The state's even setup a nice portal to automate these requests across 600+ data brokers.

https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/

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.

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.

They are welcome to continue voting however they like, I'm not really looking to change any minds.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/26/ice-lawyers-...

Trump has hired multiple qualified firms to find fraud in the 2020 election and thus far none of the reputable ones have found any.

> they might take this evidence seriously

Whether the cause is global warming, vaccines, election fraud, the effect of gender rights on society, or any one of the military actions being taken by this admin - the only time evidence matters is when it aligns with their previously -held biases and can be yielded as a weapon.

The rest of the time (read: almost all of the time), it doesn't and is swept under the rug or called fake, without any counter-evidence to back that claim up either.

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

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.

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 just hope something in my backlog of eastern philosophy will at least delay my descent into complete hopelessness.

It has been really disheartening to find that it can also bend away. Voting was always going to be at least something of a farce, but it genuinely seemed to be better than the alternatives. Now, it's not clear that it is.

That's a very appropriate term. There has always been various forces who either believe the majority of citizens don't deserve democracy or that they are above it.

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.

I'm not sure what a bureaucratic shuffle would buy you in today's environment.

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.

They can’t even say they’ve found evidence when pressed https://newrepublic.com/post/213185/trump-election-fraud-guy...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Of course they are.

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.)

It's true that this isn't as true for NO, because a small change can give a huge return, but that's asymmetrical. So there's incentive for traders to buy NO, hoping that it moves down, but not an incentive for traders to buy YES, since it doesn't have any room to go up.

This is about instilling fear, uncertainty and doubt.

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(...

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.

We. Have. Checked. Over. And . Over. We have multiple layers of checks. We have cross checks. We already invest a ton into this.

You are proving my example by presupposing there are no checks and that investigations never happen. You are the person saying “please think of the children and install smoke detectors” when they are already installed.

>> You are proving my example by presupposing there are no checks and that investigations never happen. You are the person saying “please think of the children and install smoke detectors” when they are already installed.

I think they're saying "Can we at least check the batteries in the smoke detectors to be sure everything's cool there?" without taking into account that in addition to there already being smoke detectors with batteries, there's also already multiple layers of maintenance schedule and checks in place to ensure that they always have a fresh battery and regular testing to ensure they function as expected.

That again presupposes no one is or has done that.

It’s like “I declare we need to check the batteries and maintenance!” because the previous maintenance reports didn’t show as many busted alarms as you want, because your ego is tied to the idea that the smoke alarms don’t work.

No. They're not the 'correct agency' for anything.

ICE knows illegals are less inclined to register to vote knowing that ICE monitors voter rolls.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

You'd think, if anything, a right wing organization would be trying to prop up Trump's claims... but yet...

https://electionfraud.heritage.org/

Every case I checked was something like this, here are two that I randomly clicked on from my state right now:

> Alex Campbell, Republican city councilman and mayor pro tem of Crescent City, California, falsely claimed his residence was within city limits when submitting his candidacy for councilman. Campbell was charged with two felony counts of perjury and one count of false declaration of his candidacy and pleaded guilty to one count of making a false declaration of candidacy. He faces up to two years of probation and $20,000 in fines for his charge. https://electionfraud.heritage.org/case/200148

> Nickey Huntley was involved in a scheme that offered cigarettes and money to homeless people on Skid Row in exchange for fake signatures on ballot initiatives and voter registration forms. This resulted in hundreds of fraudulent signatures. He pleaded no contest to one felony count of circulating an initiative or petition containing false, forged or fictitious names. Huntley was sentenced to 3 years’ probation. https://electionfraud.heritage.org/case/201251

You have to be disinformed to think elections there are secure, you can't possibly know they are.

California's elections are widely audited, observed, and secure.

Stop spreading lies.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

Is it really? Have you been asleep for the last decade?

I will retain my right to be shocked and angry about government overreach, thanks.

The ICE comparison is spot on, IMO.

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

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.

With the recent immunity ruling and the impossibility of the Senate upholding impeachment, yes, the president can basically try anything he wants.

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.

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.

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.