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This process has been carried out, publicly, a few times. Every time the results not only fail to support the current regime's narrative, they actively goes against it. So, the question becomes: "Who is getting kickbacks for this 'deal'?"
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
They are trying to confuse voter fraud with election fraud so they can justify ICE election interference in November.
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), ...
Because he's turned them into his own secret police - they even wear masks to hide their identifies. Fun fact - ICE has only been around for a little over 20 years. It's not some sancrosanct entity that couldn't have its necessary functions moved to entities with some sort of actual oversight and eliminated.
ICE has been basically transformed into the FBI but mostly targeting American citizens. The goal has been, for a while now, to develop a domestic military and intelligence apparatus that can be used against the American people where they are - in their cities, in their states.
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.
In a world where most people blindly accept answers from machines and never care to verify from actual sources the simple announcement effect followed by lies and accusations of fraud relayed repeatedly is enough. The whole mode of operations of extreme rights all over the world is to repeat lies ad nauseam until people unconsciously surrender and accept them as facts.
They don't need to prove that it's true. They just need to get it repeated enough, with some officialdom thrown in, for it to enter the public consciousness as "true".
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.
ICE is Trump's private army, and their only loyalty is to him (and Stephen Miller, who's actually the puppet master here).
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.
If you're a California resident, under the CCPA you can submit a request for Thomson Reuters to both provide you with and then delete any information they have collected about you.
The state's even setup a nice portal to automate these requests across 600+ data brokers.
What’s the outcome if you submit a DROP request, less targeted spam phone calls/junk mail?
Since they are working for the Federal government here, doesn’t the supremacy clause trump state law and allow them to deny / retain that data?
This may be an unpopular opinion, but is this really the best way to respond here? Won't this just give them the opportunity to claim that California is doing this specifically to hide fraud? $125 mil is a drop in the bucket compared to ICE's budget, if they want to spend it like this why not just let them? Thomson Reuters has an excellent track record of being impartial/non-partisan.. maybe we could finally get past the nonsense election rigging claims. Just my 2c
I reckon that if you replace "find" with "make", you might be closer to the truth about what this data will be used for.
The boring truth is they’ll find nothing and the admin will pretend it never even looked. They’ve done this already with all the “very real and provable voter fraud” they investigated in previous elections. All the initiatives quietly disbanded after saying they found nothing.
They can’t even say they’ve found evidence when pressed https://newrepublic.com/post/213185/trump-election-fraud-guy...
Either outcome is risky for TR here. They're a very respected news publisher, so if they start colluding in fraud that would damage all their other business. If they take it seriously and don't produce results they'll get reprisals. I suspect they'll dig up every random voter registration paperwork error they can find and hand that over, while trying not to have their name tied to bigger conspiracy theories.
So the fraud perpetrated here will be this administration denying people their right to vote?
Pretty sure you're supposed to get a warrant to access private information. I don't know how we ended up in this place where somehow paying for info precludes the necessity to get a warrant a la flock, cell tower data, etc.
The legal argument is that we gave this data "voluntarily" to the data broker so the government no longer needs a warrant.
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.
I do. Citizens United. It is a pay-to-play system we have going on here and it is working exactly as designed. Bribery? Why no, that is simply a donation. With enough money and moral bankruptcy you can accomplish all sorts of silly things that are in direct violation of the constitution, the law, and even common decency.
My understanding is it started at least from the aftermath of 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Though I wouldn't be surprised if it predates that.
Third-party doctrine.
Oh don't be silly
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.
sure as if laws apply anymore. who enforces any of this when the DOJ is run by the president's personal lawyer?
The product we're talking about here is CLEAR.
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.
https://archive.is/2L3sU
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...
US politics is cooked. I wonder if polymarket will start taking bets on mid-terms being canceled.
They only need to cancel the results they don't like.
Why would you wonder that: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-2026-midterm-elections...
Of course they are.
This isn't about "finding" fraud.
This is about instilling fear, uncertainty and doubt.
ICE have jurisdiction over elections now?
If they will pay me $10 million I will guarantee to find voter fraud or refund half their money...
When I was young, I thought mandatory voting was silly. It made uninformed people vote. Well, certainly in this case, I was the uninformed person because seeing how non-mandatory voting works (in the US) should convinced everyone that voting should be mandatory.
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
Its time to abolish ICE.
Has this always been ICE responsibility?
Why is this flagged?
How is this immigration enforcement?
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.
There are lot of ways to do it, but the biggest challenge is will they do it? like it's mostly a descision rather than capabilities.
Is ICE the correct agency for voter fraud?
Ah yes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that famous election security wing of the US Government
This is shocking and scary amount government over reach, to fabricate evidence of something that everyone knows is false...
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
It’s Cyber Ninjas all over again
Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.
Batshit insane. Does this mean they need to "find" it, like how he wanted to "find" more votes in Georgia?
Our country is now a clown show
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.
Would be nice to get in on some of this grift...
But that's not nazi because Trump have no mustache.
Well there's obviously at least some amount of fraud and a lot of people with eyes on it so finding it seems like the best course of action at the moment, mostly due to the latter since millions of people trusting the elections is pretty important AND if they are verifiably secure it prevents people from running their mouth about it and swaying anyone to distrust them (had to get ahead of it).
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(...