With Trump’s help, Republicans across the country are sowing doubt about next year’s congressional elections—and gearing up for 2028.

Special elections in Florida and Wisconsin have suggested that voters are already fed up with the Trump administration and point to the possibility that the 2026 midterms could be a blue wave. As Trump’s failures continue to mount, Republicans have good reason to fear a backlash.

Perhaps this explains why Trump is intent on bolstering the election denial movement, which has lately notched a number of key victories. On March 25, the president signed Executive Order #14248, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which neither preserves nor protects our elections but rather undermines them.

It is a clarion call to Republicans throughout the nation, who are being encouraged to question the legitimacy of any election loss and ultimately establish a permanent electoral advantage by challenging and removing eligible voters from the rolls. Now, with Trump’s executive order, they have insurance: a way of tipping elections in their favor by choosing the voters rather than having the voters choose them.

  • monotremata@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    So, when I search on this, I can only find reference to a single guy, Stephen Spoonamore, making this claim. You said “multiple prominent Computer Scientists and Statisticians”; do you have a link for that?

      • Septimaeus@infosec.pub
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        22 hours ago

        I remember this. The petition was more about security assurance than a specific accusation, and the letter from Spoonamore was sus because he is a known attention-seeking alarmist (and sole-proprietor of a cybersecurity consulting company that he pumps a lot).

        Spoonamore cried wolf too many times to be taken very seriously, but also his “analysis” is weirdly unspecific just like his deflection in interviews. It honestly felt like those “security alert!” popups from fake antivirus software, if that makes sense, like the point isn’t security just the alert.

        Ultimately the gold standard for verification is random sample hand counts, and several rounds of these confirmed software tallies within very small margins. That basically closes the case, because if they “hacked” the hand counts, it would mean the conspiracy went well beyond tampering with voting software.

      • monotremata@lemmy.ca
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        20 hours ago

        That has nothing to do with the claims about bullet ballots though. You made it sound like there were a bunch of people all united behind a single, specific claim about a statistical anomaly, and as far as I know that’s simply not accurate.