government, the sky is the limit in what they can do. Buying data from Thompson Reuters is really mild compared to what I'm sure is going on inside of PACs within the US. When you add in the state groups operating outside the US on US social networks with the goal of spreading distrust and disunity, I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.
> I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.
I can't prove it, but it sure looks like this is what's going on with some of the accounts which are posting anti-datacenter content on FB. Old ladies inactive for years who all of a sudden become super activists.
A wild world indeed, and frustratingly one that Meta doesn't seem bothered by. Presumably because it drives engagement.
> The problem is that everyone doesn't know this to be false. A substantial portion of the population "knows" it to be true.
If they choose to believe a histrionic liar, that’s their problem. The rest of us don’t have to entertain their credulousness and ignorance. Repeating lies doesn’t make them true, it only makes credulous people believe it. Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the theatrics around election fraud will cease.
It absolutely becomes everyone else's problem when they start shooting people or seizing control of things they're not supposed to. If you wait to the point that it affects you personally, it will probably be too late to do anything about it. Refusing to believe in something doesn't immunize you from force wielded by people who do believe it.
Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the theatrics around election fraud will cease.
We could all hope so, but this is a very passive response. Do you really think the people in the President's orbit are unaware of his advanced age and declining health, or are willing to just return to private life and give up power once he dies of natural causes? It seems far more likely to me that they know he could go any time and have some sort of plan to stick around. While none of them have exert the same sort of charismatic influence as the President does, do you really imagine that they and the substantial bloc of voters behind them are just going to magically come back to their centrist senses and abandon their violent and paranoid ethos?
To paraphrase a popular saying: if one of your countrymen believes a bunch of bullshit, they have a problem. If tens of millions of our countrymen believe a bunch of bullshit, we all have a problem.
Really? How do you audit or control for who shows up to vote? Do you check some kind of government ID or can anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are?
Each California county maintains a list of registered voters. Every voter gets sent a ballot in the mail, but is also allowed to vote in person. The consequences of this are that every single ballot and voter are tracked carefully.
Additionally, a person can vote anywhere in a county, so all in-person voting sites maintain connectivity to that somebody doesn't go to multiple voting sites and vote multiple times, in addition to tracking the mail-in ballots.
When voting in person, you provide your name, address, and sometimes age, etc. in order to disambiguate you as the particular person.
Mail-in vote counting happens with outside observers watching, with verified signatures.
So the system protects against each registered voter only voting once.
Registration of voters is usually tied to driver's licenses, when you file a change of address you can check a box to have your registration updated. If you're a new voter, you can provide or drivers license, or if not, the county will follow up with you to obtain other information to ensure that you're not registered by other means and are in fact a real person with that name and address.
> anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are?
Of course they can! That's only just and fair.
If you tried to steal somebody else's identity and vote as them, that would get flagged for multiple voting. Additionally, local political campaigns get lists of every registered voter, as well as which elections they voted in and party affiliation (if they chose one), which they use to campaign and knock on doors. Campaigns have sophisticated information systems to ensure that they don't bother the same voter multiple times, to indicate likelihood of voting and whether the canvasser thought the voter was going to vote for their candidate, etc. If there were a batch of fake voters somewhere, that would show up pretty quickly in these campaigning efforts.
You just don't require ID to know this. Voter ID is a very new construct and we don't need it, period. We already know who is and is not registered to vote and the voter registration process is pretty secure.
I can't speak for California, but here in my area of NY you show up, give your name and address, which they find in the registered voters list, and you sign on an iPad that gets checked against the signature on file. Then you get handed a ballot. By the local volunteers who are mostly people from the neighborhood, plus observers from both major parties. Your neighbors are there checking in alongside you.
Getting past all this risks years in jail for... an extra vote in a safely blue state.
None of this requires an ID, in part because in the US, there's no law that you have to have an ID in the first place. "Papers, please!" used to be a derogatory thing about totalitarian regimes.
(More practically, if we Dems were rigging elections, we'd win more often.)
If the person you're impersonating shows up to vote too, then that will be noticed and there will be questions. If they don't, there are still opportunities to notice issues after the fact. Get a list of who voted, call a random sample and ask if they actually voted. Check for dead people or noncitizens.
There isn't a ton of checking in advance but that doesn't mean we can't know if the results are legit. If there was a concerted, large-scale effort to impersonate voters, it could be done, and it would seriously screw things up. But it would not go undetected.
The problem is that if you look with an inquisitive eye without having a preference on the outcome there's no way to tell because of the margins in just a few districts, all that is sure is that the Constitution was followed and the valid electors chose the President (which is a major reason why it is designed that way).
What do you mean "there's no way to tell because of the margins in a few districts"?
Anybody looking with an inquisitive eye and no preference for the outcome reaches an extremely strong concision, that there was no voter fraud that could have influenced the outcome.
Despite what people say, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, if you've gone looking for the evidence and it's something that you should find if the claim is true. There's a bunch of evidence we'd expect to see if there was enough cheating to swing the election, and we don't see it. All we have is evidence of some pathetic attempts by the actual loser to overturn things.
No. But framing them as such is setting the stage for them to be involved in the upcoming midterm elections. That's the whole point of this fishing expedition.
Whatever the conclusion of "is ICE the correct agency for..." the answer is no. But you use the brownshirts for things regular civil servants would gum up with protests and procedure adhering to the actual law.
> Sturmabteilung: German, literally 'storm division.' A German Nazi paramilitary force formed in 1921, whose members were known in English as Brownshirts.
I see they're no longer bothering to even put up the slightest bit of pretense ICE is anything but Trump's brownshirts, a group of goons to brutalize and intimidate any opposition to his antidemocratic project.
When I was young, I thought mandatory voting was silly. It made uninformed people vote. Well, certainly in this case, I was the uninformed person because seeing how non-mandatory voting works (in the US) should convinced everyone that voting should be mandatory.
The history of the US is one of voter suppression. Women couldn't vote. After Emancipation, barriers were put in to stop black people from voting (so-called "grandfather" laws). We got the Voting Rights Act for a reason. Many reasons actually.
All the way back in the Reagan era we had the Republican Party engaging in voter disenfranchisement with, for example, the Ballot Security Task Force [1]. This was part of the reason why we needed federal preclearance until John Roberts and his Heritage Foundation henchmen decided that it was impossible to prove racism or disenfrachisement.
We continue this by not only removing the voting rights of felons (which should be unconstitutional) but we pass around lists of names of felons and strike off people from electoral rolls for having names that sound similar to that of a felon from a completely different state.
There is no widespread voter fraud. There is widespread voter disenfranchisement. All of this is just a pretext for stealing elections. We'll se on January 3rd if the current House Speaker refuses to certify results and swear in new members when the Republicans lose in a landslide. Or we see more shenanigans like in the 2020 election to overturn the presidential election.
Heritage Foundation, you know those super-left liberals, already did this and found like a hundred votes max over a decade and most of those were pure accidents and not intentional fraud, certainly not able to sway elections even by accident
I previously felt there was a suitable purpose for a small tiny ICE like Obama-sized era
But now I'm with the abolish folks, it's 100% irredeemable and between them executing people without repercussions and a budget larger than many critical organizations, just delete them completely and start over.
Well there's obviously at least some amount of fraud and a lot of people with eyes on it so finding it seems like the best course of action at the moment, mostly due to the latter since millions of people trusting the elections is pretty important AND if they are verifiably secure it prevents people from running their mouth about it and swaying anyone to distrust them (had to get ahead of it).
But really if you compare the US with the first country your mind thinks of when you think if trustworthy elections we have a long way to go and spending money and time looking for the weak spots is the correct start.
This is an example of the minimum viable amount of effort that should go into this:
"Belgium who was
little known that time received more votes than mathematically predicted. So the members of the
counting authority took out the magnetic cards and started counting again. After several hours they
found that the vote total for every candidate was exactly the same before except for Maria
Vindevogel. For Maria Vindevogel, the number of recounted vote was less than the original by
4096 number of votes. How this inflation in votes becomes possible even? What went wrong?
Computer experts were brought in to run extensive tests to check the programme. They combed
through the code but no bug was detected. Then they tested the hardware again and again."
So much of this noise tho bakes in the assumption that we weren’t already doing voter fraud detection. If my parents are a decent gauge, this is the entire lie the right wing is trying to push: that there has never been rails against voter fraud. That there isn’t a massive amount of machinery already preventing it. And, by acting like “oh now we’re doing something” and ignoring prior work it allows them to put on a captivating dog and pony show for the base that desperately wants to believe the elections are rigged.
It would be like declaring “we are taking the big step of installing smoke alarms in every school in America!” when there are already smoke alarms in every school. You just want the political noise for a base that is too dumb to realize you’re not doing anything new.
for the sake of the smart ones can we at least check? or how much intelligence does one need in order to qualify as a citizen worthy of trustable elections?
This process has been carried out, publicly, a few times. Every time the results not only fail to support the current regime's narrative, they actively goes against it. So, the question becomes: "Who is getting kickbacks for this 'deal'?"
More importantly, how in the hell it this under the purview of ICE? Agencies and units have strictly outlined mission statements they are not supposed to go outside of. What kind of secret police nonsense it this?
EDIT: Word choice & spelling
They are trying to confuse voter fraud with election fraud so they can justify ICE election interference in November.
There are only a small handful of voter fraud cases per year: someone tried to vote for a dead relative or whatever. Never enough to change an outcome. https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/how-many-cases-of-...
On the other hand, potentially far more impactful is election fraud and election interference. Tampering with voting machines (Coffee GA, Tina Peters etc), paying voters (Musk in PA), asking a state to "find more votes" (GA), ...
I can't believe this is how the guise of democracy in this country dies.
I'm still suspicious of actions like this: https://abcnews.com/US/dominion-voting-systems-sold-company-...
ICE has been basically transformed into the FBI but mostly targeting American citizens. The goal has been, for a while now, to develop a domestic military and intelligence apparatus that can be used against the American people where they are - in their cities, in their states.
The police largely failed this job. Too local, too much accountability if you can believe it. The government really wants a federal force, beholden only to the desires of the dictator. The constitution gets in the way a bit, as you can't just deploy the military domestically against the US people. So ICE it is.
Because he's turned them into his own secret police - they even wear masks to hide their identifies. Fun fact - ICE has only been around for a little over 20 years. It's not some sancrosanct entity that couldn't have its necessary functions moved to entities with some sort of actual oversight and eliminated.
Anywhere you move it, it's executive branch stuff.
I'm not sure what a bureaucratic shuffle would buy you in today's environment.
In a world where most people blindly accept answers from machines and never care to verify from actual sources the simple announcement effect followed by lies and accusations of fraud relayed repeatedly is enough. The whole mode of operations of extreme rights all over the world is to repeat lies ad nauseam until people unconsciously surrender and accept them as facts.
They don't need to prove that it's true. They just need to get it repeated enough, with some officialdom thrown in, for it to enter the public consciousness as "true".
The next step is to go dark on data about ICE, immigration, and voter fraud so that nobody can prove the opposite anymore.
This is a very old playbook, and it works extremely well.
ICE is Trump's private army, and their only loyalty is to him (and Stephen Miller, who's actually the puppet master here).
All of this is a painful lessons that institutions are not things, they are agreements and if someone with enough power does not agree than the institution is reshaped by that disagreement.
If you're a California resident, under the CCPA you can submit a request for Thomson Reuters to both provide you with and then delete any information they have collected about you.
The state's even setup a nice portal to automate these requests across 600+ data brokers.
https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/
This may be an unpopular opinion, but is this really the best way to respond here? Won't this just give them the opportunity to claim that California is doing this specifically to hide fraud? $125 mil is a drop in the bucket compared to ICE's budget, if they want to spend it like this why not just let them? Thomson Reuters has an excellent track record of being impartial/non-partisan.. maybe we could finally get past the nonsense election rigging claims. Just my 2c
California passes a law to protect consumers from data brokers amidst the destruction of the CFPB.
Californians individually make use of these protections.
Magas: "That just confirms voter fraud!"
At this point it is simply best to ignore what they are saying or would say.
nice zinger, but they can still vote, and ignoring them does not seem to be working.
The type of people who have been worked up about supposed voter fraud have rejected all existing evidence, so I don't know why you'd expect this go do any differently. Let's not forget that ICE has already admitted to lying directly to courts about the justification for their actions[1]; there's absolutely no reason to enable them in digging for more info. At absolute best, they're in a wild goose chase based on our speculation, but more plausibly they'll either lie about the results or try to use it for entirely unrelated purposes.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/26/ice-lawyers-...
Since they are working for the Federal government here, doesn’t the supremacy clause trump state law and allow them to deny / retain that data?
Is there a federal law with supremacy over the state law? My layperson’s understanding is that there would need to be something in existing federal law that forces retention. Not just some executive order, government contract, or executive policy.
A company could defy state law but they wouldn’t be protected from state level civil and criminal charges. There’s not much of a mechanism for the federal government to do anything about that.
I reckon that if you replace "find" with "make", you might be closer to the truth about what this data will be used for.
Either outcome is risky for TR here. They're a very respected news publisher, so if they start colluding in fraud that would damage all their other business. If they take it seriously and don't produce results they'll get reprisals. I suspect they'll dig up every random voter registration paperwork error they can find and hand that over, while trying not to have their name tied to bigger conspiracy theories.
At this point I think they are already screwed. Just collaborating with MAGA has destroyed their credibility.
Anecdotally I was considering dropping my Washington Post subscription and instead paying for Reuters. Now I'm definitely not doing that.
They're not a news publisher. Not exactly anyway. They are a huge conglomerate and Reuters is just one division - and a recent addition at that. TR is probably more known for legaltech, Westlaw and ancillary kind of stuff that ends up spilling over into other industries like tax and accounting. They also have a large government division, which presumably will take on this project. Their bread and butter is enterprise tech, consolidated public data and research tools. That's sort of where the news fits in. It's just another data source.
The boring truth is they’ll find nothing and the admin will pretend it never even looked. They’ve done this already with all the “very real and provable voter fraud” they investigated in previous elections. All the initiatives quietly disbanded after saying they found nothing.
They can’t even say they’ve found evidence when pressed https://newrepublic.com/post/213185/trump-election-fraud-guy...
Are you not counting the SAVE Act as an “initiative”? Even if it doesn’t pass, it’s certainly keeping the idea of election uncertainty front and center going into the midterms. Which gives cover to the local officials who have been inserted all over the country to mess things up.
Indeed. If the law passes they can use it. If the law doesn't pass, they can run against it not having passed.
There is a non-trivial chance that Trump prefers the latter and he'd end up vetoing SAVE because it has some small amendment he claims to hate.
Worth remembering that there was strong bipartisan immigration reform on the table in 2024 that Biden would have signed, but Trump told its own GOP co-sponsors not to pass it because it was easier for him to run against "open borders".
Drummed-up fear from the absence of the SAVE act might be the one thing that gets Trump's disillusioned base out to vote for him. By contrast, getting the SAVE act passed might be a dog-catches-car thing.
I’m not sure what you’re asking. All I’m saying is they keep saying they’re “going to prove it” and when they find no evidence, they don’t stop acting like they’re going to solve the problem that they know doesn’t exist. The investigations are a waste of time and money because they already decided it’s true. They don’t care what the results are.
I’m responding to the “quietly disbanded” part. Neither is true; they continue to loudly come up with new initiatives. I don’t even know that they “decided it’s true”, as that’s irrelevant to the strategy, which is just to maintain a continuous atmosphere of loud uncertainty.
The groups established to investigate. Not all initiatives related to it. Clearly the save act exists. Clearly they legislate based off this issue.
It seems you’re looking for the most binary, worst possible interpretation of my comment. I feel like what I’m saying is plenty clear at this point.
So the fraud perpetrated here will be this administration denying people their right to vote?
My guess is the fraud they are looking for vs the fraud they find will not at all be related. If they find the fraud at all, it will be entirely the current administration at fault.
My bet is that they'll find a few jurisdictions where the voting rolls or other paperwork were altered in a way that runs afoul of some reconstruction era laws. The root cause will likely ultimately be metric gaming. They'll find a few more people from Chicago, New Jersey and the other "usual" places who did "real fraud", likely at the local and party primary level and immaterial to federal elections. This is technically election fraud, not voter fraud, but that won't matter. They'll flamboyantly prosecute everyone they can, maybe for a dozen total, and declare it a success before moving on to the next shiny distraction
Pretty sure you're supposed to get a warrant to access private information. I don't know how we ended up in this place where somehow paying for info precludes the necessity to get a warrant a la flock, cell tower data, etc.
The legal argument is that we gave this data "voluntarily" to the data broker so the government no longer needs a warrant.
This is an area that desperately needs new laws to catch up to the reality of what is going on, but I don't really see much motion toward that goal in the near future.
To put it more specifically the third-party doctrine needs reforms.
There are lots of things that are public information. Anyone can request public records like land titles, marriage certificates, bankruptcy filings, etc. Even ostensibly social media posts I'm kind of okay with being treated as public information.
The question is - why is Thomson Reuters allowed to get my utility records? If you call up my utility, this is not information they will give you. But Thomson Reuters is allowed to have it.
The utility can point to the language of the contract and say it's in their terms and conditions, but for the most part, I as a consumer don't have a choice between utility companies. And the law appreciates that access to water and electricity is a right - but yet these utilities enjoy a monopoly, so the idea that accepting their terms and conditions was a consumer choice wouldn't stand up to any strong legal scrutiny.
>I don't really see much motion toward that goal in the near future.
There is progress! Carpenter v. United States was a clear win that is still slowly matriculating through the legal system.
More importantly, the Not For Sale act passed the House not too long ago with broad bipartisan support. It's stalled in the Senate (of course) - but it's clearly something that has legislative attention.
agreed. The sale of data is effective a run around existing law that forbids govt to collect it.
This is a huge issue. Privacy is dead as long as the government can buy its way around it.
Sheriffs depts and FLOCK, Ring Cameras, FBI , etc.
The government never needs a warrant merely to ask for info, and a private entity doesn't need a warrant to voluntarily hand over info that they have. If we had decent privacy protections then a private entity couldn't decide to just hand over whatever data they have on others, but, well, we don't.
Increasingly it's becoming necessary to disclose data to private entities just to survive and live a reasonable approximation of a normal life.
Why have constitutional protection against search if in practice nothing can be shielded from such searches?
Every once in a while a company will publicly push back on such requests, but I feel it is getting rarer. Public libraries are a good example of places that still care about privacy, but companies that have to worry about going out of business because of a heavy-handed government tend to cave easily.
> Why have constitutional protection against search if in practice nothing can be shielded from such searches?
Now you begin to understand.
And it is extremely unlikely we ever get a constitutional amendment to fix it. We're more likely to simply fall apart as a nation first.
I do. Citizens United. It is a pay-to-play system we have going on here and it is working exactly as designed. Bribery? Why no, that is simply a donation. With enough money and moral bankruptcy you can accomplish all sorts of silly things that are in direct violation of the constitution, the law, and even common decency.
My understanding is it started at least from the aftermath of 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Though I wouldn't be surprised if it predates that.
Third-party doctrine.
Oh don't be silly
Private companies take whatever information they want and sell it to any bidder they want and you get no say
It's freedom. It's not like its the government that is doing the collection, so that's ok.
sure as if laws apply anymore. who enforces any of this when the DOJ is run by the president's personal lawyer?
US politics is cooked. I wonder if polymarket will start taking bets on mid-terms being canceled.
They only need to cancel the results they don't like.
There's no mechanism that could possibly cancel the mid-terms. What we should worry about is the election being interfered with, and swayed by intimidation and disinformation, NOT being cancelled.
Why would you wonder that: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-2026-midterm-elections...
Of course they are.
Wow, 97% that there will be elections. That's high, but if you handed me a gun with a 3% chance of being loaded and offered me a billion dollars to point it at my head and pull the trigger, I would not. My foot on the other hand...
It's worth noting that Polymarket (and all other prediction markets using money) has some fundamental problems that cause inaccuracy. Most notably here, the elections are still several months out, so you're asking people to put up 97 cents to get a dollar back in three months. But for that time frame I could also put 97 cents in treasuries and get 98 cents back, so the market won't be accurate within 1% of reality, and treasuries are considered a good deal safer than Polymarket.
In addition, there can be issues related to fees, Kelly betting (if the correct bet is 98%, don't want to bet all the way to 98% or you have no returns and you definitely don't want to put all of your wallet in on it in case it goes against you), and so on.
So this isn't a "3% chance of the elections happening" it's "3%, plus or minus the rate of return over three months, plus or minus all the other related issues". I don't know if that gets you down to zero percent, but it definitely gets you closer.
(Yes Polymarket has tried to do some things to resolve these issue, no they don't work very well.)
I don't think it's high at all. Elections are required for almost any legitimate government these days. Russia has elections. China has elections. North Korea has elections. The question is not whether there will be elections, but whether they will be free and fair.
https://archive.is/2L3sU
More information:
Target Data Collected
According to procurement records initially reviewed by 404 Media, the system allows continuous monitoring of the following personal data points: [1]
Names and addresses
Social Security numbers
Ethnicities
Geolocation information
Social media activity [1]
https://www.change.org/p/demand-thomson-reuters-cancel-its-1...
This isn't about "finding" fraud.
This is about instilling fear, uncertainty and doubt.
The product we're talking about here is CLEAR.
And one of the deep ironies is that CLEAR is already highly deployed at the state level, among other things, to verify voter identity and prevent voter fraud!
DHS and ICE also ostensibly already use CLEAR for a variety of other purposes - what's novel here isn't that they are getting access to new data, it's that they want to backseat drive on investigations the states are already conducting, using only a subset of the data the states already use.
ICE have jurisdiction over elections now?
That's what happens when you make them the most highly-funded police force in the world. They start looking around for new jurisdictions.
ICE shipping out to Hormuz when.
If they will pay me $10 million I will guarantee to find voter fraud or refund half their money...
Its time to abolish ICE.
There are lot of ways to do it, but the biggest challenge is will they do it? like it's mostly a descision rather than capabilities.
Has this always been ICE responsibility?
Of course not, but ICE is the weapon of choice. A loyal, armed goon squad seemingly unconstrained by law compared to other agencies.
And now the FBI has announced they will not investigate any crimes that ICE commits.
ICE is less than 25 years old.
Of course, sorry but — rephrasing slightly for clarity — has it been their bailiwick since they were created? Like, is illegal voting an immigration law violation, or is this just Trump projecting a new responsibility onto his independently funded army?
Adjudicating whether an individual is eligible to vote is not and has never been the domain of any federal agency. It is categorically none of their business. The only federal intervention in elections that the Constitution permits is for the executive branch, traditionally through the Department of Justice, to ensure that states are not improperly preventing voters from voting, via the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments.
Why is this flagged?
This is shocking and scary amount government over reach, to fabricate evidence of something that everyone knows is false...
We are really through the looking glass here, folks. Watch the confirmation hearings where potential appointees are asked to simply state factually who won the 2020 residential election. The amount of dissembling, avoidance, and inability to say that the emperor has no clothes..... it's just shocking.
This sort of rank corruption, of turning a government against its own people to subvert democracy... that more people aren't out in the streets about this makes me quite angry. We live in a state of continual shock of how bad things have gotten, I guess
The problem is that everyone doesn't know this to be false. A substantial portion of the population "knows" it to be true.
Agree. Signs and flags around my neighborhood after 2020, "Trump won, you know it and I know it".
ETA: Why the downvotes? It's true, and I have photos of the signs. These people exist.
(We're not supposed to talk about downvotes, but boy have I seen my comments fluctuate up and down at the top, which is highly unusual. In most web open forums I take part in, anything connected to this brings in lots of "new" users, some or many of which end up being bots. I upvoted you, for the record.)
Talking about social media strangeness.
I've noticed on Facebook that when you make a comment on a political article, you will sometimes - within a minute or two - start getting failed login attempts or password reset attempts on your account.
Given that your email address and phone are not visible unless you explicitly share them (and I use a pseudonym on FB), the implications are frankly chilling.
Could be coincidence, could be a data leak from Meta that wasn't reported, could be outside groups using LLMs to match profiles of text to external sources that do have your name...
It's a wild world out there in political technology, and I probably can't even guess what's going on with half of it.
Way back in the early 2010s I went to a data science meetup, way before facial recognition and face processing was easy, and found out that Facebook was tracking the faces in every photo, building databases of locations, times, and people out of it all, even for people without accounts, etc. And that was just a side project! 15 years ago!
For motivated groups operating without the usual bounds of being part of the US government, the sky is the limit in what they can do. Buying data from Thompson Reuters is really mild compared to what I'm sure is going on inside of PACs within the US. When you add in the state groups operating outside the US on US social networks with the goal of spreading distrust and disunity, I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.
> I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.
I can't prove it, but it sure looks like this is what's going on with some of the accounts which are posting anti-datacenter content on FB. Old ladies inactive for years who all of a sudden become super activists.
A wild world indeed, and frustratingly one that Meta doesn't seem bothered by. Presumably because it drives engagement.
> The problem is that everyone doesn't know this to be false. A substantial portion of the population "knows" it to be true.
If they choose to believe a histrionic liar, that’s their problem. The rest of us don’t have to entertain their credulousness and ignorance. Repeating lies doesn’t make them true, it only makes credulous people believe it. Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the theatrics around election fraud will cease.
It absolutely becomes everyone else's problem when they start shooting people or seizing control of things they're not supposed to. If you wait to the point that it affects you personally, it will probably be too late to do anything about it. Refusing to believe in something doesn't immunize you from force wielded by people who do believe it.
Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the theatrics around election fraud will cease.
We could all hope so, but this is a very passive response. Do you really think the people in the President's orbit are unaware of his advanced age and declining health, or are willing to just return to private life and give up power once he dies of natural causes? It seems far more likely to me that they know he could go any time and have some sort of plan to stick around. While none of them have exert the same sort of charismatic influence as the President does, do you really imagine that they and the substantial bloc of voters behind them are just going to magically come back to their centrist senses and abandon their violent and paranoid ethos?
To paraphrase a popular saying: if one of your countrymen believes a bunch of bullshit, they have a problem. If tens of millions of our countrymen believe a bunch of bullshit, we all have a problem.
Because California has systematically made it impossible to audit elections there.
You have to be disinformed to think elections there are secure, you can't possibly know they are.
You are making up things, and then saying others are being disinformed?
California's elections are widely audited, observed, and secure.
Stop spreading lies.
Really? How do you audit or control for who shows up to vote? Do you check some kind of government ID or can anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are?
Each California county maintains a list of registered voters. Every voter gets sent a ballot in the mail, but is also allowed to vote in person. The consequences of this are that every single ballot and voter are tracked carefully.
Additionally, a person can vote anywhere in a county, so all in-person voting sites maintain connectivity to that somebody doesn't go to multiple voting sites and vote multiple times, in addition to tracking the mail-in ballots.
When voting in person, you provide your name, address, and sometimes age, etc. in order to disambiguate you as the particular person.
Mail-in vote counting happens with outside observers watching, with verified signatures.
So the system protects against each registered voter only voting once.
Registration of voters is usually tied to driver's licenses, when you file a change of address you can check a box to have your registration updated. If you're a new voter, you can provide or drivers license, or if not, the county will follow up with you to obtain other information to ensure that you're not registered by other means and are in fact a real person with that name and address.
> anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are?
Of course they can! That's only just and fair.
If you tried to steal somebody else's identity and vote as them, that would get flagged for multiple voting. Additionally, local political campaigns get lists of every registered voter, as well as which elections they voted in and party affiliation (if they chose one), which they use to campaign and knock on doors. Campaigns have sophisticated information systems to ensure that they don't bother the same voter multiple times, to indicate likelihood of voting and whether the canvasser thought the voter was going to vote for their candidate, etc. If there were a batch of fake voters somewhere, that would show up pretty quickly in these campaigning efforts.
You just don't require ID to know this. Voter ID is a very new construct and we don't need it, period. We already know who is and is not registered to vote and the voter registration process is pretty secure.
I can't speak for California, but here in my area of NY you show up, give your name and address, which they find in the registered voters list, and you sign on an iPad that gets checked against the signature on file. Then you get handed a ballot. By the local volunteers who are mostly people from the neighborhood, plus observers from both major parties. Your neighbors are there checking in alongside you.
Getting past all this risks years in jail for... an extra vote in a safely blue state.
None of this requires an ID, in part because in the US, there's no law that you have to have an ID in the first place. "Papers, please!" used to be a derogatory thing about totalitarian regimes.
(More practically, if we Dems were rigging elections, we'd win more often.)
If the person you're impersonating shows up to vote too, then that will be noticed and there will be questions. If they don't, there are still opportunities to notice issues after the fact. Get a list of who voted, call a random sample and ask if they actually voted. Check for dead people or noncitizens.
There isn't a ton of checking in advance but that doesn't mean we can't know if the results are legit. If there was a concerted, large-scale effort to impersonate voters, it could be done, and it would seriously screw things up. But it would not go undetected.
Are you seriously suggesting that Trump would have won California if not for cheating?
The problem is that if you look with an inquisitive eye without having a preference on the outcome there's no way to tell because of the margins in just a few districts, all that is sure is that the Constitution was followed and the valid electors chose the President (which is a major reason why it is designed that way).
What do you mean "there's no way to tell because of the margins in a few districts"?
Anybody looking with an inquisitive eye and no preference for the outcome reaches an extremely strong concision, that there was no voter fraud that could have influenced the outcome.
I can't tell because there's not enough evidence either way, it's OK to have a third opinion of "I can't know", that's actually the default position.
Despite what people say, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, if you've gone looking for the evidence and it's something that you should find if the claim is true. There's a bunch of evidence we'd expect to see if there was enough cheating to swing the election, and we don't see it. All we have is evidence of some pathetic attempts by the actual loser to overturn things.
> This is shocking
Is it really? Have you been asleep for the last decade?
Having ICE buy data from a data broker to fabricate evidence for a well disproven conspiracy theory? This is still shocking, absolutely shocking!
I will retain my right to be shocked and angry about government overreach, thanks.
It’s Cyber Ninjas all over again
And Cyber Symposium. Oh man, those were the days, when "ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!" claims were met with laughter instead of Joe Rogan saying "wild".
Batshit insane. Does this mean they need to "find" it, like how he wanted to "find" more votes in Georgia?
“Find” in the sense of “find me the man and I’ll find you the crime”.
Is ICE the correct agency for voter fraud?
No. But framing them as such is setting the stage for them to be involved in the upcoming midterm elections. That's the whole point of this fishing expedition.
That's the one murdering innocent civilians in the streets? That's the one locking up thousands and denying basic human rights?
No. They're not the 'correct agency' for anything.
ICE will say their mandate in this context is to ensure that non-US citizens are not on state voter rolls.
ICE knows illegals are less inclined to register to vote knowing that ICE monitors voter rolls.
No, of course not. They have zero domestic police authority for US citizens.
Meanwhile they run around pulling people over for "traffic violations" and then pulling a "Your taillights are out, and papers, please."
No, it's the FDA's role, as everybody knows
Whatever the conclusion of "is ICE the correct agency for..." the answer is no. But you use the brownshirts for things regular civil servants would gum up with protests and procedure adhering to the actual law.
Ah yes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that famous election security wing of the US Government
We called them Sturmabteilung in the original German.
> Sturmabteilung: German, literally 'storm division.' A German Nazi paramilitary force formed in 1921, whose members were known in English as Brownshirts.
The ICE comparison is spot on, IMO.
How is this immigration enforcement?
I see they're no longer bothering to even put up the slightest bit of pretense ICE is anything but Trump's brownshirts, a group of goons to brutalize and intimidate any opposition to his antidemocratic project.
I found it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...
Because there are no consequences of Trump's actions, he would continue to commit offenses.
Neither Biden's administration, nor the judge presiding over Trump's crimes did what should have been done.
The checks and balances failed both when Trump was in power and when he was not in power.
You conclusion is true but how you get there is deeply flawed.
With the recent immunity ruling and the impossibility of the Senate upholding impeachment, yes, the president can basically try anything he wants.
When I was young, I thought mandatory voting was silly. It made uninformed people vote. Well, certainly in this case, I was the uninformed person because seeing how non-mandatory voting works (in the US) should convinced everyone that voting should be mandatory.
The history of the US is one of voter suppression. Women couldn't vote. After Emancipation, barriers were put in to stop black people from voting (so-called "grandfather" laws). We got the Voting Rights Act for a reason. Many reasons actually.
All the way back in the Reagan era we had the Republican Party engaging in voter disenfranchisement with, for example, the Ballot Security Task Force [1]. This was part of the reason why we needed federal preclearance until John Roberts and his Heritage Foundation henchmen decided that it was impossible to prove racism or disenfrachisement.
We continue this by not only removing the voting rights of felons (which should be unconstitutional) but we pass around lists of names of felons and strike off people from electoral rolls for having names that sound similar to that of a felon from a completely different state.
There is no widespread voter fraud. There is widespread voter disenfranchisement. All of this is just a pretext for stealing elections. We'll se on January 3rd if the current House Speaker refuses to certify results and swear in new members when the Republicans lose in a landslide. Or we see more shenanigans like in the 2020 election to overturn the presidential election.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force
Our country is now a clown show
Heritage Foundation, you know those super-left liberals, already did this and found like a hundred votes max over a decade and most of those were pure accidents and not intentional fraud, certainly not able to sway elections even by accident
I previously felt there was a suitable purpose for a small tiny ICE like Obama-sized era
But now I'm with the abolish folks, it's 100% irredeemable and between them executing people without repercussions and a budget larger than many critical organizations, just delete them completely and start over.
But that's not nazi because Trump have no mustache.
Well there's obviously at least some amount of fraud and a lot of people with eyes on it so finding it seems like the best course of action at the moment, mostly due to the latter since millions of people trusting the elections is pretty important AND if they are verifiably secure it prevents people from running their mouth about it and swaying anyone to distrust them (had to get ahead of it).
But really if you compare the US with the first country your mind thinks of when you think if trustworthy elections we have a long way to go and spending money and time looking for the weak spots is the correct start.
This is an example of the minimum viable amount of effort that should go into this:
"Belgium who was little known that time received more votes than mathematically predicted. So the members of the counting authority took out the magnetic cards and started counting again. After several hours they found that the vote total for every candidate was exactly the same before except for Maria Vindevogel. For Maria Vindevogel, the number of recounted vote was less than the original by 4096 number of votes. How this inflation in votes becomes possible even? What went wrong? Computer experts were brought in to run extensive tests to check the programme. They combed through the code but no bug was detected. Then they tested the hardware again and again."
https://scotopia.in/journal/journalbkend/paper_list/v-4-i-1(...
So much of this noise tho bakes in the assumption that we weren’t already doing voter fraud detection. If my parents are a decent gauge, this is the entire lie the right wing is trying to push: that there has never been rails against voter fraud. That there isn’t a massive amount of machinery already preventing it. And, by acting like “oh now we’re doing something” and ignoring prior work it allows them to put on a captivating dog and pony show for the base that desperately wants to believe the elections are rigged.
It would be like declaring “we are taking the big step of installing smoke alarms in every school in America!” when there are already smoke alarms in every school. You just want the political noise for a base that is too dumb to realize you’re not doing anything new.
for the sake of the smart ones can we at least check? or how much intelligence does one need in order to qualify as a citizen worthy of trustable elections?