2016 elections - because it's never too early

[CountDeMoney]

Holy shit!  You mean it was actually brought up that Diebold machines could be fucked with using Access on Youtube and nobody gave a shit???  That boggles the mind!

Nobody gave a shit then, nobody gives a shit now.  It's not an issue.

Anything else, stoner?

[LaCroix]

tim: 1, dorsey: 0

You can't win a pot you fold.

you can in shittalk 

[alfred russel]

Clinton's lead in the popular vote surpasses 2 million

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/hillary-clinton-s-popular-vote-lead-now-over-two-million-n687701

People can shit talk me for being stupid for proposing a stupid bet, but keep in mind that the original point I was making - that you brought yet another dumbass article to the forum is still valid. Ie, you remain the ebola of this forum. Here was the original post:

"California Secretary of State reporting 4.6 Million ballots left in the state. If true, Clinton will win ~51-52% of national popular vote."

Crazy vote share for someone who lost the electoral college. It's supposed to be virtually impossilbe once the win is by more than 2 percent.

She is not going to win that high of a vote share.

So while I took that article plus another more credible tweet you posted to put together a couple of bet terms that you never accepted, it remains that you brought yet more bullshit to the forum.

If you want to flex your muscles because even though you weren't really right about something but I was wrong, I'd point out two things:
1) do you even have real life muscles to flex or is flexing for you an internet thing?
2) how have you forgotten the zillion posts you made predicting the demise of trump and the republicans over the past few months? If this is a contest of who has been more wrong in this thread, while I certainly have a shitty track record, yours is without a doubt the shittiest on the forum.

[11B4V]

tim: 1, dorsey: 0

You can't win a pot you fold.

you can in shittalk 

[The Minsky Moment]

The real question is when are they going to recount the 2001 Hesiman vote.  No one ever followed up on the disturbing and unprecedented Putin for Crouch campaign. 

[Drakken]

Clinton's lead in the popular vote surpasses 2 million

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/hillary-clinton-s-popular-vote-lead-now-over-two-million-n687701

All in California, so irrelevant.

[Valmy]

Californians are not Americans?

[Drakken]

Californians are not Americans?

Their electoral seats are already assigned to Clinton, it won't change the electoral tally.

[Syt]

So maybe some machines were hacked, after all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/us/politics/vote-count-hillary-clinton-trump.html?_r=0

There is a statiscally significant discrepancy between computer generated ballots and paper votes in Pensylvanya.
Could be fraud, could be malfunction, could be human error.

The election could be rigged

In some dozen states, the electronic voting machine leave no paper trail, nothing to audit.  So if a participant claims there is voter's fraud, in say Pennsylvania, it will be impossible to prove or disprove the fraud.

In 58 of the state's 67 counties, including those comprising its two largest cities -- Philadelphia and Pittsburgh -- once a vote is cast, it exists only in electronic format. That means if the election is close -- and Clinton fails to sweep the state by a landslide margin -- Trump's claim that the system is "rigged" will be virtually impossible to disprove.

This was all brought up before with the 2004 election--how Diebold paperless voting machines could be fucked with using Microsoft Access on YouTube, just when the President and CEO of Diebold promised at an RNC fundraiser to "deliver Ohio" for Bush.

But all that was blown off as ZOMG URAPARANOID LEFTY crazy talk. Nobody gave a shit then, nobody should be giving a shit now. So I don't want to hear a single goddamned motherfucking thing about rigged fucking elections.

So sad.

Wait, so with those Diebold machines, if someone is contesting the vote, there's no way of verifying it? Or is the data retained for a limited time?

[garbon]

Californians are not Americans?

Their electoral seats are already assigned to Clinton, it won't change the electoral tally.

Good thing no one was suggesting that it would then. Or at least no one here.

[Admiral Yi]

Wait, so with those Diebold machines, if someone is contesting the vote, there's no way of verifying it? Or is the data retained for a limited time?

Here's my experience, based on working two elections in Johnson County:

The first time we had Diebolds, it was paperless.  You made your choices, told it you were done, and it went into the unit's memory.  When the polls closed someone inserted a memory stick kinda thing in a slot, pressed some more buttons, and the vote tally got loaded into the memory stick.  A courier took all the memory sticks, plus the paper readout from the manual vote scanner, and ran them to the county auditor's office.  The vote tally for the county got added up there.

After that election people bitched about no paper trail, so Diebold modified the machines.  They added like an adding machine tape in a little window.  When you voted it got printed out on the tape for you to see.  (e.g. For President: Hillary Clinton.  For US Senate: Chuck Grassley.  etc.) That tape was the paper trail.  It had a log of all votes cast on that machine, plus tallied totals at the end.

[jimmy olsen]

Yes please.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/11/23/barack_obama_could_run_for_congress_become_speaker_of_the_house.html

Barack Obama Should Launch a National Campaign to Become Speaker of the House in 2019

By Ben Mathis-Lilley 

Ohio congressman Tim Ryan is campaigning to replace Nancy Pelosi as the House minority leader. In an interview with the Washington Post, he argued that Democrats need a strategy for appealing to voters that doesn't rely on President Obama's personal popularity.

"If we don't have Barack Obama at the top of the ticket, we can't win elections. That is an unsustainable model. He can't run again, so it's not even like we can say, well, every four years we'll win."

Indeed, Barack Obama can't run again ... OR CAN HE???

Such is the question posed by this Change.org petition, which was ... well, it was posted by a friend of mine. It's called "President Obama: Run for Speaker of the House in 2018," and it outlines a practical and eminently constitutional path by which Obama could become the second-most-powerful elected official in America two years from now.

Here's the whole deal: The president's Chicago residence is in Illinois' 1st Congressional District, which is represented by Bobby Rush. If Rush were to step aside in 2018—not entirely implausible, as he turns 70 today and has served in the House since 1993—Obama could run for Rush's seat while campaigning nationally for other Democratic House candidates on the premise that he'd be selected as Speaker if the party won a majority. The Dems will need to flip either 24 or 25 districts to take the 218 seats necessary to control the 435-member chamber, and that currently seems like a long shot—but it'd be less of one with a popular national figure to rally around. Current House Dem leader Nancy Pelosi's national favorability rating is 28.5 percent, according to Huffington Post's poll aggregator; Obama's approval rating by the same measure is 53.5 percent. As the petition notes:

Barack Obama is leaving the White House with his standing nearly as high as it's ever been. He is by far the most popular politician in the country. In 2008 he beat John McCain in 237 congressional districts (as currently drawn), and today he's certainly more popular than Trump in a majority of the 435 districts.

Donald Trump, of course, lost the national popular vote and is the least popular incoming chief executive in modern history by a large margin. Speaker Obama would be a formidable national foil to President Trump, and not just for the attention he'd command from the public and the press. An Obama who occasionally speaks out about issues of public importance while mostly, like, working on his memoirs is one thing. An Obama with formal powers over the legislative process is another thing altogether, and the prospect of putting such a trusted figure in a high-leverage position would likely motivate midterm Democratic turnout more than anything Obama may be planning to do as a civilian.

This plan wouldn't be guaranteed of success even if Obama were interested in it. (For what it's worth, he reportedly does plan to become involved on at least some level in organized efforts to improve the Democratic Party's fortunes in local races.) In 2012, Obama only beat Mitt Romney in 207 congressional districts, and his current relatively high approval rating reflects the reality that, as a soon-to-be-ex-president, he's no longer involved in contentious advocacy for specific policies. He'd likely become less popular the minute he stepped back into the political fray. But the hypothetical Obama for Speaker campaign would still pretty clearly be the Democrats' best chance at swinging Congress.

There are also precedents in American history for both the continued involvement of ex-presidents in national government and for the linkage of local House campaigns to a national agenda. William Howard Taft became the chief justice of the Supreme Court after his term in the White House, while John Quincy Adams served in Congress for 17 years after leaving the presidency. More recently, Newt Gingrich organized the Republican Party's successful 1994 congressional takeback attempt around his own potential Speakerdom and advocacy for the party's "Contract With America" manifesto. An Obama run for Speaker would be extremely surprising, but there's nothing stopping it from happening apart from his own presumable interest in taking a break from the spotlight after eight stressful years.

On that note, though, it's worth pointing out that Obama has actually had a very short national political career thus far. He was only elected to the Senate in 2004, and he's only 55 years old today. That's pretty young! In an era of shorter life expectancy, John Quincy Adams ran for Congress at age 64—and, as it happens, he did so after the election as president of a loose-cannon populist with authoritarian tendencies who engaged in white-nationalist ethnic cleansing and had claimed Adams' own presidency was illegitimate. Does history ever repeat itself as neither tragedy nor farce, but as a reason for hope?

[derspiess]

Shut up, Meg.

[Phillip V]

No.  Barack Obama needs to return to the unfulfilled promise of raising and educating a generation of black boys and girls.

Michelle Obama needs to join in the above or become chief executive of a public or private sector company.

[Martinus]

Obama should be closing Gitmo any moment now - that way we can laugh at Trump for going back on his campaign promises.