[0] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-bots-democracy-usa-el...
There are other reports of voter fraud.
Your vote, as well as mine, were counted. But it seems that the loss was perhaps overwhelming and not as close. We need to get access to the voter databases for election accountability arithmetic. My understanding is this has not been released.
It's also worth mentioning that the idea of restoring voting rights for people once they have served their time has bipartisan support--in part because so many people have served time for nonviolent marijuana possession convictions. Take a look at the election results to see how the country feels about marijuana possession these days.
This is a power of the governor
The truly disturbing idea is that voting rights are removed in the first place.
It saddens me that a media source twisted McAuliffe's restoring of voting rights into "pardoned 60,000 felons in Virginia for votes".
Also it was 13,000 ... not 60,000.
* Virginia is 1 of 4 states who's state constitution takes away the right of felons to vote. I'm going to be a bad person and just assume this was part of Jim Crow era laws to make sure less African Americans could vote, but I have not researched the subject.
* Before 2013, if you committed a non violent felony in Virginia and had fulfilled all parts of your sentence, including serving time and probation and fines and restitution, two years later you could apply for a certificate giving you the right to register to vote.
* In 2013, Virginia governor McDonnell issued an executive order that got rid of the two year waiting period. I've read this affected about 100,000 potential voters.
* In 2016, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe issued an executive order that made the restoration of the ability to register to vote automatic, no certificate needed. His order covered violent and non violent felons. It didn't change the fact that the governor could just individually restore the ability to register to vote to someone who had completed their sentence. It just made it easy and automatic.
* Due to some screwup somewhere his order somehow restored the voting rights for several child molestors still in prison, and a few serial killers who had serial killed in Virginia but were serving a sentence in a different state. I guess. I'm not sure how that worked. I can't imagine a child molestor in prison trying to register to vote.
* The Virginia state supreme court overturned the governor's order.
* In Aug 2016, McAuliffe vowed to individually restore the rights of each individual ex-felon by hand, but by using an automatic signing machine. He claimed he had signed 13,000 so far, and said he could conceivably cover 200,000 more people.
There are some voter advocacy groups who think you should have the right to register to vote after you've completed your sentence, regardless of fines imposed on you by the state.
I took some of the above info from the Washington Post ( NOT THE WASHINGTON TIMES )
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/mcaul...
Other countries have polling places in their prisons, let alone allowing ex-convicts to vote. If there's one demographic that should be allowed their say on what society feels is legal and illegal, it's those who society has chosen to punish. Otherwise, you create the possibility of a tyranny of a minority which comprises the majority of the electorate.
So is liberty, and so is life, and we deprive convicts of those rights too.
> If there's one demographic that should be allowed their say on what society feels is legal and illegal, it's those who society has chosen to punish.
That's a bit of a non-sequitur: why should those who have chosen to violate the social compact have a voice in it?
> Otherwise, you create the possibility of a tyranny of a minority which comprises the majority of the electorate.
That's also a non-sequitur: if they are disenfranchised, they're no longer part of the electorate.
As of this moment, that's not true: Mrs. Clinton received 48% of the popular vote. That's more than Mr. Trump, but that's not a majority.
> It looked like a total landslide to me based on national and public data.
But it wasn't a total landslide, so your understanding of the data was not accurate. Will you accept that, or will your bubble filter just reject it since Trump won?
This is a conversation. Disagreeing with you doesn't make it something else.
The media was not talking about what was staring me in the face. I'm not a journalist. I don't know what it meant, but to me, I thought, "wow, a landslide is coming".
Can I have an opinion?
You thought it was going to be a landslide because you only exposed yourself to--or only believed--information that reinforced that opinion.
Now that you know it wasn't a landslide, will you go back and look at where your opinion diverged from reality? Or will you just think "I was right after all" simply because Trump won?
You are correct, I am in shock that it was not a landslide because of what I thought I was seeing at the time.
I'm in technology (I assume you are too) so I went about doing simple data sampling online. I did not care what my local state was doing, I wanted national data. Something that would hopefully give me real insight. What I found (in my non-professional way) was that Trump had an overwhelmingly large number of people interested in him from both live events as well as more static events. The people present seemed more excited as well. She also had more negative online information available about her.
From that, I developed a theory that Trump would win in a landslide.
Thank you for the conversation.
The fact that CNN interpreted the data poorly doesn't mean the data was bad. FiveThirtyEight stated repeatedly that Clinton's lead was not insurmountable and the a typical polling error could easily flip it to Trump.
She ended up with a 1-2% preference
The same thing happens every presidential cycle. Counts come in much slower for populous states with large volumes of absentee, provisional, and mail-in ballots. Clinton is going to win these votes by something like a 2:1 margin.
Observing that social media accounts have X followers does not constitute 'investigating the numbers', even in the most casual of senses.