The myth of an ending: why even removing Trump from office won’t save American democracy

[Trausti]

:And while I can’t find any specifics, it should also be noted that Pennsylvania was one of the states whose election records the Russians hacked. Pretty much every single piece I’ve ever read on the election records hacks always focuses on the wrong worry; changing a vote after it was cast. The point of hacking state election records was to find out exactly who actually votes in the particular counties and their voting history (and email addresses, etc). You can’t find that information anywhere else.

Firstly, Pennsylvania's voter records were not hack. (Read your link.) Secondly, election records (whether a person is registered, where they vote, etc.) are obtainable through Lexus Nexus. You just need to affirm you're using them for a proper purpose.

 

[Trausti]

That is a woefully ignorant and illogical assessment that contradicts your own previous points. There is, however, a far more logical reason why Trump inexplicably went to two solidly blue states late in the game: Russian-linked Facebook ads targeted Michigan and Wisconsin.

About those Facebook ads, this is from its VP:

What was in the ads you shared with Congress? How many people saw them?
Most of the ads appear to focus on divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum, touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights. A number of them appear to encourage people to follow Pages on these issues.

Here are a few other facts about the ads:

An estimated 10 million people in the US saw the ads. We were able to approximate the number of unique people (“reach”) who saw at least one of these ads, with our best modeling
44% of total ad impressions (number of times ads were displayed) were before the US election on November 8, 2016; 56% were after the election.

Roughly 25% of the ads were never shown to anyone. That’s because advertising auctions are designed so that ads reach people based on relevance, and certain ads may not reach anyone as a result.

For 50% of the ads, less than $3 was spent; for 99% of the ads, less than $1,000 was spent.

About 1% of the ads used a specific type of Custom Audiences targeting to reach people on Facebook who had visited that advertiser’s website or liked the advertiser’s Page — as well as to reach people who are similar to those audiences. None of the ads used another type of Custom Audiences targeting based on personal information such as email addresses. (This bullet added October 3, 2017.)

Of the more than 3,000 ads that we have shared with Congress, 5% appeared on Instagram. About $6,700 was spent on these ads (This bullet added October 6, 2017.)

Earlier, Facebook reported:

About one-quarter of these ads were geographically targeted, and of those, more ran in 2015 than 2016.

So, a quarter of the ads were never seen. Most ads ran after the election. Of the geographically targeted ads, more ran in 2015(!). And over all this time we're talking maybe $100K. This conspiracy shit is ridiculous. When Michigander Michael Moore predicted a Trump victory, Facebook ads were not part of his analysis.

 

[Emily Lake]

So... Trump had better campaign strategy, better tactics, and better analytics than Clinton did.

Is the DNC going to start focusing on actually using data and campaigning based on game theory in the future? That would be the smart thing to do.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

:And while I can’t find any specifics, it should also be noted that Pennsylvania was one of the states whose election records the Russians hacked. Pretty much every single piece I’ve ever read on the election records hacks always focuses on the wrong worry; changing a vote after it was cast. The point of hacking state election records was to find out exactly who actually votes in the particular counties and their voting history (and email addresses, etc). You can’t find that information anywhere else.

Firstly, Pennsylvania's voter records were not hack. (Read your link.)

Yes, they were. Read the link. What wasn't effected was the voting system (i.e., how the computers count the votes), which is why I pointed that out.

Secondly, election records (whether a person is registered, where they vote, etc.) are obtainable through Lexus Nexus.

Once again, had you been paying attention, what you CAN'T get is exactly how individuals who are registered previously voted in other elections. General information on registration won't help you when you're micro-targeting (a) registered voters who actually vote (as opposed to those who never bother) and (b) registered voters who actually voted along party lines or wavered in past elections.

- - - Updated - - -

About those Facebook ads

That we know about and it's not just the ads and this is why knowing specific individual's voting history is relevant.

 

[Trausti]

Yes, they were. Read the link. What wasn't effected was the voting system (i.e., how the computers count the votes), which is why I pointed that out.

Secondly, election records (whether a person is registered, where they vote, etc.) are obtainable through Lexus Nexus.

Once again, had you been paying attention, what you CAN'T get is exactly how individuals who are registered previously voted in other elections. General information on registration won't help you when you're micro-targeting (a) registered voters who actually vote (as opposed to those who never bother) and (b) registered voters who actually voted along party lines or wavered in past elections.

- - - Updated - - -

About those Facebook ads

That we know about and it's not just the ads and this is why knowing specific individual's voting history is relevant.

Are you somehow unaware that voter ballets are anonymous?

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

So... Trump had better campaign strategy

If by that you mean, Putin did, yes.

Is the DNC going to start focusing on actually using data and campaigning based on game theory in the future?

Nothing Cambridge Analytica or Parscale did was based on game theory. That's the point. They are using that as a smokescreen, but again, the kind of information available without hacking into State voter records (not the system; the records) cannot provide anyone with enough information to effectively employ any such theory (emphasis mine):

In GOP political consulting circles, Cambridge soon gained a reputation as the Mercers’ somewhat odd pet project. The wealthy hedge fund family would reportedly demand that candidates hire Cambridge if they wanted Mercer money. And after working on various low-profile GOP political efforts in 2014, Cambridge landed a major job with a Mercer-funded Super PAC supporting Ted Cruz’s presidential candidacy. But the gig went poorly — the Cruz team claimed Cambridge’s data was worthless and fought with them over money, according to a later New York Times report.

Eventually, Donald Trump emerged as the GOP nominee-in-waiting. And though Bannon was still a few months away from officially joining the Trump campaign, he made the introduction between Cambridge and Trump’s team. (Bannon owned a stake in Cambridge and was being paid by it at the time.) Various reports name Trump staffers Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Brad Parscale as involved in the decision to bring Cambridge on board, and on June 23, 2016, the campaign signed a contract with the firm.

Trump’s digital team was run by Parscale out of an office in San Antonio, Texas, and Cambridge sent along 13 people to work with them there, Wired reported.

What did they do? Well, in the new Channel 4 News report, Nix, the Cambridge CEO, brags to someone he thought was a prospective client that “we did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy” (though he could be inflating the company’s role).

However, one thing that both Trump aides and Cambridge staffers have since claimed the company did not do for Trump is use the firm’s fancy, futuristic-sounding “psychographic” personality modeling. People from both camps have said, in public statements and to reporters, that the Trump campaign chose to use the RNC’s data file as its raw data, not those tens of millions of personal profiles matched with Facebook data that Cambridge obtained.

If this is true, Cambridge’s work for Trump resembled less sexy, more traditional political consulting. More specifically:

• Cambridge oversaw a $5 million placement of TV ads — though the Times reports that the Trump campaign was unhappy with the results, since
• Cambridge ended up paying for ads on cable channels in Washington, DC.
• The firm worked on targeting digital ads and online fundraising.
• They did polling of swing states.

...
During the campaign, Trump’s digital operation was generally thought to be a joke, and Clinton’s team was portrayed as the ingenious data wizards with incredible algorithms. But after Clinton’s shocking loss, people naturally searched for explanations — and Cambridge Analytica was willing and eager to take credit. Not everyone bought it, though — the Spectator’s Paul Wood asked “Are Cambridge Analytica brilliant scientists or snake-oil salesmen?” in December 2016.

Here's the Spectator's piece: The British data-crunchers who say they helped Donald Trump to win:

‘The impressive bit,’ says Nix, is to expand the findings from those who took the personality tests to the entire American electorate of 230 million. They can do this because Cambridge Analytica also has ‘4,000–5,000 data points’ — pieces of information — on every single adult in the US. This can be anything from age, gender and ethnicity to what magazines they buy, which TV programmes they watch, the food they eat, the cars they drive, even the golf clubs they belong to. This is indeed impressive — and a little bit creepy. Regardless, the data is for sale; Cambridge Analytica take it and (they have persuaded their clients) spin it into gold. There are two assumptions: first that people who buy the same things and have the same habits — the same ‘data points’ — have similar personalities; secondly that your personality will help predict, say, whether you go for Coke or Pepsi, Clinton or Trump. ‘Behaviour is driven by personality,’ Nix said.

To the detractors, this is pure fantasy. One Republican political consultant said: ‘Their thesis is people don’t know what they think about politics but we can anticipate what they will think based on their personality types. That’s nonsense.’ Political consulting — the business he was in — was full of characters like the Duke and the King in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, schnorring the yokels and relieving them of their wallets. ‘It makes perfect sense that Donald Trump used these people. You’re talking about a guy who lost money on red meat and professional football, booze, sex, gambling, discount airfares and higher education in the United States. He went broke doing things it’s impossible to lose money on in this society, so he’s very good at being played for a rube.’

A Republican data scientist for a rival firm said he did not use psychographics. ‘If you get a voter on the phone, why are you asking them what their favourite ice cream is or what their favourite colour is — why don’t you just ask them who they’re going to vote for?’ He added: ‘They’ve got a smooth-talking Brit wearing Savile Row suits who gives you a great pitch and wows you a little bit; they’ve got a great PR operation, but with psychographic profiling, there’s nothing there. They’re really, really smart people. It’s like they’re a bunch of board-certified doctors who decided to make a lot more money selling snake oil.’

Snake oil that the Trump team now claims it never used.

And of particular note, once again it was Trump (i.e., Putin) who determined the strategy:

Trump had already announced his rust-belt strategy before Cambridge came on board. But Oczkowski says he ‘greatly influenced’ where the candidate travelled, based on the ‘density of persuadable voters’. ‘We certainly don’t take credit for any strategy,’ he was careful to say, but ‘we reinforced decisions that Mr Trump had already decided to take’.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Are you somehow unaware that voter ballets are anonymous?

 

[Trausti]

Are you somehow unaware that voter ballets are anonymous?

Then, enlighten me. How is it you propose you'd discover how someone voted in past elections using state voter register information? Have you ever voted before?

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Are you somehow unaware that voter ballets are anonymous?

Then, enlighten me. How is it you propose you'd discover how someone voted in past elections using state voter register information? Have you ever voted before?

Are you seriously just going to keep digging yourself in deeper like this? It's called google, but fine: A Trump commission requested voter data. Here’s what every state is saying. Each State has different laws regarding what information they consider public and what they consider private. Some (like Alaska) considers a person's voter history public (though it's not clear if that just means how often they voted and not necessarily for whom they voted), while other States only consider one's party affiliation public.

Take ten seconds to enlighten yourself, but you can start with the fact that it was Trump himself who requested from each State the individual voter's history (emphasis mine):

President Donald Trump is asking for voter names, addresses, party affiliation and voting records from all 50 states

as part of his "voter fraud" witch hunt. All a hacker would have to do is compare the votes and the log of voter Id numbers, at least in regard to electronic voting machines. Caucus primaries like Iowa's are even more vulnerable:

New and chilling technological practices have emerged in just the past few months. One of the most frightening so far was a claim by a firm called Dstllery that it had captured the mobile device IDs from Iowa caucus goers and then matched them to their online profiles. They then used this information in combination with precinct results to make assumptions about their voting presences.

As Fusion’s Kashmir Hill reported:

What really happened is that Dstillery gets information from people’s phones via ad networks. When you open an app or look at a browser page, there’s a very fast auction that happens where different advertisers bid to get to show you an ad. Their bid is based on how valuable they think you are, and to decide that, your phone sends them information about you, including, in many cases, an identifying code (that they’ve built a profile around) and your location information, down to your latitude and longitude.
…
So on the night of the Iowa caucus, Dstillery flagged all the auctions that took place on phones in latitudes and longitudes near caucus locations. It wound up spotting 16,000 devices on caucus night, as those people had granted location privileges to the apps or devices that served them ads. It captured those mobile ID’s and then looked up the characteristics associated with those IDs in order to make observations about the kind of people that went to Republican caucus locations (young parents) versus Democrat caucus locations. It drilled down farther (e.g., ‘people who like NASCAR voted for Trump and Clinton’) by looking at which candidate won at a particular caucus location.

As I pointed out previously, hacking State voter records is not just about worries over changing any particular votes; it's about getting as much individually-based information as possible that can then be used in various other ways to micro-target those particular individuals (as opposed to broader scale or more general demographic targeting).

ETA: There's also this from Stanford regarding Direct Recording Electronic (DRE)-type sytems:

With DRE, there is no paper trail, no verification, and thus no scrutiny of the processes. Voter anonymity is also a problem. Voters have to provide much of their personal information to the systems for voter verification, and with that comes the problem of keeping voter information safe and keeping voters anonymous.

Here's a PDF that goes into greater detail in regard to how seemingly "innocent" voter records could nevertheless reveal the identity of the voter and breach anonymity: Privacy Issues In An Electronic Voting Machine.

How many states have those systems? 30 by my count, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Michigan only allows paper ballots, which may help explain why it was the lowest swing of the three (only 10,704) and yet the highest focus late in the game for Parscale and Trump for no explicable reason.

It would also considerably help explain how Trump won Pennsylvania (by the largest swing of the three, 44,292 votes) in spite of the fact that they supposedly abandoned it in favor of focusing exclusively on Wisconsin and Michigan.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Because I'm sure no one is going to read the Stanford publication, here are some key takeaways, but first this little tidbit from yet another piece that assumes the concern was with changing actual votes and not gaining access to other forms of information that would allow breaches in anonymity (emphasis mine):

"The good news is that, for the most part, most of the things that we saw attempted in 2016 were just that, attempts," he says. "There was nothing that impacted the voting tallies, as we said before, and for the most part, these attempts were not successful in any intrusions into systems."

Only two state election security breaches last year have been made public so far. Hackers were able to gain access to the records of tens of thousands of voters in Illinois' centralized registration database, but there is no sign any records were deleted or changed. Russian hackers also gained access to the password and other credentials of a county elections worker in Arizona. Again there is no evidence that records were altered.

Earlier this year, a leaked National Security Agency report also detailed attempts by Russian military intelligence to infiltrate an election software vendor's computer and to use that information to send emails containing malicious software to up to 122 local election offices. There is no evidence any of those emails were opened.

Got it? The emphasis is always on assurances against alteration or vote tallies, but no one asks about ancillary and seemingly unimportant bits of information that may have been stolen.

And note that the above piece was from September of 2017 and we are of course dealing with third-hand reporting on only that which has been revealed by the government so far. As with so much about this Byzantine nightmare (such as how first it was revealed that it was 21 states, then 31, I believe and then 39 that were targeted, etc), the full extent of who did what and exactly what kind of information they stole is still ongoing. But, again, note, at least, who Russia targeted and now consider this from the Stanford PDF regarding DRE anonymity breaches previously linked (emphasis mine):

At every stage of information transmission, from voter entry, through vote casting, through canvassing, a voter’s identity must remain hidden. It is relatively simple to describe the overt communication channels in terms of the information that actually should be transmitted at each stage. But within the actual transmission mechanism it is possible that a covert channel also transmits improper identity information. Covert channels in a voting system can take a number of forms. Some covert channels require the cooperation of collaborators, such as voters themselves or poll workers.

By "poll workers" the authors are referring to the people that actually hand you the ballots or otherwise assist you in voting at the various voting stations. Iow, these would be people working at the "122 local election offices" and the like. I note this because, while the paper speculates on their "cooperation" they could also be used in other covert means to help reveal information that in turn could be used to figure out who voted for who in particular key counties.

This is the darker side of the coin in regard to voter ID laws. It's not just a way to suppress voter turnout primarily among Democrats, it's that the poll workers keep lists of all the registered voters in their counties and check off your name on those lists once you present your ID. That's how you get your ballot. So, while they may not know who you voted for, they may either record what time you came in to vote (even in States that don't have DRE) or the voting machines timestamp when the ballot itself was cast and that could be correlated to when you signed in or such times could be narrowed down by more indirect means (such as hacking poll worker files to see when certain records were inputed/updated, etc).

I'm speculating, of course, but the fact of the matter is that the Russians did breach these systems and they did steal information and they did target specific election offices. What they did not do, however, is what everyone feared they would--which was attempt to meddle directly with the way in which votes were counted. So what--exactly--did they actually do instead? I suspect Mueller's team and the rest of the intelligence community knows, but so far we have either not been told or--as I keep pointing out--just about every single reporter keeps asking the wrong question.

It's not, "did they go after the votes?" It's, "did they go after the seemingly irrelevant data that when combined with other seemingly irrelevant data reveals information about the voters themselves that could be used to micro-target individuals not just groups?" Iow, did they find a way to breach anonymity or, if not, at least narrow it down even farther such that particular individuals could be specifically targeted that in turn would help shift the minuscule percentages we've been talking about this whole time?

A longer question to be sure, but the one that no one seems to be asking in the press.

What we do know, however, is what I've posted from Parscale and about Cambridge Analytica and Trump instructing both to focus on two states in particular (Michigan and Wisconsin, abandoning Pennsylvania, supposedly) and how that directly corresponds with what Russia did as well, to the extent we civilians know about at least. AND we know that Parscale and Cambridge Analytica's supposed superior data and analysis wasn't used! So that's all a huge smokescreen.

So, again, how is it that they won Pennsylvania (abandoned), Wisconsin and Michigan (specifically targeted by Parscale at Trump's insistence, but Parscale's magic analysis not utilized, but "found" data was)?

 

[Emily Lake]

If by that you mean, Putin did, yes.

Are you under the impression that Putin ran every aspect of Trump's campaign?

Nothing Cambridge Analytica or Parscale did was based on game theory.

Of course not. Trump's selection of states and where he rallied and campaigned hardest would have been based on game theory. Not done by him, of course, but by his campaign strategists.

Regarding the rest of it... that's what predictive analytics of consumer behavior does. It's not new, it's been used by advertisers for a long time now. Psychographic indicators aren't a perfect match on an individual basis, but the fit on aggregate is often quite impressive. Politics IS advertising. Frankly I was surprised to find out that psychographic targeting within a predictive framework wasn't already widely used by politicians.

 

[Emily Lake]

Take ten seconds to enlighten yourself, but you can start with the fact that it was Trump himself who requested from each State the individual voter's history (emphasis mine):

President Donald Trump is asking for voter names, addresses, party affiliation and voting records from all 50 states

Voting records contain WHEN a person voted, as well as WHICH (if any) political party they are registered with. They don't contain WHO the person voted for.

New and chilling technological practices have emerged in just the past few months. One of the most frightening so far was a claim by a firm called Dstllery that it had captured the mobile device IDs from Iowa caucus goers and then matched them to their online profiles. They then used this information in combination with precinct results to make assumptions about their voting presences.

As Fusion’s Kashmir Hill reported:

What really happened is that Dstillery gets information from people’s phones via ad networks.

Geofencing and mobile ID persona tracking aren't new, nor are they particularly chilling.

If you really want chilling, you should go look into Adobe's Marketing Cloud Co-op. That's some high-powered analytic engineering right there!

 

[Emily Lake]

It's not, "did they go after the votes?" It's, "did they go after the seemingly irrelevant data that when combined with other seemingly irrelevant data reveals information about the voters themselves that could be used to micro-target individuals not just groups?"

And again, microtargeting individuals isn't new. Personalized advertising has been around for a while now. Have you ever paid attention to the ads on the side of your Google home page? Or the banner ads that pop up as you're surfing the internet? Don't you find it interesting how so many of them seem to be things that are relatively similar to stuff you've searched for, or things you have an interest in?

FFS, I bought my spouse a stocking stuffer last Christmas - a titanium top. It's a silly thing, but it's all engineered and fancy, just the kind of thing he's into. Now I get ads related to that - other things made of less common materials, highly engineered or machined, but of no practical purpose. And the creepy bit is that so does he. Because Google, Adobe, and Amazon all know who we are, what we search for, and that we're married. This isn't new stuff. Creepy, I'll give you...but it's not out of the blue.

 

[Trausti]

Voting records contain WHEN a person voted, as well as WHICH (if any) political party they are registered with. They don't contain WHO the person voted for.

I am genuinely surprised that Koy does not know that. How the heck do local election officials keep track of which ballet was yours? Could you imagine getting a call from the local supervisor of elections about whether you intended to vote for candidate A or candidate B? The year 2000 hanging chads drama could have been solved in an afternoon.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Voting records contain WHEN a person voted, as well as WHICH (if any) political party they are registered with. They don't contain WHO the person voted for.

I am genuinely surprised that Koy does not know that. How the heck do local election officials keep track of which ballet was yours? Could you imagine getting a call from the local supervisor of elections about whether you intended to vote for candidate A or candidate B? The year 2000 hanging chads drama could have been solved in an afternoon.

It would be helpful if both of you actually read my posts as I explained precisely how it is possible to breach voter anonymity.

 

[Emily Lake]

It would be helpful if both of you actually read my posts as I explained precisely how it is possible to breach voter anonymity.

That would be because the processes you outlined don't breach voter anonymity. They use advanced analytics to infer who a person most likely voted for. Those are not the same thing.

Although I admit that it's possible I missed something in there. Your posts were pretty long.

 

[Copernicus]

Some posts containing personal insults were moved to this Elsewhere thread: https://talkfreethought.org/showthr...s-from-quot-The-myth-of-an-ending-quot-thread

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

It would be helpful if both of you actually read my posts as I explained precisely how it is possible to breach voter anonymity.

That would be because the processes you outlined don't breach voter anonymity. They use advanced analytics to infer who a person most likely voted for. Those are not the same thing.

Although I admit that it's possible I missed something in there. Your posts were pretty long.

In light of Cop’s actions, you did miss many things—including exactly how your anonymity could be breached— and I humbly suggest you go back and read them in order to see how your points were already addressed.