Election Vulnerability

· Reason

Trump's stolen-election claims: "Great damage has been done to our country," said President Donald Trump last night in a special address to the country, addressing election vulnerabilities he believes exist. "Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue."

China, in his words, carried out "the largest compromise of election data in history" starting with the 2020 election, allegedly gathering 220 million voter files "over a period of years." If true—which is a big if—this is a huge indictment of government data-security practices (not much else).

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"U.S. intelligence and congressional officials have long known that China obtained voter data," counters The New York Times, which was "publicly available information often purchased by political campaigns. What's more, former intelligence officials have said, China gathered the data not to manipulate voting results, but instead to better craft influence campaigns to shape voters' perceptions." Influence campaigns are different than straight-up election tampering—and seemingly much harder to prevent.

Trump also said we must fix issues with electronic voting so that "we can never watch a stolen election again." But it wasn't especially clear what, specifically, he was pointing to that had been proven to show outright manipulation of vote counts.

"If you look at voting today, it's in such bad shape in so many states," he continued. "And we are committing to fix it, and we are also committing to be working with those states and local jurisdictions to help them fix and patch known technical vulnerabilities before the midterm elections."

It looks a little bit like Trump is working to tend to the seeds of distrust in elections that he has long ago sown. But there's not much new evidence he can marshal to substantiate these claims.

Are we living through an era of measurement problems? "Millennials and Zoomers are not doing fine," writes Johann Kurtz on his Substack, Becoming Noble. "In fact, I think there have been structural changes to our economy and society which clearly explain why these cohorts are failing to move through the five pillars of a stable middle-class existence: education, stable employment, marriage, homeownership, children."

"What has happened is that previous generations were able to take advantage of highly valuable and productive social capital as well as their exploding financial capital to move through each of these life stages in a fiscally efficient manner," continues Kurtz. "Our current young, lacking access to this social capital, must engage in enormous outlays of purely financial capital in order to achieve the same levels of stability and accomplishment—capital that they do not have. We see this clearly in the data on schooling, homeownership, and family formation."

"On the surface it does seem as if the young are fine. Real median incomes are higher than they were for their parents at the same age, unemployment has spent most of the past decade at historic lows, and purchasing power has risen roughly 63 percent since 1973. Televisions, clothing, food, and air travel are cheaper than ever," argues Kurtz. "And yet this generation is also not marrying, not buying homes, not having children, and seem pretty miserable. I think we're clearly in the midst of a tremendous measurement failure."

Scenes from New York: The family of a tourist who was killed in a freak carriage accident in Central Park is calling on the city council to ban horse-drawn carriages. "Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents horse-carriage drivers and owners, has for years fended off efforts to abolish the industry," reports The New York Times. "The horses are well cared for and doing the kind of work they were bred for, the union says, and it argues that ending the carriage rides would be devastating for the roughly 170 licensed drivers and would harm the animals as well."

As a rule of thumb: We don't need laws named after victims or laws passed in the wake of freak-accident deaths to try to prevent extremely rare accidents from happening. Losing your child is awful and tragic—I know a thing or two about that—but trying to squeeze every last bit of risk out of society, in favor of perfect, predictable safetyism is a fool's errand. It also, sadly, won't reanimate the dead. If only we humans had the power to do so.

QUICK HITS

  • "President Donald Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on goods from Brazil on Wednesday, the latest step in rebuilding U.S. trade barriers following the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that invalidated his first try at erecting a shield around the economy," reports The Washington Post. "The president's trade chief, Jamieson Greer, recommended the move after a year-long investigation concluded Brazil had engaged in several 'unfair' trade practices. Greer said Brazil's digital trade and electronic payment systems, preferential tariffs, ethanol market, intellectual property protection and illegal deforestation all had hurt U.S. companies."
  • "Outside of stripping away the human component of asking another human to spend time together, Partiful also made parties less fun," writes @burntmilk on Substack. "There is no mystery or drama in knowing exactly who is going to be there and who is whose plus-one. The turnout is pretty much what you see when you open the event's page day-of. There is no secret for the host to hold.…A party is good when you're talking to strangers, and the best when strangers are rambling to you, a fleeting entity they can forget about. I want to interact with people without already having mentally processed their presence."
  • True:

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