Very long post, sorry. The short version of it is that there is a social taboo among progressives to call out cheating by Republicans, and how this is probably impossible to change. I am new to this community, please let me know if this post is inappropriate and I will post it elsewhere. Thanks

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Now that the elections in the usa are over, I would like to share how I perceive politics, the American left, and the possible political future of the USA. These personal views may not find traction here.

First, about myself. I have participated in Texas politics for a couple of decades, and I have a four decades of programming networked systems under my belt. I have been involved in some of the county level Democratic party before (East Texas)

I will just come out and say it. Anyone who thinks the Texas election results are accurate is a fool, uneducated, a grifter, is scared to talk about it, or is hopelessly in denial. And many other states follow suit. I feel the Republicans certainly did not get all those votes, and by my own estimate the GOP have been inflating ballot counts here in my area since the late 1990s. I have reason to suspect many of the "Battleground" states are similar.

Yet, to mention this without proof, for example by just raising a hypothetical viewpoint, yields a silence so profound, across the political spectrum, that its quite simply amazing. Usually there is no rebuttle, no denouncing, no agreement, no laughter and no curiosity. Just ignored, politely, listened to but not acted upon.

This is not only my experience with many people in Texas, but online. It is the experience of others who raise this too. Eventually, in my area, the silence gets to most of us who have tried to press for transparent vote counting (aka paper ballots) , more exit polls, and more record keeping at the county level. And many people gave up over the last few decades. The last I checked, there is no group in Texas to advocate such things, and perhaps there never will be for a long long time.

This is not like the fascist accusations of fraud, by those Republicans who likely won due to actual fraud. Their accusations of loosing are careful to not be too specific, too believable, and its only about them in their mind. The current level of fascism in this country has a way of making a mockery of ballot counting.

Americans tend to be suspectible when something is ridiculous, and widely mocked, then it is not looked at too closely. And this current level of not caring about how ballots are verified and counted has probably been the death knell for the current political national progressive movement.

To be more specific, mail in ballots in Texas are accurately counted. This is why they are made almost impossible to do.

The rest of the votes go into black boxes with no way to audit, whose inner workings are protected by trade secrets. Who are run by companies started by cronies of President Bush (the elder). Over the years many have complained how easy it is to hack such systems. But for some reason, even though these systems are just as secretive: this has been ignored, as far as I can tell, by everyone who has a voice in politics these days.

My own issue is not the hackability. But in the accountability. There is no public or verifiable logs of admin access in a system where its possible to change the votes by a single command (see the test modes talked about by others). We do not even know who the admins are. That alone breaks any possible chain of custody that is possible with other ballot counting.

People in my area like saying that the paper printouts can be backups, but in my experience I have never seen them actually used to compare the vote totals.

That is not even the worst. As a systems designer, I know that its very possible to make such computer systems to allow a single person to set up how the ballots will be counted, via future commands or real time commands, without the rest of the voting company knowing about it, and being blind to such actions. Without any source code to examine, there is no proof such things are absent.

Most people assume such systems are carefully monitored for such behavior, but I can say after many years of looking into this they are not. Not in my state at least. There is no accountability, no effective goverment oversight. It is very much a good old boys network thing. There are some official looking words about it, in the state of Texas, but its all fluff and has no real implications.

Even all this could be tolerated if the exit polls were not consistantly off, and getting worse by the election. Most people do not understand that exit polls are so unreliable in parts of the USA that all the major networks stopped using them to predict election outcomes early.

In Texas, such exit polls are rare to begin with. The United Nations uses exit polls to determine cheating using ballot stuffing in most countries. Exit polls have been an accurate indicator of this sort of ballot manipulation, altered by the people in charge, for the last few centuries. Its not new technology, unproven, or conspiracy level stuff. And there is a long history of cheating and attempted cheating the world over.

Yet exit poll differences are ignored today by much of the left, and progressive movement in the USA. Many don't even not know what an exit poll is. Most people have no clue how to look at statistics to use the UN tests for cheating. And this is not new, one only has to look at USA history briefly to a trend generations long, that never went away.

What I have to say here, all of it, is as true in the 1910's as it it today, with the only exception being computers are in use, and the parties that abuse the trust.

Today, there are no leaders who ask these questions, or even bring any up in passing.

The exit polls being off so much, so often, would be a scandal in most democracies. Here, in most of the USA, the exit polls are considered to be so unimportant, so beneath notice, so trivial, that it is never brought up in many online communities. Indeed, I think that such mention of polls could well be going into conspiracy theory only realms, given enough time if this trend continues. It would not surprise me in the least to find a movement showing how bad these polling companies are. And indeed, that seems to have early signs, in some places and some ways, with support among a broad political spectrum.

About ten years ago, I thought this was a lack of education about exit polls and counting transparency. I mean, if a fifth grader cannot recite the exact way ballots are counted its probably too fancy. So I tried, I really tried to get interest in these things. I tried to get organizations involved, I tried to get a plank into the Texas Democrat's state conference. Nobody wanted to do that.

After years of hitting my head against invisible obsticles, I realized it was not a lack of education, but instead a social taboo. Americans cannot deal with large scale cheating. Period. Their brain stops functioning. See my comment above about how this does not contradict the Trumpers accusations who use neither reason or logic.

After realizing I was dealing with a social taboo, I tried to look into why. Eventually I decided it has something to do with some common faith stuff Americans are exposed to at early age, perhaps. I did not really persue that after this insight.

But the upshot seems to be that the American left, any Progressives, have locked themselves out of changing the system, and there are no true leaders to help take on the task. Things will stay this way.

I would go as far as saying the average American does not understand democracy, which involves not only casting ballots but making sure they are counted in an understandable and honest way. The American left is very anti intellectual and incurious about these things. Great at getting out the vote, failing at making sure that matters.

I also think most of the rest of the world does not really understant the pure lunacy of all American politics. They see parts it, and think that is crazy enough , not understanding the deeper insanity.

When I got the results of the elections in my county, a few years ago. We, the democratic party, recieved it by logging into a url run by a site in austin, which told us the results. (We are far away from Austin). There were no recounts, no possibility of comparing paper printouts. Just cold hard fact on an electronic page.

This was the offical way of telling us. The actual paper trail, such as it, was stored in a very hard to get place in the country records. Nobody, including me, had the fortitude or strength of character to demand a physical recount using those records. I imagine if we tried it would not have ended successfully.

There is no online source for these records like there are in other USA states. Many states have an online site, run by the state government, that provide all the needed info in one download. In Texas, this would be.. inconvient.

To be plainly blunt, the democratic party leaders in Texas are as in bed with all this ballot stuffing as the GOP here is

This whole insanity is not democracy and never will be. And I seem to be in a distint minority of ever being bothered by it, much less having specific objections.